Tales from the edge of the morning sky

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She could see their forms shiver and shimmy. She stepped closer. Her self belief was not unsurprised by what she was seeing: two people bound together by time, place-and not a little love.

The wind whispered again, hushing her doubts aside  as she stepped closer towards them. She could see through their opaqueness: the edge of the lagoon, and the grey-blue waters still and quiet under a fresh western sky. Beyond, and stretching behind them, was the beach itself, like a great arm separating sky and sea, past and present, now and then.

They turned as if they could see her, he beckoned her towards them both. His eyes full with belonging, his hand waving, almost urgently.

She walked again, closer, and yet closer, leaving Cassie whimpering further and further behind.

She walked past them, they flickered and faded as she went by, and as she looked at the gravestone, standing and yet tilted, deep in long grass and covered with tears of moss, lichen and split into a mosaic of cracks and fissures. She reached out and touched the cold, wet, damp stone and rubbed the green fur of centuries, away from the inscriptions and read:

‘Mohune, Emily, b. 1746 d. 1796. Mohune, John, b. Unknown,d.1796.’

She read further, and in doing so, dared not to look at the two figures standing behind her, but feeling them step closer, she read on:

‘Life giveth and taketh, returning all who live to the beckoning sea, waste not your days, and heed the wind, for your chime of hours, is what is left to be.’

She felt a mere whisper, a breath of wind behind her back. She turned slowly fearing what she might not be able to see.

John and Emily stepped back from the gravestone. They had walked from the wreck, left the wounded and broken, the bloated dead that lay strewn across the beach, their bones shattered, their organs pummelled, their bodies abandoned beneath the unforgiving skies, across the  breached and storm -battered berm.

It was too much, knowing they had each other, but others had lost their own  lives, slipping through the storm that had separated what was alive to that which never would be. One to the past, the other to a future neither would remember.

They walked up the beach, to the edge of the marram grass, across their spiky crests, to the dunes that rippled and fell until they came into the lee of the wind, and the pathway that led them through the silver birches and bristles of Scot’s pine, through sheltered oases of silence  towards the nestling church.

‘I’d not remembered this,’ she said,’Our names must be here, unless this is finally the now where we both belong.’

He held her tightly, he couldn’t let her go again. He pointed at the figure still peering at the gravestone. Fading now, she was a mere grey smudge upon the stone, a shadow or pall that seemed to collapse into the gathering darkness.

‘She might,’ he nodded as if only talking to himself, ‘I mean she might remember us before she too turns upon this way again.’

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She turned and walked back from the beach. Everyone had long since gone. The storm had passed, the skies were  clear once again, and the wind had settled into restful sighs across the silver birches. The trees were still and yet crooked, bent and twisted with their boughs and branches in repose after surviving another bout with the seasonal storms that raced up this battered coast.

The path was small, she had not taken the tourist one, the direct route, instead  she followed the sunken one, the one that meandered through the wheat fields, along the high hedges that edged the rippling folds and furrows of fields, copse and sky.

Cassie ran ahead, turning, pausing, sniffing, following an invisible pattern of smells and traces that bound her instincts to territories of the hidden world around her.

She could just see the church, the original one, the one that had been flooded, wrecked and mauled by the storm of 1776. Only the nave remained, now a chapel surrounded by tilted and ancient gravestones that stood like sentinels against all that time could offer. Belief in life beyond the tide.

She followed the sandy path, the rabbit clipped grass either side, the droppings marking the places where they danced in the late evening sun. She passed the silver birches, their leaves shimmering in myriads of silver shadows upon the old red bricked wall. It leaned to one side, roots and subsidence having dislodged bricks that had galled into the sandy loam.

The gate to the back of the churchyard was ajar. Broken and battered, it swung lightly upon ancient hinges, with soft sigh and whispers of the empty wind.

They were standing together over the double grave stone. He was leaning his head on her shoulder, she had her arm around his waist. He was  bent and traced his hands over the letters hidden behind centuries of weathering, moss and incalculable seasons of cycles of summer and winter.

Cassie whimpered and lay down not wanting to go closer.

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He paused, scratched his head with his pen, as if to recall something he had forgotten 

‘…and,’ he stuttered,‘something has turned up at the church, over the last few months, we’ve had reports of moving lights at night. Youths probably, come down from the caravan park, drinking, playing ghosts, larking around.’

She turned fully and looked him directly in the face. 

‘He is young, almost too young to keep the law, never mind enforce it,’ she thought to herself

‘Is there a connection? Between that and…,’ 

She paused, hesitated, sighing at the release of the stress over the past hours- not least from the interviews and cameras that had poked her privacy, as well as asking her the same questions about what she had discovered until there were no more answers any different than the one she repeatedly gave.

‘You know the smuggling history along this coastline, the shipwrecks, the beach and the flooded church…’

Her voice trailed off. The mystery of it all sounded too real, too familiar somehow, almost like a predictable television after nine show.

‘ I don’t know. But we do have a missing person, an abandoned car, and a wreck of bones dragged from who knows where,’ he paused himself, then added,‘and when.’

Behind them, the waves had lessened in their intensity, the roar and rage of the shingle had shifted to a hiss and rattle. The crowd of people had thinned. The tideline was mostly of broken wood, seaweed and fragments of casings, caskets and long thin bends of binding metal.Twisted and rusted they pointed, wildly, madly, at shattered bottles, brown glass and thin arms of a myriad of twigs and branches that had piled in heaps from the retreating tide.

‘How do you trace a missing person who you know has abandoned his life, his time, and probably drowned in the sea?’ He asked.

