It's Still Life

Dead Men Don’t Drown: #8

(catch-up with all episodes here)

Episode number 08: Dead Men Don’t Drown

That night I sleep badly, pitching from one side of the bed to the other as though the cottage has come loose from its foundations and we’d gone to sea.

At dawn I give up, pad barefoot downstairs, and put the kettle on …there’s only so much mystery a woman can endure without tea taking a formal position.

Something in the museum papers has lodged beneath my ribs — not a fact exactly, but the shape a fact makes when it is standing in the wrong place.

By the time the toast is cold, I have dragged my grandmother’s old shoe box of photographs onto the kitchen table and begun sorting through deckled edges, blurred summers, christenings, graves, and the merciless toothy smiles of people who knew more than they ever intended to say.

Then I find one of the cottage, dated on the back in my grandmother’s perfect hand: she is heavily pregnant in the doorway beside a smiling man with his arm easy on her shoulder, and behind them, clear as judgement in the sitting room window, the Staffordshire spaniels face inward.

The toast slips from my hand, stops marmalade-down on the floor, and all I can think is that Captain Jacob Macleod came home.

Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “stop”. Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.

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