Gardening – you need to cut back, crop, treat not like a wild thing but train it to bear fruit. Exercise, energy, insistence, love and attention. Stripping and dressing, plucking and pruning. Tenderness is suffocating when it is afraid to reprimand.

A thief designed the first key.

Mind on, keep the gap, carry on, keep minding.

Parrots come to eat the pears; they sing the mobile phone ring tones and cut them off with an inquisitive “hello?”

A woman kills her boyfriend for putting too much salt in the borscht. She says to herself: Well, better not let it go to waste, and eats the soup before handing herself in to the police.

Black teeth: toddontoid,
Dead little extrusions.
Bad breath putting forth,
Out of the envelope of the mouth.
Little moth bitten teeth.
Extending barely beyond
Their frog tapestry / gum topiary.
Unsheathed from their lax longitudinal holes.
Unshod from their dominions;
Unkind (forced into the daylight),
Unjust (almost), this intercession of light.

Lifting the candle from the table, a dribble of wax cascaded down the side and onto her hand. Without flinching she glanced at the sheen, already solidifying. She smiled to herself and in a whisper, barely leaving her mouth, she said: A nice reminder.

The cat’s velvet presence penetrating the house by the entrance that only it has the key to; eyes violent with calm. The upturned sun sending spears of pleasure into the ether; pouncing in the ashes; sobbing over sable skin.

Smell that? Dead rats, on every floor. You often smell it on the streets; my friend pointed it out, just before we were about to eat, so we went somewhere else. I’m friendly with one of the maintenance guys. He told me. You smell it now? In the walls, under the floors. They go there to die after they have gorged themselves on poison.

Walking away recasting the conversation to phrase the repost perfectly. I could see his face practicing the expression, each time tweaking this or that element, eyes open slightly more, mouth wider, more cheeky, duration, force, until he settled on a configuration that pleased him. He repeated this to himself a few times and then dropped the act.

A rescue boat sniffed around the sides of the cruise ship—waspish movements to the heavy plod of the giant. A human had fallen, but why so close to harbour? 'Perhaps he forgot something,' a husband said to a wife as they stood on the balcony overlooking the scene. 'Perhaps she was homesick,' a wife said to a husband.

Please, let me always be good, let me always see the good in people, let me always wear good shoes and drive good cars, and let me be a good driver. Let me not be angered when people are bad, when they have bad teeth and wear bad cloths and smell bad. Let me find it in my heart to forgive them and to help them when I can. Thank you in advance, I knew you would help me.

Congratulations. This is the guiding word of the celebration shop. And how it sits in the mouth, munched around (—O—O—) like a chewed chunk of cake. The contracted congrats I find verminous in comparison to the sleek ermine luxuriance in its full Latinate splendour — I don't know how people swallow this bite size congrats— spat out without chewing, like a guest arriving without a gift. The blue tack would stain the paper rapidly, soaking through to the surface, infecting the image with blotches of premature age, sepia seeping, surfaces itching with brittleness, expanding bruises on the surface, oil spills engendering surface catastrophes, wildlife sick and blotchy with the effects, verso images seeping through the skin, a beak ghostly poking through a muscleman's triceps, a bikini line intercepted by the straggly beard of a gruff mountain goat, a killer whale spray painted with a 'save the ozone' layer. What I learnt is that it is all disposable; a year born as lightly as a paper plate. Life is a picnic and if not consumable then disposable—chuck the leftovers and return to the car. The tack from the holiday shop was as familiar as the sun peeking through the clouds; chuck-able fun; sand strewn hedonism; gulls obscenely flocking; greasy fat chip fingers squished into a potato head.

As I was saying, my wife was telling me a story about a work colleague of her friend who met Fidel Castro when he was visiting Cuba, whom he said was making a speech that he could not understand, not because of the language nor because of the terrible sound system that made Fidel sound like he had not only died but had been dead for several years. He said that he could not understand him ideologically; his speech was full to bursting with contradictions, and whether he knew it or not, he was spreading, according to the colleague of my wife's friend, a vast web of delusion that would in the end kill him and his people. Well, what do you think? My wife said. What do I think? Think about what? About what he said, my wife clarified. About what who said? The man who met Castro! I agree, I said, not knowing what else to answer. Good. I said you would.

Pebbles had been piling up on the mantelpiece for months now. Every time Sandy dove to the bottom of the lake, returning with a choice specimen, they gladly received the gift and added it to the pile. Today was a special day. The arrangement of the pebbles had seemed to naturally suggest a pyramid; today was the pebble that would complete the scheme. They placed it at the apex and turned to look at Sandy. She danced in a circle, tail wagging and tongue lapping. No longer would Sandy venture to the bottom of the lake.

Hour by hour, the clock itches on; a jump here - swift - not prone to indecision. Small, in brief, holed up in the air.