Alison Wells Author

Along the long pavement on the straight road she imagined being run down by a wayward driver mounting the kerb, her body crushed, the car ricocheting over her bones. Her feet became manic on the path, slapping the cruel concrete over and over. At the high voltage sub station the grid of the mesh gate zinged. She imagined her fingers sizzling, her body dancing with electric; that mad scientist hair before she slumped.

Around the ring road, strangers walking too close. She felt disliked by ivy, she passed quickly but felt their liquid tendrils round the slim lines of her throat. She had trouble breathing. Planes in the sky had that falling note, clouds rallied like the fists of boxers, rain spat, buses roared warnings from Hades.

She might eat her own fingers, her nails nibbled away in ancient times, long gone, she might unravel her clothes, picking away at loose threads, she might rub holes in her trouser legs, in her own legs, she might erase herself. Yes.

Round and round the ring road.

Chewing on her lip.

Stabbing the cruel concrete with her toes.

Bullets came.

On the back of her slim neck, on her head, firing, raining down, stones of ice. The heavens were out to get her. In Asia a hailstone killed a man.

The ice rain obliterated the view, all hail, all falling down. The long pavement grey with a kind of mourning. Dark rumbles from above, light daggers through the clouds stabbed at her. This constant raining of pain. Her heart galloped, leapt into her mouth.

And her heart saw out, this strange beautiful land washed clean. She held a hailstone in her bitten fingers, watched it melt. And the top of her head was cold and renewed. Liquid slid down her warm cheeks.

She lay in the abandoned road. Her arms out in the way of making snow angels. And the cars didn’t come and mow her down and above her the clouds parted and on the walls the ivy shone.