Vermin
Matthew Byrne. He and I plan to parachute from the outhouse roof using bed sheets held by their corners. His extravagant curly hair is so unlike my own, and so like my own father’s, that I wonder if we haven’t been mixed up, he and I.
We both stand on the slates above the outhouse gutter, the white sheets trailing from our shoulders like capes. We bend our knees. We count to three. We stand on tiptoe, staring out across the yard. We count to three again. We stand.
Neither of us will step off into the air and eventually we climb down, ashamed.
After her bath, I spy the mole just below my mother’s ribs. She tells me it must never be picked. She says: “It was left over from when I was made.”
That night, I dream I pick the mole off and find it’s attached to a thread of skin that won’t stop unravelling from my mother’s side. I’m shocked awake by her laughter.
Sheds, pigsties. The brown-kneed sisters from next door who lead me between loose planks into the hovel where the workbench sits, its wooden top gouged and scattered with corkscrews of drilled steel. There they stretch me out and insist I be still and dead and numb in heaven, my arms stiff at my sides. Then they strip and examine me all over, their eyes and their little teeth glittering. From the road outside I can hear the cows, like a low tide, coming in to be milked…