Ivan has kept the lighthouse for over thirty lonely years, its staircase is filled with old novels.

"...i've kept that lighthouse for over thirty years" he grunts gnashing his teeth, "now the sky doesn't storm, the sea doesn't roar, the gulls aren't flying, the grass is too green, the crabs aren't dying and nor am i."
he pauses, looks to his boots and sighs, then continues a touch more cheerfully "but at least i'm old, have a beard and hook for a hand.

woman and child.

...He sat there for hours, catching the blizzard in his beard. He shook, shivered, snorted and bounced his numb legs. But when he caught first glance of the two walking by him, a whirling warmth lined his stomach and thawed out his insides. He smiled as if the boy was his own.

birds and bees and beds and futons

This place was massive, a warehouse the size of a suburb, filled with furniture for the Sunday consumers. We all sat together in one of the display rooms, the whole family. We were spread out all over the thick cushioned lounge, it was long, so we all fit on it comfortably. My father said it reminded him of the lounge his family sat on, in their fifth storey flat in a grey concrete apartment building in Wroclaw during the 70’s. We lazed around, tired from a frantic sleepless night of moving furniture, boxes and white goods, our muscles ached and our caffeine tics toced. We sat and watched the crowds rotate from display kitchen to kitchen to office and through to lounge room; it was a life size dollhouse. We watched the Indian families, the Arabic couples, the trendy lovers, the Chinese children running around, the dread-loched beach siders pushing their newborns in new prams. Sure it sounds diverse but really it was about as multicultural as the furniture they were looking at, same thing just different colours and shapes. For a moment, as the crowds walked past and looked awkwardly at us watching them, I proudly felt like we didn’t fit in.
There was some tacky 70’s hit playing over the system.
“You love this song don’t you?’ I said sarcastically to my old man.
He listened a while.
“I don’t mind it” he replies after some time.
“It brings back memories”
He stared at the high iron ceiling, where the music was apparently coming from, after the chorus passed, he continued…
“When I first came here and I was going to English classes, the teacher brought in the lyrics to this song and the class sang it together. She said it was a good song for us to practice, because it has a lot of verbs”
we listened some more and all looked at each other smiling, my mother, father, brother, sister and I, almost laughing. The song finished and no other followed, just the sound of peoples footsteps hustling about the shiny wooden floors. We were silent for about five minutes whilst my father contemplated with nostalgia in his eyes.
“Her name was Ruth” he said
“My English teacher, she tried one time to explain to us what the word ruthless meant”
I thought about the word a while and then the name. I couldn't think, I felt confused to be here, I think we all did a little. We decided we could make some bookshelves instead and pushed ourselves out of the comfortable lounge and left, walking against the grain of the crowd. Even when my dad was driving down, from the 5-storey car park, he drove in the wrong direction most of the way. People wrinkled their foreheads and waved their hands, palms facing up. We all laughed as my mother grinned nervously and my dad zigzagged through the car park singing the chorus with a strong accent.

“When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.”

diving through the sky into the earth.

The pale grey concrete highways heading south always remind me of an American freeway, just like the ones on the high speed police chases across California, filmed from a helicopter.
With my window open and my sneakered feet on the dash I tilt my hat forward to block my eyes of the bright warm rays. Every so often we burn across a high bridge suspended over a gorge with tall trees and a river underneath. The shadows of the bridge cables flicker over the bonnet, up my legs and skip over the brim of my hat, one by one.
The dry grass plains are tightly stretched across the horizon, like the skin of a drum. I only wish we didn’t know where we are going so we can improvise a beat on that drum like those outlaws running from the cops do.
I wonder if the dead wombat on the side of the road knew where he was going, or if this hitchhiker in sandals, with her knotted dreads and belly sagging out of her little shirt and over her tight waste band, knows where she is going. The crows on the powerlines I don’t wonder so much about, crows always look like they know exactly what they’re doing and where they are going.
In the corner of my eye I watch some skydivers drifting down from the sky, the parachutes and air gently letting them down. I take my hat off and stick my head out the window to have a proper look. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, one of the five sky divers speeds past all the rest at an incredible pace. Both his body and his parachute are facing the wrong direction. I pull my head in the car to watch this horrific scene through glass. In the car we all catch the sight of this man’s last seconds on earth, before he hits it. All we can do is watch and yell and scream and grab our jaw dropped faces. His arms and legs flail in a terrifying manner as the whole gravitational pull of the planet sucks him down. He disappears behind the trees and we don’t see the impact. The other divers slowly float down towards him. We turn to each other and all swear and cuss for a while, then go back to silent gazing out of the window. The rest of the day goes on like any other day and the incident is never mentioned. Things like that stay in a person’s head somewhere; maybe in some slight way even change them. Maybe I didn’t know where I was going that day after all.

