SECRETS OF THE KITCHEN TABLE
What felt like all of a sudden, he found himself racing down a country lane in a smaller car than his usual. Although high hedges blocked his view across the fields on either side, he sensed he was driving home. A couple of spitfires buzzed overhead, and for a split second he felt a wave of terror, but thankfully remembered quite quickly, that that was all over now.
(Sometime later, the planes landed in a nearby school field to the ecstatic cheers of twenty-nine 9 year olds, four clapping and nodding teachers, and the faraway look of one little boy who hadn’t a clue what was going on).
Whizzing around a corner he saw the driveway and swung a left. The farmhouse sprang in to view. As he climbed out of the car his right hand caught a bramble that was taking over the hedge, and a small bead of blood formed on his little finger and dropped silently onto the car. He noticed then that the car was sort of torpedo shaped, and made of tightly woven wicker. As he watched his blood slip between the weaves, he frowned, trying to convince himself that the car must have always looked this way.
In the kitchen, the rest of the family were sat at the table. Father was talking rather quietly and anxiously about the future of the farm. There were heavy thuds from upstairs. Aside from Father, who continued to ramble on, they all looked up to the ceiling, following with their eyes the thuds from one side of the room to the other, down the wall to the stair door. The sound of the latch, and then grandma appeared, for the first time in three weeks, in her nightdress. She shuffled over to the head of the table and sat in the vacant chair there. Father stopped speaking.
"Ninety years I have sat at this table," she said, slowly lowering her head to place the left side of her face on the dark wood.
"The things I have seen and heard. All the secrets this table holds, all the things you will never know."
She stretched out her right hand across the table and stroked it gently back and forth, gazing off into the distance, looking through the wall to the stirring ocean outside.
The sound of waves.
Closing her eyes she continued,
"And now, as the tide turns, so do I."
(I dreamt this)
