Scattering #2: Melting Point

This week, a silly story about putting ice cream in the food bank donation point. You may think, 'what a stupid premise, nobody would do that', but friends, I have seen a tub of ice cream in the food bank donation point. There are more things in heaven and earth...

This week's daily stories

Monday

It was the fanciest place I had ever stayed, a proper country pile. When I went down to breakfast I announced myself to the lads: "Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick." There was another guest sat across the dining room, an older woman, dressed all in yellow. She looked daggers at me. She looked ropes, lead piping, revolvers. I took my breakfast up to the room. It didn't feel safe downstairs.

Tuesday

The tattoo artist refused, at first. Said the words were too cruel, that she had a duty of care. But she understood they were better on my skin that in my mind. We put them on my left flank, where it's tender. I never look. You don't need to look, when something's safe.

Wednesday

"Why do we go round so many churches?" Edie was whining, but she was doing it quietly. She respected the place; it was her dad she wasn't sure about. He gave the question some thought. It was one he had asked his mother many times, in grand cathedrals and little village chapels. She had talked about beauty and history and architecture and tradition, and said he would understand when he was older. And now here he was, older than he ever thought he would be, dragging his daughter past candles and stained glass and looking for the same thing his mother always had been: an answer to the question, "Why do we go round so many churches?"

Thursday

All around me are things you mended. A soldered patch on the hot water pipes. Embroidery on the worn knee of my jeans. An apostrophe added in neat black ink to each unsent invitation. There are so many things that you can do. There are so many things I can't. It makes me want to break something.

Friday

There was something in the stone. We all knew it: there was something wonderful inside, if we could only crack it open. But it’s not an easy thing to break a stone in two, and it’s harder still to keep hold of it long enough to try. I was the lucky one, in the end. I scored it with a chisel, then let all the strength I had left fall on it in one great blow. It shattered into fragments. I was half blind from it. Inside, there was nothing.

Saturday

She opened up the little box of left-behinds. There she kept eggshells and plum stones and the punched-out frames of board game tokens. A milk tooth nestled inside the lost-wax mould that cast her ring. All the little in-betweens, the punctuation of life. She tucked the letter inside, and closed the lid.

Sunday

It was a hot day, but it was cool in my hole, with water round my ankles and shade from the walls. I had brought a few things down, book and snacks and water bottle; it was getting awkward to climb out. Hard work, but fun. I rested my head on the sand. The children playing up above were muffled, like a dream.

The walls were weeping, and I thought how alive seawater seems, and yet how cold. I saw the slip just in time to know I couldn't stop it. The children went silent. The sun went out. The sand was too heavy to struggle with; I couldn't even open my mouth to drown. But there was a strong hand pushing through the sand, reaching to me. Grasping tight and cold around my ankle. Pulling me down.

I have been reading...

• Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (translated by Lucy Jones), a small but dense novel from and about the German Democratic Republic. Siblings movngly captures the way disparate feelings – about family, romance, art, politics – get mixed up in a person; it was well worth having its namesake silly internet song in my head for the week.
• No One Talks About This Stuff, an anthology of writing about 'almost parenthood' edited by Kat Brown. A fitting book for Baby Loss Awareness Week, but it brings together a much wider set of experiences, from indecision to infertility to the impossible choices that pregnancy sometimes involves. A book that shows how cold and painful the world can be, and how we can warm it for each other.
• 'Door in the Woods' by Chris Scott, a short story I really enjoyed over at Okay Donkey.
• Broken Ground (see shameless plug above). I've loved reading the other stories in this anthology, and the artwork by Lucy Scott is gorgeous. Uncertain Stories are also distributing free little one-story books to bookshops and cafés; a very cool thing to do.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week's story: Melting Point

She must have known. That was the worst part: that she must have known, and just been unable to admit it. If she didn't see the problem, then she would have said so. She would have explained, justified, invented. But she didn't. I would say: 'Lydia, there's no point putting ice cream in the food bank collection, it'll melt before anyone ever comes to collect it,' and she would say, 'Yeah, I get it, poor people don't deserve ice cream. They should just get a kilo bag of oats and be happy with it.' I would say 'Everyone deserves nice things but a tub of melted sticky goo isn't really a treat,' and she would say 'For God's sake, Allie, we're in the middle of a heatwave,' and I would say 'Yes, exactly,' and she would post on the local Facebook group about how people just don't want to think about people who use food banks like they're real people. And then she'd do it again.