Joover

Suited, he pulled a little tight on his tie to straighten it. His skin enjoyed the soft silk. There was no change in his pocket, and he wouldn't part with a note. The smell of damp clothes and old sweat revolted him. It was a homeless man. 

You're desperate he thought.

I see you, even if you do not see me - I maybe a roofless man, but your walls are narrower. Your silk cannot control the cracks in the pavement you walk on or the button that falls off a shirt. Bound to the world as any other, desperate. 

It was that afternoon that she stole the boat and rowed it out to the middle of the lake, just a notebook, a cushion, and a pencil. When the pencil hit the page, the monsters from beneath the boat stirred and rocked the water. A cloud appeared and thunder roared across the sky like the veins of a leaf that hold together paper thin tissue. Trees bent and from across the field sparrows rose and fell together making waves across the sky. She followed them with her eye in dips and turns. The boat expanded and grew trees that rooted it in the lake. A new island.

I got aspirations - he said, looking over his coffee cup. His bushy eye brows were trying to intimidate her in all their seriousness, so serious and bushy. I got aspirations - he repeated - to be a writer! - his grandiose speech seemed miss placed in spoons on a Tuesday afternoon, and she couldn't quite tell if he was being sarcastic -  of course the pay isn't great, but I'll pour my heart on the page nonetheless.

Her coffee needed a second sugar. She cleared her throat. - Well, this does change things, I'm not sure I'll be able to see you in the same way, this kind of thing changes a man, all that wealth. - Her lip curled up in one corner as she stifled a giggle.

He still had serious eyebrows and hadn't made eye contact with her. How will he pay his bills anyway? She studied him, too many ideas - writery ideas, you know the kind that you have to grab with both hands while they are fluttering past before they are gone for ever. But you try dance off after them nonetheless.

She tried to follow his gaze but couldn't tell what he was looking at.

You know I had this one idea - his fingers where drumming on the table as if it was a piano and all of a sudden the place mats were people and the glasses where places. - It would start in a coffee shop, and end in the same place but 10 years previous. His eyes were widening and the thought of time got Lou thinking about the busses.

Why should we praise those that came out culturally favourably in this genetic lottery?

I walk amongst the dead breathing. I fall with the living waiting. Willing to talk, exposed in blindness. Life that comes from a sense that all is chance and all will be. We all have our blind spots - build the walls around us, like a beetle on its back baked by the sun. Turned, shining, breathing, becoming.