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In five years, on Space Mountain, we’ll blast asteroids to clear a path through the Milky Way, buckle up and hold our breath as we journey into the void of darkness. When we disembark through adverts of outer space cruises, you’ll say, ‘Yeah whatever,’ but secretly want to go again. We’ll see Buzz Lightyear outside. You’ll tell him all about black holes.

In three years, we’ll be licking sticky spareribs sauce from our fingertips as we sit on separate sofas in our cinema room. Woody and the gang on the flat screen for one last hurrah. You’ll look down at a message on your new iPhone and absently knock your Coke glass so it spills onto the carpet. I’ll call you butterfingers but won’t think to worry about the stain. The cleaner will scrub it away in the morning. There won’t be any more landlord inspections from Mr No-Shoes-Inside-The-House.

In two years, I’ll buy you a telescope for your tenth birthday. We’ll take it up to the Downs and have a midnight picnic huddled in ski jackets and mittens (not that the cold will bother us). You’ll learn the constellations at your new school where you’ll not be bullied for wearing charity-shop trousers two sizes too small. Your socks will no longer double as glove-puppet aliens from Mars.

In one year, I’ll paint the edges of our solar system in subtle hues of grey that’ll entice a gallery’s owner to take a chance on a complete unknown. She’ll say things like, ‘It’s all about saleability, darling’—and fling out prices as if they’re confetti. At the gallery, the patrons will call me the corner-shop surrealist. ‘Surreal?’ I’ll ask and they’ll say, ‘Of course.’ And I won’t contradict them even though they’re wrong.

In seven months, you’ll help me hide everything under the bed so Mr No-Shoes-Inside-The-House (who has turned up, as always, completely unannounced) won’t know I’ve been painting in the living room. On an experimental canvas, I’ll have transformed the veins of bathroom mould into an ice giant tentacle in decay, the flickering hallway light as a white dwarf with an asbestos beard.

In three months, you’ll have halloumi cheese for the first time. You’ll laugh at it squeaking as you chew, say it must be from the moon. It’ll be out of date and destined for the waste before I ask if I can take it. The manager at the corner shop will raise an eyebrow but I won’t care. I’ll take fruit and blitz it into smoothies. The bruised skins will become the focus of a still life. I’ve not done one of those since leaving college under a cloud, aged nineteen.

In one month, the makeshift tarpaulin that Mr No-Shoes-Inside-The-House has nailed to the roof in the attic will come loose and we’ll creep up there at night and peer out at the stars. During the day, there’ll be a drip, drip, drip, drip of rainwater collecting in a bucket but I’ll be at my new job and you’ll be at school. And you’ll be a brave boy, won’t you, walking there by yourself? Remember you’ll get to meet C-3PO if this all goes to plan.

In one week, I’ll put on my duck-egg blue uniform and think of clear summer skies, bubble gum ice cream. Each tinkling of the bell as a customer walks inside will see me with my newfound smile. I’ll buy you an astronaut figurine from the pound shop on the way home. The next day, I’ll buy myself two small tubes of paint—black and white—and my hands will start to itch.

In two days, I’ll go to the job centre for the last time and they’ll say, ‘Gosh, it’s the end of an era’—and—‘How long has it been?’ I’ll say, ‘Eight years on and off.’ And they’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ They’ll be sceptical, of course, just like my mum was sceptical when I went off to college with a fistful of secondhand brushes and little in the way of a plan. At the job centre, I’ll tell them how it’ll all pan out and they’ll smile and say, ‘That’s lovely.’ Then onto the next—

Tomorrow, I’ll need to beg for credit on the meter again. Because it’s cold lying here without the heating, the lights off, hugging you to keep you warm, hearing the wind rattling the attic tarpaulin. Mr No-Shoes-Inside-The-House is overdue and he’ll grumble if he sees the meter is in debt. He’ll imagine marks on your bedroom wall and accuse you of crayoning blueberry spaceships like you did when you were four. He’ll remind me I’m lucky he lets me stay here with a child. Then he’ll give me that look that asks how I’m old enough to be a mum.

Tonight, I’ll dream of the young man who thought he was Paul Gauguin reborn. I’ll imagine him with a hipster beard and a stud earring and he’ll have two models posing with pineapples, sitting cross-legged back to back. In a fissure of the night, I’ll half-wake and think of the weekend we went to his parents’ and how they were the original No-Shoes-Inside-The-House. There’ll be a portrait of him at my exhibition offering a bag of silver for his unborn child. And there’ll be a humorous sketch, seen through the hole in the roof, of Mr No-Shoes-Inside-The-House shoeless inside a rocket ship hurtling towards a ravenous black hole.

 

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MATT KENDRICK is a writer based in the East Midlands, UK. His stories have been published in Bath Flash Fiction, Bending Genres, Fictive Dream, FlashBack Fiction, Lunate, Spelk, Storgy, and elsewhere. He has been listed in various writing competitions and won the Retreat West quarterly flash fiction contest in June 2020.