Budding

Budding

"Let's meet and talk about it, but not tonight," he said. "Tonight's my first shift at the steelworks." "Right," she said. "Tomorrow night, then, in the bar."

March 29th 1971. On the television screen, slaughtered bodies on the fields of My Lai. A boy, bullet ripped. An open basket, bloodied.

He was grimy, thirsty when he arrived. A drink, a tacit assignation with the future, and then out into the frosty Sheffield air - a clean dry burn, the tiny needle fibres, deadly arrow tipped, embedded in his pleura, a future efflorescence, a fatal flowering over fifty years of friendship.





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