Sweating palms cling gecko-like to isolating glass between your three-years polio-ridden self and me. Glassy eyes seek sister’s comfort from your lonely bed. You raise my teddy to contaminated air, a toast to futures yet shared. The parents enter, masked and gowned, restrained. Loving, helpless hope wills their child well.

Jackie Hales is a retired English teacher, an avid reader and writer of fiction and poetry, whose lifetime ambition was fulfilled with the publication of her début novel, “Shadows of Time”, by Willow River Press in 2022, with a second recently accepted for publication. She was co-author, with her sister Bonnie Meekums, of “Remnants of War”, a creative memoir of post-war childhood, and has had various pieces of flash or micro fiction published online, for example with Dear Damsels, Paragraph Planet and Roi Faineant. Over many years, she had individual poems published in anthologies, most notably in the Poetry Society’s “Symphonies of the Soul”. Hailing from south-east London, she lived for many years in Yorkshire but is now settled in Somerset, where she continues to draw inspiration while walking in the countryside or on the coast. She belongs to the Society of Authors and two writing groups and was delighted to be invited to support the Clevedon Literary Festival.