Two Fairytale Microfictions

Snow

Her memory drifts and piles over the frozen living room. Her chair is buried; the photographs on the mantelpiece are hidden.

Her memory is in seven small boys, each different but each just like her.

Patrick who closes his eyes and says he's too sick for school.

Lewis with that irritating tick of a laugh that I will never learn to accommodate.

Fergus who is so unrelentingly eager to please.

Mark with teeth too big for his mouth.

And I love them as I loved her; painfully, awkwardly.

Jamie who spends all day looking in the mirror.

Her memory is not a memory until she is gone. She lies there, undecided. We visit once a week, walking into the ward in single file, and lining up shortest to tallest without knowing it.

Andrew who talks as if he were king.

When we leave we each kiss her once on the forehead. Me last. She doesn't know it, of course.

Calum who was always her favourite. I love him the least.

The boys march up the stairs in single file, to play computer games and swear at each other. I wonder if they know how little they have. A memory made of water and cold that shifts and drifts and has no substance of its own. Not really a memory at all.

The boys are growing taller. Fergus is almost a man. I dread the day he outgrows me. I think about spring.

When the buds grow fat and hungry, I wonder will I tell them? I wonder if they think that they ever really had a mother? I turn away.

Perhaps one day the words will come. Your mother was a myth. Their mother. A photograph buried under snow.

The words will bounce back and echo in my face like a reflection in a mirror. I will tell them so that I will know. And maybe then I will brush the snow away.

The Sea Cows' Love-Song

We breathe underwater. Silkily we suck. We huddle and squabble and rise up, shimmering, our song a bubbled breath.

No one above knows our colour, our shape. It’s easy to miss our faces from above. The surface light distorts us and, confused and thirsty, sailors think us beautiful sometimes.

We could be mermaids. We roll in mud and our full-body-mask peels back to reveal fresh, clean skin. Seaweed surrounds us like long, toothpaste-green, fairytale locks.

We breathe where we’re not supposed to breath, mammals under the sea-skin, rebels of the undercurrent. We breathe, slowly, deeply, daring to be desired, sucking in fumes from the tankers and the mainland, living for the high. We swim like dancers, defiant in our ugliness, our sweet rolls of blubber secret under murky water-mist.

We’re down here for you if you want us. Down, a lifetime down. Come for a visit. Stay a while.

We’re down here, down on the seabed. We’re down with the slick wood of shipwrecks. Don’t fear our seaweed tendrils; we could be mermaids. We could hold you down here, deep in our ugly embrace, until the sea holds you too and the holding is all there is.

Our slow embrace. A lifetime of slow, that grasps your mind and body as the gentle water softly skins you and picks your bones to clean.