An excerpt
In the darkness of an early July morning, you piled into the car with your suitcase, plugged in your headphones and pretended to sleep; a well-practised strategy to avoid becoming the focus of your parents’ low bickering. You spent the flight with your gaze glued to the horizon, searching for the first thin slice of another country peering out above the sea.
The dirt road to the house was rough, and the car stirred up the dust of three weeks with no rain, flinging some of it through your open window. You felt the excitement of a new place and stared out at a sprawling field of sunflowers, thick stemmed, their rough faces turned to the sun. You don’t remember what your room was like, only the silence and darkness that night. You wanted to sleep with a lamp on, so kept reading after your parents went to bed, but your mother crossed your room like an uninvited spirit and switched the light off. You watched the faint glow of her white nightdress recede to nothing.
The next day, you spent a little time in the fields, tipping your head back to bathe your face in the heat of the sun. Your mother would have liked to rest in the shade, but your father had a schedule. Every morning he swept you both into the car and drove into town or to the sorts of places he thought you should go: a ruined castle, a museum, a hissing wind-whipped beach. Once, he took you to a pottery and, while you mother cooed over a dull, expensive vase, you found yourself wandering past shelves filled with palm-sized, long-limbed creatures, wings draped over skeletal bodies, eyes huge, dark and uncaring. Fairies perhaps, but not the reassuring kind. Some had sharp little teeth. All had claws. You bought one, clutching it in your hand all the way back to the farm.
That night you woke with an ache in your belly and found blood on your pyjamas when you stumbled to the toilet. You sat, exuberant and sore, pressing your feet into the cold floor tiles, until your mother pushed the door open and stood at the threshold, arms crossed.
Published by Valley Press in Permanent Emotion, an anthology of stories from the Northern Short Story Festival Academy (July 2024).
Full story coming soon on Patreon.
What Vicky Did Next 