I was concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other when my body began to change shape. It began to change shape because I love you, and you don’t love me.

​

First, there was a noise I didn’t recognize and it was the only thing I could hear. It was a long high-pitch sound that went on and on up there somewhere. It would sometimes change speed, becoming slower, then slower still, before speeding up again. I thought it would end soon, and I waited and waited, and that’s when it happened.

 

I was lying on my back in bed when my t-shirt began to sink where my stomach is. I thought there were things inside me that would stop it doing this, but when I lifted my t-shirt to have a look, there was a hole to the left of my navel as large as a fist.

 

I put my left first finger inside the hole and felt around until I touched the tenth rib. I continued to the ninth and, pushing my finger as far as the knuckle, I finally reached the eighth. I wondered if I would find my heart if I kept pushing my hand up through my ribcage.

 

Then, as my left hand was somewhere inside my ribcage, I realised I was standing alone in a field of grass taller than me. The grass was greeny-yellow, or green and yellow, and all around me I could hear the chirrups and clicks of insects rubbing their body parts together. I wanted to see what they looked like.

 

I raise my arms above the grass to feel the warmth of the sunlight. It moves between my fingers, and over the backs of my hands and forearms, and I watch the shadows on the ground becoming longer, and changing direction as the sun gets lower in the sky.

 

Suddenly my hands feel colder, and I look up to see they have pierced the sky, which is falling over my upright arms. It stops just below my armpits, trapping my arms and head above it; my torso and legs still standing in the grass. I never imagined what it would be like up here: in every direction, it is dust and bones rising on and on, to blue mountains on the horizon.

 

I break up the boredom of being trapped here by tracing letters in the dust with my right first finger. “E, V...” I notice what lies just beneath the surface is darker, colder also. In the distance, I hear singing, and to my left an old woman is walking towards me, kicking a path through the bones with heavy footsteps. 

 

“Woe-ful me

Un sad th day

My hart es not my own

My mind es sad un trubbled

Sum-times I think I’ll go

Unto my heedlus luv

Un all my pash-un show

Un ye ef I shuld do so

I fear, et be en vain…”

 

The old woman sees me, stops singing, and now that she is standing over me, I notice her clothes are old fashioned and her mousey hair is pulled through a band on top of her head into a bun. She looks exhausted, and I wonder if she has the energy to carry on. 

 

“Hello,” I say. She ignores me, so I decide to try something else. “What was that song you were singing?”

 

“Ush,” she snaps back. 

 

I shield my eyes from the dust that rises from her boots and offer an apology before asking, “What happened here?” 

 

“Wot appened ere appened uh long time ago, un nuff-in appened since.” She lifts her chin to look over my head and beyond me. “We walk roun all day, but we’re not gett-in enywhere, we’re jus kick-in th dirt wiv our feet.”

 

“And the others?” I ask, and turn to look over my right shoulder to see if anyone is there.

 

“Ain’t seen no-body else ere.”

 

“But you said we, who are—”

 

“Look, yurr star-tin te annoy me Simon,” she snarls, and before I can think where she might have learned my name, or if we have met before, she hit me on the side of the head with a rock, and the blow threw me forward against the ground. She walked around me and kicked me in the side, and I grabbed her ankle and pulled her down onto the ground. She quickly turned over, sat up, and slammed the rock down hard on the ground again and again, and the noise ricocheted off the thousands of bones and covered everything with that same high-pitch sound I had heard when I discovered the hole in my stomach.

 

“Stay away from me,” I shouted, and again, “Stay away.” The old woman took a step back. I moved my right hand toward the side of my head where I thought the wound was, but before I could reach it, she lunged forward and hit me again, and my body relaxed as if someone had said, “Simon, it’s all right.”

