flash fiction – mariaology

I knew that Hunger Day was created when I became an adult

I knew that Hunger Day was created when I became an adult

It awoke blessed with need and unkind feeling. The trembles of the unmentionable, now and as ever. It needed time to replenish the hormone stock of its happiness. Like the rest of us. It needed so much more than stock and horror. It needed video — swithering — it needed Latinate prose, free indirect fries and vinegar. O so much fucking vinegar. It was tabs, log-in distress, the altitude of edible starlight.

It knew goodness so much as a child knows the day is structured around hunger. When I was growing up, it was easy. It was so easy. I would plunder the stress realm so much to get what it wanted. You are in want of the possession of character, said a soap-lathered mouth. It cried. It died. It died again. It died in the succulent wormhole of nothing in particular.

It did what

makes a good leader: motive, openness and the emotional intel having bloomed droll talent on the vintage catalyst. It did unto them what dread blossomed corpseflower altruism ugh no. It deepened. I did so much for it. One of daddy’s ego tantrums was colloquial botany. Sold out the id. It did.

expandable pets

Daily writing prompt

Dogs or cats?

View all responses

Lately they’d been doing this thing of pretending they were walking the dog. Which dog? Obviously the dog. The dog would appear alongside them kind of grown from original emoji like those tiny dinosaurs, flowers or anime characters you used to get in stockings at Christmas, the ones you add water to then they expand with superabsorbent polymer to become a whole other thing. Idk what the dog was expanding with, some air of affection. It was lonely to walk around the abandoned railway lines and through underpasses and along by the retail park and up by the meadowing verge of the motorway. It was lonely to eat litter. It was lonely to squish shadows into predators and gull cries into opulent music. Having a dog you were present and obvious. People stopped to say the dog was beautiful and so were you, pet.

Cats cry in the mouths of children and follow them home. They take the canal route without listening to father and collect tiny yellow flowers so to eat bitter all the more sweetly. Cats had a feel for waywardness. Poised for the kill. Whispered: don’t work. Cats hated the water and their orientation was always away from the canal and towards the city. Cats took upon the gulls at night, like the mushroom controlling the ants, and this is how they learned how to fly. You’re a child right? Ofc you’ll follow.

Spider Necklace

That spiderwebs look like necklaces is hardly surprising. You made really good use of the cookies. They lived in your brain and measured time like a smart meter to cost more, horrible sharp smell of time, golden darling. The temperature got cold enough so that spiderwebs were necklaces encrusted with sharp frost, to unhook from trees and arabesques of gate to wear at night. The people took pictures of glaciated cities and posted them on the outer gates, with affections measured by the gram. They wore black tourmaline wolf spiderlings and blizzard stone zebras to cover their décolletage. Inside the small room, scared my hot water bottle would burst on me, I was too cold to have glamour. I looked at my golden darling coming close to coming, I could hardly wait for winter to end its solo guitar on the buttress of autumn. It wasn’t as though time snatched the web from her neck and said no more posting, no more selling yourself short as a small glass animal. Often I was a gelid cadaver, after a fuck. The man on the podcast who was a famous director said he hated to be in pain and encouraged women to stop poking their own wounds. He said to do things that made you feel better, instantly, and he put those words in the mouth of a blonde and glamorous actress. I used to buy lighthearted eyeliner and dot my face with artificial freckles to look ‘healthy’. Squinting at the sun is a personality. The moon is our universal friend. Those cookies will be hatching soon and we’ll live in the fat of their secrets. I couldn’t be alone again, especially with the gimmick machine of octovision. I had studied the web and was now found styling myself a spider matriarch, highly resistant to magic, indulged in the cannibalism of love’s imaginary, myself at the end of Verity Spott’s Hopelessness. Frost crystals glitter in the gathering wind saying people make mistakes. You can tear this from me, all of my necklacing sentence, I don’t care anymore.

