Ad Hoc Fiction

20 Seconds during an Earthquake in Walnut, California
you’re in class when it starts and your skin tingles and you smile but the kid with the tight haircut shouts for everyone to get under the desks so you roll your eyes and say yeah sure what the hell everyone down but you have some arthritis so you stay up and this whole thing reminds you about a lecture your father gave you thirty-five years ago about how you’re not a leader and he was right so to spite Tight Haircut and your father you fold your arms and lean back against the whiteboard like you’re James Dean or Marlon Brando not that these kids are old enough to know Brando but this isn’t for them it’s for anyone who wants to know what you’re rebelling against and this stance says, “What do you got?”

Sinking
They say that’s where London used to be, but we don’t remember. We’ve seen pictures – sodden, then dried out, faded pictures. We’ve heard the stories – alcohol-soaked, never-to-dry-out, kaleidoscopic stories. We’ve felt their pain – sob-drowned, sinking, seeping pain.

Up here, we say we’re drookit when we’re wet, but they don’t know the word, so they haven’t started to worry yet. We say, ‘Dinna fash,’ instead of ‘don’t worry’. They hear it as comfort. And it is. Though false. If we used their tongue, they’d hear the lie. Up here, even this high, we all lie.

And I never did learn how to swim.

Miracles
If you pee on toothpaste, and it fizzes, you are pregnant. I want to know, but I am afraid to jinx it with a shop-bought test. But how do you pee on toothpaste? If I were six, I'd know who to ask; we used to deal with disgusting things: frog eyes, mosquito bites, soup made of compost. Now we do spreadsheets and go to staff meetings.
     I'm alone, it's 3 am. I squeeze the toothpaste and pipe out little people into the sink. This one is lopsided, and this is more like a mouse. I try again: this blob is like a girl. Cadmus had it easy. If I had dragon teeth to sow, I'd watch my warriors sprout out – all grown up, perfectly formed, ready for battle. I'd brandish my sword. Instead, I must become small and slowly go back into childhood, earth, and the dark corners of my body.

The Bear
The striped walls flap in the wind, making a sound that reminds him of summer storms from his childhood. If he closes his eyes he’s transported to the lush greenery, the cool air, and the fierce rustle of leaves before the thunder rumbled.

Here, in a world of candy floss, so little is familiar to that time. His new world is one of chaos, loud music, vibrant colours and applause that circles him like a noose.

It makes him tired.

The lights flicker to blue and his trainer comes towards him. He stumbles to his feet. Thousands of eyes bore into his soul as he first balances a ball, then keeps a balloon in the air.

After the applause comes relief. He can hide in his cage, and in the shadows he can cry his tears and pretend for a moment that they are raindrops, and that he is home.

Bare Bones
'Us sardines have to stick togevver, mate. Life's hard enough as it is. Have you niffed the body odour of twenty sardines squeezed into a tin? Course you ain't. Who'd wanna do that? We have delicate stomachs, us sardines. Delicate bones, too. We squash easy. Ouch! it hurts just'a fink of it.'

'Me, I'm allergic to tin. Come up in hives, I does. Gawd knows why they're considering me fer food. Me allergies an' stuff, that's why I don't holiday in Cornwall. All them tin mines. Not to mention the freezing water in January! And them sharks! Nuff said, eh?'

'Absolutely. You poor thing. I don't understand what we're doing here, though. I was perfectly happy swimming in the Algarve.'

'Ha! You stuck-up toff. We're heading fer toast. Brown bread, dead! Y'know, even if it kills me, I'm gonna makes sure someone chokes on me bones!'

In a Bookshop in Finland
They have placed you on a high stool – metal legs, pink vinyl top – a high stool on a platform in the centre of a shop, in Finland where, surprisingly, your books are kept in stock.

They have fed you vodka – 80 percent per shot – and you are smiling as if you’ll never stop in a bookshop in Finland.

But these are shy people, won’t meet eyes when they talk and all they want to do is walk silently round a bookshop in Finland. They have no desire to gawp. While you are Nelson on a column, David Blaine on his pole, talent sliding off that slippery seat, running out into snow-covered street where the air is clear and chill as vodka. And you are left completely alone.

Too Much of Anything Can Kill You
At first, it was just an innocuous shopping list. She’d placed it on her arm where it was easy to read. But when she tried to remove it, she found the low-tack adhesive had stuck fast.

In time, to-do lists, telephone numbers, don’t forgets, and reminders started to multiply capaciously. Post-it notes were peeled from their stacks and added to her personage in quick succession to conceal the tasks completed or left undone.

When an email address became embedded in her elbow she started to wear long sleeved tops. Her clothes became baggy, misshapen, housing the sticky appendages.

Her identity slowly smothered; she became a smorgasbord of fluttering patchwork squares, concealing layers of wafer-thin paper cuts, tiny slices in her skin where ink tattooed her veins.

She finally freed herself from the burden of every day responsibilities crushed beneath the weight of words.

