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By Root 421 0

shower of shadowing roses, on our plains descend. That was where he was going. He didn’t know why, but the first time he had read these words, in the tattered copy of Thomson’s Seasons the visiting weaver had allowed him to see, his heart had twittered with joy. On our plains descend. The weaver had laughed at his transports, his sudden breathlessness. The weaver was a Methodist and rated Wesley’s hymns far above Thomson’s bucolic pentameters. His copy held only half of ‘Autumn’. All of ‘Winter’ had flaked away. John desperately desired his own volume. He bothered his father for money unrelentingly, hoarded his own pennies, and finally gathered enough.

The bookshop was empty, its blinds down. John sat staring at it in the empty centre of Stamford, listening to a dog bark. He loitered like a thief, hands in pockets, the words dancing along his nerves. Come gentle Spring. Picked up and blown off course, still a child, obsessed by a few words and not knowing why. He sat and waited and almost felt he ought to hide when the owner arrived and unlocked his premises.

He watched until the man had lit his lamps, light softly blooming inside the window, then knocked at the door.

‘Yes? I’m not open yet.’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘What is it, lad?’

‘I have to go, you see, back home. Can you sell me Thomson’s Seasons? I have the money already exactly.’

‘Ah. Oh.’The man looked about him as if searching for an excuse, but couldn’t find one. ‘Very well, very well. Poetry, is it? Give me the money, then.’

‘Yes, yes.’ John scooped the coins out of his pocket and poured them into the man’s hand.

The owner, who within a few years would be publishing John’s first poems at a profit, stood and counted slowly while John danced from foot to foot as though needing to relieve himself. ‘It is exact,’ the man said. He opened a box and parsed the coins into its compartments, then finally took the volume from a table and handed it over.

‘Thank you,’ John said. ‘Good day to you. Thank you,’ and hurried out under the sprinkling notes of the bell.

As he walked back towards Helpston with the book in his hands, not daring to open it until he was somewhere safe, the dawn started to come up, wide and coldly dazzling and raw.

He lay and watched through his window the same ascent of strengthening light.

The maze of a life with no way out, paths taken, places been. He heard his door unbolted, saw a wooden plate of food shoved in.

She lay on the floor of her room and tried to bear it. She could hear them all, could hear the devils in this new place shrieking as they rioted in their hosts, but there was nothing she could do, locked in this foul room. She was exhausted anyway, spent, an excremental husk. No brightness was left by the touch of her fingers.

She lay in her open grave, miles down, with the sharp voices of the place like dim clouds far above. She lay as still as she could. Her heart kept up its hateful slow tread in her chest. Warm tears that gave no relief now and then rolled into her ears, stopped, started again. Ever so slightly, she moved her hands, closed her fingers a fraction and felt the joints creak. An event: her hands’ minute twitch like something killed. She felt killed. Everything felt final. She was covered in death as with a thick paste. She lay at the bottom of this well, stinking of death, on dead wood, enclosed within dead walls, but she wouldn’t die. Everything was terminal and nothing ended. God kept His Presence from her. Unimaginable that it would be otherwise. The idea would have pushed a laugh out of her mouth if she’d had the energy.There was nothing else. Just the empty light moving across the room until it died in the evening and she would again survive it, lying in darkness. Her Silent Watcher stared upwards, saying nothing. She would like to kill herself, if she had the strength or freedom to do so, to take her rotting mind and kill it, to fuse her darkness with the world’s and wait for the music, the wailing, the streaming bloody colours of Judgement Day. Tears made loud thumps and rustles in her ears.

Polly