The Last Mile of My Car

We drove
down a
dusty
potholed track
toward the sea.
The sun was setting
and the
wind
smelt good
like the ocean.

(Actually)

We drove
down a
dark
wet road
into the town.
Red lights flickered
and the
wind
smelt bad
like petrol.

Class

You
could be forgiven
for thinking
that
there is no
class
left
in the world.

But
it is there,
buried
in the ground
like
forgotten
jewellery.

Waiting.

A Christmas Story

The first glimpse we catch of our hero comes as he leaves his house on a clear and frosty day. The house looks tired and the front lawn is not exactly what you would call crown green. The glass in the front door is cracked and has since been repaired with cardboard. There is no car on the drive. Our hero wears a long blue winter coat, large black gloves and a similarly oversized black woollen hat. As he turns from the door, we see that he wears glasses that almost entirely cover the visible part of his face. The rest is hidden behind the high collar of his coat. He pushes his glasses up his nose and sets off.

We move along quietly beside him, hearing only the clear and satisfying sound of his footsteps as they crunch their way along the pavement. His frozen breath spills out over the collar of his coat. As he passes in front of other houses on his street we learn that it is Christmas, or thereabouts. This is one of those streets that take decorating seriously. At one house there is a man on a ladder securing lights below his roof. At the final house, a woman is in the front garden wrestling with an inflatable snowman. She says something to our hero but her voice it is faint against the sounds of the steps. Our hero does not stop.

He reaches the end of the street and turns down a busier road. There is a long queue of people at a bus stop opposite a post office. Each person watches our hero as he passes. They use that look people save for when they know someone but don’t want to say hello. A group of children start to giggle and poke at each other’s ribs. As our hero walks away, we can see them over his shoulder. They are pointing and laughing, but all we hear is the steady sound of his feet on the frozen concrete.

Without warning our hero turns onto a white playing field. Below the field in the distance, there is a town. We gaze over the town for a moment as our hero disappears off to one side. Momentarily we hear a weary metallic sound, and after a short pause, a smooth sliding noise followed by a thump. Our hero reappears and sets off again across the field. He brushes snow from his rear end as he walks. Eventually he rounds the hill and we are left alone to gaze at the town once more.

The town is heaving with Christmas shoppers, and based on the number of children present it must be one of the days of the weekend. It used to be obvious when it was Saturday but not so much any more. Christmas music plays from one of the many market stalls lining the high street. On a corner, a lady dressed as a reindeer shakes a large yellow bucket. Our hero comes into view briefly. The reindeer lady shakes her bucket at him but he doesn’t slow down. If anything he speeds up.

We catch up with our hero outside a shop with all types of Christmas ephemera in the window. It is the kind of shop that sells Halloween costumes, then fireworks, and then Christmas decorations in that order. For nine months of the year it sells only air. It has an inconsequential name that begins with a ‘Z’. Our hero stands facing the store, staring at the brightly coloured items in the window as the rest of the town passes him by. Suddenly he rushes inside, and then just as suddenly he emerges again. He slams the door hard and the decorations in the window shake. He must have let in some of the cold air. Our hero walks away from the store not carrying anything. Perhaps he bought some air on sale from way back in the autumn.

We set off again behind our hero as he cuts through the dense crowd. A lady passes him with a festive but impractical hat. She looks cold. Above the crowd, we can see that the town’s Christmas lights have been turned on. It makes the place seem a lot darker than a moment ago. In the darkness we briefly lose our hero, then notice him heading inside a hardware store. This is one of those old fashioned places that sell everything: gravy granules, houseplants, welding equipment and fishing tackle. The name above the doorway sounds like someone who has an excellent moustache, and has been hand painted there by someone with talent. Our hero emerges with a large, unmarked white carrier bag. He sets off the way he came.

We see our hero walk past the shop that sells air. The ‘OPEN’ sign in the window has a festive motif and is being turned. We see him pass the empty corner where the lady reindeer used to be, and the high street where market stalls are being taken apart and put back into vans. Above the town we wait for him on the frosted playing field. The town below has a pleasing orange glow. By the time our hero appears it is completely dark. It must have been a long way after all. As he walks toward us, the sound of his footsteps on the frozen grass becomes clearer. His breath is nicely illuminated by the orange glow of the streetlamps.

He walks past us without slowing and we follow behind, past the bus stop and eventually round the corner leading on to his street. This street is anything but dark. On both sides, as far as the eye can see, the houses are lit up or flashing. There is not synchronisation. Our hero stops in the centre of the road, gazing down at the street. He and the carrier bag are silhouetted against it. He walks over to the house by the corner. Strips of light outline the windows and doors, and make it looks as though a child had drawn it in brightly coloured crayon. The inflatable snowman nearly fills the front garden, its arms waggling comically in the breeze. It has a wide and pleasant smile on its face.

