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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. […]
late in the season again — the way I’m late for everything that matters — and there they hang, those dead hydrangea heads, brown and crisp as paper lanterns left out in the rain, still clinging to stems that don’t give a damn, pushing out new blossoms anyway, pink and smug, like the world saying
motorised chairs whine. plastic seats creak under old bones. fluorescent tubes hum low. steel poles rise above balding heads and thin hair. clear bags of saline drip slow, intravenous lines taped to blue-veined arms. they sit in rows, three deep, five across. care-home attendants move quiet between them. they wait for the talk show host.
the barns bulge with rot. heaps of marrow and turnip gone black and swollen. the harvest turning to mush under the glare of the sun. out on the land, the cattle drop, legs buckling into the dust, the hides split and caked in flies. dust blown into the furrows. the dirt won’t hold a seed.
it was a private screening, no appointment, just the final masterpiece there on the wall. and him — part of it now, framed complete. like an artist’s work, it was modern, strokes of gaudy colour with thick applications of material, no planning, no design. on a large canvas of magnolia it lay, a perfect wash
the soup again tonight, using up the stale crust of bread from Saturday, only tonight I bought a tin of fava beans from the corner shop, breaking a thirty-year silence I hadn’t meant to break. I’d gone down there for the paper, and just as I passed under the flats, old Mrs Rodriguez tipped her