Ornament & Missouri

Once, the temperament of the bellflower was of concern to me. I wrote down words like ‘ornament’ and ‘Missouri’. I had a Lamy pen to write sideways, slantwise, of my other life. There was one club in particular where I excelled in the art of other people’s music. What some call karaoke but I call languishing in melody, obsessively, falling apart in front of an audience. I was like the VHS girl-child in Aftersun butchering ‘Losing My Religion’ with such sweetness the whole resort goes silent. What talent had I for pitch or flourish? There was a column of white light above my head at all times which I imagined writing into, solemnly, a long list of my songs. The more they snared in my throat, the more they became me. The newspapers declared this behaviour ‘cheery perennial’ at the local, noted my penchant for particular martinis, the olive glow of the evening. Any evening, you could find me there in a sequin distress, picking my excess off the floor. I had this thing called a hem. It was the way my voice dropped. The way I gathered it up. Outside the club was a cottage garden, can you believe it, where I tended these purple flowers. I spritzed the last of my drinks across their wilted leaves and I murmured the inside scoop of each song, so only the flowers knew. Their growth was writing itself all over the skirts of the club, I was feeding it; soon we would nourish ourselves from the fruits of trial and error. It seemed appalling that my whole generation had fallen back into the habit of other people’s songs. As a child, I was dragged along to open mics, and all the songs were original, weren’t they? You had to put a few coins in the kitty to get on the list. According to the principle of locality, a particle is influenced by its closest surroundings, with interactions limited to the speed of light. But according to Bell, there are variables. The risk of being heckled or worse, adored. I knew my theory of the song to be incomplete and quantum. It went very far. I stroked the rare blue hue of my partial shade. I queued Outside. Sung the non-lexical vocables of glossy stars. Ate lyrics for kicks. I paid the price.

12/09/1998

I began life calloused on the thumb of the family. All my life I ate chalk. My first memory was volunteering the date in class. “It’s the 12th September miss”. What’s the year? They made me stand up to write it. That morning a bee had stung me behind the knee, in that very soft spot, and I hadn’t told anyone. I winced and limped to the board and wrote 12/09/1998. It was the summer the ash tree was felled and then the oak, and we all made nests from the heaps of cut grass and I tried not to cry when scolded for grass stains, my skirt too short, my sting. Did I not understand the task at hand? You need to help the boys beside you, they said, when you’re finished your work there’s always more to be done. I wanted to be done with it all at once, and to never do it again and bask in the slow, drawn-out time of my earned oblivion. Then I discovered coffee and had all these memories rushing to the loch where I learned the name of a baby swan, a cygnet, which sounded like a form of jewellery or grammar. “That bread has stones in it”, I would say when presented with brown slices of something seeded. Throw it all to the swans. The mothers did not know what to do with me. I would not eat the slabs of pink trembling on dinner plates, so I ate the sleepover candy, all of it, and slept through the films, the first to want to sleep in their company. The mothers were vicious with hairbrushes. Do you know what happened that day in 1998? I licked white powder off my forefinger, then my green thumb. I felt funny. Under the table, the boys showed me their easy-peelers, their cigarettes, their rusty little knives. Somebody telling me to focus. To stop. At any moment, I’d feel the ash, the wax, the writing all over me. I was in the birdshit deep in the loch, my sediment; I was a lot of work.

notes on fake heiresses

‘I work for my success, I earn my accomplishments. […] Maybe you can learn to be smart like me. I doubt it, but you can dream’.

I would really like to exorcise Anna D*lvey from my present obsessions, having blitzed through the hyper-cringe miniseries and comparatively breezy podcast in barely a week, pursued a bunch of Instagrams and finally shut my eyes only to dream of that accent grinding through a void.

Credit card, credit card, credit card
assspiration/respiration

I used to draw pictures of infinity pools and flick through brochures of luxury hotels for no other reason than my dad works in travel.

In Anna’s story, to dream is compensatory for the actual accomplishment of success, and your dreams can be extracted by an app called Shadow…….and all that dream data you uploaded gets aggregated as part of general projects of self-optimisation, leading to what?

I prefer my shadow-realm in dreaming device; what other people dream. You can listen to the stories of other people dreaming by pressing yourself to the groundwork of a landlord nation. So many people have pressed themselves to the skin of these floors and walls. Why the old hard rain or old hard road? It’s nice to stand outside in the rainy asylum of television.

There’s a loud buzzing in my flat like a fly the size of a building is stuck. It’s been going since Thursday.

Today at four o’clock a dark grey cloud.

