Some moments in life last longer than others. As if God plays tricks with our clocks while neglecting to pay the same service to our minds. Some seconds last days. Some days last years. Some last no time at all. As if the pages of history, being written in real-time by a celestial author, got raspberry yogurt spilled on them, and they stuck together. And now they kind of smell funny. You’d think the writers would have better etiquette. High and mighty, literally. But they’re slobs. Look around you. Slobs. And that’s why some moments smell so bad. That’s the decomposing crumbs of a heavenly bargain bucket, scratching grease onto the pages of your story. No respect at all.

You shuffle up to the desk and drop your heavy bags to the floor with a flumpf. They’re actually not that heavy, but you’ve been carrying them for slightly too long. They don’t hang straight down by your sides, and so your arms had to hold them fifteen degrees outward, and now those arms ache and your hands feel pinched and clammy. You announce your arrival. There’s a bowl of red-wrapped sweets eyeing you up from the counter. You take one and unwrap it. Mint imperial. It’s always a mint imperial.

He comes in here maybe once a week. Sometimes more? Not sure. He usually just sits. Thumbs a magazine or two. Legally we can’t do anything. There’s nothing to stop a person sitting in a waiting room. Everyone’s waiting for something. Sometimes he chats to the other patients. I mean owners. I mean… well sometimes he speaks to the animals, too. Derek’s nice enough. The owner’s uncle. But we haven’t seen or heard from Frank in months. Years? Years. A pretty long time. Last I heard Frank was in Rio sipping Caipirinhas and snorting wisdom on some kingpin’s boat. Derek nods his head at me. “Morning Derek!” I smile.

You close the door quietly behind you. You tap the bedside light twice, half bright. Your sheets are crisp, clean and neat and your carpet is free of fluff. Picture frames devoid of dust. Clothes on their hangers. There’s a faint and pleasant aroma. It feels bare.

It gets cold at night here. Have you ever tried being a snail when it’s cold? For the most part, it sucks. We freeze easily. We get stuck to things. Our touchscreens stop working properly. No one sells scarves for snails.

On the bright side, most of the birds are on holiday. Across the Mediterranean, or somewhere. And the ones that have hung around, they wear mittens on their claws, making it much harder for them to grip us. And eat us. So we can go out without fear. We let little blades of slime freeze beneath us, just enough to form a skate. And then we shuffle onto the hardened lake, and we dance the Bolero.

You stumble up to the shoulder of the staircase. The liquor tickles the space in between the back of your nose and the stem of your brain. You have no idea how much space that is — you’re not an anatomist. It could be a  good few inches, or a couple of millimeters.

You’re wearing her scarf. It suits you. “That’s a girl’s scarf. You can’t wear that.” she had said. You wonder what the difference is between the neck of you, for all intents and purposes a man, and of her, a woman. Both get cold. Both are awkward columns of flesh between the trendier regions of the body. Head boy or girl at the top, the brutish jock of the torso below, with its Gryffindor, showoff organs, the heart and lungs. Just dweeby, useless, intermediary, neck.

You can’t remember your room number. You choose to remember hers, instead.

 

Sarah lays three pages of tightly packed prose on the table. Six sides, A4, squeezed by hand at a density of approximately one word per fibre. It has taken her all morning.

“It’s taken me all morning.” explains Sarah.

Helen looks up from her origami penguin. She still hasn’t folded the wings, so it looks a more like an origami plantain. She could, at this stage, equally as well add it to her origami curry as to her origami climate change diorama.

“That’s some very dense prose,” she says. “Thank you, Sarah.”

Sarah leaves. It is dense prose..

She leafily forked the leafy green leaves of her leafy green salad with her forky prongy fork. A big catty cat eyed her cattily from the silly windy windowsill. Gulpily and milkily, she gulped a milky gulp of her gulpy milk and wiped a mouthy froth from her frothy mouth.

It was 9pm. On the clocky clock.

Scrapily, she scraped her scrapey chair back toward the wide, tall, tall wide wall. The catty cat continued to eye her, eyeishly, with its eyes. She eyed it right back. The ticky tocky clocky clock clocked in with a ticky tocky clock tock. 9:01pm.

There’s a word we have back home that we don’t have here. It’s a sort of softness in the air. A blueish quietude with pinkish-purple hazy edges. It flows like liquid, at the same time thin, like gasoline, and viscous, like the yolk of an egg. It’s the kind of glow that soothes your muscles and levels your head, like sliding into a cold pool on a hot afternoon, or taking the first sip of a dram on a misty hillside.

In the shady embrace of a pair of twisted salt cedars, beside which a pregnant juniper tree lazily lay licking his spiny, sandy fingers, a pelican was trying to find the answer to five down. She nibbled the end of her pencil (HB, not too soft, not too hard). The island air had drained the names of Kings and Queens from her brain. “What use do you have for Kings and Queens,” her mind had said, “in a lovely place like this?” Five down, that’s what.