access please is by boat only (fragment)

The silent fens saw day come and were sated. The night had been desperate and long and rich with woe and the relief of the sun was palpable, its tender fingers eased into the cracks of the landscapes with the surety of a proficient lover’s explorations beneath spent ragged sheets. The rich soaked grass, the clusters of wind-gnarled stumps, the staggered belching waterways that led like arteries to aged triumph, all were lost beneath the bodies.

The village could only be accessed by boat, a knackered rower left in dock at either side of the main riverway for the purpose, pooled water gathered beneath the rotten benches that flaked along the seat in great splinters, the oars coarse and worn and laid like downed weaponry along the floor of the vessel, with two large handbells left in wooden boxes on either bank to summon the villagers in such event that the boat was docked on the opposing bank (during better times two or even three vessels had adorned the banks but the times now were worse and the vessels now remnants, jutting skeletally from the water or upturned like dead whales, riddled with large holes many feet from water’s edge); arrivals were uncommon however, the last of the surrounding settlements still untouched by the paved roads, served by few amenities but those of the village itself. Two isolated tracks accessed the western quarter but the stony pocked surface and awkward topography was inaccessible to cars or motor vehicles and kept a primal isolation prevalent in the villages continued existence. The handful of residents who used or owned motorcars left them some miles away at the crest of these tracks, parked in circular ground where the road ended like the end of the world itself; unmarked by signage or warning, it only ceased, as though materials were exhausted, the tarmac severed in some erosive drop, snapped apart, the layers of construction visible in cross section between the rich weeds and grasses that accumulated at the end, like the final collision between two disparate times.