...She said no She couldn’t
make it, “Money a bit tight, it is quite impossible”, she left it at that.
Why would I want to go
out in a world of yielding knives and machetes in the Underground? The world’s
unravelling. Every single day, from Monday through to Sunday a kid dying,
flower wreaths proliferating on blood soaked city pavements, and mothers
crying; why should I go out? Cars
mounting pavements and ramming crowds; a world where no one looks into
another’s eye, but only over the shoulder. After the attack where a white van
charged through a market one Saturday night, a summer night when people where
just hanging out and ran them over, then three men jumped out of the back
yielding serrated knives and proceeded to cut flesh, slash throats, pierce
hearts, senselessly cutting the thread of young lives, she entrenched herself in
her back garden amongst roses and ferns, robins and starlings; This little kitten has used up eight of its
lives, she liked to say. But that evening She finished washing the iron pan,
the final chore or so She hoped, the last thing to do in that never ending list
of to do things, ―the taken for granted little things that must be tucked
around the ‘big things’, all the stuff to stop the chaos, stop dust from taking
over, toe nails from becoming twisted claws―, dried it with a fresh dish cloth,
put it away in the cupboard next to the collection of iron pots ―She could not
help it, the obsession over the little things, it gave her some sense of
security, of being in control, her hands would grip until they ached; at times
she would interrupt her reading of Borges or Mrs Dalloway to fix an upturned
curtain hem or enter an item in a shopping list; since she came back that’s how
life was, she could not help it. But that evening it all came tumbling upon her through some unexpected crack, one chore to many and the one that broke the camel’s
back. She went online and bought herself a ticket to Marseille, then sent a
message: arriving next Friday.
He responded with little
doggies holding flowers, with kittens jumping, with a profusion of bubbling
hearts and in her chest, out of the blue, a Fairy Liquid iridescent bubble
swelled. A long lost memory of the days before she became invisible.
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