This evening a bracken boy borrows my lungs.

I breathlessly await his return, while the white clay gurgles up between the ferns.

He's gone a long time: his patients queue from here to eternity. But eventually he blows the cobwebs from all their corners and comes back.

I'm turning blue from lack of oxygen.

The bracken boy lies down on top of me as though I were a woman; blows a fanfare inside me as though I were a cathedral; opens my eyes as though I were a visionary; clacks his forehead against mine as though I were a ram.

Then he scoops up some of the clay and, by simply pressing it between his hands a few times, produces a perfect miniature of himself (pose - squatting; scale - about one-fifth).

He hands it to me. I shake my head in amazement.

"How on earth did you do that?" I ask.

But he's already disappeared.

 

~

 

I take the model home and show it to my wife.

"Very nice," she says. "What's it supposed to be?"

"A bracken boy."

"Oh yes? And what's that?"

"You know the place down there, where we used to go together, in among the ferns? Where we saw the white clay coming up out of the ground? I met him there a couple of hours ago. He's a bit of a trumpeter. I think there's a whole tribe of them. He made this to remember him by. He was grateful because I lent him my lungs. I don't know how he did it. It only took him a few seconds. It was like he was using his hands as a press-mould, you know what I mean?..."

Her eyes have glazed over and she's virtually asleep, but I'm quite used to this response by now, so I go on talking anyway until there's a knock at the door.

I open up to find the bracken boy standing in a pool of glory. I'm overjoyed to see him.

"Come in. Come in. I was just talking about you."

"I know you were."

As soon as he sees my wife sitting in the front room he dodges back into the kitchen.

"I thought she was asleep," he whispers.

"Not quite," I say. "Anyway, it doesn't matter, does it? Come in and meet her."

"No," he mouths, urgently shaking his head.

"She won't eat you," I say. "She's a vegetarian."

I laugh at this, as I do at all my own jokes, but he's not amused. His face is suddenly covered by a network of wrinkles, through which his anxiety runs.

"What's the matter, then? Are you allergic to women?"

"Put it like that if you want... I must go. Just come out here a minute, will you? There's something I have to tell you."

He leads me into the garden:

"You know that model I made? Well, I've got into a lot of trouble about that. I'm afraid it must be destroyed immediately. Has your wife seen it?"

"Yeah. But she's not interested. She thinks it's some whim of mine."

"A whim? What's that?"

"You know - something you do without any meaning behind it."

He shook his head:

"Oh, I thought you meant a whim-engine."

"Why must it be destroyed?''

"It's a bit complicated. I broke a rule I didn't know about. It's not just me who'll be punished but all of us... It's a matter of history more than anything, I think."

Before I can interrogate him further my wife comes out to see what I'm up to and the bracken boy vanishes into the dark.

"What are you doing out here?" she asks. "Who was that at the door?"

"Just someone who's lost their cat. I was seeing if it was in the garden."

She yawns.

"Coming to bed?"

"You go on. I'll be up in a minute."

I wait for him to return, even shout out a couple of times. I'm reluctant to destroy the model without any more reason than he's provided.

Eventually I give up and go in. The clay looks so appealing, sacred almost, that I just can't bring myself to touch it. I get ready for bed.

~

We're woken by a tremendous cacophony as the floor-joists creak and crack and split and break. We cling to each other as the bed crashes down into the front room. I notice instantly that the model, which I'd left on the mantelpiece, is squashed beyond all recognition.

My immediate reaction is laughter. Unfortunately the wife chooses rage.

"This is all your fault," she yells. "You blithering idiot. Can't you do anything you're supposed to do?"

"What do you mean?" I protest, wondering how she knows.

She picks up a piece of floorboard and begins to whack me with unfeminine force.

"Look at my home," she screeches. "I told you a thousand times that ceiling wasn't safe. Why don't you ever listen?"

 

 

A. R. Lamb, a Sculptor by trade, lives in Cornwall, U. K.

---New fiction presently at Unlikely Stories, Gravity, In Posse Review, and electronpress.com.

---Poetry published in Disquieting Muses, Swansong, Shadyvale, and ariga.com.

---Early experimental fictions published by John Calder and in anthologies and magazines.

---Most recent paper publication In Many Ways Frogs, a joint poetic volume (with P. N. Newman, published by Abraxas).

---Ongoing project, an unusual synthesis of music and poetry: first recording, Bark of a Stray Dog, now available (music and voices by Lamb, words by Newman).