USES OF COMMON SALT

...can be read at the wonderful Metazen.

NON-DATE

I endured teeth-cracking cold for you on the night we planned to meet. I gave up precious body heat to the glaciating air, my extremities surviving on the memory of blood flow. I stood sentry-stiff by a sighing junction until the town closed down; imagined other intersections hosting lonely vigils too. When I thought I saw you driving by, eyes on the road ahead, I felt infatuation die. Its tenancy was taken up by bitterness and hate - their insulation worked at once. I headed home the wrong way, in revolt against the grid, and mocked the servile traffic lights repeating patterns without pause.

SECOND DRAFT

I ripped up my portfolio in a fit of self-disgust, I did it, I had to, its pages made me sick. It was a reckless desperate deed, there were blood stains on the spine, and though I fainted when the stitching split, at last I was unbound. My skin was left in ribbons with paper cuts from the past; I found staples slowly rusting in my heart and in my lungs. When I discovered the dust of that life beneath my nails I made a firm commitment to clip them keen and short. Disconcerted friends pledged to send me tape and glue, an alibi to hide behind, or some good, heart-warming food. But the old me was mere confetti now and I fed fistfuls to the wind, I watched it fly then went inside, set to begin again.

OPEN SESSION

I am momentarily blinded by my own steam as it rises from the hard-earned contours of my body. I squint through this mist of exertion at the silhouettes gathered against the window opposite. They want poetry, transcendence, some epiphany to ignite their writing - anything but the blood in the bucket, or the casually-ruptured spleen. I give them some brutality to bite down upon: I dip and swivel, skimming the ring as I dance from phantom aggressors, before puncturing the air with unholy clusters of punches. They scrawl shorthand across notepads with snub-nosed pencils, convinced they have unpicked the mystery. But their prose cannot contain me and their text will not define me, for with every bout I am born again.

LIFE SUPPORT

I sat with the young man in the back of the ambulance, gently holding his hand. A monitor on a shelf translated bodily travails into cold, inscrutable data. He managed to maintain eye contact with me, and occasionally offered a resigned smile. I tried to look nonchalant, feigning interest in the everyday details of his life, while in my peripheral vision a vivid green line spiked and dipped across a scrolling grid, as fickle digits twitched. He remained composed and that, under the circumstances, was admirable. And all the while, a fist was closing tighter and tighter around my heart.

SUNNY SIDE DOWN

He shovelled shit as a short-order cook. Sweat rashes and fat-splattered lashes. One day his pan boiled over. Pushed the manager’s face flat onto the griddle. “The eggs are off”, the waitress told customers. The eggs are off.

A GUNPOWDER PLOT

He earned a B in Ballistics and blew up the school, report cards descending through the smoke like scorched ticker tape as he strolled from the campus in thrall to his newfound vocation. In a small town without Semtex he became addicted to tinder, and was soon the neighbourhood’s pre-eminent arsonist: he could raze a damp ramshackle and nonchalantly detonate a dud, though firework factories remained his favourite display. With a future in flames he began dressing only in touchpaper blue, chain-smoking lustily as he recalibrated the night sky, puncturing the high, star-spun, blackness with dancing shards of brass and hammered bronze. Eventually exhausting his old haunts, he took to hitchhiking cross-country with a case full of kindling and an incendiary eye, intent upon torching every staid estate and slumbering conurbation in the land. Year after year, region by region, he blazed, forcing the redrawing of maps through his signature ignitions, his ruinous artistry ensuring notoriety within the twin mythologies of fire fighters and civil planners. Having left his indelible fingerprints upon the landscape, he’s less combustible these days: he eschews candles and declines barbecue invites, preferring to spend his time peacefully tending embers at the local crematorium.