Plates of carefully selected finger food provide the only colour in the pub’s function room. Monochrome people stand around, splashes of reds and greens on their plates, tiptoeing through conversations in forced clusters.
He walks into the room, hands in pockets, like it hasn’t been forty years since anybody has seen him. Silence descends. It is cold, like marble, with black lines of tension running through it.
Cartoon-like speech bubbles pop up above heads, filled with capital letters, expletives and exclamation marks. They crash and bang into each other like bumper cars.
I am the only one to voice mine. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Paying my respects, like everyone else.’
‘Mum wouldn’t want you here.’
The bravado slips down his face, dripping into a puddle on the floor, revealing a much older man beneath. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘It’s too late for sorry.’ My words coil around him like a snake, squeezing tighter and tighter until his eyes bulge and he starts wheezing. He reaches for a table, legs shaking in his black trousers. He nods and turns.
The words slide out of the room behind him.
Author bio:
Laura Besley writes short fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online (Fictive Dream, Spelk, EllipsisZine) as well as in print (Flash: The International Short Story Magazine, vol.9 No.1) and in various anthologies (Adverbally Challenged Vol.1&2, Another Hong Kong).
Photo by Zach Guinta on Unsplash