The Open Road

The heat was oppressive that day, beating down. Unfamiliar on our skin. Unwelcomed within what we knew about this country we called home.

When we tried to look too far ahead, the ground bubbled, forming those wavering lines which rest just above the surface. The distant fields only existed because we already knew, To a stanger, there was only the pink gravel directly below which was left unharmed from the sun.

“It is the dust, melting. All the footsteps from the winter’s cold, evaporating, into the floor,”

she, my mother, would say as we walked along the open road, picking only the largest, juciest blackberries from the bushes. The fruit had come early, it was only early August and already the dark fruits were dripping from their mother branches.

Slowly, my small hands would reach out in front of me, covered in purple stains of varying colours from where gluttony has caused me to crush the fruits just a little bit too hard. Naive to their fragility. Picking and picking and picking to fill the basket we both shared.

She hummed, my mother, as she picked. Mainly old tunes and folk songs. Some I recognised, she would turn to me, as she sang, and smile whilst gently bending down and swaying her hips, taking my arms and swirling me around. Laughing. Happy?

Other songs were part of a time before I was hers to teach, when she was still living and not just a mother.

Her fingers reached out, unstained, her bare feet brushed along the surface. I remember looking down, the dimamonte encrusted flip flops on my feet seeming ridiculous, excessive.

I wanted to be just like her, I thought. My young eyes yearned for the freedom to feel the ground beneath me instead of just the shoe’s barrier, to understand the unfamiliar songs she sang, and be part of the life which she kept so secret.

She called out to me, giggling as I was scooped up into her arms, her familiar smell wrapping itself around me, a mixture of natural and unnatural floral auroas.

We were running along the road, laughing and fighting our way. Home?

*

The hum of the coffee machine pulls me from sleep, unfamillair smells, strange stacks of books. Old mugs filled with tea which was never mine and scraps of paper with scribbles I don’t understand.

I pick up various objects, trying to find out about the person who lives here, about the person whose bed I am in, but who I barely know beyond their name. Searching for anything which will give me something to say when, inevitably, he comes back in.

The right thing, the perfect thing.

And he does. He walks back in, handing me the coffee. Shuffling around, gathering his things for his day, and handing me mine from the night before. We move around each other, not quite awkward, but not quite comfortable either.

The radio plays strange voices in the background as we tray and find the right words.

It’s only surface level, the conversation. I hide beneath those giggles, left over from the alcohol still staining my teeth. Pulling the fun up and over my head.

Laughing at stories he tells me, telling him stories to make him laugh.

I don’t shower.

Over breakfast I tell him “emotions are overrated” as the conversation moves down coppiced branches and broken roads, never quite leading to anything.

Before walking out the door, thirty minutes later.

His road, I notice, is filled with a mixture of trees, mainly planes, but others poke their heads into the mix as their roots try to poke out of the surface, suffocating under the thick tarmac and crushed under the weight of heavy boots and shoes which walk by everyday, on their way to somewhere else.

I dodge, in and out, weaving between cars half parked on the pavement, congesting the pavement and preventing people from moving without planning their way around the different obstacles.

It’s limiting, the road ahead, it’s closed. Every turn leading to a dead end, or more chaos, the primal instinct in me crushed into believing this is all so natural, as I pull out my phone to text her.

‘I’m coming home, tonight.

*

Will be on the 6.23’ sighing as I hit send, wondering where she is now. What she is doing. What will I say to her now?

I remember the time, on a similar street, covered by the safety of her car. Waiting.

Watching. Strange bodies moving in and out of the revolving door in front of me.

Everytime someone walked near me I lay face down, inhaling the dirt from my siblings shoes on the car floor, scared the people outside might see me. Might take me away.

I waited for her. And waited and waited

Until she came out, her face flushed red, her hands clutching the small gym bag close to her chest, bursting into the car, her foreign, sweat smelling aurora filling up the space between us. Normally, she masked the hours she had spent running from what? in her distinct smell, but that day was different.

She didn’t look at me, or speak. She just looked at the business ahead. It was a small, side road leading to one of the bigger, A-roads, one we had used everyday to get in and out of the City, dropping off and picking up bags of shopping and various siblings. It was always full.

Yet, Somehow it seemed busier that day

I watched her when we were at home, placing bags on the table, replenishing the butter dish and filling up the egg stand. Methodically, the things we always seemed to have were replaced, re-stocked.

More bread in the bread bin,

Olive oil poured into it’s bottle

The shakers replaced with salt and pepper,

whilst the water on the stove bubbles and spills over.

She was feeding me thick strands of pasta covered in butter, cheese and black pepper, but never letting herself taste them, the shiny white shoe strings. I noticed the placemat in front of her at the table was empty, always empty. She had already given everything to the re-stocked kitchen.

It had not always been that way.

I remember wondering if that was what it was, if that was the key to the fleeting moment of happiness that last, hot summer. If that was how I could learn the patterns and songs to her freedom. If restriction was part of a wider balance of pleasure.

I pondered, as my father never came home that evening, and we sat together watching strange cartoons and reality Television, me being fed ice cream and marmite on toast. She was laughing. So I laughed with her as the salty, yeasty buttery bread filled my mouth, mirroring her behaviour in an effort to keep the balance.

until I ask her

“When is he coming home? When is papa coming back?”

And her hand retracts from stroking my dark brown hair

*

A few days after, him, staring at my phone, scrolling through different lives, pretending to be okay with the silence.

