Dodge Rose

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Then where from here. When the train rolled over a canopied bridge the eyes of the boy in the opposite seat opened and closed to the broken sun but he dozed on. His head was rocked against a woollen sleeve. Eliza had stretched her legs out in the space beneath his feet and now she crossed them and pressed her thumbs to the bundle in her lap. The shoes above hers swung back and forth like pendulums staccato lights between the shadows that beat through the carriage from the bridge but for all his moving parts the boy remained oblivious and his brief eyes gave back nothing but the wrong end of his reveries. Eliza yawned and turned towards the window. Before wide green plots the spokes of the canopy blew past, then they were gone.

She looked down at the pair of ripped envelopes beneath her hands. In one was a letter from the family solicitor that said her aunt Dodge was dead. Eliza was coming to deal with the estate because her mother couldn’t. I wrote the other letter, to cut a long story short. After a week in the post it arrived a day later than the solicitor’s, and so the envelope itself with its return address was a surprise because she was expecting to travel to an empty flat. She unfolded the sheet of paper faded to azure once on the train. She had never met her aunt and her mother had not told her much about her, so she was used to considering her relations tolerably less than they may have been. Dear Max she wrote back, who are you and can I stay at the flat. The sleeper shuddered. It was a clear winter morning and the air that hissed through the window began to taste faintly of salt.

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