'Entertaining strangers'

Sculpture by Charlie Mackesy

(Originally published in Point Bloc's first anthology)

 

There was an aching precision in the trajectory of the man with the camping rucksack and ragged ponytail, who always walked backwards, muttering and somehow dodging the black bins and the parked- up Volvos and the sandwich boards. He was oblivious to the glares he elicited. 

She averted her eyes when he marched on by, whilst she was perched - against her mum’s wishes - on one arm of the divan in the apartment the two of them shared. 

Next to the woven placemat in the middle of the coffee table in that lounge were a few candles, two glasses of juice, plates, and a vase with some wilting tulips submerged in murky water. None too soon, her mum whirled in from the kitchen with the centrepiece. A casserole dish with offal lipped by blood - the product of ravaging, draining, stealing from that self-same April evening steeped in loveliness and flecked with apple blossom. 

She resented how her mum slurped the juice so, with those greasy and urgent puckered lips. She resented how wide her mum’s hollow cheeks now bulged and swelled to accommodate the chunks of pig’s heart that her talons had ripped off and shovelled in. The girl, she shuffled down onto the seat and picked in degrees at the flesh, her other claws scrunched up and nested into the deep and soft carpet to suppress her slow-burning contempt of it all.

**** 

The whirring procession of birch trunks and dappled shade, and the rasping breaths of his two fading loves was interrupted by the descending, beating slivers of white, landing just metres in front. Be not afraid. The two towering and wan womanish figures looked at the man, and yet he lived.  In the placid mastery of atonement, to dash against imbalance, the visitants’s outstretched arms clutched the soul of the woman whose veering car he had swerved and crashed into the ditch to avoid. They flew on relentlessly, hell-bound.

****

This. This abyss so wide was Tartarus for the man who walked as if trying to reverse time; he was caught in stasis, at the bargaining stage of grief, reckoning with their handiwork. He was alive and alone with a mind that throbbed with tender longing for his wife and for his son, crawling, with all his strength, along an arc with the stubborn insistence that it would tend towards his idea of justice; one that grated deafeningly with her mum’s. 

Hope fell in that still, small moment when the windswept truth landed in the girl’s lap: that she was condemned to do that which failed to bring unrealities to fruition - but would be forever unable to fix this, and restore his family rather than punish the guilty woman. With opened eyes, she set her teeth into a ripened sorrow.