NZBC short fiction: The Barn
It was a lifetime ago, the walk through childhood from his family’s house along lanes prickly with blackberries, past the hiding places in the brambles at the roadsides, over stiles and fences and through the paddock where there was a circle of standing stones, to the ruined barn.
One evening, on his way to the barn to meet his school-friend David — they must have been around ten years old — he reached the stone circle and the stones appeared to light up, glowing in the twilight. He was overwhelmed by a sense of contentment. The light from the stones was pulling him in towards their centre, and he wanted to go but didn’t want to be late at the barn.
Never again has he felt such peacefulness in his life. He even returned to the stone circle at exactly the same time on the same date years later, but nothing was as it had been that night on the way to the barn.
Across scrubby sheep pastures, through gorse and nettles, to the ruined barn.
Its walls were crumbling, most of its slate roof was gone and some of the roof rafters were charred. Scattered around the remaining floorboards there were mysterious owl pellets, which he and his friends crushed beneath their feet, revealing tiny bones and skulls.
His friend David was a misfit of a boy who would later get into trouble for scrawling graffiti on seaside benches and puncturing car tyres with a knife. But in those days of muddy faces and scabby knees he always seemed to be wearing shorts and carrying a stick. David was waiting for him, after his experience at the stone circle. “Where have you been?” he called out, tapping his stick against his bare leg.
But he didn’t tell David about the glowing stones as they were swinging on lengths of rope tied to the rafters, climbing up into the barn’s roof space, throwing stones into puddles and watching night descend over the mountain.
Ever since his childhood he has thought more often of the ruined barn than he has of the secret thing that happened that night at the standing stones. Yet he has rarely thought about how strange that is.
He is no longer sure of the significance of the barn in the story of his life. He doesn’t even know whether it is still standing; it might have been demolished years ago. If it were still there, would the barn remember him as he remembers it?
The odd landmarks marking the way; the scrub and thicket; the broken roof; the crumbling walls; the keepsakes of unseen owls; the mysteries of their scattered pellets; they are each as fragmentary as his life seems, looking back over it. He is old, and impressions of his childhood come back to him — if at all — unbidden, like glimpses of a roadside illuminated by a car’s sweeping headlights at night. They arrive in bursts, like recalled dreams in which locations intersect, connecting up atmospheres and emotions from lost places inside himself.
The fragments are still intact in his mind, yet elusive. They are sensations that shimmer like mirages as he tries to grasp them, leaving him immersed in the half-remembered, feeling fleetingly as he did at the standing stones: cloaked in warmth and well-being. It is a past that exists only in a patchwork of mismatched memories, mental images of fields in which the derelict barn will always stand as a monument to childhood.
One evening, on his way to the barn to meet his school-friend David — they must have been around ten years old — he reached the stone circle and the stones appeared to light up, glowing in the twilight. He was overwhelmed by a sense of contentment. The light from the stones was pulling him in towards their centre, and he wanted to go but didn’t want to be late at the barn.
Never again has he felt such peacefulness in his life. He even returned to the stone circle at exactly the same time on the same date years later, but nothing was as it had been that night on the way to the barn.
Across scrubby sheep pastures, through gorse and nettles, to the ruined barn.
Its walls were crumbling, most of its slate roof was gone and some of the roof rafters were charred. Scattered around the remaining floorboards there were mysterious owl pellets, which he and his friends crushed beneath their feet, revealing tiny bones and skulls.
His friend David was a misfit of a boy who would later get into trouble for scrawling graffiti on seaside benches and puncturing car tyres with a knife. But in those days of muddy faces and scabby knees he always seemed to be wearing shorts and carrying a stick. David was waiting for him, after his experience at the stone circle. “Where have you been?” he called out, tapping his stick against his bare leg.
But he didn’t tell David about the glowing stones as they were swinging on lengths of rope tied to the rafters, climbing up into the barn’s roof space, throwing stones into puddles and watching night descend over the mountain.
Ever since his childhood he has thought more often of the ruined barn than he has of the secret thing that happened that night at the standing stones. Yet he has rarely thought about how strange that is.
He is no longer sure of the significance of the barn in the story of his life. He doesn’t even know whether it is still standing; it might have been demolished years ago. If it were still there, would the barn remember him as he remembers it?
The odd landmarks marking the way; the scrub and thicket; the broken roof; the crumbling walls; the keepsakes of unseen owls; the mysteries of their scattered pellets; they are each as fragmentary as his life seems, looking back over it. He is old, and impressions of his childhood come back to him — if at all — unbidden, like glimpses of a roadside illuminated by a car’s sweeping headlights at night. They arrive in bursts, like recalled dreams in which locations intersect, connecting up atmospheres and emotions from lost places inside himself.
The fragments are still intact in his mind, yet elusive. They are sensations that shimmer like mirages as he tries to grasp them, leaving him immersed in the half-remembered, feeling fleetingly as he did at the standing stones: cloaked in warmth and well-being. It is a past that exists only in a patchwork of mismatched memories, mental images of fields in which the derelict barn will always stand as a monument to childhood.
—oOo—
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home