She found the quality of light at this time of year awfully confusing. Dull grey in the morning, silver streams of mist that lick the sky like butter from your fingers. The twilight haze of three o’clock, where the amber lamps come out like fireflies and shadows gather ominously across the sky. Maybe a wisp of some foreign wind, darkling in the fade towards four, where she’d be sitting at her window, wondering. It was the time of year to tend to the garden, pile up the heaps of leaves, clusters of rotting pinecones and acorns that clotted in the soil. The earth was hardening for winter, and soon the frost would come, eating into the grass like a glittering poison. She’d see it as she dressed in 7am sunlight, the whitish mist making crystals at her window. Everything still and beautiful.
It was a luxury, to be home now. She waited for the seasons to change, right at the hinge between autumn and winter, before she made her journey. Asleep on the train, dreaming of being small again, so small in the bubble of childish memory. She could smell the peanut crunch of M&Ms, the sparkling particles of someone’s perfume. Soon, soon she’d be home. The place grew tighter every year, as she grew fatter on the milk of new years and their offerings of plastic joys and flattened dreams. She stood in the kitchen, watching the steam swirl out of her first cup of tea. No new mugs, of course. Later, she would press her face to the window and her breath would fog a dewy canvas, and with one finger she’d draw pentagrams, like she always used to. There’d be the rubbery squeak of skin on glass.
No-one was at home now, just her in the wide archives of the house. In the dusty shelves that made her sneeze, and the picture postcards, she imagined a thousand phantoms. They were pretty phantoms, ornamented with the smiles of children and the pinkish sheen of memory. They did not speak to her, but she was somewhat comforted by their silence. What counted was the presence, the ghosted sigh of a skin-prick or coldness. She would wait till her parents got home and read books, in that nook between the banister and the cabinet on the landing. Imagining herself as Jo in Little Women, taking great bites out of Braeburn apples, lines of prose flying before her eyes. She did not fit there as well as she did as a child. The wood cut into her arm as she read the strange poems covered in gold-frosted dust. Somebody had been spraying glitter in the study, making Christmas decorations. That was a long time ago.
***
Morning came like a murmuring of starlings, and slipped away again just as quickly. Her body was heavy, her limbs tree-trunks of aching muscle. She felt she had been away again, and the new hours were another return. She worked them over in her mind, pondering the way their shapes formed with her hunger and sleepiness. Moulding, slowly. At the window she stood and yawned. Some machine was whirring away, making her coffee. The smell dissipated through the room with its warm opulence, stirring her brain to life. Yes. She peered closely into the garden, staring at strange dark shapes which clumped in the fronds of long grass. Most peculiar. Later she would investigate. She ate her breakfast of burnt toast with the radio humming in the background, speaking of a war somewhere, and then advertisements for hair salons and special restaurants. Onto her toast she spooned pools of blackberry jam that looked like crushed rubies, and the soury sweetness bit at her tongue between her teeth. She chewed loudly and grinning, the wine-coloured juice staining her lips. Afterwards, she left everything on the table: the crumbs peppering the wood like a pixie’s debris.
It was almost enough just to be here, out of the shouting sirens, the madness of the city. Home, she supposed. She sat at her laptop, fingers clicking ruthlessly at the keys. She was writing a message to someone, a sad story about why she would no longer remember them. She would keep it saved, locked deep in her computer’s hard-drive, and then one day send it. When she had the person’s address. When the time was right; which it wasn’t just yet.
