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I remember the first day the fog came. It rolled in over the ocean and hunkered down over our little town, settling like a stray. When I woke up and opened the curtains, it was like seeing snow. There was just a sea of grey, the houses across the road dissolving like cigarette ash up into the clouds.
I couldn’t stop running that day, feeling like an intrepid explorer set free in uncharted jungle territory. The walk to school was an adventure, navigating through parks a challenge, finding my peers in the playground at break a nightmare. We revelled in this new world, and James Morgan invented a game called ‘disappear.’ We would send one of our party out into the stark grey wilderness until we couldn’t see a trace of their silhouette. We played all of lunch time, and when it was my turn I took giant strides out, a boat leaving safe bays into treacherous wide oceans. My strides went from bounds to steps to tentative shuffling, hearing my friends calling out that I’d disappeared, as if from a great distance. In the middle of the mist, there seemed to be no landmarks or anchors and I couldn’t pinpoint where their excited cries were coming from. But then, as if the sun was melting over the horizon, through the haze I saw a sliver of red slip into view, coming closer and closer, getting bigger and bigger until I saw that the sun was Erin Lane’s red converse shoes, her spindly legs emerging from the fog, her face washed out in this blank wasteland. Without words, she grabbed my wrist with forget-me-not violet hands and dragged me back to my friends. They all joked that she was a life ring, a beacon, a compass point – her bright red shoes cutting through the playground like gasoline tracks set on fire.
It was fun, living in a world that seemed like an incomplete sketch. And that night, the streetlights came on as usual and out of the window all I could see was faint orbs of yellow light, as if the stars were floating right there on the soft cotton waves.
In the morning, I had already forgotten about the wild adventures of yesterday, of disappear and of Erin Lane’s bright red shoes. But as I drew my curtains open, a blank canvas stared back at me. The fog hung thick and heavy outside as before. The walk to school was still exciting, seeing my little town from a whole new perspective, re-discovering pockets of beauty, noticing the tiniest details in my small circle of vision – a pansy blooming between paving slabs, the bright white-washed picket fence at number three, the perfectly straight yellow lines following the pavement’s twists and turns. In a world devoid of colour, I began to notice any change in the soft grey scenery I wandered through. Down the alleyway that cut behind the park and the old housing estate, a girl walked ahead of me, her bright blue backpack burning onto the underside of my eyelids, remaining whenever I blinked. But she played a good game of disappear, and dissipated into the clouds within moments.
At break, we gathered in the classroom and headed out together to play disappear once more. But I couldn’t focus; I kept looking out of the corner of my eye for the red glow of Erin Lane’s shoes, for the blue skies of that girl’s backpack. I missed my turn through not paying attention, and James Morgan kept pinching the bridge of his nose impatiently whenever I asked him to repeat what he had just said.
The days began to blend into endless grey. At some point, the streetlights stopped working and from then on time was a guessing game. The teachers tried their best to figure out what day it was, but even they struggled. Some school weeks seemed to last ten days, others four. Some days ended at noon, others at midnight. It was hard to tell. I started to forget what this little town looked like before it was submerged in downy swan feathers, in wispy clouds. I overheard the younger children say that the earth had been tipped upside down and we had fallen into the sky. Other’s said that this was the end of everything.
There was no traffic, no nothing; walks to school were a lonely affair and no-one chose to go anywhere on their own if they could help it. Rumours spread about people who got lost in the mist for days, re-emerging changed and shaken. We had to stop playing disappear after Tom Nicholls got stranded and was missing for hours. Teachers sent a search party of students out, under the lead of Erin Lane and her red shoes, and after what felt like years trying to trace the source of quiet echoed sobs, we found him clinging to an old birch tree trunk like a sailor on a rock. We stopped going outside at breaks soon after that.
Some days I saw that blue backpack recede into the fog just out of reach. It burned, and I would blink and blink to see the flash of cerulean skies over and over again, grasping the memory of clear blue atmosphere and swollen cicada songs and no clouds, no clouds, no clouds. And I would track the back of Erin Lane’s red shoes striding past, repeating the words ‘there is a sun somewhere’ in my head.
