There's a bad smell hanging around, like an atmosphere, like someone who you know. And god-dammit is that a trident in my heart? It has leaves with alterations of veins between them, thin rivers of who the fuck cares, certainly not life, which is in me now. So you sit there highly strung and you're awful worried the second mother will come and when she does boy the shit will hit the fan. I'm awful, you see, I mean I tried harder last year but people around me find evil sexy.

No but I was talking about the weather. It'll come in great wide washes, and they'll bring tears to your eyes, because British people are sentimental about that sort of thing, and that's why the sun never shone on Nelson's funeral. Are you still with me? I'd gladly steal everything you have, but I'm not sure I could get you to carry it home with me. So OK then there are these broadsides, these shots from afar we give each other and I'm not sure how much I like it. Although you always said blood brought colour to my face. Anyway that's the worst sentence so far, we'll simply have to do better.

Then it's a case of mistaken identity. You heard me right. One blossom flies and a pigeon haunts the skyline - it's a still-life on the run. You fucking idiot. I hate it people who use the word 'cuss'. All right so you're on top of me, and things are so intimate I'd rather kill you than look at you again. Christ I hate these moments when you think we're seeing each others' soul. You have little pigs' eyes, really, locked into your conventional doll-face. Oh yes and I'm a misogynist and yet I'm always talking to women. You see, really it's that I hate the world, but women are the only ones I'll talk to. But I'm meandering. No, it's a bad fashion. I listened to you until I could hear your teeth, or feel your sadness - but in the end it was a thin drone, barely disturbing your moustache.

Well and we aren't so used to silences any more. I stretched out something along a plate and hoped, oh Christ I hoped, that it was a continent. You can come up and see me any time. It's good to hear from you. I wonder if you could help me? How do you do - how do you do anything, when there's so much idle chatter and you can walk through life on auto pilot and not notice until the fucking thing crashes? Oh why aren't I more intelligent? Is this all that I have to say? Oh it's so bare and lean and yet at the same fucking time, above it all, it's so bloated and rotten. A fucking - a thin man with rotten teeth and stinking breath, he's drunk but there's something about him that occasionally strikes a note, and that's my art, my prose.

All right then but let's not get too self-analytical ... please let's pretend that it's France and we're happy. There's an orchard and someone is eating oranges. I file away each memory as it happens, knowing how much it will mean to me someday. But you can be force-fed that kind of happiness, drowned in honey. So we won't go there for now. Let's pretend one of us is having a tough time with their marriage. No, let's just pretend that there is more than one of us, with me, above me, inside me, someone there - always there. Oh but you silly fool, you're bleeding all over the page. One more blood metaphor and I'll shoot you - you know you only do it because it vaguely amuses you, and manages to make your suffering trivial.

No. We're in taxis in the middle east. There are no seat belts, just a thick blanket spread over the seats, because priorities are different here. Your taxi is following mine with the luggage, and I'm with the kids. That sentence hurt: I can't think why. My vital life is draining away and there's no one to witness it. And I almost made myself cry. Surely this must matter to someone somewhere, what I'm doing. But really I'm so awfully boring. And I could pull off a con, you know I could, before some people who mistook boring for meaningful, and get shown in front of a panel of critics, and they'd expose me past my skin - they'd say I was boring, tho' I'd rather they told the world my entire sexual history than strip me down to such a truth. Deep down in your heart you've only ever been frightened of being called a fraud.

On the other hand, it's not like you have anything to be fraudulent about. I mean, you're not exactly a success story, are you? You have few friends, little love, a ruined education and no achievements beside - what conman wouldn't want to be you? Great rushing oil from her bosom. Streaks of light across the night sky like paint being stripped. Or something better and deeper that I can't see. You're almost 23. Desperately trying to hold out for old age, hoping that's where you come good. But you know that the people who are better at being young than you now, while you talk to old people, will be better at being old too - and so you'll talk to young people. This is all so lousy I could cry and scream but what the fuck do you expect, it's 4 in the morning. No, I'll tell you Sammy, you may not be much of a writer but you're an artist with the excuses.

Listen, I remember the monkey bars in the park. Please don't take that away from me. I'm going to die, and the only one who'll remember the monkey bars will be my sister, and she'll realise that the memories are only real to her now, and that's if she cares to recall them. I remember the fucking monkey bars in the park, I remember the plastic tree outside McDonald's where you got inside and it stank of piss. None of it is of any exterior worth to anyone, although I desperately want it to be. I think I write to commemorate my little world and make it come alive again. Although I never can or will. If the smell in my garden can be remembered, when I tell you that my garden is a person sitting there, that the smell of my garden is alive - no, I'm going to screw up the entire thought for you, but if it could ever have been remembered then the memory would have been something somehow. And people think it's the place, and they take you on a god-damn tour of Dickens' London, but it was never the place, it was the memory - and this is what you won't believe - that memory could have been made anywhere.

