Part
We didn’t expect it to snow but look it falls in soft flakes. Alone now, we leave the cottage between white folds and aim at mountains.
You walk ahead: a gap, I leave and over your footprints, I press my own. We follow the stream winter has frozen leaves in mid-flight, caught under the surface, forgotten and skeletal like fish, fossilised. I click my camera and catch a print for the album to retrace.
Down the hill, the stream slips from sight though I stand on tiptoes, peering. Facing my camera up, I frame a square of sky with silhouetted leaves.
You tell me, I know already, this is a busying, a knotting of fingers, two hundred sandwiches cut into triangles, orchestrating our walk, our path, the past, working hard at losing- that art; the details always slip in. On top of the hill now, the land stretching on, we try to lay it out; they left.
Jenny Moroney lives and writes in South London. You can find some of her short stories and poems published in journals online.