Below is a tense piece of the domestic from Laura Tansley. I love her use of detail of life in an early nineties household, and the subtle ramping of stress between the woman and girls, even as they are introduced as a single unit – it appears as if they are, in fact – like a single organism attacking its own cells.

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Rings Only Get Lost Down Drains in Films

In the spring of 1992 the Milner’s were eight, ten and forty-one. Mr Milner had left the January before. The August after the January before, Marcia became the fourth voice crammed on to the answering phone. She seemed to be the additional element needed to sync up their cycles of frustrations and fractiousness. A sharpness came about them all; they turned their elbows out to pierce and spill the space of others, bending their knees over the arms of chairs and sofa cushions to mark the places they felt were owed to them. After arguments three pinched chins would turn three heart-shaped faces in three different directions. Marcia was not one of them, but she liked to joke that because her great-great grandfather had been a milliner somewhere in the East Midlands at the end of the eighteenth century, she’d inherited some qualities that they all shared.

“I’m good with my hands,” Marcia would say, “and you Milner’s are all such artists.” Mrs Milner was a painter; the children were creative but only if no-one noticed, and uninterested in anything that would be made together. “We could all sew something if you like, we could use my sewing machine to make some clothes.”

“Kayleigh’s so fat we’d have to cut down the curtains.”

“Mu-um!”

“Katherine please stop it,” Mrs Milner did not look up from her food that she willed to get cool enough to eat so she could mash vegetables and potatoes together, take great hulking forkful’s into her mouth and finish the farce of forced civility as quickly as possible.

“Stop kicking me!”

“Well move then!”

“I can’t move, she’s in the way.”

She. In this house, Marcia was heaven and hell, famine and feast. Kayleigh and Katherine would not let any of them forget that they were all sitting in the wrong chairs; that everybody had moved round one since the separation. Avoiding the spaces Mr Milner had left was like trying not to walk into an invisible wall that everybody else knew was there.

Marcia persisted, “we could go to the haberdashery in town, buy some fabric. It’s cheaper to buy bulk.”

Katherine snorted, derisive as well as amused by the joke she completed in her head

“So we could decide on something nice and then each pick a pattern.”

“I don’t want to be anywhere she’ll be,” Kayleigh said.

“I don’t want anything she has,” Katherine said, slashing the air between her and her sister with her knife.

“You want everything she has,” Marcia spat out the apparent, spoke without hesitating, and left the table without waiting for permission.

They were as thick as thieves, Katherine and Kayleigh, wrapped up together like a fish-tail plait, whispering in each other’s ears behind the curtains of their shiny blonde hair. But this closeness brought jealousy, and their age difference meant they would never be equal, not truly, so they bit and swore and tore themselves apart over every thing the other possessed: first toys, then attention. Now the antagonism extended to each other’s bodies.

It had started between them after a long conversation and an agreement. There was no flurry, no frisson. They had known each other for years, had met at Nursing College in the 80’s, only Marcia had qualified. And one afternoon in spring, when the girls were away at Brownie camp, they talked it through.

“I’ve never done it.”

“I’ve always done it.”

“But we love each other, don’t we.”

“Yes.”

They hadn’t needed to convince each other, but they both knew it would not have happened any other way. They lay together listening to dozy flies knocking their heads against walls in a house that was suddenly so full they felt compelled to open the windows and doors, inviting birds and insects to share their sounds and keep them company.

There might have been gossip at the school gates, but neither of them were ever there to pick the children up. So they forged forward, oblivious.

Guilt pushed Marcia to action, like it did most people. She saw it all the time at work. A new baby, a new death, a new disease; the hospital was rife with people struggling to control these pangs, keeping their mouths shut to stop it pouring forth. Guilt about this new relationship made her hide bandages, plasters and an otoscope in her handbag so she could take them home to let the children play doctor. But they unravelled the bandage into the bin and made safety-pin bracelets that made their wrists red-raw. They took the batteries out of the otoscope to use in a walkman they fought over ‘til the tapedeck snapped off and shattered in to splinters of pink plastic.

