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Billy said that I was only allowed out of the house if I could see the moon from my window and if I brought him wishes from the garden.
I knew where the wishes hung out.
I twirled the syllables around my head as I collected them – dandelion, dandelion, dandelion. Earlier that day, we had looked up the word in the big dictionary underneath Billy’s bed. He explained that it came from the French term – dents de lion – lion’s teeth. The dandelion began as a pretty thing and the petals of its skirt were pointy and yellow like a tutu. ‘This is its daytime dress but the flower eventually needs to go to sleep. It withers and looks tired and haggard and just when you think its time is up’ – Billy held up his fist – ‘it turns into a clock.’ He uncurled his fingers and
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the wishes that refused to die.
‘You have a story for me,’ Billy says. ‘I don’t feel like a story.’ ‘You do,’ he says. ‘I’ll pick a star.’
Maybe I should try and make friends. I’m nervous that all the good ones will be gone by noon.
English accents clip the cobblestones. I wander around like a self-conscious ghost waiting for someone to notice me.
It doesn’t look like she’s getting stung at all until she moves out of the bush and it becomes apparent that she has set herself on fire.
I could never fathom the idea that my mother gave birth to me. It seems much more likely that I rose up from the slurry pit like some sort of hellish Venus, or that I came out of the arse-end of a cow.
Walking into that room is like stepping into the middle of a pop-up book. She rips out pages from books and sticks them to her bedroom walls. Leaves upon leaves of paper make a collage of poems, novels and philosophy books – all of them about dreams. She places them side-by-side as if she’s trying to link clues.
‘Alice is not herself because she has disappeared,’ Mam explained. ‘When Alice falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, she falls out of herself. It happens to us all. When we fall asleep, we fall out of ourselves.’
The mystery of the dreams was enough for me too. I tried to follow Mam’s logic but she let go of my hand along the way.
We found a queen conch once. Mam said that if I put it against my ear I would be able to hear the ocean. Then she told me that what I was really hearing was the sound of my own pulse – the sea inside of me.
‘So are you from a farm farm?’ ‘As opposed to a not a farm farm?’
I recognise him the way you’d struggle to place an actor playing a different character in another film. He slides into context and clicks into my frame of reference. I’m just after waking up from being inside his head. And I know how he’s going to do it. He’s been thinking about it every day on the train home from work. He’s planning the best way to kill himself.
The bruised light made everything blue.
Maybe all the stuffy world of academia is missing is some Disney sparkle?
‘Debbie, put the mascara on. I’ll be fine. I have tissues.’ Mam’s eyes are mostly brown, but there is a crack in her left eye and half of it is light blue, as though she has another person inside her trying to break through.
I feel like I’m trying to coax a bird to protect an egg that is not her own, silently pleading with her to adopt this delicate, alien hope.
I wonder if they know how much is being taken away from them.
‘People have such a narrow view of what they consider to be reality. We only ever catch a glimpse of our shared imagination in art or music.’
‘She is fluent in bullshit.’
lets her fingers spell out a melody,
A tiny, pink miracle. And so perfect. I didn’t want the world to ruin you.’ ‘Well, now it has.’
I’m always uncomfortable leaving the kitchen when the radio is on. I feel bad that it’s rambling away to an empty room. I’m also afraid I’m missing out on something, like the voices will say something interesting, or bitch about me when I’m out of earshot.
Browsing in a bookshop is a lot like collecting shells on a beach on a really good day. I want all of them.
‘I feel like your shells wouldn’t be friends with my shells,’ Mam says.
And it was all in her head. Look at Maeve. It’s still all in her head, that’s the problem.
Snowflake began with a dream.
