Another journal

Written during my month of writing.  You can find all the sections here.

Kitchen noises and falsetto disco woke Emily after the sun had been pouring in her bedroom window for hours. Making a disgusted noise, she slid the window shut and dropped the blinds, darkening the room.

“Closing the barn after the horses,” she muttered. Her aunt’s trailer worked like a solar oven, heating steadily throughout the day. A neutral state that one could sleep in was only possible if the entire place was closed like a tomb as soon as the sun appeared, then opened up to night air and bugs the moment outside temperatures dropped. Emily hoped that she hadn’t doomed herself to over-warm tossing and turning that night by sleeping in.

She coughed up something gross in the bathroom. Splashing her face with cold water, Emily decided she was more or less acceptable and shuffled into the kitchen.

Her aunt was half-dancing at the sink to a worn out mixtape a boyfriend had given her years ago. Tall, still prone to wearing the short-shorts that made her popular with local bar bands and mortified Emily in grade school, Janice was a perfect aunt and a woman who would have never been a mother, given a choice. Emily remembered one of her favourite stories, from when her aunt was still in high school and had decided to skip a week, to go follow some sort of fair—

With a sharp intake of breath, Emily leaned against the dark wood panelled wall. Her aunt had never gone to high school. She’d spent her young life in some sort of court in the Sidhe, living in a way that couldn’t be imagined while standing in a decades-old double-wide trailer listening to New Wave and feeling like somebody had punched you in the gut.

As she made the realisation, her aunt turned and met her eyes, paused mid-dance move. The two women sized each other up, resetting assumptions built up over nearly two decades of living together. Emily noticed for the first time that her aunt’s dark hair had threads of grey shot through it.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.