Resist The Urge To Put The Sea Glass Into Your Mouth

by Christina Neuwirth

A soft fresh bird, dead, as if sleeping, underneath the concrete ramp when I step outside to get better signal.

A silk throw as a wall rug, covering a blossoming of mould.

The black spikes on a railing, slipping in between the bones of my hand, the bones connecting my forefinger and middle finger to my wrist.

The pettiness of injustice, a petticoat, a car crashing into a pair of knees, a double decker bus slowly toppling over.

Inflation making your bank balance worthless overnight.

Losing everything on a sunny day with pop music.

I didn’t know the road was blocked and ran straight into the barbed wire fence.

And where were you when you got the phone call?

I was in a duty free shop in an airport putting Keira Knightley perfume onto my wrists. There was a whole wall of cigarette packets, each box decorated with an image, like a collectible sticker album of ways to die.

I was catching a chicken in the long grass with my arms out like I was also a bird.

I drove the large quiet hire car straight into the trunk of the tree they had cut down.

I had never before understood why, in the fairy tale about how to be a good woman, one of the incarnations of the girl feels sorry for the apple tree that is hanging so heavy with apples, but I suddenly got it; because even just the sight of it made me feel sad, kind of like imagining a big marrow in my grandmother’s garden a few weeks after she died, split open at the seam and woody inside, or how I feel having to put the tights in the wash that still smell of someone else’s fabric softener.

The grass is silky and there is moss, too, so the lawn is never dry. The thing that is chasing me is coming quietly and slowly and I try to assess the drop of the slope before I skid down and lift up one of the trap doors into the wooden tunnel. The trap door is rotting and soft but inside the floor is reasonably solid. I feel like I’m a domino in a box, clacking against the sides as I bump my head on the ceiling. I can hear it slowly getting closer and so I edge along the tunnel. I drag my legs and the wood is so rough that even through the thick denim of my jeans I get a long splinter stuck in the fleshy part of my knee, finger deep under the skin skimming the knee cap. The tunnel is built into the hill but then stretches out on stilts into the valley, it has dropped ladders and small windows. I know that the thing that is chasing me will still find me here but I feel I ought to at least try to get away. There is a second floor under me now and I see a flat rabbit with no bones edge along fluidly. Where was I when I got the phone call? I was in the third floor of a rickety treehouse escape route with wind coming in through the cracks.


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Beneath the Bog of Time