June 2023 - The Pure Life of Dreams

June 29, 2023March 20, 2024

Campsite Reconciliation with the Cold Cousin

Mao Sr. aka Dad and I were camping by the river, a grassy area out in the open. Our tents were already pitched, plain white Boy Scout V shaped tents, one for us and another for a friend of his.

Geri, a cousin, was there too; she showed up unexpectedly, and I thought to bring up some of the past grievances that kept our two families apart. She came by bike and she stood propped against it using the angle of the bike to lean back. And she was wearing a white chemise with plain dark trousers, and talking random stuff.

I too was sitting on my bike, only I was backwards on the seat.

Then I asked over to Dad.

“Might as well,” he replied.

And I told her. “When you came over to Coring Road all those years ago, one of you, I can’t remember who, said, ‘Is there a TV in this joint?’ as you walked in.”

I paused and thought about telling her about the cucumber sandwiches, how lousy the cousins thought them, and also the card game. Instead, I looked past Geri towards Dad again, but he was unpacking large bales of tobacco by the river. I wanted to tell her that Dad was playing cards with her, she was all of twelve or thirteen, and she was F’ing and blinding as she kept losing with each hand.

Then I thought not.

Geri needed to get some cigarettes from in town and we started walking, or rather she walked while pushing me on my bike, with me still backwards on the seat, and I thought we would veer off and I would fall but she held the back wheel and the handlebars and kept pushing firmly.

I was conscious of her white shirt close up, her breasts ample beneath. I wanted her to stop but then suddenly Geri stood back and pulled out a cigarette, ready to light it.

Dad was still behind her, him and his friend shaking the leaves from their clear plastic wrap. The leaves fell, wrinkled and brown, large and loose, from the wrapping into the water. And I thought I would be cool, because I too smoked the occasional cigarette, that I’d do the same.

I looked in my bicycle pouch and there was only one cigarette left, it was one of the long ones, the 100’s, and it was slightly bent and cracked. I took it out and held it to my lips then I leant towards Geri to light hers first, but hers was even more cracked than mine, and the paper barely held in the tobacco, I could see the brown of it poking through the slits.

And I could not see how to light it without the thing falling apart.

Cucumber image by Kai Reschke from Pixabay
Bikes by Barry MacHale via Flickr

June 23, 2023July 1, 2023

The Frog and Cat – Part 2 Back at the Hotel

After dozing off again, I find one of the frogs back with me in the hotel room. I have to let him lie in a small container of cold water for a while, to let him recuperate.

I put him in a long rectangular Tupperware, and put a lid on it so he cannot escape, but every time I put down the container, he starts hitting the lid with his head, almost knocks it off.

So then I fill the bathtub in the room, it is filled quite high, and I let the Tupperware float in it so that this time, if he escapes, he will only escape into more water.

The bathtub is only filled with water from the tap and is not the boiled, sterilizer water I used for him but I’m sure it will be OK for the time that he needs to get better.

Then I leave the room.

And it is only when I get back that I see the horror.

Artie is floating under the water of the bathtub his small body rotating slowly under the surface, the frog paddling around him, the Tupperware up-ended.

Artie must be dead, I think, as I pull him out. A bit of claw catches my hand and comes away from his paw, lodges with a piece of fur at the soft base of my thumb.

I lie Artie’s limp body, belly down, across the lip of the bathtub. I stroke his back, and press hard, up from his hind legs with both thumbs, push his fur up towards his throat until the water ejects from his mouth into the bathtub. And I repeat it again and again until the water spurts out, until after the third or fourth time he splutters into life, and rolls out of my grip onto the floor.

“Oh Artie,” I cry as he walk away.

He no longer has his buff coat but looks more tabby and smaller than he was before; when he was chasing the frogs.

I leave him to return downstairs where they have the constructors out on the patio. They are mending the tiles, resurfacing them with white squares in a diamond shape, white to match the balcony wall which surrounds the patio. And I want to see how the construction is going.

When I get there I’m surprised to see Artie once more. This time he is lying on his back, his body splayed across the balcony wall. A small but deep gash is visible across the white fur of his belly, bleeding,

“Artie,” I cry out once more as I rush towards the wall.

Next to him sits a contractor and, at the far side of the patio, two more. They wear grey hard hats and are eating sandwiches, it’s their lunch break. And they stare back nonchalantly at my commotion.

Then a second cat bounds out from the French doors of the hotel, across the patio and up onto the wall to my dead cat. Only it’s Artie who ran out of the hotel and the dead cat is not Artie after all, although he shares the same tabby markings and size.

Artie sniffs at the dead cat briefly before leaping towards the two contractors at the end of the patio. He ducks between them as they slouch and chew their sandwiches.

“Catch him!” I yell before he disappears under their legs.

Photo by Eu_eugen via Pixabay

June 16, 2023June 17, 2023

Two Women, One a Smoker the Other a Drinker

I am in a bar with two couples some years younger than me, maybe in their twenties. They are hooked up already, one couple, one side of the booth, the other couple opposite; with me sitting on a chair, next to the second couple.

I fancy the platinum blonde with the long curly hair and would like to go out with her, especially now they talk about swapping partners.

She’s a drinker rather than a smoker, whereas as the other woman, her hair straight, shoulder length and dark copper, she smokes but does not drink.

