Ghost Birds
David Antrobus Posted on Saturday, August 4, 2018 at 11:56AM 
What have we here? A field in England. Absent colour or anything defining.
Wait. Sound of a bird, a two-syllable scream. Could mostly be anything. Hear it? The monochrome ghost of a lapwing.
Unveiled, the razor stubble underfoot, foreground to a copse. Ploughed lines littered with fallen crows. Black-pepper dead things and mud, well seasoned. Botched black ops. Othered.
Oh, this is it. Here. The land of nowhere. It's grey, and in that grey another grey partitioned.
Separate this. Memorize it. Long gone, the caws of crows are a haunted echo of here.
No one survived. Not you. Not me.
Caravans in a lacklustre grid, arranged on causeways, flavourless as barroom eels in watery aspic.
This is a sort of ending.
***
"You remember that summer?"
"I do."
"How do you know which summer I meant?"
"I guessed."
"Huh. You were so splendid. And those luscious hills!"
***
Programmed, the night train plies its loop, though nothing living enters or leaves. Entropy will win out, but for now emptiness goddesses its route. Sparks shower lost highways, accidental angels on agnostic tableaux.
Tell me I am lost. Read me a story, Mama. Warn me against the aroma of risen bread. Against tricksters and temptresses. Fresh ground Arabian beans and newly cut grass.
Next? Will I triumph? I barely even exist.
***
"How is any of this right?"
"It isn't."
"Then…?"
"There ain't no then."
"But…"
"Enough. We won't ever answer this."
***
Each season speaks its maddening tale. This glass, this pane, is but a sliver cleaving air.
No glass can separate our lust. Air is blent blank comfort bathing everything.
Armies approach. Still the empty sunless skies hover like dismal apparitions over barren fields. The sound of clanking armour barely registers. All is ashen subdued terror.
Your champion's enticed into a tent, his low guts cut and unwound as he's sent into the dreary afternoon. Sent away screaming, watching his own steaming innards unspool between his feet.
***
Our quiet road angles its way beyond the town, arcing when it needs to, straight beside the black waters of the river, an extended jawbone savouring asphalt taste, seeking salt. Keep on driving. Maybe it will all resolve itself. Make sense. No one else pretends to even share this space. Silent wrecks litter the ditches. This once vibrant seat is ever more bloodless.
Cormorants bow and dip in the reeking shallows, flex their pitiless cauls, persevere and stretch and swallow, such drab unlovely priests.
Where did you go? Did you abandon us on purpose? Is this what it is now? Will any of us be spared?
Probably no. And you? Probably don't follow.
Reader Comments (2)
You had me at "Black-pepper dead things and mud, well seasoned." This entire piece captures the end of the world, doesn't it? I always imagine that the penultimate thing to disappear will be colour, leaving us in several moments of black and white before the end. Luckily, I don't imagine it very often.
Your "luckily" was perfectly chosen and perfectly placed there! And yes.