This Is Not A Test

I tried to cover my eyes. Even though it’s not too dark in here, when the door opens sunlight floods right in and sometimes it can be blinding. He had his back to it, but it got me like an atomic flash. I squinted past him and he laughed low, from his belly. And when I closed my eyes, the shape of him burned there in the centre, like he was all the world.

Gravity

He doesn't know how to take what she's said. He thinks he needs to just sit here a while longer and try to figure things out. She is running circles with the others, playing freeze tag. Half his friends are statues. He leans back against the wall and bits of stone fall in his hair. He knows he should feel heavy right now, but her laughter makes him weightless.

Time Travel Is Possible

She draws a line in the dirt. Whatever happens he has to stay on his side. They sit cross-legged, knees almost banging. The line is a table tennis net between them. It is a spiderweb.

Conservation Area Please Keep Out

There’s a space the size of a matchbox that nobody else knows about. It’s hidden underneath piles of old clothes and books. There are old cassette tapes scattered around, some of the ribbons unravelled and spilling out, words and music coming slowly undone. There’s a part of him in that space that doesn’t exist anymore. The part that was happy. The part that was loved by her.

The Right Words Will Always Come Back

You write on brown paper bags. Sometimes it is just a few lines, sometimes it is more. Other times, it will just be a single word, and you will choose this word carefully, like you are choosing the only flower you will ever be able to look at for the rest of your life.

You don’t write in biro. Biro can survive water, and you need these words to be ephemeral, you need them to be as fragile as the thoughts behind them. You need to know they can be washed away with tears, that they will bleed into pretty patterns before they disappear completely.

Once they’re gone, you imagine the journeys they will make. The wind might catch a paragraph and sneak it into the tallest tree. There it will whisper to the birds, teach them a new song. A sentence might find its way into the pink hands of a child, as it crunches on cola cubes. A word might find itself part of a shopping list, and nestle there a little out of place, between bread and toothpaste, above bananas.

Your words will always be remembered, somehow. Even when washed away, even when the ink of them is just a swirl of an idea in a puddle, what’s important will go on, picking up pace like a downhill snowball, or a runaway train. Your words will go down the track, finding their way back to the one they were meant for.

And one day, a bird will sit on a windowsill, and like a postcard it will sing your words. And they will be heard, and absorbed, and kept for a lifetime in the soft rooms of someone’s heart.

By The Time It Gets Dark All This Will Be Gone

He rolls pebbles under his hand so that they clink against each other in the dirt. In this light, I can only see the movement, not the details. The line of his arm draws my eye to the ground. He tells me something just crawled over his foot and I scream and he laughs and says, Just Ambiguity. And I know it’s a word and he’s trying to be clever, but all I can think about is how many legs an Ambiguity might have.

Everything Can Be Broken

So you take one rock and put your hand on it and with a pencil draw round the outline. You do it enough times that the lines are nice and thick and there is no mistaking that what you've drawn is a hand. You place it by the side of the path, half in the grass. You stare at it every time you come here, hoping one day you forget about it and it surprises you.