This short story won second place in the William Taylor Memorial Short Story Competition for 2018
Detached
Auburn leaves detach from the English trees and muddle about the garden. I’m unsure how long I’ve been watching their charming, futile flutter through the reflection in the dresser mirror. It must be April, though it could be early May.
April. Such a pretty name.
Pasted to the mirror, a square, yellow note shouts, ‘Your DAUGHTER APRIL will collect you at 2pm today’ in a stranger’s upper-case scrawl. They must consider me quite vain to presume my mirror the best place for posting messages. Beneath, in lower case, it reads ‘today is your birthday’ alongside three hand-drawn balloons surrendered to the breeze, each dangling an S-shaped thread.
They seem detached, as though they are drifting further from each other.
The old woman’s hollow, sunken eyes gape at me. Her features are carved into the mirror in deep furrows. She is ancient and still, her last essence of life captured and framed like a Goldie portrait. I reach a gnarled, spotted hand out to trace her creases.
A sharp knock at the door cuts through the room. A brown-skinned girl lets herself in and flaps about me like a chicken soon to meet an axe. We have chickens at the farm. My mother hands me a bowl of scraps each day and I scatter it in a radius as they follow me about the yard like disciples. Awful creatures, they are – always nervous; a sense of impending doom their only constant. The girl frets through my wardrobe, liberates my few dresses and strews them across the bed.
‘But dear,’ I probe. ‘Where is it that we’re going?’
She clacks and clucks, pointing to the yellow note fixed to my mirror. ‘Your DAUGHTER APRIL will collect you at 2pm today’ in a stranger’s upper-case scrawl. Beneath, in lower case, it reads ‘today is your birthday’ alongside three hand-drawn balloons surrendered to the breeze, each dangling an S-shaped thread.
A violet cotton dress with red roses hangs off the bony shoulders of the old woman in the mirror. It must be an unreturned gift, because it does not suit her. It’s three sizes too large, and red and violet are not her colours. The brown-skinned girl refuses to help me change, despite my insistence that the silk dress that Bert bought me on our honeymoon – the one from Kirkcaldie & Stains – is there, in the wardrobe. If only she’d listen. Instead, she applies rouge to my cheeks, scolding my tardiness, and I’m staring at that ancient, lined woman in the mirror, suspicious that the girl has taken the dress and that’s why she won’t comb the pitiful wardrobe; cawing, instead, with her incessant instructions.
Another knock at the door; this time discreet and apologetic. The girl flaps her way over to answer it. She confers in a murmur with a stranger, who occasionally nods in my direction and feigns a smile through pinched lips and doleful cow eyes.
‘This is your daughter, April,’ the brown-skinned girl declares, as though I were a simpleton.
‘Yes, yes, dear,’ I say, shooing her aside and shaking April’s hand, foiling her clumsy attempt to embrace. ‘Of course, it is. How are you, April?’ I inquire and, despite the crow’s feet surrounding the worry in her eyes, she smiles that impish grin that once belonged to Bert and pecks me on the cheek.
‘I’m well thanks, Mum,’ she divulges. ‘How are you?’ Before I can complain that the room is too dark, the old man next door cheats at cribbage, and the girl is taking money from my purse, she adds, ‘Happy birthday. Are you ready for your party?’
I ask what on earth she is prattling on about and she points to a yellow note stuck to my dresser mirror. ‘Your DAUGHTER APRIL will collect you at 2pm today’ in a stranger’s upper-case scrawl. Beneath, in lower case, it reads ‘today is your birthday’ alongside three hand-drawn balloons surrendered to the breeze, each dangling an S-shaped thread.
At the front door, I ask April where she’s leading me. She murmurs something about somebody’s birthday. She never could speak clearly, that girl. It used to drive Bert up the wall. She bundles me into a car and it’s all blue lights and dials and leather and so very plush and I wonder if it’s new. She tells me she’s owned it for a year or two and I feel suddenly aggrieved that she’s never come to collect me and take me for a drive. As she starts the car, I can see that she’s very red faced. ‘There’s no need to be embarrassed,’ I exclaim. ‘Just come by, perhaps on a Sunday, and we could drive to the tearooms at the lake.’
‘We did that last Sunday!’ she thunders, and I tell her it’s not ladylike to yell. I am sat right beside her, after all.
She drives in silence and when I ask where we are going she doesn’t answer. She always had cloth ears, that girl. It used to drive Bert up the wall.
‘Do you need help to get undressed?’ asks the brown-skinned girl. Oh, the cheek of it.
‘I’ve managed a good many years thus far!’ I bark. Unbuttoning my dress, I lock eyes with the antique etching in the mirror. There is a yellow note pasted next to her ancient face. ‘Your DAUGHTER APRIL will collect you at 2pm today’ in a stranger’s upper-case scrawl. Beneath, in lower case, it reads ‘today is your birthday’ alongside three hand-drawn balloons surrendered to the breeze, each dangling an S-shaped thread.
My birthday. How wonderful. I open the wardrobe, searching for the silk dress Bert bought me from Kirkcaldie & Stains. On our honeymoon. Ever the romantic. I’d better hurry, I think as the copper leaves detach outside. April will soon be here.
Bevan M. Nicol