Deli-rium - The Colour Coordinator

I was making a coffee. I don't remember what kind it was but let's just say it was a tall latte because the odds are high. I was in a coffee dream-world, probably gazing hazily into the rich beige crema trying to find meaning in the white swirls of milk foam. I finished making it, turned round to hand it to a customer and abruptly snapped out of my latte-haze, because there, right before my very eyes, was the most unusual customer the shop has ever seen.*

She was in her sixties. On a mobility scooter (a pretty nifty one at that). And she was wearing a neon pink coat. Which was not so unusual in itself, except for the fact that her short granny hair was exactly the same colour. If not even brighter. It hurt my eyes. I had to look away, although this was also in order to hide my expression of bemusement.

When I looked back again, she was up out of her scooter, looking at the real ale shelf several feet away. I noticed that her socks were the same colour as her hair and coat. And her handbag, for that matter, which was sitting in the basket of her scooter (which, devastatingly, was metallic purple, not pink. You can't have it all).

Pink lady perused the ales for several minutes, decided she didn't actually want to buy any of them and sat back down on her scooter. She then began to reverse out of the shop, dragging a couple of chairs along by mistake as her scooter made indignant beeping noises.

I have never tried so hard not to laugh in my life.

Then she suddenly stopped before she had even reached the door and asked if we had any squashy brie. "We have Waterloo, which is a brie style cheese made in Berkshire," I informed her. Not squashy enough, apparently. Oh well.

So she carried on reversing noisily and beepily and with incredible difficulty (she got stuck on our shop sign) and I could barely breathe and as soon as she was out of earshot I collapsed onto the granite cheese counter, giggling. If only her coordination as a driver matched that of her dress sense.

*(So far).

Sleeping Pill

If there existed a 

pill that kept you 

awake for a year,

I would take it.

No more drowsing

in stuffy lecture theatres.

No more Monday mornings.

No sleepless nights.

No nightmares.

No more alarm clocks.

No more wasted time.

No more waking up with

a crick in your neck.

No more rest.

No more dreams.

No more drifting off

to the sound of a lover's

breath.

I would walk the empty

night streets alone like 

some crazed, lonely

Queen of an abandoned

world.

I would drink all night 

and lie on my back

to watch the stars

spin,

and sober up slowly,

and painfully, 

in the white dawn.

I would have nothing but

time to kill, whilst the

others slept in bed.

I could watch every film,

or read every book I'd 

I'd never seen or read.

I could learn to unicycle

with no one to watch,

and laugh.

I could lie awake all

night at your side,

watching you sleep.

Alone. Utterly alone.

At sunset my

redgold heart would

sink over the horizon

like a stone.

Each sunrise would 

wash over me like

relief.

Mr Limpopo Goes to the Doctor

Niall Limpopo woke up one morning feeling a bit out of sorts.
He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but for starters, he felt a bit cold. Not shivery. No, this was a cold that he felt in his bones. As though it ran through his veins. And his skin was pretty dry. His legs and elbows were going all scaly. His teeth felt a bit funny, too, he realised, once he'd come to think about it.
He'd been having a lot of other strange symptoms that he wasn't sure he would have noticed, individually. But together with the other stuff, he had an inkling that something rather odd was going on. He rang his local doctor's surgery and made an appointment with his GP, although he wasn't altogether sure he shouldn't be seeing a psychiatrist, too.

"Mr Limpopo?" Dr Mganga stuck her head into the waiting room.
"Uh, yes, that's me". Mr Limpopo stood up sheepishly and waddled into Dr Mganga's office after her.
She sat down heavily on her big-comfy-doctor-chair and indicated that he do the same, opposite her, on the little-creaky-patient-chair.

"What seems to be the problem, Mr Limpopo?" She had a kind voice. He felt a little less uneasy. He cleared his throat.
"Well, I've been feeling a bit out of sorts lately," he began. "It's hard to explain. I don't think anything is wrong in particular it's more... lots of little things."

Dr Mganga sighed. Here we go. Another patient wasting her precious time trying for a free, full-body MOT. The hypochondriac special. "Go on," she said. Her voice still sounded kind, only, the fake kind of kind.

"Well. My skin is very dry, all of a sudden. Scaly. It wasn't before," he added, trying to give a little weight to a complaint which suddenly sounded embarrassingly trivial. The doctor raised her eyebrows and smiled fake-kind-of-kindly.

"And I'm cold all the time. Not shivery. It feels like. It feels like my blood is cold. I know that sounds silly. And my teeth hurt."

