Now everyone is writing two pieces! This forum is so demanding ;) Again, 500 on the nose. ------------------------------------------------------------ An Aerial Photograph of Home The wine tasted of oak and the autumn sun. Twin bubbles swayed and conjoined under the rim of my glass. I rolled a mouthful over my tongue. He still kept an excellent cellar. How was the journey? he asked. Long but comfortable. A blur mostly, I sighed. Im glad Im finally here. The familiarity of his face added to my feeling of belonging, more so because he hadnt aged a day in all the years that wed been apart. Lets leave the dishes and get comfortable, he said, leading the way. As I expected, pictures crowded the drawing room walls. I havent seen most of these, I said. Its been a long time, he replied. Then his eyes sparkled, I want to show you something. The latest one. He took my arm, led me into the darker part of the room. A lamp clicked on. Isnt it magnificent? On the wall was a triangular sprawl, like a cobweb across a corner, its filaments an accretion of macadam, the spaces stuck with block and tile. There was our hometown mapped out and framed but not, I saw, a map. This had all the dimensions of summer, the jewels and shadows of saturating sunlight. Home, as photographed from the sky. The detail is astonishing. The resolution its like being suspended in air. Its beautiful. My eyes flitted about the photograph, sprinted through the places I knew, a street a second. A strip of sky - the reflecting river - wandered across. Shadows of clouds, sailing higher yet than this vantage point, daubed the green geometry of the parks. And here, to the east, was the great grey circuit of the traffic interchange. Intersecting beneath it were the walkways wed skateboarded, wreathed in traffic fumes, following our echoed shouts through the tunnels. Look, he said, Mill Road. The railway bridge. I traced down from the splayed railway lines. There was the first place I ever lived. All those terraced houses, each with its portion of homes warmth, indistinguishable under long communal roofs. A few streets away, a small patch of tree-freckled green was crossed by two paths, connecting at a pale circle in the centre. There wasnt a park there, I wondered. The cemetery, he said, and with that word I fell, spiralling into the photograph. Here were the avenues I knew, the pavements and the crossings, caf, and grid mapped roads, spinning up through the tearing air toward me. My body falling, limbs raging against uprushing wind. Suddenly standing, one of a silent group inside a memory. Bare sky over headstones. All of us black draped, turning from where we had lowered him down. His girlfriend, unwed and widowed; my cold touch on her thin fingers. How are you? Terrible. Terrible. Id never left him behind before and was uncertain how to walk away. He touched my shoulder. Its where they laid you too, he said. You didnt see because you were on your way here.