Flood

The flood came and went in one night so to many of the townsfolk the wet carpets and two metre tide marks were treated in personal isolation. It was often only when they attempted to call the office, some grateful for the excuse not to work, that they found the lines down and they began to suspect that they were part of a broader picture. The assistant mayor muttered and swore as he fished his favourite tie from out of the basement laundry room. He would have no answers for the angry public. His young boy stood naked in the front room, smiling broadly as he looked out of the French windows. In the middle of the lawn were many balls, all different sizes and all thought lost to the garden next door.

Banshee beat

The road slopes up way, way too far. How am I meant to climb that? An old lady in an unseasonal coat begins before me. Maybe it's not that bad. I count my steps, knowing I have a roughly half metre stride, so I can work out the angle from the top. I've lost count by the time I reach twenty, or seventeen or whatever. The houses are painted different colours so the stepped terrace becomes a radical pyramid of toy blocks. Mixed colours also distort my face; the forehead white as the blood puffs red to my cheeks. My feet slap on the rough, dry pavement, big feet in enormous shoes; I'm a breathless, tardy clown.

A beat is bouncing thickly down the hill, knocking on houses and regulating footfall. It could be coming from any of these tributary streets that pump life into the rising road. Children peer around corners, searching, festival ribbons tied in their hair and cat masks painted bright on their faces. My head slops left to right as I stare down the passing streets, a tired fan-head that can barely raise a breeze as it blows forlornly around the room.

I'm sure I haven't passed the marching band but they are rattling away from me, dragging me inland, uphill, closer to the end. There are banners taunting me from houses, draped flags that wave me on. A hat thrown high to hang up on a lamppost, signs that something was here but has now gone.

“You're late, you clown. Here, drink up, we're going.”

“Why?”

“I'm sick of all that drumming”

The Longest Day of Summer

A leap year and the longest day of summer but even Noah would have shaken his head and gone back under the covers as the droplets clattered down. The dark shoulders of light coats showed umbrellas that had gone up too late. Shoppers hid under overhangs and awnings as if washed from the roads, thrust to the river banks by the rushing flood-water. The gutters quickly quenched their thirst and spat back unwanted water. Bus tickets, leaves and Mcdonalds packaging gurgled down the streets, the torrent dribble of a city giant.

It was 3 o'clock and I watched as the street light in front of me switched silently on. It illuminated the rising stream that was flowing just below the level of the pavement, heading downhill towards the pockmarked sea. A river often cleanses, a river can wipe away but most of all a river changes. The flow narrowed and spread as if inhaling and exhaling while it raced on. It carried boats. I wished I was aboard; an owl or a pussycat in a pea-green apple pie box, moving, changing.

I stood still, aside from the occasional shudder and the flitting motion of my eyes. Cold snakes slithered down my back and soaked into the top of my jeans. I could see both ways from here, at the top of the shallow hill; where I'd been and where I was going, both were empty of people. I wanted to run out into the rain.

A runcible tramp came up to me and asked me for change. I told him he was asking the wrong guy.

Entropy

First; the colour leeches out of it, not entirely but enough. Grains of rice contract and bond, becoming a lump. The water gently evaporates from everything, most notably from the thin brown sauce which becomes a flaking stain on the plate and a thin skin on the food it's coated. The meat of the pork chop shrivels slightly into itself and detaches in places from the bone, fat coagulated on its borders.

Second; spots of colour begin to reappear, a light blue with a green hue, or vice versa. The spots blur and spread, seeking each other with uniform growth. They flick out tender tendrils, running rank silk over every surface, binding the rice tighter together and knitting the meat back to its bone.

Third; the food has entirely lost its identity and is a loosely monochrome lump, an ugly tumour attached to the inanimate plate. The meal I cooked is gone as are both the love I cooked it with and the love I cooked it for. Both have been assimilated into the meaningless monochrome of my grey memory.

Entropy is this; everything turns to shit. She's not coming home

A lick of paint

In the back of an old warehouse, Billy found a box by accident. It's invisible. He walked into it in the dark and, after finding and turning on the lights, he saw the blood from his elbow sliding thickly down the air. He prodded at it with his finger and felt the side. He's sized it up; it seems to be a cube, about 75cm each way. He's shining a torch through it now to see if the light reflects or diffracts but nothing's happening, we can just see a weak yellow circle dancing across dusty crates.

He's decided to take it home but can't work out exactly how. It's not that it's heavy, quite the opposite, just it's going to raise both eyebrows and questions if people think he's miming carrying a box. What's he doing now? Aaah, there we go, he's painting it. He saw an industrial bucket of white emulsion and he's splatting it on with a rag. He'll go outside after this, lie in the soft dirt and wait for it to dry.