 

The air is hot and stuffy, and my clothes cling to my body as I fly with my arms straight out at my sides over a lake in the middle of a park. The lake is circled by a well-worn path, busy with mothers with small children kicking restless feet in pushchairs, holding candy floss and balloons-on-sticks. Bigger boys and girls chase one another over bridges, in between food stalls, and blow into plastic horns; they throw Frisbees, shout, scream, hide from their fathers behind tree trunks, and argue over tangled kites stranded on the grass. Away from the noise, older people sit in the shade under the tallest trees in tricolour deck chairs, reading newspapers and listening to the radio whilst eating hazelnuts and potato chips.

 

A small white, short-haired dog runs out from under a tree, stops, looks up at me and barks, its tail moving excitably from side to side. A woman grabs the dog by its collar, and after catching her breath, points at me and says, “Look at that bird, he is too big.” A second woman exclaims, “He is the wrong colour!” And a small girl holding an ice cream, grabs the second woman’s sleeve, and asks, ‘Mama, where is he going?”

 

I close my eyes and think back to eating ice cream with my sister at Nanny Tessa’s beachside café. We both had a favourite flavour ice cream and a favourite colour ice cream. I would always ask for chocolate, but mint was the best colour because it was green like an alien and they were cool. My sister loved strawberry because it was pink, and people ate strawberries when they watched Tennis, and she wanted to go to Wimbledon and see Steffi Graf play. We would talk excitedly about making an ice cream tower with one scoop of each different colour, piled high on a single cone, and we both agreed, “The best thing in the world EVER,” was when you had finished eating the top of the ice cream, and there was still more pushed down inside the cone.

 

It’s been four summers since I went home and swam on that beach. I think about what it feels like to dive off the breakwater and go deeper into the sea, and I pull my arms back further, and I’m lifted higher and higher, and everything around me is blue.

 

The sky begins to fill with dark clouds, and I can hear the distant roll of thunder. There is a lightning flash, and the first warm drops of rain land lazily on my outstretched arms. After the rain, the dark clouds rise higher in the sky, and the smaller, lighter clouds sink between the hills below me. Still wet from the rain, I watch these hills bursting with daffodils, crocuses, and snowdrops. 

 

The sun rises higher in the sky, and the plants turn their creaking heads to face it as if unfolding after a long time asleep. As their stems grow under and over one another, they become grazed and tangled, and the breeze cries through huge choking knits of stem, shoot, and leaf.

 

Either side of me, the hills grow taller and lean inward and drag their shadows over the plants who bow down their heads at the ground. The leaves on the trees turn orange, then red, and fall on the lichen and moss and rot, and the air is filled with the sounds of branches snapping clean from dying trees and thuds as they punch the earth.

 

Grey flat clouds move quickly across the sky and crowd out the sun, and everything lays blind and broken on the moonless earth. Exhausted, I fly closer to the ground to look for somewhere to rest, and fireflies pass by me and flash electric blue in bursts that burn down the night.

 

I hear, “Simon,” and I am woken up. 

 

I rub my eyes open, yawn, and stretch. Alicia is sitting in front of me on a low dry-stone wall, looking at the ground with her legs together from the knees to the ankles, her hands resting in her lap. She looks up at me, and the breeze blows everything away for the last time. 

 

“I didn’t think you’d remember,” she says.

 

I clear my throat, and reply, “I was standing in a field of grass that was this tall” —gesturing with my right hand above my head— “and I was watching the shadows on the ground, and suddenly the sky—”

 

“Yes, I know. You were with her.”

 

Alicia is looking at me and waiting to hear what I have to say. “I don’t think I want to talk about this now,” I tell her.

 

“Tell me, Simon.”

 

 I turn away and mumble, “I was with her.”

 

“Did you plan to?”

 

“I thought about it.”

 

She huffs, “And you spoke about it, the two of you?” 

 

“Yes,” I say.

 

“So, what happened?”

 

It was January. The edge of the water was just a few feet away on my right side, and the sun shone brightly over everything. 

 

I often listen to the cello when I write, and I was thinking about the wordless song it sings as I untied my laces and slipped off each of my shoes, left first, then right, scrunching the socks down inside each of them. I was thinking about that warm dark sound as I ran barefoot along the beach, and I’m still thinking about it now.