Slowly, things began to unravel. School became the hub of the town, the only place everyone knew how to get to, the only thing still functional. Other services had dropped off gradually, leaving the adults and parents with hours to spend thinking and thinking and thinking. As the weeks stretched into sketched nothings, interspersed with moments of clarity, of colour, of vivid reminiscence, adults began to talk outside the gates. And then they began to broadcast, shouting the latest theories at each other, voices from unknown sources echoing from the depths of the fog. ‘We have been forgotten, abandoned, left to die out here in the unknown.’ It rattled the windows of classroom 1-A, and I could only stare with sore eyes at Erin Lane’s red shoes and whisper ‘there is a sun somewhere’ over and over and over, holding my pencil so hard that it started to splinter in my grip.
Sometimes I thought I saw a flash of blue, dreamed of a day when the sky would open back up and pool into my lungs. Sometimes I thought I saw that girl’s backpack bobbing in the distance like a fishing lure. Sometimes I thought she looked back, hesitated as if debating whether to join me or not, to say something or not. But she never did any of those things. I would blink blue and remember the days when my friends and I would lie on the lawn and talk to the stratosphere as if it understood. Sometimes, when the nights didn’t come for weeks, I prayed to the sky, picturing her backpack with tightly clenched eyes, and I asked ‘what we did we do wrong?’
Sometimes I thought I saw the sunrise of Erin Lane’s red shoes ascending over the blurred horizon. Sometimes, when she walked past, I thought I saw her straight scowl deepen, sometimes I thought I saw it soften. Her eyes are green. I never noticed before. But our schedules have coincided; somehow our lungs have both decided that now is day, our brains that now is noon. And I watch the sunrise each morning and set each night, and it feels familiar. I have written ‘there is a sun somewhere’ at the top of each page of my notebook, have noticed that her eyes are green. We meet when we can by the only streetlight that continues to intermittently flicker. It is now known as The Lighthouse, and she is now known as The Lighthouse, the younger children reliant on spotting her shoes if they get lost in the mist, following her like a beacon. And this fog has erased the meaning of personal space. Somehow, the colours of a face seem more vivid, and anything that is not grey must be drunk in, every detail must be absorbed and when she solidifies from the cotton sea, our faces grow close. It is the ritual of each morning, standing in the middle of an endless blanket of fog, staring at each other without saying a word. Sometimes her scowl deepens, sometimes it softens and her eyes are green. I remember spring afternoons, the streets dripping with buds and fresh leaves and flocks of peacock butterflies. I remember grass stains bleeding into my white trousers. The grass has withered and I would give anything to be covered in grass stains again. And I watch her watch me, and then we start walking without speaking, side by side, my eyes straining to keep track of her red shoes, hands itching to hold hers.
Human contact is a strange joy now. Outside, everyone is alone, lost amongst the canvas. It is hard enough to stay together in the mist, let alone to meet each other in it. And her steady scowling presence next to me feels like a candle burning, wax melting onto my arm. In the nights when the fog broods, charcoal and ash, I dream of her scowl blazing beneath my fingertips, her forget-me-not hands carved around my wrist, my wax skin melting into hers. And I dream of cerulean oceans reflecting aquamarine skies, that girl turning and turning and turning between my cupped hands, I dream of kissing the waves and loving the tides and existing as the moon caught between sea and sky and sun. And I wake to the same void outside my window, the same ache in my chest.
