Roof Garden.

If I ever live in a city, I want to have a roof garden. Just a tiny terrace amongst the roof tops. I could grow herbs and some flowers, maybe even a few vegetables.

Actually, forget the plants. I'd just lay there on my back after a long day of work. Staring up at the sky. All the people, all the cars, all the noise of the city forgotten far below. I'd just lie there, staring up at the sky. Watching swallows cut up the sunset like tiny scythes.

Peeling Grapes

Ander was 12 years old the first time he ate a grape with the skin still on. His grandmother (whom he'd  only just met) sat him down in her living room (which he'd now seen for the very first time) and handed him a glass water and a bag of white grapes (which were green, not white). They were still wet from the quick rinse they'd been given, still attached to the slimy brown stalks that made him think of dirty, fallen branches. And they still had the skin on.

Ander wasn't hungry. Ander felt sick. He felt as though his insides had been replaced with the English Channel. Cold, grey-green, choppy and nauseous. His intestines swimming around like skinless sea snakes. But his new old grandmother was sitting opposite him on a new old armchair in the new old living room, watching him. And he didn't want her to talk to him because he didn't have anything to say to her, so he pulled a grape from its branched bunched brethren, and popped it into his mouth.

The skinny grape felt odd against his tongue. It pushed hard back as he rolled it around his mouth, like a green glass marble. He pushed his teeth into it and shuddered at the bitterness as its skin burst open. A taste he wasn't used to. Like sudden, unexpected sadness. The kind that came all at once like a summer storm, then lingered afterwards, in big sad puddles, lying there for days on end. Ander felt like a big sad puddle.

Grapes without skin aren't as hard to bite into. And they're not bitter. His mother used to peel his grapes for him, one by one, and serve them to him in a sky-blue bowl. He never asked her to. He didn't even realise grapes had skin, not until he was much older. Even then he wasn't sure whether the skin was to be eaten or not. His mother just peeled his grapes for him. It must have been because she loved him. But perhaps it had a little something to do with the fact that she was sick.

His new old grandma brought the white grapes in a bag to her hospital bed. And when his mother died, she brought them home again, and brought Ander with her. And she didn't peel them, or put them in a little sky-blue bowl. She just placed the dripping bag before him on the coffee table. He asked her why she hadn't peeled them. She sighed and said, "From now on, Ander, you'll have to peel your grapes yourself."

Ander decided he didn't want to eat grapes any more.

Reincarnation

I lay back on the warm grass, letting the sun paint my limbs gold. The clouds tinted green, the sky tinted impossibly turquoise by two rounds of horn-rimmed glass. I chewed a blade of grass. It tinted my tongue green, too. Miles above me swallows soared, wings eyelash-small, tiny blades spiralling, slicing through nothing. Framed too in the green glass of my spectacles were the tops of tall trees, evergreen evergreener.  I exhaled deeply, like a dying breath. I thought of reincarnation.

If I knew I would be reborn as a swallow, I wouldn't fear death, I thought. And the thought was more comforting than the thought of an afterlife, of infinite hours spent languishing amid do-gooders on impossibly solid clouds. It was more comforting than thoughts of reunited loved ones and looking down on the living milling about mortally like dull ants.

If I knew I would be reborn as a tree, I'd die with relief, not fear. Not sadness. I'd sigh my last and assume my role as a sapling, silent, unconscious, unfeeling, unthinking. Just living a leafy lifecycle, spring to summer, autumn to winter, over and over and over. Growing. Not worrying. Not knowing, nor caring.

And then I thought, what if we are all reincarnations, all reproductions repeating endlessly, recycled souls recycling and recycling. A ladybird that used to be a fireman, a priest that used to be a dog.

And what if we were all reincarnations of the same soul, time-travelling back and forth to live every life at once? If every human, every creature, every flower, every tree, was one soul, living each life through to its finish and starting again at the beginning of another? And I was just another reincarnation of my friends, and I was really just passing warm red wine in a green glass bottle to myself, in a way, and sitting there in the park looking at myself running past, lounging on the grass, play fighting with myself, kissing myself, chasing myself. And what if all the pigeons were myself, and all the ducks, and every blade of grass  I was lying on was myself? An old, weary soul, repeating over and over, unaware of any of it. Repeating and repeating ad infinitum, wheeling and soaring into endless green-blue.

What the hell are you looking at?

I was walking down the street with my dog, minding my own business, the sun warm on my face. Cars rushing, people brushing past. Birds in harmony with bike wheels, singing their summer cicada song. I didn't expect it. I had no expectations. I never have any expectations. They are not something often afforded to me. Not something I often afford myself.

So I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't expecting it. Just out of the blue. The voice of a person I hadn't seen. A voice that made me stop and turn.

"What the hell are you looking at?"

The man squared up to me. I could feel his presence bristling to start trouble, to kick off, to fight. What do you say to that? What the hell am I looking at? "You? I'm looking at you?" Only asking for more trouble. Does he want trouble? Is that what he wanted? Trouble?

What else could I say? The tension, in those seconds, mounted like gargantuan waves about to break. The calm before the tsunami. My dog whimpered and growled, quietly. I hadn't been looking at him. I could say, "nothing". I could say "nothing", and keep walking. No trouble. No nothing. Just silence, darkness, moving on.

Let me tell you now, I am not normally one to put people on the spot. I don't like to embarrass people. I don't like to make a scene. I just like to mind my own business. Walk down the street on a summer's day with the sun on my face. Looking at no-one.

