Deryn Rees-Jones

Fires | Erratum

ERRATUM

Peter, 3.5

We had driven to the woods. Only a walker, occasional, nosed the world’s corners. You pulled me down: mud, leaf-mulch, moving shade and shadow.

Let me start again. You took my hand and we agreed. We’d walked the long way to the burning copse. I saw myself being set alight, my face blackened to a shroud of bees. Look up, I said, the sky splintering through evergreens. You were bending me slowly, then, across a fallen tree trunk. We were all error,

slippage. You were a song and its singing. We were a burning corpse. Or was it the light, those soft explosions, blowing us open a note in the breeze. Do you recall? Your coat was a bear-skin on the young wet grass. I thought of Blodeuwedd and her face of flowers. I remembered silence that was never a silence; the woods inching into being around us, the green powder of algae from treebark, staining my cheeks, my lips, my hands, my knees.

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