The road never walked

You walk slowly down the high street of your nearest town, street lights giving the closed shops' windows a faint orange glow. It is quiet, the silence only interrupted by the occasional car passing and the soft patter of rain on the umbrella you're carrying. Once in a while you hear the murmur of a television set from a first storey window or a wine-induced laugh. Still your feet carry you forwards, their steady one-two beat regulating your thoughts.

From a side alley a teenage boy saunters out, followed closely by a girl screaming profanities over the rain. Her heels clatter as she dashes across the road; they disappear once more into the night. Soon the shops end and the light reflected by the moon shines through that of the streetlights more strongly. As though without warning, the high street breaks into fields, so suddenly that you gasp in the cool night air.

The damp smell of the earth and hedges pervades your nostrils and you collapse your umbrella and drop it in a hedgerow. The drizzle persists as the street lights fall away completely, so ahead of you is only potholed tarmac and endless acres. Rabbits' eyes reflect the moon's light as they dart across the road ahead, sometimes stopping and waiting in shadow. Still you walk on, over the bridge and past the gate, into the middle of the field.

And all at once, the world crashes in on you. You fall to the floor with deep gasping sobs and scream at the top of your lungs. You breathe in the smell of summer's rain settling on grass and fox trails and manure and bullfinches song at 4am when you're tired and hungry and so alive it hurts. You breathe in the rush of cold winter's nights spent shivering with your hands shoved down horses' rugs while they scoff down mouthful after mouthful of sweet hay and a childhood well lived, and you scream it all back out till there is nothing but a cask in which the broken fragments of your soul remain.