Added£1.29Add to basket(A short story of 2877 words)
Photographs of Her Father
Literary
by Carmen Nina Walton
A woman is abandoned by her father as a baby but he is never really out of her life.
She had seen her father on several occasions. Once, on the terrace of an hotel in the town where he sat with a statuesque woman who rested a cigarette between her orange segment lips and glowed in expensive clothes. Brigitte was walking by on her way to a friend’s house and had been attracted by the lilac dress the woman wore. It was slim fitting and elegant, tailored to fit her curves and angles, made in mercerized cotton that shimmered in the afternoon. She had long legs, intricately crossed, and sat tilted in the chair like something architectural and divine.
It was only through the striking woman that Brigitte noticed her Father. He was impeccably dressed. Manicured and buffed. A gentleman. Brigitte wondered how he would feel if she were to step out and declare herself. Reveal her fawn coloured socks and dry knees under the hem of a grey pleated skirt; the woolly jumper too stifling for a day that had turned out sunny. She knew it was him because she had seen pictures of him in the town paper standing outside his shop. She also kept photographs of him behind the picture of kittens that hung in her room. They shared the same blunt chin and hair that waved and curled of its own accord.
Her mother told her she was never to enquire about him, however obliquely. He had left and he was to be forgotten. It was simple for her but Brigitte burned to know the other half of who she was and how he could have looked at her, when she was three months old and by all accounts delightful, and left...
She had seen her father on several occasions. Once, on the terrace of an hotel in the town where he sat with a statuesque woman who rested a cigarette between her orange segment lips and glowed in expensive clothes. Brigitte was walking by on her way to a friend’s house and had been attracted by the lilac dress the woman wore. It was slim fitting and elegant, tailored to fit her curves and angles, made in mercerized cotton that shimmered in the afternoon. She had long legs, intricately crossed, and sat tilted in the chair like something architectural and divine.
It was only through the striking woman that Brigitte noticed her Father. He was impeccably dressed. Manicured and buffed. A gentleman. Brigitte wondered how he would feel if she were to step out and declare herself. Reveal her fawn coloured socks and dry knees under the hem of a grey pleated skirt; the woolly jumper too stifling for a day that had turned out sunny. She knew it was him because she had seen pictures of him in the town paper standing outside his shop. She also kept photographs of him behind the picture of kittens that hung in her room. They shared the same blunt chin and hair that waved and curled of its own accord.
Her mother told her she was never to enquire about him, however obliquely. He had left and he was to be forgotten. It was simple for her but Brigitte burned to know the other half of who she was and how he could have looked at her, when she was three months old and by all accounts delightful, and left...