“Is that an original Smrnk Frnklstein on your wall?”

I made up the name of the artist. But it was a legitimate question nonetheless.

“Yes.”

I couldn’t tell it she was lying or if I’d just channelled some truth about the world that I didn’t know. So I nodded and wagged my finger at it for five beats, and then I added, “that’s a damn fine specimen.”

“It’s a 1978. His blue period.”

The painting was a wash of rusty red, brown and blacks, through which you could vaguely make out the outlines of two, maybe three people. It looked quite a lot like it had been painted in dried blood. Period, maybe, blue, no. I wagged my finger and my head again for about ten beats each, not always in sync. “That guy!”

“Would you like another drink?” she asked.

“That guy!”

She stood up to go to the kitchen, at which point I realised, yes, I did want another drink. My glass was empty. I tipped it to my lips and sucked the ice cube into my mouth and crunched it into three pieces which i rolled around with my tongue.

Magneto (from the X-Men) had a damn good sleep. The kind of sleep that, when you wake up from, you look around your house and you see the dust and dirt, and you look in the mirror and see your scruffy beard, and you open your fridge and all your yogurt is moldy, and you think, “damn, I’ve really been letting life get the better of me.”

Magneto trimmed his beard and cleaned his floor and threw away his yogurt and took it to the trash. “Thwunk!” went the moldy yogurt. A nearby rat watched in amazement and said, squeakily, to his friend, “isn’t that Magneto (from the X-men?)”. Magneto pretended not to hear.

Later, at the shop, as he plonked a vat of onken onto the counter and threw a Snickers into the mix, too, the shopkeeper looked at him, and said, “By golly, aren’t you Magneto (from the X-men?)”

“No,” said Magneto, “I’m famous shakespearian actor Ian McKellen.”

Things were easier this way.

Every now and then a star falls out of the sky.

“Plop!” it goes. Usually it falls into the ocean. They’re only little, but very bright. A couple of fish get a fright but nothing major.

I folded the limp, wet toast onto my tongue.

Is it even toast any more when it’s wet? At school they used to sell white toast cut into triangles dripping in butter. That was floppy too. No, didn’t have any crunch to it. But definitely still toast.

I chewed and rolled the quid of limp carbohydrates around my mouth with my tongue. The rain continued to pool on my plate, the other slice getting wetter and wetter.

It was nearly dusk and the tide was coming in. I could see three lit-up boats just over on the horizon. They say the horizon is only a few miles away. I reached into my pocket for a biro and the piece of paper with the shopping list on, to do a little calculation. But that was sodden too and crumbled in my hand and onto my jeans.

She glanced at his intray. In it, atop a stack of crisp red paper sheets arranged in a neat pile, was an unopened jar of pickles.

“What’s with the pickles?” she asked.

“They need eating,” he replied.

On the wall of the flat that I’m selling, there’s a faint outline, in off-the-shelf, cursive font, of “live laugh love”.

On Thursday a couple came round to view the flat. 11:30am.

“What happened here?” one of them said.

I glanced at you sheepishly, perhaps trying to say, be normal, and let me sell this house, so I can go home, and feed my wife this leg of ham, so that she does not eat me.

“Well, the love left, and I stopped laughing,” you replied, “so I shattered most of it with the metal heel of a bespoke italian shoe.”

I had this dream in which I wanted to climb down to the next layer of reality. But in order to do so I had to go through this weird and horrible tunnel, through all the stuff that had been buried and squashed and smoothed over by our pleasant world.

I remember going through a door and entering into a long chamber filled with decaying rotten rubbish. I was swimming through bin juice.

I’d rather swim through shit than bin juice.

And at various points, I stopped swimming through bin juice but had to walk through strange dark rooms filled with ominous figures watching me from the shadows. They smelt musty.

The main thing I remember is the smell. And the tunnel.

And, when I got to the end, I didn’t really feel like I’d arrived anywhere at all.

I’m pretty sure I ended up in Detroit.

I may as well have taken the train. But it would have been more expensive.

Derek dug another pomegranate seed from out of his nose.

Erica watched in disgust.

He noticed, “I’m sorry!”

“Are you ok?”

“Honestly I don’t know why this is happening.” It was the truth. But you’d think he might go to the bathroom, or something. Not a good look for a first date.

“Why are there pomegranate seeds coming out of your nose?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“I think I’m gonna go…” Erica shuffled for a moment and thought about whether she should try to pay her half of the bill, but, eventually, filled with a deep confusion and disgust, fled.

As the last glimpse of her evaporated out the door, so did the last pomegranate seed. Derek stared down at his red-stained shirt and napkin filled with little lumps.

The next day he messaged Erica.

“Hi Erica, sorry about the pomegranate seeds. Nice to meet you but I didn’t feel the chemistry was quite there. Best of luck for everything and I hope you get that dog!”

Erica wept.

“Five.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“That’s not a lot.” I check my phone. Still off.

“It’s better than nothing.” You drop one of the boxes of cereal. I reach to help. “Stop.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“But I am.”

“But don’t be.”

I am. Not about the cereal. You crouch down and lift it up with your working left hand. You don’t need my help. And I don’t need your help. But it’s nice to have it, sometimes. Even if I don’t need it. Sometimes it’s nice just to know that someone is there.

I hoist myself up onto the counter. “If it were up to me, there’d be more than five different kinds.”

“Why would you need more than five different kinds of lucky charms?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’d feel a bit luckier.

On Sunday I saw a leaf shaped like Richard Nixon.

I walked straight past it and then a little something at the back of my brain said, “Hey, did that leaf look like Richard Nixon?”

So I came to a little stop and I stood there for a moment, wondering whether to go back and check. And I thought, “why not.”

So I swivelled my suitcase around, and threw my scarf, which had fallen loose, over my shoulder, and went back to look at the leaf, which, indeed, did look like Richard Nixon. But then there was another leaf next to it, too, that also looked like Richard Nixon. I began to realise that in fact it was not that these leaves, which were the latest in a long, ancient line of foliage, looked like Richard Nixon, but rather, that Richard Nixon, with his jowels and his bulbous schnozz, had looked like them, like some sort of strange cosplay. When I looked across the bridge under the oak tree I could see nothing but Richard Nixon. And it distracted me a little from the fact that it was Autumn, and that summer was over. It felt like a sort of arboreal, John Malkovich version of 1972, which actually didn’t seem like a bad place to be in at all.