Fiction by Josephine Greenland
She can taste them as she puts the jars on the shelf. Plush blueberries, sweetened with sugar, exploding on her tongue like a thousand desserts. Her best batch yet, too good to be eaten, too good for the stale biscuits on the table. They could belong in a shop, in those shiny glass jars—gherkin jars she waited for the family to finish. Washed and scrubbed, to erase the brine residue. Polished so the glass can be used as a mirror. Labelled and dated, Blueberries by Ruth, July 1932, in a longhand rivalling her father’s.
‘Aren’t you done yet?’
Another face in the glass, battling her for room. Blonde and bright where she is red-haired and dull.
Mary, apple of father’s eye. Faultless, no matter what she does. ‘You promised you’d play with us.’
Us. Mary and the merchant’s daughter, who eats store-bought jam with a silver spoon, who makes Mary forget where she belongs. Ruth motions around her. ‘I have to clean up.’
‘Then let me taste!’
‘I’m saving the jam.’
‘Why?’
Because of the sigh of an empty purse. The smoke and liquor on father’s breath. The snatching of their savings when he wants more. The curses, the bruises. The suffering no mother should endure.
Ruth goes to the sink. ‘Because butter and cheese are running low.’ Mary’s been away too long, she wouldn’t understand why they can’t buy more. ‘And mother loves it.’
Mary’s eyes flash. ‘I bet father hates it.’ She edges up to the cupboard. ‘No one cares about your jam.’
Like a bird taking flight, she leaps and grabs two jars. Empties them out the window as Ruth rushes to pin her down. Their screams, like their bodies, twisting round each other.
And swarming over the jam outside, the ants.
Josephine Greenland is a Swedish-British writer from Eskilstuna, Sweden, with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham. Her debut novel, Embers, was published by Unbound in 2021. She has won and been shortlisted in five writing contests, and had work published in various online and print magazines.