Dr Mganga was clearly waiting for him to stop talking so that she could fake-kind-of-kindly deliver a dismissive diagnosis. So Niall Limpopo jumped in again before she had a chance to.
"AND I WANT TO EAT RAW MEAT AND BITE PEOPLE."
Fadhila Mganga's face fell. She had seen hypochondriacs desperately clutching at symptomatic straws, but never this.

"Mr Limpopo, you're trying to tell me that you suddenly have a desire to eat raw meat and BITE people?"

He had succeeded in making his illness sound less trivial. He had also succeeded in making himself sound utterly ridiculous. And a little psychotic. He faltered.

"Yes. Well. I didn't like sushi before. But now I want it all the time. And meat. I just want to eat raw lumps of steak or something. I can't stop thinking about it. And I get the urge to bite things, and people. I want to bite people. Oh GOD I sound completely crazy," and he added a little laugh to make himself sound less crazy but it only made matters worse.

Dr Mganga nodded slowly, fake-kind-of-kindly.
"Do you want to bite me, Mr Limpopo?" she asked, as one might ask a five year old if they needed to go to the bathroom.

Niall looked at her. She was a large woman, with an enormous bosom and glossy skin the colour of dark chocolate. He did want to bite her. He wanted to bite her very much. He hung his head and whispered, "Yes, a little," then quickly added, "I'm not going to though. I won't," and he seemed very sincere.

The doctor nodded, slowly, in that way that could mean either "I know exactly what is wrong with you," or "I have no idea what is wrong with you but I'm going to just nod so that you think I do." Then she asked, "Do you have any other symptoms, Mr Limpopo?"

"Well," he answered, "I was walking past a canal the other day and I really wanted to jump in. But I couldn't get my suit wet before work, so I didn't. And," he added, "I keep having very strange dreams."

"What kind of dreams?"

"Well, ones where I'm underwater, and then there are hoofs all around me splashing down through the water, and everything's all green and murky, and then I go up to the surface and there are all these wildebeest running about and I'm trying to bite their legs. Then I wake up."

Dr Mganga smiled. It wasn't a fake-kind-of-kind smile, either. It was an, I-know-exactly-what-is-wrong-with-you smile.

"I know exactly what is wrong with you," she proclaimed.

"Oh," said Mr Limpopo.

"You're possessed by the spirit of a crocodile," she proclaimed.

"Oh." said Mr Limpopo.

Then she said, "I can't prescribe you anything. Not on the NHS, anyway. And I'm not supposed to give anyone these, but here," and she handed him a small business card.

MR MCHAWI
WITCHDOCTOR
07746827364

and there was a blurry photo beside it.

"Don't tell anyone I gave you this. But he is very good, and very cheap, too. He helped a lot when my dog was being possessed by the spirit of my great-grandfather."

Mr Limpopo was a little taken aback. He wasn't a suspicious man. He didn't believe in all that witchdoctor stuff. But he had to admit... it all made sense. The dreams. The cold blood. The hunger for raw meat. He thanked Dr Mganga and left the surgery.

Dr Mganga waited until he had left the room, paged reception telling them not to let Mr Limpopo leave under any circumstances, then immediately picked up the phone and dialled the code for the hospital.

She waited for a few seconds, tapping her long nails nervously on her desk.

 "Hello, yes, this is Dr Mganga speaking. We have a high risk patient on our hands. He is extremely disturbed, a danger to himself and others. Was talking about drowning himself and biting people. Sectioned? Yes I think so. Can you send someone? Yes. Yes. Okay, I'll tell reception. Thank you."

Then she breathed a long sigh of relief. She was lucky, she thought, that she was so good at being the fake-kind-of-kind.

God of Small Things

One might believe there is no God. Because they say he is omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. But why would a benevolent God let bad things happen? Why would an omnipotent God not stop them from happening? One might believe that God does not exist because if he does, he is flawed. And belief in something flawed is worse, for some, than belief in nothing at all.

But perhaps God's flaws lie not in his inherent power or his benevolence. To us the lives of insects appear fast and brief. Perhaps to them it is an eternity. A life time. And perhaps, to God, our lives, too, are fast and brief. Things happen so fast, from His perspective (if indeed God is a He), our lives are so fleeting, that the effects of his actions, however benevolent, happen only too late. And his actions, however slight to him, however tiny (the flap, lets say, of a butterfly's wing), are catastrophic to us. And this is why, for example, the heavens opened so hard, and so long, throughout the British summertime. Because God heard about the hosepipe ban. And He was only trying to help.