They are all going to another bar, one that is a bit rough and dark, they say, even though it is raining outside. And when they get up to leave, the smoker pulls out a large green golf umbrella and I think to get mine too. Only I have to hurry back to my flat to get it.

I leave the couples waiting at the entrance, and on my way to my flat I call Ricky G to describe what’s going on and which woman I should hook up with.

Then on my return I pass by the White Resort, pass through the side alley where all the workers bustle about, behind the view of the patrons. To my right are the tall white columns of the front entrance, and as I walk side by side with a Hispanic worker wearing the white tunic from the resort, the alley gets darker. I explain to him that I am going to the rougher part of town, a black neighborhood where it isn’t so safe.

And then upon my return I see the couples are still waiting for me by the old bar. The blonde sees me, holds in one hand a flagon half filled with red wine, holds it up with a finger hooked through a small circular handle at the neck of the bottle.

“You have the same umbrella!” she says and indeed I have the same matching dark green golf umbrella.

The smoker peels off. “I have to get something first,” she says. And I suggest to go with her, because it is not safe.

Her hair is darker than I first thought and I go with her to a local supermarket, black owned, with dark wood paneling and an empty feel.

I follow her in as she walks through empty aisles with low wooden counters that would normally have goods for sale; until she arrives in a new room, at a corner where a black man closes in on her. The man hems her in between a brown wooden counter that lines the wall and another counter that stretches out perpendicular.

I see him adjust his shoes so that she cannot move, so that he can further close in on her.

I think he is going to threaten her but then she turns away from him where, the other side of the counter, sits another black man on a stool. He’s older with a greying Afro.

And in the bright voice of recognition she cries out to him. “Hello!”

Photo by Shima Abedinzade on Pixabay

June 8, 2023August 24, 2023

Visitors from Japan

Photo by Berlinofx via Pixabay

June 2, 2023June 29, 2023

The Frog and Cat – Part 1 At the Restaurant

I’m in Indonesia and we’ll eat over in the restaurant district. But before I leave my small single room for the restaurant, I notice that I have a cut on my belly. It is on my right side, just above the joint of my hip but I won’t have any time to do something about it.

We have arranged to meet at a small restaurant, the near side of the pedestrian zone, the one with the large inviting red trestle table outside.

As we finish our drinks, we notice on the other side of the street, on the second floor, there is an unlit neon sign for another eatery, two lowercase letters either side of three larger Kanji. We are trying to decipher it before we move on to get food. Only it’s already night, and late, and maybe we should just eat here after all.

We go inside and up some stairs to a small room with two bare Formica tables hastily pushed together. The waiters first cover them with white tablecloths, and butt the tables up against one wall; but there is not enough room until we shift the tables back away from the wall and open up the head of the table.

“Reed or Cameron can squeeze in then,” I suggest.

Elaine is already sat down as well as Mum, and Siobhan. And I sit on one side with two others there but I am complaining that I should be opposite.

“It won’t make a difference,” says Elaine from the head of the table.

“But our elbows will knock,” I reply, spreading out my arms to illustrate the point.

There’s an ache in my stomach that I brush off. Then I get up to squeeze into the space on the other side of the table. I can sit the other side of Mum as well, I point out.

As I sit down a group of Scottish dancers come into the room. They are prancing in a highland fling, legs with heavy stockinged plaid socks swirling, arms high. They troupe into the room as part of the entertainment. I can join them, I suggest, but I stay sat while the sound of bagpipes from the other room urges the dancers in.

A Chinese girl sat behind us on a chair flat against the walls, knees pressed together, is talking to a boy in the chair next to her.

“Shhhht,” and I motion to her, forefingers snapped across my mouth, Zip It, before pressing an index finger to my lips. My gesture feels unintentionally harsh.

And when dinner is done, and I return to my room and close the door for the night I return to my cut and notice how the vein underneath now traverses my belly and down to my groin where, on the right side, there is another cut. My groin bleeds slightly, a bright red star.

Then I pull up my shirt and the vein continues in the opposite direction, up from the cut on my belly, across and over towards the left side of my chest. It throbs purple and I daren’t pull my shirt up further to see where the engorged vein ends.

I pick up a glass that I left lying in the small sink by the side of my bedroom door and think to drink the water left in it, but there is a frog is in the glass partially hidden in its purple liquid. There are flecks of white mould as well, and I am about to put a lid on the glass to stop the frog bouncing out but I am too late. The frog jumps from the glass and splashes, a soft rubbery shape onto the linoleum.

“Damnit!” Then I begin to pour out the liquid from the glass, into the sink. But the liquid is already congealed into a messy white shape, another frog just in the nascent stage of growth. It’s a patchy white congealing shape, legs, torso and head barely discernible from the primordial goo, and it too splashes out onto the floor.

Quickly I open the hotel room door to get the frogs outside and kick them with a little poke from my foot until they hop into the hallway.

Of course, Artie is sitting waiting outside. In he comes at first until he notices the frogs crossing his path. And he is about to slip out again when I block him with my leg.

I shut the door, the frogs still outside, Artie inside, but he’s sniffing under the crack in the door, pawing underneath to get to the frogs on the other side.

Image created using Midjourney AI on Discord