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Copyright Seeing it First Hand 2026 | Theme by ThemeinProgress
Written by jackbrewis
forty-five years on, and the memory blows back through my skull like smoke from a tailpipe. that day rushing in. a breeze pushing cherry blossoms around the churchyard. petals swirl down on the stone. soft. useless. the incense finds my nostrils. a thin grey ghost of smoke curls up from the wick of a candle. […]
Spring. new blossoms force their way open across the garden after the dead winter. the air has the first thin smell of lilacs and the promise of tomatoes. across the patch of turned earth, the beast is cooking. steam rises thick and sour from the middle of it, a slow furnace of rot where the old waste
the pictures went in like a splinter you cannot dig out. one was a Jewish boy, maybe ten, lost inside a heap of striped rags. the yellow star sewn onto the chest like a shipping label on a crate. then page after page of bones twisted wrong, black smoke rolling out of brick chimneys into
the horn blows wild. tidal wave, six to one, 3:35 sharp, the bell clanging, and there she goes, the grey ghost streaking over Sandown’s green lung. punters lean into the dream, eyes wild, hearts pounding against the rail, while Mary — sweet Mary of the quick laugh — slides the coldest pint across the oak,
the bar hasn’t changed, and neon still bleeds a sickly red down the walls. and the smoke hangs in the air like it’s got nowhere better to be. I’m on the stool next to the empty one, the corner spot where Uncle Patrick used to sit with a Campari and Soda glowing in his fist
I dragged myself along the canal path through snow that rose to the ankles, pure and untouched, no one across it yet. the cold cut at my face with a slow, steady insistence, the way old debts come back in the dark. ahead, one yellow smear of light leaked from a porthole, warm-looking, false-looking, the
