Competition Twenty-One Shortlisted: Land Girl by Alison Wassell
Her wedding is arranged in a hurry, because he has received his call-up papers, her dress hastily constructed from an old curtain. The honeymoon is a single night in a B&B in Blackpool and, since no-one has thought to prepare her, takes her somewhat by surprise.
She is war-widowed before she has become accustomed to writing her new name and, when a loose bit of carpet sends her tumbling downstairs, the child she has no idea she is carrying slips out without a struggle, takes two breaths, sees nothing worth staying for and is gone, laid to rest in a common grave alongside her hopes. She names him John.
While she is still sore a poster promises her health, happiness and gainful employment in lush, fertile countryside, with the prospect of wielding a pitchfork and looking trim and pretty in a perfectly tailored uniform. She sees no reason to say no.
Like everything else in her life so far, the reality fails to live up to the poster. She is set to work with no overcoat and no wellingtons, in breaches two sizes too large, and spends her days, at first, kicking carrots and parsnips out of frozen earth. She welcomes the cold, the numbness that accompanies it, the fatigue in her limbs, the dreamless sleep.
She sticks it out until spring, and is sent to the lambing shed. A motherless lamb becomes her favourite. She pushes thoughts of Sunday roast out of her mind and, holding him close as he suckles, cries her first tears. She names him John.
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.
@lilysslave @alisonwassell.bsky.social
Image – public domain via wikimedia
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Oh, this story!! If ever subtext rose between the lines in a story, it is here. Beautifully crafted!