Category: Flash fiction

Unfinished business

Standing, hand on the sign. Feeling its rough. Bloody communists. ACORN ALLOTMENT COLLECTIVE – hand daubed, painted, green on blue with a peace symbol. Someone has scrawled fuck off in black paint across it. Bend down, push in through the low circular gap in the fence wire. Hole the size of a small boar. Catch the back of my jacket. Damn it. Is it torn? Can’t see. Twist neck, Christ that hurts. Must ask Hannah for a massage. Her fingers… Hole cut with wire cutters by the look of it. Bloody bastards. Shouldn’t be in here at all. Private property. Dandelions everywhere. Don’t they know how to weed? Eleven or twelve allotments but loose on the boundaries that’s communism for you. Place pinched and cooped up in the space left over from the developers. Couldn’t even give them time to refinance. Parasites. A high rise on each side, not bad for affordable housing, views of the sea and the castle, apart from the third and fourth floors – bloody thugs the lot of them up there, council wastes services on the likes of them, leylandii hedge at the end, no one can get through that. Too much shade to grow much here. All of them must have to crawl to get in, not for the faint hearted, or the disabled, just those that like to break the law, gives them a kick, what is it they say? Property is theft. Idiots. Brush leaves off trousers. Mud on my bloody new shoes. Whole place smells like vegans. Rotting vegetation and tea made from tired lawn cuttings and something fresh, vodka tonic, must be mint or lemon. Free, the plots here, if you can get your hands on one. So they say. Would she have buried him here, Samantha Pryce? That soil on her fingers. The frown at the sausage roll. All that chat about permaculture. All those books on gardening in her home office. Doesn’t seem her sort of place, though. She’s more fresh linen than blind peasant woven hemp. No scratches down that beautiful back. But definitely an allotment. Sure as I’ve ever been sure. Got to be. Where else does a greenie bury a body?

Back in the Jag. Sink back in the soft. God that pigskin turns me on. Switch on the radio. Forth FM. You’re the devil in me I brought in from the cold… Fingers tapping to the beat. You’re coming on strong… Chemical Brothers. She’s got every album, Hannah. Knows every line. I’ll tell you now it’s just too bad. Light a cigarette. Who are they kidding with their Smoking Kills ads? Yawn breathe inhale yawn. Could do with a shag. She was off this morning, Hannah, right off. Muttering and tutting and slapping cornflakes in front of the kids. Couldn’t look me in the eye. Monthly probably. No concept of my needs. Carnal aint it. Keeping her in vinyl. In satin pants and strawberry handstitched bras. Milk delivered in bloody bottles with the cream still on top. Toss the fag out the window. Spin the wheels. Frown at the three neds hanging off the third floor balcony. Give them the finger. The hurled bag of shit bounces off the rear window and lands a foot or so behind the car. Get the fuck out of here.

Parking up. Maybe this is more like it? Beechnuts Allotments – KEEP OUT! Large sign, commercial print, large plots, each numbered, in orderly rows, flower edged (marigolds?) high fences (electric?). Mr and Mrs. Surnames at all times. A code of conduct behind a glass sign. Who knew there were so many rules for veg? Owners here have turned their front gardens into SUV parks and quite right too. Didn’t the neighbours have a plot here for a few years. Forever back and forward with their trailer of soils and manures and bags of worm ridden bloody horse shit. Andy right up his own arse. His Aileen not far behind. Those jodhpurs of hers. Should be banned on anyone over a size twelve. Not keen on a large arse. Out of the car and take a long peruse. Security cameras everywhere. Doesn’t look like a place for burying a body. Apples trees flattened hard up against brick walls. On remand. About to be searched. Leeks a soldierly six inches apart. Weeds banned and children banned and the faint smell of bought-in peat and bleach and the soft murder of pesticides. Silent Spring – she would have been pissed off, that Rachel woman. Hannah forever reading out quotes. Fifteen year waiting list, if you’re lucky, and three years on the committee before you can even get on the list. So Andy said. Might have been exaggerating mind. No, Samantha Pryce is only twenty three. Would stand out a mile. But could have talked her way in? Has the accent and the gall that’s for sure. But every bloody plot a fresh mound of earth. Like that leprechaun story Father used to tell. Someone would have seen something, would have reported it. One of those misters or missuses. Sit down on a bench. Hand on balls. Still there. Bloody Hannah – more time for the kids than him. Not even her kids. Not that she ever mentions Della. Della can’t manage an ice cream now never mind two boys under ten. Shut eyes. Sun on cheeks. Scratch balls. Shadow across him. Woman in a pinny and wellies right there in front of him. Green gardening gloves. Soil on her cheek. Can I help you with something, she says. You haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary have you Madam? No, of course you would have phoned if you had. Absolutely. Well, here’s my card if anything turns up. You don’t look like a police officer she says, studying the card. Looks me up and down. Not fit enough.

