Space, Time

Unsun. Unwarmth. Unweather continues.
 
Some people live in this permanent fog. Like a bowl or a drum, it comes down on you. Frost flowers form on the car windscreen. A snow plough patrols, backwards and forwards.
 
Daybreak. I peel a pear – from calix to pedicel. Variety; Conference. Origin; Belgium, where it’s progenitor Leon Leclerc de Laval was grafted. Grown in a polytunnel. Unnatural.
 
Fruit in my left, peeler in the right, I must first make a nick with the rather blunt blade, then pull smoothly downwards, while turning it round, to lift away the skin, denuding it in strips.
 
˜
 
A nasty experience. It was in childhood but decades later she still hesitates to put it down on paper, even to pronounce it.
 
The past haunts the present – the dread, the foreboding, spreads like a contagion. The memory of something that took place in a room makes her fear that whole building and the street that it’s on; the name of the street and street-signs in general; the postcode that forms part of the address; the radius of hm hm hm; the numbers of the buses whose routes she knows run through that part of town. The digits X and X. The verb in the present tense. The past tense, the past … the bully leaning over her.
 
˜
 
A new start for you! More satisfaction!
 
Live with fulfilment, sharpen your understanding of people, manage crises, kick your junk food habit, suss out your children, get on top of problems, re-use and re-cycle! Do it! Do it now!
 
Up beyond the atmosphere, in luminous blackness, a woman in a bright blue boilersuit manipulates some tubing while her space capsule docks. Her long yellow hair, pulled together at the crown, floats out like tentacles – an octopus trying to escape a glass box.
 

Mary Michaels

in collection Games of Soldiers, 2023, Sea Cow Press, ISBN 978-0-9506729-6-0