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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. […]
across the road and onto the pavement, feet hitting wet concrete in that old, flat wanderer rhythm. and then I see her, walking dead ahead, just out of reach, a stranger I’ve already named Kate in the silent room of my mind. beside her strides a Great Dane, a massive, ridiculous beast I’ve christened Claude
untouched, a beautiful size 12 gleaming in the lamplight, pressed up hard against the cold steel teeth of a vice that grips her like some old jazzman’s fist around a bottle at midnight, unyielding, eternal. naked in her isolation she waits, this slender shank of possibility, for the first tender strand of cotton to come
the morning is a performance we both sign off on. toast, the smell of burnt butter, the kids chewing with their mouths open. we pass the salt, we ask about gym kit, we do the small talk. then the yellow bus idles at the curb. a rusted chassis spitting black diesel smoke into the frost,
rugby season in Cambridge, last night’s training brutal, a muddy grind under the floodlights, oranges sliced and quartered for halftime, the sharp acid juice stinging like fire on cracked lips. one last scrum under the dark sky, shoulders slamming into ribs, the smell of wet jersey and hot breath, stubble scraping against raw cheekbones until
there you were in that ragged denim jacket, frayed at the cuffs, and your jeans hung loose on your bony hips in the hot wind. I stood at the kitchen window, watching you reach up into my husband’s pear tree, plucking those fat golden pears one by one. slow. deliberate. you turned and caught me
