Read Online New Welsh Short Stories by Author: QuarkXPress - Free Book Online

imagined there would be a Jakub; instead I had wrapped the kitchen utensils she’d chosen in tissue paper and swathed the computer and the television in a pair of velvet curtains because even though we hadn’t included them on her list, I thought she might like them.
    I’d packed the other things into cardboard boxes and plastic crates and put them in the hall next to the front door ready for her to take away. I now wheeled the Dyson vacuum cleaner out from under the stairs to join them and brought down the piles of towels and bedlinen that had been set aside upstairs. I went round the garden and gathered up the plant pots she’d eventually agreed to accept. In the driveway I could see Jakub putting down the back seat of their car to make room for everything while at the door I took off my now slightly muddy new shoes and went into the kitchen. At the sink I brushed off the cobwebs and dried leaves and bits of loose earth from the pots and pushed them into the waste disposal and ran the water on top of them. Through the window I watched Jakub moving to and fro between the front door and the car. Vlad e ˇ na stood silently behind me and I handed her the clean pots to take out. She smelled nice, a mixture of smoke and a powdery scent.
    When everything was out of the hall and off the front step and into their delapidated car Jakub roped the tailgate to the back bumper so it was pulled down over all the stuff piled into the back, and when he’d secured the kitchen chairs to the roof - rack with an arrangement of bungee cords, the two of them drove away.
    I stood at the open door and watched them go. Jakub took the speed bumps carefully. One, two, three, four. The chairs bounced a little. I could see Vlad e ˇ na’s garish hair, the shoulders of her puffy white coat. Briefly they waited at the flashing lights of the Pelican crossing and then Jakub steered them around the curve in the road and their pale blue car disappeared and I turned back into the clean and silent house, which was where I discovered that along with the vase and the electrical goods and the kitchen utensils, the chairs and the curtains and the laundry hamper, the towels and linens and the plant pots and various other miscellaneous objects I’d added onto the original list and put into the boxes at the door for Vlad e ˇ na, she and Jakub had also taken my brand new size 11 Timberland Earthkeepers® Stormbuck plain toe lace - up shoes.
    In the quiet and emptied hallway of my father’s house I stood in my seven - league socks. I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. I went into every room. I looked in the kitchen, the sitting room, the dining room, the study, the small laundry, both bathrooms, all the bedrooms. I went back to the front door. I even went outside and walked into the street and stood in the traffic, scanning the tarmac, the four evenly spaced brick - coloured speed bumps, the Pelican crossing up ahead but there was nothing.
    I put the tulips in a jug and took them upstairs to Dad’s bedroom.
    In my stockinged feet I lay down on his bed and in the bright daylight I folded my arms across my chest and closed my eyes. Behind the lids, in the darkness, I could see the orange rectangle of his window, the black bars of the small individual panes and in the blotchy dark it felt like everything , absolutely everything in my whole entire life, had been leading me to this exact moment – Helen, and Dave Crater, and all the big and small surprises of the last few strange weeks in Zlín and Norman Park and the hospital and the house had somehow produced it, and none of it had been a breadcrumb trail, it had all been a slowly advancing length of horrible tangled knitting, impossible for me now to go anywhere or do anything; as if I had lost, not just my shoes, but everything.
    In one of the neighbouring gardens a lawnmower hummed and from somewhere farther away the slightly creepy chimes of an ice - cream