The Cardboard Rots Before The Burger Does

I felt an intense heat off the parked cars. Metal in the drab shades of respectable citizens, of families plodding along, of nothing-to-see-here, nothing to invite the police camera or crowbar. They are parked down the hill from the train station, briefly, alongside the kerb in a chaos of approximate angles. There is someone waiting behind the wheel but they do not move. It is crowded down the hill, crowded for the pedestrian, the gentleman in a hurry, a gentleman such as myself. Up the bank of lopsided concrete and iron railings, are the railway tracks behind a modesty of overgrown nettles & tattered billboards. Someone will be called to replace the advertisements in the early morning hours; it is special glue; the layers come away in thick flakes and fads. Will the bank collapse? The lopsided concrete holds it in place. There are three new chicken burgers from McD—’s, each remarkable in its texture, you can clearly see; Aztecan gold, how delicious. The nettles rustle with vigour, no heat is too sour. This is the season of their barbs. 

That is on one side, then you have the cars, stationary cars, someone behind the wheel. Beyond the stationary cars are cars in movement. The liberated taunt the parked. They move; traffic lights; they move; congestion, the weight; they move. An office building made of blue glass stands up over the other side; the lights inside are dim, just a lone spindly vacuum hose being rubbed back & forth.

A woman dragging her luggage along the floor to the passenger door tries it and groans, then she moves to the boot. It has been a long day. The english heat is muggy. Commuters trail down the hill. The pavement is uneven; there are ticket machines, lampposts, parking signs, electric chargers, telegraph poles; a patchwork of utility grabs and drags. The remaining slabs splinter upwards. I am a commuter, my life as vacant as the last, and it is down that hill I hurry, desperate for the sanctum of home. I felt an intense heat off the parked cars. Where have they come from that they should be so hot, hot enough to syrup the air about their bonnet? Between the bank and the cars, it is so hot. The heat hits me. It is enough to suffocate a man.

When the cars pull away, there is a puddle from the air conditioning system. Slowly the puddle runs down the hill and into the hill it is absorbed. If I put my fingers there, it is already gone. The puddle is dark, darker than a shadow. There is the heat from the cars and the puddle; one can hardly find the energy to dream, for the air does not move.

‘Thank god for the fan,’ I say, looking up. She apologises, lifting her weight from my chest.

Sometimes I am so sad about us that I do not recognise myself, or; sometimes I am so sad about us that I do not recognise the emotions overwhelming me. The woman I woke up with becomes a stranger and I a stranger, too. It is a long time since I was a loner, many weeks now. I do not know whether to call them incidents or incidences. Each time it happens I wonder how long it will last. All the love and joy I felt at six-thirty this morning takes an almighty step away from me. It is perhaps an unnatural situation. This evening it is just the cat and I. Protect the cat at all costs. She sits on my lap, looking up at me; when my hand moves to type, she stares, in her eyes all the wonder of existence, my measure of love, the reflection of spring’s late dusk, a thick purr down to my femur, that bone, which fixed, anthropologists hold to the light. If it is just me and the cat, then we share a bed, her paws on my back and my hips. It is three-a.m. and she runs around in a fit of feline excitement. In June’s late pale, I see her sprawled out on the pakistani runner for my attention. I tell her I love her more than anything. She slowblinks at me. I slowblink at her. Otherwise it has been hours since I heard from — no, I will not say. The weight on my chest is still there.

I like to rearrange my sentences by moving the ’s’ from one word to another. When the car pulls away; when the cars pull away. It is so simple to change the tense of a sentence. We have each other; we had each other. Language is such a delicate thing! Every letter I put down here is mine to do with as I please. The slightest movement makes all the difference. The cars have moved, the air has not. The puddle is dry; the puddles are dry. It is not so much the misery caused by these incidents that hurts but their proximity to the joy, how one can exist so close to the other. I am caught in their friction. On a Sunday morning, as the clock tumbles past twelve and the heatwave furies, we make amends, discuss our future, come over the phone.