Everyone is leaning away like a forest at the horizon of a polished marble. (That's what the world looks like from the surface of a road.) Which boy was it? I haven't met him yet. But over and over he asked. And if I'd been able to answer, I'm sure he would not have heard.
I think the first stitch caught in March. Walking home, the bridge over the brook felt like a trampoline. Then a bramble found its way between the seams. That must have been the first snag. The whole shirt came apart weeks later, but that was because I picked at it.
I spent the next weeks in your kitchen, barefoot on the peeling linoleum. I remember you stooped down, pulled it back for me. Look at the woodlice, the trilobites. Look at how many there are. Like the pattern on my shirt. Watch them swim. But maybe that was a dream. In the yellow kitchen light, with the garden spilling out into the bushes, your white duvet wrapped me up.
But now the sun has been split. I notice it in the mornings. Here, come to the café and drink too much coffee with me. We can laugh and I can show you the pavement in the grey bright, how it shimmers.
Now the heat runs down the glass of the sky. Now the heat is a mile of water. Someone on the news grins a gloaming English grin and the boy lying in the road asks me to tell him: What is the point of it all?
In some ways the summer was quiet. I went digging down the back of the city in search of lost coins. Wandering the cafés, the dirt. Beneath the station's dome, I scraped the sand off my shoes, caught the train back to campus and knocked on the office door.
In the heat, I started a new project. Symmetry, and the tracery of cobwebs behind the mirrors too. And I have more questions this summer. Like how my threadbare shirt still holds. How in my dreams I am lighter than this. How a desert is so much like the bottom of the sea.
I come in out of the night, humming. The paramedics in the living room ask me who I am. This is my house. They are kneeling like divers amongst the tangled printout from an ECG. Slow, heavy. Are you here for me? I almost ask.
One of them looks up, but I already know. I read it in the air before the door spun out of the night to meet my key. I had forgotten it, like all premonitions.
Later, in the corner by the curb, I watched the loose threads of my shirt coalescing, spiralling like leaves in the wind. Buoyed by the day's residual heat which flowed in. Filling the abscess carved out by the sunlight. And in the night, I saw the threads turn into the curl of an ammonite. It hung there, turning, quiet.
You know, I don't remember the boy's face at all. But I remember that all the expression had been bleached from it (the heat is unkind). And I remember the people, a row of treetrunks, leaning away. And I was the only one who heard them whispering.
Out from the canteen with my colleague, blinking. Food in his teeth, he prods the cloth of the sky, thick as curtains. If we could tear it here – right here – we could see what it's made of. I open my mouth.
But someone stumbles onto the road. A screeching of tires. Clack of paving stones. They go jittering down onto the ground. Car starts. Car is gone. Boy lies curling. Nobody moves.
And my voice is hailing an ambulance, coiling like a green and yellow warning down the black Edgbaston road.
Sometimes I breathed my senses into an empty bottle. Sealed and cast it, so that I might find it again in the morning. We made our way, threaded through a tear in the lining of the night. When you are tall and bend in the current, hands catch on your hems. A man with black seaglass for eyes watched me across the dancefloor of The Village. Bodies in bright light. Not right now. But yes, I think you're very pretty.
In the early dark, I swear I saw a car go careening down the road on its two left wheels.
The days don't come in order. Only all at once, and bickering: Your new house where people shout down the walls. The rags in the sky, starched, wrapped in on themselves. They are nautili. Frayed like Terry Gilliam props. Shoaling. There's lamplight and limetrees. Everywhere dust. It aches in and out like a tide.
And in a dark room, on a bright day, a boy climbs the walls to avoid the thermocline (it's swelling with the tide). Finds a noose in the rafters.
In the time lapse, by the brook on the floodplain, we pared the bulrushes. And like children, we threw the stuffing into the air.
I've been at three attempts in the last four weeks. All these sliding black waters and nothing holds fast.
I remember your hands were cold. Nails hard and smooth and blueish. I watched your face and the trees behind it.
The sun is setting. Maybe these bulrush feathers are more beautiful than anything else. Sinking through the air in bright clumps. The sky is a red-bordered bowl.
I haven't felt the wind in four weeks. Sometimes, when I'm tired, my messages unanswered for too long, the tarmac outside is stretching out in both directions.
You are not the boy in the road. But sometimes I see your body melt into the brackish night like tissue paper. I look up at the ammonites, hanging in the clouds, turning, quiet. I need to call you, even though we just spoke. But I know I mustn't. I want to call. But I know everything is fine.
