Ernst Is Coming Home by Jack Morris
The rumours arrive on the dawn wind and by mid-afternoon the village ladies have landed in Leonora’s kitchen to disembowel the news.
“He’s been gone so long.”
“You’ll need a spring clean.”
“But what will he make of the new arrangements?”
Leonora has trained the canary to leave its cage when she whistles for it and the magpie family to hop through the window to clear the table. Next, she plans to teach them to deposit silverware into the washbowl instead of stealing it to adorn their nest in the old fir tree. And of course, Georgia lives here all the time, now. No. Ernst will not approve of the new arrangements. Leonora’s head begins to contract until it is the size of a pin.
Georgia, two metres tall in her stockinged feet, billows forward and offers the village ladies a slice of Battenberg. Since she arrived she and Leonora feast nightly on cheap shop-bought cake, licking the plastic packing clean with eager tongues before they climb the stairs to their moonlit bed. Remembering, Leonora’s head begins to grow back to its normal size.
The village ladies pat their flat tummies.
“No no,” they say, “we can’t possibly. But tell us,” they wheedle, their eyes avaricious, “have you missed him terribly?”
Has she? Ernst once loomed like a snow-capped mountain. But now—
Georgia’s capuchin monkey leaps onto the wooden table with a screech. The ladies squawk and clutch their hats. Their china cups tumble, pell-mell, and piddle dark dregs onto the linoleum. The tea leaves form a migration of silverfish which swirl up,up towards the setting sun.
The village ladies scuttle-hop home. Georgia puts her arm around Leonora’s shoulders and Leonora leans into Georgia’s soft waist, their single shadow long on the moss-filled lawn. From its open cage, the canary begins to sing.
“We should tidy,” Leonora says. “Ernst likes a tidy house.”
But Georgia grabs a silver spoon from the beak of a passing magpie and uses it to feed Leonora mouthfuls of sweet, luscious cake. Mouthful upon mouthful upon mouthful of neon pink and lurid yellow until Leonora’s head begins to expand, bigger and wider and deeper; until she is as vast and as full as the star-pricked evening sky.
Jack Morris has been writing since 2019 when she started an MA in Creative Writing ‘to see if she liked it’ (a bold move in retrospect). Since then her short form work has been published in various places (and been twice Pushcart nominated in ‘23, indicating lightening can indeed strike twice). She edits Neither Fish Nor Foul, an online ‘zine for short fiction.