Fear sometimes comes from the unlikeliest of places like sweet shops in broad daylight or the sound of laughter coming from inside your pillow as you prepare to sleep. For her it began when she was a child, as these things often do. She used to play with her friends in a pile of abandoned tyres at the back of an old garage. The owner was an old man who only seemed to care when he found himself in need of a tyre from the pile he otherwise neglected to the point where grass grew between cracked tarmac and rotting rubber.
The children would dare each other to climb higher and higher, always trying to reach the famous white tyre on the top of the garage's roof and nearly always chickening out before they could even see over the roof. She wasn't the first to touch it but she was the first to actually get up onto the roof and look inside the pale rim.
Her friends from that time would talk forever more about how loudly she screamed and the wet crunch she made when she fell from the roof and hit the tarmac. They'll cry about how it's such a shame she never healed up right and how they never saw her after as her family moved to the other side of the country at the same time the garage closed.
They don't talk about what she said while she lay crying and bleeding on the floor before the ambulance arrived. How she kept saying there was a baby up there, how small it was and how it was all bones and needed their help. Nobody believed her at the time and her friends were forbidden from visiting the tyre pile for fear that they would end up like she did, injured and presumably unstable.
Years later a few of them would go back as a group, for old time's sake they would get a ladder and climb up the old garage wall where the tyres used to be and cut away the ivy that had grown over most of the old white tyre. They wouldn't talk about what they found but they would meet up to check the tyre regularly, bringing small amounts of food with them and never quite understanding what they were feeding or why.
The children would dare each other to climb higher and higher, always trying to reach the famous white tyre on the top of the garage's roof and nearly always chickening out before they could even see over the roof. She wasn't the first to touch it but she was the first to actually get up onto the roof and look inside the pale rim.
Her friends from that time would talk forever more about how loudly she screamed and the wet crunch she made when she fell from the roof and hit the tarmac. They'll cry about how it's such a shame she never healed up right and how they never saw her after as her family moved to the other side of the country at the same time the garage closed.
They don't talk about what she said while she lay crying and bleeding on the floor before the ambulance arrived. How she kept saying there was a baby up there, how small it was and how it was all bones and needed their help. Nobody believed her at the time and her friends were forbidden from visiting the tyre pile for fear that they would end up like she did, injured and presumably unstable.
Years later a few of them would go back as a group, for old time's sake they would get a ladder and climb up the old garage wall where the tyres used to be and cut away the ivy that had grown over most of the old white tyre. They wouldn't talk about what they found but they would meet up to check the tyre regularly, bringing small amounts of food with them and never quite understanding what they were feeding or why.
No comments:
Post a Comment