Reap
‘TV screen after TV screen drives past and you realise: we’re going to reap just what we sow.’ The young man, eyes peering out curiously, nodded in response to his fellow passenger’s diatribe. Situated at the front of the coach, he stared resolutely ahead whilst the companion fated to him looked darkly through the faded red curtains, like a huddled up Dracula. Rain was beating heavily on the windows, the greyness turning everything outside two-dimensional. This, combined with the glass pane it was viewed through, reduced the pride of trees and the sporadic eruptions of birds and the dainty roadside graves to nothing more than a spectacle – a painting – whilst reflections faded in and out, synechdocic of magic apparitions being interrupted by returns to brightly lit life.
Why had she put her fingers in my mouth?
‘We’re going to reap just what we sow,’ said the man again, not moving from the window. ‘The hour of vespertide is almost upon us.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the young man. As soon as he said the word, it soaked into the grey background, lost forever before it could ever have meaning.
17:28
17:29
He tried not to look at the time but the digitally illuminated red light bounded into sight off every reflective surface.
17:30
The coach jumped and farted along whilst the rain’s anger became less easy to ignore.
The grey expanse brightened momentarily, wanting his attention with the blue wave of a ghostly hand: ‘Look here,’ it seemed to say. The hills, like a huge pile of shoulders, encircled sunken villages and jolly puffs of smoke billowed upwards as the old little building – knowing each other’s ways – chortled and rasped. And windmills splashed through the air, scattering the clinging droplets upon the dead leaves, only to be trampled by a magpie on his way to pull a juicy worm from the soil – whilst it was still wet. For a moment, the young man felt happy, his mood only disrupted by the shameful fact of its pathetic fallacy.