Arasteia

Like snails they bear the weight of their world on their shoulders. Slugging through the sunrise their rainbow wares dull in the light and their smiles fall when we look away. Up and down the beach they pick like plovers fabric feathers rustled in the breeze buffeted one way then the next, indignant. The voices make a shrill dawn chorus buy? buy? buy? They stab their endless question into the shattered silence and shaking heads. By their sides, the foamy gust of waves tumbles over and over sprays the sand white chases the seagulls thrashes with a chorus of its own. The infinite hum, the boundless back and forth of the irrevocable tide a

When I leave his cell, his happiness is still warm on my fingers, and that’s how they see me for the first time. She’s kneeling by the door down the hall with her hands curled about the bars. The tears on her chin are pale and heavy. He’s in the cell. I can see his fingertips on her knuckles. They are ashen white. She looks up at me as my bare feet clap the concrete. Her cheeks are the most vivid shade of red. Against the jagged grey of the prison walls, she almost glows. “Who is that?” She puts her face close to the bars, keeping her eyes on me. “I don’t know, baby.” His voice echoes within

Down here, the floor smells like yesterday’s washing and just a hint of mould below the window. Down here, I can scream into the carpet and nobody will notice. Newly reborn, I am a babe of dust, leftover crumbs and the corners where no-one will find me. Weeks have passed since I hugged the walls with their tack-stained white: weeks since I peeled at the edges and my paper-thin weight dragged me from my pedestal. Shed, I was, like the leaves of last summer, cast at the base of the bed and left to crease and wither and gather the filth the cleaners missed. It’s cold down here, cold but not lonely, for I am hung with the husks of o