“How much is this one?”

The shopkeeper peered over the rims of her rimless  glasses and closed her book, marking her page with a pen. She jumped off her stool, which scraped slightly on the gritty tiles, opened the hatch, and shuffled over to the reddish looking man hunched over the rack.

“That’s five dinar.”

The man looked at it, shook it up and down a couple of times as if to check its weight, and looked back at the shopkeeper. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, it says right there.” She turned it over in his hand to reveal, quite clearly, the five dinar sticker. “See, five dinar.”

The man looked a little confused. He blinked hard, sniffed twice the incense-infused air, and put it back on the rack. “What about that one?” He pointed.

“Yes, that one is also five dinar. It’s the same.”

“Are you sure?” He asked.

You look behind you and pull in to the left, behind a red parked volvo. You wish you’d worn mittens. They’re in your coat pocket. Why didn’t you wear them? You lower your fingers to your right jeans pocket to pull out your phone. Your hand is limp and immobile, like a medical glove filled with sand, attached to your sleeve by a string. You bash your appendage against your leg as you try to enter the pocket, to little avail, like one of those grabber arms at the arcade that no one ever wins on. You try again. Bingo. You force your ornamental fingers deep. The heat from your leg begins to tickle your palms and bring them back to life. You hold them there for five seconds or so, until the tiniest amount of control returns to your extremities, and you pull your arm up again and back down so that now the phone is between your hand and your leg, and then you pull it out with your phone in tow, unlock your screen with your nose, and check Google Maps.

The light sprinkling of snow that had been resting on his hair had begun to melt, and was now unwrapping itself from its crystals and creeping down his forehead. She noticed the blue lights from outside reflecting in the rivulets that were now exploring his forehead. She left for a moment and returned with  a small brown towel from the downstairs bathroom, knelt on the soft seat of the sofa, and rubbed it over his head, which was silent and motionless and pointed at the far wall. She patted down his increasingly damp coat “And take that off, too.”

You drop your phone in the canal at 15:06. You were feeding the ducks, grapes cut in half, because that’s what they like, and bread makes them bloated. They love it but it’s like giving them KFC. You think to yourself, “KFC is delicious.” and you begin to salivate slightly, and one of the ducks can tell. She gets slightly nervous and backs away. Maybe she knows that people sometimes eat ducks? And yet, they have no problem coming to feed them. Duplicity at its most pure. That’s probably what the duck is thinking. You take out your phone to search the internet. You’re leaning against the railings, tapping at your phone with your UniQlo gloves, thumb, middle, and index fingers specially treated somehow so that you can still work a touchscreen. And you hold it in your right hand and with your left you type “Why is KFC so delicious?” and you press go, and it tumbles out of your hand, and into the canal, and the duck that shyed away from you, even though her beak is completely rigid and unmoving, with a single axis of motion, you can tell that she is grinning a wicked, gleeful, vengeful grin.

“I can see why you like him.”

We crouched on the floor by the window, just poking our heads above the sill, peering through beads of condensation on the inside of the window, mirrored by a patina of light frost on the outside, as he tended to the two horses. He took the larger by the reins and led it into the barn.

“I don’t like him.”

“Yes you do.”

“No I don’t! Look at that hat!”

“It’s a nice hat. What’s wrong with hats? You do like him.”

“No, I just pretend to. Because it’s obvious, and no one will ask questions. And I can’t be having questions.”

He came back out the barn with the reins in his hand and shut the bottom door. He looked around and we crouched a little further. But he didn’t look up.

“Plus he smells kind of weird.”

“He smells of horses.”

“I hate horses.”

You rose up on your tiptoes, stretched out your feet, craned your neck, flexed your back into an arch and extended  your arm. You reached over six tins of ragu to find the back. “The best is at the back,” you said. You took another and loaded into the baby seat of your trolley, leaving the main body empty. “Just in case,” you said.

I tried to keep up, but you were quicker than me. “Slow down!” I said.

You slowed, and turned to look and wait. “Would you like to get in?” I said yes, not with my words, but with my mouth and my face, and I rose up on my tiptoes, and craned my neck, and flexed my back into an arch, and I didn’t mean to. And you extended both your arms and picked me up, and placed me in the driver’s seat, just in front of the ragu.

“Don’t put that on.”

Too late. The damp cardboard began to steam at the sides and cover the encampment with a thick, acrid fog. Helen tried to poke it with her big stick. She moved it further into the flames. The wet smoke grew denser.

“Don’t poke it!”

“But it’s fun and it smells nice.”

“It’s not fun and it doesn’t smell nice. Put down the big stick.”

She grabbed another piece of cardboard. She wondered whether, if Phil could move his arms, he’d grab it off her, take her big stick, make her sit down. And then she started to smile, inside at first, at the base of the throat, until it bubbled up and lifted her mouth. And she threw another piece of soft, limp, wet cardboard it into the flames, and began to poke it with her big stick.

Maud pulled the keys from the lock with a jangle and tossed them into the bowl with a clink, then stomped and scraped her feet on the stiff-bristled coir mat to remove any dirt or dust or grime, and kicked the door behind her with a click and a thud, concluding with a sigh that familiar six-second symphony of sounds that marks another day plucked from the future, processed, chewn, and archived.

I’ve eaten too much. But I keep eating. Because what else is there to do?

When I was younger I read about a man who’d had a hole put into his stomach. So he’d eat things and they’d just pop right out.

I feel too full and it hurts.

He’d eat things and they’d just pop right out. I wish that was me. And then I could just slurp that hot dog. And then slurp it right back. Endless, infinite hot dog loop.

This is going to hurt in the morning.

Endless, infinite hot dog loop. Don’t even need to chew. Perfectly gastrodynamic. Made for it.

I didn’t even need that mince pie. Why isn’t there a practice mode?

“The one thing you can always rely on,” said my father, “is noodles.”

He was, in a way, right. Noodles were always plentiful round here. Those brittle little briquettes of frizzy moulded umami goodness. If there was nothing else left in the shop, there would still be noodles.

And so my father, ever the inventive sort, took it upon himself to rebuild our crumbling home with this plentiful, cheap sturdy, regular-shaped building material. And it was beautiful, and magnificent, and strong, and perfect. And so we lived in our house of noodles for a good three months. Right up until monsoon season. And then, soggy, salty but full, we went back to the drawing board.