sweet shop pick and mix, rummage around and if you find something you fancy...dive in!
Why won’t you let me home.
I can see it so clearly against that lifeless gull grey sky, our home on the hilltop, silvered boards and shingled roof so near across the long grass and then a few more yards over the stubble, the short cut that tears my hands and knees as I move ever closer alongside the dry ruts curving towards the door, tantalising, until everything grows dark and I fail, awakening later, cold and back to my beginnings.
Why won’t you let me home.
Sometimes, when our oil lamps gild the clouding window glass, I can make out shapes moving in the house, passing to and fro, but not mine because you won’t let me back and I don’t know why, can’t understand what made you dispatch me into this eternity, this endless rolling, bitter struggle, bleak and hopeless under these implacable skies, ever crawling skin shredding, closer and closer till the darkness comes again and I am sent back.
Why won’t you let me home.
I know you can return me home, bring me back amongst our kin, enjoy the nervous routines of our dystopian daily life, help mother and father to stretch and stitch the fabric that once held us all together, happy as we were until that day when you arrived and changed our home on the hill for ever, excised us from Maine, from Cushing, or worse perhaps simply dispersed the world and kept us to yourself.
Why won’t you let me home.
What are you doing here Andrew, what plans you have for us is never clear and we cannot ask, must not ask, for fear those dreadful purple eyes might spark, and another thought drop like a hot coal through ice pushing reality aside and bringing that great nothingness outside closer to our home, though I would love to know, and even that thought itself brings darkness and a return to the beginning.
Why won’t you let me home.
This time I’ll try again to move un-noticed by the shadowy barn, where once a happy child played amongst the straw, light and airy, childhood games with friends from Cushing, all long since disappeared, warm memories help me glow but still the stubble slices my parchment skin and pain burns deep, deep into my failing bone-aching arms, slowing me down as I curve closer to home, and I imagine that purple flash as the darkness closes in.
Childhood’s End.
Dolores sloped into the deck chair under the pavilion’s awning and welcomed the sun. She lay, slim frame sickle curved, gently but firmly held by the chair’s rough blue and white stripes.
Already a flaw marred her pleasure. Beneath the chair’s left runner a fissure ran through the concrete slab supporting the pavilion. Started perhaps by shoddy construction, or, Dolores thought briefly, the beginning of a global subsidence that would end in total collapse. Despite her efforts to remain inert, the chair rocked infuriatingly over the telltale crack. To the ants, busy in it’s dark and inviting recesses, it offered opportunity; security in a hostile world.
Dolores stretched, feeling her skin reach greedily for the sun, absorbing it, consuming ray after ray; longing for more. As the arid soil around the edge of the lawn longed for rain, fresh and invigorating, the life-giver. Rain that would flood the ants’ nest, frenzied beneath the fissure, eroding still further the pavilion’s vanishing foundations. A hard rain.
Across the tangled rooftops, overlooked from the pavilion in Dolores’ garden, grey and richly flecked with lichen, unsteady in the heat, a church clock struck twice. Echoes harried amongst the chimney stacks; it was two o’clock and Time vanished with the last notes of the chime; she’d half an hour, the family was due at two thirty. A slight movement of the deck chair caused it to rock over the crack. Ants, in twos and threes at first, but then in greater numbers, emerged in turmoil carrying impossibly large flecks of soil, monoliths of gravel. Dolores abandoned herself to the sun, but before closing her eyes, she stared at the lawn, which lay, green and puzzling in front of the pavilion.
It’s shape, brazenly imprecise, suggested the rectangular, but one beyond the scope of any formulae. With gaping bites of gardencare and thyme, arcing indents broke it’s rectilinear pretensions, making room for plants and ants; lebensraum for grey and desiccated soil. And where no conscious act had shaped it’s eldritch form, ravaged edges dipped, weaved and twisted turning in and out. Smoothly revealing on, closer inspection, each cove itself by coves was formed.
Dolores gazed at the double breasted indent directly in front of the pavilion. Sweeping curves, gloriously irregular, bulged away from her feet. Overhung by matted grass, approaching and receding in tangled weave; smooth to the eye, masterly deceiving greensward. She lowered her eyelids, blotting out the light, though still aware of a blackened green disc lingering on her retina.
On the lawn, threading tirelessly in and out of it’s interlocking blades, foraging ants made their inexplicable way back to the fissure beneath Dolores’ deck chair. Passing, en-route, tiny signal red mites, pointless in the megalopolitan landscape below the grass tops.
Before the half hour chimed, Dolores awoke to the sound of a drawn rifle bolt as, away to her left, the side gate opened. On the surface of its anodised mild steel bolt, corrosion, patient and relentless had taken hold. Rust, darkening from red to brown against the lifeless grey metal, pitted and raised its surface. Peak and hollow, tooth and cog grated in atonal sharps and flats. Tortured by friction, single cells of ferric oxide tore from the substrate...
© bramblepress. all rights reserved.
We need your consent to load the translations
We use a third-party service to translate the website content that may collect data about your activity. Please review the details and accept the service to view the translations.