A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

‘Don’t be.’

‘I’m sorry. Because of you … because the … I don’t want to …’

‘Don’t.’ She whispers this, so the world cannot listen to her, only him. ‘Be whatever you need to, but not sorry. Fuck that.’

‘I’ve never been so fucking furious. And so fucking happy.’ He breathes again. ‘That’s how I feel.’

And they sway their heads together, they nuzzle and smooth each touch and strong light comes intruding, comes screaming up from beneath the horizon and unfurls and it’s today and Meg and Jonathan rock against each other, they just rock and that is all there is for them at this moment — the knowledge that they are unsteady and together and unsteady and together — and new birdsong begins in skeins and bursts, while they taste salt and they believe they are saving each other, that two people are being saved, which is two more people saved than yesterday, and a handful of parakeets makes its first pass overhead — tsseuw, tsseuw, tsseuw — in those unasked-for colours that never were here before.

Then Meg lifts Jon’s right hand.

My hairy-knuckled, miswired animal hand.

S he kisses it as if it were spun sugar, or a model of his soul, and he nods and is single-minded.

Here it is.

Love.

Here it is.

AN ILL-KEMPT COUPLE are sitting on a hill above a well-known metropolis.

They are side by side and laughing.

They are side by side and crying.

They would rather be here and die of it than have to be anywhere else.

Here it is.