The Picnic by Erin Fulton
The little rowing boat bobbed in aisle eleven of Tesco, where the bread and long-life milk used to be. Ferns and mosses tumbled from the walls. In the boat were two old women. One of them took uneven strokes of the oars, while the other sipped gin and tonic from a flask.
“Where do your sons think you are today?” Claire asked, struggling slightly with the paddles.
“Aqua fitness class,” Connie replied. It had become necessary over the years for Claire and Connie to become slightly inventive in order to escape watchful eyes and do anything interesting. They didn’t feel in the least bit bad about it.
The pair ducked under the ‘No Entry’ signs as Claire paddled the boat out onto Main Street. They rowed down onto South Street, passing skeletons of buildings that used to host the hairdressers, shops, and cafes where Claire and Connie had spent their childhoods. Now trees stretched out of empty windows and dandelions nodded in the crevices. They passed the Hippodrome where a group of young people, who did creative things with salt water and hydropower, now lived.
Claire and Connie paused outside the old library. A family of herons had moved in. Claire pulled in the oars and let the boat drift as they ate their sandwiches. When Claire was fourteen, she had spent a week doing work experience in the library.
“What would you do,” Claire asked, “if you were to do it all again?” Connie leant back and thought for a minute.
“I think I’d like to make things. Things that were very detailed and beautiful and took a long time to make. And then I’d gift them to people. No one would know it was me who made them for a long time. Perhaps not even until after I died,” Connie replied.
“But how would you make any money?”
Connie shrugged her shoulders in reply. “How about you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Claire replied, sprinkling crumbs into the water to see if she could entice any tiny fish to the surface. “Maybe a dancer?”
They rowed on. Claire steered them over the railway line and into the deeper waters of the shore. Eventually, the rowing boat bumped gently onto a little island. Over time the island had become smaller and smaller until only a nub of land remained. A bench remained at the highest point. It didn’t take them long to get there. Connie reopened the flask of gin and tonic.
“Do you ever wish that you had left? Lived somewhere different?” Claire asked. Connie watched a bumblebee crawl inside the flask to sample its contents.
“Not really. I did what I could with what I had. I tried to do the right thing. Sometimes I didn’t have a choice. And some things were just for fun. And all of that meant that I stayed.”
The two old friends watched clouds drift over the tops of the Ochils. A flock of shorebirds cascaded onto the estuary.