The Lighthouse

by Alison Moore

He becomes nauseous just thinking about walking through the bars and restaurants with their clashing textiles, sitting down at a dishcloth-damp table, the smell of other people’s warm food lingering beneath the tang of cleaning fluids, his stomach roiling.

His heart feels like the raw meat it is. It feels like something peeled and bleeding. It feels the way it felt when his mother left.

Her top’s thin straps sink into her flesh, which is pale and doughy like uncooked pastry.

Passing a pub with tables on the pavement, he stops and gets himself an unexpectedly huge glass of beer and watches the people walking by. The women his forty-something father brought back to the hotel were young, in their twenties perhaps. But Futh is not looking at the younger women, he is looking at those in their mid-thirties, the age his mother was when she left.

He holds her by the upper arms and squeezes, twisting her flesh a little, as if juicing an orange.