...

There was another place. It was a bit of grass and bushes by a river by a recycling centre in a city. It was where children played, scratching at the earth trying to get in. The white berries on one of the bushes were magic berries that could not be eaten, or you would become part of the bush and have to stay there forever. Staying there forever was the most horrifying thing the children could think of. They dreamed of going elsewhere. They dreamed of making elsewhere in the dark warm place just out of reach under the earth. They could never quite manage to do it.

In the river, by the patch of grass and bushes, there were microbes that spoke to each other. They had come from the waste of the pottery kilns in the city, which they hardly remembered because those kilns had closed a long time ago. In the city’s small museum, one of the children had seen a postcard labelled ‘monster soup’ showing a microscope slide teaming with strange small bodies with strange drawn-on faces. The child tried to imagine them, but the child could not imagine them.

Thus unimagined, the monsters in the soup wafted arms languidly at each other, trying to decide on something to talk about that would be interesting enough to justify the effort of talking. Unable to settle on anything, they drifted along making strange and pretty shapes too small to be seen with the naked eye.

On the bit of grass by the river, the children lay down on the un-opening earth to rest.