Sunday Short: Baby Change Table by Rowena Lennox

I was neither joyous nor innocent on the day we bought the change table but I cry while I am cleaning it because we bought it on the day my brother died and we bought it before we knew my husband had a tumour in his neck. I cry because things have changed and I want to be the person I imagine I was on that day: a 32-week pregnant woman looking forward to having a baby, my husband and I seeing our future as fairly straightforward. I was never that woman and only now, after things have changed, do I see that I might have had the potential to be that woman.

I'm pretty in love with Seizure's Flashers series (and not just because I was published in it). It really is an exciting series catching new and old voices alike. This tiny work by Rowena Lennox is beautiful and so, so emotive, reminding me in no small part of Hemingway's shortest short story ever told. She captures this sense of domestic ordinariness in all it's joys and tragedies so charmingly that it's hard not to want more of it, or, at least, more of her writing generally. It's pretty darn lovely.

You can read 'Baby Change Table' by Rowena Lennox over on the Seizure website.