from The Leavetaking
(c) Suzanne Bosworth
Winner of the Readers Digest / Burmah Castrol Writing Competition 2000
and read by the writer on BBC Radio

  A honeyed sweetness hung in the air, with an undercurrent of flared sulphur, like burned matches. The room was cool, half lit by a shaded window and a small candle in a tin can in the corner of the room. A body lay on top of three tea chests pushed together.
  Marsha went in, closer, fantasies of horrible disfigurement dancing like devils in front of her eyes. She looked with the periphery of her vision for horror and ugliness and then, seeing none, finally let her gaze fall like a blessing on the young man's face.
  A length of dirty ragged sheeting, stained with blood, had been thrown across his body and only his head, throat and feet were showing. For a second he was someone only half remembered and then her eyes were blind for long minutes when she recognised the lines in his face and the shape of his mouth.
  Leon had stayed at the door of the room. He watched Marsha stroke the young man's face with the palm of her hand, lean down to kiss his forehead and hold it to her cheek.
  After some minutes she moved to the window, gazing out, and reached up to take off her hat. With careful fingers she slid one, two, then three hairpins from her greybrown hair which tumbled down past her shoulders. She shook it free.
  She had begun to move. To sway quite gently from side to side, turning in a circle twice, three times. Not a sound came from her as she moved slowly round and round, and round, circling the body in the centre of the room, moving her hips, her arms, stretching her neck like a dancer. She arched her back: a perfect curve, to sweep her arms down across, round and up into the air, stretch her wrists and hands and fingers taut and then supple again, describing her ancient, wordless grief in the air. Down and round and round she went, slowly, gracefully, with perfect control, the only sounds the whisper of cloth, the scrape and step of foot on dust and the in and out of her breath.
  Finally Marsha came to rest by the far wall, and leaned against its coolness. She slid to the floor and sat still, listening to the sound of her breathing.
  Sunlight eased around the rag draped across the window,  painting bars of bright light on the floor and the walls across the room. The brush strokes became longer, more angled, deeper in colour.
  She noticed the little things.The room, clean and swept. A handful of scarlet flowers with black centres, their heads hung over the sides of a white enamel saucepan without its handle on an upturned bucket, a plain wooden crucifix on the wall above it. A jumble of unseen things in cardboard boxes had been pushed into a corner and covered with sacking.
  How curious that everything should be so still. It must be late.
  Marsha stood up, listening. Outside the room the farmhouse was quiet. No one.
  She stepped out to the courtyard, shielding her eyes from the setting sun. Two chickens scratched in the dirty ground. Hot dry air nudged through the scrubby bushes and grass. Leon and the soldiers had gone. The guide was sitting in shade by the front nearside wheel, a thin line of smudged white wavered upwards from a cigarette held between his fingers.
  He turned to her as she walked closer and jerked his head back.
  'Here. They left this.'
  In the dust was the long wooden box lined with newspapers. A box to put her son in and carry him home.