It's Still Life

Mum thought it was a suitcase, but then she didn’t open it up to look, because that would mean spending more time in the charity shop than she wanted to do, just in case some neighbour walked by and saw her – in a charity shop for fig’s sake, so she bought it for a pittance and walked home as fast as her feet could manage in kitten heels, which all 1950s mothers wore along with ruffle aprons and Avon cherry red lipstick.

At home, she tried to open her new secondhand suitcase, which I forgot to mention she wanted for storing all of her knitting stuff, when she discovered that it was locked … and she had no key … but that was no problem because she’d seen To Catch a Thief at the Neptune Theatre, and paid attention when Cary Grant was picking locks, and so she wiggled a hairpin in the lock (which did nothing except bend the hairpin), and with a sigh of “this might defeat me” took one of Dad’s claw hammers and started hammering away at the lock, which is why it’s called a hammer.

And then Mum let out a little chirp of happiness as the lid popped open.

It wasn’t a suitcase – it was a wind-up record player for 78rpm records, and Mum said “I thought it was suitcase,” and I said, “Why would you think that, Mum, it’s a record player,” – and since I had a record, I said … Do you want to listen to “Teddy Bear’s Picnic?” which was the name of my one and only record, and of course she said, “Good lord, girl, no I do not,” and she left me with her new secondhand record player, and after a month or so I discovered if you turn the record over there was another new song that I hadn’t listened to.

I played Teddy Bear’s Picnic over and over and over, and then a little while later when I’d learn to read, I noticed a new word on the label, and I tried sounding it out but I’d never heard that word before so I asked Mum, “Mum, what’s this word?” and she said it was “Unbreakable” which she explained meant you can’t break it, and for me that was a challenge, and so I started bending Teddy Bear’s Picnic up and down and up and down until …. it broke — at which point I complained like a banshee that the record company had lied to me … to which Mum just shook her head in disbelief, which she’d do regularly and often for years to come.

Written for Girlie On The Edge, word “turn”. Word count: 467, 2 minutes reading time. Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Imagery and poems ©Misky 2023.