The Man’s Life
The birds have been here for ages; spiked black shapes flitting across cloud and blue the same way for millennia. Countless eyes have watched countless crows and since the start of my time in this field I’ve been stretching my arms out towards them.
I was placed here by the man’s parents to watch over their bristling wheat but I have memories from before my body was made. I remember being the seeds of the cotton plants that made my waistcoat and hat. Waiting in the dark soil was a lifetime in itself. I can remember my stuffing when it was long grass drying in a barn. In the afternoons, the barn floor would stripe over with rectangular bars of gold. I remember being the metal of the pole that holds me up, before it was shaped, laced in the rock of sleeping mountains.
And I remember the man as a baby, a bundle of blankets with a face older than his years. For a while he didn’t talk, but then it seemed in the blink of an eye he was running and shouting, sometimes to no one but the sky who listened patiently. There were no other children for miles around so he’d talk to me, sitting at the base of my pole and asking questions I couldn’t answer. Sometimes he read out entries from his diary, a worn blue book that took him years to fill with his small writing. He was always precise, disliking the way time moulds change. Eventually, he took over the fields from his parents. He kept all the crops the same, and kept me too.
He worked on his own after his parents died. No one visited. The view of the distant kitchen window never altered, a vase in the same position, full of orange flowers in summer. He cried the week the milkman died, when the man who whistled down the lanes in the mornings became a different man. I would have cried too, if I could.
Bleach
As the man grew older, the sun marked his skin with wandering wrinkles. It bleached my waistcoat and hat, made the paint on my button-eyes peel. The sun has always been here to make birds into spiked shadows. It was there to raise me from the ground when I was just grass and cotton plants, and I watched it urge the crops in these fields to life, feeding the man and his parents.
I have a dread, so strong that sometimes I think my arms must be spread out in despair; a sense that the sun is dying. Every single moment it grows weaker, with no one to notice. The dread fills me so much that most days I can’t concentrate on anything else. Just as the red of my hat bleaches, the sun loses its gold, fading away, and it’s been happening since the start of it all. The eye of the man can’t see it. A beetle wouldn’t notice. Any day now, it’s the sun’s turn to leave. Each sunset I worry it won’t come back. But night to the sun is just a blink, not the close, of its eye.
Beetle’s Fall
There was one beetle I knew particularly well. She was born, amongst many brothers and sisters, inside my head. I’ve always hated insects making a home in me, as if I’m an empty scaffold. No heart, no brain, they remind me; living their fast and hectic lives that burn out like shooting stars. Whilst the rest of her siblings left for greener pastures, this beetle stayed, parading over my straw synapses to scramble thoughts, making me itch from the inside. In the man’s measure of time, it was only a few days the beetle marched. To me, it was an eternity of frustration, until one moment when she lost her footing, and the straw in my neck gave way to emptiness.
She tumbled through long tunnels between my stuffing, like dropping through wormholes in space. Her ridged back bumped on rough edges and everything was black with speckles of daylight shining through my waistcoat like spinning suns. She kept falling until she slammed onto the cool surface of my metal pole. She clung on, not knowing night from day or life from death. Soon after, her body stopped for good. Neither man nor sun noticed. There is no funeral for something so short-lived.
Weaving
I remember watching the man weaving a basket outside his back door, on a day halfway through his life. He had learnt the skill from his father, who had learnt from his. The man was pulling a short knife across long, thin strips of bark, a motion that seemed to slow time. He was muttering to himself in a way that made me think about how he used to talk as he sat beside me, blue tattered notebook open in his lap. This was a long while before the day he stopped still in his kitchen, collapsing out of sight behind the vase of orange flowers.
The way the sun was glinting on the pale underside of the bark, there one moment, gone the next, made me certain it was dying that day. A crow’s shadow tumbled over the angles of the man’s face and a feeling of dread dropped through my insides. I was sure it could all end, all of this, right then. My arms splayed out at my sides, I wanted to cry out to the man, tell him to never stop pulling his blade along the curling ribbons of wood, never stop weaving them together, to catch the sun spinning with all its light inside this moment and never let it end.
Lucy Smith is a short fiction writer from North West England, currently based in Wales where she has completed an MA in Creative Writing, two writing residencies, and co-written an audio story. She is creator of Talking Ink, a podcast showcasing flash writers and poets, and runs community writing workshops. Her work has appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Popshot Quarterly, Palm-Sized Press, Lost Balloon, Cease, Cows and more. Her fiction has won awards from Legend Press and Lancaster University. Find Lucy at @lucysmithwriter and lucysmithwriter.wordpress.com.
Photo by Mateusz Raczynski on Unsplash.
