A Moment on the Lips… (Five Sentence Fiction, November 2012)

This week’s one word prompt from Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction was ‘Feast’, which prompted an old childhood recollection.

“Don’t you even think of it my girl!” said the look in my mother’s eye, as I surveyed the oval platter laden with dainty triangular sandwiches, crusts carefully removed and bulging with juicy, pink tinned salmon.

We kids had never tasted salmon in our lives, nor were we likely to today, as the sandwiches on our side of the plate were thinly scraped with strawberry jam, and woe betide any one of us who dared to take a sandwich from the guests’ side of plate.

As conversation flowed, I chose my moment carefully, and reached casually out, hand hovering momentarily before, on a rising tide of wilfulness, I snatched one from the other side of the plate and crushed it swiftly into my mouth.

“What did it taste like?” asked my younger sister later that day, as we washed our faces and struggled into our nighties.

“Like heaven,” I said airily, perching my red and tender buttocks on my side of my bed, though it hadn’t really; it was more like the sour taste of guilt, laced heavily with an expectation of nemesis to be promptly fulfilled after the guests’ departure.