There were a load of cracks all over the field behind our house. They weren’t there yesterday. They were only there today.
The biggest one of them was so deep you could put your arm down it and never reach the end. This worked whether you had a short arm, like me, or a long arm, like my dad, or a leg, like my mum, who refused to lie down, like we were doing, and just sat on the side and dangled a leg down there instead.
“What are they, though?” I said.
“Mouths,” said my dad.
“Mouths?” I said, uncertainly.
“Yep, mouths,” said my dad. I could see my mother shaking her head and putting a finger to her lips but he carried on regardless. “It’s been so dry all summer that the ground needs to get water from somewhere. So it’s opened up some of its mouths in the hope of gulping down a child or two.”
“A child?” I whimpered.
“Children are full of water,” my dad said, and laughed and made to push me down the hole but he didn’t push me down the hole.
I jumped to my feet and thought of mouths and began to cry and my mother said, “Christ!” but not at me at my dad. My dad just shrugged his shoulders somehow even though he was lying on the floor and then rolled over onto his back and looked up at the sky.
“He needs to grow up,” he said, bitterly.
“You need to grow up,” said my mum to my dad, while hugging me and assuring me everything was okay, everything was all right, they weren’t really mouths, they weren’t going to eat me at all. And she made it all better and I stopped crying and I really love my mum I do.
A little while later we went off to the shop to get some ice creams, and when we got back my dad was asleep on the blanket. My mum smiled at me and put a finger to her lips and then exaggeratedly sneaked over to my dad and rolled him up in the blanket and pushed him down into the crack.
You’d never believe how much water there is inside a person, how thick and dark and endless it all is.
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Notes:
1. Written on August 3rd, 2018
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