Our hero sets off down the street, and eventually comes back to his house. There are no decorations of any sort. As he walks to the door, he looks to his left and notices something. We look to the side and see that the house next door is bare as well. The front window flickers with a faint light. Our hero continues to look that way.

We see him head next door and ring the doorbell. It takes a while, but eventually a light comes on in the porch and a small old lady stands in the doorway. After a brief moment they both go inside. We gaze at the outside of the old lady’s house for a while. With a sudden flicker, a small sign reading ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS’ lights up in the window. It doesn’t flash but the lights are bright red and green. Our hero emerges from the house and closes the door behind him. He takes a wreath out of the carrier bag and hooks it onto the old lady’s door.

The final glimpse we catch of our hero comes as he gazes up and down the street with a wide and pleasant smile on his face. His frosted breath rises in front of his glasses, obscuring the reflection of the brightest street in England.

Autumn

The first day of autumn came like an old forgotten jigsaw of brown and orange. It was such a beautiful day that I decided to sit in the park and watch how things turned out. There was a lot of wind so I had taken my hat and placed it securely, or so I thought, on the top of my head.

The park was full of the little brown and orange jigsaw pieces. They drifted against the walls and blew like insects in the air. They made a good noise as they clattered against one another. By the bench where I sat, they were gathered in such number that it was like a carpet of noise under my feet.

There was a sudden change in the wind that surprised my hat and blew it to the ground. As I bent down to retrieve it, I remember there being a light rain in the air like dust. It was being blown in every direction. When I sat back up an old gentleman was beside me on the bench.

“Hello,” I said, “I didn’t notice you there before.”

“Hello,” he said, “I wasn’t until now.”

I liked his reply a great deal. It was exactly the reply I would like to have given in his place. I smiled and looked out over the park. The trees were dancing so vigorously that their tops were now entirely naked.

“It’s a beautiful day,” I remarked. It was a beautiful day.

“I'm glad you like it,” he replied, and leant back on the bench with his hands behind his head. He was breathing softly and a strange whistling sound came from his nose. I liked this reply too.

The man’s outfit was that of a traditional British outdoorsman. He wore leather boots, heavy woollen trousers and a filthy waxed coat. Filthy was perhaps not the right word. I have known people with filthy coats in the past, but this coat had an agricultural significance all of its own. You could have probably grown good potatoes in folds of its fabric. However, the most striking feature of this man was his magnificent hair. It was white and thick and grew in every direction imaginable. Within it, and please bear in mind I could only examine its periphery, was a good assortment of leaves, moss, twigs, and other things I could not name. He was perhaps one of the few men I have met who could truly say, “Hello, I need a hat.”

He caught me staring at him and offered the kind of smile one would give to a precocious child. “What can I do for you?” he said. He made a whistling noise without opening his mouth.

If I didn’t ask I knew that I would regret it later. “I was wondering why you are dressed as you are?” I said. “You seem prepared for the elements.”

“Indeed!” said the man. “I dress like this for my job.”

“And what would that be, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Not at all!” he said. “I do many things throughout the year, but right now I’m in charge of the autumn.”

Having already become somewhat used to unexpected replies, this seemed to go straight in without touching the sides. I found myself saying in all seriousness, “Oh! Well, it must be a very busy time for you.”

“Exceedingly!” said the man. “There is an awful lot of wind to be made. Every year there are more people to blow about and then there are the leaves to be scattered. Of course, there are wind farms now as well. Wind farms are really very awkward.” He seemed set on considering wind farms for a while, so I gave him a moment. Eventually he let out a weary groan and leant back on the bench. He looked suddenly quite glum, and tremendously tired. He rubbed his eyes with large calloused hands and yawned.

I thought perhaps I should try to take his mind off wind farms and how awkward they were. “What’s your favourite part of the job?” I asked.

The man took his hand from his eyes and looked at me with sudden mischievous glee. He let out a small chuckle and leant over to me as if he were telling a secret. “Umbrellas!” he said, like he was at the circus. “Umbrellas are my most favourite things in all the world. That’s the good thing about living in the city. There are lots of umbrellas!”

“Umbrellas?” I asked.

I’ve never seen a man point with his eyebrows before, but this he did in a way that was far superior than using a finger. I followed the line from tangled white hair, over the playing field in front of us, to the path on the opposite side. There, a lady was walking a dog and holding an umbrella out in front of her like a medieval knight. It was one of those happy umbrellas that showed all the colours of the rainbow. Within an instant, the wind and leaves had swirled around behind her and with a pleasing WHOOMF, the umbrella was turned inside out. The dog became very excited and dragged the lady about the path. There was a great deal of yapping.

I chuckled into my hand and the man made a dry laugh as if he was filled with the leaves that sat all around us. “That’s quite a skill.” I said.

