unforgiving limbs would suggest not. A sustained love that could bend and break and twist stiff limbs and sallow skin into that space in case someone stops them on the drive down. Or sees the body when they stop to fill up for petrol. A nylon farewell is just as good as a wood and what’s the difference anyway, with where they’re all going, where they will all end up? She did it. Like she put him to rest each night and kissed his forehead and squeezed him tight so the bed bugs wouldn’t bite; so she squeezed him tight into the rucksack. After they’d decided what they would do. After their boy had died. The ceremony and care speak for themselves. Surely. Just like the drive. A funeral procession of two, the practicalities of the drive as pressing as reaching that final moment of release. His limbs were folded, were bent and broken, just as a bottle of water was filled in case they got thirsty. Perhaps two. Because that’s what you do when you go for a drive. They carried the rucksack to the car, their fresh baby boy’s corpse curled up on dad’s back, just like when they went to the park - did he falter and did she catch him? Did they share a smile? In this absurd farce, the comedy and tragedy sickeningly intermingle, imbuing everything with a hard to swallow irony or underscoring the sick joke of it all. Is the cloying dance of life outside a reminder of all that they were giving up on, or of everything that deserved to be forgotten? However it happened, whether the sweet was red, whether they missed the junction, whether they bought a bottle of water… they reached the cliffs. Sweets finished, or melting in the glove box. The wind would have whipped their hair, pushed their tears to one side, and then a final embrace, lasting a moment or forever, united in action, love, emptiness, and despair. Did they throw the rucksack first, or hold it close? It’s no good. Either a running jump or letting go, slip sliding away off the land, down and down, back to the land. Smashed to pieces of rock, united, broken, beaten, defiant. Either way. It ended the same.
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