Suspicious Minds by David Mark

Author:David Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448304585
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2020-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Days slide by. Nights too. They eat when they remember to. Get dressed only to walk Marshall or to take slow, meandering strolls upon the moor. Jude points out abandoned buildings, interesting trees, old mine shafts and crumbling bridges; his hand never unlaced from hers. They become an island, for a time. Betsy does not miss contact with the world beyond their boundary wall. She feels drunk. Mesmerized. High on pleasure and contentment and the sensation that every cell in her body is exploding and re-forming each time he looks at her in that way of his: as if she is a rare bird that has fluttered into the woodland – multi-coloured feathers dazzlingly conspicuous against the green-brown foliage. She feels safe. Feels good. She waits until he is asleep to tell him that she loves him but she does so with absolute conviction; whispering in the dark, staring into him as if trying to see the bottom of a well. She longs for always. For the first time in her life, she wants only this. Only now, in perpetuity.

One morning she wakes to coffee and poetry. He has written her a verse; black ink on a scrap of card, torn from a cereal box. The words leave grooves in the card, the nib pressed in so hard that his fingers must have been white as he wrote.

Days that Laze.

Days that drift, reeds upon water: lilies falling upon gathered rain.

Such evenings are damp eyes and violet stones.

Lilac poppies, spinning as Dutch sails.

Fields of canary yellow, crying beneath the weight of sky.

Such evenings my chest softly splinters.

Aged oak, paint as old parchment, piled with skull upon skull of ancient rock.

Ribs a creaking cage: screeching hinge atop whispering tomb.

I feel.

I who searches for dock leaves before the nettle kisses flesh. I. Wrapped tight in muslin.

I breathe. Breathe as if emerging from ice.

Gasping kiss, drunk deep.

Cleansed. Risen. Effervescent.

A sky of tender lightning.

You. Did this. Built this.

Breathed upon Dead embers. Folded brown paper into a bruised rose.

You.

Rain and flame upon dry earth.

A kiss of shattered glass.

You.

My immaculate sky.

She holds the card against her chest and pushes herself against it, as if trying to push it inside her skin; to brand it upon herself. Nobody has written her a poem before. Nobody has told her that she is rain and flame. She is unaccustomed to being deemed responsible for another’s effervescence.

She tucks it inside her pillow, like a rosary. Hopes it will keep her safe from bad dreams.

Asks herself, just once, whether it has been written for her, or whether he first used it to woo Maeve.

Weeps for the ugliness inside her, even as she lingers upon the beauty of the words.

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