SPEED DIAL
ANITA GOVEAS
She rings you at three am to tell you that she ate dhansak again and it isn’t going down well
but that doctor is wrong and she’s too old to have allergies and the last week of her soap
opera was a betrayal because they heedlessly killed off the main character, and she’d known
it was coming because she’d read at least three articles in the glossies about how the actress
only liked tepid oat milk cappuccinos and fired an assistant because they wore odd socks
which was all behaviour that her old boss at the advertising firm had often flung about before
elevenses and nobody blinked an eyelash and even then they could have managed her end
with some dignity but she heard a noise in the night in her beige condo where she lived all by
herself and had never shown any sign of buying a burglar alarm or Mace or having her only
daughter on speed dial, and she crept downstairs to check if she’d left a tap on and she
tripped on the end of her excessive nighty and it was the first time they’d ever shown either
the stairs or the nighty and she tumbled down arse over tit and landed sprawled out in a way
that didn’t show her knickers and it’s been two more episodes and no one’s found the body
and everyone knows the biggest killers of women of a certain age are heart disease or out-
lasting everyone they’ve ever loved or thoughtlessness, and you don’t mention that when you
visit on Sunday bringing some type of pot plant that won’t last two days and fresh dhoklas
you’ll watch all the week’s episodes together twice so you don’t have to talk about why you
still use your spare bedroom to grow chillies.
Anita Goveas is British-Asian, London-based, and fuelled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently by Atlas and Alice. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, and is a submissions reader for The Selkie. She tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer. Her debut flash collection, ‘Families and other natural disasters’, is available from Reflex Press, and links to her stories are at https://coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com