“What’s that one?” Selene asked, pointing at the brightest object in the night sky.
“Which one?” Patricia said.
“The one I’m pointing at! The brightest one.”
“Oh, that’s the moon.”
“It is not the moon,” Selene said. “I think I know which one the moon is. I lived there long enough.”
“It is the moon,” Patricia said. “It’s definitely the moon.”
“If that’s the moon,” Selene said. “Then what’s that?”
Patricia screamed.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on May 5th, 2021
__________
Agnes was in the kitchen when she heard the music in the distance. A chill ran down her spine. She closed the laptop and waited for what was sure to come.
Footsteps on the stairs. Doors flung wide. A swarming crowd of desperate faces, raised from some winter-long hibernation.
“Mum! Mum! Can we have some money?”
“For ice creams!”
“From the ice cream van!”
“We’ve got a freezer full of ice creams,” Agnes said. “Can’t you have one of those?”
“But they’re not the same!”
“They’re exactly the same,” Agnes said.
“They’re not.”
“The ice cream van has more.”
“And they’re bigger!”
“And colder!”
“They are not colder.”
“They are!”
“And they might have some new ones!”
“Last year they had some we’d never seen before!”
“They were horrible!”
“Well, our ones aren’t horrible,” Agnes said. “I got the ones we all like.”
“But we’ve been good, Mum!”
“Really good!”
“You said if we’d been good we could have an ice cream!”
“From the ice cream van!”
“I don’t remember saying that at all.”
“Well, you did!”
“You definitely did!”
“Okay, okay,” Agnes said, fishing out some small change from the pockets of her jeans and dropping it into their grasping mitts. “But don’t just buy the ones we’ve got in the freezer!”
Footsteps in the hall. Doors slamming shut behind them. Cries of excitement fading out down the street.
Agnes sat down at the table and sighed. Of all the things in all the worlds, the continued existence of ice cream vans was the thing she understood the least.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on May 4th, 2021
2. With thanks to Arab Strap for the title.
Daytime
Yulia didn’t count how many dreams she had in any particularly day. If she did, she would have discovered that today, for example, between the hours of 8am and 5.30pm, not including an hour for lunch (1pm-2pm) and two breaks for tea (10.15am-10.30am; 3.45pm-4pm), she had 23 distinct dreams, plus 3 subdreams, one of which also contained a single subsubdream, for a total of 27 dreams, occurring at a rate 3.375 dreams per hour.
That was the speed at which the day passed her by.
Nightshift
Yulia’s nights were somewhat slowe. Yesterday evening, for example, between the hours of 11pm and 6.30am, not including two toilet breaks (2.13am-2.17am; 3.49am-3.57am), an hour of acute anxiety (11.01pm-12.01am) and a short period of moongazing (12.02am-12.45am), she had only one dream, albeit experienced across three distinct (but linked) periods of sleep (12.46am-2.12am; 2.18am-3.49am; 3.58am-6.30am), at a rate of 0.18237082066 or 0.547112462 dreams per hour, depending on how exactly you wanted to count them.
In this dream, she dreamt of the shop, and everyone in it, in a detail so exact and complete it could have come direct from the shop’s CCTV. In some ways, the only difference between Yulia’s nights and days was that at night she no longer had her dreams to distract her from the monotony of the day.
___________
Notes:
1. Written between the 1st and the 4th of May, 2021
__________The Path
We used to lay down paths behind us as we walked. There was no one to stop us from going where we pleased.
Instead of stones or breadcrumbs we would use the coins we found washed up on the beach by the old pier, spilling out of the rusted machines below the tideline.
We laid the coins down as went through the woods, as we stepped over fallen trees and crossed broken bridges, as we followed half-forgotten paths all overgrown with brambles, the paths we had walked together since we were little, the paths we would have walked forever if we could, if things had never changed between us. If we had never changed those things.
We walked all the way down to the hidden clearing and the cold, shadowed lake that you couldn’t see from anywhere until you came to it and it was there, and we would take off our clothes and step into the water and swim off from the edge, swim all the the way out to the centre.
And we waited there together for whoever might follow our way.
The Jetty
She always called it the pier. I said it was the remnants of an old dragon, its vertebrae fused together to form this truncated path to nowhere, out into the sea. The boat tied up at the end of the pier I imagined was its skull, or perhaps the lower half of its jaw.
I never could decide if it died on its front or its back.
Its wings had been lost to the sea, I said, a faint echo of them painted out in kelp at the line of the tide. The vast caverns of its heart lay hidden, buried deep beneath the beach.
My sister wasn’t listening. She climbed out onto the boat and beckoned me to follow. I watched her swaying there.
“Jump”, she said.
I didn’t want to.