Everyone on the internet seems to criticise AD for not using conditioner but I like seeing out of context screenshots flash across google — prison is so exhausting, you wouldn’t know — and everyone asking where is she, what’s that bridge — boys with names like Hunter and Chase

Get off on development

Writing this adds to the AD economy, but I can’t help making notes. For a while now wondering what a dream is and wanting it always to be more than compensation for the struggle we’re put through — dreams are not opiates for mass depression —
ineluctability. luxury.

We are suffering a mass shortage of pleasures at least in the narrow world of these isles and especially what I imagine to be england……..who else watches this and thinks, I don’t even like champagne. I wanna be adored comes to mind………I find the soundtrack flashy and intrusive like TOO ON THE NOSE but perhaps being gauche is aesthetic necessity……if you are trying to do a satire on the people whose lives you incorporate fully by lassoing the loop holes of their own system — weakness, lust for novelty, a good story.

Court fashion. What it is to be well-heeled. Attentive to somebody’s daily post. I miss outfit posting thus Polyvore and lookbook but also, ouch. It’s all in posture? Like how you present the myriad proprioceptions of finance itself, plus conceptual finance & platonic finance. Get your eyebrows done.

Obviously this whole show is about whiteness and how this is performed, tacitly stratified and constructed for actual material consequence, a f f l u e n c e.

What would you do with access to an app called Shadow? What invocation of the shadow realm does this offer? My eyesight is getting worse the singer is a blurred intimation of human blue on the stage. My dreams blur as with eyesight, so become less of narrative detail & character — more of feeling. I wake up with spillages of emotional pigment all over my chest, belly, brain. Sometimes it makes you wet too

which is to say, we read each other.

Deeply? Every time I blink there are several billion more tweets in the world, you have to know that. Know it all the time like feeling your white blood cells come up. I have a bulimic consciousness I don’t want any more info, the words are burning my throat

for how long has acid been pouring upon them

Los Angeles in fall?

You can tell by the podcast voice. Someone says ‘scammer and scammer – a match made in heaven!’

spoiler alert for other fake vocal fry heiresses.

This one is the largest dream database in the world, it’s in her heart. You gave all the dreams by watching it, like & subscribe. Self-identity as Futurist means you floss everyday on the internet. I’ve been studying the little bits.

Last night a tiny centipede crawled out of the spine of my copy of Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. I want to go to San Francisco. I want the noise to stop.

AD = After Death. Anno Domini. Anna Delvey. Advertisement. Advantage. Analogue to Digital.

Bin man outside is singing INXS.

Dumb socialite lite lite extra cherry diet coke

‘I wanted to learn everything. So I could be anything’.

The Anna D*lvey aporia of February.

Scam trends of 2022 as response to crypto?

Tindering loneliness, paying for soap operas of algorithmic advantage, buying virtual real estate including the non-fungible artefact of a HEX number.

I wonder who I spent a long time being real in.

How much I paid a month to use all that purple.

It’s so convenient to log into all the channels at all times, listen to other people talk of their dreams in computerised accents, dream exactly their dreams until you are what kind of god posting anyway, just to reblog them in the 24 hour window of the story

you feel accelerated then smoothed, depressed as in self-love

just to be in their world at the click of a button

I like her best in the lilac pantsuit and classy copper

abyssal sensation that some of this is really true, even the fashion. Slip diamanté talk of I love Dostoevsky accordant to telly

A book she says her father passed onto her, it’s all about struggle, and telling the psychiatrist, Look, that character who said he was going to america, “he shoots himself in the head” — you know what happens

resultant

cesspools of debt

“to girls like me”

precognitive data analysis [ crisis ]

augmented saturates of the dream economy

surplus love

love

plus size appliances

Turns out, a scam, you can use right now for free

taking out money the same as taking the bus to just get somewhere

none of this is real

no land

forms a bubble

Cowboy Gardening

It was supposed to snow in the night and the not snowing was sore as a missed period. I awoke with two crescent-shaped moons in the palm of my hand and thought of a sacrifice unwittingly given in dreamland. Said Jesus. Peridot phlegm and the scratchy sensation, knowing that speech too could be cool, historical, safe. Could not see beyond pellucid rivulets, Omicron my windows, my streaming January. January

streams from every well-known orifice of the world. Its colour is shamelessly stone. I seem to be allergic to inexplicable moments and so keep to the edge of the polyphony of yellow. I am cared for. The Great Barrier Reef dissolves in my dreams the substrate of yellow. It goes far. Pieces of the GBR are washed ashore in Ayr, Singapore, Los Angeles, Greenland. I go to these places by holding a polished boiled candy in my mouth, like the women in Céline and Julie Go Boating. My ankles licked by truest shores / but January didn’t fucking happen.

