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Dini Armstrong
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Glitter in the Dark

by Dini Armstrong

 

Saskia tried to look defiant while she was grating the piece of shrapnel against a stone, careful to collect the fine metal dust on the cloth below. She wasn’t sure what defiance looked like exactly, but Dad had said that what they were doing was an act of one. Her hands were frozen.

Dad was by the fire, boiling up rabbit skins for glue. He looked perfectly at peace, stirring and stirring as if in a trance. It made Saskia sleepy to watch him, and she let out a yelp when she grated her own skin against the rough surface of the stone.

          “I guess that’s a good sign,” said Dad, smiling at her.

          “How?” she snapped back, sucking her knuckles. Her stomach was growling. Even the disgusting slime he was cooking started to smell good.

          “Means you’re still alive, snoepje.” He continued to stir the gunk. He always called her snoepje, sweetie. When she was little, he had chased her around the house, pretending to gobble her up, and it was strange to think she had been squealing with delight.

Saskia looked around. The war had been over for months now, and they were still in the displaced persons’ camp. Which was funny, because Saskia and Dad were not the ones in the family who were lost. They knew exactly where they were. They didn’t know where Saskia’s baby sister was, or their mum. Not long now, Dad had said, not long, and they were all going to go home.

The woman in the tent next to theirs was having a baby. A birth on Christmas Eve, Dad had said to her worried husband, who had been pacing outside the tent. It’s like a Christmas miracle. The man had just stared at him with that face that people made when Dad told them that everything was going to be okay. Dad had tried to keep him busy by enlisting him in cutting out star shapes from bits of cardboard. It worked for an hour or so, but then the woman’s groans became so scary, that the man jumped up and forced his way into the tent to see what was going on. The old rules no longer applied. To be afraid of a bit of blood and suffering. The idea seemed silly these days.

Saskia was expected to go to school when they were back home. She tried on the thought in her head, but it was hard to picture it. Five years old when the men took her away, there had been no schools where they took her, even though they called it a children’s re-education camp. Almost nine now, she had heard stories of teachers using rods for discipline. She wasn’t scared.

The woman’s groans turned into high-pitched screams.

Dad started to whistle. His face lit up, and he stopped stirring.

          “That’s it, just right. Are you ready, snoepje?”

They both squatted on the frozen ground, and Dad arranged the pot of glue, the metal scrapings and the cardboard shapes in a little assembly line. He dipped his calloused fingers into the hot gloop and smeared glue all over the stars before handing them to Saskia, who sprinkled some of the metal powder over them; careful to hold it over the cloth, in case of spillages. Her dad held one of the finished stars up high — and a beam from the floodlights set it alight.

It sparkled and twinkled, and Saskia thought, Hold it higher, dad, hold it so high that mum can see it and find us. She was mesmerized. Memories came flooding in from a time far away, when the world was not grey and ashes, but gingerbread men and pink and white aniseed sugar sprinkles, and sweets stuffed into boots by Sinterklaas.

That’s when she noticed that the screaming had stopped. The man emerged from his tent, his face ashen, his shirt covered in blood. He slumped down next to them, shaking his head before burying his face in his hands.

Saskia stood up. She grabbed a handful of glitter and walked over to the man.

          “There,” she said, sprinkling it over his head, “all better.”

 

 


Idylls of the Queen

by Dini Armstrong

 

When the rapist hit her again, the impact of his right fist shattered the permanent mandibular first and second premolars on the left side of her jaw.

Within minutes his hand was visibly swollen, suggesting a fracture in his fifth metacarpal. An inexperienced fighter. Savvy pugilists present with a break in the second metacarpal. Suppressing the urge to offer him some ice for the swelling, she silently recited Tennyson. Idylls of the King. At one point she had to start again because she got muddled between the “Coming of Arthur” and the “Passing of Arthur.” The terracotta tiles were cold. Her mum had been right, linoleum would have been warmer.

The guy was so tall.

When he finished, he washed her blood off his cock in the kitchen sink. Right there, splattering over the mug that read Queen of Fucking Everything in faded colors, from overuse. She couldn’t help feeling embarrassed about the dirty dishes in the sink. She was going to take care of that before bedtime.