A Brief History of Time in our House
This second is the same as the last, a press of the screen, the same exhalation.We lie in bed having social intercourse. Our hearts have pumped four ounces of blood.
 
Minutes replicate themselves like bacteria. Your quantum of likes leave you unloved. We have breathed sixteen litres of air. Little is different in this hour. Our livers have metabolised another drink, the sky sticks on black with white moon. Lunar and menstrual cycles are looping. With variant ingredients we cook the same suppers. Together we have shed a complete layer of skin.
 
We took an excursion around the sun again this year, five hundred million miles back to where we started. The Earth is a fraction warmer although it doesn’t feel it here. Expended another 1.25% of our lives, give or take.
 
On the event horizon of a black hole, time is white. Our white blood cells die every day.

No room for dark thoughts
While a suicide bomber killed whole families in Kabul and Hindu men raped a Muslim girl in Jammu, while Boko Haram kidnapped young women in Chilbok and US diplomats shared porn in Phnom Penh, while Assad gassed his people in Douma and five rangers were killed in the Congo, I walked my dogs over Bathwick Fields and watched the bloodied sun set over the city and breathed the soft English air and allowed no room for dark thoughts.

Fishing
Sitting with Suzy, tears rolling down her face yet all the while certain he would come back to her, I thought of the summer we made that place in the woods our own. Children one moment adults the next, screaming as we dived and splashed in the water, flirting as we lay by the river bank, the fast flowing water like silk against our fingers. And Suzy standing every day on the bank, fishing rod in hand, swearing the flashes of silver that lit up the water were fish. Of course he never came back and the fish were only sunlight glinting on the water.

Sunday Roast
He slips sage leaves and lemon slices under the skin of the chicken, wipes his hands on a towel, and squints at the recipe book. Gas Mark 5, it says, but the numbers around the knob stretch into hundreds. He pulls his phone from his pocket and Googles, swiping salmonella over the screen.  

He should have taken his daughter up on the offer to eat with them, but that's not the way they do things. Sunday means a roast here in the family home, where the walls throb with memories of the girls as children, bickering over Barbies and scattering Lego bricks that later he would step on and have to bite his lip to avoid swearing.  

He chops an onion for the gravy, the way she did, just last week standing here in her yellow dress, only sixty-nine, heart thudding reliably. His eyes water.

The Language of Seasoning
Don't get me wrong, Grandad told a lot of stories. Nobody believed he really crossed the Atlantic on a raft made of plates, or taught Winston Churchill how to make a good salsa, or invented the doily. But, the way he cracked pepper. The way his hands held the mill tight and gave it a sharp twist, one way then the other, his face plain and tight, made me think that the stories he didn't tell dripped out of him like drying paint. Slow. Mournful. Permanent.

Collapse
I lay the belt out on top of the jeans, dark blue shirt, grey jersey and socks, ready. I pick up the belt again, the metal buckle under my fingers. This won't be allowed for the cremation. I put it aside.

In Too Deep
She takes a deep breath and explains it’s been going on for months, that the ticket you found in her pocket was only the latest in a run — she's seen them all, Blood Brothers, Billy Elliot, Les Mis — he appreciates theatre, unlike you. She throws out confessions like accusations: that business trip to Paris, you didn't even suspect, you don't see her as anything other than a mother. You want to hit her, or at least throw her clothes in the street, but you're in too deep, with the house and the kids and the years you aren't ready to admit you wasted, so you swallow a sob, grit your teeth, and ask what you can do to fix it.

A Cold Autumn
The last time we spoke was deep in the cold autumn of 1973, in front of a shuttered store on Front Street. I found him brushing crumbs from the lapel of his corduroy jacket with one hand and brandishing a crust of bread in the other. Tall and thin, with curly dark hair and horned-rim glasses, his appearance was intense and scholarly from across the road. Nose-to-nose, however, there was desperation in his eyes and spittle at the corner of his mouth. He tried to hold onto a coherent thought while asking me for money. I, his only son, turned him down and walked away. 

When he was found near the railroad crossing east of town, I was the one they called. The side entrance to the morgue was frost-covered and locked, but I remember turning to face gorgeous, metallic starlings wheeling and calling in bright shafts of morning light.

Mutability
Pair the socks, he says. She couples black with blue, red with green. Tidy the tins. She mixes tomatoes with beans. Sort the rubbish. She plants cress seeds in a yoghurt pot.

Highlight the nouns and verbs, he says. She underlines adverbs and adjectives too. Memorise the eight times table. She learns six, seven and nine. Write three hundred words on your favourite character. She writes three thousand and could go on. 
 
Be back by ten, he says. She doesn't come home. Don't go out alone at night. She hitches to London. Phone once a week. She calls him every day.
 
At college, she studies the physiology of a horse, adds a horn. Takes a fin from a fish, gives it an engine, splinters the sky, explodes a shed. Hangs it in a gallery. 
 
What a mess, he would say, if only he could.