Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

The pink flask has seen prettier days. Sun through car windows bleaches out metallic finish. It is pink-ish, matt, mostly looks like a Caucasian prosthetic, but still we are fond of it. It keeps the coffee in warm proximity, here in the car café. The cup twists off. Silver shines under the pink, patched, a map: silver lands in a pink ocean. Espresso is the magma of my little cup planet. Rain distends the river again, overspills, over fields: the fat streams flow. Even the moon is swollen. We see the lower curve of it on the last stretch home. The flask in its former incarnation, bringing 9-5 coffee access

Thoughts on: how to be comfortable and not get stale. Which is not yet a problem: I'm actively pre empting. Like everything, it bubbles in the pot, sputters down to attitude. I am rich. I have always been rich, in experience, in appreciation. Actual material wealth seems tacky by comparison. Just enough to get by keeps you sparkling. Think: what can getting by include? A house, some land, a campervan? What I would say to someone else: Yes. Because it all fits in the pot of thoughts and it sputters just the same. What I remind myself: Yes. Because you hold a link between want and invention and yet once you held a cigarette that gave you powers of calm, remember, and when the very last one was stubbed out, idiot, the calm was stood just as quiet and lovely. If you are good inside you are good in any tax bracket. Will it hurt anyone if I rake up a heap of gold? No. Because it all fits in the pot of thoughts.

Up the flue the brush is pushed. Matt black soot absorbs light: only in specks, for light is not easily consumed. Lit, the fire hacks thick smoke. The soot still bothers it, still catches in the throat of the house. Outside, gluts of rain slick the roads, bog the fields. A brash wind bullies tall trees. -How else to dry the washed clothes? Lit, the fire stays.

As I type, a queen wasp is circling inside the light shade. White washing dangles damp from the clotheshorses: it has been fetched in from flails of chill wind and waning flares of sun. Indoors, it has been warm enough to wake a high-ranking wasp. The fire is not even lit, because the flue is choked with wood ash. We resorted to electric heat to keep Little Granddaughter cozied up this morning. She runs around the living room, condensing meaning into strings of single words. Doggle : meaning this in some way relates to Dog. Mow : meaning this in some way relates to Cat. Nam-ma : meaning Granma there is a job for you to do here. Down : abandon the coffee cup, there is important other stuff to do. Yeh-plea : what children have to say to be obeyed. I hand her toast in a plastic bowl. She looks at me, says phonetically: 'Szis breakfast?' 'Yes.' A satisfied nod: the expected answer. There was no dialogue to be had with the wasp.

This morning, a chicken stole into our house via the broken cat flap. I cornered it in the bathroom and carried it back outside. I think that Cat had ripped off the duct tape but not that she had expected the appearance of the chicken. Cat and Dog both sat in the kitchen with saucer eyes, aghast at the interloping. Cold and bright, the day pops up, takes me to the beach. Two horses gallop about; as many dogs as people; seabirds and crows steady in a bracing onshore blast; no chickens. Dog follows her tennis ball through waves and pools and the toothsome castellations of rock. My eyes follow Dog: over a row of molars and juts of incisor and around the chunky buttress. Press my feet over soft sand. The beach graduates from fine particles to rockfall slabs. Small white pebbles: the teeth of the drowned: salt polished, scatter evenly throughout.

False Start Friday: in which writers share some words that didn't make the final cut, or were in some way unwanted. Here's a failed competition entry of mine from last autumn: a tell-a-story-in-100-words challenge. It wasn't a terrible fail: Boy liked it; it's always good to practice one's skills. It isn't a whole story, it's more of an extract. It has a monster from the abyss theme that relates to the prehistoric and thus the deepest unconscious regions of the human mind, but how would the reader know that? Go too deep and you compress too much! It is exactly 100 words, of course J Hunts By Eye 'At first it is a space, darker than the deep water, indistinct under thick ice: the distance makes us brave. As the shape gains clarity, we grow chill, like the ice melt runs straight into our veins, but there’s a level of curiosity that breaches reason. The pale glaze melts thinner and thinner, a stir in the still water breaks co

Starlings pour from a tree, noisy as a waterfall. As I walk I heat up: flinching eyes in the brightness of sun. Here by the old barn, something blooms red in the ivy: a robin, not a flower. It blooms and flies from the open field, into the wide calm sky. We amble on, over the gate, over the grassy bumps of lane. In the shadowed woods there is old bones and there is fresh; splayed with wing feathers, a blooded fan. Cold holds on the low path. As I climb I heat up: clumsy as a troll in the bracken and sticks. Look at these caves and holes and kicked down trees: badgers here are big as people.