Here I am, dated and pasted between thin plastic sheets, pressed and smoothed in the red leather album from Grandma’s house.
I’m the girl with the pudding bowl hair, gap-toothed, arms splayed, up against the wall where the pear tree droops. My sandals are sticky with sweet rotting fruit and the wasps are biting.
I’m the girl with hyacinth eyelids, wobbly strawberry lines around my mouth, dusty pink kisses on my cheeks. Downstairs, she whacks her ruler across the back of my hands, twice. My room is out of bounds, she says, and nice girls don’t wear make up.
I’m the girl on the back seat of the Zephyr 4 parked outside her front door, my Sunday dress too tight across my chest. Grandma’s cigarette is clamped tight between her lips and she’s looking elsewhere.
Where’s the photograph of the raggedy lobed hawthorn and purple sloes flying past the car window and the hundredth time of my mother saying she was a kind woman, wasn’t she?
Where’s the picture of Grandma’s house never smelling of bread and blackberry jam, just empty shells and a stiff north-easterly?
Or the shoreline where I walk, smoking in quick inhalations like a beached fish gulps air.
I hang back as our little family tramps up the gravel path to St. Botolphs, but there’s no photograph of me sucking blood from my thumb, ravenous.
Are you alright, my mother asks, but maybe not then, maybe much, much later.
When they finish lowering Grandma into the freshly dug hole, I step to the precipice, turn out my pockets. Shell shards tumble and so do my cigarettes but no one sees, they’re too busy slinging mud.
I don’t cry, oh no, not until Mother’s thin arms lasso me, and then I am gasping.
Alison Woodhouse is a writer and teacher of short fiction. Her debut novella, The House on the Corner, is published by Ad Hoc Fiction and her collection of short fiction, Family Frames, is published by V Press.
You had me at 'hyacinth eyelids', Alison. Great writing!
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