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All The Ways... by Anita Goveas

All the ways as a 28-year-old woman with a Masters in Psychology you could now effectively rewrite the ending


1. When Benjamin Braddock turns up at the church, Elaine looks carefully at both her options as the music swells like an emerald sea before a breath-stealing squall and goes on the coconut-drenched, tequila-scented honeymoon on her own.


2. When you knock the draughts set to the floor and the worn cardboard splits with the noise of the tearing of your mother’s last nerve and the white-as-a-ghost and red-as-blood pieces bounce indefinitely like thudding heartbeats, instead of covering your face with slippery palms and waiting for the blow, you say to your Year 3 teacher “I’ll just pick that up.”


3. There is definitely enough space for Jack on that door, and the perfect interlinking of cold-cream-smooth fingers within charcoaled fingers makes up for the slipperiness of water in indeterminate states. Icy chill seeps into their feet, and Jack becomes skilled at knitting fluffy turquoise one-size-fits-all socks, that slide on like a whisper.


4. When you fall over as you entered the hushed lecture theatre, instead of lying down in the musty dirt brushed from a thousand shoes as the laughter swells like a giant pimple on graduation day, you leap athletically to your feet and smile.


5. As well as chanting them rhythmically into a meaningless blur in your head, you manage to say the words “I’m sorry”.


Author bio:

Anita Goveas is British-Asian, based in London, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was most recently published in JMWW, OkayDonkey and X-Ray lit. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction,  a reader for Bare Fiction and tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer Links to her stories can be found at https://coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com


Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

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