I wrote this short story as an imagined reconciliation I would have liked to have had with my sister. She died in November before that moment could happen in life. So I gave it to us in fiction instead — not to rewrite truth, but to hold love, regret and the healing we can now only share on the page.
A woman presses the buzzer of the communal entry of a flat not far from Dunfermline High Street. It’s technically spring, though no one has informed Dunfermline, and the sky is stubbornly grey—just the odd slash of blue showing through. The wind bites, and she pulls her padded black coat tighter around her.
No answer.
With a sigh and a roll of her eyes, she presses the buzzer again.
A voice crackles through the intercom. “What?”
The woman scrunches up her nose. “What? You knew I was coming. And I’ve brought Prosecco!”
She waves the bag at the intercom, rattling it for emphasis. “And Marks & Spencer dips. Crispy flatbreads. Crisps. Other things. And olives. And artichokes. And some smoked salmon and chorizo with Manchego.”
“Artichokes? Yuck. You would. What’s for pudding?”
“Pudding, pudding… no, I didn’t get pudding. Oh, fine. There might be a chocolate éclair.”
The door buzzes open. She starts up the stairs. Years ago, she would have bounded up them two at a time, showing off, but her knees and ankles have closed that chapter.
One slow step at a time.
The door swings open. Her sister stands there. Still too thin. The months of living on cereal linger in her skin tone, the slight grey cast, the flatness in her hair. It gives the woman pause. Later she’ll go online to look up supplements promising hair thickness and vitality. Snake oil, probably, but maybe something will help.
“Thanks for dressing up for me,” she says.
Her sister pokes out her tongue.
She hasn’t dressed up at all: a saggy green sweatshirt that hasn’t seen a washing machine in an age, grey leggings bagging at the knees and stripy socks that almost certainly once belonged to someone else. Her sister always did have a habit of stealing socks.
Suddenly, the woman’s ambushed. A furry, slightly smelly creature launches itself at her legs, its nose burrowing enthusiastically into the shopping bag.
“MARLEY!” she yelps.
Her sister glares. “Don’t shout at my dog.”
She wants to argue. While her sister was at her worst, the neighbour—a former police dog handler—took Marley in and worked absolute wonders with him. The dog has always been sweet-natured, but training was never high on her sister’s list. And judging by the enthusiastic chaos now unfolding, every bit of that hard-earned obedience has evaporated.
Still… she’s well again in this version. Better. And if being well includes a badly behaved dog, then so be it.
The woman follows her sister down the hallway and into the living room. It’s standard-issue council accommodation: sparsely furnished, functional, nothing fancy. A two-seater sofa. An armchair. A small MDF table masquerading as “dark wood,” doing its best to be whatever you need it to be—a coffee table, a place for mugs, or for the celebrity magazines her sister has always devoured.
The walls are blank, painted in a shade the woman can’t quite classify. Is it light grey? Light blue? Neutral. Non-committal. Holding its breath.
She shrugs off her coat—her sister hasn’t offered to take it—and drapes it over the back of the sofa. She waits for her sister to fold herself into the armchair before sitting down on the sofa opposite.
She opens the carrier bag and pulls out the first offering: two cans of Diet Coke. Ice-cold.
“Want one?”
Her sister nods. Of all things, this is what they’ve always shared—this ridiculous addiction to fake coke, a fake drink full of chemicals and comfort.
The ring pulls crack open at the same time. They take the first sip. More of a gulp, really.
Lovely.
“How’s Mum?” her sister asks.
The woman takes another gulp of Diet Coke and tells her. No better.
“What about the club? The one in the church hall?”
The woman hesitates. She and their other sister have talked about this. Circled it carefully, cautiously.
“Could you take her?” she asks. “I can’t make it this Monday. I’ll give you money for the bus.”
Her sister nods. “Mmm-hmm. I can do every Monday.”
The woman wants to say, let’s see how you get on the first time, but she bites it back. Instead she says, “Cool,” and adds a gentle, “That’ll be really helpful,” just in case it wasn’t clear.
