Stories

Fen story


She wasted hours restlessly, the restlessness defined the wastefulness. They disappeared without much ceremony, they didn’t clatter into her memory, they bore little emotion with them, they just decomposed into an unremarkable past. The light from outside dithered. Greyness sank in through the windows, and she fought away the passing time with warm, yellow lights. Sometimes, she resisted, sitting in a sad half-light, as if the refusal of electric light could make the day last just a little longer. If you could see her, you would see a person, painstakingly cleaning the electric stove, in an attempt to have something to show for her day. Sometimes she even used cotton buds.

Cleaning normally made her feel better. It was something tangible, an orderly kitchen. She believed it to be a sign or a message, ‘I’m ok, look at the kitchen’. Rough dry hands at the end of the day and neatly stacked Tupperware gave her the heady rush of usefulness. As she reorganised the shelf with the cans and the dried goods, she reflected on the monotony of her diet. Pasta, rice, pasta, powdered mashed potato. She projected a quinoa-eating image to the world, but in private she didn’t see the point. No quinoa, then. Cashews had gone, apparently they were unethical. She was a smoker. Sometimes she secretly bought things on Amazon.

Lentils, black beans, sweetcorn, plum tomatoes, chickpeas dried and tinned. Dry for the ambitiousness of them, tinned because her ambition, of late, had waned. Some other things that she would never eat, like the jar of asparagus. When did that happen? Her diet was largely healthy, she ate a lot of green vegetables, the cheap ones and beetroot. Beetroot until she was sick of it. When she was sick of it, it came out an amusing, alarming pink. She would make so much that she ate from it for 4 days straight, until she could bear the sight of its coagulated mess no longer and had to throw it in the bin. The organic waste, which was over full and becoming foul, rotting right in front of her.

The bathroom was something she needed to build up to. There was a bathtub, and often she needed a lie down in there. Standing up was a big ask, it used a lot of energy. ‘I’m worth it’ she would think with a feigned flippancy, lowering herself into the hot water. At least the bath was never really full, never really satisfying. She scrubbed the greasy ring that clung to the bath, inhaling the vinegary smell of the bathroom cleaner. She looked at the tiles above the bath, and decided that those were a lost cause.