Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: domestic violence
Uvular fricatives [ʁ]
Paris [paʁi] – Paris
This is how you build an incendiary bomb in a day; go down a cold street in the Latin Quarter with a dying phone. You should have charged it in the hotel, but you leave early, very early, after sleeping in the bathtub with the door locked. The cold has you coughing, muttering your r’s as you curse the paving stones. Startling how the snow makes everything look like it’s covered in smoke, ash-like flakes falling on your face, freezing your cheeks.
rouge [ʁuʒ] – red
It’s snowing thanks to Storm Caetano; alerts for ice and the closure of the Eiffel tower. A scarlet-skirted woman, frost-drenched, is standing in heels on the Pont d’Iéna. She’s gripping heart-shaped balloons aloft in the snowy, dove-coloured sky. She poses solemnly for the photographer and eventually hands out the balloons to the bewildered tourists and loudly quits. Discarded, they roll up and down the length of the Seine, pelted by snowdrift and eventually sink into the river.
grand [ɡʁɑ̃] – big
You left your umbrella in the tourist bus yesterday and must find your way with soaked hair and shoulders. Every breath clouds out of your nose in a beat. A clopping French Garde horse startles you with its size, looming out of the mist as you turn into the Musée de l’Homme. Many postcards, all featuring a grim ancient figure smiling – throaty, guttural, rictus grins.
être [ɛtʁ] – to be
He was snoring when you left. You found the screen cracked, falling from what used to be your side of the bed. It was knocked off the cord after you threw a lamp at him. What are you if you’re not with him anymore?
merci [mɛʁsi] – thank you
It’s meant to be a once in a lifetime trip. Your knee bruised from the side of the concrete block on the end of the bridge, where he never once offered to take a photo of you the entire time you were there. Seated at Bistro Parisien, you take the coffee from the serveuse with a smile and delete every single photo of him, just before your phone blinks out.
très [tʁɛ] – very
He is so, so sorry, but he cannot continue this relationship, this job, this romance, you write carefully on the terrifiant postcards, neatly, tidily – ready for the throat of the boîte aux lettres.
miroir [miʁwaʁ] – mirror
You don’t know who that is in the black glass of the broken phone anymore. You leave it with the empty cup.
rentrer [ʁɑ̃tʁe] – to return
Après les jeux, ce site se refait une beauté says the sign at the Place du Trocadéro. After the games, after all that has been played, beauty will be restored. You buy a new umbrella – rouge – and watch the tower disappear in the sky as you are driven away.
Kylie Sturgess is a communications lecturer in Perth, whose research includes the analysis of paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs in Australians. She recently completed a graduate degree in creative writing, and this year her goal is to finish writing a novel. She has published short stories in university creative writing magazines, had a flash fiction story appear on the side of a building in Fremantle in 2025, and in her spare time studies French.
Locative Magazine 