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.

Britney couldn’t decide what to have for lunch. It was a tough choice. She knew she definitely wanted lunch, which was a good start, and a sign that things were getting better. She asked Hannah. Hannah was her dog.

“What should I have for lunch, Hannah?” asked Britney.

Hannah stared at Britney, nonplussed. She did a little shuffle and licked her lips, and yelped very quietly. Not a scared or unhappy yelp. Just a yelp. The sort of yelp that might say “I know you’re asking me a question, but I don’t know what you’re asking, so I’ll just nod and hope for the best.” Hannah didn’t know what lunch was.

Britney remembered that dogs don’t speak Human, let alone English. “Stupid Britney!” she said to herself.

She grabbed her phone and called her friend Carol.

Carol was a dog translator.

“Hey Carol, please could you ask Hannah what I should have for lunch?”

Britney held the phone to Hannah’s ear. Hannah perked up, opened her mouth, salivated, panted, and barked twice. Britney took the phone back.

“Cheese sandwich”, said Carol.

I ate too many pringles.

I had popped that little lid of that long, smooth can.

Peeled back the soft, smiling paper covering.

And helped myself to just one.

Just one.

Sour cream and chive.

Sour cream.

And chive.

I threw it onto my hungry tongue.

Dripping with desire.

I deserved it.

The tangy powder atop the duck-billed crisp shook my taste buds.

Saliva spewed forth from my pulsating gullet.

I closed my eyes. The ripe summer air spun around my pursed lips. Everything was good again.

I took the tiniest sip of San Pel.

Oh go on then, I said.

Just one more.

 

Take my hand in yours, little fly. Let me cradle your flaking wings. There’s no need to flit away. No where left to go. No shits left to lick. No steaming bins ’round which to flutter. No foals’ faces left to dance on. It’s okay, I’ve got you.

It’s just you and me now, little fly. No one else. You can rest your weary shoulders. Cradle me in your flaking wings, and let’s watch the sun go down. One last time.