One day, I am walking to school alone. Like a mirage, the blue backpack wavers on the edge of my peripheral vision, half mist half real. I speed up, and as usual I think that the girl falters, hesitates, at the end of the alleyway. And suddenly I am running, desperate to touch, to hold, to glow ivory and lunar in her indigo planisphere, to fall beneath violent bruised blue waves, to see any of the spectrum of blue hues up close and suddenly she is turning and turning and turning to look at me. And my eyes crash into brown irises, a lifetime of bonfire nights and games in the forest and climbing old oak trees howling into my brain and I almost forget to stop running. And we are stood, staring without speaking. And she is beautiful, pink mouth half-open, freckles like sawdust, a kaleidoscope of hues to my starved senses. And I am senseless, lost between candyfloss and the august funfair on the green and woodshop and birds flitting between the birdhouses we all made first year and she is a world, complete in and of itself. And she smiles and my god I spend the next week dreaming about more than moons and seas and skies. I dream in old home videos, the town I grew up in mapped out across her skin, the life I remember held in the lines of her palms.
I forget about time with her. We spend months kissing under a bare maple tree, the iron sky forgotten and discarded. We spend years holding the shattered pieces of the past up to the light of The Lighthouse, examining every fibre of our memories against the colours of our skin, comparing and contrasting the winter nights when the sky bared its ribs, sunken and stained with oncoming snow, with the autumn evenings which roared and blazed and burned with furnace lungs and reaching fingers into the sunrise. But in every memory there is a sun arching overhead, on every page of my notebook I see the red stains of her shoes and this girl may be a world, a planet, a being so complete that it should be enough, but this earth would not bear such fruit without the sun combusting with a steady scowl far away.
I leave her under the maple tree, and only what seems like days later, I see her glowing backpack in the near-distance, her hand tangled with another’s. Like her moon, I orbit, strung-out in deep space. But like the moon, I bend her tides and wash her away to the far side of the globe. I try to forget. For the first time since the fog came, I try to forget what went before. It is hard to let go, and James Morgan pinches the bridge of his nose impatiently whenever I cut off my friends’ discussions about once-was and forever-ago moments. ‘All that matters is that there is a sun somewhere,’ I say, and they stare at me with crumpled faces and disbelief. Erin Lane’s seat is empty for three days, and all I can do is repeat that mantra and rub my palms around my wrist, the windows no longer rattling. Like our old game, the adults have played disappear, melting back into the houses in resignation.
I have not seen red in weeks, the ocean is but a faint memory. Colour seems to be a theory, a state of mind and even the white washed picket fence of number three seems to have faded to cygnet grey. Although I have tried to forget the world before the fog, there will always be, deep in the marrow of my bones, a desperation to see the sun. It is like existence is not real without a dawn breaking the endless night. I wait under The Lighthouse for four days and four nights and then, finally, the sun rises.
She emerges and the mist thins around us. And we stand and stare without speaking and I have no idea whether skies were purple or white, whether the oceans black or gold. But her scowl deepens and then softens, and I stretch my arm out and her fingers circle my wrist and we are satellites tied together by gravity and we stare, faces close and closer and closest and-
I remember the first day the fog came. And I remember the days after that. And in the time that followed, I became a meteor tethered by two gravities, and mother I stared into the sun for too long and now I am blind. I have wandered deep into unchartered territory and lost my way home. I have played ‘disappear’ and let myself burn up into ash under her touch, and now I am just a patch of smoke amongst the fog. And I have forgotten all that went before. I remember the first day the fog came.
(Mother I am blind, blindly in love, and I can’t find a way home even if I tried, the only Lighthouse is by my side and god knows no-one else has red shoes that glow, a scowl that makes my heart ache.)
I couldn’t stop running that day, feeling like an intrepid explorer set free in uncharted jungle territory. The walk to school was an adventure, navigating through parks a challenge, finding my peers in the playground at break a nightmare. We revelled in this new world, and James Morgan invented a game called ‘disappear.’ We would send one of our party out into the stark grey wilderness until we couldn’t see a trace of their silhouette. We played all of lunch time, and when it was my turn I took giant strides out, a boat leaving safe bays into treacherous wide oceans. My strides went from bounds to steps to tentative shuffling, hearing my friends calling out that I’d disappeared, as if from a great distance. In the middle of the mist, there seemed to be no landmarks or anchors and I couldn’t pinpoint where their excited cries were coming from. But then, as if the sun was melting over the horizon, through the haze I saw a sliver of red slip into view, coming closer and closer, getting bigger and bigger until I saw that the sun was Erin Lane’s red converse shoes, her spindly legs emerging from the fog, her face washed out in this blank wasteland. Without words, she grabbed my wrist with forget-me-not violet hands and dragged me back to my friends. They all joked that she was a life ring, a beacon, a compass point – her bright red shoes cutting through the playground like gasoline tracks set on fire.
