Listen to a reading of this story by the author:
This is just to say I never really got why you were so floored by Caravaggio’s basket of fruit all those years ago.
I remember you saying look properly, doofus — at the colour modulation in the apples, the tiny insect entry hole, the dew drops, the fig’s striated skin, how the fruit reaches towards the sunlight on the upper left, gives way lower down and withers and dies on the right.
You went on about that mural they found in Herculaneum at some guy’s house with dead partridges, agaric mushrooms and eels with dangling tails. Look how mundane objects turn into dignified subjects, you told me, how time can pass in a leaf fall. I think I probably yawned and checked my phone to see if there was a text from the Milanese man whose tongue tasted of salumi.
This is just to say it takes time to learn to be the right kind of sister.
We were sort of ok at some point, then it all went to pot, didn’t it?
Was it when I got a boyfriend or when you did? Was it when I turned square and you bragged about being any shape you damn well wanted? Was it because I missed things out in Mum’s eulogy?
Anyway, when you came by yesterday, for the first time in donkeys, I had something planned, and then not.
I think it’s because I get it now. All that stuff about still life.
So I suspended a mashed up pheasant I’d found on the road to Tip Farm from the utility hook on the ceiling, just above the oak table, and wedged a pyramid of grapes between cooking apples and a pomegranate. I popped Big Granddad’s clock beside my X-ray—my crappy X-ray— and scattered the latter with street dandelions.
I yanked open the curtains, drawn for the best part of a week, and watched light bounce off everything.
But when the doorbell went, I thought you drama queen you, and so I cut down the pheasant and flung a red blanket over the table, and when we were sitting on the sofa with our mugs of hot tea, sisters again, and you said you were chilly and asked if you could have the blanket, well this is just to say that that’s why I took off my jumper and said have this.
Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats and rabbit. Her work can be found in some lovely journals; The Citron Review, Bending Genres, trampset, Milk Candy Review, Splonk and Smokelong Quarterly, as well as the Best Microfiction 2024 anthology. Her debut flash collection, Scream If You Want To, is out with Alien Buddha Press and a second collection, The Bully in my Pillow, is forthcoming with Stanchion Books.