Rose & Thorn Journal - Winter 2012
______________________
Graham Tugwell is a writer and performer of Irish distraction. His work has appeared in over forty journals, including Anobium, The Quotable, Pyrta, THIS Literary Magazine and L’Allure Des Mots. He has lived his whole life in the village where his stories take place (he loves it with a very special kind of hate). His website is grahamtugwell.com
Graham Tugwell
They ran away the night he lunged for Aunt Marie and locked his needle teeth around her wrist and even when she pulled a pot from the stove and smashed the scalding metal down, still he gripped, tightening, needles meeting—bursting vessels, breaking bone—
In the corner of the kitchen, cowering folded on tiles, Philip runs fingers over the red her slap has left, saying so softly he can barely hear himself:
“Boxty . . .”
“Stop . . .”
“Boxty . . .”
“Don’t . . .”
She screeches, her red in arcs on worktop and window, hand hanging limp like a feather or leaf. The dog releases her, and as it pads to Philip, she slumps, angling along kitchen presses, the long wound spitting in her face, screams dying to an open mouth.
Gently she settles where her bottle smashed, driving splinters of glass into her back, into her neck.
The dog rests his face in Philip’s lap. Saying: “Just say the word. I can take her face away.”
“For you, Phill-up. Say the word and she loses her face . . .”
It purrs, a deep belly-thrum, and Philip feels it through his flesh.
She writhes in glass in silence, the newborn wound clutched in haemorrhage to her chest.
“No,” says Philip, rising, “We’ll just go, Boxty, me and you. We’ll just go.”
He looks across the room at Aunt Marie. He looks down at his special dog. They go.
Philip Conway and his dog, shadows outlined in moonlight, across the fields and through the gaps in towering hills, down the lanes and into woods as sirens paint the town in blue.
They sit together in the shade of a gate, cold and wet and free. Philip is thin and bruised, with auburn hair and scars along his hands and wrists and clothes already worn and ripped and darned and stitched. His lips are full and red and he should by rights have freckles but spent too long in the dark of the Big House.
His eyes are wide and green and thickly lashed and they have seen more than a boy should see.
(The moon in slanting grease reveals the rising hem, the skinny knees of Aunt Marie—
“Is it running clear?”
“Is it running clear?”)
And Boxty is his special dog—a pointed fold of leather, scabbed in purple psoriasis skin, its small flat face shadowed in creases, with two iridescent eyes, the colour and lustre of beetle shells, electric green and silver and black and a tiny mouth of piranha teeth, opening round like a lamprey.
But there is no nose. There are no ears.
Its body is covered in a quilt of skin, in curtains hanging down its flanks, swamping paws, puckering in joints. Its tail is a bubble of meat unmoving, poised over the raisin-pinch of anus.
It looks like something that shouldn’t exist.
But it’s here, and it looks at Philip with love in its glazed and pupil-less eyes.
At their feet is a plastic bag, like an organ teased to opened, holding things snatched before their flight from the Big House: half a thing of biscuits and bread already going blue, a tub of apple yoghurt, two bottles of water, a radio with dying batteries, and creased and creased again and faded: a photo of his parents and sisters.
(They left the road near Mixie’s Well and came to pieces in the field.)
That bag of scraps and ends, that’s all they have.
But Philip and Boxty have each other.
There was a secret under the stairs in the Big House. Wood panelling came away. You could hide. You could recover.
In there, with the dust and spiders, there is barely room for both of them.
“What will I call you?” whispers the child.
It shifts its weight, flat feet pressing down on belly, calling forth a gasp or two. The sharp purple point lightly dabs a philtrum.
“Phill-up you get to name me.”
The voice is high and softly accented . . .
“Think what you need.”
Intonation and tone are strange.
“You get to make me what I am.”
A pod of blood is swelling from the boy’s split lip. It hangs. And gently lowers itself on a thread.
The creature consumes with a swip of its tongue.
“Boxty . . .”says Philip, “Boxty . . .”
It smiles.
(Or at least shows its teeth.)
