Conflicts
The day was a perfect cut out, turning the sky into a two-toned collage, a blanket of blue with an orange heart. As hours moved inexorably through themselves and as the sun dipped and dimmed, the second lives of trees and bushes had been teased into life. Spreading out grey fingers they grasped at the earth, tugging themselves slowly, achingly forward until eventually a critical mass was reached and, merging like lovers, they melted into the grass. Shadow slowly exerted its sombre hold, unnoticed by the joggers, basketball players, dog walkers and young mums who trotted, sprinted, whistled and wheeled themselves through the park.
I sat uncomfortably, my back pressed at an angle against a knot in the tree trunk, eyes focused on the book but occasionally pestered by an uncooperative flash that had managed to escape the disc overhead. The story was proceeding excellently, and the small distractions of this environment were no serious competition against the hollow laughter ringing from my insane Russian duchess, as she burned her money, mocking old priapic merchants who, too polite to beg her grace, simply grasped their cocks and posed as lovers.
Then, a movement strong enough to draw my eye, forced up by hormones which, defying it seemed all logic or sense, had sourced out the tightly defined buttocks of a Lycra-clad jogger and demanded my attention focused thereon. Frustratingly frequently the duchess paused her collapse and her ardent admirers winked in lecherous sympathy from the pages as I tried to dispel the rush of blood to my groin, savoured and then discarded the primal urge, the centralised push to chase and mate and mate again until I was spent and empty.
It was one such woman or man (memory cares little enough for distinction) who led my sight to a copse of trees directly ahead, a flash from above which sped to earth. I flicked my eyes, reproachful, to the sun, and saw between the branches and the leaves in grey a fall of flakes that glinted gold, which pushed and swam against their descent from sky to pale earth till it slowed to a still, and they hung in amber long since gone. They were the last dying children of day, sedate and heavenly in their demise, with the unreasonable, irrefutable beauty of a siren call, whispering of the glory that would come tomorrow, their explosive resurrection, their enduring triumph. I know not how long I sat, transfixed and lost in the extended moment, but I do remember clearly that the white van which roared by in a clogged up cough of artificiality and muted, poisonous explosions, was how I ended. When it had passed the specks of light were gone also, snuffed out by exhaust. I closed my book, bid them farewell and stood, not sad, but looking forward to tomorrow.