if walls could talk

“There were great piles of charred food over the pavement. They spread everywhere leaving blots of oil and specks of ash in their place when swept away. The weird contradiction between grease and dryness was testament to an amazing party.”

“I explicitly demanded access to the secret place over supper – she granted it, grudgingly, and farted me out as soon as her requirements were met.”

“We cycled in the near dark beneath the huge circling murder of crows as they came into roost. Must have been a hundred birds or more. The noise was frightening and very loud.”

“Three of them there were, each perfect, all skin, pores, hemispheres. Three of them.”

“I heard they carried his body from the lake and through the middle of campus covered in lost property garments and stored it in a cold room in the registry building for hours before the ambulance or whatever could get through the traffic.”

“She leant over the back of the chair and rested on her thick forearms on the table between us and I watched her teeth specifically while she confirmed our evening arrangements. They were wet with spittle and slightly overlapping in the right places. Later I would recall this happily while we were at it on my pouffe.”

“Yeah, no hands, the fuckin simpleton.”

“Same time every day. Older than I go for – forties, later even – but the jeans sink perfectly where they should. She looks tired, which I like, and glum. I follow her into the trees. Though we don’t speak I know she wants us to. She looks at the book I’m reading when she walks past and I can see she’s impressed. Her wellingtons slurp like sex through the churned soil. I saw her squatted over, pissing a steaming stream with her back to the footpath just a few metres into the foliage while her dog sniffed about. Her wax jacket offers some camouflage. She didn’t see me. Her bare ass, the orange brown leaves, the rain.”

“The guy absolutely stank of oranges, but off ones, rancid. Took your breath away.”

“Can’t remember his name but he had this huge Alsatian. Used to menace the Italian in the ice cream van with it and always got a free 99 and a screwball for the Alsatian. Just had to hear the lead jingle and he was getting his Flakes out, like a Pavlovian thing. A response. Ate ice creams all bloody summer he did, didn’t cost him a penny. What was his name?”

“I find that using the tools of my trade to self-harm is both incredibly cathartic and the most delicious irony, given that it’s my job that gives me all the motivation I need to self-harm in the first place. Staples, paperclips, drawing pins, all in the forearms; those staple removers like fierce mandibles around the fingertips; flogging with 30cm rulers until my flanks are cut. Helix, Staedtler. I’m in admin.“

“I don’t want to drink but I know I will. I turn nasty when I drink.”