Flash fiction!

(To see the missing numbers scoot over to Middlebrow Magazine...)

One

May didn’t seem to believe in time. Not that she’d have put it like that, if you asked her. Likely she’d have looked at you with that eye-brow raised, lip slightly curled kind of face on her, before getting on with what she was doing.

She was always doing something.

When I say she didn’t believe in time, I suppose what I really mean is that she only believed in the present. She never seemed to think about the future, or at least I never heard her mention it –except for maybe what she planned on doing with the potatoes when she’d finished digging them, or what time she’d bring the chickens in.

And when she spoke about the past – only ever if someone else brought it up – it was with a kind of detached humour, as though she was reciting a story that really belonged to someone else, to amuse a child.

She always made me feel like a child, thinking back.

Seven

There was this church near where she lived – you had to go past it on the train to get there. It was just an ordinary little church, like most villages have, but it had this big cross outside, all lit up in neon.

It was always there, but I could never get used to it. Some days it just looked odd, other days I think it reminded me of a scene from one of those low-budget horror films… Not that I really watch them.

Anyway, next to the church was an allotment, and that always looked wrong to me as well. I think because I expected it to be a graveyard, and it did sort of look like one if you just glanced at it. But then you realised the things coming out of the ground weren’t gravestones, they were little sheds and fences.

Maybe there was a graveyard on the other side of the church, I don’t know.