❤

Put together the orange-purple rose, your possible outcomes are red or gold (if you are lucky). Two reds together, with the golden watering can, could result in the rare blue rose. A novel rose. Black velvet roses grow in the old woman’s garden because she has infinite time to tend them. I’m not saying she’s immortal, like the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish; only that she doesn’t exist in our time. It’s rude to assume so. I’m not saying the lines of her face are asemic writing — nobody did that to her, or scarred her. She’s not scared. She just lives and dies all the time. She waters the roses.

Sometimes I imagine her in fisherman’s clothes, in meshy nightclub outfits of neon flavours, in extravagant ballgowns, blue boilersuits. Sometimes I’ve seen her before. The only way I can see her is to climb a few steps on the ladder by the village store, its red paint flaking, and I hang my body upside down the other side, risking exposure. I never eat before doing this. She doesn’t see me; she doesn’t see her roses either, not the blooms. In the village, people walk around with handfuls of rose seeds sometimes strung in little hemp bags. These are the currency of care. I have tended the young with haircuts and watched the flourishing of teenage roses. They say I am an old lady in the garb or garbage of former actresses. I hear them sing to me their stories. “Remember
she shot the guy who brought the astrograss”.
What they don’t remember, whippersnappers, is the incorrigible realism of that turf. Fuck it,
I have done nothing wrong. I perform for them my cowboy gardening. Broadcast the surplus value of our mutual twilight. Halloween roses for everyone. Every night I wake up from someone else’s childbirth and the world is so sore, the wound in the sky the snow wants to fall through. They bandaged it with realism. I need to go far. Do you remember the last time you awoke and felt like a person?

❤

The roses grow up in the gaps of the cattlegrid, knowing they will be trodden on. Again and again. We can’t stop them from doing this and they do it so often we have to account for a portion of Waste. Kissing you is itself a trellis. But we are propped and grown sideways with the vines strung betwixt our ribs. We are babies.

I like the tired way the roses intonate colour. The economics of the roses. Their euphemistic fetish. I tried to avow my commitment to rosehood the day I saw your calves all torn, and saw about women getting their labias reduced, and the red, blood roses sold on the internet, and rest. I lay this on your grave, the world.

My love, as a redness in our rosette
That’s newly worn in June
O my love, like the melt
That’s sweetly played in turbines

So fairway artery thou, my bonnie lasso
Defiled in love as I
Will love thee still, my decade
Tinged as the seas are garlanded dry

Tinged all the seas as thee, my decanter
At the romantic menagerie of sunset
I will luminary still, a debutante
Of the lighthouse sarcophagi

And plough thee well, my only lathe!
And plough thee well, awhile!
And I will come again, my love
Though it were ten thousand millennium.

My love’s rose-coloured highlighter really hurt the extra-textual, and thus booked trains to bed. I had an identity. I knew what you had done to the text. Austerity of the meadow to blame for ongoing culling of kin. You are abandonable as you have always been. Saplings for pronouns.

I feel wild and sad.

I feel pieces together stirring inside the world. Little bits of coral awake in
my throat, the shape of eight billion sun-spike proteins I was dumb
enough to swallow. It is not my fault but in my dreams
I get product emails like, Forget-me-not
a pair of jeans, high-waisted Levi’s
as if to wear at the end of the month
we keep saying sorry for delay, embroidered
our thighs with spiders
excuses to use lighters
without smoking
does it make us vectors
the warning of snow and ice still issued
from inside the snow globe of the rosehip
changes as it withers, glass shards
pissed from acid clouds in all colours:
black, blue, burgundy, cherry brandy, coral
cream, dark pink, green, lavender, light pink,
lilac, orange, peach, purple’s timeless red,
salmon, Hollywood white & yellow, rainbow
chosen for the significant other, a masculine flower
dipped in fortified light, I’m thankful
I look good lying down, the long unconditional stem
aka Lemonade, l-l-l-lemonade, l-l-l-lemonade…….