“Come on, jump.”
I did.
The Hut
Rain clattered like stones on the metal roof and we were glad of the shelter.
My sister took some cards from her bag and for each picture she turned over one of us would tell a story, our voices raised slightly so we could be heard over the din. My stories were based on things we had seen and things we had done. What hers were based on I do not know.
As the sun began to set she put away the cards and took out a candle and lit it with the last of the matches, the only dry ones in the box.
I took the candle in my hands and held it as gently as if it was my own heart.
Outside, despite the rain, on the horizon we could see a single blood red star, and beside it a bloated yellow moon.
The Stairs
1… 2… 3… 4… 5…
She had seen it from the cliff top, the dead or dying whale, and wanted to see it up close.
6… 7… 8… 9… 10…
And so I followed down behind as she bounded down the narrow stairs cut into the rock.
11… 12… 13… 14… 15…
Tentatively.
16…
Counting each step.
17…
One
18…
by
19…
one
20…
I couldn’t bring myself to look ahead. The steps seemed to fall away vertically below me if I did, gravity welling up almost visible before me, drawing my body forward, forward, to topple and tumble and fall and die.
21… 22… 23… 24… 25…
And I couldn’t look over the side, down to the beach, although I did, I did. I didn’t mean to but I did, and each time its body down there in the sand loomed larger, nearer now, more bloated, deader somehow, deader than before and deader than ever, deader than everything.
26… 27… 28… 29… 30…
I couldn’t even look up at the grey skies in case I lost my footing and slipped.
31… 32… 33… 34… 35…
So I stared intently at my feet, at the tips of my shoes and my careful steps from step to step. Right foot down. Then the left foot next so both were side by side. Then count.
36…
Right foot. Left foot. Count
37…
Right foot. Left foot.
38…
Right. Left.
39…
Right. Left.
40…
Careful never to hurry.
41…
Careful never to miss a count.
42…
Hoping the stairs would never end.
43…
That I would never reach the sand.
44…
Never have to look up.
45…
And see it.
46…
47…
48…
49…
The Stream
We sat facing each other from opposite banks. Socks balled up in our shoes and placed by our sides, our trousers rolled up to our knees, our feet plunged down into the cold and clear of it.
The water was deep from the rains, the stones we’d placed suggestively as steps in earlier days now almost completely submerged. The waters ran so strong around our ankles the dirt was scoured from our skin, and it billowed out downstream like clouds of blood from old unhealing wounds.
I smiled. She smiled. In the afternoon sun we had never felt so alive.
The Sky
She walked ahead of me across the fields, out under the starry sky. I could see her only as a shadow, a deeper darkness in the dark of night that disappeared when I looked straight at it, so to follow her I had to keep looking away, glimpse her form only out of the edges of my eyes.
I stumbled over something, or into something, tripped and fell, the fall more terrifying for not knowing what had caused it, for not seeing where I was about to land.
When I picked myself up and looked around I could not see her at all. I looked away in every direction, concentrated on every periphery, but saw only darkness, uniform, yet without form.
I called out to her.
I cried.
The world span so fast every star was a blur across the sky and you could feel the whole galaxy turning above you.
__________
Notes:
1. This was written in April 2021
2. To submit to a thing
3. It was rejected.
4. Also as it’s all taken from An Escape
5. It was really written between 2014 and 2017
6. Please don’t hate me
7. Recycling my past is all I have
It was hot. The sort of heat where you feel sick from it, cloying and wet and sweating and sick. Nothing to be done except sit there and wait, sit and stare and fidget and itch. And moan, and moan.
There’s no better weather for moaning. “Urgh, it’s so hot,” every ten minutes, looped, throughout the day, the night, the whole fucking week of it. Followed up always by “Too hot,” half in correction to that earlier “so”, half in confirmation. Moaning to yourself, with yourself, against yourself.
It was all we had. Unable to even use our phones as distraction, our fingers and thumbs too drenched in sweat to operate the screen, their innards and workings too hot to cope, their response even more pathetic than ours – screen glitches, randomised resets, refusals to turn back on. At least the sun doesn’t make narcoleptics of us all. Not yet, anyway.
Out of the house she comes, her hair still wet from the shower. A new summer dress, a radiant smile. A slight fragrance of something, some scent of flowers or fresh fruit. She drops her book on the table top, sits in the seat next to mine, takes a sip of her drink with a small shudder of delight.
Turns to me.
Smiles.
Glows.
“What a glorious day,” she says, the ice cubes clinking in her glass, her smile as wide as the sky, as bright as the sun. “I hope it’s like this all summer long.”
The only thing more unbearable than the heat is other people’s happiness.
__________
Notes:
1. Written in the summer of 2020
2. When it was quite hot