You are compact, says the estate agent, a glorified cupboard say your owners. You are the custodian of cardboard boxes and unwanted wedding gifts. You are magnolia.
You are papered in pink princesses. Cartoon character curtains hang at your window and a homemade mobile of cotton wool clouds and knitted rainbows is suspended from your ceiling. You are filled with laughter and lullabies, crying and crises, the gurgling, giggling growing of your girl.
You are outgrown. Your girl’s petulant fingers pick at your princess paper. A slammed door rattles your windowpane, shudders your furniture.
You are reprieved, repapered. Princesses make way for boy band posters, beanbags languish where they land, your ceiling is painted like a night sky, stars twinkling. Fairy lights adorn you. You are a sanctuary, a haven. Your walls envelop your girl in a hug.
You are painted black. Storm clouds gather in your sky. Your no longer girlish girl lies on her bed, cursing you, cursing everything. Your hug offers not comfort now but constraint. You are despised.
You are ransacked. Boy bands are consigned to bin bags, beanbags stuffed out of sight in wardrobes stripped of clothes. You are beige, no longer night-skied. You are Guest. You are Spare. You are seldom visited, never by your girl.
Time passes. Lots and lots of time. You are a repository for rubbish, a place to deposit undealt with debris. Pointless paperwork piles up in you. Beads of condensation weep down your window. Damp rises. Damp penetrates.
Your no longer girl returns. She carves out a too-small space for herself in your cluttered chaos, sleeps stiffly in your single bed with one ear open for calls that come in the night. She rises, she comforts, she cares. She cries, often. Sometimes she seems to struggle to breathe. You are suffocating her, she complains.
You are empty, scrubbed spotless. Your window sparkles. You are, once more, magnolia. You are compact, says the estate agent, a glorified cupboard, mutters your no longer girl who pauses, one last time, in your doorway. Even so, you were loved, she says.
Alison Wassell is a short story, flash and micro fiction writer from Merseyside, UK. Her work has been published by Reflex Fiction, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Litro, Roi Faineant, The Phare, Ellipsis Zine and Retreat West. She has a passion for very short fiction, and no plans whatsoever to write a novel.
Twitter/X: @lilysslave
Bluesky: @alisonwassell.bsky.social