HOW TO DISMANTLE YOURSELF
Make notes in the margins as you read.
Dog ear the corners.
Leave breadcrumbs in those impossibly small spaces where the pages meet, because you’ll want to find your way back.
• • •
We used to visit our father on the last Sunday of every month, before his Alzheimer's convinced him we were strangers. Old margarine tubs full of tulips and cracked dirt were lined up on the window ledges and it would become spring, even on the darkest of days.
Most of the things I learned about the world were from those Sunday afternoons of rolling news channels, where loud dusty men spoke in proverbs and set things alight. I remember groups of people holding homemade signs amongst dozens of collapsing buildings. It turned out to be only one but they played the footage so many times I thought the world had ended.
I sat on the button-backed armchair for hours eating biscuits and drinking my father’s cement shaded Earl Grey under the re-framed portraits of my mother. Visiting him in our family home always reminded me of being young, when his mountain range hands gripped our fingers so tightly it hurt until bedtime. He used to take us out for walks in the ever-rainy moors and we’d trek over to the steam engines at Dawlish Warren. We’d walk for a while, and when we got too tired he’d put us on his shoulders and we’d dig our fists into his raincoat and hang on for dear life. He was a cathedral of a man with the heart of a chapel, and I loved him.
And we were all there when he died. Right up until he closed his eyes there was a strength that reached out as though caught in a burning building. An alive soul in a collapsing body. Fighting to breathe. A desperation to fly upwards and away from the flames. A dream, that after an evening of bright hospital lights and praying relatives, eventually arrived.
• • •
Mark the lines that trouble you.
Bend back the spine until it cracks and fits in your back pocket.
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Complete story available to agents and publishers. Contact Russell James at russelljamesauthor@gmail.com