Decay

It was a September morning, and the air was already beginning to taste of autumn. The smell always gave me butterflies in my stomach; it had done so since I was little. It was the thought of change. I was sitting in the kitchen with the door open. A group of leaves swirled around each other in the courtyard. One blew over the step and onto the kitchen lino where it sat lightly, as crisp as fresh salad. It was a curled butterfly. I reached down to touch it and it snapped and crumbled under my fingers.

That’s where it started.

It was cold that day, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t close the door, didn’t move from the wooden chair at the kitchen table, but sat, clutching my mug of tea. As the hours slid by that day, I reheated it several times in the microwave until it began to taste like porridge. It didn’t seem worth it to boil the kettle, as I never got past a few mouthfuls. I was transfixed.

The brown leaves danced around in circles as the wind whipped them up and then threw them down again. Some were long and thin; some were screwed up into little fists and others were still soft and willowy. They curled around each other like lovers.

Later on, as the day turned darker I turned and ran up the stairs to fetch the duvet and a pillow. I couldn’t think of doing anything else. I spent the night there, curled like an ear towards the open door. Each time I woke in the cold, I looked for new signs by the dull light of the stars, but there was nothing. I shivered as the breeze brushed over the duvet. It was worth it, though, to hear the scratch of the leaves as they dragged across the concrete outside.

It only took a few days until the neighbours noticed. Jane knocked on the door with her face twisted into a frown.

“Your back door’s been open for days,” she said, pointing with the cigarette in her hand.

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Even at night.”

“Yes. Look I’m busy,” I said looking over my shoulder into my dark, cold house. Jane really didn’t know anything about what I was trying to achieve. She wouldn’t have understood. She thought only of daytime TV. She spent most of the day in her dressing gown.

After Jane went, I decided that maybe I wasn’t being welcoming enough. I opened all the windows upstairs, as wide as they would go. I had to prop some of them open so they didn’t blow shut in the wind. It seemed that nature itself was joining in to keep us apart, which disappointed me.

The next thing that I noticed was the twigs and feathers that were being blown in upstairs. It made me happy to see them form in pale fringes underneath the windows.

Once, when I came upstairs, there was a pigeon there that had flown in to the bedroom. It was sitting on the curtain pole above the window, shuffling its weight along the bar. I cried.

I can’t remember how long it took until the others arrived. One night a stray cat came, it wound its body around my cold face. Mice came too; the sound of their rustles worked their way into my dreams. A fox came in to raid the contents of the bin. Since I hadn’t bothered to change it, its contents had rotted. This drew the animals; they came for the smell.

The open door brought with it rain and damp. It wasn’t long before a silky green algae started to grow by the back door. The paint had started to peel away on the walls upstairs where the wind and the wet came in to the bedrooms. The pigeon grew thin because he couldn’t find the way out. I took him a piece of stale bread, which he eyed suspiciously from his perch. He didn’t move when I was in the room, no matter how long I stood pinned to the wall.

I no longer used the front door; I drew the curtains closed so the people would leave me alone. I brought things in from the outside and spread them over the lounge. I bought apples and stones, things that I wanted to be part of my world. I had no time for speech because they didn’t trust that.

And it was only as I saw the pair of swallows find their way through the kitchen and into the lounge, to build a nest for their young that I thought I had managed it. I wanted to share it, for it to become theirs and as they swooped in with worms in their mouths, I knew that they had said yes in return.

Liz Pike lives in Guildford, Surrey with her husband and son. She juggles motherhood with writing short stories, fiction and poetry. She has previously worked as a bookseller and librarian and has recently finished her Masters in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths University, London. Cities, long train journeys and her husband’s songs inspire her.

Photo by bhav.bhav