There were scales in the bathroom.
Shell looked to the two blue towels already hanging with their limb-shaped patches of damp. Her dad and stepmother had had their showers already, and Shell felt two speeds in her heart. They had left them out. Dad wasn’t supposed be awake while others slept. Scales in the bathroom meant that weighing yourself was as common and as necessary as peeing or shaving. It meant that your weight might fluctuate, meant that it was normal to monitor that change.
Shell’s dad said it didn’t matter what he ate, his torso was up and down like the trunk of an oak tree. Until he turned fifty, of course, when it all started to go more oak barrel. Shell’s stepmother said it was because all the whiskey and wine he’d filled himself with over the years was finding its home. Shell never liked that joke, didn’t like to think of the new one her dad might make since things changed.
Neat outlines walked from the shower to the press and over to where the scales were placed. Echoes of heat from neat little soles crisscrossed the floor, steam-stained tiles where warmth met their chill. It was almost a test, keeping eyes averted from those echoes, focusing on closing the door, hanging fresh clothes, a dry towel brought from basket to rack. When she pulled over the shower curtain, it was hard not to let her gaze drop, not to notice where her slippers smudged the delicate outlines, not to trace how the footprints went so far and then stopped. Trunk to barrel to shipwreck and only delaying the decline.
If there were scales in the bathroom, that meant someone had used them, had known where they were, brought them out past all the bulk-bought toiletries and not returned them. Someone who thought nothing of the fear, the desire, created by the presence of them. Someone who’d forgotten the needle could go down as well as up.
There was a hit of citrus when Shell opened the food bin to scrape out her porridge. A sourness as addictive as any sweet, and after the scent was the sight of thick creamy pith on wide swathes of amber-orange. Grapefruit. A food, she used to be told (and to tell others) whose acid melted fat, whose rubbery, segmented flesh filled you with all its chewing, whose special make-up interfered with the absorption of medications and dispelled toxins. There were no more grapefruits in the fruit bowl, or behind the pre-made Complan in the fridge, or lurking in a partially unpacked shopping bag. A single grapefruit had been purchased and consumed, and was it shock or fury at the fact that the evidence had not been similarly stowed away? Slug-like, snake-like, its sloughed skin lazed atop onion peel and kale cut-offs.
It was still barely eight when Shell set up her Zoom and heard the gathering of keys that was her stepmother preparing to leave. She knew what would come next. A light knock and a head through the door, a look that took in all of Shell’s room: the made bed, the steaming pot, the ergonomic set-up of an angled keyboard with laptop sitting on vintage September Issues and a Harper’s Bazaar. Shell tried to summon the welcome that had been growing towards these daily check-ins, but the events of the morning, the speeds of her heart, told her to hide, told her check-ins were back to checkups and she needed to tune her face to the old dawn. One delicate foot in a patent tan heel brought forward Shell’s stepmother, with her warm morning greeting.
“I’ll be back around seven, but text me if you think of anything we need. I’ll pop out at lunch.”
“Is Dad…?”
“No more than half the shake with his meds. I made him lie down. He’s just fallen back to sleep.”
“Good. I’ll…I’ll set an alarm and try to get some more down him.”
Instead of agreement, a scan of the desk.
“He said something about the garden today.”
Shell leaned up for a kiss on the forehead. Impulsively, her own lips feinted for a jaw peck, trying to show gratitude that someone else was trying to take care of the situation, that she had relinquished control.
“I don’t smell pu-erh, do I?” A teasing smile as she left, as if turned earth and cut grass filled the room, as if cleanses and cider vinegar and linseeds were still kept over the kettle for daily use. As if that which minimized and hollowed and governed every move had been a youthful indiscretion, a silly habit now only occasionally indulged in. Just their little secret, Shell’s father none the wiser with his double cream protein shakes and every meal seen as a chance to give him strength. As if worrying about falling into the trap wasn’t as all-consuming as fighting your way out of it.
Elizabeth Cox is an Irish writer living in England. She has an MA in Writing from NUI Galway and her fiction has been published in Impspired and Allium, A Journal of Poetry and Prose.
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