Is a Half of Hedgehog better than No Hedgehog at All?

The rear half had been run over, leaving the head and thorax, and the front legs of the hedgehog shape. A scream from a cramped open jaw... The scream of the mute is more horrible than the silence after a flood, when even black swans float belly up. There was no hedgehog doctor to be found.

We tried to run over the hedgehog’s head with the front wheel… but with no success…and still the silent scream of half of a hedgehog. I got out and found a heavy piece of brick. I looked at the hedgehog and thought of death, and wondered if I would have those eyes when my own time came…

The day of sad songs by the railway bridge, and the clouds…

Thirty years ago transport trains passed here, open wagons loaded with silhouettes, with heads and shoulders cut out from the black paper of horror. And these people loved somebody, but the train returned empty every Sunday evening, with only a few hair grips and cinders on the wagon floor.

I knew in the first brief moments when I stood in the bedroom holding the knife, what would arise. But I could not live in the same world. I could not walk the same streets knowing what he had done to my mother, because from that there would be no escape until he breathed his last. There are no sisters of mercy. There is no God that can help me in these final moments. There is just darkness, and my own madness, and the face of mother looking at me from the hospital bed, not able to convey the slightest warmth from the body that brought me into existence.

I struck the blow as hard as I could, the steel tip of the dagger piercing the flesh. I felt his body jerk towards me, rebounding off the spring mattress. He bent double almost, his legs swung up together towards his chest – then suddenly they straightened out. I held my arm there whilst listening to him gurgling. I twisted the blade. Should I strike again? I leaned my whole weight onto the blade. I was inches from his face. In the pale light I could see his eyelids were open - could he have woken in that brief moment? Did he know before his death that it was me?

Blood began to seep along the blade of the dagger, looking black in the unreal light. I could not let go of the dagger. Along its blade, up my stiffened arm, across my smarting shoulder, a sensation of the utmost horror found its way, from the body, deep into my chest, to my thumping heart, the only thing that moved in all of that room. I knew then that he was dead.

I stumbled down stairs with blood over my hands and arms, and hastily ran cold water over them from the kitchen sink. Oh! Mother what have I done? I sat by the fireside shaking, watching the flames rise up the chimney back, licking the darkened coal. A swirl of smoke full of sparks, frothed up in the fireplace. The wind murmured in the silent room.

Outside in the backyard, I propped myself against the wall and breathed the cold air. Never as a winter sun spilled such light. The air is brilliant, sharp. Never have I taken such long breaths…

Through the clouds I see the ordered universe and the stars clicking into place. Deep in the valley a train shunting, a faint whistle. It moves off down the track, the night on fire.

I wandered along the silent street in the yellow fog. In the pale light of midnight, stood the derelict town, and a world that did not kill.

Where is everybody walking, in grey overcoats and brown hats with gloomy and tired faces down dirty steps to stand on litter-strewn platforms in the murky light? And when the train leaves, a stray wind scatters the pages of paper and litter swirls. All day and into the night, the grey over-coated, gloomy and tired brigades, march to and fro…searching.

All the aching muscles and the hunger in my belly were bad enough. The surrounding dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting here meditating and praying for the world… to have been born just to die, as we all are, was sufficient.

Something will come of it in the Milky ways of eternity stretching in front...silence is the golden mountain.