Can’t get a bloody car park anywhere near Hazel Loan Allotments – hate walking, what’s the point. Oldest in the city, so Hannah says. Funny how she knows that stuff. Used to like that about her So old, doesn’t have a sign, she’d said, trying to tell him how to get there. I’ll use the Sat Nav, right. Suit yourself she’d said, pulling a jumper over George’s head. Should have listened to her properly. Can’t get a bloody signal. Down Bury Loan, turn right or was it left. Something about a narrow footpath and a style. Sweating. Hot. How would she have got a body all the way down here. No way. Unless a wheelbarrow? Here it is, clamber over the style 100 metres, fuck right in the ghoolies, really need to get fitter, that’s what Hannah says, alright for her, twenty years younger. Here we are, well look at this – must be at least thirty plots each with a clapper board shed, a metal bench (painted black) and a stack of communal wellies for sharing at the beginning of the path. A dozen faces turn. Leaning on spades. What are you all looking at? The faces don’t speak. Turn back to their spades. Pungent and fresh sweet peas and clambering wild rose and sticky ivy. Piles of crap in each corner. Must be those beetle banks the kids keep going on about. Hannah talked about a gardening ghost that plucked aphids from tomatoes and flies from carrots down here. Give the silent mooning faces a card each. No nothing strange, they all say, eventually. In chorus A bloody choir. They go back to their corduroys. But feel free to have a look around officer. Take as long as you like. But don’t touch anything. Biodiversity is precious you know.

Sycamore Collective. Laminated sign tied to the barriers with a zip tie. On the large roundabout on the city bypass. No sign of a sycamore or a collective. No sign of tyre tracks. Do they even have cars? Must run across the road at their peril. Wonder none of them have been killed. Drive up onto the grass and park on a potato patch. Demarcated by a channel dug with an old can by the look of it. The kids round here call it the Sick More Moat. Little shits. Highways Agency threaten the users every year or so. Gypsies here now and again with their fires. Traffic hellish. Nothing freshly dug. But look at that, butterflies. Little blue ones. Hannah would know the name. They were busy here at the beginning. When it all kicked off. Digging for country and all that. Looks like potatoes mainly. Though how would I know. Hannah does the cooking. But winter greens. Know them a bit. But as a kid. Plucking handfuls of slug spun spinach and kale that curled right up in your hand after picking. From living to passing my mother used to say. She knows a lot about life. Find a stick and poke around for fresh earth. Nothing. Not even a worm. Easy access, though. Could come at night. People likely to keep their mouth shut. But so many drivers. Someone would see something surely. A slight of a lass like that dragging a man nearly twice her size. A brute their neighbours called him. Her best friend said he’d been beating her for years. So why didn’t she come to us before? Why not report it? Easy excuse. Bit of a slut that friend too. Way she looked at me through them false eye lashes. Women these days. Think they can get away with anything.

Back in the Jag, wait forever for it to reverse out. Love that it does it for you. What’s the point of a car if it won’t pander to your every need. Tell it to turn up the heating on the driver’s seat. Feel that warmth working up my backside. Car more of a turn on than Hannah’s fingers these days. One last visit before heading home. Other side of the city in the new tech industrial estate. Park up in the electric charging point nearest to the entrance.

