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Went shopping that day. In the square flowers in bloom, but on the turn. I noticed how there is a sort of grandeur
in the passing of flowers. Youth, the full flush, cannot have it all. The trees were turning too — a curl and twist to each leaf,
some falling, some fallen. Early, I thought, too soon, too little time in the world. I paused, put down my bags.
There is a bench near the post office. I sit there in the summer, in autumn and watch the birds, the children.
I sat there on that day and, leaning back, looked up through the branches. Did I see the ‘plane or only hear it?
Three breaths, nine heartbeats. Then the light. And then the heat. And then the sound. And only my shadow left behind.
I have become my bones. I wear my skin like a shield of leaves, like wing cases. I am safe here at my core.
My mother grooms herself. She turns and turns before mirrors, buffing the peach, the downy, the over-ripe as if you can hide behind beauty forever.
My father watches apples falling in October. No-one will gather them now. He dreams the old dream of fruit that lies unharvested.
My lover drinks. His eyes burn at me across the beaker’s rim. ‘What is the nature of this journey that she needs no flesh, no comfort?’
I have become my bones. They are a cage for the dust that is my element. I diminish. It is cold here at my core.
Up on Bell’s Hill, hours after sundown; watchless thus timeless; starlight printed on the earth below:
all the lights of Exeter in a black bowl. We breathe through our mouths. No wind in the hillside beeches
or the hawthorn hedge we crouch behind. Bob looms at my side, log-still, indistinct, yet electric
with attention, his cradled shotgun staring at the ground, round-eyed. An owl quavers in the ice-heart of the wood.
Movement at the field’s edge: shadow on shadow; an elision of shape and formlessness. The fox slides along a dark rail, single-
purposed, the fanatic’s way — hand over hand through the long grass at the field's edge.
Bob’s gun coughs twice, dry-voiced. Night cracks like slate; shards fly and the world tips up.
We stare, bloodshot, jangling, into the bright darkness. Shadows realign at the field’s edge. Night self-heals, like water.
Strange word, ‘stroke’ — a gentle sleep and then you wake up, changed. Caressed by infirmity on the brown hill, kissed by disability as you climb the long drive. The farmhouse tips and, heart in crescendo, you embrace the grass.
Indifferent sheep manoeuvre, crowding out your sky. You lie in a lump, adrift at the field’s edge, floating on the dead raft of your limbs. The sun nails light into your one good eye.
Near dusk her scarecrow voice scatters your crowding dreams: she calls you from the house, the sound of your name curling out of the past, a gull-cry, fierce, impatient, tearing at the membrane that has dimmed your world.
Root-still, potato-eyed, you are another species now. Your medium is clay and saturation. Mummified, like the bog-man trapped by time, you lie dumbfounded, mud-bound and uncomprehending as the sun slips down behind the hill.
The urgent fingers scavenging for a heartbeat, fluttering like bird-wings at your throat, are busy in the dark. You feel nothing of their loving panic, their distress.
All love, all optimism, pain, all memory, desire coarsen, thicken into vegetable silence. A dim siren wobbles in the dark. And then rough hands manhandle your clod-heavy bulk. Night swallows the spinning light and closes in like smoke.
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