I am asleep, secretly harbouring left-over hurt, when Chrisie falls into the sink.
Over the salt stone candle, she picks out the rice from her risotto, I pick the peas. Hers pushed to one side, sticky parmesan-coated. I like how they were frozen not long before balancing so deceptively garden-fresh on my fork. Just when I’m [...]

Let’s pretend.
Three
Two
One
Weeks. Days. Hours. Being omnipotent we compress time. With food mixers. In with the hard unchewable numbers.
Out with something softer and easier to swallow.
Two weeks, let’s pretend.
See, if we squeeze our eyes together like that, your cute nose wrinkles plus my cream-clotted mascara-ed lashes, it works better.
Try it. (But not into minus numbers, [...]

From the scuffed plastic box labeled Lost and Found I picked the word cacophony, camouflaged with its black block capitals against white card amongst the child’s flashcard nightmare of cat sat mat rat. It is now tightly tethered to my bedroom door handle, and tomorrow I shall untack the missing posters from the trunks of [...]

Come to Helsinki, he says, or Stockholm. He gives me his business card, talks and talks and talks over the backs of our two couches. I sink lower. He traces for me his journey from Delhi to Sweden. In between the different countries of his life recalled, he holds a large hardback book with pictures [...]

I found a chunk of the Berlin Wall in my desk drawers. At which I sat and marveled for a while. How did it get there? The Next Doors spring - wobble - to mind inexplicably, with their midnight balaclava-donning and the painting of swastikas onto their very own car for the insurance payment. Obviously [...]

Now that the sun’s up when I crawl out of bed I no longer get dressed in the dark, stepping on the end of plugs. Mirrors present unwelcome shocks. I worry the wind will change and my mascara face stick like that, for ever. It gets to around 10am before I realise this is an [...]

My hair smells of smoke and jelly bean sweets. Today’s wind blows hair into mouths, black wheelie bins into roads, fusty pms cobwebs into trees. I get into the car next to my mother, and hold my breath so she won’t guess. She looks at me anyway. Under the flash of streetlights she is the [...]