Rush

A Flash Fiction by Liv Norman

1920s flappers

We cut our hair, listened to jazz, wore our necklaces long and our hemlines short. We shot about in fast cars driven by boys down from Oxford, drinking cocktails until dawn. We crept home in early light, the housemaid pink-cheeked and open-mouthed as we lounged in the kitchen making scrambled eggs. We tiptoed past our mother’s room, and she looked tired. We hid her lace, stole her corsets, unwound her plaits and retreated to bed. We threw parties, spilling out to the garden for long hours, patrolling dawn, playing lawn tennis before breakfast. And our mother looked tired. We shopped for silk dresses, for strings of jet beads, for gramophones, for nothing. We tiptoed past our father in his library, and he looked tired. We stifled laughter with our hands, glanced past him, hysterical at his shaking legs, his sea-green face, his suffocating under newspapers. We ate scones with jam, and cream cakes, and violet-scented chocolates delivered by men with stiff voices and sewn-up limbs, shifting eyes. And they looked tired. We stuffed our rooms with flowers, and sang standards with smoke-filled voices and danced with the boys down from Cambridge, and tiptoed past our parents’ rooms, where they looked tired, and those boys stirred father from his library and we put him in a car, and kissed his cheek and drove him, fast against the sky, the roaring blue sky and the road lined with trees dropping blossoms, and he rifled laughter and threw his hat into the wind, and said wouldn’t it be nice, wouldn’t it be nice to buy something lovely for our mother, because she had been like this once, alive like this, in this glorious shifting fragile young world.

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Author: Liv Norman is a short fiction writer living in Surrey, UK, with her husband and three children. Her flash, short stories and micro fiction have won or placed in competitions, and appeared in Splonk, NFFD Anthology, and Paragraph Planet among others. Best Micro Fiction nominee 2024.

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Read the interview with Liv to discover the story behind the story…