Paths and Traditions

The city does not go dark. It only changes colour. At two in the morning the sky above the rooftops is the low orange of sodium and cloud, and a single pane of glass holds a candle flame and a bus shelter in the same reflection. A siren rises somewhere south of you, thins, and...

The roof is cold under your palms, and the tar still holds a little of the day. Below you the street keeps its orange hum. Headlamps. A window somewhere with a television flickering blue behind a curtain. The city breathes out its light and the sky takes it, and gives back almost nothing. Almost. Look...

There is a kitchen you may remember, or one you have only been told about. A low ceiling and a dresser of cups hung on small brass hooks. A window fogged at the corners. A woman at the stove who never once called herself a witch, who threw salt over her left shoulder without breaking...

The tide draws back at dusk and leaves the whole shore shining. Kelp lies along the strand line in dark wet ropes. Bladderwrack pops beneath your boot. A hundred small pools hold a hundred broken pieces of sky, and the light in them slides from copper to pewter to grey while you stand and watch...

Picture a house that grew by addition. One room has a stone floor and a hearth gone black with four generations of woodsmoke. Another was raised much later, glass on three sides, holding the last of the afternoon like water held in a bowl. A narrow room at the back smells of dried thyme, paraffin...

There is a room somewhere with a low ceiling, a paraffin lamp and the smell of beeswax, where a book is being copied out by hand because copying by hand is the only way it is permitted to travel. There is also a hillside, bare, the wind coming off the stubble, a thorn tree bent...

The lane runs out where the hawthorn begins. Behind you the last cottage holds a lamp against its window, and the smell of somebody else’s fire hangs low in the damp. Ahead, the field falls away into wet grass, and past the field the wood stands black and unlit, keeping whatever it keeps. Between the...

There is a shelf in this craft that smells of last August. Brown paper bags gone soft at the corners. Jars with handwriting on a strip of tape. A bundle of something grey-green hanging from a nail, brittle now, still holding the shape of the morning it was cut. Outside, the season has moved on...

The kitchen wakes before the rest of the house. A blue ring of gas. A kettle beginning its low complaint. Flour dust turning slowly in the slant of early light, and the cold tap running until it runs cold enough to drink. This is the room where the day is assembled. It is also the...

The house is quiet at the hour when the kettle has gone cold and the lamp is the only warm thing left in the room. On the shelf above the radiator there is a jar of salt with the lid sitting loose. A candle burned down unevenly on one side. A feather carried home from...