It is freezing fucking cold all the time and dark. In summer.
It was the week after Martha died.
Mike was on anti-depressants, because he was depressed. Not because of Martha - he hadn't met her - but because his mind was full of sadness and hate. The anti-depressants didn't make him happy, they just stopped him from feeling like he wanted to tear his own brain out, and they stopped him from wandering around the house grizzling and occasionally hitting the wall with his head. He said it felt like being underwater. I thought the house sounded weird without the sound of him whining like an injured dog. It went on so long that you got used to it, like the rain and the traffic.
The poppies were crawling in red blood spatters through the waste land opposite by then. They'd die in a few months, washed away by the rain like everything else, or bulldozed to make way for the ever-promised garage. I figured if we could get used to Mike's kicked-puppy whine and his endless crying, we'd get used to it being gone.
Mike said we'd get used to Martha being gone too. It seemed a sick and cruel thing to say at first, but he was right. The longer someone is gone, the more used to it you get. You might never get happy about it, but like Mike and his pills, the time and distance from their death pushes your grief underwater, and you don't whine and beat your head any more.
When the poppies went over, Mike lay down in the mud where the red splashes used to be and cried and cried until we were scared someone would take him away. We thought we were used to the rain, but without the colour to lighten them, the days poured into nights and everything blurred into a long sick streak, hurtling downhill toward winter.
It was four months after Martha died. Mike was still on anti-depressants. Still underwater. We made poppies out of red tissue paper and hung them from the ceiling on wire, upside-down Flanders Fields. The house had dents in the walls from Mike's forehead, but none of them were new. I wished I was under water too, but there was only mud, and I'd read too much to think drowning in that was any way to go: Paschendale. Mike's depression was his duck boards; he didn't get the reference, told me to fuck off.
No one built on the waste land opposite. Martha had been dead for four and a half months. Mike was becoming amphibious. It never stopped raining.
And that was when I started to be scared of the shadows the poppies on the ceiling cast.
Mike was on anti-depressants, because he was depressed. Not because of Martha - he hadn't met her - but because his mind was full of sadness and hate. The anti-depressants didn't make him happy, they just stopped him from feeling like he wanted to tear his own brain out, and they stopped him from wandering around the house grizzling and occasionally hitting the wall with his head. He said it felt like being underwater. I thought the house sounded weird without the sound of him whining like an injured dog. It went on so long that you got used to it, like the rain and the traffic.
The poppies were crawling in red blood spatters through the waste land opposite by then. They'd die in a few months, washed away by the rain like everything else, or bulldozed to make way for the ever-promised garage. I figured if we could get used to Mike's kicked-puppy whine and his endless crying, we'd get used to it being gone.
Mike said we'd get used to Martha being gone too. It seemed a sick and cruel thing to say at first, but he was right. The longer someone is gone, the more used to it you get. You might never get happy about it, but like Mike and his pills, the time and distance from their death pushes your grief underwater, and you don't whine and beat your head any more.
When the poppies went over, Mike lay down in the mud where the red splashes used to be and cried and cried until we were scared someone would take him away. We thought we were used to the rain, but without the colour to lighten them, the days poured into nights and everything blurred into a long sick streak, hurtling downhill toward winter.
It was four months after Martha died. Mike was still on anti-depressants. Still underwater. We made poppies out of red tissue paper and hung them from the ceiling on wire, upside-down Flanders Fields. The house had dents in the walls from Mike's forehead, but none of them were new. I wished I was under water too, but there was only mud, and I'd read too much to think drowning in that was any way to go: Paschendale. Mike's depression was his duck boards; he didn't get the reference, told me to fuck off.
No one built on the waste land opposite. Martha had been dead for four and a half months. Mike was becoming amphibious. It never stopped raining.
And that was when I started to be scared of the shadows the poppies on the ceiling cast.