“Wow” he says. He has seen my bra. Well, he has just seen my mum’s bra. It’s my mum’s black lacy number. I smile back, but I really hope I am wearing it right. How do you know? No one talks about it, there’s no elective I could take at school.
He saw Karen turn to Karl, say something and then laugh. “Good joke, Karen,” he added with an accompanying smile. He noticed the shocked look on Karl’s face. “Karl,” he thought, “you have no sense of humour, old boy.”
She looks around and approaches. Our faces are so close I savour the scent of the anti-bacterial spray used to thoroughly clean her plexi face protector.
People often ask me what it feels like to be literally married to something or something that you’ve never seen and never will.
No one ever prepares you for “happy ever after”. No stories ever continue into that realm of the kingdom. Was this always inevitable and COVID has just sped up it’s arrival?
He had always been told by his mother to think before he acted. “Think once, so you don’t have to think twice” she had said. “Think, think, think, boys and girls” had been the cry of Mrs Simpson, his year 9 teacher. A person whose bra made visible ruts across her back as it grimly […]
“Oh,” he suddenly realised his error, and quickly grabbed his drink from the bar “I apologise again …”
“You know what Janey?” he said. “I heard there’s a good service down at the Funeral Parlor this afternoon.”
I open my eyes. The ceiling is covered in cork tiles that appear to have been there for a while. A dried up water stain spreads across a number of tiles. I wonder when that happened. There are no paintings or pictures on the walls, no pictures of recognisable faces anywhere, no mirror. The room […]
The following extract comes from the last few entries of a diary I found under a brick at 23 Victoria Grove. We had just moved in and I was cleaning up the front yard. Date: Wednesday, 12 October, 2011 It’s funny how these things happen. You suddenly lose both parents in an accident and then […]
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