Lemonade Hair by Rory Hughes

lemonade hair dead and deflated thin like a bleached ghost; mascara rings fat as a star pitcher’s eyeblack; she cracked her broken finger back into place with a short scream behind the teeth, limped to the kitchen, put a handleless pot of water on the hob and collapsed onto the plastic flooring, her palms honeystuck with dead maggots and rice; she felt the phantom pains of her morning bones askew; the sun no more than an iced butter square of frosted glass heating her skull; her arms gave way to the greased insectarium of the floor and she writhed with them and shed her three-piece exoskeleton of piss, ash and chinese takeaway; swallowed a sharp ghost that clawed down her gullet and hocked a dry flubber of catarrh onto her chin; she’d watched that film six times the saturday her father had rented the vhs from blockbusters; she felt old, she wasn’t, but she felt it, everything made her feel it; innocence was wonder and not knowing, but now we know it all so the wonder’s all gone, there’s answers to every fucking thing and they mostly suck; this wasn’t age, no, this was karma, a necessary exchange; a string of bad decisions now manifest as an oblique fracture of the proximal phalanx of the index finger;

Rory Hughes is a South London-based writer and music journalist. His challenging short stories have appeared in publications such as BlazeVOX, Angel Rust, Fleas on the Dog, A Thin Slice of Anxiety and Squawk Back. He is the Feature Editor for music magazine, Astral Noize and has a novel, Theseus 34, to be published in 2023.