This is a flash fiction short based on this week’s Flash Fiction Friday prompt from @scoot
“Look around. See who might be in pain, who might just need you to ask some questions and release some of that pain.”
Mary stared at the corner of the hall, off centre from the red-clothed English woman with the practiced smile. The hall was too warm, the almost-midsummer sun beckoning through the high windows. Mary recrossed her legs and glanced around the room. Eighty or so women of various ages, mostly in blouses printed with flowers or birds or spots or irregular chevrons like the seats of buses. They all seemed to be paying attention, soaking in the smiling words of the English woman, apart from Mary’s friend Eunice. Eunice, who had dragged Mary along to the More Precious than Rubies women’s conference, had fallen discreetly asleep.
“Look around, at this gathering of beautiful, strong women around you! At the coffee break, just say hello to someone new, ask them how they’re doing! It might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. You are the precious daughters of God. You are strong. You are beautiful. You are loved.”
Mary recrossed her legs. The speaker had been going almost an hour. She looked again at the bunting along the back of the hall. Flags of every country in the world, and of some political entities that weren’t countries. Mary had spent frustrating portions of the previous evening and this morning trying to work out the order in which the flags were arranged. They weren’t alphabetical in English or in Chinese - she’d wondered whether the string of flags might have been made in China and therefore be in a Chinese ordering, but that didn’t seem to be the case either. They certainly weren’t geographical. It bothered her. Some flag-bunting factory somewhere was stringing things together in no discernible order at all.
In the silence as the speaker paused for reflection, Eunice snored softly. Mary nudged her, so that she wouldn’t embarrass herself in front of the other ladies.
In the line for coffee, Eunice disappeared, perhaps to the bathroom. Mary stood awkwardly behind a couple of retired schoolteachers in floral blouses, wondering if anyone would heed the speaker’s message and talk to her. The line shuffled forward. No sign of Eunice. Mary checked her phone, skimmed her emails, feeling her unknownness pressing against her the way wet tropical air presses into your pores when you step out of an airport in a hot country.
A hand brushed the back of her neck. Mary froze, fingers tight on her phone, neck stiffened like a cat. She turned sharply, expecting to see Eunice. The red-dressed sharp-smiled speaker from England was there.
“Your label was sticking up,” smiled the woman in her red spotted dress. “That happens to me all the time!”
Mary said nothing, but took a pace backwards, away from the woman. Then, trying not to seem rude, she spoke to the woman.
“So, um, is this your first time on the island?”
“Yes,” said the woman, with her dyed blonde ringlets bouncing. “Such beautiful..”
Mary nodded, waiting for scenery or perhaps beaches.
“… women,” said the speaker. “Such beautiful women. So precious.”
Mary nodded again, cautiously, and ran her fingers across the case of her phone. The queue moved forward, and Mary moved with them, away from the red-dressed red-cardiganed woman.
The hall was hot, and there was a clatter of spoons and chairs scraping and scraps of conversation that surged and roiled at Mary. She could still feel the touch of the speaker’s fingers on the back of her neck, crawling like a moth, mother-like tucking in the label of her t-shirt.
Mary stuck her hand in the heavy pocket of her leather jacket, the one that had been Tom’s, and felt the no-longer crisp edge of his last packet of Silk Cut, the ugly box she took out and smelled sometimes to remember him. A thought came to her.
“Excuse me,” she muttered, pulling the Silk Cut out of her oversized pocket so that the smiling woman could see the grim image of the man with mouth cancer. She strode towards the open door where the June sunshine lay in a sharp-edged parallelogram on the floor of the hall. Ignoring the raised eyebrows, she went as far as to take one of the half-dozen remaining cigarettes out of the box and put it between her lips as she made for the exit.
Eunice came out of the bathroom just as Mary stepped out the door. She saw the unlit cigarette between Mary’s lips.
“Ah, smoke break?”
Mary nodded curtly and carried on. She went as far as the gate, then leaned on the gatepost in the sunshine looking out on the backpackers walking up from the harbour.
“I didn’t know you smoke,” said Eunice, who had followed her.
“I don’t,” said Mary. She twisted the slim cylinder in her fingers then replaced it in the pack and put it back in the pocket that had once been Tom’s. “I just needed to get out of there for a bit.”
“OK,” said Eunice. She asked no questions, but pulled a bag of licorice sweets out of her bag and offered it to Mary. They chewed the soft black sweeties and watched the backpackers walk along the street and the herring gulls slide along the air, and neither of them said anything for a while.
Escape! 🤣