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[mwaltonwrites]

Puffins

The morning was dazzling. The sun had had too much to drink and refused to be ignored.

The Child had on his very small red boots. His lemon hair soon became crisp with the cold and the salty sea air. As he pitter-pattered down the hill from his house, towards the seafront, he looked up at the sky and noticed how very blue it was. The Child thought that the seagulls made rather a horrible noise as they circled above. He wondered why they circled and asked his Mother, but she did not reply, and he thought that Mother seemed strange this morning.

The Child and his Mother rushed through the small town just as it awoke. Fishermen were the only others up at this hour. As they walked along the seafront, the fishermen stoically untangled their ropes and unloaded the day’s catch. The Child wondered why he and Mother were walking along the front this time rather than on the beach. He wanted to feel his boots sink into the pebbles and scour for shells and bright rocks, but something in the way Mother gripped his hand told him not to ask. Each day, the distant hills would watch as The Child and his Mother walked their familiar walk. The Child watched them back and sometimes he would wave and sometimes he would see sheep. A few times a year he would see Puffins and point them out to his Mother, and she would make a small, delighted noise and squeeze his hand with excitement and love, and they would detour to see the Puffins and take pictures.

The Child’s red boots and lemon hair shone on a morning like this, and as he walked next to his Mother it was clear that he was made of Life and she wasn’t. His Mother made him nervous as they scuttled across the street and towards his Father’s house where he would be staying for the weekend. The Child thought that she was moving in the same way that people move on his videos when he pressed the fast-forward button. He thought that usually Mother smiled, but today she did not smile. As he looked up at her, he thought that her face looked a bit like a stone or a piece of chalk. He would have asked why she was crying if she didn’t seem to be trying so hard to deny that she was at all.

It would be the last time they would see each other and after pressing the doorbell, The Child’s Mother squeezed him as if trying to transfer the final specs of life from her empty shell into his small, warm frame. She smelt The Child’s lemon hair and kissed his pastel cheeks. The Child waved goodbye as she left, thinking that he wished they could have seen a Puffin that morning, because he didn’t like that his Mother seemed so sad.