Fairytale Mother

Gina Wisker

In their marriage she created her own fairytale.
Handsome prince.
Foreign climes.
Sunsets and a gin and tonic.
Soon she became the sleeping beauty.
Rests and lie ins.
‘Your mother’s asleep, I’ll just fetch her’.
He died.
Unscripted.
She slept longer. Once
she even disappeared
back to bed when I’d driven the 360 mile round trip
to clean and cook her 13 meals.
Then freeze them.
Only a short period as the wicked witch
Mumbling curses and bad nothings
to everyone.
Then she returned
to her simpler, more pleasant self.
There were cobwebs
and brambles
hacked through and wafted back
to carry her off in the ambulance
then my car.
No coach to the ball.
Just a confused Christmas.
Tray meals
And bruised encounters
at every dangerous ordinary step.
In the care home she’s sometimes Goldilocks
wandering vaguely into other people’s rooms.
Eating their chocolates
offering her tea.
And mostly she’s just singing or
engaged in kindly conversations.
Telling her fairy stories
To imaginary friends.

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Le Soir

John James

for Philip Crozier

They shuffle slowly forward on the pavement in a line extending some thirty metres from the Metro entrance. Their clothes are dark or russet under the cadmium orange lamplight. It’s mild for later winter, dark already but the sky is touched with cobalt blue above the blackness of the buildings. A shop assistant whose children wait for her with their grandmother. A nun without her veil in subfusc civvies & a beautiful Muslim girl in a green hijab on her way home from the Lycée. A carpenter still in his yellow safety jacket whose wife has recently detached herself after twenty years determines to be resolute. I’d worked on this all day wanting to show it them before they’d gone. But it’s not ready yet.

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