Fairy

Met the highway at Old Bar:
strung out, amphetamined,
he swung off the rut-ribbed dirt feeder,
felt tooth and jaw unclench
on the smooth grey strip,
the k’s a curling ribbon of road beneath his Toyota,
mind chiming on the nitpick words of his father’s goodbye—
just do no harm, if you can’t do any bloody good—

gripped the wheel so tight an old cut opened,
sepsis square in the black gash there
and in the thumb an ache
that leant a pulse to the maddened rush
of trees–road–black sky;
and so on, ad nauseum
(his mother spat that Latin once:
she acted bookish, didn’t join them
chipping shell from the boat on Sundays
when his thumbs got new cuts
while other cuts seeped).

He disappeared the old folks from behind his eyes,
swallowed miles,
dissolved himself into the capsule of the car,
saw he was atomic, in the clever chain of it,
time passing in his mouth and out his arsehole,
his insides a trivial tube
(the head a hollow thing),
and then, of course, his thumb.

He clocked one-eighty
(trees–road–black sky)
when the thing hit—
the windscreen a diamond shower
and in his lap a flapping wing.
A gush of acrid fear; he felt the front wheels swing,
sent a glorious spray of shoulder gravel
up around the windows,
in the Bollywood headlights of the
thundering B-Double in the inside lane
God no, not like this, not yet
then he was stopping, stopped,
his thighs clawed by the manic dying thing;

a bat, he saw—
with the face of a dirty fairy
crying human tears,
opening and closing its leather coat
ad nauseum, ad nauseum, until he faded
and the creature’s agony shriek brought him around;
he was alive
the split night ringing in his ears.

© Fiona Britton