Fleet ‘The path was small…’

She turned and walked back from the beach. Everyone had long since gone. The storm had passed, the skies were  clear once again, and the wind had settled into restful sighs across the silver birches. The trees were still and yet crooked, bent and twisted with their boughs and branches in repose after surviving another bout with the seasonal storms that raced up this battered coast.

The path was small, she had not taken the tourist one, the direct route, instead  she followed the sunken one, the one that meandered through the wheat fields, along the high hedges that edged the rippling folds and furrows of fields, copse and sky.

Cassie ran ahead, turning, pausing, sniffing, following an invisible pattern of smells and traces that bound her instincts to territories of the hidden world around her.

She could just see the church, the original one, the one that had been flooded, wrecked and mauled by the storm of 1776. Only the nave remained, now a chapel surrounded by tilted and ancient gravestones that stood like sentinels against all that time could offer. Belief in life beyond the tide.

She followed the sandy path, the rabbit clipped grass either side, the droppings marking the places where they danced in the late evening sun. She passed the silver birches, their leaves shimmering in myriads of silver shadows upon the old red bricked wall. It leaned to one side, roots and subsidence having dislodged bricks that had galled into the sandy loam.

The gate to the back of the churchyard was ajar. Broken and battered, it swung lightly upon ancient hinges, with soft sigh and whispers of the empty wind.

They were standing together over the double grave stone. He was leaning his head on her shoulder, she had her arm around his waist. He was  bent and traced his hands over the letters hidden behind centuries of weathering, moss and incalculable seasons of cycles of summer and winter.

Cassie whimpered and lay down not wanting to go closer.

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