Tablecloth

we arrive early at the museum of your life
and start in the book exhibition
where Vera Brittain and George Eliot sit
in dust and well-thumbed covers

we work mostly in silence
except for the occasional
‘do you want this?’ or ‘mind if I have that?’
someone hands out bin bags
but I collect my treasure in a bag for life

it’s the tablecloth we fight over
each scrap of cheap cotton
the purple stain in its left-hand corner
your sloe gin, immortalised
the cloth that survived three house moves
Christmases and toddler tea times
the cloth that we sat round when five became four
and then, when four became five and six and seven and

I win
it costs me the TV and the mahogany desk
but on the way home I wrap it around my shoulders
like an olympian, victorious
skin strokes soft fabric
heavy with our history
and filled with a thousand tiny threads
of you

Good Boys Deserve Fudge Always

you stand alone
in my childhood wardrobe
dust clinging to your shoulders

you’ve been there
coming up ten years
strings unplucked
bow dangling like a lame arm

now and again I open you up
stroke the zebra-striped wood
that smells of time
smooth under my fingertips
smooth now too

as I unbuckle the case, sound escapes
the scrapes and scratches of freshly-rosined bows
the muffled coughs as the audience waits
late night scales and arpeggios
tired sighs after bum notes

other stuff spills out too
the dread
the fights with Mum on the car journeys home
the dreams that weighed heavy on small shoulders
straps cutting into my skin

Julia Fausing is a writer from the South West of England. She recently completed a Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Stockholm Writers Festival First Five Pages Prize.