by Judy Darley

The coffin makers are on strike, but that’s ok because Dad says when his time comes, he’ll drift off in a cello case.

Last spring Dad took Harri kayaking on the icy river near their home. With one hand pressed to his heart, he hummed compositions to the rhythm of the water, urging her to notice every accent that swam up her spine.

She was distracted by trying to puzzle out how the kayak was made, thinking of a spinning, heated machine that could shape the seamless shell.

Today he talks of rivers and rapids sweeping him to the sea. Imagining a wood pigeon’s swooping view, Harri pictures sweet, ballading greenish-blue and foaming arias of white carving his passage through the land as leaves glint into gold to wave goodbye.

Harri asks about the cello case and Dad describes it as green as weeping willow trees in spring. He says he’ll wear a bright lime-hued suit to match, and Mam pulls a face like rain.

He chuckles. “Ok, Sapwood cream wool, if that’ll please you, my star.”

Mam’s portamento gulp sounds like drowning – too much water and not enough air. She leaves the room so fast the door forgets to close.

The corridor outside is loud with hailstone footsteps, but whatever the sky declares outside, it’s always bright daylight in this place.

In here it is all robbed time.

Harri listens to the gusts and ticks of Dad’s machines. She wonders how to translate them into verse, chorus and bridge. She wonders how it would feel to unscrew bolts; understand connections.

In her mind it sounds like unpicking a composition.

Instead of musician, perhaps mechanic or engineer.

She thinks of the lessons she enjoys most at school, and how her own creativity, what Dad calls her expressiveness, leans away from the arts.

She hasn’t yearned for the smell of rosin in all the hours and days they’ve spent here.

Instead her fingers have itched to take things apart and decipher their inner workings.

Harri takes a breath but holds her silence. This isn’t the time for that particular denouement.

With one fingertip Dad draws a spiral in the palm of Harri’s hand and says that last ride will be the coda of his life. When he reaches the sea, he whispers, he’ll be ready for the waves’ applause. 

Judy Darley is a fiction writer, journalist and occasional poet living by England’s North Somerset coast. She is the author of short fiction collections The Stairs Are A Snowcapped Mountain (Reflex Press), Sky Light Rain (Valley Press) and Remember Me To the Bees (Tangent Books). Her words have been shared on BBC radio, aboard boats and on coastal paths, in museums, caves and a deconsecrated church, as well as being selected for publication in the Best Small Fictions 2025 anthology.