Common Scents

Walking home in the
long late sun and I smell
jasmine flowers and
fir trees in the heat.
Suddenly I'm in the
courtyard of my childhood
home, and the woods behind
my Grandma's house,
all at once.

The Ticket

We were standing in the queue to buy a cinema ticket. It wasn't a long queue but there was only one woman at the till; we had been waiting for quite some time.

Then a young man approached. Late-teens-early-twenties. Short sandy hair. Unmemorably dressed. He walked past us to two guys of around his age, who were standing in the queue behind us. He opened his mouth and words came out in nervous quick succession:

"You going to see The Dark Knight Rises?"
The two guys are a little taken aback. "Yes," one says.
"Students?"
"Yes".
And the approacher just said, "here," and thrust a cinema ticket into the hand of one of the approachees, and walked away as quickly as he could.

The ticket giver was long gone before the ticket receiver realised what had just happened and shouted, "Thanks mate! Decent of you!", and so his thank you was only heard by his fellow queuers, all of whom looked simultaneously amazed, impressed and jealous.

We speculated why he'd done it. The look on his face as he delivered his lines was one of determination. And embarrassment. Was he embarrassed to be doing such a random act of kindness? Was he embarrassed because he'd just been stood up, hence the spare ticket? On reflection, his face could have just been damming tears. The redness was certainly there. The fixation on carrying out the task and leaving before anything could be said. Before he could even be thanked.

Good on him, if that be the case. He turned his hurt into kindness. Into another's happiness. Not bad in a world where our hurt so frequently becomes violence and hatred.

Whoever stood him up missed out one of the rare gems of the human race.

Or maybe it's just all the waitressing

I think my brain sends all my worries to my feet.
I'm happy, yes.
But my feet hurt,
quietly.

Good Luck

Some cultural clichés have become so commonplace that to see them leaves one absolutely nonplussed.  If you saw a pig flying, for example, would you bat an eyelid? 

But when I opened the letter I never expected, I saw that in the bottom right corner there was a four-leafed clover, perfectly symmetrical, perfectly preserved against the off-white paper. The beauty of it, the purity of it, somehow outweighed the worn-out, over-lauded, so-called rarity of it, so that its rarity was the very thing that brought tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat. I stared at it until I'd burnt its form into the back of my eyelids. It was the single most beautiful thing I'd seen in so very long. Despite its over-misuse on St Patrick's Day cards. Despite the fact that it was an emblem I was already saturated with. The reality of it - the first real four-leafed clover I'd ever seen in my whole life, the most exemplary specimen - was utterly singular. The tenderness with which you must have picked it, with which you must have placed it on the creamy paper and folded it into the envelope. The fact that of all the clovers in all the world you found one with four leaves, and of all the people in all the world, you chose to send it to me. 

You sent it to keep the letter safe. It almost never came.

But it did. With the clover intact in all its mutated glory. Little freak of nature. Little survivor against odds. Worn out, unloved little cliché.

If a white dove brought me an olive branch I'd scoff in its face.

But when your letter brought me a four-leafed clover my heart filled with hope.

Mercy

So I'm lying on the sparse garden lawn on my stomach, body burning in the brief glimpse of British summer that we've finally been granted, laptop in front of me, screen barely visible in the sunshine. There are ants crawling about and one bites me on the elbow. Worse than a nettle but not as bad as a wasp. It got what it deserved.

Then another ant crawls over my laptop screen and then along the very top edge, and I'm about to kill it, but all of a sudden it reaches the sunlight and its body just lights up, amber, gold, like fire, and for that split second it is just beautiful in the simplest of ways. I can do nothing but watch it crawl down again, and away.

 I am stunned into mercy.

The Garden

Our garden is long and narrow. It used to slope downhill, but we dug the earth into flat descending platforms and hemmed it in with red bricks and railway sleepers. A cross between Thai rice paddies and the steppes of Mongolia, hewn in the temperate soil of British suburbia. Wild strawberries spill over the sleepers' tarred edges.

It is surrounded and invaded by trees. A squirrelly sycamore in the neighbour's garden that spills its spiralling seeds onto our lawn. A statuesque fir that drowns our patio in shade each morning. A huge holly tree whose leaves might have been spiky once, but have all but given up now. Once every three winters it is weighed down with a million blood red berries, but by Christmas they have been devoured by pigeons and blackbirds. Bamboo and clematis shoot and climb and cover. Behind the purple-leafed cherry tree ferns sprout from damp and softened wood.