He's going to come back in and push it home and even though he'll forget to paint the underside, the thick grass field behind his house will catch the dripping emulsion and lick it across the bottom, giving it a scrappy but complete coating. He'll leave it in the garage and run in for dinner. Tomorrow he'll realise that he can't get the paint off and it will stay in the garage where his dad will eventually use it as a place to rest his tools. 

I wish we could tell him to stop.

Parliament

It was time to vote. Some stared up at the oily blue sky, distracted by passing shadows but only momentarily. Feet were shuffled and the noise of scattered earth ran across the ground like dancing insects.The accused stood still, alone in a small, open circle, his eyes locked to the floor as he tried to control his trembling heart.

New members came from the south and joined the ring quietly. They looked over the heads of the others to the accused. It seemed as though they were rising out of a warm, static sea since the rise and fall of the rutted field made the tops of the crowd's heads into a rippling wave, almost motionless, like an old video on pause.

There had been no evidence given, there were no facts to think over; it was just a matter of waiting. So they waited and a decision took hold. It seemed to come in on the air, packaged in dust and dandelion seeds, suddenly filling the collected heads. The open circle around the accused snapped closed as they rushed him and in seconds his blood crept down the cracks of the dry crust that covered the field and the occasional drop blew off light on the breeze.

The parliament dispersed and from the air, each looked back at the one they'd left for the ground.  

On a warming vent

Outwards from a molten core,

a fiery heart to which all hearts draw,

leaving other hands to fettle

to lick the walls of liquid metal.

A hearth surrounds with fierce grate

a ponderous flow of silicate

which floats a plate so gently curved

where some are saved and some are served

and on this dish we'll find a spread

of all things upward from the dead.

Past hubbling bubbling pockets black,

through toiling tubes that suck them slack.

From carbon to calcium, marrow dry bone,

look at what's been set in stone.

Time's passing fragments firmly stuck

where bodies marinade in muck

and splash the wheels of the circling truck;

death then life, eat and fuck

live then die, fuck and eat

ad infinitum, and its repeat.

We reach the playground in the mud

which boys have filled with dry grey blood.

Will mother laugh at how they played

or damn them for the mess they made?

We reach the burrows of clanking worms

who rattle us round the languid turns.

Follow the tracks of the tunnelling train

and maybe you'll come back round again.

In pallid carriage, avoiding sun

it's none for all and all for none.

Climb the ladders, climb the seams

To papered pockets full of dreams.

Up spine, up belly, up back, up vein

To a grey and sloshing brain

Where the head-case bookcase fills each shelf

With blank-paged manuals of the self.

Rising onward as before;

one man's roof, another man's floor

To the station's coursing crowd

whose feet drum chaos loud and proud

And for all that chasing, all that stress,

their motion tallies to motionless.

Look! Above us. The One True Light

The sun we sang of in the night.

A grubby shaft

A rising draft

A gap gapes open as we pass.

The light diffracts through dripping glass

held by a lost and desperate clutch;

a hand forced to extend too much.

Baptising memory in lament,

to splash the head of time long spent

with heart and cloth and spirit rent

such cost for so little consequence.

Past one cocked knee so harshly bent,

lies a lonely man on a warming vent.

Cinnamon Lips

Rankin and Forsythe thought the bruise looked like a kiss, a tender blessing behind her ear, but Josep, the coroner, said he couldn't make it out. Josep said he was too long in the tooth to see anything more than the facts. It seemed that the one blow had killed her though, cracking the skull at the base and knocking her straight out, never to wake up. She had a thin sliver of glass in her ear that looked like a piercing. Josep ran the trolley into the chiller room, next to the body pulled from the water that morning. When he stood at her head, looking at her face upside down, a spark of recognition flashed in his mind but couldn't place it. He said nothing. Rankin and Forsythe continued to argue about lunch then left.

They returned an hour later. Forsythe was still finishing a pulled pork sandwich and he waved away an assistant who tried to shoo his food out of the morgue. Josep told them he hadn't had a chance to look at her properly and they feigned annoyance but slunk off again to get coffee and pastries. They didn't have any leads anyway and didn't expect to get any; her mother had been the only person they could track down and she hadn't seen her for over a year. They checked in again at the end of the day, sharing a cinnamon swirl, but Josep wasn't around so after staring gormlessly at the kiss for a few minutes, they left for a bar, not bothering to brush away the crumbs that had drifted down onto her lips.