1177 words.

The River, 3rd Draft (send to Tom)

EXT., RIVER, DAY

DYLAN, a young man of bookish appearance, and JO, a young woman with a charming smile, are walking along by the edge of a river together.

DYLAN

Let's have a swim!

He takes off his top and jumps into the river.

JO

What, here? I'm not really -

DYLAN

It doesn't matter, the water's amazing ...

JO stands on the edge and looks at him. Then she loses her uncertainty and plunges in. We see them splash around for a while. DYLAN holds his breath and dives under the water. JO looks for him, and he appears further down the river. They improvise little games until they get bored and climb out again. They lie down in the bright sunlight to dry off.

JO

I can't wait for the start of the season to begin. Arsenal are going to peel off the frontrunners by boxing day, though, I reckon ...

As DYLAN looks at her, the sound of the river begins to drown out her voice and he is simply gazing at her body and face while we see her talking.

INT. COTTAGE, DAY

DYLAN is kneeling in front of a severe-looking icon.

DYLAN

Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven ...

We see flashes of JO, laughing in the sun.

DYLAN

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses ...

We see shots of DYLAN making notes beside a Bible, covering the edges of a sheet with "JO".

DYLAN

As we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation ...

We see a shot of JO's bare arms.

DYLAN

But deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen.

He rises quickly and leaves the room. He begins throwing out all of the food in the little kitchen. He heaves a great mass of it outside and pours it into the compost bin, covering his mouth to protect it from flies. When he returns he finds a rabbit in the kitchen, eating pieces of strewn-about lettuce.

DYLAN

Neither of us are getting into heaven, my friend ...

INT., COTTAGE, NIGHT

We see shots of him in front of the icon, sweating and looking ill, occasionally holding his stomach.

INT., SHOP, DAY

DYLAN stands at the counter of a village shop, still looking pale. A set of Victorian scales lies behind him. A voice from the back of the shop calls him.

SHOP-KEEPER (O.S.)

Dylan, can you take a bag of potatoes over to the Three Lions this afternoon?

DYLAN looks apprehensive.

DYLAN

Sure.

INT., PUB, DAY

DYLAN enters an ancient-looking pub. JO is behind the bar.

JO

Hey Dylan, you can just leave those here, thanks.

DYLAN

Right.

JO

Something the matter?

DYLAN

I've just never been in here before.

JO

It's lovely, isn't it.

DYLAN

No, it's ... horrible. I don't know how as a Christian you can ...

JO

You work at the village shop, that sells alcohol to fifteen year olds. Get real, mate. You see what you want to see, that's all. What are you laughing for?

DYLAN

You called me "mate".

JO

We are mates, aren't we?

DYLAN's face clouds a little.

DYLAN

I thought we were more than that. But I guess you're right, I see what I want, don't I.

DYLAN walks off.

JO

Dylan ...

EXT., RIVER, DAY/ INT., SURGERY

DYLAN sits on the rapids in the river, his head and feet above water. He observes the dragon flies at play in the rapids.

DYLAN

My body is without sin!

He looks at his hands, filtering between the sunlight, then looks around in a white room. He is lying on a surgical bed in the centre.

A surgical knife cuts under his left pectoral, and water rushes out. We see his sleeping face. The flap of skin is lifted up, and a river of images flows beneath, of icons and JO and animals. We see his body change to a woman's one.

EXT., BEACH, DAY

A man is standing at a beach. His back is turned. A woman rushes towards him.

DYLAN

Joe! Joe!

The man looks behind him.

DYLAN

I did this for you, Joe ... so we could be together.

JOE holds her at arm's length and looks at her body up and down. Then he embraces her. We see the mouth of a river, running out into the sea.

FADE.

TREATMENTS

1: There is no continuity in the film. Clothing changes constantly, furniture changes from shot to shot, and in the pub scene clients disappear, and JO's arm against the bar in the foreground of a shot of the pub is a man's arm. During the scene where DYLAN runs towards JO(E) - who is clad in a man's version of the shirt he wore in the pub - objects change in the tracking shot itself, rather than between cuts, but when JOE turns around things achieve a perfect stillness.

