Pulling Up The Stakes

What chances sleep from danger when all around, tumult? Blasting their way in, cutting through steel doors and sliding, vaporous, beneath faulty air tight seals. There is no escaping them, these monsters.

Except when you zip up your sleeping bag. All the way up.

Thick socks are ballast and a hat to warm your head. Protection from a torch, boxes of matches, one of those air gun things. Shadowed shapes, on the screens of the tent walls, may distract the kids from the terror outside.

Through grass the creeping of dust. Above dust the low-lying mist, the unbreathable air. Needless to say, the family bundle, out through the flaps, is enough to alert them to your previously guessed at -

- presence.

They are mostly blobs. Splats of gore and pus. Spikes of black, scaly. They hiss, wail, sigh. Terrifying screams that, of course, keep you up all night. From his farmhouse door the farmer motions to his wife the glow of your tent. His lit pipe, a sway against the moon, also like your tent. The farmer’s wife, her touching lament:

I am at last a part of this that surrounds me, the blank, the heather, the escape of space. Oh brrr, how I fought against it once and how I now laugh to think of it, especially how I embrace it now. Please help me. We have butter churns and cobs that rotate. We build wooden things and feathered things to sell by the roadside. Please take me away. My husband, him and his tractor, you would not separate them. We milk hearty and all day long. Sometimes the weather, sometimes the moon. That glow from the tent. I could crawl inside and they could take me. I once wished hard for children.

Outside the flap. There, beyond the aluminium pans, past the low hiss of the gas, above the frame of the windbreaker, certain figures – spiny, scaly, black – dancing on the line of the horizon. It is too dark and too far to see. Are they moving toward us or are they moving away from us? If the former, then what were those noises we witnessed before?

Those noises we heard before?

Dances are what they do in the countryside. Music to the movement of the trees. Beware you and all of your tents.