The boy watches a cat on the windowsill. It’s early morning. The sun has stolen the shadow and the cat won’t sit in the brighter light. The boy eats croissant, they are yesterdays; hard and stale. He can’t decide if he prefers them this way. They crumble and flake onto his lap as he sits at the table. He has taken his father’s notebook out of the bag which his mother had left on the table unopened. It’s like a box of memories that she doesn’t want to see, a tin of photos that remind her of a past that needs to be left alone, for now, left in the cupboard for another day. To look now would be like peeling away a sticking-plaster too soon, re-opening the wound before it has healed, exposing it to the sun and the stinging air.
The cat arches its back, stretching impossibly on the ledge. The boy imagines doing the same. Stretching and arching out his back, pushing his fingernails into the wooden boards of the floor, feeling them sink in, feeling his spine stretch out the cloth of his shirt, hearing the seams creak. He wonders if this would feel satisfying, fulfilling in some way or if the splinters under his nails and the cotton on his back would take him to the lost place where all his fears live, the place where the skimming stones go after the fourth bounce and before the fifth, the place that is always hard to see and always harder to come back from. The cat jumps down and is gone like a phantom in peripheral vision. His father’s notebook is open on the last written page. Beyond this, the paper is tight, the unused pages uniform, clean, crisp. The boys fingers are sticky with jam and butter, they annoy him, he tries to get it off. He shakes his hands, rubs them, wipes them, the sensations frustrate him, raise his heart rate, incense him. He jumps up, knocking the table, spilling the milk. He holds his hands like they are on fire. The feeling makes him scared, he starts to panic, pacing the kitchen like a condemned man seconds before they take him to the noose. His mother comes in. She sees the notebook and the open bag but not the boy’s anguish. She sees the spilt milk and the sticky mess but not the eyes that well in hopeless pools of frustration.......
From Avignon by Teddy James