Summer Stories
1 min
Tidings
REBECCA M NEWMAN
A December wind ghosts through cracks in the front door and grasps at the last threads of Christmas. The teenager plays ‘Coventry Carol', a slow wallowing melancholy on her cello. The smaller child has a balloon—
inflates it
deflates it
inflates it
deflates it
until the teenager snaps.
Natalie is only half listening to her children from where she stands at the bench, sorting through papers and brushing at stray fruitcake crumbs. She finds the unopened envelope, the one with the test results. She fans herself with it, as if it's of no consequence.
She looks across at the children and slides a finger under the flap and then suddenly tears at it, jagged, desperate.
Down the hallway the wind whistles and wheezes the notes unravel
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Rebecca M. Newman writes for children and adults. You can read her work in magazines and anthologies in Australia and internationally. Rebecca is the co-editor of a 2024 poetry anthology for children, Right Way Down, featuring poems penned by Western Australian writers.
© Rebecca M Newman
Published in Twice Not Shy: One hundred short short stories by Night Parrot Press (2021)
www.nightparrotpress.com
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