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You are what you eat (II)

12 Mar 2005

For the next few weeks Amanda passed the shop with no urge to look in the window. It was clear from the other side of Wall Street that the display hadn't changed, and would probably have to gather dust until after Christmas. The jars of piccalilli never diminished, but then none of the piles on display seemed to. They must have been restocked during the day, she decided.

You are what you eat (I)

6 Mar 2005

Amanda was first drawn to the delicatessen she passed on her way home, because she loved Christmas decorations. One of her first memories was of gazing into a bauble at herself gazing back; the reflected face was speckled by a wintry scene, picked out in raised points of white paint. Every time she conjured up the memory it would unfold behind the decoration to encompass an enormous tinsel tree (unashamedly fake), hundreds of ornaments, tiny strings of lights hung from the branches and a tiny, Barbie-perfect fairy doll so far away from her toddler hands as to be in heaven with the angels.

Some mistake

19 Jan 2005

Nils left the house at nine o'clock precisely. More punctual than the sunrise, Nils took no small delight in the seasons that varied around him. He would sample the air and the light at the same point in the earth's rotation each day, and could thus feel summer's approach and guess at winter's onslaught.

Stay calm

26 Dec 2004

You wake up and everything is wrong; you can't understand it but everything is wrong. The shock of it propels you into an upright position, like the horrible last second of a nightmare, and you look around the room. Surely you're simply muggy with sleep? Isn't the tail end of a dream wrapped round you still, twirling the sense of the world into a spiral every time you turn your head? Well?

Guilty secret

20 Nov 2004

Square after milk chocolate square, shiny and oozy from a day's basking in the kitchen, the room with one wall almost all window. She crammed them into her mouth, hot sun trapped in the sugar, the long day's sun that she tried to savour and to swallow all at once, squishing sweet cheap cocoa between her fingers like rich sin, as a car crackled up the gravel drive.

(Breath mint. Grab your purse and leave, even as the horn pip-pips its summons.)

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