Ian Seed

THE ACCUSED


The troubled look in her eyes, like a small child worrying, yet her hair is white. Our most private lives are run, whether we like it or not, by decisions taken in a boardroom on the other side of the Atlantic. Neither of us was ready at that point for a change, waking when it was already too late. The hiss of a flame passed from one house to another. We lay there as it got closer until nothing else existed. A world we had never dreamt of was reached by staying in the same place. Even if it was just a trick of the light, neither of us would take the other for granted in quite the same way again. As planes crowded the sky, I covered your body with mine. On the other side of the street was a cheering crowd, but it faded away after seconds, a jagged shadow the only moving thing in the silence that followed.