Brideswell

The day started out soft. Soft rain softened all the colours, like someone had turned a dial and muted the fields' fierce greens right down. Even the dry stone walls that rose and fell like backbones had their hardness softened by white lichen. Running up the lane, the puddles softened my footfall, the rain softened my burning breath. Then the sun came out. Flies, lethargic from their blackberry feasts, emerged from the hedgerows to dance in the heat. I ran on and the road stretched out before me, patched in alternate swathes of light and shade by dark trees and low-lying, rain-pregnant clouds. In the lanes the sound of rare cars approached slowly, a low hush like the sound of the sea in a shell. As the cars went passed the sound wave crashed over me and all the briars and  hemlock swayed like kelp and bladder-wrack. The rain came in much the same way; I saw it coming down the road, a patch of sound and darkness building over the fields, and then it hit me. I ran straight through it. I ran to Brideswell.

On the way back along the impossibly long lane my mouth was desert-dry. I stopped at the rusted water pump by the old school house. I lifted the handle, breaking cobwebs. The paint flaked off in my palms. My body was exhausted; my leg muscles, burning. I'd run out of the rain again, and the sun baked down on my shoulders as I brought the handle up and down, up and down. I could hear dry raspings beneath the earth. The pump was as parched as I was. But then I heard the sound of water rushing up from some deep forgotten well, and I pumped faster, until it came splashing out onto the dry rocks, onto my raw palms. I splashed it up into my salty face. My thirsty mouth. The water tasted of grass and rain and rock. It tasted of the fields I'd run through. I walked home, exhausted. Refreshed.