Summer Wicks

The stars are glued to the sky tonight. You can almost smell the milky way igniting the silver tops of our silos.

The farm lies like an open book waiting to close into a city. You can feel that infernal solitude, brewing between the stick legs of water cranes, that only a million people in one place at once can so selfishly design.

David June is a grumpy old man. He sleeps in his bed, his elderly nose poking over the weathered sheet, the nostrils like two sore caves. He doesn’t know he won’t wake up.


Elsewhere, Jacky June is still awake. She is David’s fourth granddaughter and sixth carer. She’s looking at the stars. The harder she looks the more distance she can see.

Jacky doesn’t like caring for David. He’s rude and cold and too obviously related to her. But, in tomorrow’s next night, as if to punish her for this reality, the coroner will arrive with lines on his cold face that turn his skin into a map of every sorry thing he’s seen. Lines on the plain forehead where he has frowned, beside the trembling mouth where he has tried politely to stay still, and beneath the eyes were all the weight of death has expectantly continued and continued to live on. After seeing what he needs to see, he will lift his briefcase and vanish. His headlights will cut a wedge from the hard night like a baby inside a (dying/dead?) mother. His strangled coat will lie on the seat and the heart that often freezes slowly behind it will tap like the starlight taps upon the surface of a puddle as if trying to break in, just hands with the power of a baby bird’s beak, trying somehow in someway to rest on a limb that can’t lie down or even snap. He will remind Jacky how grief is so simple and almost strangely relieving and almost strangely resolving.

Right now, Jacky holds a plum in her hand. It feels hard and manufactured and she can’t bare to put her teeth inside it, it’s too perfect.

Her mind drifts back to David, how he is rarely satisfied by the gift of a life far too prolonged. And all the while the stars, dead flat, hot white, numb bright, won’t ever die but in payback for this unrequested power they cannot know it.

The sensation beneath those desperate pricks of light is difficult to place. It’s as if everything can be beautiful but instead longs to just be alive.