Once Marcia had woken from a night shift (Mrs Milner at work in her studio since nine, them to school at eight), to find an exhibition of their mother’s old anniversary cards pinned awkwardly by young hands to the dado rail and hung from the mantel. Marcia wanted to rip them in two and throw the halves with the hand-written love messages in to the recycling bin, to be chewed up and spat out as colourless pulp and made into other cards for other anniversaries, for another day’s newspaper. Instead she took them all down, diligently stacked them in a velvet-lined, carved jewellery box she emptied especially and left it on the vanity table in the children’s bedroom. When they came home from school they said nothing, and when their mother came home, Marcia said nothing. But the handwriting swirled around her for days: Thank you for everything, You’re my rock, You’re like the day dawning.

By the next May, Kayleigh had taken to wearing her mother’s engagement ring around her neck on a silver chain. When she walked it clacked against the large, silver cross she wore on a velvet ribbon around her thick neck. Marcia knew from pictures that the stone was the same colour as Mr Milner’s eyes and she was sure he had done this on purpose. It made her want to suck the stone from its claw clasp and roll it around her mouth, dull it with her saliva. It’d rattle her teeth and leave a bitter taste like money and sweat but at least that way, under her tongue, he wouldn’t be able to see her.

One afternoon in June when the yellow turnip flowers in the fields beyond the houses on the estate were flowering, and buttercups shone yellow light under the chins of children whose parents and grandparents had shown how the reflection could indicate a taste for butter, Marcia lost her shit. She was in the garden smoking a roll-up, listening to the girl’s arguing in the kitchen and watching birds buzz around a feeder that hung from a hunched tree that curved like the back of a lady after a long, exhausting life. They were arguing about how there wasn’t enough semi-skimmed left for cereal because Katherine had drunk three cups of tea for breakfast. But no, actually, Katherine’d only had two, and if Kayleigh wasn’t so fat she wouldn’t need to have cereal and toast on a Saturday. But Kayleigh always had cereal and toast on a Saturday, with her mother’s homemade marmalade, because that’s the way things were.

“Mum’s out at the shop just now, so why don’t you just wait and have cereal then. In the meantime I’ll have another cup of tea – give it here.”

“But why should you have the last of the milk, why can’t I have a cup of tea now?”

The shouts of the children didn’t seem to bother the finches and tits, intent as they were on pecking at the feeder, spilling some as they dipped their heads. Sunflowers and thistles had begun seeding itself in the grass below.

“Kayleigh just wait for mum, then that way you can have full-fat milk to match your full-fat arse.”

“Shut up you cow.”

Kayleigh must have grabbed a part of Katherine because she squealed as if something had been pulled or twisted.

“Get off me!”

“Get away from me!”

The sharp squeak of bare feet skidding, a wooden chair rocking on its legs, cutlery thrown on to a work surface.

“What’s wrong with you?!”

“I hate you you fucking bitch!”

Marcia flicked her cigarette over the fence to the street beyond the back garden and whipped the curtain at the kitchen door aside smacking its tendrils against the outside wall and bursting the wooden beads like fireworks.

“For God’s sake will you just stop it! Stop-it-stop-it-stop-it!” and she grabbed the milk bottle out of their quarrelling hands and flung it against the wall, splattering a calendar and a pin-board.

Their mother stood in the hallway, bulging hemp tote bags slowly lowering to the ground, the front door wide-open framing the kids on their bikes queuing in front of the ice-cream van that came at 9am and parked until it got dark. Their heads were all turned in the same direction, and even though their faces were blurry she knew that their eyes were all focused on the opportunity to revel in the drama of the sound of something thrown to make it smash.

All four of them swept and sponged and soaked up the howlite puddles of white and glass, all four of them cried. Eight hands clashed, two sets of joints creaked, two sets of knee scabs chipped on the tiles of the kitchen floor.

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Laura Tansley is a recent Creative Writing PhD graduate. Her creative and critical work has appeared in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Gutter and Kenyon Review Online (with Micaela Maftei). She’s brand new to twitter @laura_tans