AMPELUS IN THE GARDEN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Fiction by Belinda Brentwood

There was a noise of wings above; then another flew past him and on towards the spray on the brink of the horizon. Ampelus, the footballer and lover of Dionysus, sat upon a high cliff where the moss grew and looked out to sea. There must have been a touch of autumn in the air.

This was how he now spent his days.

Ampelus was lean, avid man who had played professional lower-league football in the UK and Greece until his ankle was badly injured in a car accident. Until last month, when he was laid off, he had worked at a public house along Oxford Road, with a boss who appreciated football and tolerated the time Ampelus spent dreamily gazing at the television screen on a Saturday afternoon. He still had enough money to feel secure and sometimes giddy with possibility.

All the long day he waited on the rock, watching the shadows shift. Then he’d light a cigarette and laugh, laugh at the setting sun and at the ebb of the water below. Then up he rose to walk back down the diamond path, committed to the darkness and gloom, all the way down to the little lights of the village and the pub. Remembering the wings he used to have.

A long time ago, before the televisions and before football, he used to run in the woods and dance to the beat of the satyr’s drum. It seemed that life was a great feast and that every wine flowed in abundance.

He had met him one fine morning in May. Eons ago. There had been a bacchanale. All night he had danced beneath the trees, and at dawn he lay beside a bale of hay, watching the light gather in the valley; then Dionysus stood over him, dew to his knees, and for a moment the sun was in his hair and Ampelus could not see his face. Whispery kisses. Dionysus had two great black stones polished smooth for eyes, and within them Ampelus could see a brazier.

Little windows flickered on as he approached the village. He knew that he lived in a dream. From here he could see the floodlights of the football stadium. There was a match on, and the drummer was beating out the rhythm. Ampelus scratched the part of his back where his wings once were. Nothing came to him now, except the belief that somehow things would work out. What else would he do with his time?

At the turn in the path he stopped to listen. A long cry rose from the ground and broke apart above the roofs. Down there, someone was running back towards the halfway line, his name still being called. The drum began again, and he went down towards it.