Scene report
Flash in the pan fiction
Pictures I’ve taken this past month, and short, tiny, minuscule, stories to go with them. (Inspired by Celine Nguyen being inspired by Bill Buckley). Some fiction, some fiction-ish.
She decided to leave the orange chair behind when they moved. He said it had never suited them – the rest of the flat was outfitted in varying shades of beige.
In their new home, the ghost of the chair followed her. Sometimes she would walk back to the corner where it had been discarded, and try to will it back into being. It never returned.
Five years later she moved again, this time with another husband. It was far away from the old neighbourhood; here the pavements were wide, so you could walk three abreast, and the trees were taller, with leaves the colour of fire.
One night, as she pushed the pram down the street, she looked into the window of the house on her left, its living room lit up by a solitary lamp. The man she used to live with, a woman, and a child sat on the floor around a coffee table. Next to the lamp was the orange chair.
I stood by the bar and watched everyone take photos in their Halloween costumes. I’ve always hated fancy dress. The same reason I dislike musicals and team sports (participating, not watching). To be confronted with a display of unguarded effort, no dissimulating, no hint of irony, is a challenge. A reminder that not everyone is as plagued by self-consciousness as me. I was wearing all black; black long-sleeved shirt, black pleated skirt, black knee high boots; my usual uniform, but if someone asked I could tell them I was an undertaker. No one had asked yet, so I continued to sip my gin and tonic and smile at strangers. The girl who had brought me to the party was in the bathroom with people I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen her for a year, but when she texted it didn’t seem like the time to rehash old wounds, so I went along without bringing up our previous estrangement. After I finished my drink, and a second one too, it was clear she wasn’t coming back. The white lace gloves forgotten on the seat next to me had not been reclaimed. I picked them up and pocketed them. The 38 bus home was quieter than usual.
The man and the woman looked forward to Thursdays. Under the cover of ‘after work drinks’, they could laugh freely. Touch hands passing pints backwards through a crowded room. When he rolled her a cigarette, it felt like a kiss.
Her favourite colleague asked her about it, one Thursday in November.
‘So, what’s going on with you and him?’
They were smoking in the narrow alley next to their regular. It smelled like urine, and the woman pulled up the neck of her coat over her mouth and breathed in deeply. The expensive perfume she had sprayed last weekend at Liberty’s still lingered; the mineral top note had faded, but a powdery, berry musk remained. The word ‘nosegay’ popped into her head. She wondered why the Victorians didn’t just bathe more, instead of creating all this scaffolding to mask their stench.
‘I mean, obviously nothing. He’s just a massive flirt. I don’t know, I’m trying not to read too much into it.’
The colleague opened her mouth to reply, but the man had bounded out to join them.
‘My favourite ladies! How are you going?’
She smiled at his Australian twang, thought about how sunny his childhood must have been.
‘What’s down here?’ he asked, peering into the darkness of the alley.
‘It’s a dead end.’ the third-wheeling colleague replied, and looked at the woman.