Ponytailed ladies working up the soccer pitch, leaping and punching the air, hugging and slapping one another’s shoulders. On stay TV, the group roars and also you shout Sure! In the meantime I’m taking part in Odd Socks on Fb with grandmothers within the Midwest USA. Matching digital socks, pair after pair, a soothing occupation. Opening the washer, refreshing my clothesline, granting fellow gamers’ sock needs.
Right this moment you went to the hairdressers, the place they had been chatting a few actuality TV programme referred to as I Kissed a Woman, so that you attempt watching it, however after 5 minutes say No and swap channels. And complain you particularly requested for a parting down the center however didn’t get one. Cross about it, not going again there once more. In the meantime I’m leaning backwards over the couch arm, hoping I don’t slip and crack my cranium, whereas inserting eyedrops.
We each love that episode of Married at First Sight: your favorite half, the butch standing on the altar along with her legs shaking, hears the approaching click-clack of excessive heels and thinks ‘Good!’ Mine: the femme reveals she has alopecia, that her lengthy blonde hair is a wig, and the butch is unfazed, saying she doesn’t give a shit. 1
Mattress. You hear in your pill to a Rory Stewart podcast, I’ve reached the second part of Galsworthy’s To Let. Center-aged June sees youthful Fleur mirrored in an previous lacquer-framed mirror, like a reasonably ghost.
In fact I don’t solely learn Victorian/Edwardian novelists, I’ve cabinets of e.g. Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, Jeanette Winterson. In keeping with Winterson when she was younger, later-life ardour is tough to endure.
And when ardour goes away that’s additionally onerous.
*
***
Frances Gapper’s tales have been revealed in 4 Greatest Microfiction anthologies, and on-line in lit mags together with Splonk, Wigleaf, New Flash Fiction Overview, Forge and Literary Namjooning. She lives within the UK’s Black Nation.