Competition Twenty-Four Winning Flash Fiction: When the results from the ancestry site come through, Dilly’s mother admits she didn’t use a sperm bank after all by Eleanor Luke
Her mother sips green tea from a mug with a hairline crack Dilly prays she won’t notice. She tells Dilly he was a tour guide in Thessaly where she did her doctorate on high altitude eremite constructions. She thinks he runs a hotel up there now. A charmingly unconventional man but definitely not father material. Dilly can’t understand her mother’s reasoning because her mother worships science and biology is science and he planted the seed.
So tomorrow she’ll buy a plane ticket and spend the flight dreaming of question marks tumbling down mossy crags. Then she’ll catch a bus that’ll take her to the hotel. She’ll pay extra for a room with a view and stand on the balcony awestruck as the ochre sun sinks behind the tall grey megaliths on the mountainside. She’ll be unable to fathom how her mother could ever leave this place behind. Down in the orchard, she’ll glimpse the silhouette of an old man and wonder if it’s him. She’ll tiptoe barefoot across the dusk-dampened grass and watch as he plucks figs from the tree, whispering his apologies to each condemned fruit. Something inside her will melt as she remembers how she’s apologised to every cracked mug her mother ever forced her to throw away. She’ll think he hasn’t noticed her but then he’ll turn and smile. And there it will be: a gap they share between their front teeth as well as 49.9% of their DNA.
But for now, Dilly lets her mother talk. About Dilly’s puerile habit of rescuing stray cats. About Dilly’s questionable decision to cut her own fringe. About how Dilly really should be more careful with her crockery.
Later, Dilly retrieves the cracked mug from the bin and scrubs it until it gleams.
Eleanor Luke lives in Spain with her husband, kids and a small menagerie. Words in FreeFlashFiction, FlashFlood, Retreat West. Longlist Reflex flash fiction, Five on the Fifth. Top ten Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2022. When not writing, Eleanor can be found eavesdropping on other people’s conversations.
Photo courtesy of Eleanor Luke
Tags:
Love the story, well conceived! Did Dilly actually speak to her father, or did she know that he was only a sperm donor of the unofficial kind and that was good enough for her?