A private place

There’s a patch between the sky and sea, a floating magic carpet sort of place, a layer of dreams that hovers like morning mist but rainbow-coloured like a filter, photo-shopped and doctored, real only as the skim of petrol on puddles, the inside of an oyster shell, but I can taste it, touch it.

I’m a pearl, I say, and I’m going to curl in wreaths of indigo and violet by the shore where the tides slip in and out, singing like sirens, but I won’t listen.

My mother shouts there’s no such place, my father howls from the dark hole where they put him years ago, and my children tug at my hands, my clothes, crying that there is no sea and nothing shines with oyster shell-sheen anymore.

I don’t have to listen to their noise.

There’s a patch of coloured light where I lie motionless as a heron and I watch the world drifting into darkness.