The trees and plants are greedy for sunlight; they leave our garden cast in emerald shade. The sun pours through in pied patches of white like spilt milk. Rickety white garden chairs with peeling paint sit in the white hot pools; if you want to sit in the sun you have to pick up your chair now and again, following the light across the garden.

In the corner is a tree house that our dad built. It's not a real tree house; it's a wendyhouse on stilts. Painted cornflower blue but faded. The inside is white and full of photos of our ancestors and spider webs. In the evenings the sun hits it full beam, streams through the smoky plastic windows and fills the tiny room with milky light.

On rainy days I sit inside, and close my eyes, and pretend it's a beach house.

Weighting II

And when the wait is over it's
like someone's cut the weight off and
you're soaring to the surface and you
burst into the open for that
long awaited breath.

Deli-rium: Psychedelic Coleslaw, Sandwich Telepathy and Poltergeists

There's something spooky going on in the deli. It's probably all the super-special organic rays eminating from the quince chutney and organic granola. Maybe it's the heady, cheesy fumes from the 18 month matured cheddar. Perhaps we're all just high on ginseng and lemongrass tea.

Anyway, we made some psychedelic coleslaw and that's probably what started it. Purple cabbage, spring onions and grated carrot, with real mayonnaise. A special experimental blend. It looked like a tie-dye acid trip - violet and mauve, emerald and lime, highlighted by flame-bright orange. We were very excited about it. It was the most beautiful coleslaw in the whole world. And it tasted sublime with delicate flakes of smoked trout and fresh cucumber slices. Afterwards we were high as kites, high as flying trout in a violet sky. High on our shredded rainbow of vegetable magnificence.

We've been trying to guess what sandwiches will sell the best. Every day it's different. But it's different by such a vast margin that it can't be coincidence. It sounds crazy. But why would five people in one day order Sussex feta, pesto and tomato on granary? And why, the next day, would we sell six pastrami and gherkin but not a single ham and cheese? The customers who order them, for the most part, don't know each other, or even interact. Maybe we're just so bored of making sandwiches that we make these links just to amuse ourselves. But we like to say that actually, it's us, sending out subconscious telepathic sandwich waves to the punters. We are the Derren Browns of the delicatessen world. We tried to telepathically influence the customers today. I was screaming SMOKED VENISON WITH BLACKCURRANT AND ROSEMARY DRESSING ON WHITE NO TOMATOES over and over in my mind, but they just kept on choosing goat's cheese and caramelised onion marmalade on granary. We'll have to experiment further.

Then there's the till. It's been acting pretty strangely for a while. We think it's haunted. If you press the No Sale button, the drawer pops open. Then you just push it closed again. Recently that doesn't suffice. It pops open again, and again, and again, entirely of its own accord, unwarranted. A cash register poltergeist, if ever I saw one. It catches me off guard sometimes and makes me scream in front of customers. It goes something like this:

"What can we do for you sir?" (SMOKED VENISON ON GRANARY! SMOKED VENISON ON GRANARY!)
"Goat's cheese and caramelised onion marmalade on granary please"
"Oh." (DAMN!) "Would you like coleslaw with that?"
"No thank you."
"Oh." (BUT IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL!) "That will be three pounds twenty-AAAAAAAA- oh sorry, the till does that sometimes. Three pounds twenty-five. Thanks".

I'm going crazy.
Maybe it's the trout.

Weighting

A long wait is like a
heavy weight.
It sits on your chest
and punctuates
your sighs.

Sometimes you
don't know if what
you're waiting for
will ever even
happen. Then
the weight is
round your neck
or tied to your
feet, and you've been
thrown off a bridge
and you're sinking,
slowly, into the
briny deep.

There's plenty more
fish in the sea, they say.
Forget about it, they say.

I'll wait until I drown,
I say.

Boris Bikes

The air is warm and dark

and smells like rain and flowers

as we cycle past the park.

Swerve traffic, change gear.

Headlights blind me, make me wobble

Can a night-bus smell your fear?

But it calms my pounding heart,

Cycling so close behind you, dear,

That I can smell your farts.

The Story of Hollisobelle Bolttwith

For Holly

She was there when I stepped into C98.
Some say it was our room mate compatibility forms.
I think it was fate.
She had twice as many bags as me and five times more sports kit.
I had a dinosaur poster, and a duvet with wizards on. Shit.

