Worthing Flash

Fox Path She knows the path the fox takes - past the bramble bushes, through the long grass, to the left of the anthill, and under the trees into the copse. Ash Alder Beech Hazel Holly Oak Her mother is crying in the house. At night, the fox cries too. She is not afraid of the fox, she fears her mother’s tears. The path runs along the edge of the field where the fallen tree lies speckled with moss and lichen. Crow Jay Pigeon Rook The path leads down to the pond banked with reeds, slippery with mud and the paw-prints of voles. Coot Heron Mallard The fox does not swim in the pond but stares up at the sky. Cumulus Cirrus Stratus A small wind shivers the leaves of the alders. The fox is gone. Her father is gone but the fox will return and her mother cries in the house. Daisy Dandelion Dog-rose Glittering like stars, the dew in the long grass. by Bronwen Griffiths

A silver Vauxhall with alloy wheels. A 1600. Easy to break into. He knows how to hot wire. His father taught him. Father gone. Left. Walked out. Five years back. Seems forever. The car started, a Def Leppard CD stereo system. He turns the volume up. Loud. Louder. Fifteen minutes later he pulls over. Checks the cubby-hole. Only the car manual there and three CDs he doesn’t recognise. The car is immaculate inside - nothing to identify the owner, not even a packet of sweets. The only personal touch is the chrome skull’s head on the gearstick, and the CDs. Out-of-date. Older guy, must be. He runs his hand over the dashboard, feels the cold of the skull’s head. The seats are low and comfortable. He flicks the electric windows up and down, puts the car back into gear. He hasn’t got his licence yet but he’s been driving for years. The needle hits sixty, and seventy on the long straight road. The seawall to the left, the caravan park to his right. He opens the window and the war...

If ever the train does not pass over the bridge in the night he cannot sleep. Under the bridge the river slides green and slow, past the implacable mountains, the old town and the new warehouses, past the willow trees and the fishermen on the banks. There was once another bridge over this river but that was years ago and it pains his heart to remember it. He stood with his wife on that bridge the day of their silver wedding anniversary and he presented her with a pair of filigree earrings and she smiled as wide and tall as its stone arch. It grieves him to think of his wife because she too is gone like the old bridge. Instead, he concentrates on the rumble of the freight train, the solidness of it, not the ghost of his wife and the days of pounding sorrow, or the way the bridge crumpled under the weight of explosions, his wife collapsed in his arms. There are two ducks on the river, a mallard and a hen. He watches as they follow each other through the eddies, as the sound of the ...

Roaming. Verb. Moving about aimlessly or unsystematically, especially over a wide area. To move about, or travel, often without a clear idea of what you are going to do. To tramp. To ramble, range, rove, and wander. A-roaming. This is how Ellen and I pass the weekends. We ramble to the blackberry bushes beyond Drayton and the pool. We drift along the road to Dodds Hill, laughing at signposts. We tramp to the elm field, dodging the raindrops. Our rambles take us to the old beeches, the hollow oak and the burial mound on Barrow Hill. We rove along elven paths, star-paths, heart-paths and singing paths. Our footsteps traverse the edges of fields, through clouds of cow parsley and past the flock of Jacob’s sheep, the scummy pond and the millstream. We tread this landscape, clad in pumps, clogs, sandals, boots and sometimes nothing but our cracked, bare soles. We roam through storms, hail and summer light, shadows and moonbeams. Through mud, nettles and brambles. Past the church...

The air is burning in her lungs, as she bare-foots her way up the dune. Above, the sky is an empty blue, falling to a metallic glare on the horizon. Below, the desert is dust and stone. A lunar surface. The truck, parked besides a rocky outcrop, looks as tiny as a child’s toy. The silence here is as big as the desert itself. She can only hear the low thud of her heart, the slip-slapping of her feet on the grains of sand. She is following other footsteps, larger than her own. Three-quarters of the way up, the footsteps vanish. How is this possible? Back at camp she shows Simon the amulet. ‘Where did you find this?’ ‘Close by the vehicle, lying in the sand.’ ‘Lucky.’ He holds in in his hand; the hand she knows so well. ‘It’s old. Valuable, I imagine.’ ‘There’s writing. Here, on the side. What does it say?’ Simon can read Arabic but he shakes his head. ‘I don’t know the script. We’ll get an expert to examine it.’ This the last day of the trip. That night they ma...