That was the Big House:
Tall windows.
The smell of Bleach.
Stiff boards and peeling walls and unlit fireplaces.
The painted nails of Aunt Marie.
But now the boy and his dog travel the wild spaces of bog, through yellow, brown and green, where clouds like hills of faded grey rest slow and unburdened on the horizon, and there are dragonflies and herons scooping overhead, and black and feral horses shrugging their way through saffron gorse.
And everything still and silent and open . . .
And everywhere the scent of moss and peat . . .
Philip and Boxty are close to content.
Foxes, rabbits and badgers, and once a cotton-coloured foal: Boxty hunts them down and drags them in pieces, haunch and hind, back over fields. They’d sit in a hollow carved in yellow-flowered gorse and make a little fire there; pale flames burning red meat black and dirty fingers cracking bitter carbon from the bone or piercing stick.
Looking over the flatness of bog, its skeletal reeds and horses staring, Philip swallows, trying not to taste.
At night they lie in gaps in gorse or where the reeds are thickest, and Boxty lies on Philip’s stomach, a dull and heavy source of warmth.
This night the stars are flecks of ice, held unblinking in deepest black, a night that drinks all warmth away. Philip is on the edge of sleep, his hands at play on a purple point. “Boxty?” he whispers, “Where did you come from?”
There is the timeless silence of wide, unpeopled places and Boxty whispers: “We are inquisitive things. We wander down lanes. We crawl through hedges . . . we come through gaps. But we are soft things and sometimes soft things catch on sharp and stay there caught.”
“Stay here.”
The stars are still and Philip, almost sleeping, murmurs, “I don’t . . . understand, Boxty. . .”
Boxty presses his face against Philip’s arm. “Am I making you warm enough?”
Philip grunts a soft consent.
They sleep.
He dreams:
Her hands are thick and graceless, the knuckles male with female nails, sharp and gaudy-painted. Aunt Marie holds his face, squeezes his lips into a fishy pout.
“Where did you get it?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“You’ll tell me.”
She tightens her hold and he squeaks, “I don’t remember—I don’t remember—”
She turns to Boxty, snarling: “That half-born, that diseased thing . . .”
It backs away, shrugs itself under the pile of soiled clothes.
“How dare you bring it in here?” Aunt Marie drags a nail down Philip’s cheek. “This is a good home. A proper home.” She cracks her knuckles one by one. “It’ll go. And you’ll follow it . . .”
And Boxty under laundry tenses.
In dark it shows its gleaming teeth.
Weeks have passed in freedom and there have been changes . . .
Philip is even gaunter, his hair matted, his skin red and rough from wind and rain. He smiles now nearly all the time—there is a brightness to his eyes.
And Boxty is growing plump.
This day is grey when Philip wakes. And there is no warming pressure on his belly. No smell of leather and wine. Something is wrong—
His body snaps in half, flinging the word across the bog: “Boxty!” He turns and turns again, frantic, searching moist and yielding ground for his companion but he’s nowhere, nowhere to be—
He’s nearby—
Lying softly on his side in reeds—Philip scuttles on hands and knees and Boxty lifts his head. Soft bumps move under his purple sheath and he lets out one long, exhausted breath.
“They’re coming. Look. I’m getting round and full with little ones.” He smiles. “Phill-up . . . touch. You’ll feel them.”
Fingers trace his grooves.
Warm and soft.
And something . . . moving . . . underneath.
Philip recoils, fingers snapped back to palm. “I thought you were a boy?”
Boxty grins a sharp circle white, “I’m both.”
Slowly he turns upon his back, opening his legs to let blunt paws stroke. “See,” he says, smiling, “Lumps and creases.”
Philip looks.
The lumps . . .
The creases . . .
“Phill-up, I’m your special dog.”
The boy’s mouth wobbles, fails to catch on words until: “But how—? Who’s the . . . the . . . the father?”
Boxty looks away. “I took something from you. In the night. I’m sorry . . .”
He scratches: Bite marks, soft pink scallops, shallow, on the insides of his elbows and thighs.