2. The opening shot of the film is of a narrow river. This shot is in a ratio narrower than 4:3. By the end of the film, the shot of a river flowing into the sea, the ratio is panoramic. The ratio slowly expands throughout the film, although the film itself will be shot in panoramic.

3. For the shot during surgery where DYLAN is opened up, there is going to be an insert shot of a double exposure, that of flowing water and that of a body of images loosely associated with each other.

All 3 treatments will hope to show that not only is the body a river, but so is the film.

The forest was filled with dust. From the assorted animals there hung spider webs, and the colour of the sun was faded. The forest had been constructed for me to play in, and then it became a romantic place for me to take my sweethearts, before the grime became pervasive. It was night in the attic, and the two-dimensional trees cast broad shadows in the torch light. I set my lantern down by an eternally startled deer.

When I think of my wife, I think of lemons. Their brightness, and the images of the sun that collected around them. How they could sit on the shelf of a grocery and still bring a bit of the continent with them. Just like lemons, my wife went with a cocktail perfectly. Her dresses lit up parties, and her sharpness suited conversation well - in small amounts, of course. Her body had the small hardness of a lemon: but most of all what reminded me was how they tasted when sugared, and when bitter.

german count murders wife, hides her in the secret bits of the attic he played in as a child, then becomes obsessed with hiding the evidence that he didn't love her, which forces him deeper into his childish world, until in the highest part of the castle he finds a keep sake of hers he placed when they first met, and this convinces him to give himself up.

The Vegetable Girl (418)

It was one of those expensive places near Oxford Street that cater for a particular type of person: the sort of person who would pay large amounts of money to spend part of their day eating a salad, while spewing afternoon nothings from their mouths in carefully bred Islington lilts.

I reached the centre of the room without anyone really noticing me, and found myself alone with a great glass display case. Inside, tempting concoctions of rare fruits and vegetables lay on large white plates. Prising the glass open at the bottom, I slipped my hand in hungrily.

Someone grabbed my arm: I turned up my eyes to meet the glare of the girl behind the display. She pulled me around the counter. I wasn’t resisting, only trying to think of an excuse. Finally she guided me through a little curtain, and we were alone in the darkness of the kitchens behind the shop.

There we faced each other, and I looked her fully in the face for the first time. Her features were long and ethereal in the flat square of light we stood in. She whispered in my ear ‘let me show you something’. I saw that she was trembling slightly.

She walked past me and opened a small cabinet nailed against the wall. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to make out what it was that was moving around. In the box there writhed the head, arms and torso of a girl, who appeared to consist entirely of fruit and vegetables.

Her hair was made up of lettuce leaves, her fingers were flailing strips of cucumber and celery and other green vegetables, and her lips were formed by passion-fruit. The girl reached in to the box and cut a carrot areola from the dark skin, and the vegetable girl began to cry. But the tears blossomed as flowers from her red tomato eyes and we were captivated: the flowers of things that do not blossom are lovely as dreams in stone.

We stood there and watched while she twisted in silent anguish, because they had taken her tongue for a gherkin, and by the stump one could tell that it was just beginning to grow back. We stood there and watched: because even empathy can be overwhelmed by something when its suffering is beautiful.

The Human Abstract (340)

The prince's walls are near, and before the gates six thousand slaves revolve around millstones that may or may not move something in the nether depths: but as I watch them I would stake my life on those grinding wheels turning the slaves themselves, like puppets in chains.

Brightness hovers near me, and opening my mouth I let them count my teeth. My mind swims deliriously in the narrow path of the seeping light, the light that seems to flow through my being: that seems to have at its core the depth of my mouth, and the light gently brimming.

Then I am bereft, and the ochre colours rush like breath back into my body, encasing me. I take up the next piece of iron and pierce my thigh through with it. The pain is intense - the spear seems to nestle within the broken shards of iron welted into the rasping wounds, each sealed with the heat like rosebuds blooming inwards within me.

I look up to where Jesus sways on high Golgotha, directing thousands of us with the spear he has torn from his skeletal side. It is only my abject mind that fuses me to him and the fires that burn under his gaunt brow. Sometimes I think that he is weeping, and it is the lights they have shone upon him that make the tears dance like flame. Such is the narrow angle of my heart. I look up again and he is gone.

This is the human abstract: we below haunt ourselves to chase ghosts from the blesséd, and it is on us that they must test their weapons, so useless against unflawed skin. Within my roots, there is an ecstasy of weakness, and in that weakness there is the Word. My body bangs within its hollow trunk, for my thoughts are trapped beneath its shades. But oh, heed my fruits, fear my fruits. They are soft enough to break your mouth open and split your entire being down to its last unblemished sliver.

