Frances Orrok
Have you seen my hat you say and it’s not just any hat it’s the funny tight cap that flattens your ears and goes under your helmet to stop the wind and I know this is important because you bike fifty minutes to the office and it’s winter but I haven’t, so I start to look under cushions and in the children’s sock basket til I smell the porridge burning and as I’m scooping it into the bin my daughter asks, have you seen my glasses and although I know this will delay us further, I run upstairs to where I tucked them into a tissue box away from the cat last night because I couldn’t find their case and when the cat got them last time we had to pay for a whole new lens, and now my youngest wants bunches so I really am running to find another hair thing before she blows— and downstairs I hear you blow because I unplugged your phone to use the glue gun on her cardboard telescope— and shit it’s nearly time to leave and the porridge pan is black and we have two slices of bread and the girls are squabbling about the end of the loaf and I don’t know if they want it or don’t and I think a cup of tea would be nice but my oldest says she has dictation today and oh god I forgot to check the homework book again and she is seven so it really is on me and did you get them, my glasses? oh my hands are full of a load of laundry I didn’t know I was doing and you say, it’s minus 4 outside and there is only one glove, and the smallest says she needs two bunches not one and so I give everyone a banana and carry her kicking into the car while my sobbing oldest asks if there are two g’s in catalogge and I can only think to tell her yes as you shoot past us on your bike, wearing what I think might be a fluorescent ski sock on one hand, and you yell to me through howls and kicks and freezing wind that the front door is open and the cat is out.
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Frances Orrok works with people in crisis and writes. Her stories can be found in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gone Lawn, New Ohio Review and other places. She has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes and she won SmokeLong‘s summer fiction prize in 2023. Her first novel explores how relationships and islands function as sanctuaries or traps (on query); her second examines tensions between capitalism and care.