Summer

What begins as a gentle afternoon’s chit-chat between a boy and his grandma spirals sultrily into a midsummer night of desire, desperation and through-the-looking-glass darkness.  Drowsily drugged and relentlessly lured by the strange power of the maze that beckons from the centre of the park, the wanderers under the heat-hazed moon stagger towards a devastating end, never knowing quite what causes their sometimes terrifying actions.

It’s the maze.  The maze makes me remember.  When my grandson was little I used to bring him here to play in it.  He did love running around in it…!  I used to sit just here and I could see him running to and fro.  Sometimes I would lose sight of him.  It’s such a big maze!  But I never worried because there’s only one way out.  For years the bushes were small and I only had to stand up to see him running around there in the distance.  It’s ever such a big maze!  

Day by day the bushes grew so much that they had to cut bits off the top…  They grew day by day, as if by magic.  That was when I started getting scared that he’d get lost, he’d lose his way.  I got obsessed with the idea that he’d disappear, that the labyrinth would swallow him up, and then we stopped coming here.  I suppose now he’s older he goes in there and does whatever takes his fancy, but I’m not scared any more, he’s ever such a clever boy.  The cleverest.  

I’ve been told that it’s turned into a dangerous place where undesirable people wander about doing undesirable things.  They say that’s why they want to cut it down and turn in into a boating lake.  Even so, I’d prefer a dangerous maze that reminds me of things to a boating lake full of little boats and sickly pairs of sweethearts rowing around spooning.  

It’s not the labyrinth that gets men lost; it’s men that lose themselves in the labyrinth, isn’t it.

Summer is part of the Four Seasons tetralogy, along with Autumn, Winter and Springtime.

Contact me for more details. 

Back to translations.