In a land far from everything, a quaint, quiet village sat on the furthest point from the sea, scattered among the lowly hills. In this far-from-sea village, stands a tall set of bricks on Tyrells End. Ivy cuddled its worn-out edges, and silver glass filled its holes. The front door, like one from a fairy tale castle with a moat around it, was a slick mahogany brown, equipped with a brass knob that seemed far too nautical for a place that’s furthest from the sea.
Through said door and to the right, then left and an immediate right again, up the stairs, down the hall, second door on the left, is where I laid my head every night. It’s where I yelled at the top of my lungs when I was frustrated, and the same place I hugged my best friend goodbye, and taught myself to play the guitar and write songs of love and sorrow. It’s where I poured my heart out in poem form, and told stories about the sister I never had. It’s the place where I tried creating my own reality TV show and failed laughing.
I was graced with a wonderland of colorful fields as far as my eyes could gaze through the large, rectangular, glass-filled hole. On the right, in the distance, tall, thick trees lined the creek and sipped on the slow rapids of Millennial Pond as it slithered along the national footpaths of the countryside. Stout ponies ground their clunky jaws on carrots a couple fields over. Pheasants soared and sank over the stretch of land, while dogs leapt to catch them.
The garden next door was so long the end was cut off from my vantage point. I could see their garden was flushed with vegetables on vines and freshly cut parsley to accommodate Sunday roast. The vegetation always looked juicy and ready to devour.
It was often that I thought of sneaking over our garden wall to indulge myself, but in the whole decade I dreamt of it, I never did.
Another cluster of trees hid a space in the center of all the elephant-like trunks. The village children told fables of what happened in that empty space. We believed there was an underground pub our parents snuck off to when we were asleep.
To this day, we believe that could very well have been the case, because not a single one of us decided to check before we left.
Outside, no public transport reached the village. No bus or train took people anywhere. There was no store, no post office, and no kiosk of any kind. They had a pool, however–which was drained about eleven months out of the year, and a cricket pitch that was filled on Sunday afternoons with a team to cheer for, and a glass of bubbly to celebrate with.
A pub, The Green Man, woke and slept across from the tall wayside church. The church and its army of crumbling graves and a sad gargoyle with beady eyes that is said to haunt the soul of the person who looked straight into them. At least that’s what I told the young ones on Guy Fawkes’ Night.
Guy Fawkes was a man who tried to blow up the Parliament building quite some years ago, and his being caught was a relief for the whole Kingdom. So much so, every year we celebrated his death with cheap firework displays and a replication ceremony of his death–a giant stuffed dummy strapped to an old chair atop the bonfire–and we danced the fire circle, along to the rhythm of the crackling burlap and cotton buds.
Drinks flowed like gushing rivers, bottles clinked, teenagers snooped around stealing leftover gin and tonics–getting drunk–on the grass, and out of sight. Theydecided who was too young to get “plastered,” which only meant it was supposedly hard to walk in a straight line, but it only ever lasted half a minute.
How cool we thought we were.
By Monday, we returned to our own stack of bricks to spend the rest of the week gazing out of our rectangular glass-filled holes facing the green and golden fields. Dreaming about the secret club, and picking the juiciest tomato from someone else’s garden. Life was much simpler back then. Back when the fall leaves drowned the Lanes and Ends of our quaint, quiet village–when adulthood was just a figment of our wildest imaginations.
Even now, years beyond the lowly hills, our dreams still linger down the creek, and in the pub, and through the trees, and past the church—crossing the ears and mouths of villagers then, now, and those to come.
Because no matter where one has been or where one will go, once you’re a villager, you will forever and always be a villager of the small, far-from-sea village that I once called home.
A year into being at SJSU, I enrolled in a non-fiction class. The prompt here was 'location, location, location'. My professor and her aide had not believed any of this to be true, and discouraged me from the time I submitted this assignment (at the beginning of my second-to-last semester) until now. (They had never heard of Guy Fawkes and thought I made him up.) Despite their...foolishness...I actually really adore this piece.
In the prior summer, I had visited my home of ten years in England. The new owners of my house were kind enough to let me into the house and look around at all the similarities and differences. When I reached my room, I looked out of the same windows and the view took me back in time. "Beyond My Glass-filled Hole" is my way of relaying the memories I rekindled that day.