Fiction from Julia Ruth Smith

Photo: Justine Camacho

A Quiet Turning Back

Lonely running, your breath trails bitter. A single egret bursts from the riverbank then settles further upstream, seeming to urge you on, saying ‘not now, not yet,’ but he’s white as heavens and you know.

The smell of piss in train station toilets, your fear that it will cling to your skin and she’ll smell it. Now she’s sobbing into your clinical sheets. You’ve both come a long way.

The slow crawl of certain sofa afternoons that are both too long, then suddenly too short as she gets up to cook for hungry children and you want to shout, ‘Stay with me!’ You touch her fading warmth on cushions.

A swan hissing in a copper-coloured day trip haze while you run higgledy-piggledy, the picnic blanket flapping like a cape. You laugh and laugh back at the car, a family.
No cares then home.

Lupines like slate purple steeples mourning the passing of your children on school days, voices giggling like church bells. If you stride, you can reach them but your breath catches.

The dog runs ahead to the bridge where frogs sing in spring. Left to the sea, right to farming. He hesitates, looks back with longing then sprints to the left, as you knew he would, as he always does.

The maw of morning as it swallows your fear and casts it into hedgerows that twitter their buttercup love of life, dawn unceasing, before you and certainly after. You understand now.

All the lore you told and were told, huddled against the world; sailors, kraken, bold women of old. Magic slips from starched white sheets, closes its door quietly but surely. You saw a shimmer late last night but it was rain, just rain falling. You go quickly. You make no fuss.
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Julia Ruth Smith is a mother, teacher and writer. She lives by the sea in Italy. Her work has appeared in Vestal Review, Flash Frog, Reflex Fiction and is upcoming in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology and New Flash Fiction Review. She has been nominated for Best of the Net by Full House Lit and a Pushcart Prize by Seaside Gothic. On Twitter @JuliaRuthSmith1 or at the beach.