Dear Sabrina – by Rebecca Baird

  After Sabrina Benaim My house is falling down. It is falling down, but  slowly. Slowly falling down is called,  in surveyor’s terms, ‘subsidence.’ ‘subside’ means to ‘ease off’,  ‘relent’, ‘become less intense.’ It is odd that in English we have words that  mean to ‘become less’ of something — oxymoron. My mother is  a hairdresser. She says she is adding definition to my fringe but all I see is more hair hitting the ground. Hitting  the ground is what dead things do. Dead things pile up in old cages in the back garden as my father shaves down wood to fix the gate. Fix the gate because every year, the gate scrapes the ground, because my house is falling down. Slowly.     My house is falling down but for now  all the cracks are on the inside. On the inside, my  mother can cover them with abstract art and photographs. Photographs make my mother happy because she likes looking at her family. Her family populate  all the photographs we have. We have none of my father’s family    — oxymoron. My little brother is a dog. A ‘dog’ sometimes  means a misogynistic man but my little brother is a German Shepherd although the kids in the village think he is a wolf. A wolf would howl at the moon, though, and we only ever get clouds or sunshine here. ‘sunshine here’ is what the cat mews  as she rolls in patches of light, leaves white spiny hairs on the red stair carpet. ‘red stair carpet’ sounds like  it should be a book about Marylin Monroe, I think. I think I lied before, because there are cracks on the outside of the house too, but we don’t talk about them.    We don’t talk about them but we notice the flowers growing in them. The flowers growing in them are pink and yellow and make the house look like Miss Honey’s house — the one from the book. The book  was the only book I kept in my grandparents’ house, which did not fall down but  which is not theirs anymore on account of they are both dead. They are both dead and in  the ground, but their house is still there, although the book     is in my house now. My house now has a birds nest in the space  between the gutter and the rafter. The gutter and the rafter are join -ed by a plank of wood and behind that plank is the extractor fan from the kitchen and so the space is always warm. The space is always warm but bird nests are not  always warm, and so the space and the bird mother over-incubated one of the eggs and the chick pecked out too soon. The chick pecked out too soon and the bigger birds poked their heads in the nest and stole it and dropped it and left it. My mother found it    laying below the nest, still half in its egg, smashed on the ground. Hitting the ground is what dead things do. Dead things are more horrifying when you almost step on them with your bare feet, says my mother. My mother tells me she put the chick in the food waste bin. The food waste bin sits under the nest, which is between the gutter and the rafter, and is probably the reason that the bigger birds were there anyway. The bigger birds are two doves which sit on our garden wall in the summer and in a sad tree in the winter, huddled together. Together, you can see why they are symbols of peace, so enduring     and loyal to one another. Yesterday it was a clammy, green day, and a third dove sat on the fence. The smaller of my garden’s pair marched along to meet it, and clamped its jaws  over the stranger’s beak in some crazy kiss — not oxymoron. It flung the new bird’s head  up and down, deranged polka dancing until the music stopped – music I was not privy to – and the smaller dove marched back to her husband and the new bird sat still. Still, I don’t know what it meant,  but I thought of the word ‘peacekeeper’ and how the black rings around the dove’s necks all look like little nooses.     Last night I lay in my teenage bed and grinned at all of the teenage memories in the teenage bed and the house  creaked. The house creaked but not the same way that everyone else’s house creaks. Everyone else’s house creaks because of plumbing or old floorboards or drunk-footed siblings sneaking in late or parents having very very quiet sex — oxymoron. But my house  creaked because it is falling down. This morning I looked for the new  crack but I haven’t found it yet. I haven’t found it yet but my mother will –  she always does — and she will sigh  and clutch a mug of warm tea. A mug of warm tea that she    will roll across her forehead, ironing out the worried creases. She will move her square jaw from side to side and flick her pinkie nail on her teeth and think about the crack in the house and how the house is falling down and how the ground is where dead things go. I will stand in the doorway and chatter so that when she takes the mug off her head and opens her eyes, she will have to look at me and not the crack. Looking at me seems to help her slow the cracks in her head. I am Polyfilla for this woman. This woman who is also my mother, whose house – which is falling down – is home  to a menagerie. I imagine the sky falling, a big ceramic plate slipped from my mother’s oven-gloved hand and smashing the house like a bowl in the dishwasher. I imagine the birds flying away, leaving behind their crushed eggs; the cat climbing to the rubble roof and finding the sunniest spot, little-brother dog howling at the moonless village sky and all the flowers pressed between bricks like they are book pages and me, Polyfilla, too small to keep this all together. Keep it together.    The ground is eating up this house, but I am told it will stand ‘long enough.’ Long enough that every year  my father shaves the gate to stop it scraping on the path and my mother cuts my hair and puts out bird feeders. This house is subsiding, but she owns the ground.        - Rebecca Baird is a Scottish poet and arts journalist based in Dundee. Her work has appeared in several small publications such as The Rally, Folklore Publishing’s 2020 Secret Chords anthology and The Voyage Out Publishing’s These Windows collection. Her self-published pieces can be found on her blog or on her Instagram. 'Dear Sabrina –' was shortlisted for the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry.  The 2021 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize closes 31 May. Enter here.