New Remarks celebrates writing as a valuable form of artistic practice and looks at how text often takes a central place both alongside, and as, an artist’s work.
Elephant Bone Bricks
by Ella Wright
10.38 am sees the moon rise. The pale sky hangs low and wide, dusted with smoke-white, vacant. Below lurks a black river held by the stillness of the wind. Heavy and slow the morning fades
9.26 am, Clydeside Sea Gargoyles, bowling clubs, Stacy Lou and the Beauty Spot, monkeys, pelicans and plastic grins from looming tenements squashed between bridges. Eric itches his armpit. He feels a distinct lack of luck today, unnerved by the distant ticking sound which has followed him out of his front door that morning but now seems to be hissing from a nearby electric fence.
He keeps walking: down and down and straight, somewhere near construction clatters and a car salesman loiters. Then left: under the wire under the fence under a lone, dejected billboard, through and into an empty lot.
9.59 am, calmed a little, he loosens his tie.
In the distance: gravel hills, shunned scaffolding intricately hung and dangling by thread, moveable homes, washing lines, oddly shaped bits of iron like bulls heads or stakes or monoculars on stands. Buddleia, nets, old nails between queues of bollards which Eric notices he can make look like burnt toast if he squints.
A cormorant flies as he climbs the pile of large concrete slabs, broken and scattered with grass and moss, like elephant bones.
Everything falls still. He closes his eyes and inhales: relief reaches through the breeze which brings the sea from sixteen miles west. With the city behind him, a scene begins to play.
