Read new fiction inspired by Enda Bowe’s ‘Hannah’

Days

You measure lately by the span of their gentle.

At present the solar rose at 07.59 and can set at 16.20. That’s already seven minutes earlier, and nineteen later, than the year’s first day. By the top of the month will probably be 07.40 and 16.47 – forty-six extra minutes than now. Forty-six extra minutes of day to fill – to make use of, to suppose with, to should make depend…

You discovered a quote on somebody’s Insta that you simply copied out on a Submit-it be aware and caught to your mirror: The place can we stay, it says, however days?

Brushing your hair, you watch your self watching: make your mirror-face make a face that understands. Time is the measure of our days, and a handful of minutes can comprise as a lot as something; even a single minute, a lifespan.

One other Submit-it quote: Your contemporary begin begins NOW

Any second we will select to begin once more. This second. This second. This.

You heave up the large sash window to let the surface in. It tastes damp – of automobile fumes, tinged with foxes. Within the uncooked winter air, moist garments have been on a washing line in a again yard beneath for 3 days now, deserted, or forgotten.

You stand until your naked pores and skin rushes with goosebumps.

 

As you dress, the mushy familiarity of a worn t-shirt, you keep in mind being a teen and carrying the identical pair of tights for days on finish, as a result of newly-washed tights have been at all times so staticky and made your pores and skin creep and soar, whereas worn tights have been mushy and heat, and had your foot-shape simply prepared for you…

You place your socked toes fastidiously on the wood-laminate patterns on the ground – a tightrope, train-tracks, a tightrope once more.

You choose up stray filaments of hair from the ground, like a fairy-tale’s spun pink-gold, and wire them spherical your fingers. At the moment of the morning, the room is awhirl with mud motes. You surprise how lengthy you would need to keep right here earlier than you have been consuming extra of your self with every breath than you have been shedding – like an ouroboros, or a mathematical puzzle of countless beginnings.

Now. Now, now, now.

 

The uncompromising slant of the morning’s gentle casts indirect sharp shadows, hard-edged diamonds. You think about intricate tunnels resulting in underground caverns and sacred Neolithic tombs, locations that come into alignment for only one second a year. On the proper place, on the proper time, a portal opens to a different dimension.

However you don’t suppose there’s a simple means by means of these minutes, lately, this life, for anybody.

I’ll at all times select a lazy individual to do a tough job as a result of they are going to at all times discover a simple strategy to do it.

You look out, because the lights come on within the mid-afternoon, on the illuminated bins of individuals’s lives, on the individuals transferring forwards and backwards throughout the screens of their very own existences, resigned, oblivious. You consider the cities that you simply’d construct in your Sims, the pace with which they’d go up. The second the helicopters would seem on the helipads. Their bulletins of gratitude or sudden despair, flashing by in a stream of ticker-tape. The mosaic lights of the home windows within the far skyscrapers typically appear to you patterns that might be decoded, like binary blocks of laptop code, or Morse, for those who solely knew how.

 

At a sure level of the solar’s setting, it swings between the tower blocks to the west and catches the crystal pendant hung out of your window, and for a protracted second the room fills with dancing orbs of sunshine. If you have been a child, you suppose, you’ll have thought them fairies – would have scampered spherical making an attempt to clutch your palms round them. If you have been a child, you begged and begged God for wings, craned at your shoulder-blades within the rest room mirror, so satisfied that the primary feathery suggestions have been about to interrupt by means of that you may really feel the prickling itch of them. Your favorite ebook then was about just a little woman who longs greater than something to fly. She tries leaping from her wardrobe and flapping her arms, tries reducing wings out of cardboard and taping them on. Then sooner or later, the postman delivers a mysterious girl-sized chocolate egg: she unwraps and eats her means by means of it, and discovers, as if pleasure is its personal type of magic, that she will be able to now fly effortlessly. Her mom, her father, her academics, her neighbours, for the remainder of the ebook all of them chase after her, making an attempt to catch her with a internet, making an attempt to chase her in a hot-air balloon, decided to lure her and to deliver her down, so terrified have been they by her freedom, her wild, anarchic pleasure.

 

It terrified you too, the locations you may go when you had wings.

You probably did fly away, ultimately, although by aeroplane – so far as you may, to the alternative facet of the globe, and now it’s too arduous to return.

You smoke.

You turn on the fairy-lights strung throughout your wall and search for messages hidden within the calligraphy within the wallpaper.

You make your pink toothbrush lengthy for a blue toothbrush. Or one other pink toothbrush.

You make your toothpaste sing to your toothbrush, Squeeze me, squeeze me, by no means let me go.

You look ahead to the ultimate second of sunshine, when the key cross flares within the top-right nook of the constructing reverse.

At that second, you cross off the day in your ironic Girls’s Weekly calendar.

Tomorrow, an additional two minutes of daylight.

You’ll the darkish shapes of the timber outdoors to think about their leaves.

You’ll them to strive more durable.