The old woman knocked out a Russian drone with a jar of pickled cucumber. No, a jar of picked tomatoes, some say. Does this detail matter? Perhaps. What happens is this: the old woman picks up the jar of pickles and opens her eight floor window in the draughty block of flats. The drone whines below, a metal bird, a predator seeking its target. A few flakes of snow meander from the sky and settle on old woman’s gnarled hands, and on the lid of the jar. She waits. She feels no fear. The moment is but a fraction of a second; the moment is the length of this long war. As she lets go of the heavy jar she thinks of all the work of growing and picking, of chopping and seasoning; the smell of vinegar and spices, the click of the lid, the writing of the label. She thinks of how fast spring turned to summer, and the sudden late winter of this war. She thinks of her children, and their children, and those yet unborn growing in the dark, and if the light will vanish from all the...

Here, where the motorway cuts through the ancient hill, where empty bottles, cans and debris lie – a shredded tyre, a baby’s nappy, a lost earring gleaming in the parched grass – here I will fashion a forest of oak trees. Here, where today the noise of traffic is as loud as a swollen river, where toxic fumes belch into the humid air and the verge is bloodied with the entrails of badgers, foxes and voles, I will stitch a thousand lichens, weave patterns into bark and sprout saplings from fallen acorns. Overnight these slender saplings will grow into immense forest. Tomorrow wrens will rustle in the verge’s undergrowth, a colony of ants will build a nest where the hard shoulder now stands and a giant oak will root itself into the middle lane, from where the owl’s eye will survey its domain. Tomorrow you will see twisted branches arching their way across the tarmac, moles burrowing under the cat’s eyes and a fox slinking along the rusted crash barrier. Tomorrow there will be a soft gre...

‘ Those shoes she wears. They’re stained and grubby and the laces aren’t tied right.’ ‘She’s always been messy.’ ‘Shows an untidy mind.’ ‘Lazy, more like.’ ‘ I have more important things to do in my life . Did you hear her say that?’ ‘Yes, I did. She should sort out her priorities.’ A soft pair of shoes, colour of sand. Like the faded highlights in her hair. Flecks of dried mud on the soles, a few stalks of grass. Spots of grease on the fabric. The laces loose and uneven, the zips at the side of the shoes half-undone. The shoes abandoned in the hall. One talking to the other. At primary school the class teacher droned on and on. Let me show you. Oh for goodness sake, try a little harder, it’s not rocket science. And she did try. She tried and tried and then she gave up and she still can’t tie laces all these years later. Give her a map to read, a mountain range to navigate - not those knots, the complications of unders and overs. Comfortable shoes, walking shoes, ...

  Few people come this way. The path is steep and winding. It is a rare day when the wind does not blow or the mountain summits are cloud clear. This is a place for the goats and ravens, not us human kind. Yet I am here. And today the sky is as blue as an eye. The way down is more perilous than the way up. Bilberry bushes cover the rocks, hiding small crevasses. One slip is all it would take. I have already passed the high lake. I do not hurry. The silence is stony deep. She is dressed in a rose-print blouse and a pale blue skirt. As soon as we are within speaking distance I say hello. It is customary to greet everyone on these mountains. ‘ Such a rare and beautiful afternoon.’ ‘ Yes,’ she says. Not a flicker of a smile passes her lips. ‘ What brings you here?’ She focuses her gaze on the grey mountain peak behind me and runs her fingers through her cropped blonde hair. ‘I do not know this place.’ ‘ Perhaps not. This is a place of wild goats and poets.’ She ...

  Plummet   When you plummeted from the suspension bridge you resembled a leaf falling. Later on the news I learned your name and your age, which was forty two, a significant number. I remembered this from a well-known book I’d read before, though you yourself were not famous. I wondered, as you tumbled, did you think of your children (a boy of six, girl of ten) or the husband who beat you, the unwashed clothes in the linen basket or your three goldfish, or did you think of your lover’s mouth, soft as a petal on your own; your red beating heart?   Bronwen Griffiths    

For a thousand years story-tellers have told stories of my wickedness and magical powers, the ugliness of my face, my warts and crooked nose, my stringy hair. It is true that my house on chicken’s legs shrieks like a thousand nails scratched across a blackboard if someone approaches. Human skulls decorate the fence posts; their eye sockets glow red at night. I own a black cat who can shape-shift into the form of a beautiful woman, a wolf, a nag; a black cat who will scratch your eyes out if I order it to do so. It is true that I am able to transform a single hair into a raging river. That I travel via a mortar with supersonic flight. That three horses and riders of the day, sunset, and black night are always at my command. But I am not one hundred per cent wickedness. I have a heart and my heart is not black like coal, or hard as diamonds. It beats red in my chest like your heart and once I saved a wife from the claws of Kostshei the Deathless. Yet no one asks after ...