Cut Grass And Diesel (by Paul McCann)

What were they doing in the fucking sky? Thousands of cars... just floating. It seemed so natural, how it looked I mean. It looked so natural.

I knew that road well. The woods where we would hide, the green where we played World Cup and the hill where we fell off our pound-shop skateboards. It was just on the corner where we stood.It has changed with time but unlike everything else, this memory seems to have grown clearer.

I once read an article on the effects of growing old on a person’s vision. The article proposed that the flickering of Television imagery experienced by the elderly was due to the gradual decay of the cornea over a lifetime.

The cornea is in a very real sense the point where the images of the world around us are actualised. Those images remain momentarily on the cornea, as a frame in a film.

 

In the late 19^th century the eyes of murder victims were photographed in detail. The Detectives believed that in the future technology would exist to extract the final image witnessed, thus revealing the murderer's identity.But the images on the cornea fade away as transiently as the moments themselves.

Interestingly, the older more decayed cornea processes this transition faster and so in fact sees faster. The flickering experienced is due to the eyes being faster than the frame rate of the television.      

 

I digress; we stood on that corner facing the sky, my father’s hand resting on my shoulder and my hand resting in my mother’s.

We watched, we watched as did everyone else on the road, amongst the rotary sound of a nearby lawnmower, and the smell of cut grass and diesel.

My friend Denis cycled by... oblivious to what we witnessed. He glided down the hill on his bicycle and around the corner where we stood.

Between the instance of seeing my friend and before my gaze returned to the sky, I expected the cars to have gone, disappeared like some ethereal spectre but there they were lingering, softly drifting away above us.

 

We used to hang out in his dad's broken down old Lada. I remember one moment vividly. It was when hurricane Charlie arrived. We sat in the car for hours burning the dashboard with the cigarette lighter. Violent winds rattled the world around us as we focussed on the task at hand.

It was a discovery of great significance. You simply pressed it in, twenty seconds later it popped. You then removed it and examined the spiraling glowing wire. You could spit on it for effect.

The car's battery was dead. It wouldn't start, the radio, the lights, the Cobra car-alarm system none of it worked but the cigarette lighter worked just fine.

Maybe the concentric nature of the burns appealed to some deeply embedded prehistoric drive, drawing out a particular state of mind, a remnant of Pagan times. Or perhaps there was simply a satisfaction through inflicting ourselves on this machine.

On this occasion, when I saw the underside of the cars; I couldn’t help but think about the colouration of marine life. The grey -green of the fins and torso to provide camouflage in the murky water of a lake and the pale underbelly to mimics the colour of clouds.

On this particular day the car’s grimy metallic underbelly likewise  blended into the overcast sky... the clouds seemed nothing more than the billowing vapours these machines once exhausted.

I can still feel it, like a humming static wrapping itself around me.  just as when a hand is close to your face, though never quite making contact it can still be felt as a presence.