Eggshells

She’s wearing an expression of pure fury on her face and a pastel-coloured tracksuit.

She looks long and soft at me and says, in the kind of voice that could knit a teddy bear, “Of course you can, love, turn around now.”

Boxes of fruit and vegetables are piled high on wooden pallets outside the shops facing the market—their smell is of the world being born.

Her world is full of children and doings and action verbs, but I’m uncomfortable with verbs; they expect too much. Since our great-aunt’s death, we have nothing to talk about, and our conversation is jerky with silences the size of golf balls

Every dead person is ‘Dearly Beloved’ or ‘Sadly Missed’, but that can’t be true for all of them; death brings out the worst of lies.