“Antigone Lives in Flat 1A, Don’t Leave Her Post here. Also The Bell Doesn’t Work, Please Knock Loudly” by Karen Arnold
Except she doesn’t any more. The notice is curled at the edges, the paper sere and yellow as a late September leaf. One corner hanging away from a dried out lump of blu tac, the whorls and swirls of her thumb print still visible on its surface, a fossil record of her sun drenched, heat wave presence. Of the day she tumbled through my door as she put up the sign.
An autumnal drift of junk mail had built up outside the empty flat, gradually becoming a forest floor mulch of money off pizza vouchers, free samples of laundry liquid, flyers for new club nights that came and went, drum and bass mayflies.
I remembered hearing the thunder of her green doc martens on the stairs, how she would bring news of the latest event we had to go to, breathless with excitement everyday at what the city had to offer, astonished by my failure to be impressed by what I had lived with all my life. She was infectious, fizzing with curiosity, joyfully bewildered at this world that had such people in it.
Today the space outside her door is clear. A new door mat, a new door bell. Someone is cooking and even the smells are different, soft and herbal, quiet smells. Antigone’s cooking had a dynamic range of chilli to scorched.
She didn’t tell me about the baby for a long time. Not until she couldn’t hide it under her baggy winter jumpers. By the time summer came she was as round and glowing as a pomegranate. She would never tell me who the father was and I stopped asking after she threw a paintbrush at me, spattering yellow paint across the floor boards. We brought a poster for the wall, “A is For Apple “She rubbed her aching back, placed her hands on her belly and said that A was for so much more. She reeled off amber, avocado, avocet, aurora. I joined in with albatross, apricots, azure. I placed my hands on hers, told her baby girl that the sky was the limit, she could have all these things.
Today I took down the notice.
Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience. She won the Mslexia prize for flash fiction in 2022 and was placed second in the Oxford Flash Fiction competition in 2023. She has work in The Waxed Lemon, The Martello,and Seaside Gothic amongst others.
She can be found on twitter @Aroomofonesown4
Image – FFF
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Such a lovely story. Bittersweet – my favorite kind. You paint such a vivid picture.