Everyone went out.
My father donned a navy suit and licked what is left of his hair over his forehead. He leaves the house with one eye partly obscured. And a bow-tie. He went out wearing a bow-tie. A spotted blue bow-tie. The parental unit has a busier social life than I do at the moment. [...]

Hush, he says with his eyes closed, I want to be a pencil.
I hold my breath and wait for a pencil transformation.
No, he says despondently after several minutes of silence. It’s not happening. He turns his face back into the pillow.

Naively, I am really hoping she will know. It has been bugging me for a while, a year or so.
I ask Mami what the ex does with everything he knows about me now that he no longer needs it.
He Knows a lot, I tell her darkly. She looks taken aback.
What does he know? Her hands [...]

In a strange twist of events, my old best friend from high school will be living a thirty second walk from my front door as of tomorrow. We haven’t talked for years. The last time we did anything together as friends was for my sixteenth birthday, when we went to swoon over Dylan Moran performing [...]

(I am in Dublin. This post is being typed on the world’s slowest computer.)
For breakfast Elisabeth and I contemplate the shrink-wrapped black plastic box of take-away sushi which she placed carefully underneath the bunk bed last night. It looks sweaty, the tuna a deeper shade of grey today, so we head to the Fresh Food [...]

We create an open-air anthropomorphic drama, where we direct and interpret and say this way that way and play audience all at once, where our causal agents walk bow-legged with six spread toes, frequently defying gravity with a sound that drops the centre of my stomach somewhere half-way between my disobedient knees and purple painted [...]

On his four day weekend visit, we sit in a dark park in semi-sleet and imagine my future Hispanic lover, whom I will meet in Austria, him a travel writer, me a nomadic backpacker.
When he says beautiful, I say like a tree.
A high class prostitute. The perversion of beautiful by two skinny funny guys [...]

He moved in with his ex and her father quite a while ago. Lost count of the number of days he’s been living on the worn couch in her living room. Sitting and eating and sleeping. It feels more like a prison sentence now than it did when he first arrived. This is no longer [...]

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, [...]