Re-document
1
Morning and sunlight spreads the long shadows of oak tree branches through a window, across a bedroom floor. Dust particles float in buttery shafts. Bed blanketed, rumpled, white and soft. Jack moves his hairy thighs under the covers, brings knees to rest in the crook of Jill’s, paunch in the arch of her lower back, the safest place. He shields his mouth at her neck, she hers to the pillow. Resemblances of lovemaking, long slow pushes and stretches. Comfort is total, the part when sleep and waking are clouded at the edges, before the remembering of everything crisply settles.
Finding out discovering the verb of corpse: after lying silently next to her husband in bed at night, as he too lay silently, and they both knew the other was awake, and neither dared to say it, Jill was compelled to look up the word corpse to see if it had any other meaning. How funny, she thought, that it did.
Other words beginning with the letter C that cause Jill some consternation: Capuchin – a Franciscan friar, a woman’s hooded cloak, a small monkey and a type of pigeon. How on earth can anyone hope to be understood?
2
A whorled bray noise caused Jack and Jill to go outside, into the dark garden. The thorn bush branches -each identically curved like the handwriting of French school children- rustled. A cat, backside elevated, claw-deep in mouse. Their cat: tonguing a struggling little mouse body. Jill shouted, slapped it twice. The first, nothing. The second and it moved, clawing two deep openings in her arm.
Dark berry punctures in the mouse’s sides. The chest moved up and down very quickly.
Jack said to leave it. If humans weren’t here this would be the natural order. It’s just nature.
Jill said but we are here. We are.
Jill said no.
2.1
A budgie has lost its cage. It flies around the room and loses six of its youngest feathers. It flies around the room until its wings tire. It doesn’t take long. If you’re too late you might find a cat gently pawing it, licking the berry punctures as if to close them back over
seal them over
apologise
3.
Jack and Jill lift the bedcovers high in the air and let them fall and settle like fresh white bread soft snow. They climb in and move their eyes over book pages, turn off lights and close their eyes and lie still, or restlessly, until their eyes somehow open again. Is this a life? Lived right? Must be. Must have. They will wake with stinking mouths and sticky eyes and brush it all away. So repave the pavements and preen the birds’ feathers. Mould green hills with rich brown soil. Slice them apart and lay down tracks and roads. Knock down this dirty world and build up a new one while they sleep.
Paul Abbott lives in Glasgow. His writing has appeared in places such as this.
