…because if a day… by Audrey Niven
… because it’s all there in front of you, the weather of it all, the atmosphere it has, the way a day curls round you and makes you its own thing, whether you will it or not: you cope with it, you pace it with rituals of bathing and dressing and eating, the order of things or the disorder of things, out of sync or running like a burn o’er the moor, who can say; because there are always things: your boy’s fever, the lateness of the bus, the gas in the meter, the cost to your heart of playing the game; a tombola that casts you back to a day at the fair and the goldfish that never lived and wondering if there will ever be days like that again, with the fabric of a summer dress, yellow and pink with ric-rac braid that means everything to you, and still lunchtime comes and goes, with or without a sandwich or a bowl of soup, and wondering how your child is or your partner, and whether there will be more to come, and once again that time floats across the sky when you looked at her and thought ‘yes, this is the one,’ and how golden that day was, how the sun fell on the freckles on her shoulder and how, despite it being a cliché, it’s still precious to you and her, a story told as the sun goes down, maybe on a bench in a pub garden looking out over a field in August where the barley is dancing, or it could be that you’re on your hands and knees in the kitchen mopping filthy water, swearing at her bare feet telling you it’s your own fault, you should have called the repair man, and those days are with you when you take a moment to reflect and somewhere in that moment you realise that this day, like all the others, is a meditation – no: a mediation – of who you are, but you try not to think about that, not to turn in on yourself, because what good does it do you; how much happier does it make you, and you rejoice that the thought melts away on its own in the rush of the traffic, or the shout of the kids in the street, and you are moved on to the next thing, the walk home, the umbrella and the sound of the rain and thinking about the things you need to tell her when you see her about buying a new duvet and going back to the seaside, and then here is your child, not sick after all, or at least no worse than he was, and you remark to yourself or to the wind or the time as it passes, that you don’t know if this day, and the hours you’ve lived of it, will be significant in some way and will remain a part of who you are forever or if …
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Audrey Niven is a Scottish writer, living in London. She sees flash fiction as the literary equivalent of sending up a flare. So far, her stories have been published in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology 2020, NFFD Flash Flood 2020, HISSAC and soon, by Reflex Press.
Twitter: @NivenAudrey