It was fun, living in a world that seemed like an incomplete sketch. And that night, the streetlights came on as usual and out of the window all I could see was faint orbs of yellow light, as if the stars were floating right there on the soft cotton waves.
In the morning, I had already forgotten about the wild adventures of yesterday, of disappear and of Erin Lane’s bright red shoes. But as I drew my curtains open, a blank canvas stared back at me. The fog hung thick and heavy outside as before. The walk to school was still exciting, seeing my little town from a whole new perspective, re-discovering pockets of beauty, noticing the tiniest details in my small circle of vision – a pansy blooming between paving slabs, the bright white-washed picket fence at number three, the perfectly straight yellow lines following the pavement’s twists and turns. In a world devoid of colour, I began to notice any change in the soft grey scenery I wandered through. Down the alleyway that cut behind the park and the old housing estate, a girl walked ahead of me, her bright blue backpack burning onto the underside of my eyelids, remaining whenever I blinked. But she played a good game of disappear, and dissipated into the clouds within moments.
At break, we gathered in the classroom and headed out together to play disappear once more. But I couldn’t focus; I kept looking out of the corner of my eye for the red glow of Erin Lane’s shoes, for the blue skies of that girl’s backpack. I missed my turn through not paying attention, and James Morgan kept pinching the bridge of his nose impatiently whenever I asked him to repeat what he had just said.
The days began to blend into endless grey. At some point, the streetlights stopped working and from then on time was a guessing game. The teachers tried their best to figure out what day it was, but even they struggled. Some school weeks seemed to last ten days, others four. Some days ended at noon, others at midnight. It was hard to tell. I started to forget what this little town looked like before it was submerged in downy swan feathers, in wispy clouds. I overheard the younger children say that the earth had been tipped upside down and we had fallen into the sky. Other’s said that this was the end of everything.
There was no traffic, no nothing; walks to school were a lonely affair and no-one chose to go anywhere on their own if they could help it. Rumours spread about people who got lost in the mist for days, re-emerging changed and shaken. We had to stop playing disappear after Tom Nicholls got stranded and was missing for hours. Teachers sent a search party of students out, under the lead of Erin Lane and her red shoes, and after what felt like years trying to trace the source of quiet echoed sobs, we found him clinging to an old birch tree trunk like a sailor on a rock. We stopped going outside at breaks soon after that.
Some days I saw that blue backpack recede into the fog just out of reach. It burned, and I would blink and blink to see the flash of cerulean skies over and over again, grasping the memory of clear blue atmosphere and swollen cicada songs and no clouds, no clouds, no clouds. And I would track the back of Erin Lane’s red shoes striding past, repeating the words ‘there is a sun somewhere’ in my head.
Slowly, things began to unravel. School became the hub of the town, the only place everyone knew how to get to, the only thing still functional. Other services had dropped off gradually, leaving the adults and parents with hours to spend thinking and thinking and thinking. As the weeks stretched into sketched nothings, interspersed with moments of clarity, of colour, of vivid reminiscence, adults began to talk outside the gates. And then they began to broadcast, shouting the latest theories at each other, voices from unknown sources echoing from the depths of the fog. ‘We have been forgotten, abandoned, left to die out here in the unknown.’ It rattled the windows of classroom 1-A, and I could only stare with sore eyes at Erin Lane’s red shoes and whisper ‘there is a sun somewhere’ over and over and over, holding my pencil so hard that it started to splinter in my grip.
