The Queen of Baked Alaska

Cathy Leonard  

a cup of Earl Grey tea

A shadow eclipsed the wedding shot of Lady Reece Beverly to Squire George Winthrop. Maisie Taylor clicked her tongue and raised her head to view the orbiting source of this hiatus in her perusal of last month’s copy of Hello. Ethel Stillman’s large frame filled the door of Dr Henry’s surgery and behind her, a double-shot to her pint-size, Arlen Stillman emerged hugging a crooked shoulder.

No caps tipped to Her Highness today. Most of the patients were blow-in yokels who didn’t know that Mrs Stillman had aspirations. Aspirations and one seat to share with the double-shot. Maisie watched the sixty-plus matron scope out the territory before directing her second-in-command to the three-legged stool at the end of the corridor that passed for a rural doctor’s waiting room.

Her skeletal smile belied the eruption flaring across Ethel’s neck and the unsoftened glare that followed her sighting of Albert Sweeney stretched across the battered two-seater, eyes buffered on the Dandy. It’s few Dandys that lad ever saw in his piggery, so not even a cosmic event was likely to scupper his gaze.

Maisie stroked the feather in her lapel, for Ethel was her arch rival in the Baked Alaska competition in the County Fair, and to downsize Ethel was accolades to her. She could forgo the fopperies of Hello would-be celebs for the foibles of a local one. And she knew something that Ethel didn’t.

Quietly steaming as the matron was now, fur rising on her faux-fox collar, hackles would soon eject at high speed. For Maisie Taylor was advised to keep her varicosed legs raised at hip level, and when Joe Carbery beside her went in to get his weekly blood check, she planned to ease her right calf into the much coveted vacated chair.

Did she mind him being home all day?

by  Cathy Leonard 

A Rusty Nail- Scotch Whiskey and Drambuie

He hasn’t deleted all of her from the den…yet.

Her stained glass mosaic of a woman holding the moon still leans against the window, her purple skirt caught in the throes of flamenco.

But her Michelin France, Eye Witness Top Ten Collection, Berlitz Budapest and Pocket Malta have been removed from the corner book shelf and Dervla Murphy’s On a Shoestring in Coory and Muddling through Madagascar are precariously wedged between his Manual of Chess Victory and The Secret of Tactical Chess. Hopefully Dervla’s survival instincts will prevail.

The roll top of the desk beneath the book shelf no longer flutters and clicks, expanding and contracting like an accordion. He prefers it left open.

On the filing cabinet a stapler, a paper puncher and a calculator have supplanted her tin box collection, Farrah’s Original Harrogate,Valroble Extra Virgin, that used to waft out the aroma of nougat and olives and travel.

Her postcards of El Cordobes, bicycles arched over the Herengracht, laundry strung from balconies on a Venetian canal, posted to herself from European mini-breaks, no longer bolster the second hand filing cabinet’s gable wall- stripped back now to scratched metal and adhesive strips.

Her walking shoes and dog paraphernalia are no longer stacked in the grate of the cast iron fireplace, flanked by art nouveau ceramic tiles, deemed obsolete, ecologically endangering, and currently on auction on E-bay.

And the sky behind the mosaic woman-moon is cracked. The type of slit that could slice the top off unsuspecting flesh and it’s a question of how long… before he decides that a brazen woman is the last thing he needs in his retirement.

Does she mind him being home all day?

Happy- Hour

Happy- Hour

 Cathy Leonard

Rusty Nail (see recipe)

1 ounce Scotch Whiskey

1 ounce Drambuie

Pour over ice cubes and stir

                          ****

You preferred a Rusty Nail to a Screwdriver in a Saint Louis Highball Glass.

But your special favourite was a Corkscrew in a Double Old- Fashioned.

Shake well and strain into pre-chilled Double, then add a slice of lime.

When you left I didn’t need ice to chill it.

And every Friday night I mix, shake and stir:

A jigger of frogs’ legs, thorns of birr

A pony of beetle-juice, dragon-scale light

A twist of spittle and a dash of spite

Top with a Catherine wheel,

Add a wedge of venom peel

And there you have it-

A Screw-U  

About the author 

Cathy has been writing and teaching for over thirty years. She has published poetry, short stories and children’s stories and has been shortlisted for a number of awards, most recently runner up in the Fish Flash Fiction Award 2013 and the Sceine Poetry Competition 2014. She had a short story selected for publication in Baubles 2016. Cathy lives in Dublin with her husband Stephen, two adult children, Molly her trusty red-setter cross and their new arrival- a stray one eyed three month old kitty- Sherlock. Now all we need is a Watson!

http://bake-a-yarn.blogspot.ie/

Bad Smell

Cathy Leonard

un coup de champagne

Sipping a coup de champagne on one of those famous French boulevards when the call came through. From home. Heart sank. What now?

Bad smell in the study.

Well, what do you want me to do about it? Figure it out. Trace source of bad smell- it’s not rocket science.

We were on our twentieth wedding anniversary weekend break and damned if a bad smell was going to ruin it.

But as we joined the queue at the Glass Pyramid in the expectation of a glimpse of that enigmatic smile, however minuscule, the bad smell enveloped us.

Food left to spoil by careless brother? Dead mouse? Or dare we venture? Dead rat under the floor boards?

How long did it take a dead rat to disintegrate?

And so the dead rat scuttled alongside us around the Ile de Saint Louis. It circled the gargoyles, snuck past the bouquinistes and imbibed our every other coup de champagne in whatever rue we ended up in. Our ubiquitous topic of conversation-rats turned to plagues, bilboes as big as apples.

There were of course the frequent updates by text.
It’s still there.
Can’t use the study.
My mock leaving cert starts in 3 days
When are you coming back?

Can’t she move the fecking computer?

And then the arguments about our parenting skills, or lack thereof?
The Celtic cubs’ lack of initiative, the infantalisation of the modern teenager, their hopeless dependency, how we in our day would have sorted it out ourselves, how long does parental obligation last? She’s over 18. It’s our twentieth. For Christ’s sake!!!

And so Paris was one long whine about children, parenting and dead rats.

About the author

Cathy has been writing and teaching for over thirty years. She has published poetry, short stories and children’s stories and has been shortlisted for a number of awards, most recently runner up in the Fish Flash Fiction Award 2013 and the Sceine Poetry Competition 2014. She had a short story selected for publication in Baubles 2016. Cathy lives in Dublin with her husband Stephen, two adult children, Molly her trusty red-setter cross and our new arrival- a stray one eyed three month old kitty- Sherlock. Now all we need is a Watson!

http://bake-a-yarn.blogspot.ie/