THE GREEK VASE (296)

A takeaway boy smokes a cigarette under the beating of the sun, beams filtering through his smoky breath. His motorbike: his glasses: his white trousers. The mountains in the distance flicker like flame beneath the shifting clouds. His eyes on the mountains, he looks unapproachable, a living portrait.

My bare legs: my towel: my wine-glass. I see an old woman with her hand against the window, looking down on us, flattened against the darkness of the room behind her. Fingers pressed against a window pane seem grotesque, more naked than mere surfaces. I let the towel slip from my body, and feel two pairs of eyes locked on me: suddenly I am the piece of art, with the artist trapped inside.

We look at each other from the back-stages of our lives, the stacked scenery hiding us from the spotlight. The old lady still stands at the window. I let him do the work. Suddenly a Greek vase - James' present for me - falls with a crash, but I don't want to clear it up: some things just happen, that's all. Afterwards, he walks away down the garden path. Slowly he becomes a silhouette, and his movements acquire a shadow's grace to them, stretching out in simple shapes against a backdrop of roses.

Ten minutes after he's gone, I get up with a strong feeling of loathing. Love-making seen backwards is disgusting. I kick the pieces of vase into the pool, returned to dirt once more. It had survived wars and plagues, James' little hint that personal history transcends conflict. His desk: his instruments: his frowns. Yet the two things he valued most were broken by a boy in badly-fitting shoes. I smile, and think to myself that all things should be destroyed this way.

PABLO AND OLGA (123)

Your face is lovely in the pouring rain, with its features made unreal by the faint lines of flowing water. On the canvas behind me, you look like what you were, a bored dancer in an artist's room. Out here you come alive, turning and laughing in front of the pink rhododendrons that seem to set your marble flesh alight.

I look at you one last time, before I must attend to the drying pastels. My love for you is so powerful that it cannot be fully conceived in my mind, but rather sipped at like a strong and endless liquor. Beautiful Olga, like a Russian river running darkly and soulfully beneath the ice. When I am with you, I am absolved.

DREAMS OF BLACK CARS (93)

Nathan first had the dreams when he was a boy. Classic cars, with wide chassis and bodies like ocean steamliners, careering down country lanes. Everything would be in slow motion, and he would be too far away to prevent what was going to happen. He would start running, and he would see the black cars breaking their bodies against a man, whose face was always blurred. Their bonnets would rupture, though no driver flew through the splintering glass: he assumed, with the logic of dreams, that each car reformed around its own spectre.

2nd hour

I'll be your writer for this evening.

You walk into the hotel, that shines drearily in the seaside fog. You reach into that purse you always seem to carry everywhere, the one that makes you look like a footballer's wife or worse. You don't have a husband, just some barely-there lover who sits at your side and if he snores after sex it doesn't matter, he is good to you.

You wear long gloves, like an actress in the thirties, but we both know what they hide. You once left notches on your arm - he loves me, he loves me not. You affect simplicity, but it just reveals the process beneath, like a child showing off a bad magic trick. You never left your village, really: you just brought it with you.

Where will we take you, then? Up to the third floor, a room that must be familiar to you. You put the room key on the bedside cabinet and wait. Then you get nervous, so you rise from the bed and go into the bathroom to prepare. At this point you're thinking, this is going to be some degraded story where he writes about me having sex, and you feel pity.

What if I did? The one part I have of you that you can never take back is the memory of your body. I couldn't photograph your mind, couldn't encase it in a moment, but I remember the curve of your neck when I stood behind you, the touch of your hand on my knee. I wouldn't debase such memories by writing about your body: it's your mind I'm after.

I wrote our relationship from the start, and I'm not going to stop just because you left me. I rehearsed scenes in flying train carriages, jotted witty comments on sick bags in aeroplanes, and scripted whole romances from my work desk on grey ugly mornings. If we eventually saw through each other, then all I can say is such things happen, and we may return to this story.

You turn on the light in the bathroom, but it's still too dark to really see yourself in the mirror. Your whole body is a battleground between youth and age, and the scars caused by one meet the scars caused by the other. Beauty is an impostor come to mock at you: yes, a forgery, the ultimate trompe d'oeil, inserted by nature to entrance us.

Yet as you struggle with your make-up bag, you are more convinced of your body's beauty than its reality. Even if beauty were a dream, it would still be worth dying for. You rotate your head in phases, trying to find your most pleasing aspect in the darkened glass, and yet you are worried that there is a twin vision that shows you in all your ugliness. Which angle would reveal more of your soul?

