There was a woman who lived alone in the woods. She walked through the trees and built herself creatures out of metal scavenged from old coke cans, discarded shopping trolleys, lost penknives, dropped coins, abandoned motorbikes, burnt-out cars, bits of barbed wire, tent poles, gas canisters, hubcaps, forgotten farming machinery, the remnants of barbecues, bicycles fished from the river, sawblades, nails, screws, copper wiring of unknown provenance found splayed out like veins just beneath the surface of the earth.
She poured into them her blood and, when she could, her love, and she watched with delight and no small measure of love as they made their first tentative moves in the palms of her hand, in the cradle of her lap – a flutter of wings, a flexing of claws, the opening and closing of tiny beaks as if speaking unheard words.
But her blood would clot in their valves, scab up their biscuit-tin hearts, and there against her skin, as quickly and as slowly as they had started, they stopped.
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Notes:
1. From August 2014
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