How To Make Something From Nothing

By Sophie Flynn

If there’s an art to making so much from so little, I must be one of the world’s greatest artists.

I turn a tin of beans into six meals that last three days and feed three mouths; a tatty blanket becomes a duvet, a curtain, a towel; cold bath water’s transformed into an underwater adventure. Every day I practice: unpaid bills into paper airplanes, holey socks into hand puppets, growling stomachs into noisy monsters.

But when they’ve gone to bed, my skills run out. Because some things can’t be made from nothing and I can’t make a life from this.

           
Sophie has just earned an MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes. She has had short stories and flash fiction publishes in various literary magazines and anthologies and is currently trying to finish her first novel.