It’s Saturday, the house is empty as others live their weekends away from mine. I scroll and wait. Scroll, wait

Staring out into the road I call mine, the small front garden leading onto it that belongs to all 42 of us in the building, yet somehow remains unkempt and overgrown, as if the commune of hands that could keep it clean are busy, relying on someone else’s hands instead.

I notice the stagnation, parked cars slot between the white lines, bikes chained to the street lamps preventing other people walking anywhere other than to their door. Everything is still, out there.

I stare at my phone again waiting

Craving something, but not quite knowing what. Wanting movement, but not quite known where.

Wanting him. But not quite knowing why.

Needing her to tell me why but knowing it was an answer I might never get.

My finger hovers over her name, the familiarity of her voice playing over in my head, the warmth of that day on the open road, that summer so long ago still lingering. Her smell, engulfing me.

But I refrain, things are different now.

And then my phone pings, and I forget about her, about the things sandwiched inbetweeen then and now, the things I want to change but which stay the same.

‘Do you want

*

To go for a walk?’ the small words under his name, the hope of something new.

I remember a time in the woods, the uncouth woodland road we used to walk down. Me and her.

Stomping three feet behind as she walked ahead, occasionally glancing back. Pretending not to notice my anger, my fragility, my restriction I had inherited from her.

The road ahead was prickly, winding between thorns and overgrown trees, we took different paths to reach the same, fleeting opening in the branches, but never stayed. I wanted to say so much, but I had kept silent. I wanted to ask why

Why did she let it happen, why did she stay?

Watching as each day she had become more

And more stitched into the fabric of the house, and I had become more and more unstitched.

I wanted to ask why she never

asked me about the hard things, always side-stepping the harsh reality, hoping that ignoring my crumbling body would make things better

But she never did. Ask. She just kept walking

Asking ‘what do you think of the weather?’ Instead

*

I am watching the road outside my house, about to leave, about to meet you, in the crisp, morning sun.

Cars roll in and out of the parking spaces, as personal and rented bikes ring their bells, moving through, around. in and out. The small bit of grass has been freshly mown. Snowdrops poke their heads out, their green daffodil counterparts waiting in the sidelines to emerge. There is movement, outside.

We are walking together. Side by side but not quite touching. Floating in and out of conversations and into spaces of the past neither of us knew existed.

There is a man, selling perfume on the side of the street, we stop to smell samples, laughing at the ones we hate, spraying the ones we both like. I twirl as you spay, before I pick up one of the bottles, it’s labeled in a thick pen I can’t read, you make me laugh as I unscrew the lid.

Before I’m hit with her smell, the one I thought belonged to her, now lost into the ether of the air around us as I spray, And spay. and let go.

Before we go back to the house, the one that is not quite ours but also not just yours anymore.

*

I go home, a few days. To see her again, her body feels fragile, small, skeletal, as we embrace on the train station platform. Her once familiar smell hijacked by the bottle I now know is owned by so many others. .

The car smells strange, one those generic smelling tablets hangs from the mirror, a smiling sun which only makes me feel car sick. I open the window, the fresh air lengthening the growing distance between us. Her and I.

My home, this house, feels smaller, somehow, as she chops and I cook we, the radio plays the Fleetwood Mac song, and I hum along. Mindlessly stirring the vegetables and sprinkling with salt.

‘What song is this, what song are you singing?’ she asks, looking at me for the first time since I arrived.

‘How do you know it?’ I smile,

‘I guess I just do’

*

I tell you about it, that weekend at home, as we walk again, our fingers finding each other, nervously at first. Twisting and turning down long foot paths, letting our feet find their way, conversation growing new branches, sustaining sweet fruits as we reach the road leading out of the park.

The tarmac spreads out, no cars, no one else getting in the way.

As I turn to look at you

And our feel fall in sync, wandering down the long, open road

in front of us.

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A note from the author:

It is hard to pin-point the exact moment this piece was created, unlike a lot of creatives I am yet to find a daily practice, and so I sort of just sat down one rainy afternoon in London, and wrote. I had recently been to Spain, and had seen a lot of art work inspired by the “mother”, I was particularly mesmerized by Joaquin Sorolla’s piece entitled “mother", linked below. 

I started to think about the different relationships, my own and others people’s, we have with a (our) mother, and how this relationships shifts as we grow. 

It is a shifting landscape that only becomes more tenuous as we become adults ourselves and cease being dependents. 

The things they do to protect us become annoying, and the way they care about what we do only makes us want distance. We forget they had lives before us, or that they too had mothers they have now left. In many ways, we hold a selfish view of our mothers, seeing them as entity that our entirely our own. They once had these lives probably not too dissimilar to our own, and I wanted to capture this shift in relationships we feel as we grow older. 

Where once we might rely on our mother-figure, we soon shift our reliance onto ourselves, and onto the person we end up falling in love with. Or even onto our friends, and I wanted to capture this silent change within the body of the piece. 

My stories are often explorations into the human condition. I like to distill relationships down and analyse how conversations might change someone, or how a single moment might alter the path we thought we might go down. Outside my own stories, I love reason Dystopian Fiction, and anything slightly Obscure. One of my favorite writers in Camilla Grudova. 

I am inspired by my studies in philosophy, as well as my university studies in English, and my work was selected the Anthology “here and now” published in 2022. 

I have a Substack linked here, where I post some short stories, and occasional thoughts. 

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Iona is a freelance journalist, based in London. Her pieces have been featured in magazines, newspapers and online for a number of different publications. Her work spans across several different topics, mainly investigating the link between conflict and culture.