Vigil For A Mother (for Michael McDowell)
The last time I was a mother, I was waving Darnley off in his dinghy. Polished mahogany flashed under an early autumn sun, the red of his sail slowly melting into the scarlet wall of maples on the great lake’s far side. I’ve learnt when a parent loses a child, she becomes something undefined. Losing a breast in ‘89 ungendered …
You’ll Find Me In The Tall Wheat
The raft is not the vessel I’d hoped for. For a time I had company in the form of terns, a miniature armada of black-prowed yachts bobbing on the becalmed waters around me. But when the barnacle-encrusted flukes of a giant erupted lazily nearby, those feathered ketches became gliders, hanging like M’s from a child’s mobile. I envied them as …
The Rise of Woman
Nobody could recall an actual date when the island appeared off the coast of Lyme Regis, why it should have, or what circumstances conspired to allow it, but one thing universally agreed upon was its portentousness. Mallory, on summer break from the clamour of Oxford’s Magdalen hallways, congratulated himself on the prodigious serendipity of his decision to holiday in Lyme. …
MIBs
Harriet rolled her eyes at her brother’s petulant bleating. She supposed this was about her beating him at real tennis after church. A man of nineteen years should know better! ‘Saints preserve us, Freddie!’ Mother called from the kitchen as she prepared water crust pastry. ‘Whatever this “flying cigar” was, I’m sure there’s an explantation…Did you see it, Harriet?’Harriet wandered …
Suffer the Children
Pigger pulled on his clothes like a zombie. These days he didn’t care what he wore; not since Ne—, not since the accident. That day, he’d walked through the chill five o’clock darkness to the abyssal yawn of Ollerenshaw’s No.8 as Chalky wittered on about Beeching’s Axe. Pigger didn’t care; he was more occupied trying to locate that wet rumble …
Return of the Women
Olenus waited as patient as time. Up and down the November beach was barren save for the stacks of mossy rocks. They weren’t much in the way of company – not even he could offer that, either – so he waited for the return of the women with those men already here, in sentinel silence. Would she ever return? Had …
The Rime of the Brackish Mariner
The wind speaks in Roquebrun. A labyrinth pond there I once fished as a boy, where darting, infant mullet kissed a fallen mirror. Away, behind eyelashed dunes, mother languished and father malingered on a Martian beach. Ahead, a choppy fringe of mountains loomed and in between, and all around, the Mediterranean’s zephyr played and urged: This way, not that! And …
Owen Come Home
Sometimes in July, when the wind cries in the right direction, I hear a tremulous calliope sighing across the flats. As a child I would sit out there for hours listening and daydreaming; giving form to my mother’s words. It’s calling to them, Owen, calling to the ghosts of the past; telling them to come and entertain again. I can …
The Heredity of Memory
She hasn’t known me for years; instead of throwing hugs she just casts spears, her careworn face now lined with meanness. It’s hard believing things mother once told me: ‘I’ll love you evermore.’ It started with the bears she saw supping in the gloaming. ‘Four of them, as real as day, with teacups of bone china.’ She speaks of them …
Oh, Jump, and I’ll Come to You, My Love
To run with white horses, white horses, white horses. Oh, how I long to ride them with you. Because the cleats of life have left boot mark scars on my skin, and cast my torn petals to the swine of chagrin. But I still believe after all, I still believe I’ll be dressed and refreshed, tumbled and polished; my thorns …