Cover

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Livia Franchini is a writer and translator from Tuscany, Italy, whose short stories have been published in numerous anthologies. Livia is also an inaugural writer-in-residence for the Connecting Emerging Literary Artist project. She lives in London and is completing a PhD in experimental women’s writing at Goldsmiths University.

Dedication

For Gesuina Bolis;
freguj

Epigraph

Sugar, flour, kippers, greens
sugar, sugar, sugar

‘Kew Gardens’, Virginia Woolf

Shelf Life

Here are some things I know about weight. A pound of feathers weighs as much as a pound of bricks, but a pound of bricks is easier to carry. A pound of flesh may be used as payment or taken as forced retribution. A pound cake is made using a pound each of four ingredients: flour, eggs, butter and sugar, which actually means a more exact name for this cake would be four-pound cake. Most things you buy in the supermarket come in a standard shape, a fixed weight, which makes them feel familiar. For example, a one-litre bottle of sparkling water, the brand you like to drink, weighs exactly one kilo. The weight of the measure of oats that you enjoy in your morning porridge fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. The weight of your suit jacket on my shoulders, when I get cold because I have forgotten to bring a jumper, is exactly the same weight as the end of that night, which is felt in the knees, in the light grip of a migraine nudging at my temples, and is easily assigned to a specific hour, between eleven and midnight, just before the last train home. The weight of your arm, draped across my waist when we are lying in bed and you are falling asleep, and how long it takes for that weight to turn into a different kind of weight, the dead weight of your deep sleep, is the weight of sleep itself. Without it, the notion of sleep is emptied of meaning. You have left an indentation of exactly the size of your body in our bed, but your body is unavailable to substantiate its weight. Which is why I am lying here at four in the morning, sleepless.

I was working in A&E when the position at the care home came up. Which was a good thing because I would never have survived the emergency room. Although I remember the training well.