Simon Avery

“Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice’s mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes.”
― Simon Avery, The Teardrop Method

“Underhill saw Sorrowmouth stooped in the doorway with his bowl and thorn, mottled skin burnished gold in the lamp glow, beady eyes beseeching him. Underhill nodded and he dipped his head under the doorframe and into the room, towering over both Underhill and Mary. Mary continued, her words beginning to slur.
“I think, no, I know that if I didn’t have my beliefs, you know my absolute belief in, well, in angels, guardian angels, all around us, around me, I wouldn’t have gotten through these last few weeks.”
She glanced up, beyond where Sorrowmouth’s face hung like a stiff mask in the cloud of cigarette smoke, and saw something else entirely. She closed her eyes and smiled an entirely benign smile at the very notion of her personal angels. There were some crude and disappointingly prosaic paintings on the wall around the fire of them floating in the air, their wings outstretched, lit up with a golden glow that Underhill remembered like the tattered fragments of an ancient dream. Angels looking over babies in cradles. Angels hovering above the Earth, showering it with their benevolent light.
Sorrowmouth finally pricked at the woman’s grief with his thorn until it seemed to bleed furious moonlight. Chaotic swirls of black and silver and red convulsing in the air around them. He gathered it all into his upturned bowl and began to sup at it like an eager dog.”
― Simon Avery, Sorrowmouth

“Underhill had to fight with himself to remain in place. But something was already changing inside him. Something that had become familiar in the last year or so. He could feel the world subtly reordering itself as his father walked away; that strange feeling that he sometimes had and couldn’t explain, not even to himself, so certainly not to his mother or anyone else. But he couldn’t acknowledge it right now; he was afraid that if he didn’t know his way home, he might wander lost in unfamiliar neighbourhoods until the end of time; he might end up in a different country altogether. Soon Underhill couldn’t even hear his father’s footsteps but the panic subsided, and the world gradually began to settle around him, changing little by little, soft and gentle and pliant, like his mother’s embrace. He could hear the insect drone of a languid summer day and the silence of a Christmas Eve wrapped in snow. It tranquillised him. He looked up to find the buildings were all changed and very distant from him, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. They were lit up from within with an incandescent golden light. They were like cathedrals floating in a changed sky; all the dreamy colours of a place where words ran out and art took over.”
― Simon Avery, Sorrowmouth

“Sometimes you get distracted and you look away
from something that’s always been there. And by the time you look again, it’s become a memory.”
― Simon Avery, PoppyHarp