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The Boy Who Could Lay Eggs Drift
The Boy Who Could Lay Eggs
He’d sit for hours at a time with the hens, listening to their strangled clucking, their attempts at speech. Life was full of things that couldn’t be articulated.
He was five when it first happened. Gazing through the mesh, not hearing footsteps behind until the laugh, come here, his father said, I’ll show you something —
Pulled across his father’s knees face down, head to the ground so seeing only the earth and two ankles planted there, feeling the strong warm hands tugging his trousers down
as if for a beating, he never knew for what, would never know — there was just some inescapable chain of events that led to this, being called over to the bench beside the coop,
the desperate cackling in his ears as he hung pinioned while his father somewhere above spat on his fingers and inserted them inside the boy’s anus, there you are! he exclaimed —
And tipped to the ground he turned to look at the oval in his father’s palm, clean as it came from the hen — you see, you can lay eggs too — staring, not wanting to touch the pale
unblemished shell, feeling inside him the egg-shaped hollowness, the way in his life afterwards he’d not want to move or do anything too suddenly for fear of breaking.
Caroline Price in collection Wishbone, 2008, Shoestring Press, ISBN: 978 1 904886 78 5; first published in Bridport Prize Anthology, 2007
Drift
There are no tides to speak of, only a gentle push and pull over the same metre of shingle, so pebbles give way abruptly to gravel; so at the first clasp of water I sink to my knees. In my company almost at once a shoal of small fish like ghosts of fish, translucent, nothing but eyes. I strike out for the tethered buoy warning off boats from swimmers and turn over, float on salt face up to the sun. My ears below the surface hear different things now, the boom of the sea, the powerful beat of my own body. The men are distant figures on the beach, one pale, one brown. They are not watching me. Their heads are turned towards each other; they have to be talking, filling the space between them where my towel lies white and blue, like a flag. With the sea filling my ears I understand nothing; only that, if I were asked as I will be later what I am thinking of, at this moment, I’d say I want it to last for ever, weight taken from me, the small motion of water alone responsible for my movement, the way I am sucked first one way, so slightly, and then the other.
Caroline Price in collection Wishbone, 2008, Shoestring Press, ISBN: 978 1 904886 78 5; first published in The North, 2007
The Alde at Snape
I’m following my father along the river’s bank, the raised path squeezing between coils of bramble — berries ripe, he’s calling back, for picking
and the reeds which whisper between creeks, each taller than a man. The leaves’ keen cut, heads of maroon fronds a shimmer of silk. Easy to think
that ribs were found here once, an Anglo-Saxon burial ship, a claw beaker, a gold ring. Treasures, still, are waiting to be discovered. Don’t give up, I hear him say
but I’m struggling to keep him in sight as the path twists, as masts and sails in the distance turn to echo the river like withies planted in the mud of the deepest water
to show the one navigable channel. From here no guessing the way ahead. As if in warning, the squeak of a bird, invisible in the rushes
and the track stops abruptly, a bitten thread: at my feet deep water welling, a maverick flood from left to right far too wide to leap,
only good for those who can balance on grass blades, who can step along the length of a single toppled reed surely, from one place to another.
Caroline Price in collection Wishbone, 2008, Shoestring Press, ISBN: 978 1 904886 78 5; first published in Agenda, 42. No. 2, Autumn 2006
Look past the house where strangers live and across the lawn: in front of the poplar hedge, that’s where she buried his ashes, in the ghost of a vegetable garden, no more now than a rectangle of deeper green —
he had begun, even before he died, to let his plot grass over, its edges draw in, the rhubarb thickening, stray sprouts and onions run to seed, the furrows littered with potatoes tiny as knucklebones; each year
turning some earth but working it less, allowing rough grasses to sow themselves and pigeons and pheasants pick their way undisturbed, depositing other seeds so that thistles soon pushed up, and red dead-nettle, speedwell;
gradually a showing of all the wild flowers from around, though nothing as prolific as the poppies she saw that next morning, that were suddenly there catching her eye from the kitchen window, an outburst, a dancing line of red.
Caroline Price in collection Wishbone, 2008, Shoestring Press, ISBN: 978 1 904886 78 5; first published in anthology, Windows, 2007, Worple Press
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