Ponytailed girls running up the football pitch, leaping and punching the air, hugging and slapping each other’s shoulders. On live TV, the crowd roars and you shout Yes! Meanwhile I’m playing Odd Socks on Facebook with grandmothers in the Midwest USA. Matching virtual socks, pair after pair, a soothing occupation. Opening the washing machine, refreshing my clothesline, granting fellow players’ sock wishes.
Today you went to the hairdressers, where they were chatting about a reality TV programme called I Kissed a Girl, so you try watching it, but after five minutes say No and switch channels. And complain you specifically asked for a parting down the middle but didn’t get one. Cross about it, not going back there again. Meanwhile I’m leaning backwards over the sofa arm, hoping I don’t slip and crack my skull, while inserting eyedrops.
We both love that episode of Married at First Sight: your favourite part, the butch standing at the altar with her legs shaking, hears the approaching click-clack of high heels and thinks ‘Perfect!’ Mine: the femme reveals she has alopecia, that her long blonde hair is a wig, and the butch is unfazed, saying she doesn’t give a shit. 1
Bed. You listen on your tablet to a Rory Stewart podcast, I’ve reached the second section of Galsworthy’s To Let. Middle-aged June sees younger Fleur reflected in an old lacquer-framed mirror, like a pretty ghost.
Of course I don’t only read Victorian/Edwardian novelists, I have shelves of e.g. Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, Jeanette Winterson. According to Winterson when she was young, later-life passion is hard to endure.
And when passion goes away that’s also hard.
*
***
Frances Gapper’s stories have been published in four Best Microfiction anthologies, and online in lit mags including Splonk, Wigleaf, New Flash Fiction Review, Forge and Literary Namjooning. She lives in the UK’s Black Country.