She starts unpacking the food. Back in the eighties, their mum used to bring home dips from Marks & Spencer—a revelation at the time. An alien concept for a family raised on the great British staples: protein, potatoes, veg. Casseroles. Soups. Stews. Puddings.
And then… dips.
Creamy, delicious, transformative dips. The kind that could trick carrot sticks into tasting exciting, though really, they came into their own with crisps, the perfect contrast of crunch and cream.
She peels back the lid on a four-pack: Thousand Island, Sour Cream & Onion, Marie Rose, Cheese & Chive. The sort of retro selection no one admits to loving anymore, but everyone secretly does.
She sets it all out on the faux–dark wood MDF table, opens the carrots and the crisps.
“Dig in,” she says.
Her sister ignores the carrots completely. Reaches straight for the crisps. Dips one into the Marie Rose, bites it clean in half, then plunges the second half into Cheese & Chive. She licks the excess from her fingers, utterly unselfconscious.
The woman can’t help remembering a story her sister once told. She’d been a student in a shared flat in Glasgow. They’d been doing exactly this—passing around crisps and dips—when Lucy went to the loo. She came back, sat down and proudly announced she’d just had a shite and hadn’t bothered washing her hands.
Funny thing: she got the rest of the crisps to herself after that.
The woman doesn’t bother with the crisps or the dips now. She didn’t buy them for herself anyway.
“So… how’s the new medication and… everything going?” she asks at last, tiptoeing across the eggshells. They’re not yet fully repaired, this family. Not even close.
A tiny bit of crisp has fallen off. It sticks out of the Thousand Island dip like a shark fin in a pink sea. Her sister scoops it out with a finger, sticking it into her mouth and then drawing it out, licked clean.
“That’s none of your—” she snaps, before remembering. It’s like watching a volcano, the lava within it rising to the top too, too, too quickly before subsiding once more.
“Okay,” she says, and the woman knows this is progress.
Don’t ask anything else. Not today.
She digs back into the bag. Extracts other treats. The chorizo-wrapped Manchego sticks. “Yum,” her sister says, and the woman tells her to eat them all. She doesn’t eat such things, what with being a vegetarian.
Her sister harrumphs. Mutters about the woman doing this diet, doing that diet, always being a pain in the arse, and the woman nods along, part irritated, part relieved that they can do this kind of conversation again.
Once upon a time, it looked impossible.
The doorbell ringing again makes the two of them almost leap out of their skin. They see each other’s reaction and burst into giggles.
“You total fanny!” the sister says, and the woman agrees.
They both get out of their seats and move towards the window that looks onto the street. Below them is a party of three. Their other sister. Tall—taller than them both, despite being technically the little (youngest) sister, her brow furrowed, and glancing up.
The woman and her sister duck, sliding down the wall, laughing. It’s childish. That old instinct to noise up their younger, much more grown-up sister.
But then the woman turns from her crouched position. Looks up over the window. Sees who is there with their other sister. Two slight, thin figures, one dark-haired, one blonde. Both nervous and unsure.
Ah.
There was a time—when her sister was truly unwell—that the woman had imagined a scenario and felt sick with dread: her sister dying while still estranged from her children. How unbearable that would have been for a woman who had wanted to be a mum so fiercely.
And now here they are. Not all of them, but two.
“Looby-loo,” she says, soft, soft, softly as can be. “Your children are here.”
And her sister turns. The light that rises in her face is astonishing. It floods the room, bright and sudden, as if a new sun has pushed its way into the flat. It reaches every corner, every blank wall, every quiet bit of space, gilding it all.
“Are they…? Are they here?”
The woman nods—nods so hard she half expects her head to come loose. She starts to say, “Good job we’ve got plenty of food,” but the sentence dissolves on her tongue.
Her sister is already on her feet, unsteady but determined, and rushing for the door.
©Emma Baird 2025
