Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     The car was a bad buy, everything wrong with it: brakes, steering, bodywork. He even discovered, from one of many mechanics, that it was not, strictly speaking, a single car at all; it was two halves, a back and a front, badly welded together at some time in its dubious history.

     Yet he was grateful for it; it was his means of escape. Without it he would never have been able to sort out his own flat, his chance of freedom. Desperately he had needed to move away from a marriage which had been held together so long by children and religious belief. In recent years the children (apart from the youngest daughter) had left home, and their own lives had begun to separate. He was grateful for his car, his means of escape.

     Blue smoke billowed from his exhaust and floors creaked ominously as he drove along, but it took more than that to disturb him.

     It took the flies.

     He could not remember exactly when the flies began to appear in his car. Large, harmless creatures buzzing lethargically around him as he drove.

     It was June, and hot.

     He would wind down the side window and gently usher them one by one into the air outside. Patiently wafting them, not wishing them any harm. Smiling uneasily at the myth of Beelzebub.

     It was when he arrived back to the heated upholstery after shopping one day that he realised the car was infested. Twenty or thirty huge creatures buzzed about the saloon, wanting an exit. He opened the doors and let them leave as he mused over the problem.

     The same afternoon he ripped out the car’s carpets, front and back. Sure enough there were dozens of small chrysalises littering the floor, some of them wispy and hollow, some of them still fleshy.

     He swept them all out, but the next day there were ten or twenty new creations to greet him in the morning heat. He assumed they had hatched from behind the dashboard or some other inaccessible place.

     Day after day be patiently wafted them out, careful always not to kill.

     Never had he intended harm.

     It was Sunday, and he had arranged to pick up his youngest daughter and take her to see his new flat. He wanted her to know where he lived. To know that things were O.K. That life went on. He warned her about the flies but strangely none appeared on that day.

     ‘Could be they don’t like the car,’ she said.

     He enjoyed the little joke. He assumed it was all over between him and the flies.

     The next day as he drove off six or seven woke up and began buzzing round. It was then that he became violent.

     The difficulty was in clearing them out whilst he was actually driving. There was a danger that he would go off-course, even crash. So he relented and killed a few. They were lethargic, so this was easy.

     At least the car was running fairly smoothly by this time, but the mess they made, sticking to the windows, and the sight of their blood, was ugly.

     It made him shudder.