Namesake
Agnes Varda, Jane’s goldfish, stops eating her fish flakes. This frightens Jane in obscure ways that only the late filmmaker might have imagined.
One night the piscine pet makes a showgirl’s entrance into Jane’s run-of-the-mill anxiety dream. Shining holy in a 1960s gold metallic dress with transparent tail, she describes her longing for a variety of flavours, textures and shapes. “I’ve heard my namesake liked heart-shaped potatoes.”
“She liked them,” Jane says, “because to her they symbolised the decaying nature of the female body, wrinkled and sprouting chin hairs.”
“Oh well, forget that then. Champagne, a sprinkle of caviar?”
***
Agnes Varda reminisces to Jane about her glory days as an Art Icon. “Toulouse-Lautrec’s previous goldfish loved absinthe and couldn’t control her addiction. She literally turned green – le poisson vert. He was pierced by remorse. Leonora Carrington called me Chouchou. We had many deep conversations about alchemy, female spiritual transformation and fish in folklore. But I don’t like how she painted me in ‘The Last Fish’. Highly unflattering, I look more like a trout than a goldfish. Skipping back a few centuries, the Early Christians depicted me in catacombs and on doorposts. They worshipped me as a god.”
Jane: “Haven’t you got that a bit wrong?”
“I do not have it ‘a bit wrong’,” Agnes Varda replies freezingly.
***
Tired of mourning, Jane types into ChatGPT “how to get over the death of a pet who felt like a home?”
ChatGPT suggests: “Plan a small dinner party”.
Jane invites an elderly widower she recently met at a midnight screening of The Gleaners. His name is François Belmondo, and he looks like a misplaced grandfather. Everyone cancels except for him.
When he arrives, he hands Jane a bouquet of purple potato flowers. Pour toi, ma chérie, he croons, blinking and re-blinking as if his eyes have run out of tears.
Adventures in Individuation
Death Pact
Way back in Ida and Ivan’s lovey-dovey days, Ivan pushed for a marital death pact. He typed one and they both signed it. Where’s that romantic document now, where the flowery (he’d doodled daisies in the margin) pledge of mutual trust/reliance? Somewhere in the attic, buried in a box of old papers near the disused Nordic Track. Anyway, Ida’s back-then intention: feign a cough, spit pills into hanky or tissue, let Ivan cark.
Foot Fetish
Andrew Somebody sucking Sarah Ferguson’s toes on a sun lounger was headline news in 1992, triggering sniggers and guffaws from Ida/Ivan. Although Ida herself has curvaceous big toes and darling little ones.
A foot fetish could have saved their marriage. Too bad. But maybe it’s not too late, thinks Ida on a lonely early December morning, snapping a barefoot selfie, scrolling the web for specialty dating sites.
Brief Encounter
Ida recalls a dusty snippet of New Age self-help advice:
1. Stand naked in front of a mirror.
2. Tell your body I Love You and it’s not conditional.
3. Smile at yourself as if you’re an appreciative stranger.
So. I worked hard, saved hard, took care of Ivan, Ida tells her pale, wrinkly reflection. Good for me, lucky for you.
Frances Gapper’s stories have been included in five Best Microfiction anthologies, and published online in e.g.Trash Cat Lit, Switch, Mythic Picnic, Exposition Review, Pangyrus, Flash the Court,Gooseberry Pie,trampset,Wigleaf,ForgeandFictive Dream. She lives in the UK’s Black Country region.
Meg Pokrass has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including New England Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, Five Points, Waxwing, Hunger Mountain, and Washington Square Review. Her latest collection, First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories is from Dzanc Books.