“Horseflies,” whispers Philip, “I thought it was . . . insects . . .”
“I’m sorry, Phill-up. It’s the only way I know how to live.” He holds out a blunt paw. “I should’ve asked. But there was change in me. I had to.”
Boxty begins to weep, beading points of mercury from luminous eyes.
“Shush,” says Philip, “Ah shush,” and takes the animal into his lap to stroke.
“I’m sorry, Phill-up.”
“I know,” says the child. “I know.”
“Shush. Shush now.”
Boxty grows. Unable to hunt he lies all day in brittle grass, softly moaning. Philip must hunt: he finds a straying lamb and wrestles its bucking body to the ground. He breaks the back of its skull with a stone.
Boxty directs but the cutting is crude, the cooking incomplete—the meat sickens more than nourishes.
“I’m sorry,” whispers Boxty and turns away.
Under leather, lumps are moving—they’re coming now. They’re coming and Boxty’s torment begins.
“Make it stop,” the creature roars, “Please, make it stop.” His flanks are stretched into translucency; something kicks his limbs apart—
Philip places the shaking creature on a pad of moss. “Hold on, Boxty. Hold on. I’m here.” He takes and tightly holds a paw.
Boxty bears down. A pink seam yawns, shows its inner redness—he wets the grass with fluid.
“I see one!” gasps Philip. Wet feet are peeking from the crease, moving in purple flesh, scraping for purchase.
Boxty screams as Philip grips and pulls the little one from its wet distending pouch. It slithers out—“That’s one,” gasps Philip, laying it aside, “That’s the first,” and reaches for the next.
Lumps slide down the belly of the beast and Philip is there to catch them, to drag them wetly into the world: seven screaming things struggling on grass, ripping themselves out of parcels of gauze.
“Are they sharp?” breathes Boxty, “How sharp are they?”
Philip pauses. “Not sharp . . . not sharp at all, Boxty.”
The creature wails. “Wrong—they came out wrong—”
“Look,” says the child, “Look—”
Boxty turns his exhausted head and sees—Philip among the babies, gently stroking soft, round heads. Pink skinned, all with auburn hair.
“They’re beautiful,” sighs Boxty, “they look just like you, Phill-up. They have your eyes. Your hinged mouth.”
There are tears in Philip’s eyes. “My sisters,” he says, “They look like my sisters.” They nibble the ends of his fingers and he laughs.
Boxty whistles softly and Philip, drenched with sweat and intimate things, watches their children swarm through grass, nuzzling blindly for the belly of Boxty, for the nourishing paps that are swelling there.
Seven newborns. Two dying that night, nameless and cold. Dawn breaks and Philip buries them by Clarke’s Bridge, standing over the mound with Boxty and the little ones, mumbling one of Aunt Marie’s prayers.
The others are named—Treacle and Tulip, Cinnamon and Harmony, and the littlest, weakly mewling, that one Philip names Sunshine. They feed, swarming packages of purple cloth straining to gain a better suck.
“They’re lovely aren’t they?” says Boxty, “Our babies . . .”
Again Sunshine is bullied away from the teats by Treacle, and Philip lifts her, placing her back against Boxty. Leaning, for the first time he sees the red between their feeding faces.
Philips voice is flat. “They’re drinking your blood, Boxty.”
Boxty nods. “It’s how we work. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt too much.” He grunts, “Their first meal,” and smiles, “my last.”
Thunder is a rumour beyond the horizon, lightning tickles the undercloud.
It will rain.
The children are frightened, curled together and wailing.
“Phill-up,” hisses Boxty, naked terror in his voice, “they won’t all make it, Phill-up, they won’t, they won’t—”
Philip rocks the creature to quieten. “Don’t say that—”
“Please. You’ll have to help them when I go.”
“Boxty—don’t talk like that—You’re scaring me—”
“Promise me!”
“I promise! I’ll look after them!”
Lightning cracks the world in half.
