The Two Ladies.

A winter's morning so cold my minty-fresh mouth stings with every breath. Listerine's kiss (O! Cruel Mistress!) lingers on my lips. My appendages, red and raw, feel they might freeze up and fall off like Special K Red Berries only to rehydrate again in ice cold, milky puddles. This one's a strawberry! Mmm! This one's a ... toe? Morning thoughts like these swirl in my morning-fuddled head. Morning! There's a reason it sounds like mourning.

I shove my berry-red fingers (desiccated remnants of a long gone summer) into my pockets, folding them around miscellaneous objects, poky yet familiar. I breathe out (minty madness) and watch my breath steam away fleetingly. I am a dragon. I am a minty dragon. My scales would be bright sea-green like Listerine. My God, my breath is fresh.

My toes hurt.

There are lots of people bustling around me; I'm in the largest square in France and it's a Saturday. Their coats are ugly. Teenage boys eat pastries from brown paper bags with red, red fingers. Everyone's smoking, we're all dragons but I'm the best dragon.

So I'm walking to where I want to go and I'm thinking morning thoughts and looking at morning people and watching them go places too. Then I see something that makes the morning thoughts dissolve like sugar into tea.

Two ladies, arm in arm, walking along the pavement. Ugly coats, in the Auvergnat style. Short, middle-aged-woman haircuts. Nothing remarkable. But before them, two white sticks are swaying, in time. Side to side. Jittering over the uneven pavement, in time, like battered old metronomes. As though they had invisible little dogs on rigid white leashes. I'm staring. You shouldn't stare. But I remember they can't see me; eyes glazed over, not even looking at each other let alone me. Is it still wrong to stare? I felt so. But I couldn't stop; their swaying canes mesmerised me, the sound of them scraping the ground, their footsteps falling into time, their quiet conversation and their absorption in one another. They were the only ones in their world, I imagined. Nothing but each other, and then darkness. You couldn't buy friendship like that. Perhaps you wouldn't want to.

I watched them walk away, canes moving leisurely, like a snail's antennae.

My toes hurt.