First Prize Winner in Dumfries & Galloway Arts Association Flash Fiction Competition 2006. Read by Jules Horne.

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Onions

There is a woman crying and chopping onions. She cries for dead babies and the pained, crooked lives all around her.

Along her window sill a line of mice watch the brown papery skins flutter to the floor and wonder at the woman’s great sadness.

Outside the window, two swallows sit in a lilac tree. Soon they fly away to Africa where they tell other birds that in Scotland there is a woman chopping onions who cries so hard that a river has formed at her feet, flows out of her door and away over the hills.

Word gets around.

All over the world women chop onions… for pilau and dall, to melt onto beefsteaks, to stew with chicken, aromatic with garlic and thyme. Everywhere animals and birds watch the women’s tears drip and puddle and are humbled, that these people who have ravaged the planet for so long should prove to be so unhappy.

The women cry on for the dead babies and the pained, crooked lives all around them.

Then the food is cooked smelling of earth and plants and hunger.

To eat is to hope.

Tomorrow women will chop onions again.


© Sally Jordan 2006