Route to Hever Station
art by Gregory Stump
by B. Anne Kalicki
HEAD SOUTH ON HEVER RD TOWARD UCKFIELD LN
0.3 mi
Hever Castle was resplendent – too much of what you expected. The crawling ivy, swans in the moat! The one thing you could have done without was the life-size replica of an adult Anne Boleyn. The castle was her childhood home, and you wanted to imagine her there as a child. Her appearance is your access point into her, after all. Getting there was easy enough, even in Britain’s historic heat wave. It was still morning. You followed that family of four and those two ladies in sun hats and found confidence in numbers. Though you have with you the map from the castle’s website with black, geometric shapes for buildings and dotted lines for paths, you still use Google Maps so you can pinpoint yourself. That one night you couldn’t sleep and scrolled your YouTube app, you ignited a fleeting obsession with historical figures or events you tend to get every so often. You watched “Anne Boleyn’s Re-constructed Face Revealed, with History.” That history, the way historians built her back to life – she became real to you, more real than a character.
TURN RIGHT TO STAY ON HEVER RD
0.2 mi
The catch for any historian is that her husband destroyed traces of Anne Boleyn after her execution, before he married someone else. Some portraits of her may be copies, recreations of originals. Some may not be her at all. Here is where you veer off the Google Maps route and go back the way you came, crossing the field of sheep. Again, skirting their droppings the whole way, yet this is what you decide. You rely on an angle you took through the field, and at this point, can see where you’ve been and where you’re going. In the castle gardens, the roses survived the heat. It’s one of the last weekends before school starts. Mothers scrolled on iPhones, one sipping a glass of red in an endless loop of a spell. Did they come here often? Can they figure out what’s really connecting them to others? It comes to each person in their own time.
TURN LEFT ONTO BROCAS RD
0.3 mi
You’re almost halfway across the field, near the middle. You, the blue dot, are drifting. Committing to your way southwest, the dot doesn’t follow. It loops around and skips northeast, choosing this moment to oppose you. You’re here again, like the middle of the night, just out of a series of dreams you can’t recall. You can no longer spot the gates around the field, so you travel northeast where you know the red markers are, leading the way. You could’ve found the station on your own, and now the visual map with the shapes and dotted lines means nothing without the perspective you lost. Don’t step on the resting sheep. They’re quiet; the only bleats now are distant, and you can’t tell where they come from. You almost trip over a sheep and get angry when your half-full gift shop bottle of water falls on droppings. You’re 40 and you need to call your parents. Your sister will mock you to the first person she sees when she hangs up. Your friends are not day-to-day friends.
TURN LEFT
0.1 mi
The blue dot drifts again, and the fence comes into sight. You didn’t get enough photos. You missed your chance to eat something hearty, like a sandwich. The Anne Boleyn video told you much of the information about her appearance came from those who opposed her. Things somewhere, somehow spun out of control. She learned French at a young age. You’re terrible at French. She was more accomplished than most people you know. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. The fence leads to a construction site, nail guns popping. You go unnoticed as you sneak by the tarp and find the road.
TURN RIGHT
RESTRICTED USAGE ROAD
495 ft
Hever Station is up ahead, and you’re skirting the brambles. The cars still fast on the narrow road, all traces of Anne Boleyn are gone. For some, if they never see a thing, it never becomes real. They may want to remain in the past, caught in puzzles of devotion. You decided to visit, knowing about the heat wave. You wanted this historic place, unfamiliar with modern people demystifying the tapestries and mellow wood – spirits comforted, vigor contained.
HEVER (HEV)
EDENBRIDGE TN8 7ER, UNITED KINGDOM
B. Anne Kalicki’s writing has appeared in NOON, Meridian, and The Adroit Journal, among other publications.
Gregory Stump, an emeritus professor of linguistics, is a visual artist who currently works in digital media. His drawings juxtapose the familiar with the unfamiliar in enigmatic ways, often involving asemic representations of written language in a variety of contexts. He has provided cover art for books issued by Cambridge University Press, State Street Press, Finishing Line Press, Main Street Rag Publishers, and Pine Row Press; his art has also appeared in the journals Kansas City Voices, Glacial Hills Review, The MacGuffin, and Folio Literary Journal as well as in various juried exhibitions. He resides in Lenexa, Kansas. (See www.stumpdrawings.com for a partial portfolio of his digital work.)