DIGITAL GREENS – iAllotments. Flash my phone, smile at the camera, it checks my iris or maybe my teeth. Can’t make the bloody thing work. Shout at the kid on the other side of the fence. Open up will you? Police. Smooth clunk clunk as the gate opens. QR codes everywhere. Must need an app. Over three hundred plots here. Hundred on each level. All look much of the same. Not a flower in sight. Except geraniums. Line of orange down the centre of each plot. How does that all work then? Hydroponics? Looks like a multi-story car park in perspex instead of concrete. Soil doesn’t even look real. Each plot must only be a metre deep. Less maybe. Impossible surely. Unless she cut the body up, or sliced it through. God forbid. Put some overalls on will you, the kid says. Biosecurity. Over there. In the red glass hut. Pull on the overalls. Bit tight round the gut. Just as well there’s Velcro. Ignore the net thing for the hair. Barely any left anyway – Hannah prefers a shaved head. Makes you look younger she says. Each plot marked out with sound barriers. We don’t sing to the plants here the kid says. We fry them alive with our big tech our fintech our Greentech our smart tech. Is he taking the piss? He doesn’t stop talking. Attend weekly or sacrifice you plot. High productivity low turnover. Perfect for burying bodies. What was that, I say? About the bodies? Just having you on, he says. Walk through the disinfectant if you go any further, mate. Don’t want you contaminating the crime scene.

Tags allotments, crime

fiction Flash fiction

nest

she’d made the nest in a hollow under the red robin hedge, gauged it out with a stick over several weeks, lined it with a blanket pinched from Mrs Watson’s washing line, Mrs Watson at No.3 not Mrs Watson at No.18 she’d never nick anything from that Mrs Watson but the other Mrs Watson sow of a woman snorting and poking her nose in all sorts of business that didn’t concern her stinking bitch her mother called her snooping stinking bitch always trying to dob us in

the nest is neat and round and big enough to fit a summer calf and it’s shallow and glitters when the sun cleaves through the red leaves the glitter from the school Christmas party the year before handfuls of small shining grab me quick plastic tubes red green silver gold plucked from the box of decorations and thrust into a coat pocket when Miss Hales was busy up the ladder shouting at Sarky Simon to help her pass up the tinsel and Sarky Simon peering right up her skirt mouthing slut slut dirty slut glitter scattering through spread fingers across the yellow blanket and all over the warped wooden cigar box too with her precious everything precious box of things

at first the nest was for special occasions when she needed to think space breathe shut her eyes shut them all out her mother the school the social worker Andy in his doc marts and his stupid friendly sympathy Candy Swanson who kicked her every time she walked past and pinched pinched blue green purple into her neck and bare arms that nothing would take the pain out of them not even a half squeezed lemon

special private occasions more and more in the nest, after school before school then during school instead of school stocking up the nest with a plastic comb and an orange lipstick and a half squeezed tube of toothpaste red blue white striped her favourite and a jar for spitting the froth to keep the nest clean must have it clean not like the house the scum pit of a house her mother can’t clean won’t clean too busy shouting at Mrs Watson both Mrs Watsons and drooling in the morning and out all night passed out all day need somewhere clean soft quiet away from the passing out of her mother

lying in her nest on her back eyes half closed catching the light and glitter and the wail of the pipes Angus the piper eleven or is he twelve every Saturday down there outside the Scotmid with his tweed hat for the thrown coins and his wee kilt and his wee pink salmon cheeks he’ll make something of himself that wee lad Mrs Watson from No.18 always says and she throws him a pound sometimes twice once on her way to June the hairdresser and once on her way back and once she beckoned her, Ailish, out off the front green beckoned her with a wink and a wee finger and Ailish went over expecting a pound and held out her hand and Mrs Watson shushed and looked around and dropped a small round cool smooth into her hand and she’d run back to the nest and squeezed in through the gap in the hedge and lain down on her back and opened her hand and it was like nothing she’d ever seen only on rich and celebs the old ones not the young ones a pearl a real live fresh water pearl

It is months after they realise that she has disappeared that Andy finds the nest, finds the empty nest with its all the colours glitter and yellow blanket and layer upon layer of mouldering leaves and a single mute feather of what might have been a wren or maybe something else. Andy isn’t great on bird identification.

How he’d found the nest he isn’t able to explain, not really. Maybe it was the glitter or a flash of yellow, he says to Officer Connolly, or maybe it was when I stopped to tie my shoe lace and looked along instead of looking up. Whatever it was Officer Connolly isn’t interested.

Just kids, the officer says as Andy keeps trying to explain, tapping his finger hard on the wooden counter. The officer picks at his teeth, and shouts at a lad behind Andy to sit down sit down and wait your turn. Andy taps again. Listen to me, he says. She’s only fifteen.You’re wasting my time, mate, says the officer. You must have had a den when you were a lad. Just kids. I told you to wait your turn! Andy says, but the jar with the spit, the toothpaste spit, that’s not just kids, Officer. Aye, Andy, you’re naïve son, they need the toothpaste for the smell of the booze. Probably nick it from the Scotmid.

