Bottom of the Well

I can see you folded in on yourself like a sleeping winkle. You are bent like a pretzel, looking uncomfortable — but you are asleep, so there must be some degree of comfort. There is a shadow of consternation on your face, resting between your eyes and in the angle of your lips.

You are bunched. Crumpled. One shoulder juts out and up like a warning, holding the world at bay. A tangle of sheets might otherwise have been pleasant, but here they look more like swaddling or ties, binding you in a frustrated mess.

I look out the window, through the shimmered glass onto a dry garden of unforgiving soil. Inside it’s cool, but outside the day already begins to feel the harsh hand of heat behind it. It’ll be a few hours yet before the blowflies hide inside the porch and the dogs lie flat in a confused stupor.

You are asleep. So far away. I watch, looking for any movement in your eyes, like they do in books and movies. Apparently that is a sign that you are dreaming. REM sleep they call it. I imagine it is like watching a movie play out on the inside of your eyelids, and your sleeping body only has to settle back into its mental cinema chair and shovel in popcorn. I’m waiting for you to move your legs and arms like the dogs do when they see themselves in their own movies.

Fracture

Beautiful terrible. It’s always beautiful, and terrible.

Scanned mice

No, it’s not too cruel. We let our little mice – Edie and Charlotte – take a spin on the scanner. They weren’t too phased by it, and now they are safely home again eating parmesan cheese slices. But they do make groovy art.

To the watcher

When you are being watched there is this crisp feeling, like the sensation of holding a handful of bark and slowly closing your fist.

I can feel you there watching me, just out of range and imagining yourself invisible. No, actually that’s not quite right. You know that I can see you, just out of the corner of my eye. You know if I turn my head I won’t be able to directly discern you, but you’ll be there. I know you are.

Umami

Katherine Tate was a square type of woman. She’d once been told she was Rubenesque and had bought a lot of red lipstick to complement her hippy, booby shape, but that was years ago. That was years before she was going to Change. The Change. What a nonsense.

Morning after rain

Clack-clack, sway

“I don’t know why you bother with him,” said her mother leaning over the bags that were placed between them. The reassuring clack-clack of the suburban train shuddered through Eliza’s feet as she frowned out the window. Outside frozen faces turned, bleached by sunlight, held for an instant then gone. Whipped trees. Lines of grass folding away.

Shoes

My eyes are tired. We’re sitting here in the coffee shop in another soulless suburb on a yawning Saturday. We don’t have much to say to each other so I distract myself again by picking at the crusted coffee around the lip of my cup.

I’m taken by the shape of people’s shoes as they walk past, and if I keep my head at an angle I can’t see their heads. I sneak a glance at you, and you’re looking in the other direction, freeing me up to follow the shoes. If you caught me with my head bowed and angled like this, peering out the grimy franchise coffee shop window, you’d make that sound between your teeth.

The Box Doodle Project

This resonates with my passion for creation through reuse, and my love of beauty in the absurd. Take a box, pull it apart, draw all over it. Submit to website. Get doodling.

The Box Doodle Project.

I live inside a twig man

I’m nestled next to his pomegranate heart. I can see inside the pulsing life he carries, and I feed the heartbeat with a blue breath. It is warm and straightforward here, there is nothing I don’t like about it. From where I sit, all knees crossed and arms folded, I can gaze up to the exquisite form of his jaw meeting his ear. When I look down through the tangle of vines I can see the outline of his scalloped ribs.