24: Bolt

Grabbits -------- Filks Wagon ----------- Thoughts meandering sound the beginning of a folk tale. You know the one of the bread and butter left on the breakfast table in a now empty house with the front door swaying open in the breeze. Tracks and footfall in the mud, a scrap of fresh skin found on a bolt protruding from the outside face of the garden wall, a specimen: scraped from something leaving at speed? Was a life of pottering and wandering in the garden quickly smothered by an invasion of this sacred space, and in turn became a catalyst for new convictions that formed a plan pointing directly at the nearby Fair? A place that perpetually vacillates between dusk and dawn, and soaks the woods with PA announcements of children lost, cars mis-parked, that are themselves drenched by another set of loudspeakers blasting into the clearing the sound of a train hitting a wall 50ft square 6ft deep made entirely of mucus, the only remaining recording of the 1950s spectacle the Fair had originally made its name by. Hey there time how are you? Am I too part of the ‘real’ amusements in this scenery? Which circling hand am I seared to? hour, minute or second? Your hungry floodlights bleaching clean the rides and amusements, their dank surfaces and corners, pouring over this clump of lumps on my hand held out ineffectually over my eyes, radiating through and searing the uneventful weeks, cauterising the dreams that have revolved in my skull of late; but there's one I can never lose, the one of the golden spine in the briefcase. “Today was an example of rotten luck, of callous vitriol” said the lump Did either of them, the lump or the leg creature really doubt that the blows would strike again. Yet could they have forseen that they would, that morning, be assailed in their own house? They didn't beat the lump. They did haul it out from the motorised trolley it used to propel itself out of the house, catching it at the gate, and they had hung it by a loose flap of skin on a bolt leaving it vibrating with frustration. “Oh to have been secured safely on a wall out of the melee,” the leg creature joked on their journey after the lump complained of soar flesh. The leg creature wasn’t so lucky, struck with whip handles and a large rolled up screenplay that the assailants left behind, addressed Peppins Fair. Uncle Uncle Auntie ------------------ Worth certain broken foundlings of gold paid out by the handful are you too full to stare? Another Saturday spent leaning out lift one foot and it thaws out some memories over the miles I stumbled and beyond the bench, beyond all the hands dampness, over the confusion of clothing Under another times canopy were you here?