For several weeks J’s apartment has been filling overnight with leaves. Each morning she puts the dry, colourful heaps into paper sacks and carries them across the road to the park. The smell of autumn woods infiltrates her clothes and hair. Some nights the leaves come almost up to the level of the bed and in the park they are beginning to form a mound. There’s a gentle rustling in the room, as if the leaves are whispering together. If she doesn’t try too hard she can almost grasp their language, its meaning hovering just beyond the horizon of intelligibility.
After a week they show no sign of stopping so she calls the public health authority. They say they will send someone round, but no one comes. Then one morning she wakes to find she is covered by a light fall of leaves, their gentle susurrations like a strange music, a voiceless chorus. She notices yellow field maple and crimson spindle leaves on her pillow. In the deep drifts across the floor the leaves are darker, moist and compacted and she struggles to gather them up. The pile in the park is a small hillock.
She rests on a bench while the leaves murmur mysteriously to her. An elderly woman is feeding pigeons near the lake. The woman wears a green hat which matches her coat. Her shoes are scuffed and worn. She scatters the last of her bird food on the ground then kicks off her shoes and hobbles away across the grass, the discarded shoes skipping along behind. One by one the pigeons transform into heaps of leaves. J sets off after her, hoping the woman might explain the leaves, but she loses sight of her near the park gates.
In the public toilets crimson leaves have drifted in through the open door and lie scattered across the floor. J looks at herself in the mirror over the handbasins. Where her head and torso ought to be there is only the image of the wall opposite, with perhaps the suggestion of a translucent shape, the faintest shadow of a presence occupying the place of her body. The wall is tiled plain white, the cracked glaze reflecting the light of the LED strip over the mirror. Above the basins is a glass shelf on which rests a small plaster bust of herself partly covered with leaves.
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Simon Collings
Picture Nick Victor
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