This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction 99 word challenge, with the prompt word of ‘Clarice’. I have taken my inspiration from the Australian painter, Clarice Beckett. You can learn more about her here.

‘Oh, that Clarice. Fancies painting more than men. Imagine that? Still, she’s done the right thing by her parents. Even if she doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.’

Robbed of her days by bedpans and sponge baths and soiled sheets, she inhabited the fringes of light, the beginnings and endings.

At the end, all of that light was in the shed, rotted and torn by the deniers of her eyes.

Yet the sun rose from her grave and illuminated her beaches and her streets anew. And now the monied hang the consequences.