The River Will Carry Her Home Fiction by Maria Thomas
CW: Death of a Child
The optician is sharp-nosed, with thick lensed glasses that magnify her eyes like an anime character. Alba sees flecks of silver in the pallid ring encircling large, inky pupils. The room smells fungal, as if it isn’t cleaned very often, and there’s an evil eye pendant hanging over a monitor in the corner. Alba is cocooned within a leather chair and staring at a box of light until a ghost glow appears at the edge of her vision; it feels warm, like a halo, like halogen. The optician uses a machine that looks right inside Alba’s eyes, and she shows Alba and her mum a photograph. There is a thick line within each eyeball which curves and loops like the River Thames at the end of Eastenders. The optician’s face looks serious, and Alba is sent to wait outside. She sits and waits gazing at a picture of three witches spinning a golden thread that binds people to the earth.
In the months that follow, Alba’s world narrows to a metal framed bed in a small bright room, hair moulting onto the pillow, mouth parched and cracked like she’s suffering her own personal drought. Her parents wear falsely optimistic faces, but the slightest lenticular shift shows sadness and fear beneath. When they think she’s asleep their eyes glaze with pools of tears, dammed behind their need to shore each other up.
In bed Alba pictures the optician’s chair, the warmth of leather and the bulbous glare of her eyes in the photograph. She closes her lids and follows the course of the river past weeping willows and island churches, bustling docks and fish-markets, towers of stone and glass, apartment buildings with flowered balconies; she flows beneath bridges, past places with names like Eel Pie, Canary and the Isle of Dogs.
She follows flotillas of boats, shoals of salmon, swarms of eels; sees mudlarkers gathering bone and coin and driftglass, knowing instinctively however far they dig they’ll never uncover all of this river’s secrets, never find all the blood and all the love that sit beneath the silt and sand.
The Thames carries her beyond a white dome, spiked and pointing to heaven, past spur-shaped headlands to the ocean, and she smells salt and feels the sting of brine on her skin. She hears the whirs and screams of birds and the susurration of waves, and she untethers.
In a small bright room, her parents snip the thread and let her go.
Maria Thomas, middle-aged, apple-shaped mum, has won Oxford Flash, Free Flash Fiction and Retreat West Micro. In 2022 she was a runner-up in Retreat West themed comp, a finalist in London Independent Story Prize & took second place in Propelling Pencil. @AppleWriter (Twitter) @AppleShapedWriter (Instagram)