Seasons Turn

The colours were gaudier, yet curiously more dull than her memory had allowed. She should not have returned. Of course, it was the wrong time of year for the seaside. Still, the penny arcades, drearily mechanical, shunted their workaday fun. The coins in the coin trap perpetually waited for a tipping point of copper cascades - brash and braying: no gold here. A few old dears struggled about peering at chance through sweaty glass. They were all on the cusp of autumn and waiting for the fall.

And she among them. She allowed herself a wry smile and jutted her chin defiantly toward the horizon, stinging her jawline on the snaking wind.

Beside her, delight. She dared not look. She sensed it - the electricity of it. Even the dead eyes of the carousel horses winced slightly at its unfamiliar crackle and fizz. It scared her. But she looked. Her daughter beside her, yet in another world entirely. Her hair was a crown of braids that she herself had crafted. The beauty of its winding symmetry -how it drew the sickly sun to it - making it dance whenever it managed to creep between galloping clouds to find her.

Perhaps I should have brought her hat, she thought.

She will realise, eventually, that she is cold.

But the child was not cold. Her blood ran hot and found the most translucent parts. Her ears, her fine cheeks, her nose all seeping roses. Had she ever been like that? It seemed impossible. She shuddered.

She should have sensed him before he was upon them both: An old man — an end-of-year day-tripper. She supposed he had broken free of the others.

“Hello”

His movements were alarmingly spritely; his cheeks busy with spider veins.

“Hello”, Constance said.

She drew her lips’ corners up fully in an extravagant smile, the better to narrow her eyes and disguise the direction of her gaze. She looked past him. The rest of his party were mulling about the arcades, lingering at the bingo, or contemplating chip shop menus. They were not far away.

“Here on holiday?”

Surely they would all be leaving soon.

“No”, she replied. “Actually I live here.”

He was not quite as old as the others, she decided. She scanned for a possible wife.

“Actually, we’ve just moved here.”

She regretted the ‘we’ at once.

“Are you enjoying living at the seaside, young lady?”

“Well, we’ve really only just arrived.” Constance intercepted him.

She began to gabble to hold him. She could not stop, it seemed. She wished she could. She was unused to conversation: She had come here before, as a girl. It had changed. Or perhaps she had. No - they had not bought yet - only renting. Getting to know the area. Nice to see the old carousel still here - a feature of the old town. The old horses still revolving. Thank goodness for their fresh lick of paint.

“May I?”

And he took a manicured hand out of his glove, wafting the scent Elemis cream as he did so and produced a bag of sweets.

“What’s your name?”

“Violet”

“Like the flower.”, said Constance

Violet smiled as he proffered a boiled sweet.

“Like the colour.”, said the man. “The last colour in the rainbow. The one most

rarely seen.”

Violet reached out and took the sweet. The wrapper crackled in the cradle of

her fingertips.

“Careful” Constance said.

She turned to the man, “You’ll lose your group.”

She gestured to the day-trippers as they coalesced into a knot and wobbled

away happily.

“Oh that’s quite all right, Constance. I’m not with the coach trip. But it’s time I was going anyway. The starlings have gone to bed.”

And off he went in the opposite direction.

Constance hoped the man was right and that the starlings were already roosting. The day had been long. She wished it to close. She should not have come. Or perhaps come earlier. Perhaps it was too late a move for Violet. Or too early. Except they had to move somewhere in the for the start of the school term. It was so hard to know with children. She had heard mothers say it. It was so hard to know the decisive moment. To do what was best at the right time.

She looked down at her daughter, who was still gazing at the sea - tracking the horizon and inviting the clouds to progress across her golden head. They obeyed her. She was chewing the sweet. Her little cheeks were moving, her hands gripping the burning cold iron of the promenade’s railing. She showed not the slightest interest in the lonely candy floss stalls or the creaking fair rides bright with hope and studded with lightbulbs. Only the ocean engaged her - they conversed in a language her mother had long forgotten.

Somehow the light, which they had thought was steadily dying, found Violet again. Its joyous energy blew the sky wide like a heart blown suddenly open. The clouds, though, appeared darker and more ominous than ever to Constance, undulating and grandly swaying in a syncopated chaos until she realised the clouds were birds. The starlings had returned. The spectrum had altered and they, perceiving it, had begun to dance.

The murmuration moved at astonishing pace, dwarfing, as it did so, all of the poor marvels of the dying little town - the tawdry glitter and the rides rocking themselves to slumber - all was oblivious huddled beneath.

Except Violet and Constance. Violet, now, moving her head this way and that, tracking the swooping gestures of the multitude as one. A great animated cloud. Her hands, cold now from the metal railing, moved in sympathy, sprouting feathers, the secret within made manifest. Joyously joining her brethren she ascended, cloaked in the black rainbow feathers of her clan. Up and up she flew into the sky to become part of the spectacle of untrammelled joy. The now night-cloaked little town slumbered below her. The neurotic churning of the slot machines was long ceased. The horses all in slumber. Only her mother, still there on the ground was there to see it. Her own wings long sacrificed, she stood by, pecking, pecking.