The Hill
Jordan Harrison-Twist

THE HILL HAD swallowed a dug but nobody were talking about it. A woman, too; she were walking it about teatime. She used twalk any dug around if you were busy or tired and she’d teach all tkids how to touch them proper without frittening them. Frank said she were tbest eighty year-owd woman dogwalker who’d teach tkids how to touch dugs proper without frittening them who lived on our entire street. 
But the hill had swallowed her, poor lass, and the dug. It were mizzling so tpass where dugs liked for tstand and shite and look oer all the houses and Ronnie’s yard what smelt a buzzed timber were treacherous — no break from tbluster. If you’re not careful you’ll lose your footing and there’s no deck any more for tfishermen so into tlodge wi’the frogs. But there were no body in the lodge, no dug. 
So the hill had swallowed her. Folk were saying that it should be cordoned after it all went to pot, when them lasses were meeting there in the blackberry bushes in summer. Burning all tbrush wi’their fags so tstreet stunk o peat smoke and me dad’s hands. Took four years for tfettle so the dragonflies come back. There int much natural that’s blue between the sky and tsea — ‘fact the sky and tsea don't look like they been round as long as tdragonflies anyroad.
Half-an-half in tLion that night and there were talk that she’d run off wi tbutcher because he’d gi’er a big hunk o brisket when no-one were looking. But a day later Jimmy tbutcher were back wi’a new grinder and still no sign o tlass and the dug. It were as natural as a widow’s wink that hill, built o’er an old coal mine after it were all done and dusted. But blackberries and oaks had taken to it and brought wi’um frogs and swans and dragonflies for tmake it their home. Nowt tha can do then, mines or nay. 
Owd gormless bugger’d probably wandered o’er ttake a look at where folk’d leave gills o mild for the lads who’d died when the pit fell in on um — near the shaft where we’d fetch coal up. That hill had swallowed a lot o’us.

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Jordan Harrison-Twist is a writer and editor based in Manchester, UK. His essays have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Double Negative, iiii Magazine, and Corridor8. He is the one-time winner of the Retreat West micro fiction competition, in which he has been variously shortlisted and long-listed; he has also been long-listed in the Reflex Press flash fiction competition. His words appear in No Contact magazine, and ‘Between the Lines’, an anthology published by Comma Press.

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