Leave terror behind
The attic and the cellar. Waiting.
She’s waiting. Cross-legged on the cellar’s pock-marked concrete floor. Her pigtails tight and nails bitten down to tiny fleshy smiles at the end of her fingertips. She taps on the porcelain head of a puppet.
Plaster shedding flake by flake – peeling skin breaking free. Bulging plaster – like Adam’s apples protruding – quite ugly. Lumpy. A surface spoilt by time. Picture Post magazines – once prized – left to rot – now clinging to each other, bound by moisture, gluing together memories of post war lovers longing for a ration-free life.
Twenty years of grime has found time to sneak through the extractor’s blades – nesting in the space – setting up home. No fresh air would want to set up home in this cellar anyway, she thinks.
He’s waiting. Standing silently on the gold flecked floor – strawberry fair hair held tight in a ribbon’s embrace. One minute more and he’ll head for the door – dash a hundred steps downwards, crash through the cellar door and pick up his child from her place on the floor.
The attic’s lemon walls, welcome summer’s sun rays bursting through the Velux, flooding his attic space. Cumulus clouds have gathered, ready to perform their ballet against the indigo backdrop. Dawn’s chorus parades the latest hits from blackbirds and blue tits. Clematis crawls up walls battered by wartime shells and nature’s spells – concoctions of acid raining down from man’s polluted ways.
The puppet he made her he’ll lift to the light – leave terror behind.
But now there’s a river raging through the terrace house – the home stolen from him when his wife died. The soulless social workers marched in and caught his butterfly child in a net so dense it wrapped around her tiny tongue and cut off their communication for a while. How can he crawl through the water and release her from a cellar papered with monsters’ screams and the damaged dreams of a silent orphan?
He takes a deep breath and dives deep beneath the gushing water. Down, down the stairs, his fishy frame flaps and flails but won’t give up. His head smacks the window frame and smashes the pane. Flipping through, the water following him, tinged with a trail of his blood.
He gasps air, fresh and fertile and crawls to the wooden trapdoor, tugging at the brass ring. As daylight flickers its way into the forgotten darkness, he hears the pounding of demon water on the cellar door.
Jumping down now. Grasping the hand of his stolen daughter. She’s grasping the hand of the puppet made by her never-forgotten father.
Wake me up, she begs, as they fly to the freedom of the open skies. Gone.