A briar morning

A briar morning of London, the original underground statuette or ahistorical blossom — what are you doing here? It is very gentle to slice the cake of your loved one’s birthday, rich dark insomnia cocoa; the sky is practicing abstinence I can’t see the stars. Consider the interface of energies required to make this: several employees gathered around with walkie-talkies, another first edition loneliness, a seat to yourself. I say to myself, “this is the morning the sky is a gradient like the standardised gradients offered by Microsoft Powerpoint in the mid-2000s” and it is not cheapening? The modern philosophy of doing your tax returns in a panic to want accountancy exhausted and proffering the invoice through which a house is saved, this is the house of the poem whose cost is enormous. What is the most expensive poem in the world and was it ever gifted for Christmas? The doorways of the poem are the blanks in the world blank dream I sing for thee, the long day doesn’t remember itself as software. A man on the train says he’s connected to mystics and he saw a person looking over me in the moment I wrote this. A man took his Tesla into the dunes to obliterate the everyday dumpling of automobile labour, that you had to repair this through various elaborate steps like I order new headphones with speakers embedded so as to walk around on the phone, like a nozzle it connects my breath to the stars. You are dropping off sleeping bags in the dream, a shelf for your glasses, a coda for napping off lavish anxieties that bloom in the elevenses of news is a fallacy. Avanti mystics. This is the worst day to pass exactitude as a micro trend or see like zoomers typing badly in the 1980s; the person is a railroad that goes on forever once they get started. Friday is a frantic alacrity I love you a briar morning, my shins torn apologies of the privileged for getting this blood so torn — a tree, a sparkle, a dove, a star. Everyone’s locked in their own toasters and burning crumbs, smoking dope commons of the momentary aerosol, first-person trauma of seeing yourself convivial in other amusements. You read? You blink game? You test positive! It is a message to educate the beautiful thumbprint of kittens who haven’t yet scratched reality out of their innocent systems. Christmas is a rate of speed. Stasis, languid and of ivy, tussling, intimacy of the leaf miner and the leaf. We need holly, poinsettia, grace. A week from today will be the new year.

My Black Dog

Life changed the moment I minted my depression as an NFT. The process was long and boring, but now I am a clean one who has never grasped the meaning of silverware. Let me try to explain the process of having a life thus expunged of its fungibility, which is to say, I feel now worthy of anything. I don’t even need to log on.

This is not a book of ‘the environment’, nor do I profess care for the precise expenditure required to fuel that sluice of the blockchain which facilitated said transaction. Honestly I am just glad to have sold my black dog to an eager buyer.
I can hear someone crying thru the walls most nights, the kind of wail that angels do, having no sex to think about they might body millennia of pain. The quality of having no carnal emotions owing to calorific deficit is guaranteed.
The black dog was adopted from more or less insipid childhood fantasies in which more or less I could not have lived this far. Small red marks on my glyph flesh. Not to be dramatic but there is a reason why I am scared of cars. The first time what is called Marlene sat behind a wheel I freaked.
Communiqué over Excel spreadsheets had led me to believe my sadness was extractable. I started feeling it everywhere, standardised and flashing among the long trails of light exposure.
Imagine buying a thing for its absolute exclusivity, only to release its essence, bit by bit, in meatspace! The ambience of my original sadness spread across the mall, where generally I was to be found weeping by the ceramic fountain, where people tossed coins as the wanton value of wishes.
[Autumn redux]
Dramatic monologue of the dog: I am a dog! A fucking dog! You better not touch me.
I tell you, I freaked the fuck out. She did. Is it better to have someone crying or having sex thru the walls? Irritability is a relative condition. I’m so tired and fucked up. Moan.
I want my black dog back Why are they not a blue dog, someone asks in the comments. The internet is so fucking literal. I paint my nails hot pink and chew them so all the polish flakes into my mouth like itsy bits of sext.
Have to stop myself reading Lauren Berlant’s blog again. Get kinda sentimental at night. ‘I was lucky to be the dreamer because the dreamer never stops being interested. People know when they haven’t said enough, that’s why they dream’. I never say enough, that’s why I write. There’s something I always wish I told you, but you never could tell.
Every time I sit next to a man on the bus, I assume he’s gonna reach for something intangible, a long red thread you could tug from my cunt with this terrible thing at the end, that’s it.
The black dog had impossible puppies and the puppies are always following me, especially onto the bus. Ten black puppies is a lot of transport coverage. Driver winks and goes, ‘you’re just a pup’. When I close my eyes, we spit in each others’ mouths. I hear a Belle & Sebastian song in the distance.
Scenery passes, etc. Static poplars.
Everybody started to ask, Where do you see your future? I see my future in NFTs, is the prepared, p(r)eppy answer. No, not as an investor. I’m not even a flip in bed, where it counts. Can you guess?
Everybody who doesn’t have a choice has a price. I used to text M. like, what do you think I should do with my life. There’s nothing to buy at the mall. You should go home, she says.
Earlier I lied. I kind of do care about the environment. Black dogs let loose among burning forests.
I have no memory for the feeling of rain.

