Round 38

38.

It was getting late.

And he had made her laugh.

She said; “You’re funny, stay in the city tonight.”

He said; ”I can’t, I promised my mum.”

She said; ”Good-night, tell your mum you’re weird.”

He took the canal road out of town; the streetlights watched him go.

The motorway was empty; he listened to his dad’s CD in the car.

Bob Dylan.

The Tempest.

But it didn’t rain; the sky was clear and the stars so bright that they looked like crystals falling from someone’s pocket.

The pocket of a thick dark coat.

He turned off and took the road through the forest.

The trees gave him no light, but they too watched as he passed.

A dear was standing in the meadow next to the house where he pulled up.

The deer barked.

And turned away, jumping through the long grass.

He could smell the blossom of the Crab Apple Tree, where the swing still hung.

Even though now he was too old to use it.

Crab Apple.

Acceptance.

He walked across the pathway - washed river stone –and the pebbles crunched under his shoes.

A cat darted towards him from the shadows.

The cat was black.

The shadows too.

He entered the house and left the night outside.

It had no right to enter in.

The night sighed and watched the cat slink back into the shadows.

Across the valley the frogs started calling again, and in the tree the owl that had been silent until now, called back.

The night tumbled down through the trees into the valley and around the pond where the frogs waited.

It was getting late.

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