Fiction

People like us

Under the rusty annexe that must once have belonged to something else, that is held together with cobwebs and ribbons, we don’t mean to mention dead mother but we do. Dead mother, who aren’t in heaven, we say in unison, in deep voices as if we are truly solemn, as if we don’t know it should be our father who art in heaven. Then we laugh and one of us whispers, Hallowed by thy name. Hallowed be, the other says. Then we laugh together again as though we are little hyenas.

Under the bent and creaking annexe that is just there beside the road as if it has been put up for people like us, who’ve left without saying goodbye, without taking anything along – as if memories won’t fade. Perhaps it is a place to wait for decisions, we say in unison, as if more answers might appear out of bad weather. Or a place to be when it gets cold and the rain blows as if it wants to be invited in, we say. But nobody asks the rain in, we think. How must the rain feel, we say in unison, out there in the cold. But still, we don’t invite it in.

Under the annexe between dusk and day we crawl in together on the newspapers with the rust and sawdust and spiders that are on the verge of dying or leaving. We sleep arm in arm like knots in a bow-legged tree. Do you remember, we mumble in our dreams. And we remember how dead mother forced us apart when we burst out of her, took one look at all of our limbs and faces and eyes and ears all stitched up as one and how it took her so, so many years to assemble the two of us. And look what we did to her, we say in unison when we wake, what gratitude. But neither of us feels like laughing, because we remember dead mother, tired and sore and done with her days and how we left her body behind burning. Then all day we sit and watch rain go on falling like something is chasing it from the sky. We try to catch some, but just as we do, it slips through our fingers as if now there are holes in us.

Under the annexe, when the night falls, we watch stars through the cracks as if the annexe is one of those tin cans punctured to let the candlelight out to make pictures. We imagine the shadows are lions and tigers and bears. We talk about poppies in fields that stretch as far as our eyes can see. And emerald green cities. We whisper, “There’s no place like home.” But when we tap our heels together nothing happens, nothing at all. Then we laugh.

We say somewhere there must be the smell of freshly cut grass and wood baked bread. We hold different pictures in our heads of where we have been and where we are going. We talk about the pictures and watch them shift like the night clouds stretched out across the sky that reminds us how big and wide and distant the edges of the world are.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 13, 2025 as "People like us".

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