Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Midnight Sun
He screams that he’s fine and no he won’t open the fucking door and just get a damn towel, enough with the questions. She hears running water, then a frantic unravelling of toilet paper and what sounds like a fish slapping onto the tiled floor. A thin line of blood drools under the door.
“You’re bleeding! Let me in!” she shouts.
She plunges her hands into the strata of towels piled in the cupboard behind her. A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels clinks against her wedding ring. She puts her fingers around its neck, then releases. One thing at a time. She whips out a spa towel stolen from the Blue Lagoon a dozen summers and a thousand drinks ago, when she’d wrapped the plush Icelandic cotton under her coat and waddled through the marble-tiled exit, where they’d waited giggling for a cab—in on it together, stealing this keepsake—back to their honeymoon suite overlooking mossy lava fields. The cab driver warned them, in the friendly way he did with tourists, especially those who were drunk, to watch their step in the lava fields: they half-listened and kissed on the back seat while he described sharp rocks, caves and lava tubes beneath the fragile terrain. But his voice was like the steam rising from rock along the side of the road and all she wanted right then was to taste the spicy Reyka vodka in her new husband’s mouth.
She rubs the towel across her cheek, the cloth now rough and fuzzy like a pumice stone. She should have thrown it out long ago.
“Towel,” she says to the door. When a fist reaches out, she pushes herself inside the room.
“Straight home you promised.”
“I stopped off for one.”
“Sure,” she says. It had been just one last month when he reversed her Beetle onto the neighbour’s front lawn into a row of garden gnomes. “And the Jack Daniels in the airing cupboard?”
“Maybe it’s your mother’s,” he says.
“My fucking mother’s?”
When she’d told her mother they were running off to Reykjavik to marry, she had replied please not him, shaking her head, adding how those white nights might look romantic, but hell, the sheer drag of dim light that never ends, how she’d yearn for the welcome relief of the black of night.
He is still hunched over the sink, blood dripping from his bent nose.
“I promise,” he says, “to never run back from the pub again. Bloody loose paving stones.”
He straightens and grins, reaching to pull her towards him, oblivious of the blood and soil all down his shirt. She steps back and hears something gurgle up in the back of his throat. How long has it been since she wanted to kiss him? She looks at the pair of them standing there in front of the misted mirror, just as they’d stood in front of their wedding photographer, the steaming crater of a geyser bubbling behind them. She recalls the wait — not knowing if it would take minutes to blow or days — and how excited she’d been when it had erupted in a tower of liquid that had drenched them both. How full of dreams.
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris has work upcoming or in Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, Bending Genres, Emerge, Janus, Ellipsis, The Phare, and more. Her flash fiction appears in several print anthologies, most recently And if that Mockingbird Don’t Sing (Alternating Current Press, 2022) and there are two shortlisted stories in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, Snow Crow. She lives in Bristol, UK and tweets @kazbarwrites