Treacle was inquisitive and was the first to roam—she followed a butterfly down a ditch and, tumbling down the slope, broke the film of greasy water at its base.
Treading water, moving turgid chemicals with pink and purple paws, she bleated for help. None came. She went under.
The crows came down for Tulip and took her eyes and tongue.
Cinnamon tried to cross the road but moved too slow. There was nothing left to bury or mourn.
And Harmony . . . what took Harmony? They never knew—dawn came and found her cold.
And that day, that was the day that Boxty died.
Philip held him.
He spoke as if it hurt to speak. “I tried. . . Phill-up. . .”
Hands stroked the bleaching purple. “Boxty. . .”
“I tried . . . but I failed them . . . our babies . . . all dead . . .”
“Boxty, there’s Sunshine. I’ll take care of her. I promise. I won’t let anything happen—”
The creature exhales a rattling breath that stains his teeth with spots of red. “I need to tell you this. It’s important.”
His eyes are the wings of dragonflies, shimmering electric green to gold to amaranth. “I was caught and came here. But your love . . . it sends me on . . . and outwards . . . Oh, Phill-up . . . Phill-up . . .”
A soundless lurch of grief shakes the boy.
Boxty’s paw is on Philip’s cheek, “I’ll always be your special . . . your special . . .”
And slips away.
Purple drains to pale.
Eyes dull and lustreless.
Philip holds him as night comes in across the bog.
Too weak to dig. Nothing to cover the body. But there’s the gorse where they had lain in shade, counting dragonflies, where they had watched the Milky Way on frosty nights and there are cambersennies all about, the softest pink and blue.
And it was good to lay Boxty there, so small at rest, where they had all been happy.
It was good.
Philip and Sunshine say goodbye and go.
Three long days of rain, making the grasses gleam as new.
Philip and Sunshine outlined by the moon, side by side on the face of the bog, and Sunshine pressed to suckle on the child’s open wrist.
Skin has to break for it, the red held against its mouth before it will feed.
There are tears in Philip’s eyes—points of ice, mercury drops . . . “Fight,” he whispers.
The night is long and cold and there is only so much blood.
Sunshine turns her face away and cries.
It carries across the bog.
And Philip whispers, “Fight, please . . . my special . . . my . . .”
I Am Your Special Dog
They ran away the night he lunged for Aunt Marie and locked his needle teeth around her wrist and even when she pulled a pot from the stove and smashed the scalding metal down, still he gripped, tightening, needles meeting—bursting vessels, breaking bone—
In the corner of the kitchen, cowering folded on tiles, Philip runs fingers over the red her slap has left, saying so softly he can barely hear himself:
“Boxty . . .”
“Stop . . .”
“Boxty . . .”
“Don’t . . .”
She screeches, her red in arcs on worktop and window, hand hanging limp like a feather or leaf. The dog releases her, and as it pads to Philip, she slumps, angling along kitchen presses, the long wound spitting in her face, screams dying to an open mouth.
Gently she settles where her bottle smashed, driving splinters of glass into her back, into her neck.
The dog rests his face in Philip’s lap. Saying: “Just say the word. I can take her face away.”
“For you, Phill-up. Say the word and she loses her face . . .”
It purrs, a deep belly-thrum, and Philip feels it through his flesh.
She writhes in glass in silence, the newborn wound clutched in haemorrhage to her chest.
“No,” says Philip, rising, “We’ll just go, Boxty, me and you. We’ll just go.”
He looks across the room at Aunt Marie. He looks down at his special dog. They go.
Philip Conway and his dog, shadows outlined in moonlight, across the fields and through the gaps in towering hills, down the lanes and into woods as sirens paint the town in blue.
They sit together in the shade of a gate, cold and wet and free. Philip is thin and bruised, with auburn hair and scars along his hands and wrists and clothes already worn and ripped and darned and stitched. His lips are full and red and he should by rights have freckles but spent too long in the dark of the Big House.
His eyes are wide and green and thickly lashed and they have seen more than a boy should see.
(The moon in slanting grease reveals the rising hem, the skinny knees of Aunt Marie—
“Is it running clear?”
