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Alison Wassell
Pleasing Evelyn Battersby
Evelyn Battersby was a difficult woman to please, an easy one to disappoint. When her children brought their gifts on silver salvers she would sniff, wrinkle her nose, send them back to the kitchen.
The paintings of people as big as their houses, a blue strip of sky, a green one of grass, a yellow smiling sun in the corner and a dinosaur proportioned poodle, crumpled in the wastepaper basket before the paint was dry.
The leering toilet roll tube angel never allowed onto the Christmas tree, the wonky clay coil pot, hidden at the back of a drawer, the scarves with dropped stitches, the dresses with uneven hems, the flowers that set off her hay fever, the over-sugared cakes, the under-salted sauces, the poems that didn’t rhyme and made no sense, the ones that did and were twee and mawkish, the jumper that wasn’t quite the right shade, (had they kept the receipt?), the book that wasn’t her genre with its too-garish cover and its too-small print, the voucher for afternoon tea at a café where the staff were surly, the service slow.
The children themselves, too fat, too thin, too confident, too self-conscious, too ambitious, too lackadaisical. Just never enough.
Evelyn Battersby, seldom-visited these days, sits knitting booties for a grandaughter she will, most likely, never meet. From time to time, she puts down her needles, sighs, mutters something about serpent’s teeth and thankless children.
Alison Wassell is a short story, flash and micro fiction writer from Merseyside, UK. Her work has been published by Reflex Fiction, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Litro, Roi Faineant, The Phare, Ellipsis Zine, Fictive Dream and Retreat West. She has a passion for very short fiction, and no plans whatsoever to write a novel.
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