OCallaghan - The Sun King

He assembled a console inside the stables glass doors and had his narrator come this close to banging his own mother in half-light in the late 70s. Rabbits tripped the halogen from the courtyards hay. He was still smoking, memorizing Burns by a hearth, singing to flicked embers that looked soluble in its black. The antique Nokia on the butcher block in the bathroom vibrated at all hours like tropical wildlife. Whitewashed horsehair plaster shed magnolia petals. Whatever glare each fresh day uploaded made a disco-ball in the double-glazings exterior smash and blissed splinters of violet all over the upstairs.

Fuelled on pre-paid credit and Finnish cider and love like Technicolor flooding the bloodstream he had heard tell of before but never dreamt, he sprinted nightly to the sweet shop in Riverstown and cracked up twice in one week when the lottery scanner bleated Not a Winner and shot the breeze with teenage freckles skitting on the warmth and caught scraps of signal overspilling the north and left times on your voicemail from a bank of poppies and thistle in that field down to the sea grown fallow with pre-historic agricultural hardware like Coney Island rides entre deux guerres and sipped green tea as if it were chlorophyll and filled a Borders tote and struck out on the rush of feeling in flight, flying beneath the radar. You know what hes like. Oestrous, cock-struck, you tubed first thing from A to B, Vivienne Westwood number pilling at the seams, to the garden flat hed blagged that had a suntrap at the back. Once, then, your head hitting the top bunks slats, a teaspoon of colostrum squeezed onto his tongue. Once later on on the patio upright against a wall amid calls home and spliffs with liquorice skins and rocket fetched from a stall on Primrose Hill. Once in stagnant water in grey dark in the bath.

Twice on the square of two mattresses dragged together, missionary, all fours, dried clots showered away at dawn. Once on lino behind a sofa glued to Charlie and Lola. Three years after the Kings Cross bomb to the minute was silence you were underground for and missed. Its pissing on Belfast Citys solitary terminal, he buzzed to tell you and got lost in the patchy coverage of Hope Valley your express was chuntering east of and heard next to nothing the guts of August. Theres no return route, is there? You sussed that too? The truth, much as time does, vanishes behind. Its not like userdata, waiting retrieval by us. I ran low on juice on the dual carriageway south that narrowed to a dirt track dead-ending at aftergrass where the house no longer stood and the bay had retreated into its shell of cloud and real estate signs were popping along the coast like crocus bulbs come late to flowering or speech bubbles in some dumb graphic novel that sees its heros profile boot corrupt and earth laid waste in the interstices between realms.

Forgive me. I couldnt hack the secrecy any more than I could go on outsourcing what history we share to the chum-of-a-chum third party beard above thats kidding no one. I couldnt breathe between it, the you you truly were and spaced, benighted me already sentimental for the futures blown cover. Forgive the ruse. Forgive my coming clean. It can still be a secret, lover, ours and ours alone.

This is its safest keeping: nobodys going to see it.

The rest have driven to the mall. Any second now will be too dark. This close to the edge, among other things, I read. Leaves rattle overhead.

Saturday, late and but for a handful of neighbourhood girls hanging in the street, nothing doing.

Saturday, late and but for a handful of neighbourhood girls hanging in the street, nothing doing.

I cut the back, brim the yard-cart. The air is thick with the scent of wild strawberries mown flesh. This weather we keep the bedroom sash ajar. I lie to myself: theyre not metaphors. They are not metaphors. drop-off through a bunch of affluent side streets between school and here a refrigerated dairy produce truck keeps catching almond and dogwood branches, so much that blossoms blizzard the windscreen and moonroof and I have to switch the wipers to intermittent in its slipstream. drop-off through a bunch of affluent side streets between school and here a refrigerated dairy produce truck keeps catching almond and dogwood branches, so much that blossoms blizzard the windscreen and moonroof and I have to switch the wipers to intermittent in its slipstream.