'

Issue #91

Spring 2025

Mausoleum and Sculpture

by Simon Collings

Mausoleum

After mum died, dad bought us a sheep which we called Mum in her memory. We had a sizeable lawn and Mum saved dad from having to mow the grass. The sheep was supposed to comfort us children but it was dad who spent hours talking to her. She was three years old when we got her, now she's eight, nearly nine, which is old for a sheep. She's become vicious with age and you have to watch out for her head butts. Sheep only live ten to twelve years, so she's not likely to be around for much longer. We're worried about how dad's going to cope. He says when she dies we'll bury her in the garden. He wants to build a mausoleum, nothing like the simple gravestone we put up after we buried our mother's ashes. He's made several sketches, a fleece cascading down the front and a pair of horns at the base. He plans to put it on the other side of the pond where we'll be able to see it clearly from the house. I wonder how our mother would have felt about this. ‘Maybe we could move mum's ashes here, once it's built,' suggests my sister. Dad's out on the lawn now, showing the sheep the style of lettering he's chosen for her epitaph.

***

Sculpture

As they approached the roundabout they saw that in the middle stood a sculpture of a tree, a flock of sheep in its branches. ‘Oh my god, it's like the tree with the sheep in your poem,' Louise said. ‘Let's stop and take a picture.' Harriet found a place to pull over and they walked back to the roundabout. Three steel girders rose as one out of the concrete base, before branching away from each other. The sheep, also of steel, stood nose to tail along the curving boughs. Harriet took photos with her phone from the roadside. ‘This is so uncanny. A kind of civic sculpture version of my tree.' ‘It looks like there's a plaque,' Louise observed, and they crossed the road to read it. ‘This sculpture appeared overnight on 21/22 June 2024. The town council wishes to keep it and would like to know who the artist is.' There was a number to call. ‘That's pretty weird,' Louise said. ‘How could it have got there?' ‘I don't know. But the evening of 21 June, I remember this because it's the solstice, we walked up to the long barrow on the Downs and that's when the idea for the poem came to me.'

Author Bio

frame


Simon Collings lives in Oxford, UK. His poetry, short fiction, translations, reviews and essays have appeared in a wide range of magazines including Stride, Fortnightly Review, The Cafe Irreal, Litter, International Times, Junction Box, The Long Poem Magazine, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mercurious and Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. A collection of his prose poems and short fiction, Why are you here?, was published by The Fortnightly Review in November 2020. His fourth chapbook, Blue Eyes, was issued by zimZalla in spring 2024. He is a contributing editor at The Fortnightly Review. His fiction has appeared several times previously in The Cafe Irreal, most recently in our Spring 2023 issue. More information at: https://simoncollings.wordpress.com/