Andy leaves the police station. Walks the four streets to the gap in the hedge. Studies the lampposts and sign poles. Chooses the one nearest to the gap in the hedge. Pulls everything he needs out of his bag and lays it on the ground.

The MISSING poster includes her name. And a carefully pressed finger print of red gold. Glitter. And a feather for her hair.

Tags dens, missing

fiction Flash fiction

Her, me

White pink tulip bursting into rose. Bowing lamp peering into what doesn’t concern. Her not me. Should have been her. I would have loved them more. Cared for them. Arranged them with choral fanfare. Harmonic grace. But she. She lets them topple. Unconcerned.

Pills to pop it all away. Her mother said no. There are other ways. Not the pills, love. I know a man. He’s very nice. Marla goes to him. I can pay for it. Really. Turn my back on her. Sun fidgeting around haloed hair.

Later she hides on the beach. Hiding in full view with all the other bobbled hats heads down watching their prints follow and fade follow and fade. Sand sliding through grit of grateful toes

Starlings all of a thither. He gave her flowers not me. Not her.

Heh, Missus watch out! Och, Donny she made me do it she made me! Petulance from the waist down. Trip over flailing little feet. Catching her balance before she fell. Footie between duffle coats goal!

He’s not worth it, my mother said pouring camomile tea into a mug without a single chip. Let him go. Little Donny has chocolate ice cream all about his chin. Smeared down the belly of my coat. He know the tulips were mine. My thing. She’d always loved tulips. The way they swayed scarlet yellow in drunken armies across flatlands stolen from the sea. Rumba to the right. Tango to the left. Festival flowers. Flowers in her lair.

She’d told him about the tulips the first time. Stomping through the hush of svelting snow. Keeping him at arm’s length. She’d measured. Kept measuring. Not too close. You need to let them in, my mother always says. In different ways but she means the same. That’s why they leave you, love. You never let them close.

Look, he’d said, his hand on the fear of my arm. The first spring of blackbird. Pointing with his free hand. And so it was. I said the weirdest thing, then. I said, yes, grapes, oh and oysters – that’s the feeling. She doesn’t remember what happened next. Or whether anything happened at all. Pills to pop it all away. Sudden need to sit down. Leaning up against the hard fail of the groyne. Pulling her socks back on. Purple lilac handknit socks. Her, me. Every time.

This piece was written during a writing class based on Ann Quinn’s Berg.

Tags beach, flowers, loss

Flash fiction

Don’t Marry the Fly

‘It’s not my fault, Arthur.’

‘What do you mean it’s not your fault. Of course it’s your fault, Harriet. It’s always your fault.’

‘How could it be, though. I told Heidi. Over and over.’ Harriet sighs.

‘Oh, you told her alright, the same way you tell everyone in that sad little wilting voice but you didn’t actually stop her, did you?’

‘Come on, love. No need for that tone.’ Harriet strokes Arthur’s head, feels the softness under her fingers.

‘Come on,’ she says, ‘hop down here onto my lap.’ Arthur drops down from the lampshade tassels, spins a couple of times on his thread, and lands gently on Harriet’s brown satin pajama pants. He stretches his eight legs out, doubling in size. She strokes him again. Under his chin. Or where she imagines his chin to be. So soft. Softer than fur. Than velvet. Than the rosebud lips of a fairy or a princess. He looks up at her and blinks. His eyes flash gold ink.

‘If anyone’s to blame it’s you,’ she says under her breath.

‘I heard that,’ he says, jumping on to her arm. ‘There you go again. Passive aggressive blaming. If you’ve got something to say then say it to my face.’ Arthur turns his back, jumps onto the wall behind her, runs up it, lands on the ceiling and then spins down until he’s hovering in front of Harriet’s eyes.

‘Now, he says. You were saying?’

Harriet curls her fingers. Squeezes them into tight fists. Harriet would like to bat Arthur away with a finger, puff him onto the floor with a long hard breath, maybe, dare she even think it, position him carefully under her shoe and then lower her foot, ever so slowly until, with a dull crackle and crunch, he is no more.

‘I was just saying,’ she says, ‘that she’s done it now anyway. What more can we do?’

