Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

I read somewhere, or maybe heard on the radio, that an animal starved in youth will devote the remainder of its life to the pursuit of eating.

The statue of St Joseph is missing several of his digits, as if St Joseph were once the victim of a ransom that took too long to be paid.

What it means is that even the tattered verges are depositories of celebration and devastation in unequal measure.

See how the hedge-trimming tractor has left a trail of massacred vegetation in its wake. Flowers with their throats slit and berries chopped, popped.

But meaning doesn’t exist unless you look for it, and so I mustn’t look, and so things will not mean.

we watch the sycamore’s crashed helicopters dithering in the dirt, trying desperately to lift into the air again, ignoring their broken rotors.

There’s a great mob of rooks scavenging a freshly shorn field, delving for gold nuggets amongst the gold spikes. Now they rise altogether to the ear-splitting pop of an invisible scarer.

At night, the sheep look like walking headstones.

‘Speak up, old man,’ I said. ‘What did you tell her?’ But my father didn’t answer, of course, and of course it didn’t matter. I knew anyway. Whatever the name of the woman who drove me home, I knew my father told her I’d run away, and wouldn’t come back, and couldn’t be found. Because I wasn’t a right-minded little boy. I wasn’t all there. I was special. See how that explains why nobody came to ring the bell again? It explains why I never started school, never lined up with all the other little boys and girls, all those all there and right-minded and unspecial. It explains why I never got a chance to play on the straightforward swings and slides and see-saws. Now do you see?

If the roof had been insulated there would have been yellow pillows of spun glass upon which to lay him out, but it wasn’t and there weren’t, and that was my father’s fault.