Issue Two
December 2024
Ladies Who Lunch
Frances Gapper
This is my first thing each day routine: ease open joints and unclench knuckles, apply lotions, concealers and make-up. Symptoms, what causes? A psychic advises me to question the summer vixen. I place three gifts in a cage on my lawn and retreat indoors. Although it’s bright noon, I play nocturnes on the piano.
There she is, a magnificent orange creature! Delicately inserting her paw to hook the offerings. I hurry out, unfasten the cage and retreat.
Wearing the headscarf she looks very pretty. Her ears are shark fins.
The flowery apron she shreds with her teeth and claws. She’s right, it didn’t suit her at all.
Last, the three silver Arctic fox coins bought mail-order from the Canadian Mint. I thought she’d love those and she does. She digs a hole in my lawn, buries them.
Turns the queenly yellow dazzle of her gaze on me.
House Guest: original artwork by Anne Anthony
I ask my question and she replies. Or rather she yaps and I guess that means something.
Running to the kitchen, she peers into my swing bin, investigates the fridge.
“Need any help?”
She snarls and I retreat to my nocturnes, making heavy use of the pedal to create emotional drama.
Lunch is served. A mushroom fricassee and foraged hedgerow salad, main course boiled sweetcorn. I bite into my greased cob, she chases hers around the plate like a squeaky mouse. But then seizing her kill, she runs off down the garden. I finish eating, wash up and mop. Find her cob’s stripped core in a flowerbed and toss it in the compost bin.
She watches me from the fence, a naked animal.
About the author
Frances Gapper’s stories have been published in three Best Microfiction anthologies and online in places including Forge Lit, Gooseberry Pie, Wigleaf, Trampset, 100 Word Story, Switch, Twin Pies, Splonk, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fictive Dream and New Flash Fiction Review. She lives in the UK’s Black Country.