Little Bandaged Days by Kyra Wilder

Author:Kyra Wilder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2020-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

More and More February

Can I tell you about my mother’s Christmas parties? Would you stay so I can tell you? It’s just so grey out today and I’m all alone and it feels like I’m tied up and drowning in this gown. Like a fish caught in a net. And I suppose that makes them, and you too really, trawlers doesn’t it? Where are you pulling all of us fish I wonder?

Really though. Would you stay? Just a bit longer. What if I kicked over my water glass? Would you stay then? To clean it up? Oh, that was horrible of me to say. Really, I’m sorry. I feel that we’re much more than that to each other. Much more than kicking feet and cleaning hands. I hope I can be more than that. Please stay. For just a moment. She’s at treatment now, the woman in the bed under the window, so it’s just the two of us.

Just the two of us girls. Someone might say that about us, if they peeked in. Oh, they might say, it’s just the two of you girls.

Would you listen? Mother gave the most wonderful Christmas parties. All the neighbours came. It was as if the house became a paper lantern, I always thought of it like that, in December. One of those lanterns with a candle inside that gets released up into the sky. It was all that perfect and that delicate. Nothing could be touched inside the house in December, while Mother got it ready for the party. The mantel was set with white cotton and decorated with Santa and his reindeer. The table was covered over with the best white tablecloth from Paris and set, the week before the party, with the nutcracker plates and fresh pine boughs and red poinsettias and, in the middle, the red and gold punch bowl from Hermès. Mother always said it just like that. A bit breathlessly. Hermès. She would lift her right hand to touch just here, just under her throat, when she said it. I don’t know if she knew that she did that. The punch bowl from Hermès. She would say it just like that. I want you to hear her saying it. Her voice, her breathlessness. It feels so important for you to understand.

My favourites though were the little houses that Mother set out along the windowsill. The Christmas village. One house with red shutters, one with green, one with blue and all with white painted snow and perfect lines of icicles just under the little roofs. There was a bakery too, with painted cakes in the window and an ice-skating pond where little ceramic children wearing tiny ceramic skates were glued to a track. At the flick of a switch the houses would light up with real electric lights and the tiny children would loop and loop and loop around the same track for ever, as long as anyone wanted them to.

What I mean to say was, inside December, inside my house, inside the party, there was a switch.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.