Sometimes I thought I saw a flash of blue, dreamed of a day when the sky would open back up and pool into my lungs. Sometimes I thought I saw that girl’s backpack bobbing in the distance like a fishing lure. Sometimes I thought she looked back, hesitated as if debating whether to join me or not, to say something or not. But she never did any of those things. I would blink blue and remember the days when my friends and I would lie on the lawn and talk to the stratosphere as if it understood. Sometimes, when the nights didn’t come for weeks, I prayed to the sky, picturing her backpack with tightly clenched eyes, and I asked ‘what we did we do wrong?’
Sometimes I thought I saw the sunrise of Erin Lane’s red shoes ascending over the blurred horizon. Sometimes, when she walked past, I thought I saw her straight scowl deepen, sometimes I thought I saw it soften. Her eyes are green. I never noticed before. But our schedules have coincided; somehow our lungs have both decided that now is day, our brains that now is noon. And I watch the sunrise each morning and set each night, and it feels familiar. I have written ‘there is a sun somewhere’ at the top of each page of my notebook, have noticed that her eyes are green. We meet when we can by the only streetlight that continues to intermittently flicker. It is now known as The Lighthouse, and she is now known as The Lighthouse, the younger children reliant on spotting her shoes if they get lost in the mist, following her like a beacon. And this fog has erased the meaning of personal space. Somehow, the colours of a face seem more vivid, and anything that is not grey must be drunk in, every detail must be absorbed and when she solidifies from the cotton sea, our faces grow close. It is the ritual of each morning, standing in the middle of an endless blanket of fog, staring at each other without saying a word. Sometimes her scowl deepens, sometimes it softens and her eyes are green. I remember spring afternoons, the streets dripping with buds and fresh leaves and flocks of peacock butterflies. I remember grass stains bleeding into my white trousers. The grass has withered and I would give anything to be covered in grass stains again. And I watch her watch me, and then we start walking without speaking, side by side, my eyes straining to keep track of her red shoes, hands itching to hold hers.
Human contact is a strange joy now. Outside, everyone is alone, lost amongst the canvas. It is hard enough to stay together in the mist, let alone to meet each other in it. And her steady scowling presence next to me feels like a candle burning, wax melting onto my arm. In the nights when the fog broods, charcoal and ash, I dream of her scowl blazing beneath my fingertips, her forget-me-not hands carved around my wrist, my wax skin melting into hers. And I dream of cerulean oceans reflecting aquamarine skies, that girl turning and turning and turning between my cupped hands, I dream of kissing the waves and loving the tides and existing as the moon caught between sea and sky and sun. And I wake to the same void outside my window, the same ache in my chest.
One day, I am walking to school alone. Like a mirage, the blue backpack wavers on the edge of my peripheral vision, half mist half real. I speed up, and as usual I think that the girl falters, hesitates, at the end of the alleyway. And suddenly I am running, desperate to touch, to hold, to glow ivory and lunar in her indigo planisphere, to fall beneath violent bruised blue waves, to see any of the spectrum of blue hues up close and suddenly she is turning and turning and turning to look at me. And my eyes crash into brown irises, a lifetime of bonfire nights and games in the forest and climbing old oak trees howling into my brain and I almost forget to stop running. And we are stood, staring without speaking. And she is beautiful, pink mouth half-open, freckles like sawdust, a kaleidoscope of hues to my starved senses. And I am senseless, lost between candyfloss and the august funfair on the green and woodshop and birds flitting between the birdhouses we all made first year and she is a world, complete in and of itself. And she smiles and my god I spend the next week dreaming about more than moons and seas and skies. I dream in old home videos, the town I grew up in mapped out across her skin, the life I remember held in the lines of her palms.
I forget about time with her. We spend months kissing under a bare maple tree, the iron sky forgotten and discarded. We spend years holding the shattered pieces of the past up to the light of The Lighthouse, examining every fibre of our memories against the colours of our skin, comparing and contrasting the winter nights when the sky bared its ribs, sunken and stained with oncoming snow, with the autumn evenings which roared and blazed and burned with furnace lungs and reaching fingers into the sunrise. But in every memory there is a sun arching overhead, on every page of my notebook I see the red stains of her shoes and this girl may be a world, a planet, a being so complete that it should be enough, but this earth would not bear such fruit without the sun combusting with a steady scowl far away.
