Competition Twenty-Six Highly Commended: The Edge by Heather D Haigh

*****When I freeze in the silent kitchen—crazy-crackled plate in hand—and my gaze flicks between your chair, my chair, and a hillock of beans slipping over the edge of charred toast, and barely cold yet ricochets around my brain like pebbles bouncing down a cliff and I’m wondering if I can remember how to pray.

*****When I sink into your spot because to face it would mean staring at your shade, and I need the comfort of your chair which holds the shape of you and the shape of our lives, and I’m choking on the prospect of tomorrow. How do I bridge a chasm?

*****When I swallowed irritation at your paper mountain avalanching across my side of the table—an explosion of letters, bills, scribble-covered envelopes, newspaper clippings and coupons—leaving me hunched up and resentful, leaving me wondering where you’d gone, so I never saw the panic in your eyes. Or the empty pill bottle.

*****When I remember Flamborough Head. The two of us watching a sailboat disappear over the horizon. A bossy Yorkshire terrier snapping around our feet. Scree pitter-pattering down to deep waters. When you looked from me to the ocean and told me you’d die happy if we were the last things you ever saw.

*****When we signed into a cheap hotel with a bottle of rum and a sea shanty, and fell onto a sagging mattress. When we found each other.

*****When I pay the last debt I can, and restructure those I can’t, and I lay my phone upon a neat pile of paperwork and allow the tears to fall and fall. Because this, we can survive, and they say you can come home.

*****And, I breathe.

Heather is a sight-impaired spoonie and working-class writer from Yorkshire. She is published by Oxford Flash Fiction, Fictive Dream, The Phare, Timberline Review and numerous others and has won or been placed in several competitions. She is also a visual artist, and lives with her husband, her books, camera and paints, and far too many balls of yarn.

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