Listen to Fiona reading her story:
The water is a sheet of grey silk, shimmering. Or a piece of hammered silver. All texture, no light. No flashing diamonds, dancing white horses. It is cold, but the wind is light, from the west, only intermittently catching hold of Kate as she walks, as she pushes the buggy along the craggy path beside the sea. Kate is invisible. The breeze pushes through her, meets no resistance in the meat of her body, in her bones that clank along, shifting and re-forming their shapes and angles. Ligaments are loose, but tightening. She will be herself again. Maybe. A version, anyway.
The baby is asleep. Facing Kate, her baby eyelashes ridiculously long, flutter against her pink cheeks. When the baby sleeps, that’s Kate’s cue to do all the cleaning and washing and sterilising needed to keep baby Ella fed and clothed and comfortable. Naptime is Kate’s time – to tidy up the chaotic house, make meals, make phone calls and speak to other adults without a background of screeching. Do the boring stuff, try to find time for some fun stuff. When she’s not on maternity leave, Kate teaches English, the literature of possibility. She does not teach maths. Maths is not her forte, she always says. If maths was her thing, she would know that the time she has does not match the volume of things she wants to do. There’s always a shortfall. And now she’s pushing Ella in the buggy at naptime, instead of doing any of the chores or pleasures on her list. Maybe she will stay up late, after Ella sleeps, after Ella has woken once, twice, thrice in the night with teething cries. Maybe then she will catch up with herself.
On the path by the sea, in the opposite direction, another buggy approaches. Kate calculates the angles. They will not meet at the point where the path is wide enough for two buggies to pass. Kate is walking against the flow of traffic; it’s on Kate to wait for a gap and manoeuvre her buggy onto the road, then back up over the lip of the kerb once the other woman is past her.
Katre recognises her. Not her face or her buggy or her child. Just her essence. The hair that is mostly unbrushed. The eyes that are red-rimmed and missing something essential. ‘Hollow’ would be the cliché she would shepherd her students away from. Dig deeper, she would tell her students, find something unique. There is no ‘unique’ here. There is only variation on the theme: the routines, the demands. This other mother is invisible too, Kate knows. But Kate can see her. Kate knows she is there too, in the ether, when the babies cry in the night and the mothers stumble to their cots. They give each other the smallest nod of recognition and pass by, the breeze moving through their broken bodies, whipping the sea beside them into waves and the endless loop of the tide.
Fiona McKay is the author of the Novella-in-Flash The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), and the Flash Fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). The Lives of the Dead, a Novella-in-Flash, is forthcoming from AdHoc Fiction (2025). Her Flash Fiction is in Bath Flash, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Bending Genres and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social
That was awesome. I didn't expect that when I was searching for zombie stories. Great!
Fiona has captured motherhood in her beautiful words. 🫶🏼