‘You’re going to let it go then? Our only daughter? Eighteen years old and engaged to that… That…’ He sputters and splutters and spins again. ‘Engaged to that toilet sniffing corpse stomping blue nosed… buzzer?’

‘Arthur, for Christ’s sake!’ The shout is out before she can stop it. The shout with its rush of air, the rush of air that catches Arthur, hurls him tornado style, spinning him across the room until he lands, on his back, on the cat’s purple and green feathered wind up mouse. The cat, waking from her afternoon slumber on the back of the couch, stands up, arches her back, and tiptoes along the back of the couch to have a closer look.

‘Oh Arthur, oh God, I’m sorry, really I’m sorry.’ Harriet is on her feet, walking across the room to pick him up but she’s too late. Arthur has righted himself and has scurried under the low mahogany-stained coffee table just out of reach of Harriet, but not quite out of reach of the cat. Harriet lowers herself onto the floor, lies down, and stares under the coffee table. Arthur’s eyes have turned a shifty shade of zinc green. He doesn’t blink. He bristles. He does a little dance. Two inches away from the stretch of Harriet’s fingers. Always two inches away from Harriet’s stretch.

‘You shouldn’t have said that, Arthur,’ she says, careful to breathe and speak out of the side of her mouth.

‘Always blaming me, aren’t you Harriet. You wouldn’t pick on someone your own size now, would you?’ Arthur scuttles backwards and forwards, jumps, and scuttles again.

‘That’s hardly true Arthur and you know it. Before. You know. Before this this thing I would have said the same. It’s not my fault you had the…’

From the hallway a loud buzz and then a jangle. The doorbell. A muted cheerful female laugh. The metallic scrape of a key in a lock.

‘That’s them,’ she says to Arthur, getting to her feet. ‘For god’s sake be polite. And don’t trap him love. I know it’s tempting. But remember the last time? The damage you did? You’ll only break Heidi’s heart. And you’ll expect me to clean it all up.’

Tags metamorphosis

fiction Flash fiction

Waterloo

I went in once with you. For a laugh. You were surprised at my surprise. Amused by being amused by the amusements. You tripped over toddlers and caught your knee on the sharp metal corner of the shooting range. Expleted. Health and safety I said. You hopped and rubbed and made a scene. Strode to the motorbikes. Climbed on sat astride, popped a token in the slot, hunched and leant and twisted and swung and grinned and gritted until you swung wrong so far wrong that you powered into a large concrete wall. Screen flashed blood and fire.

We burn him at Seafield. We stand, all of us, two metres apart, legs adrift, hands clasped behind our backs. Twisting fingers and tired lips and eyes rubbed pink raw. Lining the road per regulations. He chose a horse and carriage. The horse wears a red ostrich plume. A strange choice for a poet, the horse says, as it trots past. Clopping silver iron on tarmacadam grey. I’m not fond of red. It doesn’t go with my eyes. The horse winks. A masked policeman holds the traffic until the horse swings into the crematorium. White van man leans on his horn. I give him, all of him and his kind, the finger.

You held your nose at the smell. Jif and candy floss and pine fresh and Brute and burnt beef fat and chips. So many chips. We used to eat chips together. In shorts and flopping sun hats, legs dangling on the wall. Before we met. With brown sauce and vinegar. You liked them fresh. Insisted they cooked them in front of you. The horse with the red ostrich plume is not a lover of chips.

You pointed at the hunch of the woman at the penny drop. The penny dropped and the coins shovelled and the woman roared. She shovelled pennies into the pocket of her yellow pinny. You gave her a thumbs up. Your thumb wore stars and stripes. You couldn’t hear yourself speak for the merry go round. You queued for tokens and went from machine to machine. All that kerfuffle and flashing and strobing and YOU ARE MY DANCING QUEEEEEEEEEN OH SEE THAT GIRL WATCH THAT SCENE you pulled out plugs and pulled down levers and you won a green spotted dinosaur and a rip off Barbie with black eyes and a purple bullet proof vest.

I come here for the pier but the pier is long gone. A woman in a periwinkle blue headscarf points at the groynes. It’s just the groynes now, hen, she says, the pier was washed out to sea. Before the war. Or bombed. You know how people are. Can never make up their minds. That’s sad, I say. She nods. You had to pay, she says. And we never had enough money for the seven of us. Just the wee ones went. Right to the end to get their ha’pennies worth.

