post christmas post

This is the scenery of inbetween days. The no-man’s landscape that stretches between Christmas and New Year.

New books form skyscrapers on coffee tables - little towers of fact and fiction. Cards that came late drape the curtain pole, white leaves with best wishes for veins. And the last arrival, hastily employed as a makeshift bookmark.

The table confetti from Christmas day has fallen to the floor. With every step she takes silver stars are carried to other rooms. To other carpets where new constellations form, forever drifting through acrylic skies.

the day of rest

On a Sunday they discuss soft herbs and nurture a mint plant as if it was their first grandchild.  They watch five sparrows circle a leaf stuck upright in a concrete crack and wonder who will be the first to pluck it out.  They take a little dose of Jeff Buckley and cheese on toast, and stand barefoot in hair clippings pulling pouting teenboy faces.  They score bonus points for awkward questions and enjoy the silence of a phone that doesn’t ring.  They catch each other’s tears and it doesn’t mean a thing.  They tell the mist not to mind if the rain is late, while laying biscuits side by side on a plate.  

through the square window

I’ve changed my mind about Christmas many times.  I loved it as a child, but we fell out sometime in my late teens, although the trust is slowly re-growing in recent years.  Now I enter into the festive spirit with the best of them, but like any good pantomime its always necessary to have a few boo’s and hisses among the laughter and the cheers.

So these days I find myself opening an alternative advent calendar, and finding things like this inside - 

behind the 5th

the work’s Christmas party - fours hours spent fighting off his brandy breath / her glittery dress

behind the 7th

the battles with Sellotape - the finger nail cruising for the end of the tape - the tacky curses at the last to use it - the polish fingerprint lifted from the edge of the dining table and transferred to the parcel - and the hair, always the hair, caught beneath, coming your way, from here to there

behind the 10th

the mother talks of frozen meats - of creatures carefully sliced and interleaved with paper this time last year - the pink, the white and the darkened brown - intended sandwiches and Sunday suppers rediscovered twelve months on and given a bin burial just in time for the next ones to come along

bargain hunting

This is yesterday and my squeaky steps carry me along polished wooden pathways that lead me through an old fashioned department store.

I linger near the lift watching an old woman try on a new coat.  Her husband and an eager assistant stand by, ready to offer advice and casual compliments.  They seem oblivious to the fact that the coat is far larger than the woman.  

That her knees sag under its weight and as the fabric skims the floor her feet are lost.  The fur collar has devoured her head and husband is still not alarmed.  She is utterly eaten by whatever fake fur beast this coat used to be.  

But still she basks under their gaze and the heat of these lights - all aglow from the giant red tag reading ‘£100 off marked price’.