You can only write about dreams in Braille.

After a long walk in the heat of the city I walk into a shaded park to find a spot in the shade. I sit in the lush, thick, greener than green grass and feel the cool breeze sway the white hairs on the back of my neck. The sensation lifts the goose bumps out of my skin and a shaking relief goes shimmering down my spine like wet sand. Running my index finger across my arm, I try and read my goose bumps like Braille. All I can understand is that it says something beautiful, but not quite logical or useful to me, something about the relationship between the grass, the trees and the sky. I cannot usually read Braille, but I can sense that these bumps include the words: beauty, soft, air, wings, fur, gentle, and maybe even love. These words sit in my head side by side and when I tilt my head back and inhale, the air rushes in and blends and shakes them all together; creating another eruption which sets off another spinal Mexican wave of trembling vertebrae. From my spine the relief-quake follows into my nerve branches and releases firmer goose bumps on my skin. These bumps are clearer and more defined and I am able to understand more of the Braille. It tells me why the birds are singing in the trees and why the flowers look so comfortable swaying in the wind and why the air feels so satisfying rushing into my lungs and why i can use this air to blow a feather away.
As the sensation wears off, the goose bumps soften then disappear and the answers fade. I fall back into the grass. Sometime passes whilst I stare into the sky and as my eyes close to sleep, I picture the earth as an ants nest in some dark woods. As I get closer to sleep I imagine a young boy, in overalls and no t-shirt, one day finding the nest and jabbing a stick into it.

with one eye open and the other shut.

A large handsome rock sat on its own on the southern side of a smooth pebbled beach by the sea, an ideal place for Edward to park his wearisome, wandering self. He stopped to tower over it a while and admire its layers, curves, lines and above all its striking bold blackness. “A slate to contemplate” he half sung, half announced in an operatic fashion, arms open to the side as if he were about to hug the thing. He looked around with a smirk to see if the coast was clear, unsure if he had just embarrassed himself or actually found himself amusing. Most probably the former he agreed, and sat down with a grimace. He sighed once again like he had been constantly this whole grey day. Not only did he not have any ideas for his next book he didn’t even feel like he wanted to write at all. He looked around a while, trying to make things beautiful by staring at them for longer than they needed to be stared at and giving them more thought than most would consider necessary. He pulled a thread out of his felt suit and let the wind blow it out of his fingers and into the boundary of the pebbles and the sea. He picked a dry leaf off the ground and wondered how it got there with not a tree in sight then crushed it in his palm and fed the crumbs to the wind... It did not land in the same place as the thread.    Even though he was, Edward did not consider him self a dreamy romantic type and felt a bit unmanly playing with leaves and sentiment in the wind; he picked up the largest pebble within reach, about the size of a flattened grapefruit, and hurled it as far as he could into the dark blue sea. The stone seemed to implode with the surface creating a brief black hole before dropping to the bottom. Satisfied, he dusted his chest and thighs with two hands. With one arm on his hip and the other shielding the non-existent sunshine from his eyes he looked out towards the blurred horizon, imagining he was a sailor, a man of the sea. In his head he played out a great scene starring himself upon the deck of an old rusted fishing trawler, his half dreaded long curls being blown about and his grease-stained bearded face bombarded with hard sharp drizzle. He could almost hear himself singing to the sky, improvising some half drunk half grumbled sea shanty. And the sea would play like an accordion and the gulls would dance like dirty sailors in a port town bar, the kind of rowdy bunch he would only write about in his wildest pages.

As he inhaled Edward smelt his aftershave, he disliked it and thought it made him smell like a sleazy old man, the kind that pinches girls behinds in the street. He decided to throw it away when he got back to his hotel room, despite his cheapness. He rubbed his clean-shaven chin, cheeks and upper lip then ran his fingers through his neatly groomed haircut as he completely fell back into the body of Edward the novelist. 

Walking back slowly he spotted a soldier crab scuttling sideways atop the pebbles. 

“Hey soldier, where’d you learn to march like that?” Edward demanded, releasing the day’s final childish outburst.

The crustacean rushed under a rock without a reply. After standing and waiting for it a short while Edward sighed once more and tried shake out his foolish behavior. He was sick of seafood, he affirmed, and went to bed hungry later that night. 

Nine months on he typed the last line of his book. It wasn’t his best work and he knew it, but he didn’t mind.

  “…and so, his little life came to an end and his eternal death had begun. The windows were open but the curtains stood still and the fearless man who was born on a ship and raised at sea, drowned. Falling asleep in a bath tub at the Tangier inn"