Spark By Jess McColl

Ben Seidelman CC




Spark

He’s framed like a Botticelli painting, you think. Long face, twitch of glamour smirking untold secrets of Bosch-like dwellings. You think that maybe this person has seen both Heaven and Hell, a kaleidoscope of both; he’s juxtaposed in the paradox, a mandorla, the centre of wisdom itself. He’ll make you poached eggs and fuck you hard in a cemetery. Above the din though, it’s difficult to make an educated assumption.
    The slope of his neck suggests humour high in capacity for self-deprecation, but that outfit screams otherwise. He wears the dress, shroud of silky silence.
    You clock eyes. Swamp green and boggy as the future. But… There’s a head thrown back in laughter-
There. It. Is. 
A spark of some kind of hidden honour; a myriad of technicolour and a penchant for the absurd. A pronounced Adam’s apple like a plum of evil, but jawline laced with kindness. If you could smell him, he would smell like pencil sharpening and earth. An alchemical mix of kink and wholesomeness in one fruit.
Ah, you think.
    You could have it all. 
    An old tenement in a faraway village, at the foot of the Campsie Hills. You could mix saliva, genitals, an atom bomb of DNA that could produce your ‘something else’. You picture how he speaks, how he educates, like a weary deity that’s so tired of this place, his lane, this terrain; dishevelled and frankly, boring. You have both outgrown this circus in pursuit of something bigger.
    Your spawn. You can see them now; their golden blonde heads bobbing in the waves of your domestic spells of homegrown rosemary and potatoes; the kinds of foods that you never used to allow yourself to eat. You take pleasure in simple things these days. The weight of your iMac, magnet to your kitchen table, the many meals with your ersatz children, tangled in their strangled flaxen hair. The rapturous joy when your dog - a Labrador? something like that, yes - walks at your heel, instead of dragging you along, much like life. How your children brush each other's heads when one scrapes their knee. See? 
See? 
Look what we did. 
The only thing that will ever guarantee your legacy because you’re pedalling against the grain - You. Got. Lazy, you know - you were told you could 
only teach. 
Those who don’t

Breed. 

But you are happy, fermenting in your town. You think:
This is enough
This is enough
This is enough
A mantra you hum like a tired bumblebee, martyrs together, the hive has given up honey for the more noble pursuit of never dying. You content yourself with gluey butternut squash risottos, and panting orgasms every second week, hurried like unkept promises. Your friends still ask you how you are and the children sing it for you instead. Speak over your once shrill, untamed protests, calling for
more
more
more
in every interlude of chaos. 
Your children are the new type of nursery rhyme that scream of peace. Black sheep that don’t get bullied.

    But no. You’re happy. Happy, you tell yourself. You awake each morning to smiling arms and soft cheeks that smell like spilt milk. Your life runs like a carousel but no one ever gets off. Except old Dorothy down the road. An elephant grey menhir at the end of your garden track, back arched like a threatened cat over her zimmer frame, crooked pose against the roses. When you didn’t see her for a year you didn’t think too much of it, only worried fuzzily about your dog with her yeasty ears, and how the boys don’t ask you how you are yet. What age is empathy supposed to develop? Frantic Google quests at 5am with whisky breath (wheezed out the wrong side of bed) you ask things like:
      How to spice up the bedroom
                                   Heard Depp defamation
                   Symptoms of depression
                                                     Proper ways to make curry
                                                                                                      How to bury a dog
                                                                                                                     Girl-on-girl    
    And then Dorothy was dead. A skeleton found in an armchair, fraught with parmesan cheese skin flakes; and you never even got past, “the days are fair drawing in.” Tight smiles all around. 
    But the hills, they have a mellow temperament. Permanent and true. They anchor you in this ocean of routine and breezy practicality, school runs and feigned civility. Your pinky’s getting sore from all the soaring over tea, clipped syllables, stifled giggles about stuff you could never say. You find shopping lists scrawled in coat pockets, to-do lists in drawers, half-baked poetry, detailing people you will never be.
      Gouda cheese from the Hebrides.
      A five-man tent.
                    A better barbecue.
      And somewhere, small, scrawled in the corner of a journal, 
      anal beads.
The minutiae, marginalia, such a tease.

      Bin them. 

You get an allotment with him instead. A real dream you fall into through some rabbit hole that was meant for someone more established than you. Here. In this paradise. You are still outsiders in this town but this might give you a chance to focus on growing something other than your own ennui. 
    The rhubarb is all that ever grows, limp and uneasy; insipid pink as your couch. You picked it from Ikea. You wade from dinner to dinner chastising them all, and flagellating yourself with E numbers and the knowledge of things you wish you never knew. You writhe in homemade macaroni, all you want is cardboard Pot Noodle but you have

                        Responsibilities 
                        Now.

But you watch their golden heads bobbing, asking obscenities like: 
“Will the sky fall down?”
“Why isn’t Hammy moving?”
                                                                   “What is time?”
“When did you and Daddy meet?”
And you think of him, as he is now, framed like a beacon. Untouched, untarnished, by this wisdom you have garnered by the crook of his nose, the half upturn of his smile. The lack of filter.
     Actually-
     Now you look at it, he might be a Right Wrong’un. So you sigh the long sigh of a tired oracle

and swipe left.

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Jess McColl is a writer and poet from Glasgow, Scotland. She holds a First-Class BA in Creative Writing and is currently learning the craft of psychotherapy. She loves the bittersweet alchemy of spinning tears into gold, and can often be found collecting the city’s stories through a hearing trumpet alongside her bonny collie dog, Rapha.

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