But as our parents left, we locked together like unsure magnets.
Sharing nothing as far as we were aware,
Except for having blue eyes and long blonde hair.
Except for this room in which our lives would unfold.
We both studied English and were 18 years old.

Soon we shared everything, only she drank coffee, and I drank tea,
and all her friends were boys, except for me.

It was perfect; there was not a single fight.
And every morning, it was love at first sight.
(But only because she didn't have her contacts in yet,
and except for the time I kept a slug as a pet)*

I loved the way she smiled - that sheepish grin to hide her brace.
We came to call it the 'Holly face'.

We lived symbiotically.
We ran in a pack,
(consisting solely of two - you could call it a Tupac)
And we always had each other's back.

We were always late for formals,
Left essays to the last minute,
But we ran thirteen miles together,
And held hands at the finish.

I've missed you this year,
In case you weren't aware.
Sometimes I wish I was a millionaire,
I would buy you a chalet in Val d'Isere,
And get Waitrose to send us deliveries there.

But I'm not that rich, so I bought you a ring.
I know it's not much, but here's the thing -
If I was a boy, then I'd ask you to marry me.
As a wise king once said - "BECKWITH IS GOOD FOR ME!"

*RIP Fabio

Deli-rium - The Ponderer

One of our customers arrives at the end of the lunch rush, almost every day. He arrives late so that, I imagine, he won't be holding up other customers.

"What will it be today, sir?"
A pause as long as a piece of string. (A long one).

"I.... don't know yet."
"That's ok. Would you like granary or white?"
"Well.... that depends on what filling I get. Hmm."

Another pause, this time the pause is as long as his beard (about two inches) and as silent as his hair is white (not completely).

"Um. Hmm. I'll have the..."
(another pause)
"Smoked mackerel please! On.... Granary." 


"An excellent choice! Would you like a drink with that?"
"Oh. Yes, I would."
And he wanders over to the drinks fridge, where he stares at the modest drink selection until long after his sandwich has been prepared. Wondering, I expect, which drink would go best with the mackerel. (Fentiman's Seville and Mandarin Orange Jigger, apparently).

Then he pays, thanks us, and leaves, briskly.

We do not begrudge him for his lengthy decision time. Far from it. I personally admire him. I admire him for the care he puts into such seemingly insignificant choices. His sandwich is so important to him that he requires a great deal of pondering. I wonder if he takes the same care when deciding what to wear each day, or which section of the paper he wants to read first, or which brand of toothpaste to buy. I imagine his life is slow and careful, and that every choice he makes is perfect.

I like to think he has no regrets.
Or perhaps it is regret that makes him so careful in the first place.

I hope he didn't regret the mackerel.

The Runner

I remember seeing her a few mornings a week, on my way to school. A woman running. I remember her not because she was running, of course. Running in itself is relatively commonplace. No. I remember her because of her age.

She must have been in her eighties. Her hair was as white as a dandelion, and stuck up on her head just as sparsely. She was tiny, bony, wizened; her skin was sallow and sunken in around her eyes. And she was running. Not quickly. Not quickly; but steadily. Every time I saw her she was making her way steadily down quiet streets and up hills. And only ever in glimpses. I'd see her running in the wing mirror of my mother's car, or out of the corner of my eye through the playground chicken wire fence.
I always marvelled at her. At her age. At her strength. I wondered how she did it.

And then I wondered what happened to her. I hadn't seen her in years. I wondered if she was still running. I wondered if she was still living.

Today I saw her.
Older (of course), than ever.
And walking, not running.

But still living.

I want to be like her.

The Potion

Polly is in the bathroom making a potion.
She's going to feed it to her brother.
Shampoo
Bubblebath
Toothpaste
Mouthwash
Hand soap 
The colours are pearlescent and aquatic, medicinal and pastel. Green-blue blue-green.
The toothpaste has glitter in it.
They swirl together in the glass jar and she shakes it
into sea-foam.

It will turn him into a fish.
And she'll flush him down the toilet.

She utters some magic words under her breath
and goes to find her brother.

Her father finds her first.

He takes her potion and
flushes it down the toilet
(sparkly turquoise waterfall).

Polly sighs and hopes
the sewer rats enjoy their new lives
as fish.

Glass Ghost

I traipsed downstairs late in the morning. The kitchen silence hung heavy. And then I heard the sound. A low whistling. Like the sound of the wind blowing through a keyhole, or the moaning of old pipes in winter. It took me a while to figure out what it was, or even where it was coming from.

