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Blossom, said the child for the first time in his life standing solid on small feet dividing pleasure between two distinct syllables, making a sullen day sizzle.
Blossom, again, reflectively, relishing rhythm the releasing of lips, the plosive, the up-down waggle of a four year tongue closing behind teeth and tapping them.
Every time we see some you must say ‘blossom’ he ordered, savouring the stop of air, the hum and vibration, the drop of pitch in the latest addition to the inventory.
Blossom, we said together while I considered the heart stopping precision of his mouth curving round vinegar sobriquet, oubliette and colonisation.
Whenever he pleaded to walk her home, she refused, needing time as preparation for return to respectability, distance for metamorphosis lover to wife.
She liked to shop on the way, trade deficiency for decency bread, cheese; staples ready for the supper table laden with silver crystal and candles,
tall, white tapers of reparation on the cool, domestic shrine, flickering to the rhythm of restful music, far from that hot flat and the afternoon’s wild reel.
A size twelve sausage plugged into a number ten bladder, some days her skin doesn’t quite fit. It itches her bones tugs at her hips snags on a nail wedges up between her buttocks. She wants to inch it off her skeleton, stretch it, slip sleek leather back over her joints;
other times it’s too roomy, she lugs it round as it sags; bow-legged, she walks wide a spaghetti westerner; or it splays beyond her toes so she flat-foots like a platypus. But, today it’s a smooth, flexible hide fresh from a tanner.
Mostly when I vacuum the house I am robotic but, today, I focus on particles of skin and hair sucked up thread, beads, wool strewn from sewing. I watch fragments of paper, pins, unrecognisable things clatter into the belly of the appliance and begin to wonder whether I ever hauled an entire human body, a steel works a cotton field, a sheep through the tube of the hose. I ponder all hoovering women of the world. Between us we could assemble plant staff gigantic industries furnish monopolies by consecutive re-construction of recovered scatterings from emptied dust-bags. I consider a search of these gatherings to prevent discarding undiscovered genius, someone’s soul, the key to all our problems.
in anthology My Mother Threw Knives, 2006, Second Light Publications |
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