Haiku

The cold clung to her as she walked along the frost-sparkled pavement, up to the post box. She and her friend were going through a phase of writing to each other every day in haiku. She had just completed a postcard that she needed to post before the day was out.

She had bundled herself up in coat, scarf, hat and gloves and let herself out of the house. It was only mid-afternoon and already the street lights were glowing. She walked up the street, peeping through the gap between the edge of her woolly hat and the top of her scarf, the postcard clutched in one gloved-hand, the other hand clenched inside her coat pocket. Her jaw ached from trying to stop her teeth chattering. It was so cold, she half wished that global warming would hurry up and happen.

Her thigh muscles ached from the way she was walking, trying not to slip on the frosty ground. She needed some new boots, the soles on these were losing their tread. Cleated soles. She smiled to herself. Why did she like that word so much? She said it three or four times in her head. Cleated, cleated, cleated, cleated. It made her want to laugh.

She and her friend used to play a game where they would choose a word and say it over and over until all the meaning fell out of it and it just became a sound they were making with their mouths.

She was halfway to the post box now. The top of her scarf was beginning to feel damp against her mouth and nose from the condensation of her breathing. She looked down at the two-line haiku she had written on the card. They had begun by sticking rigidly to the 5-7-5 formation, but now she was beginning to free herself from that constraint, trying to condense the essence of a moment into the least number of words and still retain its wholeness.

She had seen the sunset earlier and written:

pink sunkissed sky

hovers over ice-tipped trees

She felt satisfied with that description and hoped that her friend would like it too. She was almost at the post box now. She checked that she had fixed a stamp to the card. That would be no fun, trying to peel a stamp from its backing without taking her gloves off. She did not like the self-adhesive stamps. She felt cheated by them somehow.

She climbed the step up to the frontage of the Post Office and stopped in front of the post box. She held the postcard in her two gloved hands for a moment, wishing it luck on its journey over the hills to her friend. Then she raised her two hands to the mouth of the box and pushed the postcard in. She tipped her head back slightly, closing her eyes, and breathed in the frosty air. Then she started on her way back to the house.

It was harder to keep her balance on the icy pavement because of the slight downhill slope on the way back. She almost slipped a couple of times, and held onto the hedges and walls of the houses she was passing.

It was quiet, there was hardly any traffic. She supposed everyone was safely tucked up in their nice warm houses. Not like her, out in the cold, posting a haiku to a friend because of some silly challenge they had set themselves.

She stopped on the edge of the pavement and looked up and down the road to make sure there were no cars coming before she crossed.

The blow struck her on the back of her head and she fell forward into the road. She felt hands rummaging in her coat pockets, trying to find a purse or something valuable like a mobile phone, she supposed. Her face was cushioned by the wool of her hat and her scarf. She was glad she had them on. She felt a little frightened but she tried not to move, not to panic. Then a hand grabbed the top of her hat and yanked it off her head. The cold began pounding on her skull and then the hand (the same hand?) began pounding her skull against the ground. She thought she cried out, but she could not be sure, then her head smashed one last time to the ground as her attacker let go his grip (her grip?) and ran off.

The world was muffled and black and finally silent. The blood ran darkly from the broken skin against her skull. She lay at the edge of the road as though she were asleep, as though she had been overtaken by a sudden bout of narcolepsy.

She was in the newspapers and on the local tv bulletins for two days afterwards. The motorist who had eventually stopped and found her became a minor celebrity for less than his Warholian 15 minutes. Later, she was only remembered by those who had known her.

The postcard bearing the haiku to her friend went astray. She had somehow smudged the ink so that the postcode could not be read clearly. When it eventually reached her friend’s house, the postmarks (5 of them) ranged from Swansea to Glasgow.

© J R Hargreaves 2002