Luke and his friends arrive at a party in a small terraced house a short walk from the High Street and they are handed a beer on the way in. In the kitchen where they stand talking a man with skinny arms and a fat stomach nudges Luke and asks him for a cigarette. He takes his beer outside and hands the man a cigarette and takes a small pack of matches and strikes two to light his cigarette and hands his lit cigarette to the man to light his own. They drag on their cigarettes in silence. The smoke rises and turns and meets somewhere in the cold air and their breath rises in the spaces between their drags. Luke shakes his can. Little liquid. He takes a short sip and pours the rest onto the grass and leaves the can on the bench. The man puts his cigarette on the arm of the bench and starts to piss in the corner of the garden. When the man is done he walks back towards the house nudging Luke again as he goes.
Hell of a night, he says, looking up.
He laughs and shakes his head and disappears inside to blend in with the shades, silhouetted through the windows. Luke looks up at the sky. It is very black. The stars pulse in their sockets. He takes the cigarette that the man has left on the arm of the bench and stamps it out in the wet grass. He stops and listens and for a moment he thinks he can hear running water.
In the kitchen, a girl approaches him with blonde hair and a low cut dress which is far too tight. She smiles at him and touches his shoulder and elbow as she asks him if he is enjoying the party.
I hadn't realised it was a party, he says. Not a real one at least.
She slaps his chest and laughs. He grins at her, but feels taken aback by the force of her blow. Someone interrupts them. A man with a collared shirt and rings on his fingers and a thick square head set upon a short neck. The girl begins to touch this man instead and Luke turns away from them. He moves to the conservatory entrance. It is lit only by the light which spills from the kitchen and is full of groups of girls in twos and threes. Luke leans against a window. It is cold against his back. Three girls on the sofa in front of him discuss film. One blinks slowly. She leans in and touches the other girl's thigh close to the bottom of her skirt. Her smile is only on her mouth and her eyes are dark and still. She sways in the dim light and he swoons against his own drunkenness. Earlier, when he had been sobering up from the first few drinks, he had felt his thoughts grow inside him like the lengthening of shadows at sunset and he felt every dreadful possibility of free will present itself to him, dark and swarming and desperate. He had clenched his fist and started drinking again.
The man moved like a serpent. Twisted his hips side to side, propping himself up with his free hand for balance. He seemed to swim through that blood. Ant had been watching the whole crazy show, swinging his head between the two of them, perhaps deciding which side to take, or perhaps just too damned scared to get involved where a blade was concerned.
I wanted to laugh. I shit you not. In that moment I wanted to fall to my knees laughing. Not because I shouldn't, but because I found the whole scene so genuinely funny. Zach losing his shit. Some dead guy coming back around and attacking him in this apartment room in God knows where with the smell of iron from the blood now driving us all a little crazy.
Six years ago today was the last memory I shared with you, walking to babysit the twins, before we saw that single headlight flickering up on the curb on the street right after ours. And the man beside the car waving his arms like he was guiding a plane on a runway. You said, let's see what he wants and I said, let's just get to the house, the twins are on their own. You punched me in the arm and told me I was no good, and didn't I want to be a good Samaritan? I had been run off my feet all day at work. Taking down rack after rack of CD's and filing them away into cardboard boxes with letters scribbled on the sides with marker pen. The store was closing. I went from boasting about working in the last record store in town to boasting about being the last record store cash-point girl the town would ever see.
The man walked towards us with his hands still raised above his head, his arms swiping like windscreen wipers from his elbows. And he stepped into the blinking beam of light from the single headlamp of his car and the light lit his face and I can remember that big smile and the dark patches of shadow across his face like birthmarks. I described his face to the police woman as handsome, even though I struggled to admit that he was. It was dark but he was handsome and he had a buzz cut and he was tall, I had said.
And I still see that handsome smile, scarred by shadows, in the face of the doctor, the postman, the uncle I have not seen in years, the young man with the motorbike from two doors down, in the patches of dark where streetlamps don't quite hit, the patches of dark my own dreams don't quite fill.
Feel like I clawed my way back inside my head, in behind my eyes. Either pushed some imposter out the way, else filled a vacancy. Been lost beneath the sound of my thoughts. S'pose. Feet are heavy and feel swollen. Eyes pulse slightly; with it, my vision. Come and go. Become aware of my eyes like something foreign. Want to claw at them. Just there enough not to, just there enough to look down at my red stained shirt and this viscous liquid pooling by my heavy feet and shit, my left hand, all bloody and red like the very skin's been peeled off and my fingers are splayed out, stuck there like they aren't my own but I feel myself spill through my body like a computer booting up.
Look up. Dark statues stood there and one of them with these huge wide eyes. He's black but for his eyes. Looks like he's fading into the dark corner about him. Looks like he isn't quite real. My right hand balled in a fist. Balled round something. Don't look cause of this dark creature and his eyes keeping locked on me like he's willing me still. Zach, he says. Zach, what the fuck.
Don't need to look. Memory starts catching me up, attaching itself to me like a shadow. My God, what a shadow. Feel the plastic ribbing of the handle hard against the skin of my palm. Blood or sweat making it real slippy. Feel myself leaving again.
A few things have come up. Not all good, but all interesting. Just finished writing my website, in the process of setting up another blog for my journalism across at heartandnerve.tumblr.com.
I will still be posting some work here, but a lot of it is more focused now, more often ending in a completed product. As a thank you to my few but, I hope, committed followers, I will post one of these stories within the next week.
The bearded man began to hack at the tree I'd pointed at with a short axe whose head was brown with dried mud. He felled it in just four or five short strikes. With one large gloved hand he lifted the fallen thing and thrust it towards us smiling through the thick red hairs around his lips. You got yourself a keeper, a charming little tree. With his free hand he rubbed my hair and a fine powder of dirt fell from his glove. I looked up through my ruffled fringe at the green wings pinched tightly in this man's great paw. Its trunk hovered a foot or so above the ground; Its separation utterly final.
She no longer was the old woman who would shuffle to the door in grey fraying slippers that once were pink, the skin of her ankles greyer yet spilling like hot glass towards her feet. She became something like a projection of myself leading to nowhere. There was the white of the sky with clouds like monochrome flames upon its surface and the dead grass in patches against the dried earth and a naked tree with branches bare of leaf but flocked with some swarm of black birds their wings raised slightly as if poised to give flight and the movement of the cars in the road which in the immediacy of the moment seemed like no movement at all just the shimmering of colour appearing upon a canvas of black and of white. Then there was the sound of her shuffling feet again. A dry scratching which kicked tiny stones into the road before her.
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