Fiction from Frances Gapper

Photo: Tuva Mathilde Løland

Stepmother

Is neurotic / very highly strung. Stepdaughter, I trust you not to murder me. But in my experience bad dreams often come true.

Fact: I just want her to eat you know something. Garden strawberries probably ok. But make sure they’re clean she says. Soak for at least 15 minutes in a solution of bicarbonate of soda.

Changes her mind. What a lot of fiddle-faddle. Just wash them under the tap.

Talks to objects. Mirror mirror on the bathroom windowsill oh dear I look like an old hag. Mirror: don’t obsess, a few tiny flaws are no reason to burn down the kingdom. Stepmother: FLAWS?! Mirror: ok that’s it, I refuse to utter another word. Anyway, it continues, what about me? I’ve got loads of spots, splotches and speckled bits.

Other times the mirror lectures her: don’t capitulate to patriarchal values.

Blames herself. I’m a terrible stepmother. You’re lovely, I say, try to cheer up. I can’t cheer up.

Has a pet toad called Harald who can spit and roll his eyes so they point backwards. Often rolls his eyes.

Generates fog. We live at 61 Beech Avenue not in a faraway castle. Our house number is carved into a wooden sign, etched on natural slate with rustic hanging rope, marker-penned on sheets of A4 paper taped up in windows. Yet post goes astray. Magic potions fail to be delivered.

Prefers herbal remedies to conventional medicine. Orders her customised magic potion from a shop in Glastonbury. Recommended as a supplement to moon worship. Its analgesic powers have started to wear off says my bone-pale stepmother. But I daren’t stop taking it. I might flood the place out.

Catastrophises. Me, off to the supermarket: anything we’re running low of? Trembling she hands me a piece of paper with catastrophe written all over it.

Anything else?

Bananas. Wheatgerm.

Gets migraines. I mustn’t eat today or my glands will go poof! She sips skullcap in a sunless chamber.

Imagines things. At night she hears an owl hooting deadly storm the new moon the auld moon. A robin in our front hedge chirps that he might sink or he might swim. Starlings perched on the feeder’s crossbar twitter don’t put your faith in love my girl.

I query the likelihood. Stepmother: Virginia Woolf heard the birds outside her window singing in Greek. Why should she have the monopoly on avian translation?

Resists leaving the house. You go alone you’re brave. Last time she saw a man walking towards us along the Woodland Trust’s recently laid sandy path. An optical illusion created by slanting tree shadows. I explained but she still clung to me.

Tries to be maternal. Peeks around my door: still on Insta? You’re umbilically attached to that laptop. (By the way I’m five years older than her.)

Is an astute literary critic. Having speed-read a printout of this character sketch she flips the last page over and back. Is that all? Where’s the love story, the happy ending?
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Frances Gapper’s flashes and micros have been published in four Best Microfiction anthologies and online in places including South Florida Poetry Journal, Splonk, Forge, Wigleaf, trampset, 100 Word Story, New Flash Fiction Review, and Fictive Dream. She lives in the UK’s Black Country.