“Is it running clear?”)
And Boxty is his special dog—a pointed fold of leather, scabbed in purple psoriasis skin, its small flat face shadowed in creases, with two iridescent eyes, the colour and lustre of beetle shells, electric green and silver and black and a tiny mouth of piranha teeth, opening round like a lamprey.
But there is no nose. There are no ears.
Its body is covered in a quilt of skin, in curtains hanging down its flanks, swamping paws, puckering in joints. Its tail is a bubble of meat unmoving, poised over the raisin-pinch of anus.
It looks like something that shouldn’t exist.
But it’s here, and it looks at Philip with love in its glazed and pupil-less eyes.
At their feet is a plastic bag, like an organ teased to opened, holding things snatched before their flight from the Big House: half a thing of biscuits and bread already going blue, a tub of apple yoghurt, two bottles of water, a radio with dying batteries, and creased and creased again and faded: a photo of his parents and sisters.
(They left the road near Mixie’s Well and came to pieces in the field.)
That bag of scraps and ends, that’s all they have.
But Philip and Boxty have each other.
There was a secret under the stairs in the Big House. Wood panelling came away. You could hide. You could recover.
In there, with the dust and spiders, there is barely room for both of them.
“What will I call you?” whispers the child.
It shifts its weight, flat feet pressing down on belly, calling forth a gasp or two. The sharp purple point lightly dabs a philtrum.
“Phill-up you get to name me.”
The voice is high and softly accented . . .
“Think what you need.”
Intonation and tone are strange.
“You get to make me what I am.”
A pod of blood is swelling from the boy’s split lip. It hangs. And gently lowers itself on a thread.
The creature consumes with a swip of its tongue.
“Boxty . . .”says Philip, “Boxty . . .”
It smiles.
(Or at least shows its teeth.)
That was the Big House:
Tall windows.
The smell of Bleach.
Stiff boards and peeling walls and unlit fireplaces.
The painted nails of Aunt Marie.
But now the boy and his dog travel the wild spaces of bog, through yellow, brown and green, where clouds like hills of faded grey rest slow and unburdened on the horizon, and there are dragonflies and herons scooping overhead, and black and feral horses shrugging their way through saffron gorse.
And everything still and silent and open . . .
And everywhere the scent of moss and peat . . .
Philip and Boxty are close to content.
Foxes, rabbits and badgers, and once a cotton-coloured foal: Boxty hunts them down and drags them in pieces, haunch and hind, back over fields. They’d sit in a hollow carved in yellow-flowered gorse and make a little fire there; pale flames burning red meat black and dirty fingers cracking bitter carbon from the bone or piercing stick.
Looking over the flatness of bog, its skeletal reeds and horses staring, Philip swallows, trying not to taste.
At night they lie in gaps in gorse or where the reeds are thickest, and Boxty lies on Philip’s stomach, a dull and heavy source of warmth.
This night the stars are flecks of ice, held unblinking in deepest black, a night that drinks all warmth away. Philip is on the edge of sleep, his hands at play on a purple point. “Boxty?” he whispers, “Where did you come from?”
There is the timeless silence of wide, unpeopled places and Boxty whispers: “We are inquisitive things. We wander down lanes. We crawl through hedges . . . we come through gaps. But we are soft things and sometimes soft things catch on sharp and stay there caught.”
“Stay here.”
The stars are still and Philip, almost sleeping, murmurs, “I don’t . . . understand, Boxty. . .”
Boxty presses his face against Philip’s arm. “Am I making you warm enough?”
Philip grunts a soft consent.
They sleep.
He dreams:
Her hands are thick and graceless, the knuckles male with female nails, sharp and gaudy-painted. Aunt Marie holds his face, squeezes his lips into a fishy pout.
“Where did you get it?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“You’ll tell me.”
She tightens her hold and he squeaks, “I don’t remember—I don’t remember—”
She turns to Boxty, snarling: “That half-born, that diseased thing . . .”
