A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

Because people don’t want homes; they want show houses—only by means of a show house can they be distracted from the generalised going-nowhereness of their perfectly pointless lives.

My mother knows everything. I used to think all mothers did but in recent years I’ve come to realise it’s just mine. My mother alone knows that, in point of fact, nothing is extraordinary.

They’ll appear in the supermarket in Lisduff one of these days, the daffodils. Divided into bunches, elastic-banded, propped up in water buckets. But I won’t buy them. Daffodils only remind me of cancer, forget-me-nots of kidney disease, red poppies of the trenches.

Descriptions of flowers which should warm the soul, remind her of malignant/terminal diseases. For example daffodils should signify new beginnings and rebirth, while forget-me-nots should signify enduring love---a bond that transcends time, and lastly red poppies mean remembrance.

Works about Flowers, I test myself: Anya Gallaccio, preserve ‘beauty’, 1991–2003. Two thousand red blooms pressed between glass panes, left to atrophy into brown pulp. They are gerbera–daisy hybrids; their heads are so classically floret-shaped. If somebody gave you a pencil and pad and asked you to draw a flower, you’d draw a gerbera–daisy hybrid without even knowing you had. I wouldn’t know either if it wasn’t for Anya Gallaccio; she chose them because they are biotechnologically mass-produced to meet the demands of the global market. So many people covet their cut stems, the Earth can’t keep up. Most of Gallaccio’s materials are perishable, her artworks concern mortality, inevitability, powerlessness. You can grow as many mutant flowers as you want, Gallaccio is saying. But you cannot stop a single one from dying.

That is bleak as hell

The escaped hairs I tugged from the brush’s bristles and rolled between my palms until they formed a tight ball. Then I squashed my hairballs inside a jam jar and placed the jar on the top shelf of my bookcase. I had carelessly selected, from my mother’s marmalade-making stash, a jar which formerly contained baby onions. Almost immediately, the knitted fibres of each ball were impregnated by the scent of vinegar—of preservation and corrosion both at once.

I love baby onions.