After the Tribe

When she left, the winds picked up and the bloated sun filled the horizon with fire, the sky turning ochre. She hurried in the heat, leaving behind what she called a tribe, not a homeland.  She still remembers the scale of the mess. It was everywhere and no one bothered to clean it. The kitchen tables packed with strong coffee, politics, déjà-vus. The dirt that splattered from top to bottom on cars, squares, offices, apartment buildings, monuments, and even mountains, not to mention the small kitchen sinks lined with chipped tiles. It spread like mushrooms, up and down the country, in a multitude of colours, dripping like an abstract painting on the talking heads on TV filled with nothing but resolve. Wherever she went she could see the shadows and the undertones, no clean lines, like a pile of dirty dishes in a giant sink.

In the kingdom of the unknown where she went, she is a night club cleaner. She sees flesh a lot, and in the toilets she often sees the truth. The truth is that anything can smell bad and look unpleasant. In the early hours at the end of her shift, she trots back to the place she now calls home.  A scent of pine and lemon enveloping her clothes, a little souvenir from work. Her own toilet doesn’t have any secrets. It’s always clean. She pushes the flush and watches the water disappear in a slow dance, never to return.

Kapka Nilan (she, her) was born and raised in Bulgaria and currently lives in England. She has her writing published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, Mad Swirl, Bath Flash Fiction Award, New Critique, and elsewhere. Her fiction can be read at www.kapkanilan.wordpress.com