SHORT STORY: The Law of the Conservation of Mass

Each month, the Wokingham Writers Group holds a contest - here is their April winner, by Fiona Eatwell

ELSIE stood by the kitchen sink filled with froth and surveyed the squat garden of the suburban bungalow. “The magnolia is blooming, the first bride of spring,” she said to Albert, who sat behind her at the breakfast table. It flowered late that year, the bristle of frost had left the ground leaden until early March. Yet things always softened.

The pale sun had begun to lift winter’s memory and the magnolia buds flourished, fed by the generations of pet dogs buried beneath the bush, their fur and teeth decayed and transfigured into blushing petals.

“Do you remember it snowed in the March we were married?”

The question was not quite rhetorical but Albert remained silent. She sensed him watching for the blue tits. They nested in the weathered bird box attached to the shed every spring.

“The birds, they’ll come soon,” she said as she remembered the darting blue, followed by comical fuzzy bundles as the chicks left the nest.

“Do you think they’re the same family? Generations and generations that have nested in our box? Do you remember when Amanda found the broken eggshell?”

She remembered their granddaughter’s tubby fingers stroking the jagged halves of the ivory shell she had found on the grass below the nest box. Amanda had instinctively understood that something had been lost but she traced the hollows of the shell with tenderness.

Elsie fancied she’d seen a blank beauty in the shell halves and Albert had said this was a lesson each child must learn.

Amanda now studied physics at Sheffield. After the funeral, Elsie visited her. She had tried to tell Amanda of her pride but Amanda had cried and said,

“Oh Granny!”

Elsie whispered platitudes to her, like “We’ll get through this,” and she’d thought of broken bird eggs. She’d watched Amanda studiously scribbling volumes of notes.

Elsie could make nothing of the dense litany of numbers but she’d tentatively grasped the concepts. It amazed her that things were not bound as she had once imagined.

Everything flowed and transformed, matter could change but was always conserved.

Back at the sink, Elsie went to wipe her hands on the threadbare tea towel and was surprised to find them still dry. She readied herself to say goodbye to Albert and go home. Visits were becoming increasingly brief and she looked forward to seeing if her daffodils were in bloom.

When she left, they had been thrusting green stalks with the potential of yellow hinting at their bulging tops.

In the October, Albert had planted them in the natural burial plot.

After her initial squeamishness, she felt honoured that her body would be broken into golden trumpets.

To think, she always used to find yellow garish. Albert would visit on Sunday. He would put his lips to the flowers’ conical middles and tell her that the blue tits had arrived.