Amy Marques grew up between languages and places and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. Her work has been published in journals including Streetcake Magazine, Bending Genres, and Chicago Quarterly Review. https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com/
Turning the Page Fiction by Hilary Ayshford
CW: Mental Health & Abuse
The photograph, faded and discoloured, has resisted the efforts of the heavy books to iron out its creases, flatten its crumpled corners. She cannot recall how it felt to be that laughing ten-year-old, eyes squinting in the sunlight, hair lifted by the breeze from her shoulders into a golden halo. That was in the Before. The pull of the picture brings her here, into the shadowed alcoves of her mind to probe the memory of the day when the Before became the After, to examine it, to test whether its potency has diminished over the years.
She hurries past the familiar archives of adulthood, feeling drawn to the happy images of recent times but not allowing herself to be waylaid by the alluring brightness of love, marriage, motherhood. Trepidation slows her haste. The aisles in this part of the repository are dark and grimy. Dread creatures with swollen black bodies and distorted limbs lurk in corners and skitter away at her approach, leaving pinprick tracks in the debris of her lonely childhood. She makes for the furthest recess, where light never reaches. Fingertips skim names and dates, summoning images of people and events long since banished to the oubliette of her mind.
She recoils when she finds the volume, reluctant to touch it, unwilling to disturb the muffling layers of dust that have settled over its cold covers like a protective blanket. She turns it over in her hands, finds it unchanged but no longer as heavy as she thought. The scalpel is sharp that she uses to excise the final folios. She tears them into tiny, impotent pieces and scatters them among the musty detritus on the floor.
Bypassing the awkward period of adolescence, she carries the mutilated memory back into the light and warmth of sunny beaches, birthday parties, board games and bedtime stories. She places the tome on the middle shelf, between recollections of her wedding day and the birth of her first child, where happiness can permeate its faded covers and rework the remaining chapters.
Hilary Ayshford is a former science writer and editor based in rural Kent in the UK. She writes mainly flash fiction and short stories, and is working on a novella-in-flash. @hilary553 (Twitter)