The Dog Man speaking from beyond himself to a child who ran away. A Confounded Letter.

So look.

Follow down past the dirty dead prams and rubbers hanging from river trees. The fruit of ages longing, hanging, saddening. Before you discover reading about it is better. Past the rat cut shit up embankment holes to the secret place of coal dust smooth washed with wasted water. The concrete industrial iron bridge and brook, orange damage with iron stain and rippled with rats. Stinking with ripe flood rot and the tunnelled temptation of secret impossible pathways. Breaking new mood with a rusty fence spear weapon for this hunter gatherer.

The canal with grey banking slipping and concrete holding back the oil patterned water. Throw the pebbles high so they hit the with a faint funny fart splat. Sticky sticks in all the cow flap pats, all over the fields when you should not go, through your secret pathways.

Between here and the coal heap, slag heap rooks with carbon stone leaves and fossil bark for collection in old green glass. Sliding danger coal dust stream to dare the friend cross chicken where others had gone forever swallowed young. No more snotty nose. Nickname the Saturday friend Woof to guess his real one. Grandmother next door in the back to back street across the entry tunnel that had holes for all my secrets and copies of naked air brushed out Healthy and Efficient players.

Back, look along the dirt track for four o'clock tea with Grandma and wrestling with the pool results to see if life had changed. Past the rotted stumps that once stopped the horses to pay a toll, and fuel picked sacks of looted coal.

Mother said come next door, I need you, Daddy Barker will not hurt you. I know he won't dying of the black lung rattle coughing. Sitting against his hundred pillows with bottom lip thrust into his opinion of this and that. Friend was not here, strange that Saturday.

“Hold him forward our good lad” said paisley curler mother, “so I can lay him out stretched proper for the Vicar.” “Got to do what's proper.”

“Why don't you talk proper?” she said and “don't eat all those apples they don't grow on trees”. Before Father drunk hit and thumped with belt and spit and slobber before sliding down a wall of protection found in hiding along the river and on the coal heaps. “I'll bloody kill you, you little bastard, bastard come here and wake me up when the pubs open or I'll murder you again.”

But Daddy Barker's mouth dropped, thrust lip flopped and the far away sound of old death came out of the pit tunnels that rotted gums and pint glass teeth. Run away from first experience of dead old dog men.

So look.

At the johnnie filled fruit river and the stinking rat prams that are all there is to run to on these Saturday mornings. Away from the dead man speaking and the mother shouting and the Father threats that nowadays mean nothing to anyone but me and you.

© 2009 Ken Simm.