This Home by Nadia Leigh-Hewitson

This Home is disproportionately small.

It has thin rooms with weighted air,

coddled by nine-century-thick walls,

anchored deep and low in the hillside.

Overstretched,

pressure-bent joints press hard against masonry pressure points,

branching from room to room.

And this Home is doing all it can to slow the slow collapsing in.

Thin rooms grow thinner still with lack of soulful nutrients.

The furnishings are weighed down with personal history not my own

decaying and gritty with age.

Each room a bursting shoebox

of photographs of people I used to recognise.

The houseplants cry plaintively for fresh air,

but outside Winter mumbles on.

And no logs crackle in shared hearths.

No strangers share the warmth of anonymity,

to wait out the weather or just the evening.

They are all at Home.

Poorly painted flaking gloss walls smell acrid with moisture.

A kaleidoscope pattern of mould through paint

makes a sullen, ugly gesture.

The window was smashed in a previous life,

and cheap blue mosaic stands sentinel over broken glass.

I can feel the muttered conversation between the hill and this Home.

And I want to stand barefoot and rooted in the mud and loam.

But instead,

I blanche myself by the red glow of the clicking storage heater.

And I’m reminded of double-length days passed.

Heat-drunk and blue-sky-blind,

slipping unselfconsciously into sleep on sun-bleached grass.

Quickly the summer swell falls away

to the smell of crisping dust on the heater.

This Home offers no comfort.

What should be burrow is enclosure.

Words by Nadia Leigh-Hewitson

Images by Liz Tollemache

Edited by Emily Gough

@FalWriting on Instagram