START AGAIN
When UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson announces the nation will enter a 2nd lockdown, due to a sharp rise in cases almost everywhere, Mick takes little Alfie out for a walk in his pram. It is dark, wet and misery sags in the air above endless rows of houses. Soon the vibrant colours of the Autumn leaves will be dead along with high numbers of people, if we don't act now. That’s the official line.
It’s been almost 9 months since they called the 1st lockdown in an effort to control the global COVID-19 pandemic. The mood has changed. The head of every adult in the country is swollen, about to give birth to a squirming, screaming, creamy bag of bones.
Mick's socks are pissed through inside 5-minutes and the occasional child and parent scurry past houses they cannot visit this year, halloween costumes plastered to their skin.
No sweets, no pocket change.
The rain comes down so heavy now that they dare not even lift their ghoulishly masked heads to look for the pictures of pumpkins some homes have printed off and stuck up in their windows for the little ones to count.
How depressing, thinks Mick.
His pork-fat face winches up a couple of millimetres in the closest thing he has to a smile. Through the small slit between folds of greasy skin, he cackles noxious laughter at the collapsed pumpkin heads strewn along the street. One of them is cleverly designed to vomit its own seeds. Its next-door neighbour, just a torn hole in an orange sphere has gone mouldy and buckled in on itself; somehow, all the more sinister than any face design.
Mick’s wife recently warned him that if he did not sort his stinking attitude out, she would leave.
On the last stretch of road before returning home, the cold, rain-soaked shirt feels agonisingly uncomfortable against his skin. He arches his back and rolls his head on his neck in an effort to shake it loose and it is then that he sees the thick clump of dog shit whirring round and round on the back-left pram wheel. He snarls and swears at whoever left it under the fallen amber leaves, then drives the pram off the kerb so he can run it through a deep gutter puddle where the drain overflows; blocked with clumps of leaves, plastic bottles and sweet wrappers. Back and forth, over and over, with increasing defiance he drives the pram through the brown slush, but the mess will not come off.
The smear will not go.
Mick begins to shake and gnash his teeth.
Little Alfie starts to cry and kick at his dripping rain cover.
Mick orders the child to shut his mouth but Alfie gets louder.
The pumpkins wake up, one by one, all the way up the street and turn to watch his breakdown with burning orange triangular eyes. They are all alive with sadistic grins, feasting on this lost soul trying to break out of its fleshy cell, which rams the pram against the kerb, screaming at the unmoving metaphor for his life in 2020.
In a hell-fire, tuneless chorus the pumpkins scream, “STAY AT HOME. PROTECT THE NHS. SAVE LIVES.”