Non-fungible errors cluster my dashboard. That I had my sadness minted and then accused of bad metaphor. Darling, I was the economic downturn all along.
I eat with my fingers among the dogs. They love me.

A Breath

A BREATH

Writing in the gloaming I would even call meadow, its scorched-out centre you can probably see from a helicopter, a drone, should you choose the option of aerial photography and remote capture in a time of social distancing. Should you have access to that tech, perhaps in a speculative way; should you have access, the way children have access because they discuss so thoroughly the possibilities, and they do this illicitly into the night. My excellent stenography skills, if we are calling this shorthand, were honed from adolescent hours on Microsoft Instant Messenger, affectionately known as MSN. Any one of us born in that particular bracket of the fin de siècle will understand what it means to spend time in one’s room alone, not quite as in ‘Adam’s Song’, but touching the void through sign-ins, statuses, emoticons, nudges. To live in the delirium of many glimmering windows. I wanted to call you up from my bower, listening to ‘Lime Tree’ on repeat because it carries me away; I wanted to call you up, but could I bear to put down my pen for this. You will never know if I am writing or typing; ‘this kind of thing’ bears no performative ellipsis. Had I known anyway what you would say, as someone who needs access to their own face to talk, something is coming away for free. We have been watching each other watch our own expressions: as with emoticons, each manner of the face feels curated. Some of us collapse on the phone. In the fractal reality of self-isolation, I divvy up zoomy contingencies of speech. When was the last time I talked without seeing my own face. Deleuze and Guattari argue that faces ‘define zones of frequency or probability’: the face ‘constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of’. Hoping to give you a meadow — multifarious and mysterious plenty — I yet give you the wall or the screen. A zoomy contingency that you are happy, that you had signed out of the chat. Against it I file down my voice to its lower registers, taking the edge off an earnestness. If you could measure the frequency of sleep, perhaps architects of the dream-state would salve the true riddles of twenty-first century expression. I wanted to call you up with a slow, perfected drawl, relay how I was hanging upside down from my bower. How I imagine the song to end is a very beautiful flower, floating down the river, but that is only how the song begins. It really ends with a daydream, ‘now that living is no good’, and the singer is lost and found as they enter the woods, barefoot like a child. Why am I telling you all this, barefoot like a child, now that I cannot tell the woods from the trees in my nameless life. And Coleridge sings, this lime tree my prison, my prison / feels like prism. If a wood haloed the meadow, if a moat, if a liquid loop — arboreal, molten, stupid. Walking in the scorched-out meadow an hour or more to be here, sometimes dreaming of this place, needing to be here — no longer a meadow for having been burned. What occurred to ruin the centre. I want to bounce, bounce, bounce with it. All my friends active now and forever. I stumble on the grammar of an instant; are you online, are you online in the meadow, I am calling you up to say this. I am checking-in, the way people used to on Facebook. What is the name of this place? The meadow goes undocumented. What is the probability that your face means the shape of a grassland, a patch of unruly narcissi, a noticing gesture that I would say I have been here before. At least in dreams. Someone is trying to brand the meadow. In quarantine, my old longing for those messaging days recurs. We all talked on that singular platform, confessed under pseudonyms, and ever since I have been lost in the trees of each channel — their foliage concealing the one true thing. Someone is trying to sell the meadow. Infinite recursion of memes and secrets and finance. There was a purity to MSN, something about its frequency. Namelessness. You see what I mean? Sometimes in the poem, I mean the scorched-out cindering middle of the poem, you take grace enough to say fuck it, hiya, wait, no, I can’t hear you. You hold ‘us’ in brackets. If