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Long time no post

Now that I'm back on line, I intend to be much more disciplined with this. To that end I promise to post my latest poem tommorrow, but be warned it is very bleak.

For now you're going to have to be satisfied with then next bit of my novel. Yes I know it's a year since I posted the first paragrapghs.

Enjoy

He was found in the park. It was a beautiful day, and I had been walking the half-mile home from school with some friends. The first thing we noticed was the noise. The park was unusually loud for 3:30 on a Thursday. On a Friday, with people heading home early it may not have been noticeable, but a Thursday was usually quiet. We then noticed the extra people. You can’t have that much extra noise without extra people. They seemed to be pushing past us into the centre of the park, or moving more slowly away.

Well what was a group of five boys to do? We followed the crowd to see what the excitement was all about. It took us about a quarter mile out of our way, and we knew there’d be trouble when we got home, but something was happening and we wanted to know what.

Being small has its advantages in the crowd. We were able to push through and get right up to what was going on. The more people we pushed past the quieter the people became. We came to the yellow police tape, and a great dark shadow loomed over us. It was almost as if someone had turned of the sun.

My memory suggests it was a giant of a police officer who stopped us, but it was probably just the way he loomed over the small boys. He was probably a junior officer pushed to the side for crowd control, only too pleased to find someone who he could order around, but to my child eyes he was a giant.

“This is no place for boys” he rumbled. “Why don’t you just push off home, you don’t want to be seeing this”.

He grabbed a friend and me by the shoulders and frog-marched us to the edge of the crowd. Can you imagine any two things more likely to make young men more determined to find out what was going on? He had ensured that we were more curious than ever. Remember most of us had been playing in this park since we were knee high to a grasshopper, and it just so happened there were trees that we were used to climbing nearby.

It was the work of minutes to scramble up these trees, see over the crowd, over the police officer, and see what all the fuss was about. That image was burned onto my memory for the rest of my life.

He was curled up as if he was asleep. There was a small trace of blood from around the neck, and he’d been stripped to the waist. In the centre of his chest were carved two crosses. The police I overheard seemed to believe these had been carved after his death. They were much more interested in the small neck wound.

posted by Robbie Craig @ 2:14 PM