She thinks, I could drink the colours of this city until my throat swells like a kaleidoscope. Purple jacarandas. Pink mimosas. Balconies dripping yellow lemons. And azure—a word that sits long and full on the tongue—azure everywhere.

She helps her daughter down the slide. The baby trots and she lets her roam, like the French parents do. They aren’t always cloyed to their children like chicken feet.

There is a woman with long eyelashes, also following her trotting child. She decides: this woman and her would be friends. This would be the park they would come to every day. Their children would play under the fig trees. She wonders what it’s like to grow up here, somewhere with peaches plump as fleshy fists. Not mealy peaches or hard peaches packed on supermarket shelves but soft peaches, jubilant amid the cherries, the fresh-cut watermelon shimmering on the street vendor’s stall.

She also wonders what this woman—her new friend—would think of her home. Of the housing estates that spread and spread until the little white houses fall into the sea like a jumble of teeth. There are colours too but colours aren’t the same when there is no light. Pebble dash everywhere. And stores. Little shitty stores.

She wonders too, how this woman has weathered the lonesomeness of motherhood? Perhaps it hasn’t been lonely for her. Perhaps it’s a singular thing, this lonesomeness. Maybe her friends think she’s busy. Or maybe it’s because no matter what she does, she can’t help bringing the conversation back to her joy, her little patch of light on this dark earth. So maybe she’s boring, out of touch. She tries to keep up with news at least but then they show Palestine and the dead children’s bodies and she feels the cry welling and oh God turn it off turn it off turn it off

please
turn it off
I can’t look any more.

She imagines this woman still has all her friends. They invite her places and gather around at hers for wine. Or limoncello—yes, there’s a lemon tree on her balcony. There’s a lemon tree just where the pink bougainvillea cascades to the balcony below. She makes her own limoncello. Fermented lemons. Lips crusted with sugar

sugar
sugar
sugar

It must be so nice to live here, for this to be your life. Someone else. Somewhere else. Somewhere with colours, where there’s no need for jackets in the summer. Warm air pregnant with magnolia and lavender.

The woman with the long eyelashes leaves the park, her child’s hands in hers. They close the gate. It whines. The light is growing peaky. She notices she’s alone in the park. The sound of cars, honking, cursing. Somewhere in the distance, the clatter of silverware.

Her daughter runs at her, arms spread, pumpkin face smiling, and she realises she has—

everything.

Cassie Smith-Christmas lives in Galway, Ireland. Her unpublished novel The Huguenot’s Chest was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and the Blue Pencil Agency’s Pitch Prize. It has also been recently shortlisted for the Historical Novel Society’s Competition in the Twentieth Century category. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her writing has appeared in Ireland, the UK, and US, including Southword, Crannóg, Gutter, The Wild Word, and Frazzled Lit. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Forward Prize for Poetry, and shortlisted in The Best of Rural Writing 2023.