Washing Day by Elizabeth Tan

Elizabeth Tan (@ElzbthT) is a West Australian writer and a sessional academic at Curtin University. Her work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Westerly, Seizure, Pencilled In, and other Australian publications. Her debut novel Rubik (2017, Brio) was shortlisted in the 2018 Avant-garde Awards.

 
 
 
Washing Day

What Kate misses the most these days is the ‘vintage inspired’ smock dress she bought from ASOS. It had the appearance of being made up of several different cuts of material, like a patchwork, but it was actually all just one piece of fabric, a simulated bricolage of floral prints in pink, indigo, blue – but predominantly red, so she wore it to the Lunar New Year gathering the last time she went home. The waistline sat a bit higher than in a regular dress – just below her bust – which had a welcome obfuscating effect on the rest of her body, transforming the slack geography of her torso into a floaty hypothetical world, inscrutable to tactless relatives.

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