Lime in my glass, in my summer sweater, I examine the masonry, feeling slobber on my knuckle. The stones are green and blue and purple, like I was once, when I woke to the alarm of a hammer. There is nothing on my hand but the leftover of my bath salts, one of the many scents I get for Christmas from my mother. I picture hands coming, the shake of the wrist, my husband’s face once kind, with cloudy eyes and hints of eucalyptus. He’d never met my father, but with that same fierce look, they could have been one.
By Kim Chinquee.
Finally, I decide fuck it. If I forgot the Neurontin, my ear will start ringing. I’ll take some Valium. I’ll feel a little sleepy, but the ear will quiet. I can’t take an extra blood thinner, that would be dangerous, but I can take an Advil, which would be just enough to raise my four dose to five if I took the pills, and therefore not be dangerous, and would give me some blood thinning if I’ve forgotten entirely. Forgetting the allergy pill is no big deal, I can always use my nasal spray. The antidepressant is a problem. I feel depressed if I miss it, but my new ADHD pill seems to counteract that.
“Your skin is very dark and pale,” you say.
Each midnight, Trumpet Forsyth leans out of his sixth floor bedroom window and blows out his horn. The first notes are avant-garde and complicated, angry, like his Guernica is inhabited by limbless limbo dancers and drowning hands. The next series of notes are big-nosed-Sonny-Rollins-sax, then tall and meditative, and after that a little fruitless like a man growing wings to turn into a penguin that will never fly. 
I knew I was one of them the day “Hey, Patty Patty!” turned into “Hey, Party Patty!”
‘Sssssand shark, it’sssss a sssssand shark,’ hissssssed the snake.
I didn’t mean it, but I felt myself getting stiffer in my trousers. The kraken had woken. I could feel it now, pressing on the zip. Pressing hard on the zip. I remembered how I’d spilt some piss before, thinking that I’d finished my tinkle when I hadn’t. But that didn’t stop me. I badly had the horn. I guess it was the heat. It had finally got to me. The air tasted of sex. And barbecues. Yes, it was one horny fucking evening. Sweat dripped into my eyes from my forehead. Sweat trickled around my mouth. I was getting close to them now. I looked the girls up and down, from feet to hair to feet again, via legs. I wanted to grab those nice breasts. I let out a kind of sigh. One girl was darker skinned than the other and her cleavage was glorious. She was staring at me. Trying to smack me with her eyes. I looked away quickly, but it was no use.
Another disaster programme done and dusted; and the anchor man made of slime and Milk Tray slips away to relax in the park. Clothes off, neck hair swept back, his metamorphosis into a creeping creeper creep happens within his own moving fog of smug. His form glides as much as it hunches, his eye is cow like, his head that of an antelope. When he arrives in the park proper he sets about worrying the deer by whispering crime statistics and the phrase ‘buckled Austin Princess’ into their hot felt like ears. ‘Bastards’ is a word he savours for unsettling the stags, their bony coat stands tensing as if they might rut and cut at any moment.
Did you bring a hammer for the pegs, Brendan?
Big taxi mouth, Barney Eggleston, got himself and his pooch kicked out of a London cab for mouthing the dirty. Not only that, but a big tit was dancing on the roof of the cab and taking the St Michael, so he let it have one with a five note concord straight in the beak. A right bloody mess. In the melee, his pooch only went and got himself on the wrong side of the river.
