‘Hot Peach’ by Emma Winter
Come on lonely girl, take that dress off
Most mornings, Syl sat on her fire escape looking out onto the village, her tiny studio throwing out heat even in summer, scattered garments and boys littering the floor, the phone ringing, ringing, ringing.
She had come to the city because it was what everyone dreamed about. Back home, small-town, her body pushed into chinos because her mother told her that’s what she was supposed to wear to church, the city seemed like some- where she could be somebody and not wear trousers. Now, she mostly wore dresses, skirts, anything in which her legs, stork-like, could pump the streets in thigh high boots.
The city wasn’t as glitzy as the dresses, it was dirty and the hurt here seemed concentrated. There was love and everybody talked. Sometimes she was suffocated with it, there was a hot summer where she had kissed every single pretty boy that came through the bar, and sometimes she was so alone it made her dig out the chinos and walk the city from tip to toe.
People would call for her from the street and she would cry back from her fire escape, tapping ash from her cigarettes onto the pavement below, dirty words, her mother would’ve said if she could’ve heard. The letter from home had arrived addressed to Walter, and she’d absorbed the stark, inked sentences that gave nothing away. Afterwards she’d burned it with her lighter because she never replied. Walter was dead to everyone. Long live the Queen, Aida had said, cackling, her throat raw from their night smoking and singing.
Through the window, Syl saw her curled up on the couch, her wig askew, the eyelashes she hadn’t quite picked off yet on her cheeks. You are loved, Syl repeated into the city air, you are loved.
From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017
About the Author
Emma Winter studied American Literature and Creative Writing at both the University of East Anglia and San Francisco State University. She’s had short stories published in The Nottingham Review and The Fiction Pool. She was shortlisted for the TSS Spring Flash Fiction Competition 2017. She’s working on more short stories and tweets @MsEmmaWinter.