It was coming from the corner. It was coming from a cluster of empty glass bottles, left for the bottle bank. It was the sound of someone blowing air across the mouth of a bottle. Except there was no-one there. And neither could it be a breeze, because there were no doors open, and only one of the bottles was making the sound.

A phantom. A ghost.

And then I heard the second sound. Like suddenly discerning the high note in a perfume. A buzzing noise. Waxing and waning. Whirling, whinily. The treble to the whistle's base. And the culprit of the strange sound.


Trapped inside the glass bottle, buzzing in frantic circuits in the pond-green glass - a fly. Its tiny wings whipping up air to sing that low and beautiful note. 


My curiosity was sated. But my mind was left whirring at the uncanny explanation. The simplicity of it. 

Deli-rium: The Two Readers

There's a couple that come into the deli sometimes. They order a latte each, sometimes a croissant. And then they sit down on adjacent sides of a table, take their books out and read.

They don't say anything to one another. They rarely even look up from their respective literature. But they smile at what they're reading, and once or twice I've seen them reach out to squeeze each other's hand. They linger, long after their coffee is finished, just reading in happy silence.

There was a time when I'd have sought more from a relationship. More than sitting in silence, submerged in separate worlds, over lattes left to grow cold.

Now, I just think it would be nice.
To have someone to read with.

Numbers

Run

To

Flee

Your

Hive;

Fix

Heaven

Gate,

Fine

Men.

Men

Sign

Fate

Heaven

Tricks

Live

Poor

See

New

Gun.

Rained on.

Today I got caught
in the rain and my paper
bag broke. I liked it.

Mean Eats

Dinner table fighting -
so exciting!
The trick is not to get
on the receiving end;
just stir, and stir, and
rub a pinch or two of
salt into old wounds,
until -
someone storms off,
and you can steal their
chicken.

Midass

Once I had a chicken and it laid a golden egg.
I cracked it open and poached it.
It tasted just like a normal egg.

But then everything went dark.

When I woke up, the floor was the first thing I saw. It was golden.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. And suddenly my skin felt different.
And my skin had turned gold, too.
I touched my clothes and they went gold, I touched the sofa and it went gold, too.
I walked round the house touching things. Turns out mobile phones don't work if they're made of gold, and golden apples don't taste so good. And golden water doesn't run. I decided not to take a bath.

I waited around for my family to get home, because I didn't really know what to do. I would have called NHS direct but they wouldn't have believed me. Well, I tried anyway, but my laptop was made of gold so I couldn't look up the number and the phone was made of gold so I couldn't dial it.

I went out into the garden and turned some grass and flowers gold, and they looked beautiful, and I stroked the hen that had laid the egg and turned her feathers into delicate gold. She asked her why her egg had made me this way but she just clucked and crooned and scratched off through the flower beds, pecking for worms.

I lay back on the golden grass and wept golden tears of despair. What would I do? Live a golden life of lonely, hungry, exorbitant wealth? Be in a channel five documentary?

Then I went to the toilet and did a golden poo. I wondered if I could sell it on Ebay. Probably not because I can't use a computer.

I flushed.

And the flusher didn't turn gold. It stayed silver.
And then so did the tap. And the water.

I washed my hand and the gold flaked off and away, down the plughole. And I wept beautiful, transparent tears of relief.

King Midas should have just gone for a number two.

The Dog With No Legs

We used to have a dog with no legs. We called him Slug. He couldn't really go anywhere on his own, for reasons which  I believe are relatively evident. So we used to put him in a special trolley we made from a toy pram with the cradle taken off it, and he hung on two fabric straps and it was like he had wheels instead of legs. We pushed him around, taking him for walks, and we fed him by hand, and sometimes we put him in an overnight bag with his head sticking out in front, and carried him about on our shoulders. 

Slug had a very hard life. He was never able to run and play with other dogs; he couldn't cock his leg up against a tree or play fetch or dig holes in the garden. But we never once saw him sad. When we pushed him around on his trolley, his tail never stopped wagging. He barked and yapped with happiness, and licked our faces when we held him. We often let him just lie on our laps, sleeping as we watched TV. He never caused us any trouble. He'd just lie there all day, in his basket, waiting for us to get home and put him in his trolley. And as soon as he saw us, his tail would wag frantically, and I swear to Jesus that legless little sluggy-wug of a dog was grinning from ear to ear.