‘Time will tell,’ she mumbled almost to herself.

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Kent

The cherry blossom 

fell, along 

the garden paths, 

and  upon others, 

that lay, 

still, quiet 

and hidden, 

among the thickening shadows, 

beneath 

the stretching hands 

of trees. 

For he walked, 

slowly now, 

remembering footsteps 

of those 

who walked 

with him, 

upon evenings,

like this one, 

warmth in the heart 

of sunlight, 

his treasure 

of life 

this time,

and memories

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A fist of leaves

For is not time dawn itself?

Having shaken the stars from a now empty sky, she now races to catch the night before the call of day, dancing, skipping, gathering the shadows fleeing before her catch, her catch gathered in a bag, in fists of leaves and abandoned trees, the rooftops reflect and mirror the first touch of sunlight, the slow rise of breakfast fires, the first call and echo of the last of black and birds, singing loud and brightly, the night reclining to a lulling sleep, 

Dawn dances to the last, a flood of gold, red and passing, a mourning empty of cloud, clutching her bag of stars and shadows, she lifts the lid of morning, and slides beneath the rising light of day, to other side of dreams, life and the twilight hush of dark before a smiling, familiar moon.

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The helicopter flew low, hovering above the breaking tide. The ship was a bleached skeleton of former seaworthiness. Fragments of sail and broken masts, collapsed and shattered, lay at broken angles and forgotten shapes, upon the seaweed and barnacle encrusted former deck.

The press had long since left. Leaving a sense of puzzlement and cheapness amongst the temporary beach combers. They grouped and haggled along the retreating tide, looking for meaning and hidden discoveries in the centuries old flotsam and jetsam that bobbed and begged with the incoming waves. 

The ship was not large, but looked more so as it lay like a collapsed and  broken dragon across the raised pebble beach.

Cassie and her owner stood over the abandoned clothes, heads down pawing and shuffling sand, still wondering at what had happened, she spoke again to the bewildered officer, himself looking as if he alone had survived the storm.

‘Is that it? They take their pictures, broadcast their videos and leave us here, abandoned? What about the missing man? His car?’

She shook her head, as if shaking it for answers thinking alone couldn’t find.

‘No ma’am, it’ll be an ongoing investigation now: missing person or suspected suicide. We just don’t know.’

He paused and looked at Cassie digging and sniffing around and under the clothes, growling in low murmurs of canine dissatisfaction.

‘We can’t trace the car to an owner apart from it was hired from AVIS and never returned. The key belongs to the church, although the warden has what he thought was the only one- the original from 1772. The village family emblem, shaped like a ‘Y’ and the date are inscribed on each side.The key left in the car is the same key, but without the rust and dents of age. 

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The Wasp

It’s colder now, wings heavy, skies too grey for warmth life, and blossom, and still the wasp moves, struggling in spluttering steps across the broken stones. The fruits have fallen, time and leaf lie together, upon the frozen, naked ground.

And though summer has passed away, and the dark is growing, through the clouded broken glass, I can still see the garden, the empty hands of abandoned trees, the colours of spring, piled amongst rope, recognition and roots. 

The broken fence has slipped further, underneath the fading stubs of bricks, the shattered  remains of a summer house from yesteryear, overgrown now, with bramble, brier and blackberry bushes.

And still the wasp crawls closer. 

Can it see me, my face peering, beyond my reflection, deeper into the fall and beyond to the frosted moon and glass?

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War is 

and coming,

a thunder-scratch

across humanity’s 

eye

Evil rises, 

the black hooded horror 

of blindness 

an endless serpent 

swallowing, 

screaming 

death

no more

Ravens circle, 

life.

ravenously 

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The Meadow

A meadow full 

of memories, 

the faded colours 

of summer, rest 

upon the skeletal 

hands and leaves, 

for summer whispers 

to autumn:

‘For now is here,

take this,

my time away,

for I wish not 

yet for Spring, 

for fall 

and sleep

I must,

to dream again

come May.’

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Here

He somehow felt the woman sag aside him. Heard a sigh of incredulity and the dull low growl of the two dogs, as he himself turned and looked for himself in the direction of the storm.

Then

‘It is done,’ Emily whispered, exhausted into his ear. Her voice as far away as the time he’d left behind.’The rest will come back upon the next tide- and then all will be counted upon the last of waves.’

She lowered her head still further and sobbed against his chest.

Here

There was a ship. With battered sails, broken masts: it was grey, and shattered and somehow out of place. Somehow there was a localised storm around it: a fist of wild wind and heavy rain that knotted in clenches of broken sky about it.

She looked across the lagoon, heard the wind roar and the deep rumble of the stones slip against each other as the waves and tides lifted the battered vessel up and onto the bank.

There were gasps and cries of disbelief as the lens of storm and weather seemed to fold in on itself, like an eye blinking in disbelief against the coming of night.

Then

‘John! John!Look!’ He caught the sudden urgency in her voice, the loss of intimacy that had for a brief moment brought them, at last, together.

She pulled his hand and moved away from him. Incredulously, he saw what she himself doubted, the storm was abating and with it the ship was somehow fading. Losing shape and form, colour and structure, it was simply dissipating, becoming thinner until it fell back into the mist and fog of tides and time out of view. 

‘What on earth..’ John ran after her and stood amongst the flotsam and jetsam, the barrels and boxes, the sodden caskets abandoned jars and containers. A few survivors struggled to get up, their clothes heavy, countenances shocked, pale and exhausted turned to look at where they were running, stumbling sliding down the pebbles, down to the edge of the receding tide.

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