Early bird
Oh god, I groan.
They've been like that since six, she says from the bed next to me.
We lie there for a while, eyes squeezed shut in the hope that our ears might be too. There are six girls in the bedroom above ours. It sounds instead like six fairly large elephants.
Right, I say. Right. Time to get up.
I manage to get a leg out of bed. Then the other.
Mmph, she says. She puts a pillow over her head.
There's a crack under the window blind, where I didn't pull it fully shut last night. The light is fanning in under it. I stare at it for a few seconds, then reach out to tug the blind up a little.
Oh, I say.
I find some clothes, a pair of still-damp shoes, and I slip out of the room.
A little way up the mountain road the trees start to thin out, and as I walk the sun lances through the gaps in the trunks like a signal light beaming messages across the valley floor; flash, flash, flash. Everything has a furry coating of backlit frost, a white edging on a backdrop of whiter mist, and the longer I walk the slower it all becomes - the flashing sun, the rolling mist, the drip of sodden leaves somewhere deep in off the road.
If I had a jamjar I could scoop a little of it up, screw the lid on tightly and store it away at the back of a shelf for the hard days lying ahead.
Instead, I cup my hands lightly in front of me and bring them to my chest. And I am surprised that hours later I can still feel a fluttering there, a piece of the morning carried with me. Those early birds still singing their dawn song.
They've been like that since six, she says from the bed next to me.
We lie there for a while, eyes squeezed shut in the hope that our ears might be too. There are six girls in the bedroom above ours. It sounds instead like six fairly large elephants.
Right, I say. Right. Time to get up.
I manage to get a leg out of bed. Then the other.
Mmph, she says. She puts a pillow over her head.
There's a crack under the window blind, where I didn't pull it fully shut last night. The light is fanning in under it. I stare at it for a few seconds, then reach out to tug the blind up a little.
Oh, I say.
I find some clothes, a pair of still-damp shoes, and I slip out of the room.
A little way up the mountain road the trees start to thin out, and as I walk the sun lances through the gaps in the trunks like a signal light beaming messages across the valley floor; flash, flash, flash. Everything has a furry coating of backlit frost, a white edging on a backdrop of whiter mist, and the longer I walk the slower it all becomes - the flashing sun, the rolling mist, the drip of sodden leaves somewhere deep in off the road.
If I had a jamjar I could scoop a little of it up, screw the lid on tightly and store it away at the back of a shelf for the hard days lying ahead.
Instead, I cup my hands lightly in front of me and bring them to my chest. And I am surprised that hours later I can still feel a fluttering there, a piece of the morning carried with me. Those early birds still singing their dawn song.
posted by Riona at
6:03 AM
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