I leave her under the maple tree, and only what seems like days later, I see her glowing backpack in the near-distance, her hand tangled with another’s. Like her moon, I orbit, strung-out in deep space. But like the moon, I bend her tides and wash her away to the far side of the globe. I try to forget. For the first time since the fog came, I try to forget what went before. It is hard to let go, and James Morgan pinches the bridge of his nose impatiently whenever I cut off my friends’ discussions about once-was and forever-ago moments. ‘All that matters is that there is a sun somewhere,’ I say, and they stare at me with crumpled faces and disbelief. Erin Lane’s seat is empty for three days, and all I can do is repeat that mantra and rub my palms around my wrist, the windows no longer rattling. Like our old game, the adults have played disappear, melting back into the houses in resignation.
I have not seen red in weeks, the ocean is but a faint memory. Colour seems to be a theory, a state of mind and even the white washed picket fence of number three seems to have faded to cygnet grey. Although I have tried to forget the world before the fog, there will always be, deep in the marrow of my bones, a desperation to see the sun. It is like existence is not real without a dawn breaking the endless night. I wait under The Lighthouse for four days and four nights and then, finally, the sun rises.
She emerges and the mist thins around us. And we stand and stare without speaking and I have no idea whether skies were purple or white, whether the oceans black or gold. But her scowl deepens and then softens, and I stretch my arm out and her fingers circle my wrist and we are satellites tied together by gravity and we stare, faces close and closer and closest and-
I remember the first day the fog came. And I remember the days after that. And in the time that followed, I became a meteor tethered by two gravities, and mother I stared into the sun for too long and now I am blind. I have wandered deep into unchartered territory and lost my way home. I have played ‘disappear’ and let myself burn up into ash under her touch, and now I am just a patch of smoke amongst the fog. And I have forgotten all that went before. I remember the first day the fog came.
(Mother I am blind, blindly in love, and I can’t find a way home even if I tried, the only Lighthouse is by my side and god knows no-one else has red shoes that glow, a scowl that makes my heart ache.)
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Literature
and you did it
in front of God and everybody.
Literature
the words i never said in the place i never was
I rattled my can of cherry cola and lifted up my right index finger, pointing at him as I nudged the words,
"Ya think this'll get me into hell?"
He smirked like he always does, staring back out at the rest of the world. I nearly toppled over in my swing, rocking back and forth like a child; the playground isn't restricted towards teenagers, so we come here every Thursday afternoon. Throwing my head backwards, I was careful to make sure the lilies and daises in my hair wouldn't flutter out. It took enough effort to get off the swing, who knows how much it would be to get back on again?
(I'm lazy too; there's another excuse for you)
"No, but
Literature
.
whispered goodbyes and sepia summer dreams-
their neverlasting brilliance is
more beautiful than
a million everlasting stars,
(because he loves in f ra gme nts,
and she hopes in sha
rds)
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26/3/15 [There is a sun somewhere and didn't mother tell you not to look directly at it]
I've never lived by the sea before and the sea-fog here is so thick you can't see the houses across the road. And somehow this story has been rattling in my bones for days and I don't know if I like the ending yet or not (I honestly could have written for so much longer about this world, it was hard to stop).
Sorry that this is so long, if you made it to the end then thank you very much
I've never lived by the sea before and the sea-fog here is so thick you can't see the houses across the road. And somehow this story has been rattling in my bones for days and I don't know if I like the ending yet or not (I honestly could have written for so much longer about this world, it was hard to stop).
Sorry that this is so long, if you made it to the end then thank you very much
© 2015 - 2024 comatose-comet
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oh boy oh boy, I don't even know what to say! this was so beautifully written, and even though none of the characters were really fleshed out more than in images, I came to care for them by the end. something about this gives me a book-y vibe.. this is totally the kind of story I'd want to curl up under a blanket to read with a cup of cocoa.