New Town by Calum Kerr

Image:Philip Halling

 

 

Calum Kerr is a writer, editor and lecturer, as well as Director of National Flash-Fiction Day. For someone who writes short pieces all the time, he’s not very good at these biographies and tends to become fixated on facts. He lives in Southampton with his wife, a dog, and two cats.

New Town

by Calum Kerr

New town? Same old thing, is more like it.

                  They come and flatten and level, then pile it up and up and build towards the sky. They drive their cars round in circles and along and back, like it matters. They talk and love and die and shop, work and breathe and eat and kill. And then they go to their houses and sleep and wake to do it all again.

                  I remember when the grass was long and would bend and flatten and die in the cold of autumn. I remember when the autumn became a winter which never lifted, but lay and lay until all was mud and silt and soil and rock.

                  I remember the heat which burned and the sun which beat and baked and hardened.

                  But that too passed. As all will pass.

                  And I will still be here when the circles are gone and the buildings are nothing but flat land again. I will still be here when the concrete cows bend their necks and take a mouthful of the grass in which they stand.

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