You will need to keep your shoes on. When she spilled the guts, and spoke accordingly. Her syntax flawed - her sentence cracked. Shards. When she opened up the hearts and stomachs of the bird she slaughtered. Right there. In the living room. With the vicar in. The fourth richest woman in the world. No body heard. 

In fields around the house ploughs had turned up flint arrowheads in their hundreds that year. A tree fell. When people walked the usual walk. It had all been said. But nothing had been made clear in the village. With the vicar in. 

Around that time. It was that time again when people had already picked all the sloes and blackberries. When only the worms were left from the apples again. And it was clear from the way that the earth smelled - if you would dare to stick your hand deep down below it and get the grit beneath your finger nails. 

Swill. The tea leaves. Someone goes to boil the kettle again. The biscuits are soft and no one has swept the vestry for months. And the warden hasn’t noticed - he doesn’t know what has happened. He doesn’t know what happens or will happen in the church that is his ward. 

At the school in the playground the children dig up a pile of earth and find stones with purpose. A football match ends when a sinkhole emerges and a child is lost for an afternoon until the fire brigade come. Apparently, in ‘The Dip’, the old bomb crater, the vicar’s daughter was chased away by a tramp. 

The old woman gives precise instructions. He burns wood for her in her room, he lights the kindling and burns bay and orange peel to please her. She demands the perfume she remembers from her youth and she looks at him disappointed time and again. She can’t get the thoughts out. She will again. 

In one larder all the eggs went bad and burst and smelt for weeks. At one farm a horse died of nothing. The biggest cabbage appeared at the fair. It all was too much to take in. It was impossible to fathom the drama of the happenings that autumn. 

The wood burned in the old lady’s fire place and she watched and smelled with great interest. She counted and whispered. When the vicar was there to visit she lead the prayer, but they didn’t know she did it when she said what she had to. They could hardly hear the lethal shards that littered the carpet around her bed. 

She remembered the grandchildren spilling egg from fried egg sandwiches onto the carpet. Even when she told them to be careful. She stopped one from playing with the tarot he’d found. After that she sat with him after his younger brother had gone to bed - for a half hour - to play card games. 

One afternoon her husband comes in with a pear, he cuts away the rot and cuts it into segments for her. Only in the centre there is a perfect grey stone. And she nods at him wisely, he puts it all aside. She doesn’t mean what she says. They say.