In total, He was there for 19 minutes. She knew, because when He arrived at the door, with his fake Amazon parcel, the BBC Weekend news started at 17:15 and Captain Francesco Schettino steered the 60,000-ton Costa Concordia cruise ship off course, turning it into the largest shipwreck in history. When Kirsty McCabe told her to expect localized upland snow in various parts of Scotland, the door closed behind him.

 

 

One cold and dark afternoon, I stumbled across a newspaper article from Paris, dated 18th March 1818. In collaboration with her daughter, a mother poisoned her husband and both her sons. Both women were condemned to death. What brought you here, mes copaines, I wondered. . . .

 

La Mère Mauvaise

by Dini Armstrong

 

Et voilà. It ends where it began, my child, not long now. If you stretch your head forward as far as you can, it will come off more easily; that’s what they say. Oh, stop your blubbering. We’ve kneeled before, haven’t we? At least it will hurt only on that end this time; the other end will be in peace, finally. It seems right, separating the head from the body. I wonder if my head will taste the iron of my blood as it works its way up from the throat.

Did you know, I was born on January 21st, 1793, the day of the execution of Louis XVI? And here we are, my girl, you and I, both getting royally fucked by that great equalizer, the guillotine.

Don’t cry now, girl; hush hush. It’s over soon.

They’ve taken my scarf to expose the neck. It carried our boy on my back for three months, didn’t it? Just as it carried you, my lovely girl. I miss the weight of you, your breath on my neck, your little chubby hands playing with my hair. The papers wrote that he was mine. They wouldn’t believe he was yours—an unmarried twelve-year-old, producing such an angel with her own brother? Well, we made him an angel now, didn’t we, my lovely? Thanks to you and me, he will never turn into his father. A beast of his own father's making, my husband; may he burn in hell. Do you remember how they writhed and twisted? I wished it had lasted longer.

The crowds have come in full number today. Seeing la mère mauvaise and her murderous daughter, the barbarous poisoners of Paris. I can smell them, roasting chestnuts. I am proud of us, my girl. When men fight back, they are celebrated. When women do the same, they are killed. Remember when we finally did it, and we sang the song all the way to the police station?

“Ah! Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira! 
Tous les violeurs à la lanterne!”

I remember when I was eleven, playing with my mother’s bread dough. The smell of yeast and burnt sugar. The softness, the innocence, the way the sunshine just flooded in through the window, as if there was no darkness. That’s when I met him, your father. He joined in with me, despite his age (he was already twenty-five), the smell of gin. At first, he shaped a flower, then he giggled and formed the shape of a man’s bits. He told me to touch it and asked me if I wanted a go at the real thing. That’s when my mum walked in, and we were married two weeks later. She was a great one at turning sin into virtue.

No, I don’t want my eyes blindfolded. No, don’t tie my hands. I will go freely with you, my liberator, mon ami, into the bliss of hellfire, purified, and cleansed — of all.

 

Weird Reasons to Be Grateful

by Dini Armstrong

 

At least she didn’t die alone, we got to be with her, watch cancer suffocate my mum, we got to listen to it, touch it, taste her death. At least there was a nurse, three times in five long days. At least it wasn’t Covid. At least she didn’t die alone. At least you got to be there for her. At least you had a funeral.

At least I kept my job and kept on working all the way, through grief, through my depression, found the strength to keep it up, locked down, burned out. At least I got to help some folk by listening and holding all their fears.

At least I got to have my operation, when others were ignored. At least I got to be sliced open, but no one saw what’s really going on inside. At least I got to heal without the need to take time off, why bother when you work from home.

At least we don’t have kids to teach ourselves, they’re all locked up inside their own lives, far away. At least my love and I have time to catch up on TV, stop talking to each other, just to be, there’s me, and then there’s him, and educate ourselves on Global Warming, Trump, and Brexit. At least we get that wake-up call.

At least I get to draw deep breaths and write about it all.

And, oh, I can knit socks now.

 

 

Dini Armstrong, now Scottish, has worked in journalism and psychology. She is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing and has published short stories and flash fiction. Her pithy style got her into trouble from age six, when, after writing a particularly seditious piece about a vengeful cat with explosives, she had to promise never to write again. She lied.

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