Cooked Potatoes, an extract

...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.