Kik Lodge
At the soup kitchen, hearts shrink and flesh out
We’re freezing our backsides off in the queue and this woman pushes in, and because we’re not a culture that voices things, we don’t react but balance our weight onto the other foot. We can feel it though, in our bellies, the aching injustice—it’s enough to start a riot. So to soothe ourselves, we pull her apart in our minds, limb by limb. We tug at the threads of her cardigan with peacocks on it, we give her names, vilify her offspring, ridicule every decision she has ever made, stub out her qualities, spit on her attempts to make a clean break. We’re all suffering here, but a queue is a queue, and we have fresh charges for her the closer she gets to the ladle. In the meantime, a man, our hero, the man everyone wants to be, even the women, the man with a bobble hat and more courage than all of us put together, speaks up and says these words —Excuse me, I think you’ll find the queue starts here, and he points to the empty place just behind me. Everyone hears it, everyone feels the repose that comes when wrongs have been righted, and in our heads there are raucous claps and encores. We, hungry humans that we are, watch the woman, and the woman says Oh, just Oh, and she looks about and receives nothing but stares. She seems off-course in this world but it’s all the same to us. Then I notice she has a kid waiting in a pushchair by the tree with another kid watching over it, and she keeps looking at them, and the claps in my head start to peter out. Not everyone sees the kids by the tree, because their eyes are on the ladle, but I do, so I think of the courage of the bobble hat man and say come with me to the woman, and we walk to the front of the queue and I say she’s alright, she’s got littluns, and the chap looks over and nods and dishes out three bowls of hot chicken curry and rice, which I help take over, but the man in the bobble hat stands in front of me, so I say step the fuck away you righteous dick, and all the others have spears in their eyes, apart from an old lady who says it’s ok, go on love, and even if I have to wait all over again in the cold slug of a queue when I return, it doesn’t matter because there’s something settling in my heart right now, something new for me but as old as time, and it took root under the tree when the woman squeezed my hand and said you’re a good man, you.
Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats, rabbit and a man now. Her work can be found in some lovely journals; The Citron Review, Bending Genres, trampset, Milk Candy Review, Splonk and Smokelong Quarterly, as well as the Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 anthologies. Her debut flash collection, Scream If You Want To, is out with Alien Buddha Press and a second collection, The Bully in my Pillow, is forthcoming with Stanchion Books.
