flendysshe

from well – assembled

“What I thought was the first star turned out to be the night light for a plane coming into Luton.”

–– Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, 2012

When the sky frowns at dusk, you scuttle gravel up dad’s twilit lane, with every stride the past about you ossifying. Undergrowth whispers the day’s secrets, thistle and hush. A wan light sinks between the trees. Latch-click and creak, close. The gate swings slow, carving its phantom arc continuous with, moving through, unmoving greyness. Day’s hard light leaks from chipping mortar, cracks in dry stone wall, misting down at vision’s limits, softening things into themselves. This someplace, elven scene, all parsed myth and ashen. Ken stretched thin.

When the night draws in, young, and the forest beyond the hollow’s limits darkens, and comes alive. Childhood folklore bristling at the edgeland, Scots pine feet. Bright-eyed horror: that wyrm in the outbuilding bog flicking again an electric tongue at your plimsolled heels. That sow’s skull, wrapped in hazard tape and memory. Dug up from three feet deep but garbled lengthwise along the village mile; so came to pass mass murder in Flendysshe, and wild boar out dusken rooting. There are hundreds of these places where the earth is tangled haystacks and bonfires’ charred sootprints –– every footfall further cracks Playmobil limbs and shards of vodka bottlenecks, their peeling labels. Perimeter trees adorned with fairy lights, long fatigued but still aglow, ghoulish under clear full moons. Wayward nails on fenceposts are the trailsigns, if only you could read the rust. Of the owl-king’s fortnight dominion they would speak, his mighty works and treetop palace skipped, unspared: the filthy long sleeve tee, erstwhile royal standard daubed in ready-mix primary paints, still shivers in the branches. They know of botched allotments, warn of boggarts in the compost heaps whose laughter howls through rubber piping, and hung on them are dog-chewed trainers, lacquerboards with misspelled portents, disregarded bras from teenage carport lovemaking through long red evenings. You can breathe here. These muddy jigsaw tracts, weedy rus, ramshackle urbe, the last outpost of fable. And sharing all a tainted sky specked there by stars or static satellites. Standing still, the movements beyond the hedgerow start up again once more, unseen.