Bringing both burial and breath, beginning and end, the bells, born of nothing but silence and time stretched thin, begin their jubilee. Protractors and papers and pens are lidded in desks. The board chalk is vanished as chairs scratch varnished parquet. The children fall upon doors, open them. The windows crowd with their faces. At … Continue reading Conjuring Sam.
Voided, the ruptured milk lorry stopped feeding Steep Street and soon enough the white river knuckles became trickles puddling in gutters. The milk dribbled into drains, dribbled, dripped and disappeared. And, before their very eyes, the tarmac blackened again in the afternoon sun. Mrs. Ffooks sits on the pavement in skeins of creamed polyester, white … Continue reading Voided.
Finally, Crazy Jeannie and Pleasant Terry 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 An Unexpected Butterfly.
We rolled her up in a big blue blanket, belting the middle, taping the ends, and we bore her, between us, right through the town while everyone slept. The street lanterns pooled the asphalt but would not give us away. The shop glass, only fleetingly. The gutters blubbered and bubbled. ∞ Shush! Shush, the fossils are … Continue reading Aspects & Angles
Lunch was a joyless chore in South Shields. The allowed hour was passed in that miserable and stifled staff room of P. Marsk Hairdressing, where the legend We Make You Look Good - that irritating and irksome italicised 'Good' - bearing down erroneously from the brown wall behind him, into him, through his thinning crown, his dimming mind, … Continue reading Mirror 9 – JMW Turner [Shields, on The Tyne, 1823] postcard.
Portholes, or rather, representations of portholes, allow wet light to pool on the dim floor and walls of the aquarium. There are several vast glass tanks of impenetrable green in the centre of the room bathing all visible lifeforms, this afternoon me, in a weed green sheen. An assortment of cheaply framed and fading posters crowd … Continue reading An Aquarium Question.
