Tag Archives: secret

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Fieldwork

She found the small black marbles again, not that she’d lost them of course. They lived, making occasional ripples, in a secret jar she kept away from most people.

It was time to open the jar. She placed them on the floor in front of her but couldn’t decide what material would constitute the floor. Was it concrete, was it slate? Most likely stone and she sat there for an indeterminate amount of time rolling the marbles around her palm.

Despite their smallness they were heavy, dense, maybe made of osmium, some were tungsten, some were onyx but most hurt her hand with their insistent mass.

She studied them, placed them on the glass sheet in front of her and leaned over. If she was quiet and still she could almost make out her reflection, some distortion, something hinted at, a ripple in time then dispersed. 

The marbles were moved by her hands, arranged in rows though she knew they wouldn’t stay. 

Sometimes they clattered into each other and ricocheted off at sharp angles feeling the force of the ones with which they’d collided.

She tried again. Lining them up in order of size, then in mass. And if they stayed in a pattern she’d be fine. She noted there was no weather, no movement of air, just the tiny black spheres feeling no friction, moving of their own accord on the dark glass in front of her.

She wondered if they had any sense of their movement and if they did, would they care? She tried to imagine how they might feel, rotating on their planes and never understanding the formula of their volume. Why would they roll with no awareness of their form, how could they just be marbles, insentient, presenting themselves to her over and over and over again.

And again.

Discrete excitations, forming patterns in her field. Around and around, crashing and clashing, firing into each other as if to say, 

‘Look at us, watch us,’ and although she didn’t want to order them on the glass and although she knew they’d refuse her actions, that they’d make their own way, she did try. 

She tried to understand them, to control them. 

She wanted to make sense of them all if she could.

Like she did, like she does, like she will try again. 

Black marbles in her hands, heavy, chaotic, despite her attempts. Around and around again. She kneeled before them, helpless, committed to their action, trying.

On repeat, kneeling down in her layers of grey skirts, soft, bundled up against the hard coldness of the stone. Her skirts, in contrast to tiny dense black marbles every time. Vibrations in a field, patterns connected through space and time. 

And she played with marbles again; it was some kind of mid February fluctuation.

by

Tucked Away

The radiator warmed the back of her thighs as the winter afternoon crept towards night. She waited for the tightness to ease out, for her muscles to relax. It had been such a bright day but she needed rain.

She wanted that cold, end-of-year rain to bounce off the supermarket car park tarmac, for the lights to fracture and sparkle like they did, for car tail-lights to be the only colour as she walked, as she headed to the pharmacy.

…

Her red fleece top kept out the cold but not the rain and of course she didn’t care. Rushing around the aisles afterwards, her right pocket stuffed, she patted it to keep it safe. She rustled, she became oblivious to rain, such that it became her well loved trademark.

And later, a little later, back home, she was the one who fractured and sparkled. She sat on the sofa and in the soft glow of the TV babble she felt like she lit up the room. 

…

She left the heat of the radiator and peeped outside to the blackness. Make it rain, she whispered to her window, to her street. Make it rain. Please.

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Under The Circles Falling

She past a new build on the left and brushed against its huge star in the window. She remembered when the trees were there, when animals hid and insects crept in the hollows of branches that had now gone.

Something about the star gave her hope, gave her a lilt, a swell of a young girl’s life and of family filling the rooms.

And she past by. The sky was swollen, saturated with an end of year rain, with a harsh rain that sliced at pavements, that peeled away the last of the year. And in her mind she was younger, she was hope filled like the fields around her. She was surprised by its sudden lush greenness, like the woman she used to be waving to her from back then.

And back then she was packed, a small bag just for one night and they would stay in the hotel that they loved. She was there in the bright white bathroom, hair curled and velvet dress. It clung to the curve of her belly, to the secret kept inside. And when the time came she would tell him, she would sit on the bed and smile. In fact she glowed, she sparkled and trembled as though she were made of the stars themselves and they laughed. After all their moments this one was the purest, the connection and the gift frozen in time, in the warmth of her hand and his lopsided grin – they were there.

She was back in the unfolding of the night, clicking up the high street in her heels. And with flat black pumps for the journey back down, they walked to the restaurant for the meal. Sometimes now when she past by the same place, huddled at the back of a bus, she would look left to the cream tiled floor and remember the DJ in the corner and the song played just for them.

She was there. Dear God, she was there and right now as she bumped along a wet road in the present, she was back there, beaming, like her soul would fly, bursting from her side.

And later she slipped into the flat shoes as they wandered back down town, to the call of the Cathedral bells. How still the night seemed, yet how full of an energy that she could taste. It bristled around them in the gentle rain, before they made phone calls, before their new journey began.

She was there, at the end of the century, slipping into the new day, softened into it like his hand in hers, as though woven into the time. And always, despite the hours, they would be there. It was their moment, in the darkness, smiling under screeching fireworks, white stars just for them.