Competition Twenty-Four Shortlisted: A Beautiful Bruise by Alison Wassell

My father always painted the past in primary colours, bright and uncomplicated, every day yellow-sunned, every cloud erased. My father always left my mother to deal with the difficult stuff, turned his face away from unhappiness, focussed on fun. My father always believed he would be the first to go, not the one left grieving in a world grown grey.

Grief makes me cruel. Six weeks after Mum’s funeral I tell my father how I was bullied, decades ago, that the schooldays he pictures as blue-skied were, in fact, one long black tunnel. I watch his face crumple as he imagines comic strip tormentors hiding around corners and lurking in school toilets, demanding dinner money with menaces, kicking and punching and leaving at least a bruise behind.

It was nothing like that. I tell him how our ugly surname became a term of abuse, called after me in corridors, how the desk beside me was always empty, how people scooted away, sniggering, whenever they found themselves next to me.

“Mum knew,” I say, although I only suspect that this is true. When he puts his head in his hands, I don’t move to comfort him.

“I’d have done something, if you’d told me,” he says. I wonder if he knows this is a lie. He’d have done what he always did, stayed quiet, hoping The Bad Thing would go away. Well, this time The Bad Thing has consumed us. The monster has eaten our happiness and spat out the bones.

Afterwards I sit on the floor, banging my wrist against the door frame of my childhood bedroom, hating myself for hurting him. The bruise that forms is a beautiful blend of dark blue and purple and, as he would, I lie when I am asked how it was caused.

Alison Wassell is a short story, flash and micro fiction writer with absolutely no ambition to write a novel. Her work has been published by Fictive Dream, The Phare, Ellipsis Zine, The Disappointed Housewife, Raw Lit, Idle Ink , Bath Flash Fiction Award and Retreat West.

Illustration – clipartbest.com