She nods when the coroner
folds back the crisp white sheet, whispers, ‘Yes, it’s him,’ as her eyes close,
and in those few swaying moments before she falls, she sees, on the inside of
her lids, that he rises from the steel slab, walks backwards through the swing
doors and sprints in reverse along the pavement, glancing pedestrians parting
for his rewind to the dank-scented woods, where someone found him, and called
the police.
He sits, knotty spine
against tree bark, and he un-plunges the hypodermic, plucks it with a soft pop
from his pulsing vein and casts it aside, then rising, skinny-legged, he strides
back, back, back, to the filthy squat with its stain-sagged mattress to scoop tee
shirts and jeans into a duffle bag. He kicks the door shut as he leaves and reverses
home, pushing through the kitchen door with jutting shoulder blades and slides
upstairs to unpack and refold the things she’d left clean-washed in his drawers.
He climbs into bed as the sun rolls East to sink out of sight over Chinese
fields blooming with poppies.
Back, back, back, growing
smaller, to a teenager on his bike, standing on the pedals as he whizzes uphill
to deliver packages for a tall furtive man with a pocket full of dirty notes
wrapped in elastic bands.
And back, back, back to a
lazy picnic afternoon when he hops up, sun-freckled and grinning, grabs her
hand and pulls her, laughing, to the languid river to see them wriggling and
darting, while up-stream, a needle-eyed heron stalks. She rummages through the
hamper, finds a jam-jar and rinses it clean so he can scoop the tadpoles, and
she twists the screw-lid tight, so they can’t spill.
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