Paid post - a spooky poem - The night before
From the upcoming re-release of Memento Mori
I decided that for the first few paid pieces, I’d share, in order, some of my favourite pieces from the soon to be re-released ‘Memento Mori’, a collection of short stories and poems up to 2017 for the horror bits and pieces I’ve written.
Next week though, it’ll be the beginning of Garrett, because we’ll be doing something new next week ;)
Then back to spooky I guess.
Anyway, here’s ‘The Night Before’.
Destroying the evidence/The night before
I never did decide whether I wrote this about a murderer or someone that had been in an accident. I wrote it though after turning up at Uni, absolutely covered in bruises from the weekend before - it had snowed, and we lived (at the time) up a very steep hill. With no car to speak of, and the busses stopped due to the whole inch and a half that had fallen (if it snows where I live, everyone behaves like it’s the last deep freeze they’ll ever see. Panic buying, cars and busses stranded and sometimes abandoned where they are. And most of all TERRIBLE driving, and even worse ice), I’d been extra clumsy on the way into town to Uni (which wasn’t cancelled till later that day) and had fallen badly enough to basically have one big bruise from him to mid rib, and a massive scrape on my face. A black eye and a nose that would have possibly broken, were it not that my nose is funny and won’t break in the traditional sense (that bone is missing from my face, though the higher bone, the sinus bit, isn’t. Basically, I have a very squishy nose). I hadn’t broken my glasses, but I was incredibly grumpy, because I’d discovered I’d cracked my two front teeth too. My injury wasn’t the worst though - the night before, one of my lecture-mates was so drunk, he fell out of a window and broke his ankle. The story he told me, of waking in his sitting room covered in blood from the scrapes and scratches landing in a bush under his window, then falling again on his doorstep and picking up what he called his ‘brick scab tattoo’, and the panic that he’d done something terrible (because he said there was so much blood and it couldn’t *all* have been his. It was.) Between the wet of the snow outside, the fabric itself, and a bloody nose, it got *everywhere*. The odd thing was he didn’t notice his ankle was broken till that morning - the text I got asking me to take notes for him, and the later story led to this.
So.
Accident or killer? I’ll leave you to decide.
I found a line of red spots in the snow,
a path between the gate and my door step,
and a globule exploded on there in an island,
outlined against the straw and mud weave mat.
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