The hospital had a particular smell. Hard to identify. It made his nose twitch. Perhaps disinfectant. Disinfectant and desperation. Desperation and decay. In the tea room it was less so. In the tea room it smelled of biscuits. It smelled of apple pie and cheap custard. Everywhere he looked, people looked ill. Or, sick with … Continue reading A Good Deal.
Some years later. He pulls the peacoat collar up over his ears and, head down, takes heel to the bottom of the street. Folk still whisper as he passes, but less so these days. They grow old, they float away, they die. He lives with the memories of that night; the sky more white star … Continue reading The Lookout.
There was an imaginable enough group gathered that evening - certainly Wax Noyle was there. Steve Arse (Ears to his face. Arse behind his back), Punk Wayne, Magic Sam and Little Annie. They were seated at a trio of tables in the front window of The Eight Kings. This would have been sometime prior to … Continue reading Sweat Lodge Construction.
They sat around in the low light and the blue smoke of the room and after a while he picked up a guitar and started to strum some rudimentary chords, plucking triads and tripping harmonics and, believing he was, of a sudden, some rough blues man, he began to throw in some hems, some hums, … Continue reading Some hems, some hums, some uh-huhs.
Medication teeth, rotund in dungarees, grey dreads adorned with beads (and other Keith Richard knickknacks), Jessica shows a greeting hand. Bangles singing. In and out of the lobster and bronze crowd to The Standard. Dialects bubbling, a foam of voice. The gulls loom and retreat and shadow the pale sand, the bodies. Beyond this, the … Continue reading The Colour of The Crabmeat.
Crazy Jeannie and Pleasant Terry finally got married again. Fair play to them. But, somewhere, somehow, along the way, in exchanging names twice, they confused each other’s nicknames, so that he, at last, found her, pleasant, and she, him, eventually, crazy. The actual details of how, or why, this confusion occurred are obscure. That’s … Continue reading Unexpected Butterfly.
