Albermarle Street

by Cecilia Maddison

The holy souls blow litter and lost dreams down Albemarle Street tonight. Sylvia slumbers in the fluorescent frame of a bus shelter, snug amongst her bin bag bundles, sound within her cast of grime.

Sister Claudine, dead for decades, billows by with her hairpin back. Good egg, she crows above the flyover’s roar, and Sylvia remembers clever and promising, words of dough that never rose, as if an oven door opened too soon.

There goes Freddy Watson, all merry eyes and peach-fuzz cheeks, you’re the only girl for me. Still seventeen, he spirals past on a bluster of empty words, his whistle weaving through the lamp posts.

How gently they carry the baby, those holy souls, parading by with a lullaby. Sylvia sighs, for even in sleep her empty arms ache. When he reaches out, his open hands sear stars in the dark. 

Here’s the lady from the Social, the one who filled the forms for the bedsit by the market. The one who never judged when clutter crept across the floor and swallowed up the bed. Small steps, she says, and she tiptoes over the pavement cracks as if to show her how.

Next up is Jackson, dear old friend, frozen through last spring. They say the frosted steps he slept upon glittered like a West End stage, yet no applause honoured his final breath. Mighty taters, he mutters, stumbling by with joints that creak like cellar doors.

It is the coldest hour, when breath hangs in clouds and clock time is a memory. Sylvia stirs, furrowing her forehead where her mother used to kiss. She’d shrug off the weight of this body and blow away in a windmill of limbs, but the holy souls tuck her hair behind her ears.
Not yet, they whisper. Not yet. 

About the Author

/p