Bravo! Well done you the card had read, as if turning 39 was a great accomplishment they had doubted she would achieve. Bravo! Well done for being alive still, we never thought you would be able to make it this far it may as well have said.

She felt ready to break into two, she could hear their conversation:
“Her hair!” one woman shrilled, “It’s so straggly and flat! Go blonde I suggested, but she said no.” The guest sighed, blowing on her tea, patting her own platinum head, offended.
“Maybe if she did change her hair that husband of hers would be round more,” and both women lifted their fingers to graze along their own lips and cheeks self-consciously, checking.

None of the guests noticed the door open and close. She was good at sneaking around.

Every time she passed the shop she would stop and press her hands and face against the glass, like a child outside a sweet store, clogging the window with her breath. She would notice the wooden tables, the old clock, the stained chair that the man would nest himself down in, hidden behind a newspaper that left only his tiny feet pointing out. He was scrawny, like a bird, and the chair seemed to swallow him. She would’ve liked a chair like that: something friendly to curl up in when her husband didn’t come home. She used to image him gently kissing her on his return, carrying her up off to bed with him. She fingered the mouldy-peach bruise rising by her left eye and guessed the chair wasn’t for sale anyway.
No one ever seemed to buy anything from the shop, because the items were always in the exact same spot she had left them in. She liked this regularity, this continuousness; she liked that everything had its own place.
‘Let me in,’ she thought, ‘just let me in. Let me become a part of it.’

TEXT by Ailish McAlpine-Green + IMAGES by Lindsay Mcbirnie