Pearl

by Siân Hughes

I started looking around for her, and crying. The midwife asked if there was family history of post-partum psychosis. I said, no. Only grief. There’s a family history of grief. You can pass it on. Like immunity, in the milk.

When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.

This was my first experience of realising too late that people whose job it is to keep a tally of things are generally keeping a tally of things.

I said, ‘Since when did we even care about the start of stupid school?’ and he said, ‘Since we needed free childcare provided by the state for working parents, which is basically the point of it.’ And there I was thinking it had something to do with education.

The robot was apparently a key factor in my distinction.

Sometimes I think I have lived my life as an observer, saving all the best bits for her by looking very carefully and trying to remember the details she would have liked.

He even tried to read Pearl. No one else has ever offered to do that for me.

lonely old people who order their prescriptions to arrive on separate days just so there’s an excuse to queue up at the pharmacy where someone will greet them and say their name, others who set their alarm to meet the milk delivery on their doorstep, just to say hello.

There is no unthinkable intention. There is no intention at all. There is simply the horror of forgetting, and then remembering.

The current that took her under the bridge and out into open water was the flood of memory running like poison through her body, the dreadful cold remembering after you have forgotten.