Fourth

by Ben Jones

It’s always as the leaves start to burn amber that the need to write sets in, and that the inability to do so cripples my mind as the season cripples my fingers white with cold. And as rub, nor blow, nor glove can warm my hands, nor does anything but force enable me to translate the nameless senses in my head into language understandable by anyone but – and anyone including – myself.

It is autumn, with its wetness, its earthy hues, its wool, and early morning shivering beneath the sheets, that ignites within me the belly-borne rumbling of the engine which exhales from the exhaust of my literary existence – my keyboard, my pen – the neat, black fumes onto the page.

Welcome the day with porridge thick and coffee black. Hours indoors with a contented cat on my cord-clad lap. Rain drives hard at the windows as wool hugs warmly my back. I sneak in a little writing to my working day, whilst others are distracted by routine. The call to write is nagging, and I answer between phone calls, instructions, tea rounds.

Pull a rubber band around my fingers. Roll a ball of tack in my palm. Sip my tea, silent and adrift in thoughts without names until I see in the fog a shape appearing. Here it is – forming itself into language – this creature I recognise but until now haven’t seen in any clear conformation; an idea becomes apparent. The next sentence, or maybe only a word with which to lay the first step across the stream. Struggling, and balancing, one half submerged stone after the last, towards a sense of completeness that I’m sure lies on the opposite bank, and from which I will pick up haste and ramble onwards over the damp fields, through the forest thick with black and up the crumbling mountainside towards the heavy, hanging blankets overhead.