This short story is written by one of our wonderful team, Lottie Brooke. It is a piece of flash fiction from her unpublished short story collection, A Little Nostalgia, which she is almost ready to send off to agents.
The visibly sticky pub windowsill stops her from steadying herself, it’s not worth being made to go wash her hands again. The fibres of the seat cushion press indents into the skin of her knees. If they had been grazed, it would’ve stung. The glass is mucky, its frame undressing, leaving paint flakes stuck in the beer foam residue. Through it: a world. An adventurer’s world. A world that doesn’t reek of alcohol and beer-battered cod. A world of bird song, mayflies and water tunes.
She wants to see the trout. It is the sole reason she concedes her hangry tantrum and gets into the car. The promise of dinner and a show, of sorts. Even the brightly coloured, plastic playhouse in the pub garden can’t distract her. She marches her mother towards the tinkling stream with a tight grip on her hand, crunching the cracked, aged skin with her small fingers. Forgetting the pain. Entirely focussed on her mission. She wants to see how close they can get before they get waylaid. The answer? She hasn’t even glimpsed the water when her father redirects them inside.
They must eat first. True pub grub: the best she has ever tasted. She doesn’t know what seasoning is but is absolutely sure it’s perfect. She asked for scampi, not knowing she meant whitebait, not knowing her father caught the waiter at the kitchen door and explained it to him. Proud she had successfully ordered her own dinner, a testament to her impressive childhood intelligence. She discovers tartare sauce, a zingy improvement on mayonnaise, but spends the whole meal searching for the path of least resistance back to the trout.
Their bodies undulate through the ripples of the gin-clear water, fins grazing the pebbles beneath them. She expected them to be… scalier. Instead, each fish wears a coat of eyes beneath a layer of slick varnish, the sunlight bringing out the countless colours of their skin. She feels a pang of regret, looking into their black eyes and remembering the eyes of the fish she had just slathered in the new and exciting condiment and scoffed with childish glee. It is a feeling she is just discovering the implications of. Soon, she goes back to watching them swim.
~$~
She pulls into the car park, gravel crunching under her tyres, the travel guide propped open on the passenger seat beside her. The walk to the restaurant feels further than it did as a child. Her legs were longer; surely, they should be covering the ground faster. Maybe the gravel has migrated over the years, shifting the location of the car park. The door of the degrading plastic playhouse sits propped up against the wall off its hinges. Should she have a child one day, should they return here, she would never let her child enter that sun-bleached danger.
The pub is just as sticky as she remembers, just as grimy. It’s only small, no bigger than a thatched cottage; perhaps that was this building’s past life. The menu crackles open as the plastic pages release their grip on each other. She can’t see through the glass of the window. Chunks of the wooden pane lay rotted among the paint flakes.
She doesn’t dare eat. She knows what food poisoning is now. She came for the nostalgia, and today, nostalgia tastes like lemonade with a vibrant pink bendy straw. The ice clinks against the glass, and, taking a sip, she grimaces at how sickeningly sweet it has become.
She takes her drink outside, where the reeds are overgrown, the oak bridge is now just a couple of planks of decomposing wood eager to drop you, and the river a trickle of water somewhere between the plants. She stands there, waiting for a glimpse of a fish she isn’t sure exists anymore.
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