Sometimes it’s the weight of a watermelon by Abigail Williams
Occasionally even the scent of chip shop vinegar is enough to take Jenny back to her old redbrick road, the chafing cold of the privy, the knife-tear sensation so unexpectedly agricultural, anatomical, like she is a tree with a splitting limb.
And then she is there. Mouth stuffed with blanket, floor spread with last week’s chippy wrappers, her Mary Janes planted astride the gloopy mess like a butcher’s back room, like shame.
Cath knew because Jenny used the pot three times a night, sometimes needed help hauling herself upright, even though the bump was tidy as a pinhead. It must have been Cath who told them, because someone finds her slumped and Jenny wakes smothered in white sheets with cool palms pawing her head and shush-shush now, shush-shush in her ears and Jenny is bruised and Baby is gone. Dead, Dad says, and her mother looks away. Jenny becomes ill, feverish. She has pushed out her fight and Dad says they buried it.
For your own good, Mother says at the end. When she doesn’t know their names, when she cannot button a cardi, she remembers it was for Jenny’s own good. And when she’s gone, Jenny finds the letter from the adoption agency and the curled question mark of dark hair, soft as butter, light as a butterfly wing. Not dead. Not buried.
Sometimes, as she grew older, Jenny allowed herself to lick the sour pill of ‘what if’. What if there’d been stories and crumpets? What if Christmas and love? But the licking turned her tongue raw.
And now a curl of hair. Not a full stop, but a comma. And perhaps, after all, it is not too late.
Abigail Williams writes flash, short and longer form fiction from her home in the UK. She has won, been listed or placed in Bath Flash Fiction Award, Oxford Flash Fiction, the Bridport Prize, Flash 500, Molotov Cocktail and numerous other competitions. She has words in Frazzled Lit, NFFD, has been longlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize and has an MA Creative Writing (Distinction). She spends too long deliberating over what to include in a bio.
