After the potter is cremated

the father whispers, let’s get the hell out of here. At home, the father and son walk the path to the shed to put in a home-brew. The seventeen-year-old daughter drifts through the house smoking cigarettes, examines her mother’s work – runs her fingers over hand-built birds with lace patterned wings, bowls dipped in green and brown ash glazes, the tall vase scored with quails and wheat. For old time’s sake, she flicks through the Collected Works of Brueghel The Elder—hovers over “The Triumph of Death” and “Hunters in the Snow.”

In the bedroom she opens her mother’s drawers as if a great truth might reveal itself—she twists the orange lipstick, feels the weight of the Mexican turquoise and silver ring. Sweeping her fingers along the clothes in the wardrobe, her mother’s fragrance is spectral embrace. She slips the slingbacks on—the fancy Italian pair she liked that her mother never wore, then sits with the quiet on her mother’s side of the bed, feels the hollow of her bones until a fantail, mistaking the Chestnut tree reflected in glass as habitat, hits the window with a BANG, beats its battered wings.

Sounds float in from the shed: the radio, their voices, the scrape of buckets, the shuffle of gumboots. In the kitchen she ties the apron strings, boils the kettle, slices tomatoes, butters bread, sets the tray. The gravel driveway crunches underfoot. Her father and brother nod at the tea and sandwiches. They don’t notice she’s wearing her mother’s apron and green muslin dress with red brocade, her Italian shoes and orange lipstick, her turquoise ring. The mother’s scent dips with the sun as the smell of yeast and hops rises. The fantail tucked in the apron pocket plucks the worm from the daughter’s fingers.

Belinda Rowe is an emerging short fiction writer and English teacher. Born in New Zealand she now lives in Western Australia. She has words published or forthcoming in Gone Lawn, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Ghost Parachute, Lost Balloon, Fictive Dream, Literary Namjooning, Unbroken, Fractured Lit, Vestal Review and BSF 2025. She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow 2025.