May 2011
2 posts
2 tags
05/05/11 - 2
The sodium light of street lamps only reaches so high, and where its luck runs out tower blocks are stained the blue of old photographs. You’ve a picture of your mum standing under a wash of that very same colour, looking happy and young and not quite the person you recognise. Or perhaps there’s one of you as a child, at a beach or the park, ruddy cheeked and sticky. It’s a shade...
2 tags
05/05/11
I feel far more tired than I ought to, given how little work I’ve accomplished today. If I was a physicist I’d invent a particle for this, something to fill the gap between what I know I’ve done and what my body’s convinced happened. My personal Higgs boson’s not quite the God particle, admittedly. Perhaps the Joseph particle’s a better name. One of those...
December 2010
1 post
2 tags
04/12/10
Someone told me that the sky and the sea are never the same colour. Why they should be, I don’t know - different states of matter, the two, different purposes and depths. One is finite but clouded, trenched and furrowed and unknowable. And clearly this is true of the other, but the fact that it is clear counts for so much. Look at a puddle, clouded by sediment, and then think of space in...
September 2010
1 post
2 tags
05/09/10
I’m on the front step, lit by streetlamps. Everything is orange. I have a fag in my hand, and its ash is littering my coat. Over the road there’s a piece of foil caught in the gate, and when the wind catches it it flutters at me in morse. I’m not sure what it’s saying, but it seems important, so I write it down in the snow. Where the light hits phone cables they shimmer...
August 2010
1 post
2 tags
26/08/10
The scar on my right knee is a ghost of the fresh wound gracing my left. A remnant of childhood all but forgotten with advancing age and more pressing bodily concerns. This new lesion is as sinister as its location, a raw disc of flesh of perhaps two inches in diameter, rich red and sticky to the touch. Fifteen years separate the injuries, but the specific soreness of a scab stretched over an...
June 2010
3 posts
2 tags
21/06/10
20 years of life and I’ve only just noticed that the sun and moon are the same size in the sky, despite the discrepancy of scale and distance between them. I’ve been living a lie! It’s like seeing the moon in the daytime, which forever feels like you’re in a film set somewhere far far away, as opposed to on our bit of rock in the blue, too much like home to be exceptional....
2 tags
14/06/10
The last of the sunset fades as we spin, the motion transforming watery sepia into paper-smooth indigo, like a pale gown trailed through clay. Papercut trees line my window, and beyond then nothing marrs my view. I’ve exchanged my new city for the one I grew up in, just for a short while, and though to some this old home is vast enough for a lifetime’s activity, I feel a slow dread...
2 tags
07/06/10
As the screen faded and the lights rose, and I could once again make out my form among the ranks of seats and bodies, I found myself regretting the speed of the passage of time, the way in which we cannot always find ourselves in the middle of things. The anticipation of future misfortunes and happinesses and the imperceptible distances separating them placed me suddenly on the bottom rung of a...
May 2010
9 posts
2 tags
01/06/10
I find the Tarot an attractive prospect - and palm reading, crystal balls and all that. It’s not that I believe in them as powerful systems, rather that I relish the opportunity for no-holds-barred introspection that they provide. The fun isn’t so much in the prophecies and suggestions given over as it is in the impressions that these things have been based on, the character traits...
2 tags
31/05/10
Saturday was idle, occupied with papers and cooking, and we fell asleep almost instantly when the time came. On Sunday morning we got the first bus away from here, cooing at unfamiliar shop signs and tower blocks as we sped towards the terminus of the route. Once there, we took the next bus to arrive, and repeated the process two or three times. Hours later, firmly embedded in south...
breakingnight asked: Do you write longer fiction?
2 tags
22/05/10
I love the smell of my room when I’ve been away for a short while. The flowers on the sill will have wilted a little, and perhaps a few petals will be shed when I lean past them to draw the curtains aside and push open the windows. This new breeze will loosen the fine dust from my bookshelves, the arrangement of volumes slightly foreign after a brief exile, and the memory of my last night...
2 tags
20/05/10
I sat under the tarpaulin, drink and fag in hand, and counted the bricks in the courtyard wall. I got to 44 before I needed to take another sip and drag, and in blowing the smoke out I effectively blocked my own view. It was warm, and the wall removed the possibility of any breeze, so the smoke hung there, drifting. It picked up the eddies and currents like dusted fingerprints, and dissipated...
2 tags
17/05/10
Thin clouds spill across the sky like split mayonnaise, distilling dusk light and making the concrete of the patio look damp. I sit on the bottom step and tread the lawn between my toes, a novel dangling from my fingers. I used to give myself to over books wholly, and devour complete chapters in minutes, but I lost this skill late in adolescence. A faint film of dirt sticks to the balls of my...
2 tags
11/05/10
Sat in my chair so long that the room’s grown cold. Wish I’d remembered to learn to like shivering at some point during the winter. All my blankets are strategically strewn over the various coffee stains I managed to get on my sheets whilst reading last night, so clearly I can’t use one of those. Having to make do with an extra pair of tights and a bottle of raspberry vodka,...
2 tags
06/05/10
I am adrift in a sea of torsos, and limbs are crashing like waves over my head. A cable is held aloft by telegraph arms and collectively we trace it to the source of the tide; a man tied to the stage by kite-string wire, wading through us to some unspecified point at the back of the room. A shoe, bottle, coat float by, appreciative flotsam and jetsam. The band is distant, a mirage overhead. We...
2 tags
01/05/10
I take your sunglasses from beside where you sleep and put them on. I look at the sky, and see it through your eyes. My own vision is obscured by a band of focus, black blurs marking thick plastic frames and cutting the sky in half. The clear glass offers no protection from the glare of the sun, and the fact that I don’t clean them often simply smears the light across their lenses. Yours are...
April 2010
4 posts
2 tags
01/05/10
So I’m wondering, why is it that all the good-tasting things stick in your teeth? Do we like the stuff that hangs around longest the best? I guess that’s true in other areas, but it doesn’t seem like it ought to be true of our digestive systems. The stuff that stays in your stomach for too long is what gives you indigestion, after all. It’s not even like it’s a...
2 tags
30/04/10
To look at the sky and see the heavens is to put yourself at the bottom of an overwhelming scale. Humankind reduced to a fleck in space. It is a unifying force, but a cold one. Watching the windows of high-rise flats flicker on and off is watching lives in play. People are as lit rooms - distant warmth, momentarily linked to your own. But to look up and not see the stars, because the city prevents...
2 tags
29/04/10
I sometimes do things in the wrong order for the pleasure of juxtaposition, cursing myself publicly, loudly, covering my tracks as I go. I like the bitterness of orange juice drunk after swallowing toothpaste. I think it’s the shock of it, in the face of the standard sweetness of both. It is, I suspect, an acquired taste - though that is a phrase I have always been suspicious of, given that...
2 tags
29/04/10
Living in the city doesn’t teach you about much except how to live in cities. All subway static smells the same, puts the same sherbet in your nose, and all escalators are the same three inches too narrow for those who like to appear busy to safely overtake those who prefer to linger. Traverse platform throngs in the slipstreams of those with more authority than yourself, and try not to be...