Summer (Part I)

I open my backpack and inside are children’s colouring books and pencils, crayons and drawings from the fridge door. I search my son’s room and find the implements needed for a napalm bomb. A fuse leads to a wardrobe newly crafted into the stone wall. Within it I discover TNT and dynamite in a hoard larger than my body, stacked beneath a poster of wily the coyote, whose face has been laced with NAZI symbols and a Republican badge. I tear down the poster and behind is a window to a purple night.

The stars glinted as if breathing beside a moon crescented on both sides without a centre. The light was falling on my fingernails which I knew would break if I stood there for too long so I fell to the floor. I fell through the foundations of this house which I thought was mine and into a dustbowl city where orange light, dirtied by an unpunished crime, shed shadows onto soot covered walls. Evil feathers seemed to drift down from unseen birds which filled the sky, their cries unheard and silent but deafening to touch and the feel of the noise they made buried itself within my mind. My brain was screaming to my body and I knew I was trapped as if by some unconscious desire to stay inside myself.

A teenager lights a flare before me and sends it to burst beneath the clouds. I thought it was hope, but it’s only anger. And all around me adults cry like babies with fear whilst children dig trenches into the pavement as if preparing for war. Suited skeletons lie on pillows which surround elegant couches and sofas, the wisps of incense disguises their true form.

Samuel Dodson