Acceptance

It was raining when I found his glasses on the moor, a typical misting drizzle that chilled the skin and gathered on the wiry grass, but leaves a person reluctant to wear a hat or pull their hood up, because by the time the weather’s apparent, hair and hood are already wet.
+++++My fingers fumbled fine wire as I reset the snare. We would eat well tonight, and mam would cuddle me, pleased with my pale brown haul for the pot. Something crunched under my denim-ed knee as I checked the warrens for fresh round droppings, grapeshot poo that would tell me whether to bother with this hole or find a new burrow. There was hardly a shortage in this desolate place, the only creatures I saw up here were rabbits and the occasional stray, white rimmed eyes searching for a route home, the car that dumped them probably back in Manchester or Leeds days before.
+++++Curiosity moved my leg; nosiness dug the legs of the spectacles from under the ground. Clearing the undamaged lens with my pinkie, as usual the cleanest of my fingers, I tried them on. Whose nose had they pinched last? And when? All was a blur, and my forehead ached. I dropped them to the side, done with the experiment, and stood, rabbit dangling at my side, taking my bearings for home.
+++++But someone was watching me. A small grey figure stood atop a hillock perhaps a quarter mile from where I held dinner by velvety ears. Not an adult, not any child I knew, or I’d have heard them before now. This morning’s small death weighed lightly in my hand.
+++++There was no hurry, mam would be busy with Alicia, bathing her, nursing her, or cooing over the pale beauty, and I was too busy to bear witness to that. My eyes scanned the gentle roll of the moor, the slant of hill sometimes broken in this area by a misty braille of hillocks and tussocks where boulders had been abandoned by glaciers long ago, and seasonal streams cut away at the softer sections, ribboning brown veins through the short yellowed grass.
+++++I felt no danger here, those that had haunted the moor, fertilising it with the unlucky and the unwilling, would not stand on this springy soil again. Locals that were left found other pastures for walking their dogs, riding their horses, or catching butterflies in ridiculous nets. For want of a better description, this was a shadowed place, as I imagined the Glencoe of school’s textbooks, and if colours had odours, grey would smell of the moor, damp, bleak and foreboding.
+++++The figure wisped closer, a silhouette seeking company. I stood my ground, waiting.
+++++“What’s that you found?”
+++++I paused before answering the boy’s question, wary of the friendly tone.
+++++“Just some specs. Old ones.”
+++++He cocked his head to one side, as I’d seen crows do as they eyed their surroundings for competition, picking the eyes from flattened creatures on the road. I tilted my face back, slitting my eyes against the drizzle, preparing for the usual remarks about my skin, or the hair I felt frizzing along my neck. But he only replied:
+++++“Want to see something really interesting?”
+++++Traipsing along the tufted surface, peaty water swirling rainbows beside my boots more vivid than any I’d seen in the far off sky, I swung the furry body at my side. Companionship is a foreign concept to me, but silence is a second skin, so I followed behind, thinking of buried treasure and metal detectors, Saxon hoards, gold, glory. My mother proud, plaiting my tricky hair for the newspapers, relaxing with a shiny smile.
+++++A person could walk the moors every day of their life, live to be a hundred, and still find themselves lost amongst a russet patch of bracken, or a hundred feet beneath grass, trapped in a disused shaft. Tin was mined here, copper too, Miss. Hennessy told us about it in a local history lecture. And the shafts await feet heavier than a rabbit to swallow the unwary whole. So I let him go yards ahead, his feet barely seeming to touch the grass, waterlogged earth refilling my footprints instantly.
+++++Perhaps ten minutes passed, as we headed to the lower ground, not a tree in sight, but wizened gorse brightening my wide open nostrils with its coconut holiday scent, the dark green prickles masking its pale contorted structure, reminding me of a season’s dead hedgehog I saw after the snows. A rocky outcrop, lichened with peeling yellow and grey, jutted beside an overgrown hole, visible only from a certain angle. Curved shells lay in unfinished mosaic, smashed by a hungry thrush, buttermilk and brown, striped, or flecked white, and the grey child beckoned me closer.
+++++“It’s in here. Toward the back, you’ll see.”
+++++Then I noticed his clothes, got a proper look at him. I had a nagging feeling I knew him from somewhere, not school, not to speak to, but somewhere. Grey v-neck, no sleeves, grey shirt, dark shorts with the hems fraying a fringe over his skinny white legs, knee-socks sloughing down towards his ankles, and a blinking unfocussed look on his friendly freckled face. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed my skin, I thought. That could explain it.
+++++“What’s in there?”
+++++His smile revealed splayed teeth, still finding their rightful place in his mouth. Moisture trickled down the back of my neck, and I shivered, the rabbit dancing by my leg.
+++++“Something interesting. I think you’ll like it.”
+++++The grass grew long and undisturbed at the entrance to the hole.
+++++“Like what?”
+++++The sky darkened further, a summer storm heading our way. A leaden curtain of rain appeared to prop up the purpling clouds crowning the higher ground to the left. Mam didn’t allow me an umbrella, fearing its use as a weapon, attracting more trouble to our graffiti’d door.
+++++He shrugged, still smiling.
+++++“You’ll see!”