OK: so he knocks, and you go over to let him in. He isn't a lover, but a teacher come to guide you through the basics. This is what I know of you, and how I choose to show you the little truths you have been trying to hide for so many dinner parties: that you are ignorant, my dear, and desperate to conceal it. He starts you on the fucking alphabet. No, I exaggerate.

His manner is awkward, and he struggles to find the authority necessary in a tutor, because he is embarrassed by the situation. But Christ, look at you, and all the artists you dated, the writers like me, the references you laughed at and the books you said you enjoyed. If there's one thing I hate worse than anything else, it's a hypocrite, a liar, a dilettante, like you.

You worked in art-charities, for christ's sake, taking money away from other causes to give to all that is irrelevant, particularly to someone who barely looked at a painting. And of course it paid for expensive lunches, and the hotel room you sit in now. Your sin stinks, like a dog in a kennel that was never born but crept from its mother's rotting womb. This is a song of hatred, a song for you, my dear.

(30 minutes)

I've got no fucking talent. Rubbish bullshit non-story just like all the others. Well, carry on.

I think it's fabulous that you're a good man, in a place like this. Really, it's so ... authentic. There gathered in his mind a sense of oblivion. Moments later, birds covered almost every part of him. She wanted him to die in a gentle, beautiful way. Some sun had sprinkled into the sunken garden, and the red brick lit up in a glow so strong it made the wall and furniture seem as one.

Her fingers worked at the button until it had fallen off. He twisted the garment until it was thin and unrecognisable. He pressed his child's hand against the keyboard and it made this word: dfh

Someone has to come sooner or later. He rocked further and further until he fell out of the tree, still laughing. It's a dire mess of a party, and no-one's brought their own drink. What she really wanted was such stillness and closeness that she could be entirely enveloped in cloth without being smothered. The baron approaches.

Listen to us, now. You tried it your way and you failed. It's a different world.

The lightning-charred tree stands wonderfully erect, yet an ominous example set by the Gods.
Her beauty was ignited by the presence of her child, and made whole with its happy laughter.
Her gaze was like solidifying ice, her liquid eyes freezing over in anger.
Nothing for me, I'm sick with music and love.
I fragmented out as she embraced me, fracturing into still quiet pieces.
The soulfulness that stirs me was absent in him, almost to the point of blasphemy.
She came softly on the sultry breeze.
A corner of his mind was clouded with the obscure conviction that men hated him out of jealousy.
The occult was a map of the soul for him, a cornerstone of mental illnesses for her.
Well into his sixties he was still bothered by the phrase, "cut his teeth", to the point of nervous irritation.
Some mistakes, he made on his own, others with acquaintances, and still others were made before he was born: and it was these that dogged his life.
Nice of you to visit, she said, flicking a crumb absently along the expanse of settee between them.
He remained strong for the length of time he was sure others were watching, and then cried like a child for the remainder of the day.

1114 words.

Hour 1

I'll tell you what I am. Fucking talentless. Sit here in the dark working on ruins, feeling them sweat like old buildings. Nothing ever happens in the dark. Sure, when you turn on the light, something's changed. You're not like the man of old. You sit there and don't speak until someone approaches you. I used to fucking respect you. Now I wait for the days when you'll need me to piss.

I can't write because I took the edge of my mind off with drugs. I could have been pure, but now look at me. Or I could have been alive, but that's a joke now. It doesn't do you good to think like this. You want something to spin, but it doesn't. What was that lift you felt in the old days, when a story was like an old interesting smell you were trying to remember? It formed in your mind before you put it down, not after.

You're so lazy you should have been a poet. This prose stuff isn't for you, you know. Oh, she was the darling of the ball, her ankles, those ankles. I find it all trivial, all of it, kaput. Everything has been said, so post modernism is merely trying to say it backwards. I used to have plans, back when it was fashionable. I used to have dreams, before they became cliche. Now I just sit in a room and check my facebook (not writing as myself, I never use facebook).

I count three of you. Children and OAPs, for free. That devil on your back, he'll cost extra. Come on, Sammy, you know you love me really. No I don't, you're fucking rubbish. I'm always there for you. Yeah, like an ulcer. I think we have to straighten a few things out. You're completely alone, except for all the things you've nicked. Yes, I believe you'd be some sort of original, if it weren't for that.