Everything stretched out like the languid yawn of a giant, just a long morning and the gape of afternoon, uncertain evening. The sheerness of time was narcotic, rendering tiny signals that pulsated in her brain. She was at once sleepy and electrified. She rushed up the stairs to check something in her room, but her phone was dead and all that was there were her clothes strewn across the carpet. She messed around looking for things to read. She highlighted her favourite words in the dictionary. It was a big dictionary, and a whole hour shed away like the flake of skin that layers the top of a scar. She remembered only a handful of this vocabulary: sapphire, salience, stardust, Saprotrophic. She was cleaning the window with lemon vinegar, making sweeping lanes in the film of dirt. A thin moon peered out of the weary sky like a wink. Saprotrophic…she had forgotten something. Ah…the mysterious clumps in the garden! Of course, they were mushrooms, only mushrooms…
She pulled on her mother’s wellies and trod out into the garden, up the concrete steps. The air was very still; mournful, even. It smelled of wood-smoke, and somewhere she could hear the crackling snaps of burning tinder. Plumes of it rose against the blueish dusk in dark arabesques. She sighed contentedly. The clumps were even more abundant than she’d thought; the whole garden was teeming with their shadowy figures. She knelt down to inspect some. She thought of the honey fungus they’d found out in a forest once, clinging prettily to a rotting stump. In the sunset glistenings that glazed the silhouetted trees, she had thought she could almost see fairies, fluttering above the mushrooms. They were lovely mushrooms, with their smooth peachy caps. Her friend had said they were edible; but you could not be sure with wild ones, so they left them alone, like a living relic, noting their path. The toadstools she saw now in the garden were a putrid brownish colour, etched with black lines and little white spots. They were ugly in a kind of otherworldly way. Ethereal, even.
Her knees were going numb from bending so she stood up and did a lap of the garden to get her circulation back. She was recalling things. The party where a boy brought out a sandwich bag of suspicious-looking vegetables, frying them on somebody’s pan. She’d stood in the doorway of the kitchen, her mind full of cheap red wine, watching the way the little things unfurled in the buttery oil, their spindly stalks stretched out like tentacles, their heads jiggling like jellyfish. As they started to sizzle and wilt, they let out a curious, bitter smell. The boy had shared them among his friends and then they had disappeared for most of the night. Later, one of them was hanging upside down in a tree at the village park, and he was reciting streams of Byron’s poetry. Sometimes, she still heard his voice, even now, reverberating through the dark.
The cold was coming out of its slumber and creeping into her bones. She stood still, wrapping her cardigan tight around her. She crouched down again and dug her nails into the earth. A weird feeling gripped her, a feeling tinged with homesickness. She pulled nothing out of the ground, no trace of seed or root. She stood up again. The quietness made her feel smaller than ever, but her mind was huge and overbearing, stretching itself across the matter of the garden. It all glared in her vision like the close-up shots of a dream. She wished some sound would break the silence. A bird-cry, even. But the little creatures were so quick with their wings that they made no noise as they flew between branches. She was trembling now, remembering everything.
The fungus at her feet now looked like the severed heads of something. She had to breathe.
If only a car would start in the drive, or a plane fly overhead…something, something!
They say that magic makes you happier. And she thought there was a thing she could do, before going inside again to the womblike comforts of heat and sleep. She brushed through the grass with her wellied feet, and stood in the centre of one of the fairy rings. It was a near perfect circle. She stared first at the mushroomy clumps at her feet, then up at the sky. It bore the dramatic flashes of an expressionist painting: great bolts of violet wounded the blue, and rivulets of yellow broke away from the horizon, approaching amber and spiralling, spiralling. Then she found again the moon. Brighter now, it was a sharp crescent, the fold of an eyelid. She waited, waited. Her body was cold and her skin prickled like coral on a sea-washed rock.
The clouds began to gather, slowly at first then fast like an army.
You could smell it in the air, the sourish dampness that held as a breath.
She closed her eyes and the rain came. She felt the initial sprinkles that bounced off her skin, the cries of birds as they darted into the hawthorns for shelter. Drizzles of silver slashing the landscape. A downpour of water and chilly air. She stuck her tongue out for the cold shock and the sharp taste. The crescendo sound of it showering louder, coming down thick and heavy from the west in globules fat as teardrops. She opened her eyes and her hair streamed down her face like seaweed, clinging to the marble of her skin. She felt it surge within her, the waterfall sounds of this injured nature. A grumble of thunder. Something stirring in her chest, a rush in her pulse. Almost like someone was watching her, a million things flashing around her. Her laughter was lost in the cavernous sound of the rainstorm, another echo pirouetting through the chambers of memory. And as she stood there, the fungus and mushrooms soaked up their nectar, before crumpling to a wasted doom. The rain had poured through and through her, and she felt hollow and purged as a mermaid tossed from the sea to a tomb. And she was the still point in the tempest around her, her body soft and sad with its sickness. This was it; home was just this, wild and true, the beatific glow of a hullabaloo.
mariaology 