+++++Reckoning I outweighed him, and definitely out-toughed him, I tucked my unease away and carried on into the gloom. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Grit and sand crunched under my feet, and musty smells reminded me of the breadth of my nostrils, for it felt as if every inch was stinging with the stink of the place. Playground taunts filled my ears in the silence, memories of school-mates rushing to fill the hush, reminding me that if I close my eyes and mouth in the dark, no-one would know I was there. Useful for circumstances such as this, though I was uncertain of what exactly this situation was or could be.
+++++I hadn’t seen him duck the bindweed wreathing the entrance, or noticed the little light there was lessen as he moved beside me, but he had. We walked back and I realised this was a tunnel. Then we got to the back, and I reassessed: it was a tomb.
+++++There was the creamy bowl of a skull, rags bundling nobbled sticks together, shrouding the clawed fingers of a ribcage in a grey shirt and sweater. There was nothing about the smell to make me heave, yet I felt the urge in the dusty air. Perhaps I would have, had mam provided breakfast instead of offering a banana for me to go out on instead. Sometimes I wondered if she too meant to taunt me. For without the betrayal of my appearance, she’d pass.
+++++“What do you think?”
+++++“What do you mean?” Dinner’s fur was cold in my hand. “How did you find it? Have you told anyone?”
+++++He sniggered, an unsettling sound in the darkness of our situation.
+++++“What?”
+++++And now he laughed, too high for my liking, its unseemliness echoing off the walls. The fur was cold and damp now in my sweating palm.
+++++“Nothing. Really, nothing.” He took control of himself. “You’re the first I’ve told. Why, what do you think?”
+++++I yearned for the cleansing summer rain, and took a step toward the outside.
+++++“I think we need to tell the police. What if someone’s looking for them?”
+++++Would my mam? If it was me?
+++++“I think they’ve stopped now. If they ever did.”
+++++Another step. I moved slowly, though keen for air, so as not to frighten him, then wondered why. The boy seemed perfectly comfortable here. Perhaps overly so.
+++++ “What makes you say that?”
+++++I felt the breeze of ill weather caressing my face.
+++++“Sometimes I get lonely.”
+++++Puzzled, unnerved, I paused in my exit.
+++++“Eh?”
+++++He was there, at my side, between me and the light, only now I could see the substance of him. Or lack of it.
+++++I ran through the cold, eyes tearing up, lips smarting, until I was far from the dumping of that unlucky boy. He didn’t follow, and it felt like abandonment. Rain washed the dust from my curls, and the soil from my fingers, but no matter the fluid, no matter the soap, I could never clear the mud enough for my mother.
+++++Home, I ran home, clenching the rabbit as talisman to normality. Alicia was having her nap, my mam asleep in the chair by her cot. Her skin glowed palest caramel against the yellow cover, and she could have been twenty again.
+++++In the kitchen-cum-living room, I cleared straightening irons from the counter before depositing dinner-to-be, fetching the skinning knife from the drawer by the sink, doing not thinking, while deep deep down, in the essence of me, something picked and pulled at the problem, offering an unpalatable solution.
+++++No, I couldn’t do that.
+++++Really, I couldn’t.
+++++ Could I?
+++++The knife slipped, the tip sliced my finger at the crease, my blood mingling with that of the rabbit. I swore aloud.
+++++Mam was on me in an instant, hissing her displeasure, cursing my clumsiness and lack of consideration for my sister.
+++++“You could have woken her, and you know how hard it is to put her down. Really, you disappoint me at times.”
+++++It felt like all the time. Nursing my unchecked finger, sneaking toilet paper to it as bandage, I looked about with sorrowful eyes. Without Alicia, my mother would never have had the temptation to pass, but a golden child with strawberry blonde ringletted hair who drew coos of admiration in the street showed my mother exactly what she could have had. Without me, she still could.
+++++But this was my home first, I thought, full of memories. The picker and puller of problems whispered, yes, but think of these memories, think of the shame, think of school. And think of the option. The escape.
+++++After an ungrateful dinner, watching my mother bounce Alicia on her knee, shining her smile but never at me, I went to my room. Tomorrow, I thought. See how I feel then.
+++++After another banana breakfast, I watched my mother cutting stars and flowers in her daughter’s buttered toast, as Alicia smeared eggs on her face.
+++++I sorted things out and left, wiping their blood on a dishtowel.
+++++At the corner shop I spent the gas money on matches, chocolate and loo roll, the other children made monkey noises as I made my choice.
+++++The moor was pale green and glowing under the azure blue sky, swifts darting black after flies, brown butterflies fluttering low. I checked yesterday’s snares, collected my catch and the spectacles. Then I was on my way, sometimes glimpsing grey movement from the corner of my eye.
+++++Today I noticed the pale beauty of the bindweed flowers, the presence of a clear stream nearby, and the tranquillity of this spot. Inside, I let my eyes adjust, the smell less foreign to me now. Accepted in the dark, I moved to the reluctant remains, squatting on my haunches for a closer look. Placing the glasses round the skull, more gently than I had ever seen to my sister, I murmured a soft “hello”.
+++++And from behind me, my friend replied:
+++++“Welcome home!”
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Gill Hoffs, 31, studied Psychology at the University of Glasgow and has worked with children with a variety of needs throughout Britain.  Married with a son, Angus, she returned to writing recently as a way to relieve stress-induced migraines and has since been published by Unbound Press and will soon have work included in Spilling Ink: Vol. 1.  She was once sat on by a horse, but prefers the traditional arrangement.