Sweating, wrapped in rising waves of wet heat, kettle steam from damp grass. When I move, the hot green and the mud beneath folds around me, sucking mulchily at my fingers and the space between my toes. With the noise a tumbler makes, pulled upside-down from suddy washing water, a perceptible space in time and sound and movement in which gravity grapples pressure. Shored up immovable on the perameters of a stagnating body of net-shrouded water, steaming clorophyll tangles of algae and blanket weed and nylon, blanketting stupified pond life.
Some time ago a blonde couple tripped past, naked, falling over their feet and each other’s, tearing the choking vines from a solid tree trunk. Not with purpose, a coincidental brushing past, a grasping, a simply not letting go and a simply not stopping tripping, sheer momentum carrying them inches past the pliable hollow from which my goldfish-silent mouth formed little round ‘o’s. Then they were gone, leaving this blinking tree and my unblinking eyes and their twenty toe dents in the mud.
Elsewhere girls meet boys with beautiful crinkly heavy-lidded eyes and curling lashes and writers create ink and paper versions of their mothers, curtains pulled over smeared single-glazed panes for thirty-four years. Prettier and more purple than real life, these mothers behind their curtains live up on the top shelf and never say you shouldn’t have said that, talk to your father, brush your teeth. Put that down.
