Flash Fiction – Jane Broughton

Shaking a tail feather

I woke to birdsong. “Up with the lark,” you’d always said. I dressed in the lemon chiffon dress you hated and pulled on that hat. You remember, the scarlet one with the feather you said made me look like a chubby robin. You wouldn’t allow me to wear it. I looked in the mirror. Perfect. I hopped downstairs and headed for the kitchen.

Time for breakfast. My head was becoming too hot under the hat so I took it off and put it on the table, exactly where your plate used to sit. Toast or cereal? ‘Heads or Tails?’ You used to despair at my indecisiveness. You were always so certain in your opinions. I tossed a coin. ‘Tails’ – toast it was then. You’d have been furious at my childish delight in leaving crumbs in the butter, dropping sticky marmalade on the tablecloth.

“Shake a tail feather, Joannie,” you’d say whenever I slowed down, perhaps to listen to a whispering willow or smell the metallic tang of a funfair, or just actually breathe. You’d said it to me that night we met at the Palais Ballroom, “come on girl, stop gossiping, come and shake a tail feather with the best-looking man in the room.” 

You were a catch. All my friends said so. ‘He’s a proper man, that one.’ ‘Solid as a rock.’ ‘Knows his own mind’. ‘Don’t know what he sees in you!’ You never took to my friends though and they soon drifted off, as insubstantial as clouds once we got married and flew away.

You kept me fed and watered for twenty years and all I had to do in return was love, honour and obey. I managed the last one. I used to love your pigeons. I’d go up onto the roof while you were out and coo with them. You set them free each morning and each evening they returned. They were such stupid birds. We were birds of a feather. I let them all go yesterday and dismantled their cages. You’d have been incandescent with rage.

A knock on the front door jolted me out of my memories. I grabbed my hat, jammed it on my head at a jaunty angle and went to open the door.

“Mrs Joannie Brown?” asked the man in black, taking in my colourful outfit with a raised eyebrow.

“No,” I replied. “Joan’s my name – not Joannie, never again Joannie. Joan like in Joan Jet.”

The man smiled. “Your car’s here, Ms Jet.”

I travelled to the church in style and made a point of waving gaily to people as we crawled past. ‘Making a show of myself’. You’d have hated that. 

In the front pew of the almost empty church I listened to talk of celebrating your life. I wished it was shorter. I’d taken off my hat, not out of respect but because it was flattening my hair, and I cradled it in my lap. I drifted off and dreamt of soft feathers, funfairs, flying.