You won. The claw grabber coming down on the blue bear’s head, grasping it by the ears, shaking it, shaking it, the blue bear is yours and you are victorious and an army of small girls are up against your legs begging for the blue bear and your feet are sinking in the dank damp of the once proud carpet and everything is pinging and pinking and flashing and dashing and rising and falling and racing and burning and losing and losing and losing so much losing the penny dropping and the woman in the yellow pinny coming at you, coming for the blue bear and you are raising your arm, your fist, your stars and stripes thumb, not in victory.

The pier. I can’t believe the pier isn’t here. I’m sure it was the last time. She drowned. The little girl. With the coin in her hand still. Her brothers on the beach with buckets and spades digging moats and building castles or houses or dungeons or race tracks or the gun barracks that sit horny on the other side of the thorned white cliffs of chalk. Her mother in the arcade. Her aunty Wilma queuing for candyfloss. The horse says he could see it coming. No good comes from a pier. He shakes and stamps and we file into the remembrance garden for the outdoor service. Only four of us are allowed in. Or is it six. The chip is warm grease and squidge in my hand.

The penny drops. Except it doesn’t. The claw does not pick up the violent pink teddy with the baleful plum pudding eyes. The pinball machine is silent, sulking, stiff, the ball caught in the clown’s leer. The vacated ice-cream containers are frigid empty. I peer through the grill at the piled high of wretched soft toys. Waterloo. Knowing my fate is to be with you. Waterloo. Shuttered. Locked tight with rusting padlocks and a straggled smear of old gold paint.

Tags arcades, burials

fiction Flash fiction

The Governor

He’s not available

It says he’s in.

Where?

On that board.

That’s out of date.

It says Wednesday, today.

That’s last week.

It says the 20^th.

Things change.

He doesn’t.

I think you better leave.

I’m not doing any harm.

You have to leave.

I’m fine here.

He’s not in.

He will be. One day.

He won’t see you.

He sees me. He’s seen me.

You’re not the first.

I intend to be the last.

Is that a threat?

No, a fact.

I’m calling security.

There’s no security here.

Of course there is.

Six people work in this office.

And one on security.

Postman Fat? Thomas the Wank Engine?

What do you mean?

It’s what he calls them. You.

I’ll call the police.

I should have called the police.

You’ve lost me.

You know what I mean.

No.

Look at this, then.

He didn’t do that.

He did.

He couldn’t. He’d never.

You said I wasn’t the first.

I didn’t mean that.

What did you mean?

Does it hurt?

Yes.

It looks sore.

It is.

Did he really do that?

Yes.

You must have provoked him.

Provoked him?

He wouldn’t hurt a fly.

I’m not a fly.

It takes a lot. To provoke him.

How much?

You need to leave.

Has he hurt you?

We’re not talking about me.

He’s hurt you, hasn’t he.

It was my fault.

How was it your fault?

I let her in.

Who?

Another woman.

When?

I don’t remember.

Are you afraid?

Jobs are hard to find.

Stand up.

Why.

We’re going in.

fiction Flash fiction

The Egg

‘I’ve told you before, Jack. Never take an egg from a nest. Think of its mummy and daddy.’ Christine snaps her laptop shut, stands up, walks past her son and flicks the kettle on. The little boy stays on his chair, shoulders slumped, cradling the small speckled blue egg in the slight of his hands.

‘But they weren’t there, the mummy and daddy birds. I had to save it.’ Christine spoons three teaspoonfuls of sugar into a hand-thrown black ceramic mug.

‘I suppose it’s too late to take it back now,’ she says. She stirs the sugar through the coffee. ‘Wrap it up in something, and put it in a box in the airing cupboard. You never know, you might be lucky.’

Time passes. A day here, a day there. Mail is dropped through the letter box. The snotty-eared Border terrier is taken for his three daily walks. A neighbour locks herself out and sits in their living room leafing through Home and Garden magazines until her husband gets home from work. There’s a typhoon in the Philippines, a mountain rescue in the Cairngorms, and a fifteen year old osprey called Hannah wins The Great British Bake Off. Jack’s father, Dennis, brings vegan cutlets home to flame on the barbeque. Christine gets through three bottles of seriously good wine. Little Jack hangs around in the hallway listening at the door of the airing cupboard. Behind the door, almost silence. Just the tick tick of the central heating system, the settling in sighs of the crisp folded linen, and the clunk of the dustpan and brush as it swings from its butcher hook when someone steps too heavy in the hall.

