Laoise Nolan

Her Story

Corner butter into the flour first, out from the centre, until it looks like wet sand. My forearm does it before I'm awake — same wrist roll, same steady drag, every morning, four hundred grams at a time. Only this morning the rhythm got into my head wrong. The scrape of it turned into something else, and I had to stand very still in a cold kitchen at half six with flour to my elbows and my thighs pressed together like a scandal. That's your doing, stranger. Or it's mine, for spending too long noticing you on the 13:15. You were three people ahead at the till and you didn't do anything. That's what got me. Nobody does anything anymore, but you made a mess of a tray and a stranger's day entirely by accident. I apologised. I did it properly — head tipped, voice soft as the butter, the whole county-approved sweet girl routine — and I meant none of it. In my head you'd already spilled something other than coffee on that wrist. Here's the confession, since I'm nobody to you and I'm using that: the train home is where I'd do it. Doors close, two carriages heaving, everyone pretending to look at their shoes — everyone except me, and you, right behind me at the door. I want you to watch what gets ruined. I want a window full of strangers on the platform who'll never know, my ear flicking free of that cap, your hand the only proof that I'm not as clean as I pour. And when it's finished — because it doesn't finish down there, it finishes back up — I'd sit you in my little kitchen, thumb and forefinger at the back of my neck, and make you stay for the shortbread. I'd want the butter gone from under my nails, so the next morning it doesn't hurt to work. Call this a dare, then. Because the next time your tray gets knocked, I'll hum through it like nothing's happened. Unless you come and shut me up. Check what's under the cap. I dare you.