It backs away, shrugs itself under the pile of soiled clothes.
“How dare you bring it in here?” Aunt Marie drags a nail down Philip’s cheek. “This is a good home. A proper home.” She cracks her knuckles one by one. “It’ll go. And you’ll follow it . . .”
And Boxty under laundry tenses.
In dark it shows its gleaming teeth.
Weeks have passed in freedom and there have been changes . . .
Philip is even gaunter, his hair matted, his skin red and rough from wind and rain. He smiles now nearly all the time—there is a brightness to his eyes.
And Boxty is growing plump.
This day is grey when Philip wakes. And there is no warming pressure on his belly. No smell of leather and wine. Something is wrong—
His body snaps in half, flinging the word across the bog: “Boxty!” He turns and turns again, frantic, searching moist and yielding ground for his companion but he’s nowhere, nowhere to be—
He’s nearby—
Lying softly on his side in reeds—Philip scuttles on hands and knees and Boxty lifts his head. Soft bumps move under his purple sheath and he lets out one long, exhausted breath.
“They’re coming. Look. I’m getting round and full with little ones.” He smiles. “Phill-up . . . touch. You’ll feel them.”
Fingers trace his grooves.
Warm and soft.
And something . . . moving . . . underneath.
Philip recoils, fingers snapped back to palm. “I thought you were a boy?”
Boxty grins a sharp circle white, “I’m both.”
Slowly he turns upon his back, opening his legs to let blunt paws stroke. “See,” he says, smiling, “Lumps and creases.”
Philip looks.
The lumps . . .
The creases . . .
“Phill-up, I’m your special dog.”
The boy’s mouth wobbles, fails to catch on words until: “But how—? Who’s the . . . the . . . the father?”
Boxty looks away. “I took something from you. In the night. I’m sorry . . .”
He scratches: Bite marks, soft pink scallops, shallow, on the insides of his elbows and thighs.
“Horseflies,” whispers Philip, “I thought it was . . . insects . . .”
“I’m sorry, Phill-up. It’s the only way I know how to live.” He holds out a blunt paw. “I should’ve asked. But there was change in me. I had to.”
Boxty begins to weep, beading points of mercury from luminous eyes.
“Shush,” says Philip, “Ah shush,” and takes the animal into his lap to stroke.
“I’m sorry, Phill-up.”
“I know,” says the child. “I know.”
“Shush. Shush now.”
Boxty grows. Unable to hunt he lies all day in brittle grass, softly moaning. Philip must hunt: he finds a straying lamb and wrestles its bucking body to the ground. He breaks the back of its skull with a stone.
Boxty directs but the cutting is crude, the cooking incomplete—the meat sickens more than nourishes.
“I’m sorry,” whispers Boxty and turns away.
Under leather, lumps are moving—they’re coming now. They’re coming and Boxty’s torment begins.
“Make it stop,” the creature roars, “Please, make it stop.” His flanks are stretched into translucency; something kicks his limbs apart—
Philip places the shaking creature on a pad of moss. “Hold on, Boxty. Hold on. I’m here.” He takes and tightly holds a paw.
Boxty bears down. A pink seam yawns, shows its inner redness—he wets the grass with fluid.
“I see one!” gasps Philip. Wet feet are peeking from the crease, moving in purple flesh, scraping for purchase.
Boxty screams as Philip grips and pulls the little one from its wet distending pouch. It slithers out—“That’s one,” gasps Philip, laying it aside, “That’s the first,” and reaches for the next.
Lumps slide down the belly of the beast and Philip is there to catch them, to drag them wetly into the world: seven screaming things struggling on grass, ripping themselves out of parcels of gauze.
“Are they sharp?” breathes Boxty, “How sharp are they?”
Philip pauses. “Not sharp . . . not sharp at all, Boxty.”
The creature wails. “Wrong—they came out wrong—”
“Look,” says the child, “Look—”
Boxty turns his exhausted head and sees—Philip among the babies, gently stroking soft, round heads. Pink skinned, all with auburn hair.
