A long we trot with Mother’s snug hand in mine and Wizard bounding around in front along the brook and see how it shudders here and there and goes down the valley until that point and then into the woods where we mustn’t go running off to now. We can see Father from here all smiley and tartan with those big green socks of his that give me the funnies and Oh how he’s proud of us in the crinkle of his eyes. Wrapped up safe and sound in thick warmth we wait for the sudden explosion of shivers that Father adores so much and then there they are, immortal fragments of hazel and wine scattered across the sky like pennies out of a poor man’s pocket all pretty and sad. Here comes one and there’s another and look it’s fast this one and it’s going right past Father and into the copse with the others, and look the red on the blue, red as if it had dipped its whole head in strawberry conserve and yellow pip eyes but you can’t see them now because it’s going past quick and it’ll have to slow down if it wants to show you. But Father bangs it down and it won’t make it to the copse and the others ever. It’s getting cold now and I’m not sure I want to stay. Mother says they have to do it to kill the sickly ones and that it really doesn’t hurt them and it’s all a sport so I shouldn’t get in such a tizzy but I do anyway because I don’t like the way they crack and quiver. I’ve seen one all lost and confused with its neck trussed to the dirt spinning and leaving a dizzying wake and Father had to crunch it quiet. And there Father comes now with one and another all scraggy over shoulders and Purdey under arm full of grace with leaves and fronds and bracts all mellow and golden and gleaming on her sides. It was around high noon when Father forever killed a buzzard flying south. Plummeting biblically from festered flight into swollen bog trailed by loose feathers freckling the ashen sky and all the while drowning in empty rapture. It’s over sixty feet away but I can still make out the tendrils of crusted vermillion oozing from an upturned wing like corrupted tributaries and it all makes my mouth feel scraped out and scarlet against the blackened thickets from which nothing seeps but an empty bleakness that creeps through me. It crawls and wriggles within my walls and deftly quells my sullen heart’s thumps with unheard silence. This is what it means to be animately existent. I begin to take up a whimper with grasps in the fading verdure and Wizard moping by Mother’s boots and the laces caked in mire and all in a tangle. It cannot go on for ever.
THRE E UP P ER SCHOOL SHORT S TOR I E S
S TAG SAM WARREN - MI ELL ( YEAR 1 2 )
Illustration by Khalil Gbla (Year 11)
My heavy limbs become recalcitrant and strained. A mud trail slips down and convexes just below the ridge, strangled by dense layers of tortured overgrowth. A few beaters’ sticks propped up against a jeep with its gray rubber tires blistering earthen flesh. We’ve walked further than we did before.
She played darts under the white floodlight after we ate. The old man was asleep by now. I sat on a rattan chair on the patio. They had set up a whole living room on the patio out of rattan chairs and a settee. We were all out there, and the moon was up. I’d had to move a Bible to sit down. One of them joked that I should have melted touching it. I wished he hadn’t, here in front of everyone. There was still slush on the streets out the front but most of the men were just in shirts. They had moved onto whiskey now and were using words like ‘peaty’ and furrowing their brows. It was such an odd thing, to play darts at night like that.
‘Michael?’
But Wizard is haggard by the yellowed moss wall and Jane Doe by little Johnny Doe dead in little fated lines with curling toes and some even on the side. I’m sick of their flower rhymes.
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