Nuclear
Tis snowing. How can you not write a snow story? This is a snippet from a larger thing.
Nuclear
Hold out your arms like you did as a child when your dad said, How much d’you reckon I love you, kidda? Remember how you almost clapped behind your back? Now look up. The sky is as vast as that love. At it’s epicentre, a nucleus of light. The low-slung sun is somehow embryonic
germline mutation
1 in 2
entombed as it is within near-solid cloud. Even so, the light is ferocious. But that’s not the word. What is? Above, the heavens are a fantasy. The spilling and rippling, travelling, blushing, reacting of pink on blue. On its knees beneath, a snowscape that will be fluorescent come night, its boundaries look like thumbprints in calligraphic black. I see tracks, palimpsestic in snow, soft and dark, some old, some young. Tonight, people will rise from sleep to sill, gaze beyond bedrooms and feel moved by the majesty. Sentries of their own domains, of their sleeping children.
Yes. Here.
My breath meets the air and is temporarily memorialised. I enjoy the thoughts of these particles of myself that have emerged from the inside and may, in some state, remain. My friends say, you’re just missing the company. My friends say, just meet someone else. How can I say
not a virus, a vendetta
that after James, any kind of kindness is so shamefully treasured, turned over like a fossil. That each morning and night, I imagine letting my lips touch that scalding skin between your shoulder blades. But how long ago was it now that all the pieces of the puzzle clicked in and I’d thought of dentures I’d never need. My friends say, before returning to their hives to busy honey, just celebrate the now. When I realised, I’d been scalding my palette in the Starbucks near Ilford station, watching the W19’s headlights feather across a shuttered Boots, the violet frill at the edge of that yellow light, revealing a couple with a baby, whose Christmas outfit has baked him into a pudding, holly for a hat. The query in my body that I had considered second hand, a left over, not worth pondering, suddenly answered. How can you argue with statistics?
