By Karen Arnold

Standing on the side-lines of another school sports day, watching, applauding, cheering. A scent of coconut performs a magic trick, and I remember an afternoon when the world turned upside down. 

An afternoon when the sun looked down on the two of us, hidden in the long grass, side by side.  The air scented with privet blossom and the coconut tanning oil she smuggled in to use at lunch times. We looked up at a heat bleached sky, watched swallows screaming and diving, before the light became too much and we were forced to turn away, psychedelic after images playing across our eyelids. She always wanted things to be brighter, hotter, louder. More.

We lay so still the birds skimmed across our burning faces, almost touching our hair. On the other side of the long grass, in another world, boys threw cricket balls like grenades, obedient girls played rounders by the rules. The air filled with shouts of encouragement, lawn mowers, ice-cream vans. All the sounds of a summer afternoon at the end of a term drifted on the warm breeze, out into the long grass. 

I remember a teacher’s voice calling out our names, exasperated, wondering how long it can take two girls to find a lost ball. Venus turning her face to mine, finger on her lips, quivering with suppressed laughter. She pulled out a packet of cigarettes, lit one, closed her eyes and breathed in, a deep, rapturous breath, like someone pulled from deep water. I remember turning on my side to watch her, thinking that I had never seen anything more beautiful, knowing that her mouth would taste of lemon sherbet and menthol cigarettes. She dropped the burning match onto the parched dusty grass and I snuffed it out with my bare hand. I remembered how much it hurt, and how she just opened one sleepy green eye and smiled at me, stroked my hair, saying she liked it longer. 

I remember the itching as the grass pressed against my bare legs. I was striped and dappled with green, brindled with dust and sweat, a chlorophyll tiger. I watched as a ladybird, shiny and lacquered as a fingernail, explored her calf, crawling across the new world of her knee. “Fly away home” I murmured, turning onto my back again, as she reached for my hand.

I catch my wife’s eye as we applaud the small sweaty boy rocketing towards us holding out a plastic medal as if it might explode with the joy, he is pouring into it. Her green eyes flash summer lightening and my mouth fills again with the taste of lemon and mint.

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Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience. She won the Mslexia prize for flash fiction in 2022 and was placed second in the Oxford Flash Fiction competition in 2023 She has work in The Waxed Lemon, The Martello,and Seaside Gothic  amongst others. 

She can be found on twitter @aroomofonesown_4