#kerria gray

Tokyo, 2018

L held the squirming piglet in her two small hands. She thought about the book she’d just finished, the first chapter book she’d ever read all by herself. The little pig, the spider, the farm. She would be just like Fern: this little pig would be her friend and she wouldn’t even care that M rarely came over to play anymore because he had a new best friend who had a train set with batteries. She wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if M never came over again quite frankly! She repeated that again, louder, with gusto. She liked that saying a lot. In fact, it was her new-favourite-saying. When her mom had said it on the phone yesterday it had sounded perfect but when L had told her mom about its new-fave status it hadn't sound quite as good, and she could tell that her mom didn’t think so either. She supposed that that was why she’d told L to watch her language, but her mom had smiled a little bit as she said it so L knew that she wasn’t in big trouble. Her mom had looked sheepish, even. L liked that saying too. Sheepish. She pictured her mom’s face on a fluffy sheep. She pictured her mom in bed at night trying to turn the pages of her book with hooves. L also liked to watch her language: she pictured all of her words coming out of her head in comic book thought-bubbles as she watched each one carefully, checking for spelling mistakes. In the book the rat’s name was Templeton and she tried saying I DON’T GIVE A TEMPLETON’S ASS QUITE FRANKLY a couple of times. It didn’t sound quite as clever out loud. It sounded pretty dumb, actually. As she absentmindedly pet the little pig, thinking about words, she almost forgot about M and his stupid new friend with her stupid battery-powered trains. FUCK YOU FUCKFACE - last week’s new-favourite-saying - seemed relevant here. She had known better than to tell her mom about that one.

The glen was so still; no birds, no wind, no people. It was cold here, and damp.  He remembered this place clearly, but didn’t know from where. His face felt wet and he supposed he was crying - or was it just rain? He looked down at the mossed and boggy ground. It shifted as he watched, altered in some way that he couldn’t quite explain into something warm and welcoming but without changing from the same green wet thing it had been just a minute before. Up on a hill far off in the distance he saw a stag that stood unmoving, regal, coated in pink. He wiped his face once, twice. Smiled. Sat down. Curled onto his side. And then - finally, joyfully, enthusiastically - he unfurled on the ground into an invincible pink starfish. The boggy wetness had arms: thick, saggy, winged arms like his mother’s. The saggy soggy boggy mossy arms hugged him tight and he hugged back with his stiff starfish arms. He was still crying but oh well! He was just a little pink starfish in a big green universe and everything was fine. He stared up at the sky that seemed not at all out of the ordinary, and then he closed his eyes.

Out in the green of all of this lie two small lakes. M once swam in one - she couldn’t tell from here which one it had been, which was disconcerting because she thought so often of that lake and felt she should be able to pick it out from anywhere, like the perpetrator in a police line-up of otherwise unremarkable faces - its details, its shape and size and colour should have been so known to her. It had been a rare day of sunshine, and though it hadn’t been warm exactly, the sun had given her a kind of bravery. Usually she was the one standing on the rocks feeling a tiny bit lonely while T and L jumped in, screaming. But on this day she was the first one in. They approached the lake and, drawn in by the green of it all, she could not take her clothes off fast enough; they seemed to shed from her body without any effort whatsoever, her pants and t-shirt like fur, like snakeskin, like a shell she had outgrown. Naked, she stood on the edge only for a moment before slipping under the cold thick skin of the lake and moving into the slippery light underneath it all. When she looked down, still under the water, she had watched as her ring danced down below the line of light and into a darkness that hurt to look at.

lost in the light

Fellas