Flash Fiction by Judy Darley
What Was Lost
We stalk the falling dusk. Moorhens paddle in reedbeds where rats paw gravel troughs for treats.
Oily water hums, bouncing tnrance tracks over its surface like skimmed pebbles. We’re as steady-paced as ever, united in our denial of encroaching years. By 9 pm, boats resemble 2 am dreams.
Light spills and bobs on the dock’s hoarded refuse. Sturdy-legged girls shiver in micro-skirts, hyper-glossed skin aglow. We reminisce about being that young and dumbly hopeful, share daring highlights, hold in confessions of things we let be done to us in the name of being liked, being favored, and the blurred-edged illusion of love.
We clink glasses and swallow sour Chardonnay to wash down the nostalgia of pliant limbs happy to open and invincibility’s long-faded fizz. When morning comes we’ll humble-brag our aching heads and clear conscience.
We’d rather regret what we did than what we didn’t, we claim, and blink back scrambled memories of what was lost.
How Insects Signal Their Love
The table my housemate Nixi chooses is elliptical, with one swooping side edged by a low bench, and the other fringed by three chairs. I sit on the bench with Nixi, leaning against the wall and keeping half an eye on the door, watching who comes and goes. Mauve and gold fairy lights twinkle near the ceiling. It reminds me of how insects signal their love. On hillsides up North, nectar-drunk bees vibrate through heather and gorse. Remembering, I almost smell the honey.
Whenever I’m out with Nixi and our mutual pals, they talk about who they’re doing, who they wish they had or hadn’t done it with, and how irked they are that so-and-so didn’t tell them they’d done or were doing it with whoever.
I stay quiet, nursing a tepid pinot grigio and turning the silver ring on my index finger round and around. I daydream about how when I get home I’ll pour myself a tall glass of cold milk and tell it things I’d never say here; all the things I might never utter aloud to anyone.
I picture turning my confessions into an art installation akin to artist Tracey Emin’s Tent, which she stitched with the names of every person she’d slept with. For my artwork, I envision a wall of milk cartons, each one printed with a grainy photo of an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend’s face and containing something that was lost or taken from me.
For instance, Barry Williams, the first boy I pseudo-married in the playground aged not-quite six, who broke my belief that boys and girls have equal roles by telling me I’d stay home and have babies while he went to work among the stars on a rocket each day.
Or Dean Ezro who at the age of nine had the kind of sweet, apple-cheeked face that made adults mistake him for an innocent, and who robbed £3.20 from my purse along with my innate trust.
Or Ellie Nord with the beaded braids I coveted, who at age eleven stole my confidence that every part of me is as perfect as my gran always claimed. We’d lined up to dive into the municipal swimming pool when she shrieked and pointed at my long toes: “Look at those maggots!” Ten minutes earlier we’d crammed together in a cubicle sampling our first butterfly kiss.
Now I mostly keep those offending toes out of sight in sneakers, biker boots or, tonight, silvery, moon-reflecting DMs.
Then there’s the boy whose name I don’t know and whose face is a smudgy blur, who pushed me against a wall, aged sixteen, and prized something from me I could never get back.
Who crushed my conviction that saying no could stop any act I didn’t want.
Who snatched away my previously unshakable sense of autonomy.
Not all encounters ended with theft, of course – maybe some cartons should hold the things given to me.
A delight in my own silliness aged twelve, prompted by Nixi snorting strawberry milkshake from her nose after I pointed out a passing dog with a moustache exactly like our GCSE Home Ec. teacher’s.
A sense of my glowing beauty, bestowed on me by Alex Witherow when we explored each other’s naked bodies aged fourteen.
My first orgasm, from Micah Jones, aged not quite sixteen, who taught me you don’t need a rocket to reach the stars.
I think of the long train journey up North last summer – hours and fields flashing by the windows as Nixi and I chattered and laughed and slept and dreamt. I remember the small paper bag she gave me holding the ‘just because’ ring she’d bought at our local craft market. I held it up to see the passing view, and then Nixi, through its imperfect circle, framing each in silver before sliding it on to the finger where it fitted snuggly enough not to fall off.
My friends pause in their stories.
Nixi tilts her head. ‘What’re you smiling about?’
I shrug and smile wider. ‘Milk, and art, mostly.’
Nixi blinks, and I can see she wants to know more. Her curiosity makes my stomach flutter.
Maybe she could have her own carton in the exhibit.
‘I’ll tell you when we get home,’ I promise.
Conversations with milk will have to wait.
I turn the silver ring on my finger round and around.
Judy Darley lives in southwest England. She is the author of short fiction collections The Stairs are a Snowcapped Mountain (Reflex Press), Sky Light Rain (Valley Press) and Remember Me to the Bees (Tangent Books.) Her words have been published and performed on BBC radio and aboard boats, in museums, caves, a disused church and an artist’s studio. Find Judy at http://www.skylightrain.com; https://twitter.com/JudyDarley.
Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.
Flash Boulevard 