Autumn - Hardcover

ALI SMITH is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, and Public library and other stories. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize. The author lives in Cambridge.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.
Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature. So an old old man washes up on a shore. He looks like a punctured football with its stitching split, the leather kind that people kicked a hundred years ago. The  sea’s been rough. It has taken the shirt off his back; naked as the day I was born are the words in the head he moves on its neck, but it hurts to. So try not to move the head. What’s this in his mouth, grit? it’s sand, it’s under his tongue, he can feel it, he can hear it grinding when his teeth move against each other, singing its sand-song: I’m ground so small, but in the end I’m all, I’m softer if I’m underneath you when you fall, in sun I glitter, wind heaps me over litter, put a message in a bottle, throw the bottle in the sea, the bottle’s made of me, I’m the hardest grain to harvest to harvest the words for the song trickle away. He is tired. The sand in his mouth and his eyes is the last of the grains in the neck of the sandglass.
     Daniel Gluck, your luck’s run out at last.
     He prises open one stuck eye. But –
     Daniel sits up on the sand and the stones
     – is this it? really? this? is death?
     He shades his eyes. Very bright.
     Sunlit. Terribly cold, though.
     He is on a sandy stony strand, the wind distinctly harsh, the sun out, yes, but no heat off it. Naked, too. No wonder he’s cold. He looks down and sees that his body’s still the old body, the ruined knees.
     He’d imagined death would distil a person, strip the rotting rot away till everything was light as a cloud.
     Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went.
     If I’d known, Daniel thinks, I’d have made sure to go at twenty, twenty five.
     Only the good.
     Or perhaps (he thinks, one hand shielding his face so if anyone can see him no one will be offended by him picking out what’s in the lining of his nose, or giving it a look to see what it is – it’s sand, beautiful the detail, the different array of colours of even the pulverized world, then he rubs it away off his fingertips) this is my self distilled. If so then death’s a sorry disappointment.
     Thank you for having me, death. Please excuse me, must get back to it, life.
     He stands up. It doesn’t hurt, not so much, to. Now then.
     Home. Which way?
     He turns a half circle. Sea, shoreline, sand, stones. Tall grass, dunes. Flatland behind the dunes. Trees past the flatland, a line of woods, all the way back round to the sea again.
     The sea is strange and calm.