Warts and All
By Perry Estelle © 2003
Marriage never works, divorce always does. Gina had heard that one out of three marriages work. She was just waiting for the third one. She took the guilt and avoided an acrimonious separation. To Genevieve it was like taking a tight shoe off. He always called her Genevieve when they were in company. She hated her name, it sounded like the usual pet names meteorologists give to hurricanes threatening the Florida coast. She left a note saying that he was the perfect husband but clearly it was all her fault and that she could not settle down to another marriage. It was not loves thirty something's dream. She forced herself not to write a P.S telling the truth. That he was a idle egomaniac with the brains of a mongoose.

Her new home was over one hundred miles from her Lewisham roots. A quaint coaching house that she decided to rent in the Norfolk border village of Hockwold. One thousand pounds a month of unmolested rustic history with no dishwasher, a barn owl in the larder and two feet of mud and Triffids passing itself off as a garden. Gina dropped her suitcases at the crumbling step and let herself in which was not easy as the door had practically rotted away more...

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"Whiff of a grapeshot." 
By Perry Estelle © 2003
Bermuda terrace shopping centre, Edwardston. South East England.

A woman dressed in deep mauve and wearing a matching chiffon scarf picked up a newspaper to read of the death of Edith Piaf. Paris had lost its 'little sparrow' to alcohol and morphine. Her last song summed it all up. "Je ne regretted rien". Piaf's close friend, Jean Cocteau had died on the spot from shock when told the news.

"The wages of sin is death. Anyway she had a voice like a rusty gate." The woman frowned and shook her head, neatly folding the paper and placing it back on display.

She was without make-up and hauntingly beautiful. A tensile, elegant woman with Christine keeler looks.  A pointed bodice, to be envied by Miss Keeler also. She was told by her hairdresser to avoid purple. A shade usually chosen for the prematurely old. A hurrying form that clickety clacked in a straight line through Edwardston High Street. Others weaved to avoid her. She wore a hat and veil, sharp to one side. She fiddled with a bow at the back that added more...

More archived fiction coming soon