I could timestamp the start to end of that, like debt. One time C. messaged me on Instagram to ask what is really meant by the gloaming. What time of day was this asked, did that matter? I think gloaming would be different at four in the morning to noon; but what did I give as reply? A quick skim of the platforms comes up with nothing. Besides, soon my battery will die in the old archaeology of dissolving thought. There was a purpose in calling you up for this, and now ants are crawling all over my notebook. Nothing has touched me for weeks. I want to say I have a lascivious craving for seaweed flakes, tousled hair, disco kisses, regular breakfasts, offline status, cetirizine, romance and saffron cakes. I have been touching nothing; lately asking myself what is it we do that makes us fruit. The blossoms are stirring on Montague Street. And you click and collect, you drag us backwards. I know that faceless, somewhere you construct the wall. Last night I ran down Great Western Road, my Spotify shuffling back to ‘Adam’s Song’, ‘Tomorrow holds such better days’. I felt burdened by the days inside the days, their seeming neon-fold, ‘the time goes by’ in the flicker of your eyelid. Because my eyes are screen-burned, hot-taken, hypothetical, exhausted; because my eyes looked too long at the meadow. Its torrified heart reduced to this logo. Because your eyes held green astride creamy lindens, to only open the same elsewhere, ‘No sound is dissonant which tells of Life’, etc. I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of power chords, the lines about apple juice spilled in the hall, harmony, the burden of a loss the size of adolescence itself. St. John’s Wort doled in the morning, soft-bitter ersatz taste of the sunlight and sensitive. I have no heart for war but air. How did I get here, on the brink of my phone battery’s untimely death, filling my notebook in the moonless April? Otherwise it would happen, haze, my father posting endless on his wall, unbeknownst to the standard quota expected on the book of the face. This feels so banal and yet I am telling you the grass is beautiful, endless, strange. Marigolds cluster around glitching trees, impossible to reach. If I could I would give you a pool of marigolds. Only just realised pool is loop backwards. Yellow and / I drag into blue and backwards to call you. I’m sorry I’ve been listening to ‘Lime Tree’ again — it’s just that this song came out in 2007, I was only fourteen, yellow + blue make green, I was starving and ever since then I’ve thought of this story. Something you could cut out from inside you, could burn from the meadow. A little kernel of narrative you tap with your tongue and your teeth, you give to me slowly. I want to leave the message to assure you, ‘It’s done’. Would you know I was talking about the disease? I was coming down from my bower, coming down, breezeless and sleepy, wishing I could call you up and quote the line, ‘Don’t be so amazing / Or I’ll miss you too much’. I wish I could climb through a window to see you, smooth myself right through the glass. Could I miss what I had not yet touched, in April’s middling haze of something receding. All those years you had told me to eat. Oh you know and you know and you don’t. Remember those hours? If we could give them back, little gifts of death, as Derrida says, like an ethics. It’s only me. I’m sorry if calling freaked you out from inside the machine. What I wanted to say was, it made me ecstatic, on GWR, zoomy the song and the voice and I could see Venus so bright in the sky. And the sky was rich as ganache, thick filled with more sky; Matty would say like chocolate, or saffron, or debt. Such a spooky ecstasy! (<3) The calorific night…I write you this so as to cut into it, hazy, reflecting, give you a slice of my dreams. Whatever anyone says feels charged with history, so I want this to be utterly redundant, depletable, delectable, careless as crossing the road without cars in the city that now never wakes or sleeps, but only deletes. The adventitious device, zoning close to us, is taking a photo. Is this a kind of labour. There are such archives beyond access they try for. Here, I will be always the small green light in lieu of a meadow, the lyrical unfinishing of cringe to know this. A breath I took / You can just call me up.

— 17th April 2020

Category: flash fiction