Sunday, 11 August 2013

OK so I know you're supposed to tell people before any sort of long break in posting...

But this one was kind of unplanned.  Forgive me?
Either way, here's something I wrote and edited at the beginning of the summer to keep you entertained until I've processed all the things I've been writing without access to computers.



I see red.
                Mottled, streaked.  The sun behind my eyelids makes a strange pattern.
                I’m leaning on my hands, sitting back on a rough picnic blanket, bathed in sunshine.  We’re in the park, it’s crowded with families and friends but we have our own island.
                Twenty metres in front of me, there are dancers in the rapture of classic 40s music.  It would nice to be them.
                Behind me, to my left, a group with drums and tambourines, weaving intricate rhythms through the hubbub of chatter and laughter.  Next to them some people with discs and pins and other circus trappings.
                Footballs and frisbees fly and roll around, the gentle thud as foot connects with ball and the ring of calls to the other players cut through the air.
                A breeze washes over me, a welcome variety to the insistent caress of the sun.
                I open my eyes.
                There are five other inhabitants of the island surrounded by grass.  Three well known, two less so.  One is learning tarot, reading the fate of another not here. Two gossip, two read, and then there’s me.
                The tarot reader talks of gains and losses, apathy and faith.  The cards are hopeful, she thinks, head deep in a book that tells their meaning.
                The gossips giggle over a friend’s folly.  Deep in discussion and intensely interested in the other’s opinions and stranger’s situations.  I don’t know them well, but their talk is a portal to a parallel world of scandals and sweetness.
                The readers are intent, silent.  They are building fortresses of imagination around themselves, another universe that they will escape and destroy as soon as they shut their books.

                And I sit, and stretch, and see.

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