In a bag, hung on the metal handle, in a turkey-cranberry
cottage by the sea, available to rent, in-between February
cereal bar, half-eaten by a hungry woman, as she always was,
and October, by any dog-less family. Bring your own cheese
even when making romantic gestures. She didn’t understand it:
and bream, a different advert reads. Bring your ten pound
why doing something lovely half-heartedly is worse than doing
notes and tip them into my lap. Bring baps and tapenade,
nothing at all. She’d have made a good man, were it not for
depending on your education, the class of your car, the place
her hands, which barely belonged to her: those glowing appendages,
you purchase your groceries. So on and so forth, it said, he
ripped from Titian’s Venus, chopped from a statue somewhere: the
said, before we said, he should, to bed, go. My brother: sweet
best and least meaningful bit of her body. I stole a photo
child of the twenty-first century, reads anything happily – so
of them once and tucked it into my wallet. I ought to have
long as it doesn’t exceed a sentence or two. Don’t bore me,
stolen the hands themselves: they weren’t much use when it
he sighs, eyes rolling, ambassador of a stereotype. It’s all
came down to it. It was torture to watch them chopping
play: a game – or ‘something’ anyway, we say, on days when
carrots, or touching mine, turning them to muck and dust as
he’s away, gone. Days when we catch our collective breath, unplug
soon as they entered the frame. We should have sold them
the computer and sit in a guilty silence, a little worried
on e-bay: that would have been best. Then we could love
lest the world should explode, unwatched, whilst we revel
each other properly, truly, half-heartedly, as it should be.
in our disconnection. A cottage by the sea would be nice.
(Pierre Monceau and Jean-Pierre Sertin)
