Camera Obscura

Eight-year-old sitting in Bramhall’s field, shoes scuffed from kicking a stone, too young for a key but old enough now to walk the short mile back from school. You’ve spied your mother down in the village crossing the street, purse in her fist. In her other hand her shopping bag nurses four ugly potatoes caked in mud, a boiling of peas, rags of meat, or a tail of fish in grease-proof paper, the price totted up in penciled columns of shillings and pence. How warm must she be in that winter coat? On Old Mount Road the nearer she gets the smaller she shrinks, until you reach out to carry her home on the flat of your hand or your fingertip, and she doesn’t exist.