THE BUST

There was a time when fossils lived.

Charles and the girl gazed at their grandfather – his stone face giving the decided impression of death. Memories were in the air like moths hovering. Their parents were arguing in one of the back rooms – unclear words that meant more than themselves, given the answering of the house’s echoes.

The voices spoke of history, of how Europe was changing even as they stared at the map. Countries merging, borders blending, frontiers in free-wheel, lands moving, slicing around rivers towards bays and estuaries that had only existed once, if at all, in legend or serious University essays. The Earth was a giant fossil, having failed to be fused by such doubtful dynamics.

“He’s dying, you know,” said Charlie.

The girl nodded.  Charles and the girl had never known sadness before or – at least – they had never recognised it as such. Their grandfather had been more of a friend than the squeaky pipe in the chimney-corner with whistly breath, given their parents’ continued absence as mere voices in far-off reaches of the house. Their parents had been Grandfather’s daughter and her husband.

The girl had a skipping-rope. As she swung it in barely visible loops between feet and floor, head and ceiling, she watched the eyes in the stone face try to follow the movement. Charlie blinked, imagining modern strobe lighting ... yet to be invented. The future was a wistful trove of novelties masquerading as an inherited nostalgia of wonder, the past (their present) being mundane and lacklustre.

Everybody’s past is painted with fake colours of wishfulness.

“I wish, I wish … we were rich,” Charlie said, during a sudden lull in the girl’s skipping.

Grandfather creaked his pipe between the teeth. His head became a globe twirling to a standstill after the unexpected consciousness of movement outside itself. “Your mother was beautiful,” he said. His daughter, thus referenced to his granddaughter.

The globe faced forward, the British Empire of his complexion settling around the King Solomon’s Mines of his eyes.

Noises off-stage. Arguments. The girl’s eyes filled with tears. Wars of the Roses. Her cheeks took blush from the dying afternoon sun.

Charlie was called away to a back room. The girl was unsure which one. She applied rouge to the old man’s cheeks and kissed his cold forehead. She knew there was a fingerprint inside every bust. One day, she guessed, there would be several fingeprints inside her own bust, given the ability to crack it and find them. She wept, whilst she was still able to cut tears. She needed the hinterland of a real family rather than standing stones…

She skipped through the gloomy moths of a wistful dusk towards her own special back room.

(unpublished)