About ten yards ahead, she could see a boy. At least, it seemed like a boy. The sheen of heavy rain made it difficult to tell. He was turned to one side, dark hair cropped close to his rounded cheek. One eye was visible, one very bright eye. So bright it was luminous, like in a Greco painting. The rest of him was dulled, grey fingers clutching a blackened bow and arrow. He wasn’t moving. He was looking at something.

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Evie’s eyes shifted. The boy was standing by a patch of dead gorse, at the edge of what seemed like a sand dune. But the dune was the colour of pitch. And from it came the heavy smell of some bottomless black hole. Soundlessly, it soaked up the landing rain. It was a Goliath in front of a thin David. And though he stood with the dead flowers, he looked into it.  He was looking straight at the Tip.

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Evie followed his line of sight. Away to a spot on that horrible moonscape. It was wriggling, as if a monster, a Kraken had come to take the boy. Back to the deep and the dark and the wet, powdery stench. But then eyes surfaced, Greco eyes like the boy’s. And nostrils, two red rings barely visible beneath the black. A bone-tired animal snorting through the whispery cold. And mangled hair, clumped together as though doused with tar. It met the boy’s stare, eyeballs big and bulging. Struggling with jerky legs against the pull of the slurry.

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There was no doubt, none of them should be there. This airless monochrome place was for the lifeless only. But the boy dropped his bow, clammy fingers splayed like burnt sausages and eyes on the drowning horse. His first shoe touched the surface of the Tip. His second. And then he was running, sinking, slipping in that miring trap. With his back to her, Evie was no longer able to see his eyes. She screamed.

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Before writing this short, I spent a fair amount of time talking with my dad, who spent some of his childhood living by a coal mine in Wales. He spoke about the colliery’s community and quirks, like the strange image of winter snow mixing with coal dust.

Still, my favourite of his memories was the coal tip. As a child, he could sneak through a crawl-space in one of the garages to get to the tip. There, he would play and run about until covered in coal dust (much to the dismay of my grandma). However, he would avoid the tip when wet – recalling that it once sucked down a bulldozer, only to spit it back out later.

This story stuck with me. And when instructed to write a slow-motion moment of ten seconds for a summer course, a nightmarish snapshot of my dad’s coal tip sprung to mind. I can only hope it doesn’t make him anxious in retrospect.

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