June

A little something I wrote a few years back (yes I am cheating on the whole writing-up-to-date-blog-entries front). 

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It began on a railway station platform, as so many things do. She had long given up on finding Narnia (the last foray into a wardrobe had been purely a space-efficiency experiment) and instead had her mind on shoes, piña colada lollipops, and the graffiti on the opposite wall. It didn’t say anything intelligible, so she wondered why the person responsible had bothered. 

An unstable evening breeze was making its way down the track, navigating suitcases and transporting pockets of leftover aftershave from the sweaty necks of tight-collared commuters. It would keep its course, more or less, until upset by an oncoming train, when in order to escape it would rush up the platform sides and spill itself over the fence. 

Summer had got tired early and was uneasy in the evening light, backing away behind clouds. Jane noticed it lingering in hanging baskets whose tendrils the breeze could only just reach as it swayed and swerved. She noticed it in the eyes of the man on the platform opposite, who couldn’t quite make up his mind whether he needed the sunglasses he was fingering. She noticed it most of all in the blackened buddleia heads, hanging limply over the rails. A season delighted by children running to their mothers with chubby fistfuls of pretty weeds had let the side down on the romanticising-the-ordinary front. Of course, it could have just been the fumes.