The Mirror
Eimear’s half-brother, Julian, died and left her a terraced house. I offered to help Eimear clear the rooms and to do runs to the charity shop with anything worth passing on. We discovered that he had amassed about a hundred boxes of shoes that weren’t even in his size, sets of identical unused kitchen appliances like microwaves, and stacks of speculative fiction magazines dating back to the 1980s. It was impossible to use the toilet in the bathroom as it was filled floor to ceiling with black bin liners stuffed with clothes alongside crates of champagne (even though he was teetotal). We guessed Julian had used a bucket for his ablutions but couldn’t quite work out how he disposed of it. We wore nose clips to combat the weird musky smell, part rotten food, part animal, that hung in the rooms. After a couple of days, I brought a radio and turned it up full blast. I was glad of that, as it meant Eimear stopped talking so much- blurting ‘Gross!’ every time she uncovered a new pile of something disgusting and demanding to know ‘How could he live like this?’, or picked up something like a Pilates book, rolling her eyes, shouting ‘As if!’.
Next to the TV sat piles of notebooks, all the same size with black covers. I picked one up with the intention of using it to swat away the wasps, gorged on fallen apples, that plagued us when we ate our lunch in the garden. I opened the book to find page after page of handwriting in capital letters. Chapters began with headings such as- ‘HOW TO TURN ON THE TV’, ‘ADOPTING A BABY’, ‘ALIENS’. I skimmed through a chapter entitled ‘MIRROR’ which began with the line, ‘ASKWETH TOLD ME IN THE MIRROR THAT THE COTSWALWDS ARE LOVELY IN THE SUMMERTIME’. When I took a sample of the books outside to show Eimear, she shrugged and said to bin them, and continued applying sun cream to her arms before gesturing to me to stop blocking her rays. As I turned towards the white glare of the sun, I began to worry that I had left our front door open, twenty miles away, and strangers were stomping in to steal our stuff.
On the last night of clearance, we cracked open a bottle of Julian’s champagne and poured it into teacups, as I sipped, I remembered a fragment of my profile on the dating app Eimear and I met through- I am an easy-going girl who loves animals and cooking. I felt an acidic twang in my gullet. Then, for an instant, I was enveloped in the sweet, cidery smell of rotten apples. I will tell her it’s over when we get home.
Fiona Perry’s first collection of poetry, Alchemy (Turas Press, Dublin), won the National Poetry Book Awards (2021) Silver Medal. Her flash fiction, Sea Change, won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards (2020). Twitter @Fionaperry17