Are there writers who spend their whole lives writing drivel just to make themselves do something? If I was getting paid for this it wouldn't be half as painful. Meagre lines, bone-dry of meaning - and you think that the bone is the meaning, but it isn't, it's just the skin. He used to be a paragraph, in his salad days. Now he's shrunk to an axiom. His epitaph is eagerly awaited, however. Oh, fuck, it's so dry in here, in this place, with these words.

Latin is a dead language, they say. But all language is dead. Writers are just grave-diggers, and librarians morticians. Even this sentence, if I were to brandish it in front of my face, does it not look a little like the hand of Eliot? Christ, you'd expect me to have more interesting thoughts than this over the course of an hour. Oh wait, you're talentless, remember. I'd love to be a nice, normal person - in fact I'd give up my stinking soul for it, and that's the issue, really.

So imagine 10,000 hours more of this, then. Are you having fun already? Don't tease me, I have dying ambitions of a faintly romantic persuasion. What are we going to do when the biscuits dry? That's what I want to know about global warming - not when the seas will overcome the land, but I want to know the moment when you look at a tea cup and realise things will never be the same agin. It's those moments on which history is built.

If I keep this up I'll turn into a pen. My fingernails will sharpen like quills, and when I kiss my lover I'll leave ink in her mouth. Oh, you're enjoying yourself really. If you got yourself a laptop you could go into the park with a picnic and do this. Just stay the fuck away from coffee houses. Made yourself a little bottle of cordial, down here in the dark, typing away for precisely no reason.

Does this count as practice? Surely as much as those meaningless scales on a musical instrument. And every thought is new, not some old thought you try to squash in with your strange mistrust of your present state of mind ('no, the past self was better ...'). The only difference between you and all the past selves is that they outnumber you. I could write the most beautiful sentence of my life right now, and in fact am slightly better equipped for it, but simply unlikely due to the sheer amount of hours I've spent writing versus this one.

He walked across the room like all that you've ever loved. The thought of his breath makes you conscious of his mortality, and you comfort yourself that his breath is clearer than the air around, and his silence is like thunder beneath clouds - how then could such a person ever die? You realise your own absurdity, standing there and watching him with your useless stitching and a passion that will never break your smile, but still: he walked across the room like all that you've ever loved.

When the count thought of his wife, he thought of lemons. Their brightness, and the images of the sun that collected around them. How they could sit on the shelf of a grocery and still bring a bit of the continent with them. Just like lemons, his wife went with a cocktail perfectly. Her dresses lit up parties, and her sharpness suited conversation well - in small amounts, of course. Her body had the small hardness of a lemon: but most of all what reminded him was how they tasted when sugared, and when bitter.

'Are we alone?'

'Yes.'

'You're sure?'

'He's gone, Clarence.'

'I'm sorry, Joe, but I just can't stand him.'

'I know. It's not your fault.'

'Yes, it is my fault - I mean, he's done nothing to make me feel this way.'

'Apart from -'

'Yes, apart from that. But it's not like he could choose -'

'Well, any more than I could.'

'Yes, but I know you ...'

'What you mean is that you knew me before you knew what I did.'

Word count: 1035

She crinkled her eyes, that had dried up with age.

"I'm so glad you've returned."

"I'm not staying long, Mama."

She rose and crossed the room, serene even with her elephant's skin. She poured milk into a glass and when she returned she placed it directly into his lap with motherly insistence.

"We kept your room the way it was."

He was startled.

"All this time?"

"Yes. Would you like to see it?"

"No."

There was a pause. He looked at the cross on the mantle piece. It was big and thick, and cast a white-gold glimmer all around. As he looked at it he felt the urge of old to touch it.

"It must be twenty years since you left us."

The old woman hesitated before continuing. He looked at her skin, which was so pale that she seemed to be diffusing into the white wall behind her, but not at her eyes.

"I know we should have told you before we did. But there was no protocol for us to follow. All we knew is that we loved you ... things were different then."

"Love wasn't different. Love was never different."

"We didn't tell you what you were because we didn't want to hurt you."

"You let me think I was an abomination for years!"

"But times have changed. The pastor says that homosexuality is like heroin addiction, and that we should love the sinner ..."

He had memories of small rooms, bent in endless prayer, and the dark smell of sweat. As he heard her speak he realised he would never see her again after that day.

"I'm going to go. Goodbye, mama."

Her eyes instantly filled with tears.

"Are you sure you don't want to wait until your father gets back?"

"Yes."

"I love you very much."

"I love you too."

"We both forgive you."

He left the room.

