April Showers by Amy Laurens

Author:Amy Laurens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary romance short story, stories about covid-19 covid19 coronavirus, young adult fantasy about protagonists who know their tropes, healthy family relationships, plague science fiction stories where the world is saved
Publisher: Inkprint Press
Published: 2022-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

As Time Whirls Slowly Past

Ashley got the fright of her life for the third time that day as she opened the laundry to be confronted by her daughter’s Labrador-sized stuffed-and-wired unicorn—again. She sighed, pressed her hand to her chest, and waited for the adrenalin to subside.

Bloody hell. Maybe she just needed to wash it now and be done with it. She’d put it in here earlier this morning when her daughter Ellie had peed on it accidentally—‘accidentally’ was a common word in their house, these days—and if she was going to be super honest, she’d been avoiding cleaning it because it seemed all too hard. A lot of things seemed too hard right now. All she really wanted was a couple of days to herself—maybe a week if she was being greedy—just to rest, recoup, regather. To stop feeling stretched thin, like there were fifty-three too many things on her to-do list every day. To stop ending every night feeling like a failure.

But then, the kids had had vegetables for dinner—curry, no less—and they’d gotten through most of their school work for the day and no one had shouted or cried during witching hour.

Ashley had even managed to convince Ellie to go to sleep without the giant unicorn guarding her bed, a ten-out-of-ten success she’d never been able to pull off yet in the three years Ellie had owned the toy.

Adrenalin calmed, Ashley took a deep breath of laundry-power-scented air and ran a hand through her slightly itchy, slightly oily, dark hair. Man, a long shower would be nice, too. Uninterrupted, for preference, though with Carter up and down for an hour and a half every night these days, who knew how plausible that actually was.

She’d lock herself in the bathroom with her favourite blackberry bubble bar if she didn’t know that he’d just sit outside the door and moan and whine until she got out and settled him again.

Ashley closed her eyes and let herself sag against the doorframe of the laundry, just for a moment. It wasn’t defeat, it was regrouping. Just for a second.

And in five more days, Tom would be home. For good, with any luck, this time.

Five more days.

Ashley wound dirty clothes down into the washing machine, loaded it with powder and lavender fabric softener, listened to the music of the beeps as she adjusted the settings, and set the machine whirring.

She left the laundry with a sigh, snagged a glass of fresh-pressed orange juice from the fridge, and collapsed onto the couch in front of the TV.

Medical drama, white-guy movie, news, news, slapstick... Urgh. Netflix it was.

It was a little ritual she went through every night, and she wasn’t even quite sure why, because there was never anything on free-to-air that she was interested in, and Netflix was right there, but she persisted with it nevertheless. She’d found, in the last twelve months of Tom being gone one week out of every fortnight, that it was the little, thoughtless rituals that kept you sane when everything else felt like it was falling apart.

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