I never need much encouragement to slip into story-telling and magic realism. Thank you, Debs, for your comment on Mount Of Assumption, reminding me, once again, of the fairytale worlds of one of my favourite authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez! :)) xx

COME AGAIN


At the end of his shift at the Recycling Depot, he raced up the last few steps of the metal ladder as though his heels had wings, then paced the length of the platform at the top, alongside the massive skip containing a bobbing sea of blue, green and brown glass. He waggled his fingers as if they itched and sighed heavily: Where to begin? Just where to begin? Still, stirred by some vague romantic notion from the Saturday night just gone (and the inexplicable feeling of having an open parachute attached to his shoulders and camphor-oil lightness in his lungs), he studied the contents hard, waiting for one particular bottle to stand out.

Just before she had disappeared through the crowded kitchen doorway, leaving the party on the stroke of midnight, she had taken an emptied Sauvignon, given it a deft spin upwards before tossing it through the open sash window into the municipal skip on the street below. “Find this again”, she had said as she quickly slipped into her raincoat, “and I’ll be there”. He was torn between chasing after her and rushing to the window to see where exactly the green bottle had fallen. In split-second’s thought, he chose the latter but groaned loudly as, in that same instant, an operative was emptying three large black sacks of waste on top of it.

She had left him with no other clues, he was sure. He stood, now, on the following Monday afternoon, gazing down into the vast paladin in front of him, trying to recollect through his alcoholic haze just exactly what it was she had said to him. She seemed to speak in riddles and rhyme all night long – about her first name being a derivative of his own; her second being the colour she reminded him of. “Come again?” he had said to her, “What do you mean?” She threw back her head and laughed.

Now he considered carefully as he surveyed the glassy swell. Her scent was like that of new-mown grass and her brightness like the greening that blooms suddenly, a mere hint to the eye on otherwise deadwood of winter. He had taken her in his arms only briefly, but she ghosted through them like an early morning mist, or the green flash of the sun as it slips below an equatorial horizon.

His ruminations were interrupted when he became aware of others gathered at the foot of the stairs below. Looking round, half a dozen of his fellow workers, each dressed in the same hefty steel-capped boots, overalls and fluorescent safety vest, were gazing up at him, looking vaguely startled. “What?” he said, slightly irritated by their intrusion. “What?!”

Big Barry cleared his throat a little awkwardly and scratched his temple in bewilderment. He shuffled a foot before speaking: “Well, John, it’s like this: Sid, here, just noticed there’s an eye on the back of your green jerkin that just keeps, well… winking. And now – look! - there’s lips, too, and they’re… smiling!”