Cherry

Cherry sits at the bar on a Sunday night. She one of very few. Every Sunday, the same stool, the same place, the same look in her eyes; and she’s excited.

70 or 75? Maybe 80? I cannot determine.
Her eyes are youthful, still the same sapphire blue they must have been when she was 16, running through the green grass fields round the back of her dad’s farm. Her fair, blonde, curly hair bounced at the side of her pin-pricked cherry-red cheeks.

Now her hair is an icy grey, thin and weary but you would never see it, hidden under her sparkling beret perched neatly on a tilt on her head. She is dressed in her finest – a long, black, velvet dress cut just above the ankles, a pair of glitter-silver shoes with Mary-Jane straps across them (ever the Princess) and a thick jazz-style deep blue coat, with an auburn fur trim around the neck. Snuggling her face against it, she drums her polished red fingernails upon the mahogany, weighed down with, surely, every ring she has in her jewellery box. Resting delicately against her collar-bone is an iced silver pendant with a small wing hanging from the bottom of it. If she could run she would fly, I am sure, for she appears filled with thrill and delight so much so that she is glowing.

She glances around her, smiling, waiting for her love that never comes. But after all this time, I start to wonder whether she is really here for him, or whether she is here just for herself.

Cherry likes to play dress up on the dull down days.

Nervously sipping at her gin and tonic, she nearly bursts into giggles and fits of laughter; but she holds it in and lets her dimpled cheeks tell the tale. The happy lines around her eyes crinkle up and flatten out again every time she lets her anticipation get the better of her. She reaches her chin over her shoulder and flickers her eyelashes for a moment in any direction. Fireworks leap across her eyes in a place where the sun never goes down. She is back in the fields, stroking the wheat strands and feeling the breeze brush up against her.

Butterflies dash around her stomach as Cherry dances in the blue skies, in a moment of ecstasy