Something For The Weekend

Meave Haughey returns with a beautiful, clipped story of the perils of partners, weekends away and DIY.

by Meave Haughey, Contributing Editor
first published: November, 2017

A horrible spluttering choke like a half vomit bubbles out my closing throat...

‘The fucking floor’s in the skip!’

‘So what? You were away, I had to make some decisions’.

She dares me to contradict her. I grip the steering wheel harder, watching my knuckles whiten like tropical islands.

Fresh wrinkles are carving themselves into my forehead and my brain balks at the report from the noise of hammer and chisel.

‘I was only gone a weekend!’

‘Maybe, but it seemed like you were never coming back,’ she says looking out the passenger window - seemingly more interested in a passing cyclist than the almost complete destruction over the road.

‘If you leave like that, you can’t expect me to take your opinion into account anymore - if you ever had one’.

Anger shoots like roman candles up my legs and explodes in my belly like an atom bomb. A horrible spluttering choke like a half vomit bubbles out my closing throat. I refuse to give in.

‘Anyway, you can never walk out on me again now because there’s no front door’.

Meave Haughey
Contributing Editor

Meave Haughey is a short story writer based in Birmingham. Recent stories have been published in Comma Press’s The New Abject, and Forecast: New Writing from Birmingham, Doestoevsky Wannabe’s Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks and in Birmingham, from the Doestoevsky Wannabe Cities series. Meave's story The Reservoir featured in The Best of British Short Stories 2021 compiled by Salt Press.

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A horrible spluttering choke like a half vomit bubbles out my closing throat...

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