"I Finished the Renovations on The Victorian Terraced House Right Before Kurt’s Funeral" by Katie Coleman

While the lads Kurt used to play football with raised their glasses to toast his life, I hammered a For Sale sign into the lawn. My mother said, ‘You’re out of your mind to leave now.’ Kurt and I had lived together for ten years. He was a builder and I worked in recruitment. We’d talked about moving away, but he always dug deep arguments and cranked out complications. Without him, I had no anchor, so I drifted with my boxes all the way to St Ives. I dyed my hair shades of sapphire and started wearing florals and fishnet tights. Every evening, I played nineties music in the backyard and reclined on a lounger. I found that, if I tried, I could tune into the movement of the ocean, the way it inhaled like breath. It pulled me back to the mountains and back to Wales, back to when we were students. I closed my eyes, and we were dancing in the woods. His shoulders were firm and I felt his skin brush my lips. We danced carelessly and I knew then that I would never say goodbye. 

Katie Coleman is a British writer living in Thailand. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Sunlight Press, Briefly Zine, The Ilanot Review, SoFloPoJo, Bending Genres, The Odd Magazine, Lit 202, Five on the Fifth, Bright Flash and others. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. She has a master’s in creative writing and loves teaching English.