The White Line

When I first started to run it was hard and made me feel sick and exhausted. Now I feel exhilarated. I get into a kind of trance and I feel I could run forever. That day I ran around the park, spinning dizzying loops around the canal like a comet in orbit. Burning.

The ducks went about their ducky antics; the swans exhibiting foul shows of aggression as waterfowl are wont to. The water level was high and bloated, the water murky and clear all at once, a smoky glass green, like smoothed glass pebbles on a beach. The surface rippled with lime-gold fire because the trees were lit up in the sunset, emerald and ochre, glowing golden across the river, burning.

My feet pounded damp, dirty tarmac, round behind the water and into the woods. The woods were deep and dark despite their rather modest size, because of the yew trees which were blacky-green and sucked up all the light like blitz black-out blinds. That's why they plant them in graveyards. Ambience. Then I turned the corner and  saw the sun coming through the thinning tree-trunks, and it was turning red-gold like autumn leaves on an unseasonably hot October day. It was like looking at a bonfire through my fingers, the way it was coming through the trees in its red-hot glory, burning.

The path led me winding through these dark and fiery trees and then it wound itself straight again, and suddenly the sun burst out from the canopy and hit me right between my eyes and I was utterly blinded, yet I ran on, unfazed, undeterred, ever determined, following the only thing I could see: the white line painted onto tarmac, between cycle-path and footpath. A white line leading into the light, bright enough to sear through the white-blindness, bright enough to lead me onwards, and I feel like the white line is every part of my being, my spine, my soul, my path into the future. Leading me into the light. Burning.

Steamed Bun

I walked past a Chinese steamed bun shop and I had to turn around and walk back past it again, and loiter for a few moments staring at the buns, and then go in. In the face of nostalgia, willpower crumbles like sandcastles at high tide.

I asked for a pork and cabbage bun. The Chinese girl behind the counter looked at me lardily, glasses slightly steamy, face more-than-slightly greasy. She took a moon-white bun from the steamed up glass cabinet in the window and, to my dismay, popped it in the microwave for 45 seconds. Of which I spent fifteen or so seconds surveying the cooler shelves stacked with tupperwares full of Chinese food, the bright, queasy contents pressed up against the clear plastic. The rest of the time I just shut my eyes and thought of the bamboo baskets in the Jinan market, full of fresh, steaming hot buns. I pictured biting through to the lava-hot centre, and my mouth being scalded by delicious, fragrant juices.

Then the microwave dinged. I paid and left, bun clutched in a white paper bag, steaming up at me temptingly. I waited until it was cool. No. I waited until I'd turned the corner. And I bit into it, and seared my tongue with that delicious nostalgia. I was back in the heat and the noise of the market, vendors calling their wares, neon lights lighting fried crabs and dumplings and grilled, skewered squid. And I scarfed it down and then the memory was gone.

Tadpole

The sun finally seared through the rain clouds, which had been clinging persistently to the underside of the sky like algae on a boat's hull. It lit up the drenched garden and all the dull greens were illuminated like the fire in an emerald. I ventured out and across the slick grass, down to the pond, whose surface was speckled with lime duckweed. As my shadow crossed it, the surface was briskly broken, whipped up by the tails of startled tadpoles fleeing. I approached slowly to look in, and in the sunlight the pond was as clear as bottle green glass. I could see the tadpoles drifting, wriggling lazily amongst weeds and black-shelled snails. This late in the year they were big and swollen, tails strong and wide, yet still showing no signs of metamorphosis. One in particular caught my eye. Bigger than the rest, its tail was fringed with a pale, delicate frill and dotted with dark speckles.

 I'd never seen one like it before. It hung beneath the surface as would a spider from gossamer; entirely still, motionless, save for slight drift. Pushed by some minute, invisible force. My hand moved like the beak of a heron, and I could barely stop it. A stealthy, slow approach followed by a deft snatch and my fingers broke the green glass and snatched a slimy wriggle from its water world. 

I don't know why I did it. Humans always want to possess beauty. It's why we cut flowers to put in vases, although we know they'll die, and why we put songbirds in cages, even though we know it breaks their hearts. The tadpole sat in my palm, stunned and frozen in the bright sunlight, in the sudden air that must have felt so alien, so thin. Its bulbous head was inset with tiny eyes. Equine, almost. Its tail was all the more beautiful in the rare light. Translucent and glossy. I marvelled at what I was holding - a freeze frame from a brief life cycle. A snapshot of a transient state. 

