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I stand leaning on the white plastic of the door-frame looking toward the fields, listening, and it’s like time-travel, zhoom, back fourteen years to the park, where these two lads are mouthing off and the smaller one walks away wiping his eyes with his sleeve saying, I’m getting a baseball bat. The fatter one follows with a whole crowd on his back – don’t stand for that Kane, got some right lip on him that lad – and once the smaller one disappears inside Kane finds the courage to run up and start beating on his door, like he’ll do something more than in any other fight between two scruffy little shits on our one-way, council-estate street. But then the small one comes back out with something in his hands and someone behind me says that’s a kendo stick as the two of them circle in the space between the terraced houses and concrete platforms where trees used to grow, and everyone’s shouting do it or fight or get him Kane or fucking do him, then Kane’s charging and the sound, thwack, like punishment, wood meeting temple, is followed by a second sound, his cry as his eyes close and legs go limp, like the sound I’m hearing now, foxes screaming in the near-dark of a cool spring evening, when he spins and hits the ground.
Craig Bates
Craig joined Litro in August 2013. He is editor of More Said Than Done, a limited-print literary zine. Originally from Derbyshire, he studied for an MSc in Creative Writing at The University of Edinburgh.
