She beat the splintered end of a fence post further into the earth.
The ground – sodden from rain, gave way easily, but still she beat it, enjoying the jolt and the bounce-back.
Chickens pecked at the soles of her boots through wire hexagons.
They’d escaped again early that morning. The wind had blown three of the fence posts down and made little glinting metal hillocks of wire mesh across the garden.
When she had drawn the curtains first thing, she hadn’t been sure of what she was seeing.
Now, here they were. Seventeen of them; Araucanas, Bluebell’s, Maran’s, Orpington, and a few Goldline’s rescued from slaughter.
She looked at them now, the Goldline’s, pecking, clucking. Clawed feet curling, flexing, cocking their heads to one side, eye-balling the ground for worms or bugs.
Raptors.
They’d taken a while to feather up. Serena had wanted to knit them jumpers after finding a pattern online. And she would have done it too, in the space before death, if she could knit.
She wiped hair from her face with the back of her wrist.
The wind was getting up again, but the fence should hold.
She dipped her chin into her scarf that still smelled of Serena – Her perfume. Her laugh. Her life.
She looked out across the field. Nothing was left of the trees now, just swaying branches, skeletons the lot of them, branches rattling like bones in the wind and around the very edges of the field she could make out the golds reds yellows and browns of the leaves from the old great oaks.
A pair of pheasants running, necks outstretched. A hare standing perfectly still in the rolling shadow of the clouds.
The storm had left the air taught and threatened, another storm waiting to follow and the wind had blown the grass flat.
She would be rebuilding the run again come morning.
She stubbed the toe of her boot into the ground. The soil bruised and squelched a belch of watery mud across her laces, hair wild and whipped against her cheeks, caught in her eyelashes and the wet of her lips.
She felt weak for the first time in years. Only moments before she had felt hot and heady and full of the thrill of life.
A fleeting feeling, like water through the fingers.
Now winter had arrived and she hadn’t even noticed it’s coming.
The garden was dead.
Rose petals had turned to brown pulp,the brilliant sweet -smelling purple Heliotrope she had bought Serena had turned grey and brittle, and the trees sung a wandering song of their own.
She turned to where Serena had always stood by the door. Watching her.
Serena, a shadow now, with her loose fitting coat, and the blue-green blanket from the back of her chair wrapped around her shoulders, both hands clasped about a mug of tea. She barely seemed to move beneath the flap-flapping of the blanket, and the gentle ruffle of her short dark hair.
But then she smiled, seemingly unable to help herself.
Serena was beautiful.
Serena was always beautiful. Graceful. Whereas she was standing in a fine mist of rain in her old boots, losing hair grips in the mud.
But that one smile was all it took to remind her of why she (and the chickens) remained.
Serena.
It had always been Serena.
∞
Raised simultaneously by David Bowie and Virginia Woolf, Natascha Graham is a writer of stage, screen, fiction, non-fiction and poetry and lives with her wife in a house full of sunshine on the east coast of England.
Her short films have been selected by Pinewood Studios & Lift-Off Sessions, Cannes Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival, Camden Fringe Festival and Edinburgh Fringe Festival, while her theatre shows have been performed in London’s West End and on Broadway, New York as well as at The Mercury Theatre, Colchester, Thornhill Theatre, London and Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York where her monologue, Confessions: The Hours won the award for Best Monologue.
Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction essays have been previously published by Acumen, Rattle, Litro, Every Day Fiction, The Sheepshead Review, Yahoo News and The Mighty among others, as well as being aired numerous times on BBC Radio and various podcasts and she has been short-listed by Penguin and Random House for the 2021 WriteNow Editorial Programme.
Natascha also writes the continuing BBC Radio Drama, Everland, and is working on Bad Girls: The Documentary which explores the UK’s ITV prison drama.
Natascha also writes for the Broxtowe Women’s Project for abused women and has also written and released several works of fiction and poetry which are widely available worldwide.
When she is not writing, Natascha is co-editor in chief of Tipping the Scales Literary & Arts Journal with her wife and co-hosts the upcoming LGBT podcast, The Sapphic Lounge, with fellow writer, Stephanie Donaghy-Sims.
