Barbecues were hardest.

“When are you two going to start a family?” they always asked.

“When the time is right,” she would reply, smiling.

“Don’t wait forever or it’ll be too late.”

She would nod politely, before returning home to an empty nursery and calendars red with a thousand crosses.

Miya Yamanouchi is a journalist in South Eastern Europe. Her poetry has been published in Poets and War and her fiction writing in Friday Flash Fiction.