Her Ladyship expects me to rise when the timer pings, remove the tinfoil from her lasagne and bring it to her on a tray with all the paraphernalia. This consists of a freshly plucked rose inside its crystal vase, a posh fork and spoon she’d bring out for guests when Kenneth wasn’t dead, the silver salt and pepper pots and the knife that cuts.
Her Ladyship expects conversations about Mr Marsdon who’s departed recently, or her lovely son Benny who’s not lovely at all because he pinched my nipple when I was opening a tin of tuna, or Henrietta who’s on her way out, disintegrating underneath her floral blanket. Henrietta’s son says that Henrietta thinks she’s in Tenerife and that a man’s coming any minute to turn on her air con, bless her!.
Thank God I have all my mental faculties, Her Ladyship’ll say and I’ll reply don’t be so sure of that! and Her Ladyship will chuckle the same supermarket chuckle she comes out with when we’re at Waitrose and the acne man at the cash-desk says steady on love, no running in the aisle!
When her Ladyship asks me if I’m still studying that ridiculous gender thing at the polytechnic or is your Mother still, you know?, I switch the conversation to the highest recorded autumn temperatures in human history or something horrific like a fatal stabbing by a young person around my age.
Were Her Ladyship to say something deflating like soon there will be no-one left to die, she has given me strict orders. Whilst she hitches her skirt up, off goes the television, off go the main light and side ones and on comes Beethoven, always put Beethoven on as it is loud enough to drown out the sound of the buzzing on her crotch.
During such moments, I usually read the newspaper in the kitchen or look out the window at Her Ladyship’s lawn – a veritable gnome central.
There are little Alpine tunnels, bridges over ponds with gnome boats.
Her husband Kenneth clearly had exceptional engineering skills to create a mechanised lift that goes all the way up through a tree trunk to a branch with a swing on
It’s all rusty now and the batteries are dud.
Outside, I scoop out the pond weed with a stick, pick up the gnome lady whose head has sunk into the mud all the way down to her neck. I wipe her face and hair with a leaf and pick a pink geranium to decorate her plastic hair.
When I arrive into the sitting room, Her Ladyship is sitting up in her armchair in the dark, a tiny pink geranium poking out from behind her ear, and I’m thinking good Lord, maybe her Ladyship and the gnome are connected somehow So I leave her in the dark and go back to the garden, kick the gnome lady over, and sure enough, back in the sitting room, her Ladyship is lying on the carpet in agony, saying call Benny, call Benny.
Like with any power, you don’t always know what to do with it at first. It’s almost too huge to contemplate.
No, I won’t call Benny, I say.
Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats and rats. When she is not writing, she is not cooking or running either. Her work has featured in The Moth, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, trampset, Maudlin House, Milk Candy Review, Splonk, Bending Genres, Ink, Sweat and Tears and other very fine journals. Her flash collection Scream If You Want To is forthcoming with Alien Buddha Press. Erratic tweets @KikLodge
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