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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. […]
two forty-five in the goddamn morning. I’m sitting with an empty mug; the crumbs of a biscuit packet scattered like dead soldiers across Shayne and Martin’s kitchen table. three of the bastards, maybe four—I lost count somewhere between the second refill and the third. now my mouth tastes like the bottom of a hamster hutch,
the room was dead cold, but it drew you in anyway, the same way you’ll drink the sticky dregs from a flat bottle left on a sill just for the short buzz. she lay next to me, a wet catch in her chest that came and went with every breath. cold skin. she didn’t open
stiletto snaps sharp on concrete, ankle caves in with a wet twist of pain. platform 2, breathless and running late for the six forty-five to London, the dawn cold slicing through bones. her lips crack audibly in the frost, Marlboro smoke curling warm and bitter around a flushed face shadowed by a sheepskin hat, arms
did you just die. I can’t hear those wings anymore. that beating gone silent. you were bashing your skull against the IKEA lamp I got last week. a circle of white light pulling you into the tin shade, electric heat. I sat here at the typewriter, sick with the flu, fingers hitting the keys. listening
that summer morning arrived hot and sticky, the air thick and close, bright sun blasting through the kitchen window while the girls tore around the place scribbling homework frantic, yanking plimsolls from under beds, hunting lunch boxes, stuffing in raisins and cucumber slices and little yoghurt tubs – all that packed-lunch madness before the school