‘Mummy, Mummy, I can hear it, I can hear it!’ Jack wrenches the handle of the cupboard door and hops from one foot to another. Christine, who has been fussing around the house, writing lists for the cleaning woman, shouting at her absent husband, and heaving the dog off the chaise longue, does not need this now.

‘Of course you can’t she says. ‘Get away from that door now.’

‘I have to be here just in case,’ he says, his tone close to a whine. Christine is not a lover of whining, nor a lover of a son of hers stealing eggs from the local wood that had a protection order slapped on it by her husband’s tree-hugger friends just three months previously. Then she feels it, the most subtle of shifts in the air. A change in scent or humidity or pressure.

‘Don’t you open that door, Jack,’ Christine says, leaning over the back of the kitchen chair and gulping back the dregs of her breakfast coffee. She wipes her lips with her hands. ‘If it is being born, you don’t want to frighten it to death.’

There are so many condolences cards that the nurse has arranged them in three neat lines along the sill of the large picture window. Christine hasn’t read them yet. Not even one. Reading means accepting. Accepting means agreeing. Agreeing makes it true. Letting it sink in as her mother would say. It was an egg. It was just an egg. She hadn’t bothered to identify it, so many other things to do, but even if she had?

She slides a hand down under the starch of the hospital sheet along the cool bump of her hip then further down her thigh. Stops at the stump. First time she’d done that she’d screamed. Screamed and screamed until a squad of nurses had appeared in convoy, gathered around her bed, shushed her and held her hand and held her down and injected something into the saline drip. The slam of the crush in her chest had loosened, dissipated, subsided into something hazy, gauzed, hidden behind sterile and crepe and words that had yet to be spoken. Now she allows her hand to lie there, the weight of it on the remnant of her limb familiar but not yet reassuring.

Jack is to visit her for the first time. She is four operations in. Does he know, Christine whispers to the nurse who’s fussing about her monitoring system and jotting down numbers on a pad. The nurse shakes her head. Should I tell him, she asks, reaching out to hold the nurse’s hand. The nurse frowns. Perhaps not all of it at once, Mrs Simpson, the nurse says. Maybe start with the amputations. And leave your husband’s passing for another time. Passing. What a strange term. Makes it seem peaceful, ordinary, even preordained. Murdered would be better. Mutilated. Torn from limb to limb. When is the right time to tell your five year old his father was gathered into twenty bin bags, each piece of him measured, weighed and photographed, and a number stuck to the wooden floors of their house to show the range of the carnage. Her feet that aren’t there are too hot and too tight. She pulls the sheet up to give them some air. Looks down at the empty space. Shuts her eyes. The space remains white behind her closed lids.

It has been all over the papers of course. Christine’s mother, Enid, makes sure Christine has access to the lot. Enid brings the fat brown cardboard file in and lays it down on Christine’s bed. Enid has been genuinely unkind to Christine for thirty three years and is not going to change just because of a tragedy. Read them while you’ve got time, she says to her daughter. Once you start on the physiotherapy you’ll have time for nothing else. Mark my words. Christine turns her face to the wall. Enid walks to the window. Lovely cards you’ve got, dear, she says. Lovely cards. Why don’t you take them home, Christine says to the pillow. You can pretend they’re all for you.

Christine shuffles her buttocks into position on the bed and hauls herself up with the pulley. Her mother has taken the cards and taken her leave. Christine needs to see outside. A flash of yellow catches her eye. A coal tit hops and flutters down the branch of the oak tree outside the window and pecks at the seeds in the bird feeder. Christine opens her palm and studies the fragment of shell she’s been holding loose for the last half hour. It is pale blue, speckled grey with a smear of red, and a grit of dark green stuck to its glossy interior. The doctor had handed it to her in a neat glass specimen jar as she’d sat up for her first meal without her legs. We found this, she’d said. What is it, Christine had asked. Where? The doctor had paused. Between your toes, she’d replied. We thought you’d want to keep it.

Note. I wrote this story from a prompt in my Monday writing group. It was written in 30 minutes and has had one light edit. The prompt was: a person finds an egg in a forest and brings it home, with unexpected results.