France in the Heat

The sun warming my shoulders and knees, my hands shaded, gripping the hot roots of couch grass, I tug at the earth. The mountains stretch slowly off, I know- but green fields feel close and hugging, and my hands sting with heat and friction, and my knees are grazed.
The scene is set, we wait.
I stand and the sunlight throbs around me. The colours seem to hover and beat, throb to and fro as the beating of my heart pumps blood back up to my head. Myriad shades of green mist and yellow sunlit shards swirl around, slowly.
I wipe cool sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm, and wait for nothing, watching the flowerbed. Its circular edge is still in tact while my eyes scoop the outline to form its shape upon the back of my head. I stand there a while longer until a breeze comes across my damp back, and brings me here.
I leave piles of wounded, extracted plants where they are, and walk into a dark cool kitchen. There is no one for miles. It is black, and my eyes cannot quite adjust. The cold stone walls sink deeper still as I try to make out the room: A coffee pot; a tomato from the garden; lavender bunched like sticks, floating from the rafters with ribbon loops.
My feet feel their way across smooth stone, cool on my toes after spiny grass and dry earth. They pad, flatly, silently up sky blue wooden stairs and lead me to a bed. I lie flat on the multi-patterned quilt and wait for nothing to happen.
A mirror’s face is on the wardrobe which stands behind the door; old and oval and flecked, like a relic from a fairytale. It reflects my worn feet into the room. I sit up to see my face. I am glowing, wide eyed. Pretty. My skin is tanned and translucent, strings of wet blonde hair curl about my face.
I study the black centres of my eyes, the freckles on my forehead; and lie back down, feeling alienated. The clock ticks my closed eyelids.
…From behind an opening of glowing green foliage, a white chair, a glimpse of moving blond hair, bare chest, eyes blanked by sunglasses. My heart stops beating and my eyes stop ticking. Silence. I wake and gasp for air.
My heart starts up again as the ticking enters my ears and my eyes reclose. The white chair in the gap of foliage returns, boughs heavy, loaded with blurred green. But now I am sitting at it. Surrounded, framed; closed in with dappled green depths.
The phone again, and I ask impatiently ‘…hello? …hello?’
I can see my grandmother, sitting at the other end. Having said hello once and not being able to hear me on the line, she sits and waits, breathing.
‘Hello?’ I ask again, I know it’s her: I can see her. I give up, and sit and wait too, listening to the breathing. She is there and we don’t need to speak. The surrounding presence closes in and I sink deeply, heavily, with black-green closing in over my ears, my eyes. It is calm and softly muffling. My body evaporates.
I simultaneously rest serenely on a patterned quilt. An open window frames a curve of sunny field against a pale sky, letting in drifts of grass-drenched air. Beneath which I lie, lightly: Pink, white, blue, green; gold-burnished skin and cut knees.