FICT_001: autumn

It's autumn already: another year draining into the early dusk. The fields are turning to their winter browns in the fading light, ploughed and harrowed and soaked by a month's rain. It's been blustery today, with fresh white clouds grazing across the blue sky in the morning, but, as the day's gone on, a gauzy grey cloud layer has smeared between the earth and the sky. Where the sun's setting, behind a curtain of cloud, the fields are bruised brownish purple.

The church sits in a hollow, ringed with dark trees. There's a bluish sheen over the black-green leaves, and she always suspects that the roots have drawn up death from the graves and made into a fine garment. When the sun's set and the congregation have left, and when the wind's flickering through the desiccated branches, the leaves skitter against each other, dry and crisp. In that scratching and scraping she can hear the death of the year coming, and feel the long dark of winter creeping in, unrelieved by high, bright light, or by the touch of warm air on her skin. Winter is as flinty and dark as the church's stones.

She remembers the day they buried her sister here. That was an autumn day, too, devoid of hope or light: a muffling fog that barely lifted all day; the wheels of the undertaker's traditional black wood carriage squeaking and rattling in the mist; the pathetic, straggling group of mourners, with her -- nine years old -- at the front, the only surviving member of the family.

That was nearly ten years ago. It'll be ten years in a month.

She can't remember Esther's face any more, except when she reminds herself with a photograph: even after a few days, the image fades again, like a word that's on the tip of her tongue, but unrecoverable; she can see the outline of the thing that was Esther, but the content won't come. Sometimes, in a dream, Esther will loom over her, smiling, and Rachel will awake with such a vivid sense of her sister's presence that she'll say her name into the darkness -- sometimes questioningly, sometimes emphatically, sometimes resignedly. The dream summons Esther's old shape and smell and weight into her mind, and it'll take a few minutes for the vividness to fade, and for Rachel to subside back into sleep. Sometimes she'll try and hang on to the images and sense impression memories, but they're elusive, vaporous, and they always get away. The poignant, irreplaceable space where the loved one lived, and still lives in memory. After a dream like that, which she'll remember again in the morning, shorn of its immediacy but still sharply moving, she'll be silent and moody all day, railing against the unfairness of the world that can hold up such a clear image and then snatch it away, with no hope of its voluntary recreation.

Esther's grave is at the furthest edge of of the graveyard, in the shadow of the low stone wall and a patchy hawthorn, which is brown and pinched, awaiting the fall of its last leaves. Rachel pushes open the dense wooden gate and goes in under the dark trees, and rests her rucksack against the hard exposed roots of the hawthorn. She stands over Esther's grave, with a ticklish mist of drizzle on her cheeks.

She's come to say 'goodbye', in her own way. She doesn't say anything aloud, but stands with her feet on the uneven grass, and takes in the view beyond the stone wall: the flat fields, the hedgelines, the clumps of scrubby trees, the misty horizon smeared into the sky, all in poorly-differentiated tones of grey and brown. Her legs feel inert, and she breathes out heavily, a great sigh of resigned frustration. She wants to stay, but she wants to go as well.

All the greyness, and her indecision and apprehension, make her feel like crying.

So she cries a little, big fat tears joining force with the mist on her cheeks. She's not really crying for her sister, or for loss, but for the realisation that this part of her life is over, and will never come again. She's nineteen.