“They’re beautiful,” sighs Boxty, “they look just like you, Phill-up. They have your eyes. Your hinged mouth.”
There are tears in Philip’s eyes. “My sisters,” he says, “They look like my sisters.” They nibble the ends of his fingers and he laughs.
Boxty whistles softly and Philip, drenched with sweat and intimate things, watches their children swarm through grass, nuzzling blindly for the belly of Boxty, for the nourishing paps that are swelling there.
Seven newborns. Two dying that night, nameless and cold. Dawn breaks and Philip buries them by Clarke’s Bridge, standing over the mound with Boxty and the little ones, mumbling one of Aunt Marie’s prayers.
The others are named—Treacle and Tulip, Cinnamon and Harmony, and the littlest, weakly mewling, that one Philip names Sunshine. They feed, swarming packages of purple cloth straining to gain a better suck.
“They’re lovely aren’t they?” says Boxty, “Our babies . . .”
Again Sunshine is bullied away from the teats by Treacle, and Philip lifts her, placing her back against Boxty. Leaning, for the first time he sees the red between their feeding faces.
Philips voice is flat. “They’re drinking your blood, Boxty.”
Boxty nods. “It’s how we work. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt too much.” He grunts, “Their first meal,” and smiles, “my last.”
Thunder is a rumour beyond the horizon, lightning tickles the undercloud.
It will rain.
The children are frightened, curled together and wailing.
“Phill-up,” hisses Boxty, naked terror in his voice, “they won’t all make it, Phill-up, they won’t, they won’t—”
Philip rocks the creature to quieten. “Don’t say that—”
“Please. You’ll have to help them when I go.”
“Boxty—don’t talk like that—You’re scaring me—”
“Promise me!”
“I promise! I’ll look after them!”
Lightning cracks the world in half.
Treacle was inquisitive and was the first to roam—she followed a butterfly down a ditch and, tumbling down the slope, broke the film of greasy water at its base.
Treading water, moving turgid chemicals with pink and purple paws, she bleated for help. None came. She went under.
The crows came down for Tulip and took her eyes and tongue.
Cinnamon tried to cross the road but moved too slow. There was nothing left to bury or mourn.
And Harmony . . . what took Harmony? They never knew—dawn came and found her cold.
And that day, that was the day that Boxty died.
Philip held him.
He spoke as if it hurt to speak. “I tried. . . Phill-up. . .”
Hands stroked the bleaching purple. “Boxty. . .”
“I tried . . . but I failed them . . . our babies . . . all dead . . .”
“Boxty, there’s Sunshine. I’ll take care of her. I promise. I won’t let anything happen—”
The creature exhales a rattling breath that stains his teeth with spots of red. “I need to tell you this. It’s important.”
His eyes are the wings of dragonflies, shimmering electric green to gold to amaranth. “I was caught and came here. But your love . . . it sends me on . . . and outwards . . . Oh, Phill-up . . . Phill-up . . .”
A soundless lurch of grief shakes the boy.
Boxty’s paw is on Philip’s cheek, “I’ll always be your special . . . your special . . .”
And slips away.
Purple drains to pale.
Eyes dull and lustreless.
Philip holds him as night comes in across the bog.
Too weak to dig. Nothing to cover the body. But there’s the gorse where they had lain in shade, counting dragonflies, where they had watched the Milky Way on frosty nights and there are cambersennies all about, the softest pink and blue.
And it was good to lay Boxty there, so small at rest, where they had all been happy.
It was good.
Philip and Sunshine say goodbye and go.
Three long days of rain, making the grasses gleam as new.
Philip and Sunshine outlined by the moon, side by side on the face of the bog, and Sunshine pressed to suckle on the child’s open wrist.
Skin has to break for it, the red held against its mouth before it will feed.
There are tears in Philip’s eyes—points of ice, mercury drops . . . “Fight,” he whispers.
The night is long and cold and there is only so much blood.
Sunshine turns her face away and cries.
It carries across the bog.
And Philip whispers, “Fight, please . . . my special . . . my . . .”
