Apricot Press

The earth is powder soft and cold, like cocoa from the pantry. I scrape it back towards me, fingertips remembering the time I snuck into the space beneath the stairs and cocooned myself around the Bournville tin. The anticipation was more delicious than the chocolate, which was bitter and came with a telling off because I’d left tell-tale marks on my dress. Nan had cleaned me up because Mam was too angry. Dinner medals, Nan called food stains, badges of honour. I wonder absently what she’d make of the mud which cakes my knees. It’s that delicious anticipation again, though. The treasure of the chocolate tub and treasure in the earth. I want to find a pen – something to connect who I am with who was here before. Bones are, for all their pretences, completely impersonal – and so the bodies never interested me. I leave the bones to colleagues who find meaning in them. We’re all bones underneath – all have the same lines of scaffolding beneath our flesh. I’m interested in the lines we choose to make on paper, the stories we choose to tell about ourselves through the objects we hold and leave behind. So here I am, hoping, and praying in a building intended just for that, desperate to find a pen.

Fran Moldaschl

Fran Moldaschl started writing when she was very little because it meant her parents would let her use the computer. Since then she has studied Danish, worked with puppies, and recently returned to university to study archaeology. She is particularly interested in the Anglo-Saxons and the Picts, and tries to work as much of the Ancient North into her writing as she can. Fran currently lives in Aberdeenshire and is passionate about early years literature, history, linguistics, and custard. She spends way too much time playing in the mud.

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