Things Witnessed or Imagined While Walking to School 6 December 1917
By Kim Murdock
Hop-skip greetings. Sunshine faces, scrubbed free from coal and morning chores.
A ferryboat weaving workers across an emerald harbour, Dartmouth to Halifax, Halifax to Dartmouth. Factories clattering with your mam and da and mine and everyone’s, their blessings and curses rippling along the docksides.
Lobster sandwiches, brown-paper wrapped, cut in funeral triangles.
The clank-swing of traces as Tommy’s horse clocks down Roome Street, delivering milk, bread, news from abroad.
Kittens with wick-straight tails that follow and won’t be shooed back home.
Mittens torn from umbilical strings.
A metallic groan from the harbour. A wince of petrol niggling your nose. One-skip, two-skip, three... The sky rips open with a face-slap wind.
Mam or Da or someone’s mam or da flying past.
Unblinking eyes, like thumb-flicked marbles, in singles and pairs.
A scarecrow dangling from telegraph lines, its polished leather boots gently knocking together.
Primary readers, spines broke open. Charred pages petaling the landscape like faulty springtime daffs, their perfume muddling your throat.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow.
The harbour candling its own long sun.
Houses jumbled, timbers to toothpicks. The tin man’s body a collision pepper-shot through everything.
A gallop of men with wood-slat buckets lunging full speed towards the harbour. Lungs rasping, nostrils sucking thick grey air.
Between the rubble, row on row.
Darkness caressing your cheeks. All the mams and das screaming, somewhere, in technicolour.
Fire after fire after fire.
Through black rain, a fluttering of nurses drawing near.
Brave little lion, say it with me, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place...
Kim Murdock is an emerging writer living in Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ellipsis Zine, Bending Genres, Janus Literary, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Hungry Ghost Magazine, and elsewhere.