Flash Fiction 3rd Place: Lucille Ascends by Jo Gatford

Lucille ascends while the bathwater is still running. The bathwater is still running when Max gets home after a shift that leaves his skin aching. After a shift that leaves his skin aching, Max doesn’t even call out a hello as he shoulders open the door; doesn’t even notice she’s not at the stove as he fetches a beer from the fridge. He fetches a beer from the fridge and stands there a moment, rolling the lukewarm bottle in his palm; takes in a hissing breath to curse her out for not leaving them to chill long enough when he hears the tap juddering upstairs. The tap juddering upstairs makes him look up, cracking all the little air pockets between the vertebrae in his neck, to see a ragged-edged imprint seeping through the polystyrene tile — a perfect outline of his wife, arms outstretched like a high dive.

Arms outstretched like a high dive, Lucille ascends to a place beyond blackened grout and grouching about warm beer and hard thumbs kneading into knotted muscle and knuckles knocking against slammed doors. Slammed doors are nothing but the punctuation between years, from a useless girl to an ungrateful bitch to something they will look on later as holy — as her light-burned silhouette echoes on the kitchen ceiling for priests to mutter at and quietened neighbourhood women to pray to — and nothing can stop her now. Nothing can stop her now she has risen beyond this small half-bath, in this small corner bathroom, in this small one-bed, this small-minded marriage, this small-ambitioned town, this small-historied country, this small, rounded earth, circling unnoticed in such a petty infinity.

Such a petty infinity, when she looks down upon it — just one more drip in an overflown bathtub.