Alison Wassell

Listen to Alison read her story:

Home for Christmas after your first term at university or, as Grandad calls it, loafing at the taxpayers’ expense when you should be working in a bank, somewhere with a smart uniform, or getting wed, keeping house for some nice young man, having his tea on the table every night, knowing your place.

Gran saying he doesn’t mean it, they’re both proud of you. She can’t think where you got your brains from.

And have you lost weight? She knows what you teenage girls are like, always counting the calories. Never mind, she’ll soon have you fattened up. She’s baked a batch of your favourite tarts, the ones with the jam and coconut. There’s some in a box for you to take home.

You, turning up your nose at her turkey, her pork, her pigs in blankets, announcing that Meat Is Murder. Just eating the sprouts and the carrots, making a show of scraping off the gravy. Producing a carton of soya milk from your handbag and pretending not to mind when it curdles your coffee. 

Reading a copy of Marxism Today during the Queen’s Speech. Casually mentioning the protests you’ve been on (one protest, in truth, and only ten people turned up, in the rain, so you went home), your support for the miners, the Silentnight strikers the fact that you know someone who knows someone who chained themselves to a fence at Greenham Common. How you’ve boycotted Barclays Bank because of their links to South Africa and started to responsibly source all your food choices, so no thanks you won’t have an orange, sweet and juicy though it may be. You don’t know where it’s come from.

Grandad telling you to wash your mouth out with soap when you curse Margaret Thatcher. 

Gran crying her eyes out in the kitchen, saying you’ve spoiled Christmas for everyone.

You, knowing everything. 

Except that, come February, you’ll be standing in the snow at Grandad’s grave wishing your last words to him had been something other than Fuck The Patriarchy, that in the Summer you’ll make it home just in time to hold Gran’s hand as she whispers that the antique writing bureau in the front room is yours, if you want it, and that she knows you’re a good girl, really. That you’ll never taste her jam and coconut tarts again.

And that it won’t be long before you put on a smart suit and sacrifice your principles for a steady job, a semi-detached suburban lifestyle, church on a Sunday if that’s what it takes to get your kids into the best school.

Nor that, forty years from now, your grandaughter will bang her fist on your dining table, causing your best crystal wine glasses to shudder, and ask why your lot just stood by and watched everything go to shit.

And that the only thing you’ll be able to say to her is sorry.

Alison Wassell is a writer of short fiction from Merseyside UK with no plans whatsoever to write a novel. Her work has been published by Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets, Frazzled Lit, The Disappointed Housewife, Gooseberry Pie and elsewhere. She was Highly Commended in the 2024 Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction and has been twice nominated for Best Small Fictions.

Read more from Alison:

Does It Have Pockets – ‘In Praise Of Angelica Valentine 1974 – 2024‘
Fictive Dream – ‘A Stupid Rubber Dinosaur‘