She’d spent ten years at home, only really allowed out to buy food or to try to sell scriptures on the corner of Oxford Road. Now the pubs and schools were reopening no one seemed to have much interest. Caroline started to catch an odd feeling in the air and it might have been hope, but hope for what she couldn’t picture. The blue December dusk was chilly and her toes were wet inside her shoes, just summer shoes really. Beside the bank a low unkempt bush dangled a few branches, their bark shiny deep grey, no: gunmetal, that was the word. The twigs had short vicious spines and odd paired buds, pale whitish green with crimson lines… and one branch, just one, held a spray of waxy red flowers. She gazed at it in something like adoration, then fished up another word from the depths: quince. Maybe hope didn’t even have to have an object, nothing you could see or imagine, maybe hope just came from something, from wherever you were?
Story by Geoff Sawers
Image by Adam Strong
Geoff Sawers lives in Reading, UK, and paints the sparrows outside his window. He has done a lot of different jobs in his time but is never going back to being a bartender at Ascot races.
Backwards Trajectory 