Reunion Song

Every time she saw herself in the mirror, I remember, she pushed her chin forwards so as to stretch the skin of her neck. The crushed tram ticket in her throat produced the crumpled husky sound itself. She had seen a throat specialist at one point and I told her a long anecdote about my trip to NY, which fanned out from the phrase ‘detective work’ which I used to describe my absorption in research. I sat there, in the library, for 9 hours a day, a short lunch in the brisk sub-zero sun, and spoke to her of the blizzard and its pattern on the east coast. A doctor pointed the sharp beak of curlew at her neck which twitched like a nerve as she sang: it’s nearly 10! We had had another wine and met outside the pain – 7 years. Most of the local bars were closed and the cellar was closed to the public given a whisky festival. I stirred honey into the corner of my mouth and went to itch my own brain through a hole in the back of my skull obscured by a flap of thick hair. The texture of a soccer ball retrieved from a swamp, my mind. Colour of cross trainers, lycra. She’d been an avid runner. It’s harder to communicate the evening without thinking about breakup (ours) and death (her mother’s) but we used those words. The light was very low.

Luke Beesley