The Air Year by Caroline Bird

Author:Caroline Bird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

We kneel to tie the laces of their unfeasibly tiny shoes.

Emotional Reasoning

THE first time we entered the empty flat we felt nothing, but after learning of the murders, the second time we felt an eerie presence like a military sonar rippling through our ear canals, the memory of blood on the walls, the children’s screams, the relentless knife, it was all there embedded in the building so we tore that building down and boy did we feel better, exorcised, even the automated voice of the self-service checkout machine instantly struck a friendlier tone, street kids started selling lemon and wheatgrass muffins from the back of a toy dumper truck, the factory fumes left a taste of burnt cocoa on our tonsils, we were happy

until we heard about the old Glendale place and what old Gregory Glendale had done in there, inside that house, behind that door, what he’d dragged across that linoleum, the hitchhiker, the nun, the stuff in jars (not one of us touched a lick of jam after that news broke), we got sick just thinking his flesh was in our graveyard, decomposing, the dark matter of him passing through our decent worms, we photographed the exhumation for our records, sicko sicko, then went back to work

but our carrots and radishes developed these black lesions and the Mayor pointed out that the worms had already eaten Gregory Glendale’s face so his face was in our soil, that unrepentant leer stroking the roots of our vegetables so we stopped eating vegetables, tarmacked our gardens which felt right, for a second, it felt right demolishing the underpass also, felt right publicly crushing the car that almost crushed the girl they found wandering in the road with a single ribbon of blood cascading down her leg – she’d been missing so long her dad had buried an empty coffin unaware she was right behind him, in the church, so we tore down the church and the priest went to prison but something was still horribly off

the envelope glue in the post office tasted like ash so we stopped sending Christmas cards, Fiona Feltham took her dog for a walk on the demolition site of the old Anderson estate, the next week he had heartworm, Leptospirosis, the mark of the devil in his yellow eyes. The Wild Swimming Club was disbanded due to fear of infected animal urine getting in our ducts, our cuts, our innocent mouths, we shamed Fiona Feltham out of town and shot the dog

then the street kids began kennel-coughing on our porches saying ‘we feel hot and shivery’ as if it was our fault, appealing to us with their boiling little hands as if it was in them, somehow, the Anderson crime – caught from the rubble of the building by the dog who peed in the river where the street kids swam, and now even the skinny one with the cataracts was using his kaleidoscope eyes to manipulate us, scare us into helping him, sorry no you

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