I watch him watching me. My watching is this sly, furtive thing. His watching has complete faith in human invisibility.

I can see you so much

Everything here wears a filter of sick grey, especially the yellow walls of my room:
("Look, your very own room.")
But some things glow, and they stare at me like I can't see them.
"Idiot" I snort. I can't believe my luck.

Bad Hair

    I dream this again: a slight scratch of cough, something discreet-ish, behind a napkin. It's a restaurant, I don't know which one. I mean, I don't know if it's a restaurant that exists outside of this dream. It seems really expensive. I cough again and it's like - inhaling the fumes from dry frying chillies or burning tyres. My eyes water and it's becoming embarrassing,even though I know it's a dream. K's sister pats me on the shoulder reassuringly.
    I can feel something lodged in my throat, or just beyond my throat and this thing needs to go somewhere, up or down. I push two fingers as far inside my neck as I can and this makes me retch fruitlessly a couple of times. The third time the tips of my fingers brush against this thing, this foreign object or it's tail at least. I try to grasp it between the two fingers, make this confined scissor motion, but that feels freaky and kind of sexual. It's useless anyway, I can't get a hold so I try to force it further up with these rhythmic muscle spasms. Whoa, I'm thinking, this is some heavy psychoanalytically significant kind of dream, isn't it? Now it's in a place where I can fix this tail-like wisp between the fingers enough to start pulling and it feels huge. Because it's a dream I'm expecting some real Gothic monstrosity - a decaying rat, a very deformed foetus - but it's just like, hair matted together with some gooey grey substance. Like the stuff you have to pull out of a plug hole when it gets blocked. Yeah, kind of gross, but not that scary. I keep pulling and it's wrapped around a bunch of complicated flesh stuff that I guess are my internal organs, or some of them. It's a sizable, messed up pile on the restaurant floor and I feel much better, kind of light and empty, with a sense of mission accomplished.
    I wake up then and notice I've thrown up on the floor next to the mattress and a little over my right arm. I take my t-shirt off and use it like a wash cloth. Then I face the other way and go back to sleep pretty swiftly. I don't dream anything else, or if I do, I don't remember it.

    When I wake up again I'm thirsty and my throat hurts some. I drink three glasses of water from the tap. The place where my tooth was aches from the cold of it, it's like a phantom sensitive tooth. The cats sniff at the soiled shirt and the patch of whatever soaked into the carpet. I wet the shirt and rub at it half-heartedly, blot it with a magazine. They weave around kind of menacing with their tails straight up in the air, the tips twitch like signals. I tip something foul that's their regular breakfast into their bowls, before things get nasty. They're pleased enough, I guess. I pull on someones hoody I find on the back of a chair. It's white and a little too tight across the shoulders, short on my arms. I'm thinking: I probably should have washed or something, before wearing someone else's clothing. I'm thinking: this is an uncharacteristically impolite action. I sniff my arm, but it just smells bland and slightly unfamiliar. My housemate stumbles into the kitchen, bleary and morning-like, starts making coffee. She says "You look rough" I can't see myself but I explain it's because my things are white and ill-fitting, it makes me look like a patient, or a jumble-sale ghost. She frowns, holding the  coffee pot between us defensively. "Go back to bed" she says. But instead I watch these heat resonance cameras tracking the captive animals.Sip coffee while giraffes glow in patches, rhinoceros horns register blue and cold.
    Smoke two cigarettes laid flat back down on the table outside. The sky is this unreal thing, wide, colourless and empty. I fall asleep as two magpies try and rip the felt from the roof of a shed.

Road Safety

    We're standing on the kerb just here and we're waiting, a lot of waiting. Step backwards, it's a foolish long time. He takes my hand and I'm thinking of instruction: my school,my babka too.But mostly my school.
    A row of seven year olds wearing reflective tabards, too close or something.
    "Not so near the edge" she says:
    "Mischa! Aisha! Pay attention!"
We could be best friends because our names rhyme. We look at her with these wide and liquid eyes.We are the very good children. Cuckoos, changelings that dream in sugar highs and world domination.What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? Gets written across a white board in green ink.Taller, she writes in her book, inscrutably.
    Marcus is this solid kid, all pink and yellow. Aisha and I squat over heating pipes lunchtimes, behind screens of coats, plotting elaborate schemes for his demise. We map them out with minute, closely detailed comic strip drawings. We say nothing. We stand tight close behind him, his hair smells of milk sugar. Aisha trembles with possibilities, squeezing my fingers until the veins buzz. Anticipation hits me very hard in the bladder. He could be mangled beneath wheels, spread out like melted marshmallow across the tarmac.He really could.
    Crossing this road here seems equally momentous. Our main obstacle the lack of actual traffic because cars are too stealthy. Stop. Listen. Look left, look right.Wait for the cars to pass. Cross at a steady pace. I keep forgetting how to breathe and in the centre of our palms that meet we cradle two bee stings like stigmata. His is real, mine is a mirage. I want to check that mine is still imaginary but I'm afraid to let go.
    Five minutes later we're still waiting. Ten minutes? I don't know, time curves in on itself. A white BMW shimmers in the sun.

