She would have been a physicist ballerina or even a ballerina physicist. If she could.
In her dreams she pirouettes through galaxies, leaps through dimensions; lands with a thump on a wooden stage in a parallel universe. Bows.
Geometry is the hardest Math. All sharp Picasso angles and infinite spirograph loops cut with linear equations. Like the string art her father made in the 60s with nails and neon thread, mounted on painted plywood. They still hang on the basement walls. She doesn’t understand any of it and whatever they say about 90-year-olds getting their college degree, it’s probably too late at 50. She should have just joined the Army like her father said. At least then she’d know how to fire a gun.
Radon is the heaviest gas. Rampant as bog turf in the Southwest of Ireland. You can’t see or smell it, but it seeps into your foundation, insidious like the voice in your head which says it’s not just a cough, it’s cancer.
Matisse reminds her of LA. She likes neither. Mostly because she needs sunglasses for both. Sunglasses and a silk scarf wrapped round her head like Tippi Hedron in The Birds but that took place at the other end of California up in Bodega Bay. She’d been there once. Driven up the coast with her ex who now calls himself Wolfgang. Hitchcock was the modern apocalypse auteur, but no one did it as good as Bosch.
Bosch is also a German white goods manufacturer. There may be a connection. She never uses her dishwasher anymore now that everyone’s gone.
Don’t forget to give the Postie and Bin Men a card for Christmas. Slip a tenner in; it’s the least you can do. Everyone loved that one Postie who looked like Christian Bale but got hit in the head playing Rugby and fell dead a few months later. Aneurysm – supposed to be a good way to go. Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, the worst.
Chocolate will never be sweet as revenge.
No matter how much they love you, dogs will eat you if they must.
Sex only becomes good once it’s no longer something done to you. Unless you are the one who is doing. Love is a need not a solution and if she could do it all again, she would cross that sticky dive-bar floor, kneel before his wheelchair and say, “Come on, let’s go.”
At night, she dances before the mirror and cries to the universe, Help me. I am alone.
Everything dies. Nobody really cares.
Dreams are the only reason we wake.
