Fluid by Mairead Robinson

I met her at a festival and she said she could feel a connection so once the tarot had given the all clear, we were good to go. Within a week, she’d moved in.

She unpacked her crystals and her dream catchers and she burned incense in every room, but it wasn’t enough. ‘This house has bad energy’, she said. ‘I can feel it in the walls.’

So, I put an ad in the paper: Wanted – House to Rent, must have good energy, and days later a voice crackled down the phone wires. It had been empty a while, quite remote, and might be haunted, but it was a steal so we jumped at it.

We travelled from an A road to a B road to a pot-holed length of tarmac and off to the left along an unmarked track. Foxes watched us from between the trees and shook their heads.

We dipped into a valley shrouded in bilberry vapour and by nightfall had arrived outside our new front door, which was hanging off at the hinges.

‘I can feel the spirits,’ my girlfriend said, as we stacked a fire in the pot-bellied stove. We swept out the dust and hung curtains at the windows. I fixed the doors and put up shelves. I clambered up on the roof and replaced the shingles, stripped ivy from the brick walls, lit oil lamps in the windows. ‘We should get a goat,’ she said.

Those early days were fun. We grew lettuce and tomatoes, onions, beetroot, kale, cannabis. She taught me yoga and meditation, acquainted me with my horoscope so I’d know who I really was. No phones or internet and who needs TV when you have a connection? A real connection, deep in the woods.

The ghosts got on my nerves though, once they appeared. They turned the milk sour and stole the custard creams. My girlfriend communed psychically so it wasn’t like I could join the conversation. ‘Can’t it be just you and me again?’ I whined. ‘Shhhhh, she said, ‘he lost his head for treason – he’s traumatised. Where’s your empathy?’

Oh, I lost my own head all right when I came home to find her in bed with a medieval foot soldier. ‘I thought you were a pacifist,’ I cried.

‘Well, we had a good connection,’ she explained, ‘and it’s not like he’s alive – you’re so possessive. You can’t control me.’ 

I left her that night, she’d been with them all, the women too. Even the headless traitor. ‘I can’t trust you,’ I said, so she let me go. ‘You’re just not spiritually evolved,’ she said, ‘you should be more fluid.’

There have been lovers since – loyal and faithful and good to go. I’ve flowed like a river, just like she showed me, following the twists and the turns, ceaselessly searching, but I meander around and away from them like they’re river stones.

I just can’t find that connection, I guess. 

Mairead Robinson is the author of The Judas Spoon and has previously been long listed for the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. She writes poetry and short stories and is currently working on her second novel. She lives in the UK with an overly affectionate dog and a sociopathic cat.

@judasspoon

@maireadwrites.bsky.social

Photo by Tom Fisk at Pexels

SUBMIT / MAILING LIST / FFF COMPETITION / CRITIQUE SERVICE / BOOKSHOP / TWITTER / INSTAGRAM / BSKY.SOCIAL / FLASH FICTION / DONATE / LINKS/COMPS/INFO

*

*