A Story

life vest

She tells him she loves him. She does not tell him that she is pregnant. They get married because he is afraid of being alone and she does not want to be alone with the baby. She has always been against abortions. A week after their wedding she can no longer hide the bulge and she tells him, making him nervous. After the disclosure there is a period where he spends most of his time away from home, but then she shames him into staying with her. They have a multitude of evenings sitting side by side on the sofa, watching cooking shows. Neither of them likes cooking.

They tell themselves that it will be better when the baby is born and in a way it is. For almost two years after the baby is born, they are too tired to be bored.

When the child is five, she tires of him and taking care of the child alone no longer seems like a large burden. Still afraid to be alone, he clings to her as she splits everything they own in two. Before shaking him off her properly, she allows him to have the child for a weekend every fortnight.

For close to a year he lives for that weekend, then he finds someone else to keep him company. His new girlfriend adores the child, but the child is terrified of her long red nails. Soon the child stays only with her mother.

One night as the mother reads her child a bedtime story the child frowns. Forgetting the story, the child says: ‘Mummy, does daddy love me?’

‘Of course he does,’ she says, ‘and so do I.’ She hugs and kisses the child and she wonders how anyone could ever think a life vest a burden.


Stuck in a Maze


I have heard that if you just keep right in a maze, you will eventually find your way out, but it seems this course keeps bringing us back to the same place or at least an identical place.

I have heard that everything changes, but I cannot find any alterations in our situation and I find no alterations in you. In fact, looking at you I wonder if this is the day we met.

Sparks still fly between us both the pleasant and the scorching ones, but my shoulders have grown heavy.

Maybe the only thing that has changed is how I feel.

Star Songs


From my roof I count the stars and they fill my head with sweet songs, but although the rhymes stick, the reason floats away when dawn washes over me.

So I return every night to admire the light and they tell me that humanity is so so so very close to touching them and I wonder whether that means that even I can touch the sky. They tell me that they are not really white, that the air is cleaner from a mountain top and that they seldom grant wishes, but they might consider granting mine and I wonder what wish they are talking about and I still believe in nothing.

Sand and Heat

Night Blooming Cereus


Worlds in a Crystal

I hold the fractured crystal to the light and it reveals its colours to me. As I turn it, I find a yellow part which must resemble a world where they can still see the sun. People tell me the sun will never peep through the smog, but just holding this crystal I feel sunny warmth spreading through my fingers.

When I turn the crystal a bit more, I find a deep blue that must come from a wide clean ocean and I smell the salt. Another turn brings me a lush green and I taste the clean oxygen of an enormous forest with trees so tall they take my breath away and I clutch the crystal tighter.

With a crack the crystal splinters, cutting my fingers, releasing red and as the stained fragments shatter on the rock below me, I wonder whether the world of trees is lost forever.

Be Back Soon



Thank you for reading.

Bag of Memories


I have a bag of memories which I don’t know what to do with. If I burn them, they will never again warm me as they once did, but as it is now every time I pick them up they scorch my heart. So I suppose I’ll just have to hide them away for a while and hope that the pain fades faster than the sunshine.

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