It was a sweaty day, the clouds had scattered. The air shimmered and the concrete inched away. The leaves waved in sorry resignation, yearning for salvation.

I killed the tomato tree. I was the culpable suspect. It was beyond any redemption. In that sparse concrete backyard adorned only with washing line twine and faded Chinese lanterns, the tomato tree had provided a burst of something beautiful. A red against grey, cool even in this messy heat.

He lightly brushed his fingers over the withered branches and they crumbled to dust. There was no saving it, and there was no saving them either.

The sky was too blue to look into, so they looked at each other. Black eyes, he had black eyes. They laughed at the dying tomatoes.

They’d fish for sour pickles with a bent spoon, bodies pressed and the smell of brine bitter. It was futile, they knew, but they’d persevere until she would push him away and reach into the glass jar with cool fingers.

They ate pickles in the kitchen, pressed against the cold marble. He’d pause, sometimes, for just a beat, a crunch of the vegetable. They’d eat pickles and his mother’s avocado dip in the quiet of the night. A silent and dark house but a dimmed kitchen with hungry youth.

smudges

Her grandparents lived in this brick house guarded over by snapdragons and hadedas, both swaying swaying in the wind. The hadeda birds were smudges of brown and grey and the snapdragons were coloured and wild, like the dragons in your dreams. They leered and danced and scared away the unwanted from the concrete flowerpot. The grass was green despite the heat and the dripping humidity.

Her grandparents had brown hair and sunned faces. They collected dolls from around the world: sad eyes leering and staring. They festered dust, but were too precious to abandon. Her grandmother, the enthused collector, had a backyard filled with glass figurines. They glinted in the sunlight and made soft sighs when they fell in the wind. Sighing and swaying, the fragile figures were almost real when the sun fell on them a certain way. She liked to squint at them so that the crimson paint bled and smudged and sparkled crazily. She liked that her grandmother would let her play with them, even though they were glass and fragile and not really for children.

" so I jump up, do a headstand first to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street and walk fast to the nearest little grocery store to buy two days of food, stick it in the rucksack, hike thru lost alleys of Russian sorrow where bums sit head on knees in foggy doorways in the goopy eerie city night. "
big sur, jack kerouac