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.