2 Flash Fictions by Chris Cottom
THE SPACE BETWEEN
CHRIS COTTOM
We agree we’ll wait, do up the cottage, adopt a rescue rabbit, maybe two.
By April the lanes are frothy with cow parsley. Every day you bring names home from the coffee shop.
‘Brett,’ you’ll say, shaking out your braid, your brow moist after pedalling up the hill to the village. ‘Barney, Austin, Bert. Ha! Bert and Ernie!’
‘Boy bunnies fight.’
‘Arabella and Araminta, then. If we get girls.’
At the Midsummer Safari Supper you’re still pipe-slim in a green satin slip dress, your soft ginger hair brushing your shoulders. ‘I’m a reed,’ you tell everyone, giggling. There are homemade spears, a cardboard giraffe, and a paunchy orangutan man wearing bits of an acrylic rug. It’s all a long way from London and your gym-bunny friends, air-kissing for England and moaning about their nannies.
The New Life Church meets in a primary school in Hadleigh. Nobody’s dressed up; there’s even a couple in cycling lycra. There’s a band with two guitars, a Roland keyboard and a drum kit in glittery gold. During the songs some people clap or lift their hands. Desperate to get out, I turn to you but you’re somewhere else, your eyes closed, your face transcendent. I blame the chaplain at Ipswich General.
You’re up in Northumbria now, a minister yourself, with two tall stepsons and a beautiful, healthy daughter. Here, the fields are stubble again. It’s the Harvest Hoedown on Saturday, where I’ll drink Abbot Ale and remember you dancing in your red gingham top and swirly blue skirt. Perhaps one day you’ll visit and we’ll walk across to the church where, on the grass that cold grey morning, the whole village stood alongside us. Perhaps we’ll sit in the pews and you’ll pray, and perhaps, finally, I too will find peace.
When the twister smacks the library
Chris Cottom
our training kicks in automatically and Patsy and I start clearing a veritable Vesuvius of 874 Latin Lyric Poetry off a toppled wannabe Mary Beard who’s still clutching a bilingual edition of the works of Catullus – intriguingly open at Poem V with its ‘thousand kisses’ – but it’s too late for Catullus, too late for CPR, so Patsy closes the woman’s eyes and places the book – still open at Poem V – over her face until I refer her to Rule 9 ‘check whether an item is on hold before trying to second-guess the wishes of the recently deceased,’ and she smiles that sweet smile of hers, says ‘yes, Brenda,’ and starts straightening 879 Literatures of Other Italic Languages when my pager summons us, a little curtly I feel, even if we are short-staffed, to an incident near 783 Music for Single Voices, so we dash down the escalator, blue lights flashing on our cardigans, to rescue a sad-eyed schoolgirl from a flash flood in 788 Wind Instruments then zip over to 391 Costume and Personal Appearance where we’re sorting through spine-damaged texts on seventeenth-century accessories when half the front wall tumbles into the marketplace just as Harriet comes on the PA with ‘all staff to the main desk’ and Patsy takes my hand – takes my hand after all these years – to pull me past the screams of the wounded in 178 Ethics of Consumption and says all we could do is refer them to 393 Death Customs or 234 Salvation and Grace and when we get to the desk the Head Librarian declares a state of emergency and Patsy offers to make a run for 614 Incidence of Injuries, and turns on the stairs to give me a quick wave and that’s the last time I see her.
