Prose

Today has been a day I wish I smoked.

I imagine sitting on the frame of my back door as if it was a step and inhaling, and exhaling, anything but oxygen and CO2, inhaling, and exhaling, anything but the day I've had.

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The sky wasn't mad at me. It just opened up like an eye that had never seen daylight, with a crimson glow in its pupil and a wince like a child preparing itself for tears. And there wasn't a cloud around. None. I'd have offered it up a giant man-made pillowy precipitation device in which it could find relief if I had the length in me. But all I could do was stare at it or look away, because I was too small to do anything about a sky that wasn't yet crying.

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She looked at me like someone else's child. I wasn't home to her. I wasn't home. She kissed me on the cheek, presented me with the reward I hadn't fought for, and turned her back as if she was showing me the hair she'd worked hours on, or the dress she'd worked months to fit so well. I knew I would hold the image of her figure and the way her hair followed it until I met ___.

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Back home there'd be an empty sink and a made pie beside it, a note from my mother reading: "I made your favourite, xo" and the cartoons section from my father's broadsheet newspaper. I don't know why I thought the room in which I grew was too small for me now that I'd grown. It grew with me; all the posters now went from ceiling to skirting board, and the floorboards to the left of my bed were worn in two little patches where my feet had stretched for my slippers each morning, just as the underneath of my childhood soft toy's ears had. There was no reason