This cellar is cold-comfort concrete, shuttered windows to keep out. Keep out, what?, he wonders.
The splayed vision of a blackened TV carcass, playing out grainy loops. Batten down the hatches as the ball is launched in slo-mo from one end of the screen to the other. The waiting batsman pauses, winks to the child on the sofa and strokes away the ball. It trickles out from the screen, and as it spins slowly into this world it gains colour. Ox-blood red and oozing grassy stains. It's stitched, this ball.
The flaxen-haired boy gets to his feet. The room is silent, and he bends down to retrieve the bloodied sphere as it rolls toward him. The boy glances back to the stiffening paunch of the figure on the sofa. A bristle-moustached Captain. A silent capped cadaver. And behind him hums a black-lace pall-bearer, her winter veil draped across her face as it turns crevasses in frozen time. It brings to mind the ghost of Christmas past, a widow's band placed upon her finger.
Hearing the footsteps approach, he knows what must be done. A knife plunged deep into the fast solidifying tissue, cracking open his rib-cage like the sparking timbre of an iced-red fire. He lifts the beating heart, crimson-stitched ball and places into the cavity. Waiting for the beat.
He has no time to spare. The glacial cold envelops the cellar, calling to him to surrender. To be dragged deep into her chilly hold until all life drains, like the colour from the staccato television playing doom loops in the corner of the room. The boy scrabbles desperately at the shuttered window as the electric hum moves ever closer. Will he? WILL HE!!!
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