Broken

Something gets pulled across the floor. It's not that heavy, but makes these little mews of complaint.
an arm, rolled over and trapped beneath at this wrong angle rolled over and snapped like a twig on the forest floor.
not a sharp, crisp, clean snap
like the floor of the forest is damp and spongy moss saturated
lush and vegetable
a green stick soft wet gurgle of a break

Only it isn't a forest, or a branch

the fingers so close to my eyelids I can decipher the spider sprawl signals creep across the knuckles

The sounds have stopped.

I stretch, shift leaves and debris, emerge and touch the very end of fingers this kiss of tips soft, fleeting, stop.

Double Date

"What are you?" stupidly, slowly.I mean this: "What are you doing?" What were you doing? Looking at my hand, like it might be written there. Making something; Coffee? Tea?  Sigh again, or for the first time. Sighs splits crashes sits

I have a message,it says: "What should I wear?" So I close my eyes and I make this very elaborate and sarcastic reply but - Ah ( it's a yawn, not a sigh) I drop my phone and it skitters beneath the counter. One of the cats looks at it, looks at me, looks at it. my hands make these trails, delightful and I conduct the cat and mouse scenario. I mean phone, cat and phone, spider phone cat mouse, whatever.What else? Dust, baskets of vegetables and spices. I burrow some more. Paper shed garlic skin cat-trapped now, beneath her paw.The kitchen floor sticks to my cheek.

"What are you doing Mischa?"(That's not me)Someone else. I'm armpit deep in this miniature world."Cleaning?" Shrugs all round. They look like giants to me. "You look OK from here" "OK?" 'OK' is this insulting thing, like 'fine' as in "You look fine" "It all depends where you put the stress" He regards something about his person and I trap his foot beneath my paw.Snigger: "Luce, your name is ridiculously symbolic" I speak maybe a third of the words that form in my head. This is how I write too.

Smoking desperately at the bus-stop here. I can't make the cigarettes hold together, couldn't make them. My fingers are ash, soft, useless curds of it. He does it for me, planted between my legs. Hectic red cheeks and glowing, definitely, in the gloom. These narrow, deft fingers rifle through papers, tobacco, wipe something from my nose all beauty and productivity. He lights it in his own mouth, places it in mine."Thank you" I say, or try to.

The whiskey is all peat and ancient leathery bodies, the smoke like a funeral pyre. My mouth full of death-tinged water; a prelude to vomitting and I spit and laugh this "I'm like - goth-mashed  - Edgar Allan - fucking - Poe" He's about seven, en route to a birthday tea. Let's sleep on the bus, when it comes.

In the hallway he says: "My dad knows this guy" and screws up his nose. A small voice in my head says "Run away, Run away" like I'm Jean Rhys now, or something.

Project 8

 He isn't that human.The design flaws are all absent, it's unnerving but pretty hot. Like, fucking with something designed to your precise specifications; some kind of high spec Love Doll, the kind that got animated by a very bored and evil god.

I'm trying to impress this maverick film-maker by grinding some telegraph wire. It's really high up, thirty feet or so. I fall off a lot and splutter a mess of bright blood, an arc across the concrete. It leaves me pristine and unmarked, every time. Pretty soon the school-yard looks like the floor of an abattoir, but I've got nothing to show for it.

He is naked on his hands and knees on some kind of occasional table. He's trying to look at the screen through his legs. The table protests, like it would prefer to hold an inkstand or a small bowl of cherries.

"You're so shit at this" He lifts his head and smiles, like my lack of skill is very pleasing.

My refusal to sustain visible injury is becoming annoying, plus the smoking with no hands is making my eyes water. I shrug, like my lack of skill is only in his mind and I'm playing like this intentionally. He buys it, kind of. Looks through his legs again then grimaces at me.

"Oh man - you're fucking yourself up on purpose"

I should have some kind of graze, at least. A bandage? I spit out the cigarette and tell him this. On the screen, I look pretty much like him.

Salt

Speak platitudes like: enough is enough, or
If you put one chair on top of another chair then it's inevitably not stable.
It isn't necessary, you don't need to reach that.
But you hold me on the kitchen floor in the light from the refrigerator when I cry because I can't stem the streams of salt pouring from my fingertips. Not: there is no salt, how could there be? More, it doesn't matter, we have plenty. Don't cry, we can sweep it up later.
When you speak on the phone to the mother of your children I am there beside you taping paper bags over my hands.
Good idea, you mouth.