Cricket by the Sea by Neil James
Even now, the sea remembers how I taste. Glassy waves lap at my legs, the boy who let the ball slip through his fingers. The boy who disappointed his father. They whisper the same question as decades ago – why can’t you catch like the other boys?
I retreat from the ocean, feet sinking into the sand. The froth knows the taste of my toes from days when I wandered the shoreline collecting shells. A broken red bucket hung at my side while my parents read books by the beach huts. The tideline still holds the shape of my footprints, tracing and retracing the same lonely steps. Back and forth I walked, between the bay’s jawbone headlands, cockle and mussel shells clinking together like coins in a jar.
And the salt wind that whips in with evening’s chill – that remembers me too. It knows too well the boy who stood on the edge of another family’s cricket game, waiting for someone to break from their laughter and call him in.
One day, I swear to the sea, I’ll have children of my own, and I won’t give up on them like you gave up on me.
Neil James is a writer from Stoke-on-Trent, England, and the author of ‘Stoke and I:The Nineties’ (Pitch Publishing). His fiction has been published by Literally Stories, BrightFlash1000 and Wensum Literary Magazine. He lives at www.neiljameswriter.co.uk and can be found complaining about football on Twitter/X @NeilJamesWriter
Artwork courtesy of Caroline Grimshaw
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