Later that night, Josep was about to start examining her when the recognition grabbed him again. She had worked somewhere he went. Where was it? Damnit, where? The supermarket? No, he could picture the four women who worked there easily, two being part of a running fantasy in his head. The cinema? Hmmm, maybe but it didn't jump out at him. The garage! She hung around the garage where that greasy prick would rip him off for new brakes and oil changes every few months. Maybe she was a girlfriend, surely not an employee, not with that hair.

He got in his car, which was behaving today, fortunately, and he drove out to the garage. Everything was shut up but not with any real security in mind so he easily climbed in through a broken side window and used the light from his phone to begin snooping around. He clattered against toolboxes and stumbled over chains, looking for a clue, anything, a connection. He slipped on an oil patch and flung out his arms, grasping something hanging on the wall. He managed not to fall but he grazed his shoulder and face. He brought the light up and saw he had caught hold of a tool in a rack made from a rusted metal sheet. The tool was a heavy pipe with the last quarter bent at a right angle. It had a hexagonal mouth for loosening bolts. A mouth, he noticed, with hard metal lips. A door banged.

Rankin and Forsythe were on duty when Josep's body turned up a few months later. The new coroner didn't agree but they were adamant that the heavy mark on his temple looked just like a kiss. After searching all the unmarked morgue units, they eventually found where Josep had hurriedly stored the woman who they'd brought in that day. They pulled it open and were hit with the foul stink of a rotted corpse. The new coroner mumbled something about dodgy temperature controls and how some sort of contaminate must have got in. Rankin swore he smelt cinnamon but said they would check it all out, after lunch of course.  

Over in a flash

Old and fat, Sam felt old and fat and he decided that he didn't want to any more or, at least, that he didn't want to today. From the cupboard, he took his best suit, only worn three times; a wedding, a funeral and an awkward date. He stood, hands on his hips, watching the iron until a thin plume of steam told him it was ready.

He gave the whole suit, jacket and trousers, a rough once over before getting down to the detail. He hunted wrinkles and chased them out with the boiling, pointed tip, like St Patrick banishing the snakes. He took the same care with a beautiful French shirt, laying a handkerchief over the collar so as not to damage the subtle, embroidered, floral motif. He thought back to when he had bought it; a spring day, five years ago.

He had scuttled into a tiny boutique in the Marais district of Paris, avoiding a brief downpour that had interrupted a glorious bath of sunshine. He had looked back out of the window for a minute to watch the panic of the other passers-by. Beautiful, young gay men had pranced around the forming puddles and clutched each other into doorways. Amazonian women had tucked tiny dogs into their hand bags and strode out of sight with long legs so sheer, you couldn't imagine even a drop of water catching hold. Chinese tourists plucked see-through red and yellow plastic ponchos from their backpacks and carried on shuffling window to window. He had turned back to the shop and seen the shirt and bought it without even trying it on, caught up in the moment.

He hadn't felt old that day and, line for line, wrinkle for wrinkle, he looked more or less the same. It must have been something under the hood, a subtle difference in the self. Everything ironed, he showered and got dressed, matching a thin tie to the suit and shirt. He felt the warm caress of sunshine as he opened the front door and he stepped out into the awaiting day. A gorgeous pair of legs appeared at the end of his road, glowing gold in the light. Without a moments hesitation, he smiled broadly, slipped down his zip and showed her what he had.

In the back of the police car, he sat quietly. The officer asked him what he was grinning about but he didn't reply. As the car turned a tight corner, the seatbelt tugged at his jacket and he felt something from the inner pocket against his chest; it was a triple pack of condoms, from the last time he'd worn the suit. He chuckled to himself.

Beauty

The golden ratio is a connection that appears in nature with bizarre regularity. I'll try to explain it as clearly as I can. Take two poles, one shorter than the other, and attach them together to make one long pole, let's call this a flagpole. Now measure all the poles; the short one, the longer one and the flagpole. Next, work out what percentage the short pole is of the longer pole and what the longer pole is of the flagpole. If these percentages are the same then we have a golden ratio. It's always the same percentage too, around 62%. This may seem just a mathematical nicety but this connection appears throughout nature, everywhere in the universe.

It shapes the spirals in the heads of sunflowers and the long arms of the milky way. It's in the proportions of bodies and, in more detail, of faces. Leonardo Da Vinci used it in the layout of many of his paintings, not as another code for some ludicrous religious mythology but because the human eye is drawn to this ratio. It makes things look how they are meant to, you could say it's beautiful. You could say it's beauty, maybe that is a measurable thing, anything could be if you found the appropriate connection; the whole world and everything beyond, laced like buttons on a line.