When she realised the neighbours weren’t home, she rushed to wash the windows. She
gathered a bucket, the latex-free gloves, a couple of rags and the squeegee. She filled the bucket
with warm water, squirted washing up liquid in and disturbed the water with her hands until
there was enough foam. She unbolted the three sash windows that composed the bay and lifted
the bottom sashes. First, she cleaned all the pigeon droppings from the window ledge. She felt
a rush of pleasure fill her when the droppings fell onto the neighbour’s patio below. And a
smile – like that of a child – appeared on her face as she imagined those droppings falling onto
the neighbour’s bald head. Had he not left food out for the birds, her window ledge wouldn’t
have become the aviary toilet it now was.
Once the window ledge was clean, she stepped on it and went to work on the windows,
scrubbing the glass with the rag soaked in soapy water. With the squeegee she removed any
trace of water and soap, and with a dry rag she dried any stubborn droplets that were left, so
there was no sign the windows had been washed other than the puddles that had formed below
in the neighbour’s patio.
It wasn’t until she was finished, until she was about to step off the window ledge back
into her flat that she tripped on her flip-flops and fell backwards about five meters to the
ground. She hit her head on one of the neighbour’s terracotta pots. The pot broke. Her
neighbour was not going to be happy about that.
She lay there in the neighbour’s patio, and as life leaked out of her and stained the
stones below, it wasn’t her daughter or husband who populated her mind, it wasn’t even the
fact that she had recently found out she was pregnant and hadn’t told anyone, not even the
father (she hadn’t made up her mind whether she was going to keep it or not, a redundant
decision now); it was her trespassing.
And it wasn’t until evening when her husband got a call informing him that no one had
picked up their daughter from school, it wasn’t until he arrived home and saw the open sash –
a bucket on the window ledge – it wasn’t until he ventured his head out and looked down, it
wasn’t until then that he found his wife, her body, latex-free gloves on her hands, flip-flops
framing her head. And it was right then that he kneeled and wailed.
Angélica Pina Lèbre was born in Brazil and has lived in the UK most of her life. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Rumpus, Orange Blossom Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Lonely Crowd and the anthology, Prototype 6. Her work was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2024.
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