Blackberry axioms

THE BLACKBERRY AXIOMS, WHICH CATHY IS LEARNING DURING AN AFTERNOON BY HERSELF

1. A spray with green and red lateral berries, tipped with ebony ripened fruit and tilted just so in cobweb light, is the Word made flesh for God exists in details.

2. Made into a painting it would be a Word that is spoken distinctly in the colours of the oils and swirls of Cathy's brush strokes. But it would be a nakedness which people could not admire unless directed how so to do.

3. Cathy is vulnerable with her dark blue intent short sighted eyes, criticism lacking generosity would hurt her to the quick of her being, like Martha's implied criticism in crying off from the blackberrying expedition. Or is this a refusal to see God in the details as Cathy does?

4. Martha, you cannot see the thousands of tiny spiders netting the blackberries and catching and suspending brittle bits of leaf. Cathy would have eagerly pointed them out, but now Cathy wonders, is it wrong, or boring, to admire the details as intently as she does?

5. For a moment, which is horrible, Cathy ceases to believe in her name. Is she really obsessive and domineering, is that why Martha wouldn't come?

6. When Martha was younger she and Cathy would discuss Keats and ideas about beauty, on the way to the chippy at night. Then they would ply their chips with salt and vinegar, and laugh about everything while they ate them. Now Martha has children and discusses them in tones that, a year or two ago, would have made her cringe. She can't or won't come out to the chippy, but Cathy has no children, so what does she know?

7. Cathy sees a pool of rainwater with metallic blue headlands and promontories of tarmac containing it. To Martha's children it would be a vast sea on which dynasties of grass-stem people sailed and fought in walnut shell boats. Martha, Cathy thinks unhappily, would call it a dirty puddle. How could she have been so mistaken in Martha?

8. Martha's children are mirrors showing everything she thinks, says and does brutally and critically. Recently, they have fallen silent, Cathy thinks they are too anguished to speak. As Cathy is. Cathy feels the poignance of pain that cannot be put right.

9. It's taking a risk to come out here alone. Sharp quivers shoot down Cathy's nerves, she is apprehensive of murder, of assault or rape, without Martha's company any horrible thing could happen. Cathy strains her ears for noises, forgetting who she is again.

10. Cathy sits on a drainage inspection cover, whose iron cannot become overgrown, and lights a cigarette. Grey and white speckled encrustations grow on it, ghosting the ember. A mosquito lands on a leaf, its antennae are feathered and Cathy wonders if it smells her as red blooded bait, and are the curious featherings heat sensitive as well? The jealous quiverings of her fear drop away, the familiar act of smoking recalls her name and person, she exhales, deciding she is Cathy Cathy Cathy Cathy, even though her close friendship with Martha is apparently over in these latter days.