George had once stood inside his aunt’s wardrobe for several hours whilst his parents pretended to look for him. He held his aunt’s tired dresses across his face and wept. The more he cried, the more the faded materials seemed to mock him as they let go the smell of her once more. He clung to them as he never had dared when she was alive. He really felt that if he listened granite hard to the spaces between each wet fold of lavender fragranced darkness, then she would speak to him again. He crushed his ears unforgivingly into her last new dress. He felt savage; mad enough to kill her, but he couldn’t because he had been told by careful voices that she was dead. And if she was dead then so were they, so was he – no one to play hide and seek with anymore, no one to feed him new words ever again. Never. Ever. Black and white pain. Rocks in his head. Iron teeth. George felt so awake, so alive to his future without her that he felt sick to the soul that his aunt had made for him out of her words. There is no ******narnia he repeated into a sleeve. No ******* narnia at all.
Then after a time the wardrobe opened and a grey man held out his arms to the small boy raging inside. It was all George could do not to spit.
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