Weeds

Up the sickly green hill the kid wandered... From the shallow bottom of the housing estate, greyish below him, a pit of old streets, lamp-posts, secret addicts in backyards. In the windblown, fresh morning he had ascended the hill, pale-faced. He was a large-skulled kid with a sorrowful expression on his face, long fingers, and was carrying a bunch of bright yellow daffodils, for no reason, nonchalantly. He seemed anaemic, insipid, frightened, yet oddly beautiful in his thinness. He walked gradually up the gravelly path, over the green smooth hump of the hill, round and swelling above the pitiful rain-smoky town. A picturesque panorama on Saturday morning in spring, just awaken from electronic bedrooms.

As he reaches the top of the hill, painful-eyed, he stops short as a hugely powerful, windy voice bellows out at him. "Ha, and are the Aliens after you?" The boy stops and he knows that the aliens are indeed after him, bug-eyed grey Aliens, strangely intelligent, full of sinister mirth, with theirs shining black eyes and in their polished saucers, always reaching for him with hollow fingers. Yet he responds simply, caressing his daffodils: "Yes, and the weeds too".

For he knows that in his wake, all along the length of the slow path he has ascended, have sprouted an undergrowth of pale-green weeds that even now rustle in the wind, that wave like living fronds of seaweed in the path. They follow him faithfully where he walks, sprout with the enthusiasm of a dog bounding behind him. They are lustrous, honest, hardy weeds, too sorrowful, too embedded in earth, to ever be plucked out.