“I can’t stand Literary Fiction, it’s all Alzheimer’s and wanking.” She’s draining her second bottle, Red, the White long gone; and I realise, I want to put this woman inside a tree and set fire to her.
One day my boss was talking to me and I just disappeared. Like that. It was amazing. Then I came back. This wasn’t so amazing. I was pretty pissed. I said, come on guys, meaning my body.
Steven John, Associate & Features Editor, interviews Leonora Desar about her flash fictions in Best Microfiction 2019, edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke, judged by Dan Chaon, published by Pelekinesis
Jessie wakes to the smell of manure being spread. Every day. Or maybe only growing season, but it feels like every day. When her father and brothers come in from the fields and Ma has one of her sick headaches, it’s Jessie who washes their clothes, pounding dirt and dung out of stiff, worn denim, watching her hands grow cracked and red, and thinking about death.
This morning when I walked Jimmy to school, I ruffled his hair and told him he’d end up with a bald head like me. All the men in our family go the same way. He’s got a lovely cheeky face, my boy, and I said even if someday he didn’t have hair, the girls would love him. But they’d hurt him too. Girls always do. The bakery is stifling – I’m cutting three strands of dough to make up the milk loaves and wondering what it would be like to have a daughter with long hair to plait.