13/7/10 (The Fire Wall)

There was a raw red anger in his face. He had some letters to open: he did this with his hand still trembling. The rage shot up in him and he punched himself in the head. The letters fell to the floor. He was strong, he was strong. He could crush a mountain if he wished. He'd fuck any cunt up who came near him. Fuck them all. Fuck the fucking arses of the lot of them. The swearwords ran off his tongue, and the frustration was still there, that there were no worse words, no words that'd strip the skin off them.

"What have you got going on down here, Mule?"

It was Trevor's voice. Fuck him. He'd like to spit poison at him. He'd like to reach into his face and tear off flesh like clay in his hands. Fuck him.

"Get out of my work space."

Trevor smirked at him and continued down the stairs. He was loving every second.

"This is a work space, is it?"

"Just don't provoke me, alright?"

"Or what? You'll go psycho? You need to lighten up, mate."

Words bubbled up and died inside his mouth. The burning ached: the anger was so bad he wanted to sob. He would come down at them from a great height, and see them run before him, the frightened sheep they really were. He would eat them, biting off the tips of their fingers and tearing open the sides of their necks and seeing the joyful blood come out. He would look into their eyes as the pupils shrank. He would listen to their pleas for mercy. He hated every one of them, the fucking cunts, the stupid mother-fucking cock-sucking cunts. He tried to focus all of this into a single glare that rested on Trevor as he walked around casually examining things.

"How do you cope with the loneliness down here? Wanking off to internet porn, I bet. You put up the fire wall, after all."

Trevor laughed softly and then suddenly looked at him. There was ice in the Mule's face, and beneath flames were distinguishable. He carried on walking, searching for something to interfere with. He put one foot up on a disconnected computer monitor, and said:

"It was only a prank, Mule."

"Fuck off!"

Unfinished

Summer days pass with a may-fly's drunken clamour, no longer than the spaces in a lazy conversation. I couldn't tell you what happened yesterday any more than I could tell you what will happen tomorrow, except that both will be good. Rafi, clothed in sunlight, stooping to dive into the river. Pawel, the stillness of the air in his eyes. Both as much a part of nature as a pebble on a river bed.

They're helping me recover from the operations, day by day. Pawel helps me to shave my chin, and Rafi my legs. Both of them have barely been outside this village, so that while the grocer may refuse to serve me, Pawel cycles to my cottage on his bike without gears, laden with bread and fruit. Rafi sits in church with her face as pure as silk, her hand clasped in mine.

Pawel's father came into his room one day, and demanded why he hadn't invited a girl to the dance. Pawel, a school boy, decided to take Rafi, who was a fully-grown woman. They span soundlessly in the midst of the marine lights, their heads on each others' shoulders. Afterwards Pawel's father beat him ruthlessly, and Pawel came to me crying angry tears.

"I want to escape this place."

"But the life you have here is so beautiful. You swim every day -"

"You don't see me how I am, but how you want me to be!" Rafi sat in the corner reading.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm a misfit. I can't be free like you."

"Well then, we'll go to the city together," I say. Rafi looked at Pawel from the corner, the brightness of the day in her eyes.

The memory of my final operation is a haze of instruments I know I could never have seen, and the recollection of Pawel's face, then Rafi's. Mainly I recall a human body lying in pure whiteness, changing without ageing, its wounds gaining the strength of flowers. When I awoke smiled to see I had two little angels at the foot of my bed, praying for me.

That night, I remember our dark hotel room glimmering in city light, where we sat at the window gazing out. The stars seemed to be propping up the heavy night sky - overloaded, they began to fall, one by one, in a shower as beautiful as any of us had seen. Each star disappeared into the thin dull glow of the city until the sky, punctured by starlight, settled back into a black mass.

Rafi came up to my cottage a few days later with a painting she had been working on. It was of all of us, myself in the centre, and Rafi and Pawel on either side with an arm round me. I called to Pawel, who was eating in my kitchen, to come and look at the painting. At that moment, I heard a knocking at the door. I went to my window and saw Pawel's father standing there.

"Pawel! I know you're in there!"

I went to comfort Pawel, but Rafi went out to confront his father. I saw them through the kitchen window, with Rafi talking to him quietly but angrily, and then I heard him say:

"You're not my son!"

He turned and left. I saw that Pawel was near the painting, and had smeared it with his hand so that his face was obscured.

Since that day, Pawel has left the village forever. Rafi is an artist, and she has never tried to redo that painting of the three of us, even though it is one of her best. I see her cycle along every day on her old bike with no gears, I can almost smell the salt in her hair: and I think I know why. Every single person is a work of art, unfinished.

