You’ll come one day, slip back into my life when I’m not expecting you, busy with other things, baking a fruit cake, planting potatoes, building my life from inside, brick by brick, keeping the hostile world outside, fasten the door, stop remembering how it was that day, how the circus arrived in town, turned our lives upside down, how you ran off to be a clown. “As if,” Dad said, “He’s a clown already.” How mother wept, waited, cleaned your room, made your bed week after week, until arthritis crippled her hands, stopped her holding the sheets. “You must do it now,” she said. “He’ll come home one day.” I couldn’t tell you when they died, within a week of each other, Dad missing Mum so much he just gave up. Ten years. No call. No message. Nothing.
I hear the circus is coming back, buy a ticket, hope it’s the same circus, that you’ll be there, ten years older, that I’ll recognise you in your costume. Huge red shoes bow tie, but you weren’t there, not so far as I can see. You don’t come by the house. The day they strike the big top, I give up, open the gin. Find I’m talking to you.
Keep writing 