pine | Janey L Foster

Her mother’s best table cloth, the awkward smile over chicken salad or was it ham?

Churchyard trees smelt of Radox, pine crumbled in her hand.

Closed restaurant, tattered menu through the window reflecting them.

The lager soaked pub carpet, did she mention modern art, and lost her train of thought?

The Mason’s Arms, the slight hill by the Job Centre.

In Brueton Park the aviary was empty, a sense of space, of absence in the caged birdshit and lost feathers.

And from the bench the mowed grass, sap full, fell away from them like rolling years then stopped at the sudden gate.

Red t-shirt in the evening, pushing chicken round a ceramic bowl. Trying to be elegant. White cold stone, little Bistro walls, The Fat Cat in Solihull, it’s probably a nail bar now or tattoo parlour.

Later. The quiet house. The Fleur de Lys of her parent’s sofa. Running her finger over its edge.

The kettle boiled, she turned to him, she felt the kitchen cupboards up her back before she made the tea.

The chime of her parent’s mantelpiece clock, the weave on his fair isle jumper.

These things.

She dropped by to watch them as though it wasn’t decades ago.

She listened hard to the sparrow chirp outside her window and if she went deep down inside its beak, she would fall on the sweet sounds and they would propel her up, back out to an earlier day.

There on the notes of a different bird and a distant window, and there she would lie waiting for the day to unfold. And younger, thicker hair would grace her pillow and the old kitchen chair beside her bed, borrowed as a clothes rail would be covered in the bright clothes she used to wear. The leggings and silk shirts, half folded and waiting and there just to the right of her un-stretched womb was the red t-shirt ready for the day.

And sparrows called out from neat gardens, tended, they flitted past the bedroom window, a moment’s shadows where she lay. The candlewick bedspread, a well worn lime green, would be scrumpled at her feet and she’d get up, pull herself to standing, slight and small.

Birds cheeped loud as she smoothed her black waitscoat and somewhere else, unseen by her, somewhere two hours away, he pulled out his best jumper from the drawer.

Birds would have sung over his head as he climbed into the Orion and as they startled up into the air, he drove the distance between them.

Until. Her hand on the brass door handle and he appeared.

And quiet churchyards and pine trees waited and park benches came and went. And in her red t-shirt, in corners of restaurants, the huge salad bowls bought the evening. Till birds slept in trees, huddled and her mind buzzed with the hours, with his words.

The sparrow chirped outside her window and she came up and out, on its song, hung in the air, like its carefree notes and remembered when they were young.