The Upsidedown Man
Carmen Marcus
‘Dad’, I said, quiet like, but I couldn’t get air enough to shout through the hot mess that was my lungs. The other lads from the 4th were behind me shouting for their mums before the mustard gas sealed up their gullets. It was the upside down tree Dad, the one in Thorngate Cemetery that filled my head before the nothing. I had been sent with your bait box. The rain had brought the blossom down, pink-veined leaves browning quick speckling the black path and the big sprawling stones. Proud hearts that had tick tocked to the end of their time not stopped and rewound. You told me that the first gardeners had planted the Yew seed upside down and it grew leaves and branches down and roots up above the ground. You said there was another world under the black ho