But he said it again. "I said," he said, "What the hell are you looking at?" he said.
So I stopped. And I stared at him, blankly, dead in the face.
And I said, "I wasn't looking at you," I said.
He started to say something. I interrupted him.
"I'm blind", I said.

And I walked off into the darkness of my summer's day, leaving him in his colourful, broken silence.

Man and Machine.

John swore loudly and slammed his hands down on the steering wheel. The white Citroen 2CV, rusted at the edges and wearing a fine coat of reddish dust, shuddered its last breath. John turned the key in the ignition, over and over, but to no avail. The little car was kaput. No more trips to the shops, no more promenades through the countryside or journeys to the pier. He got out and sighed, slamming the door behind him. Opening the bonnet, he realised he knew precious little about cars and would be unable to help the situation by fiddling around. He gave the car up for dead.

He was about a 25 minute walk from the next village. He would push his car into the woods a little, and set off to find a telephone. The car slid (with a little difficulty), off the road, and he was on his way. He can't have walked more than 100 metres when the first of two things happened. The Citroen lost its grip on the soil (perhaps the handbrake gave way, perhaps the ground did) and rolled down the hill where, after gaining quite some speed, it collided with a birch tree and was brought to a halt, its bonnet wrapped round its trunk like a boxing glove holding a broomstick.

The second thing that happened was that John was hit by a Ford pick-up truck, pushing 80 down the country lane, and killed instantly. And the driver dragged John into the woods and drove off, even faster than before.

Some people who go missing get missed. Those people get searched for. Others don't. They don't. John was 67, retired, friendless, unmarried, a single child long orphaned. No one came for him. So there, in the woods, his flesh melted away in one thousand rainfalls, his bones picked white by the creatures of the forest floor.

Meanwhile, the Citroen, once lifeless, was now full of life. Green mosses grew up its sides like algae on a boat's hull. Ivy wound round its wheels and saplings pushed up through its leather seats. Mice nested in its glove compartments. And in spring, flowers pushed their bright faces through its windows.

The Man Who Couldn't Stop Eating

Once a man woke up hungry. Hungrier than he'd ever been in his life. How could he be so hungry? He wondered. He'd eaten dinner the night before. But now, his stomach felt like a bottomless pit of emptiness, a gaping void, a vacuum, black infinity imploding on itself. Hunger in its fiercest form. 

He got out of bed and flung open the fridge door. Its golden light blinded him briefly. Then he set upon its contents, ravenously. He pulled everything out and laid it on the table, a motley banquet of jars and Tupperware. He found some bread and piled on ham and cheese and mayonnaise and mustard and wilting lettuce, squashing it down into a sandwich. He ate it with the ferocity of a wild beast, a hyena scarfing a zebra carcass. It hurt his throat to swallow down the big, solid chunks he hadn't chewed. He washed it down with half a carton of milk. 

For a few brief minutes, he felt sated. Then the hunger came back, stronger then ever. He put the last two slices of bread into the toaster. That should do it. Whilst he was waiting for it, however, he opened a foil box to find leftover chicken madras from over three days ago. He ate it with his fingers. Then the toast popped. He spread on a thick layer of butter and another of raspberry jam. He ate it upside-down so he could taste the jam better. There. 

But then he saw a jar of gherkins, and fancied one. He savoured its sharp, salty taste, its fresh crunch. It cleansed his palate. He ate another. Then he finished the jar. Afterwards, he ate a few slices of cheddar to mellow out his mouth. Then he took a swig of orange juice to cut through the dairy-coating on his tongue. And then he opened a packet of kettle chips just because they were there.

Hours later he was lying on his sofa, still eating. He wasn't getting any fuller. Just sicker. But he just kept eating and eating, and when he'd eaten all the food in his house, he ordered in a pizza, with a side of garlic bread. And when he'd finished it, he stopped eating, not because he felt full, but because his jaw hurt, and his stomach hurt, and he was tired. 

The hunger was still there, though. The emptiness inside him, that cavernous void. And food hadn't managed to fill it, because food wasn't what was missing from it. But he would never see her again. He would never get her back. The hole in his heart, in his soul, would not be filled by salami or Ritz biscuits. It could only be filled by her. And that would never happen.

The next day he walked round cradling his emptiness like a newborn, craving everything but nothing in particular, tears falling not from his eyes but rising as saliva in the back of his throat. 

Sunlight Through Shutters

When we woke, it felt like we were waking from some strange, shared dream, stretched out to span six months and eclipsed by waking. Our bodies, sliced open by thin lines of sun, sluicing through the shutters. From our sun-cuts, we bled magnesium light. Our tessellations changed and shifted, kaleidoscopic forms in brown and gold, peach and white. Dark fever dreams dissolved like salt in the morning's purity. Our wholeness. The sound of our hearts like ticking clocks. The beauty of it pained me. Leaving the bed, my bones were heavy magnets pulling back. My stomach, an anchor sinking in a sad salt-water sea.

You drove me to a hilltop and we lay there like effigies, sun stricken, pale bodies burning in the bright, slow-burning flame of the moment.

You drove me to a lake and we jumped in and the cold was such a shock. Like waking from a dream. Like finding yourself suddenly alone. Our limbs yellow-green beneath the surface. Our faces above it, shocked and lost, water streaming down our cheeks. How could we bear such shock. Such loss.

The sun warmed and dried us. And it burnt us, too. Burnt you into me. Burnt you into the back of my eyes like a camera flash. Like sunlight through shutters. Never leave me. Never, ever leave me. 

But after a few minutes the flash will fade, and be gone.