And then I let it fall back into the water like a rain drop.

The Man Who Could Talk to Rocks

There once was a man who could talk to rocks.
It started on a trip to the beach. His mother told him if you listened to a shell, you could hear the sea in it. His sisters ran to find shells and, upon pressing them gently to their ears, began to squeal with delight at the quiet hushhh they could hear inside them.

He couldn't find a shell, so he tried it with a pebble, to make his mother laugh.
The pebble said "Hello!" and he jumped out of his skin.
"The pebble spoke to me! The pebble spoke to me!" he yelled. His mother laughed. His sisters chased him with a bouquet of slimy, blistery seaweed.

As he grew older he didn't have to press his ear up to the rocks to hear them. He could hear stones in walls muttering under their breath or pieces of gravel whispering to each other. He heard diamonds, glowering on women's fingers, spreading gossip. He heard boulders grumble and cliff faces call to each other across ravines. He began to strike up conversations with the flinty pebbles in his back gardens. Once a gravestone yelled an insult at him, and was incredibly affronted when he yelled one back.

But it was a blessing, more than a curse. He learnt to ask rocks more pertinent questions, because 'how are you?' means very little to an inanimate object with no emotions or nerve endings. He went to university to study geology and archaeology, and used his rather banal sounding talent to discover greater findings than any geologist or archaeologist before him. No carbon dating for him; oh no. A simple 'How old are you?' would suffice. Of course, some rocks were more trustworthy than others. You couldn't really trust shale, for example. Much too flaky. But you could get what you wanted out of most. Especially the metamorphic ones, who buckled under pressure.

He could find out, for example, how landscapes had changed around them, what creatures had walked on their backs, had lived in their caves and crevices, what settlements had been built on them, out of them, using them as a tool.

The man who could talk to rocks carved himself a rather successful career. He was the best in his field. He was unprecedented. He knew rocks better than anyone. Better, almost, than they knew themselves. But he was at a loss where to go from there. He sometimes felt very lonely. He could tell nobody about his talent, because nobody would believe him. He only had rocks to turn to, and he was getting a little bored of them, despite their infinite wisdoms.

Then he had an idea. An idea that would make him very famous indeed, and not just in the geological realm.

He would ask the rocks of Stonehenge what they were for.

So he went to Stonehenge and asked the rocks what they were for, and
they didn't know either, but they sure as hell had some funny stories about summer solstice.

Anthropomorphosis

Which is the happiest animal? Dolphins and chimpanzees and dogs and birds. The former three because they smile, the latter because it sings. Dogs wag, too. And cats purr, but only sometimes. Crocodiles have big wide smiles but we know they're not nice because they bite. And butterflies are happy because they're flappy and colourful, even though their colours mean danger, stay away, don't eat me.

Which is the saddest animal? Sad squashy things that lurk at the bottom of the sea, like octopi and eels. Horses because they have long faces and carry us about all the time. Sharks with their gaping, downturned mouths and we know they're not nice, because they bite. Tigers locked in cages. Elephants locked in cages. Anything locked in cages.

What do animals know of happiness, or sadness? What do they feel? Only what we tell ourselves they do. Only what we want them to. We treat them like mirrors. Look at that monkey smiling. Look at that polar bear, crying. Who's really sad? Their suffering is at our hands and the sadness is in ourselves.

The saddest animal is us.

Zero

Lying flat out on my cool white bed, sunken to the bottom of my aquarium attic room, and the light through the wooden shutters ripples on my eyelids. My head is doing some sort of dream-maths, and coming up with the same answer over and over. Zero, zero, zero. No. No. No. Whichever way I pose the question. Whichever way I add up my integers. The numbers can be anything, they can be everything, they can be infinite. But it's always zero that I come back to. That nothing. That absence. That no. No, Nothing, Gone, Alone; all the words you can make with zeroes in them.

I turned my back and now I have nothing. Someone must have multiplied everything by zero when I wasn't looking.

And it's always the zero that screams out the loudest, that you notice the most. Not a sore thumb, but a missing one. Our eyes are drawn to what's missing, above what's there. Negative space is all-important. It's the missing tooth you can't stop tonguing. The last step that isn't there. Your foot falls away into nothing and it's nothing that you're missing. Why do you have to be so nothing, why do you have to be the zero that I can't ignore?

My maths dreams reflect and fold in on themselves in confused geometry as I fall into sleep. Above my roof red kites screech and slice circles into the sky like pairs of compasses.