THOUGHTS FROM THE OVERGROWTH

With nothing to end

I hadn't seen the moon since the previous morning. I'd been staring at the ground for lost coins and discarded cigarettes when I saw it reflected in a puddle, but by the time I'd turned upside down to look at the corresponding place in the sky, it had gone. It had started raining sometime after nightfall on a deserted country road and it was there, just as i seemed to be as far away from anywhere else as i could get, that the stranger had stopped his car.

I had been walking in a straight line until all the people and concrete had given way to green fields and woodland and the dried mud on my shoes had replaced my reflection in the windows of passing office blocks as the only evidence that I'd ever existed anywhere else. I stole a glance at the clock on the dashboard as the darkness flowed by. Midnight. "You live round here?" I had asked, but the stranger just shook his head slowly and smiled.

The train station was cold and deserted. I looked up and down the tracks into the nothingness merging with the darkness on a pitch black horizon and then walked across the bridge and down onto the opposite platform, where something floating on the night chill caught my eye. It looked like the piece of paper I'd covered in vinegar and then baked in an oven as part of an infant school experiment long ago, and there, marked at the centre of a crudely drawn map, was an x.

My back ached and my arms felt like jelly. I leant against the side of the hole and took the last sip of water from a glass bottle my wife had included in my packed lunch. I had saved the food until I was really hungry and had stopped on a bench by a kitchen window as our son brushed past her legs as he joked about using the leftovers from dinner, and i had cried uncontrollably. Now it was buried beneath six feet of soil.

As a new dawn painted the first streaks of sunlight across the horizon, I felt the bottom of the spade clanging against something that wasn't soil, and as i knelt down to brush away the earth, a gunshot echoed across the valley. My legs went numb and it felt like the tranquil waters of an underground spring were washing over me. The stranger smiled, and as the sunrise glistened on the handle of the spade my mouth began filling with soil and I laughed hysterically, for the first time since I was a small child.