stories, 1

I'm filling up a small sheet of paper with 5 stories. Each of them can only be as long as the A5 sized section allotted to it. It's just a little exercise to try and get started on writing again. When they're all finished I will scan the paper but until then I'll just transcribe the first one. It doesn't have a title and is inspired by a man I saw walking down the road.

The beginning. Once upon a time there lived a man a very very hairy man who was called the wolf-man for the very pure and extremely simple reason that his father had been a wolf a grey brindled old thingwith one scarred ear. The wolf man was as I said already very hairy. His hair was luscious and silken over it grew from his hair in whorls down his neck in ripples then and eddies over the knotted constraints of his back near the shoulders where he had to work hard to keep the wolf part of himself inside here it became more of a full flow into the small of his back as if in relief at its release. From the small of his back his hair stretched and curled itself around his sides to curlicue its satin self around to his stomach from whence it tumbled up in alphabetic forms to the crunching indent of his navel and up up up up to greet his beard. I don't know what happened below the waist because he always ore trousers of course to protect his modesty. Even when it was winter he would take off his shirt and parade the streets and people would stare at the signs and wonders that may be hidden in the patterns shifting through that hair but he just bared his teeth at them all and strode on by. THE TRUTH. The end.

Right, back to what I was doing before which was singing along to Johnny Cash and eating apples.

the Wharf

Canary Wharf is somewhere I love and hate and cannot stay away from. I go there to the cinema because it's close to my house and - less prosaically - while I'm there I like to stoke the fires of scorn and self-regard. Yesterday I skipped around in my jeans and navy aran jumper and my dad's tartan scarf that's older than I am and my red lipstick that smells like lily of the valley, carrying a bunch of outofseason sunflowers and I watched all those grey faced sleep deprived men and women glance at me like I was an alien creature. A medieval peasant. A martian. A woman wearing trousers in a time of corsets and hooped skirts. It makes me giddy, all those buildings that are hundreds of times taller than me, all hard edges and glinting chips of steel and glass.

The inside of no.1 Canada Square is the colour of hastily masticated steak mixed with a glass of milk taken before bed in the hope that it will cool all that meat lying on the stomach.

It is all so much of its own expanding self, existing only for itself and for the great grey gobbets of imagined coffee gold and oil that stream into it and out of it in algorithmic waves. I can't help but believe that its time will be brief and that when we are back to tilling the earth and these words are locked inside this machine and forever lost that I will survive longer than the grey faces will.