Fate

A sickly wind blew through the town. It lingered in alleyways and died in gutters, doing nothing to alleviate the heat. Worse, it carried the stench of the late summer with it, smothering the decent doings of the townspeople with the smell of rot. Small sensations turn pervasive in such weather: a dry mouth is intolerable, and sweat itself makes one feel weary.

A woman crying on a hot day becomes a terrible mess. There should have been a strong man to comfort her, but there was just me, and I shrank from her as she sat on the balcony, letting ants crawl over her. The crystalline pureness of the grass framed her white form, and gave her the immediacy of a vision. It was obvious that she didn't want me to look at her, and yet I couldn't help it all the same. She really wasn't at all beautiful in that moment, and so she fascinated me.

But more than that, I needed my tip. I could tell that in the midst of her histrionics lay a sort of revulsion for me - that I could think of money at such a time. They were all the same. A job's a job, and where would we be if we didn't abide by such things? Eventually she rose and walked over to the small table by my side. I would have passed her handbag over, but it would be improper to handle a woman's purse.

As she took the money out, I saw her fingers go stiff. She was wrestling the impulse to throw the money to the floor. People had done, in the past. I never stooped - it was not in my job description - but armed with my polite cough I would wait for them to come around to my way of thinking. When I received the coins from her, they were already damp with her sweat. I bowed and walked out of the room, and past the torn envelope that lay where she had dropped it in the hall.

The next house featured a young, married couple who were always arguing. I could hear them shouting at each other to get the door for some seconds following my unobtrusive knock, and then eventually the man came to the door. He too was flustered in the heat, perhaps thrown also by my pristine uniform and serene air. So instead of tipping me instantly, he opened the telegram that was addressed to his wife.

It was always a good idea to wait, because if the telegram was good news they were prone to tipping handsomely. However, it was clearly not good news. His face turned white, and then red. He turned suddenly, attempting to slam the door in my face, but I had thrust in a well-polished boot. Without looking at me, he took out his wallet and left me a handsome tip. I thanked him and left.

I was making unusually good progress as I walked over to the poor side of town, and felt inclined to whistle as I stepped among the rubbish. I forced open the gate of an old mining house, on the sort of street where it looks as if the architect has tried to carve as many dwellings as possible out of a single block of white stone. A troupe of handsome children ran to the door. Avoiding them as much as possible, I reached over with the telegram and placed it in the mother's hands.

"Thank you."

Being poor, of course, they always spoke to me. It was rather infuriatingly informal, to tell the truth, and I kept up a haughty silence on my end. She would often speak at me, on whatever pretence her loneliness forced on her - mothers, of course, being among the loneliest of all. She was an earnest, well-scrubbed type, the sort of person who being hit by an ambulance would say, "that was lucky".

She looked up, and smiled, although sometimes eyes have a truth in them they can't conceal.

"I'm afraid I can't pay you."

I smiled back.

"I'll wait."

She disappeared into the darkness of the house. One of the smaller children remained in her wake, staring up at me. I tried to deflect her gaze by looking in a constant way above her head, but after a while it became most disconcerting. For the first time I felt the heat of the day reach past my uniform, and sweat prickled at my neck.

"Ask your mother if she'll be long."

Instead of leaving, the insolent brute merely looked back into the cottage and shouted for her mother. Then she returned her eyes to my face again, when no answer came. I decided that enough was enough, and narrowly resisting clipping the child around the ear, turned on my heel and departed the awful place.

I met my boss in an old pub where he and I liked to lunch together. The ancient glass of the windows produced a narrow shimmer, like a coil of smoke, that made the world outside seem small and dreamlike. My boss had already begun his poacher's pie, and merely gesticulated to the bench in front of him as I entered.

"Afternoon, Harold. Devilish hot, ain't it?"

Without waiting for me to reply, he suddenly raised his yellow eyes at me.

"How was the rounds?"

"Well ... not too bad. I think the weather's baked people's brains."

"Oh, yes?"

"People were acting strange when I gave them their telegrams, that's for sure."

He raised a straggly eyebrow.

"Did you have many telegrams, today, Harold?"

"Oh, the usual."

"Harold, today we got into your locker. We found steaming apparatus, a typewriter and a bunch of opened telegrams."

By that time I was out of the door. The blast of heat carried with it his voice, rising in anger:

"Harold! ... Harold!"

# 1

I am dying softer inside the lines this time, slow and deep within you. You're a cat searching for a goldfish, and then the goldfish itself, melting away into darkness. Every sound we make is another name for beauty. Suddenly we are near, very near, and you look as startled as if we'd met in some forest clearing. Then the chasms between us open up, and we are both alone in togetherness once more.