A dream slips off your face and onto the floor and crumples in a messy shiny pile. You open your eyes slowly but they’re covered in eye mask. So all you can see is eye mask. And hardly even that, because your eyes are glued shut by eye goo and little crusty bits. If you were a soup, these might be the croutons. The croutons are everyone’s favourite bit, aren’t they? What kind of soup would I be, you ask yourself. Carrot and coriander? Or some kind of broth? Like, with chunky bits of root vegetable and stringy meat. Maybe a goulash. Is a goulash a soup? Or a stew? What’s the difference? You peel the mask from your face and pick the flakes from your eyes, and give them a little taste. So good, you think to yourself. And you groggily swing your legs around to the side of the bed, and slip slightly on the puddle left by the rippled satin of your melting dream, but you keep your footing, and you go and get a coffee.

Elle poured milk directly into her stomach. Via her oesophagus. Gulp gulp gulp said her oesophagus, as it pumped cold semi skimmed milk from Elle’s mouth over her tongue and under her teeth into her hot, sloshy bag of sick.

The fridge door hung open pathetically. Yearning. Have you no self respect Elle said. With her mind. She said it with her mind. But the fridge door didn’t respond. Maybe it couldn’t hear her? so she said it out loud. “Have you no self respect?” she said, quietly, firmly, bitterly. And the fridge door just stayed there, open, as if to say, take it, take it all. It’s all for you. So no. The answer was no. No self respect. So she took out all the ham and all the cheese, and all the jars of jam and mayonnaise and pickles, and she shoved those down too. And the fridge shivered with delight at its own servitude.

There’s just about enough of an orange glow reflecting from the clouds above to make out the walls of the corridors. The light is silent and still and the air is calm. She treads gently over dust and rocks and broken glass, slowly so as to allow enough photons to enter her eyes for her to put together a little map in her mind of the maze. She sees a right turn, and, carefully, she takes it.

The day I lost my mind was a Sunday. It was November and grey. I only noticed I’d lost my mind when I reached for it and found it wasn’t there. That’s how it usually goes, I guess.

I was in Sainsbury’s at the time. The cashier made a joke about the cherry tomatoes I was buying for our lunch. And it was funny, so I asked my mind to throw a smile or a little chuckle but nothing happened. I just stared at her and then at the wooden beads round her neck, and then at her name tag, Judy, and to the little tomatoes in their punnet. I took them and I paid and I left.

I looked everywhere. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it last. I looked under the passenger seat, and by the trolleys. And I realised I could have lost it any time between waking up that morning and the tomatoes.

I’m still looking.

In the garden there was a green tree. The bark was covered in a patchwork of moss and lichen so complete and so thick that it completely covered the trunk, from the roots to the tip of every branch. An old woman holding a lamp watched a grasshopper, also green, shimmy up the flank of the wood. Where is she going? thought the woman, quietly, to herself. Why is she holding that lamp? thought the grasshopper, quietly, to herself. It was daylight.

There’s a white rope coiled up and hanging above the stable door. It’s attached somewhere through a hole in the ceiling. The man is still lying unconscious in the hay. She nudges him with her foot. Nothing. But he could be bluffing. She can’t reach the rope. She looks round the stable floor for something to stand on, but it’s pretty dark. Almost as if horses didn’t like to read. She finds a bucket but it’s still too small, and so she finds two more and builds a little pyramid and climbs on top of it and grabs the rope, and uncoils it, and pulls it down, and goes to the man to bind his arms and feet. And as she feels a little resistance in the rope she hears a loud peal from the bell above, which of course she had just accidentally rung. Shit, she says, as she realises that it’s all over, and that she will not have time to go to Tesco to buy strawberry laces after all.

I went back to 1996 yesterday

using a time machine I bought on eBay.

And when I got there I was seven again, and not thirty-three

and you woke me up and made me toast with peanut butter.

Later we went to the shops.

I bought my first CD and we stopped off at pizza hut for lunch.

After we got home we went out to look for conkers in the woods

and in the evening we watched a television show about airports.

I ate an entire packet of frankfurter sausages tonight. I know what you’re thinking. How many is that! Well, it’s six. Six frankfurter sausages. But I only meant to have three.

They were Knacks actually. The sort we used to get at Flunch. I bought them at the supermarché on my way home from the rain. There was no queue. I guess no one else needed sausages today.

I ate one when I got home. As a snack. And then I put the oven on, and put in some chips, which I also got from the supermarket. But, plot twist, I actually didn’t put it on, I forgot, and I just left the chips in the cold oven gently defrosting. And then I noticed and turned it on. You’d have laughed at me. You wouldn’t have forgotten to turn the oven on.

And when the chips were nearly done I fried two eggs in the same pan, and then I put the Knacks in and I tossed them in the oil, till they were good and hot and a little bit crispy. And then I put some emmental on the chips and a bit of salt and pepper and ate the lot.

This was a couple of hours ago and just now I got peckish. And I went to grab another sausage, but it was the last one. Yes I know what you’re thinking, weren’t there six? And you’re right. I don’t remember eating the other one. To be honest I’m sort of hoping you ate it. And that you’re still here, somewhere, maybe hiding in one of my cupboards, chomping on low-quality processed meat.

You tripped on a plank of wood on your way from the tube, you said. There was thick blood running down your cheek from just above your eye and the geese were arguing about something by the pond. I reached to wipe the dribble of red before it dripped onto your extremely luxurious cream-coloured cashmere jumper that you said you’ll never wash. You were reading the news, you said. What a shit show, you’d thought. And you weren’t paying attention and you tumbled head first into an upturned nail. But you came anyway, because you really wanted to see me.

You told me you were going to Switzerland. But I saw you in Sainsbury’s. Buying radishes.

You don’t usually eat radishes, so I thought, what on Earth is going on?

And I hid behind a stack of Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. They were discounted so I grabbed two and put them in my basket. I will eat them later, probably slowly while seething about how you lied to me, and thumbing through all my angry thoughts and plans to get you back, but getting them all chocolatey and orangey because my fingers will be too hot and too slow.

I peeked out and saw you taking the thin plastic bag filled with clean juicy radishes off the weighing scale. You put on a little barcode and walked towards my aisle.

And as you came a bit closer I realised that it wasn’t you at all, just someone who looked like you. You were probably in Switzerland, after all.