“Thank you,” said the man, drying his eyes with his hand. “It gets me though the day.” He looked quite a lot better.

There was a sudden break in the cloud and the wind changed again. I liked how the dried leaves piled up at the side of my feet, like they were trying to explore the lower regions of my trouser leg. I felt a sudden cold and looked to my side. The old man was gone. I stood up and looked around. On the other side of the park, the lady was wrestling with her ruined umbrella. It seemed to like its new look and was putting up a good fight. I looked behind me and saw the magnificent white hair of the man bobbing in the distance. The rest of him was perfectly camouflaged against the autumn that spun like brown and orange jigsaw pieces all around.

The Mill

The walls of the mill are streaked black with time and neglect, and bowed out like something is rotten inside. Once these walls were red brick, straight and proud, but those days don’t even belong to memory now. The windows are done-with target practise for generations of children. Rocks, catapults, grubby old air rifles. Some of the small ones on the sixth floor held out until a few months ago. The lower ones are heavily boarded and covered in the graffiti of years.

The roof is losing its battle with the autumn wind. Already it’s half gone, a sagging broken smile offered to the gathering crowd in the hope that it will be returned. So far no one has smiled back. All around, brightly coloured men climb into machinery like houses or stand talking into radios. They all smoke and are the only noise.

The wind picks up dried leaves and dust from the floor; the men cover their eyes. The machines briefly halt their approach but don’t get any quieter. The crowd examine their feet. The cold wind carries across the yard and blows through the empty building with a deep, sad sound that's lost in the noise of machinery.

The smile in the roof is the first thing to drop. It opens wide and falls with a heavy sigh. Birds vacate through windows and come to rest in symphony on power cables nearby. They whistle a jumbled but affectionate farewell.

Like an end-of-show curtain the front wall drops, somehow leaving the rest of the building in tact. It takes everyone by surprise, even the man with the radio and name badge.

The late afternoon sun slants through the windows on the opposite side, cutting through the autumn shadow cast on the street below. For one brief moment before the collapse, everyone stops to stare at the lonely relic of white cotton on the second floor. It’s as pure and fragile as the day it was made, and waves like a perfect golden sail in the cold autumn wind. No one can make out what it’s attached to, and no one gets the photograph in time.

A Silver Bird

I was walking in a field of long grass, inspecting the seeds and listening to the wind blow past when I felt something hard against my foot. I looked down and noticed a silver bird in the shape of a bracelet half buried in the earth. I picked it up and held it in my hands. It was silver like a reflection of the moon and felt good to touch. It was colder than I expected. I held the bird up close to my ear and it told me that it had become lost trying to find its way home. It had a nice sound to its voice.

I placed it carefully in my inside coat pocket and walked to the top of the nearest hill. Looking down into the next valley, I noticed a house nestling in some trees. The house was small and white, and had a gentle smoke pouring from the chimney that wandered toward the top of the valley.

I walked down to the house and saw a young woman kneeling down planting silver seeds in her garden. They glinted raw sunlight as she held them in her hand. All around, silver necklaces grew from the earth, coiling themselves around whatever was there. Bushes planted in neat rows flowered silver rings that shimmered playfully as the wind swirled through the garden. It was an incredible sight. When I looked back at the woman she had stood up and was facing me, wiping her hands on her apron. The wind blew brown hair across her face and she placed it carefully back behind her ear. She smiled and said hello.

I walked up to her and held out the silver bird. I kept my hands gently around it like I was riding a horse. She took the bird bracelet from me and held it for a time, perhaps appreciating its coolness as I had done earlier. She held it up to her ear and smiled in one corner of her mouth.

After a while she handed it back to me and pointed loosely to a small outbuilding with a tree growing against it. The branches of the tree were pinned to the wall. It was so laden with silver bird bracelets and earrings I doubted whether it could support its own weight. As I walked toward it, the other birds chirped excitedly. The bird said thank you as I held up my hands and it hopped onto a branch to join its friends.

As I passed the woman she smiled at me and told me thank you. She held out her hand and offered me a bird in shape of a ring. It was a very small bird and would only fit on my little finger, but it fitted there perfectly. I said thank you and set off through the long grass back over the hill, feeling the wind of the valley blow past me and listening to the song of the silver bird that was perched on my little finger.

[O: Here, I guess...]

Another Planet

A darkly thick green light defines this late night dawdler. He’s invisible but for the glow of the emergency exit sign- it's the only thing turned on in this decomposing hotel. In emerald shadow he sits in front of final one o’clock beer, a lank newspaper there also. Someone had sex with someone else, or so some other alleges. As you approach, he fixes you with hobgoblin eyes aside unfathomable frown. He’s angry red by day and all hellish scowl, the warmth of the day’s sun emanating from his still half naked wrinkled body. He’s Earth-bound, no doubt, but his skin looks like the surface of another planet entirely.