A bruise of clouds blossomed in that halloween sky. They lurked as if they would be there forever, a never-fade echo of misery. I watched them billow. I watched them swirl in the coldest of currents. Yet it was a pumpkin spice wind that blew, a soft aroma of better days. And so, costume on, masked for the parade, I skipped on rain-washed concrete.
The smell of the drains was a Gollum hand, reaching up my nose to rattle my brain. It was as if its fingertips had made craters in my grey-matter, bruising it for no other reason than a cold and petty thrill. How could it? Foul though was, it’s just a stink. Somewhere, behind the closed and double-locked doors of my memories, a darkness stirred. PTSD erased my memories, but whatever happened, it stank this same way.
In the lake I was an astronaut, weightless and able to move with absolute freedom. Up and down meant nothing at all, until my lungs needed their refill. I could be as large as a blue whale and it wouldn’t change a thing. From the sunlit lake bed below to the ever changing puzzle of blue-white light above, both my body and brain had space to find true serenity. After everything that had happened, after a journey none would ever believe was a true story, it was just the ticket.
Ignorant of the desert bloom’s beauty, the scorpion lurked. Parched sand and shrivelled plant-death were all the same to him. Blind to the shimmer of light warmed land, no fragrance did he detect. Through life-thickened armour, came not a murmuring of the world beyond. He bore his venom tail in high jaunty fashion, as if it were both coat of arms and standard bearer. As days became weeks, as weeks blurred into a yawn of time, he was the monarch of that fractured rock.
“You know they’d never do it for you,” said Mary. “They’d sit in their palaces and eat caviar while you burned.”
“And if I stop,” said Grace, her eyes finding her friends, “what of our entire way of life? What future will the children have? I have to cut a path and pragmatism has its own demands.”
“That it does,” said Mary. “Be careful out there. Heroes don’t grow on trees. We can’t replace the likes of you.”
“I’ll do my best to stay alive,” said Grace, pulling on her winter coat, her face hugged in fur. “It is what it is. My path is my path. Chin up, Mary. When life becomes an interesting story, it’s always the worst of times.”
Rain splattered, the storm cloud grey headphones perched half in and out of the backpack. The bluetooth moving out of range, their sound was an inconsistent dribble to the beat of rain on the closeby pane. Quieter they grew. Splutter. Splutter. Silence. Connection dead. And so they sat there, rested, wrested from the demands of the phone. Silence. Silence.