Far From The Madding Crowd

We ate on the floor always.

Not because we didn’t have a table – we did technically, though you couldn’t see it. It has vanished beneath topographical maps, broken lamps, a box of obsolete dental moulds, and a rotary phone that no longer rang. To clear it would have felt like a betrayal. As though the objects were meant to stay there until they remembered why they had gathered.

So we made space.

Pulled back one of the older rugs, just enough to expose the warped paraquet beneath. The in,aid starburst pattern at the centre had faded to almost suggestion. A compass rose with no true north.

The boys helped. One handed me the bowls, the other swept crumbs from a low ledge. I don’t remember which. It changed, depending on the light.

Dinner was stew. It was always stew. Lentils, garlic, something rootlike. I stirred it with the same spoon I’d used for twenty years. The enamel chipped, the handle a little bent. He said it made the food taste like memory. I told him not to be poetic at dinner.

We sat in a triangle, knees touching by chance or design.

Callum began talking – softly at first, then with more confidence. About something he’d read, or dreamt, or overheard from the flat itself. His voice was even, exact, unchildlike. HE described a bird that nested upside down in chimneys, singing only after dusk.

“He says we have one,” he added.

“Who?” I asked, though I already knew.

“My brother.”

Daniel – if that is what we called him then – did not speak. He stared into his bowl. His spoon moved, but never reached his mouth.

Callum reached out, touched his arm lightly. A reflex, too practiced to be spontaneous.

“He’s just listening today,” Callum said.

“To what.”

“The building,” he said, as if I should have known. “It remembers differently when its cold.”

There was no cold.

I watched them a while, trying to trace which movements belonged to which boy. Callum’s hands were clean. Too clean. Daniel’s were dusty, smudged with graphite from an earlier drawing I hadn’t seen him make.

I blinked. For a moment, I saw only one boy.

Then they separated again.

The stew cooled. The lantern flickered. The shadows stretched out behind them like long thoughts, unspoken but dense. I noticed then that Callum had begun humming – not tunelessly, but with structure, like a hymn I didnt know.

Daniel leaned into it, almost imperceptibly.

They weren’t brothers, not really.

They were two halves of something I hadn’t dared name. One built of silence, the other of form. One who watched, one who edited.

Afterward we played cards. A game none of us understood, but played ritualistically. You knew you were winning if no one corrected you. Callum smiled too much. Daniel didn’t smile at all.

At the end Callum gathered the cards, sorted them into suits, and tucked them back into the pouch without being asked.

I stood up and stretched.

He said, “Ill stay up with him tonight.”

I didnt argue. I never did.

As I walked toward the turret, I heard him say, “He’s afraid the reeds are looking in.”

“And are they?”

Callum didnt answer. But when I turned back to look, there was only Daniel, seated cross legged, arms around his knees, the light from the lantern bending around his shoulder.

8The rest of the room had gone very still.