The-Ginger-Muse

Attitudes Orange can mean many things; Fear or Fire, Loneliness or Life, but today, it is loveliness; the leaves around the street-lamps whisper around me, and at long last, I am awake again. Today, orange is happiness, and for a while I know, that it is not the light that implies the darkness, or the darkness that implies the light, but just this: the lamps, and the streets they stand in, are nothing alone. We must bring our own love.

Tidying Up I am looking at my life as a series of objects: Lego bricks, books, an old journal, a puppet, a kite with a coloured string. Items reduced to tokens: tentative roots or balls of string, guiding me down to my past. I am sweeping the dust from my memories. Disturbed, it lifts, but in an inscrutable grey cloud, and will not move. I reach inside to collect and label myself. Later, I am drawing up plans for the future. Those false friends, delusion and ambition, have gone to work, and now everything is process; a long, difficult ladder to an ascending heaven. Looking back giddily to the fields below, I grit my teeth a

Dull Town Nothing happens. Sometimes, lucky people leave.

Overpass We have wandered alone, on dark pavements. We have walked under moody moonlit skies, in the gasping freshness of the night, shoulders hunched in the cold air, Our tired eyes searching perpetually for the vast, unobscured horizon. We have stared down by night from rainy motorway bridges, while headlong determined headlights rush past fast in the drizzle beneath, dreaming their way beyond the wilderness; beyond forever, where the white lines end, and the rain falls just a little bit lighter. We have stared out by night from our rainy bridges, and we have dreamt in vain. While beneath us, huddled tightly in its shroud of

An hour and a half later, after Daniel had served his sentence for his technology teacher, he was walking home from school again, a couple of borrowed tools still sitting uncomfortably in his pocket. He was still nervous, but he was feeling happier now, confident in the knowledge that he and Coral would somehow be able to sort something out. He just had to get to her house and talk to her before Kieran managed to do anything, and last time he had waited until the night, so he would probably be OK. All he had to for the moment was to get home. He walked along the pavement quickly, his mind alert. The weather had begun to grow darker, and the

Another day passed, and now Daniel was even tenser than before. He avoided the two again, disappearing from one lesson and appearing in another, moving so fast that he surprised even himself. Even the slightest of noises made him jump about a foot, and everywhere he looked, his imagination was turning stranger’s faces into the faces of Coral and Kieran. He felt surrounded. He imagined that at any minute, Kieran was going to jump out from behind him, his face grinning, and his hand holding the knife with which he had murdered the cat. “I’m going to make things worse Daniel,” Kieran was repeating in his mind again, his face

Darkness fell yet again, and Daniel approached Coral’s house for the second time. A picture of her face appeared in front of him from his memory, and he realised with surprise that it was only three days since that first incident had occurred out on the park. It had begun to feel far longer, and the days since then had seemed to stretch, dragging on sluggishly behind a thick curtain of distraction. He shook the feeling away and knocked on the door. He was almost as nervous as he had been on the evening of a couple of days before, but for different reasons, and he looked behind him quickly in order to check he was alone. It was completel

The second he was out of sight of Coral and the back road, Daniel turned off the main road, and began to run, his feet pounding hard against the pavement. Hedges and walls rushed past beside him, dissolving into a grey blur. He hurled himself carelessly along pavements, flooring pedestrians and hurtling clumsily across main roads, skimming through the moving traffic, and escaping several collisions by little more than the breadth of a hair. It was almost a mile to Kieran’s house, from the road where he had met Coral, and by the time he had arrived he was almost totally exhausted. Gasping for breath, he threw himself ferociously at the d

The day later, under a grey dawn, Daniel was walking to school alone, when suddenly Coral appeared, walking slowly on the opposite side of the road. Her head was down, and her eyes were slightly glazed, almost as if she was in a dream. Her face was totally dejected. She was so deeply absorbed that she didn’t even notice him walking up to her until he greeted her, and she turned to him in surprise, her expression desolate. “Daniel?” she asked, her voice shaking. Daniel nodded. “Are you alright?” he replied hesitantly, slowing down to match her speed. She shook her head slowly, and he could see gleaming teardrops beg

Back out on the park, it was night again. The clouds of the evening before had dissipated to unveil a clear moon, a bright gibbous staring eerily down from above like an evil eye. There was no rain, but the wind was powerful, and the sound as it blew through the trees was like rolling thunder. It was almost 4AM. A few metres away from Coral’s house, Kieran crouched quietly in the bushes, watching intently. He was totally alone. He patted the side pocket of his trousers, which resonated with the satisfying clash of metal against metal, and glanced warily behind to check that there was nobody watching. He was ready. He pushed his way cau