Snap Shots


We were dancing to I will survive. I kid you not. Thriving and writhing through the night in boot cut jeans and bright T-shirts. Arms caught in flashes of jerky motions, huggings and jumpings and fluids everywhere. The eighties in the nineties in a night club with a spinning silver ball and a couple having sex atop the speaker; my friend’s mate’s flatmate’s classmate from way back when, you know, shagging. And there’s a girl in a Cindy skirt who’s peeling off her strappy top and bouncy flouncy flying into our little circle. The stepping back we do is just a reflex, couldn’t help it, and besides she’s up and crawling up and along my friend’s boyfriend’s jeans, and I’m kinda liking it, the flashing, you know, in the strobe light. The way the picture changes every time I look, my friend caught there in a series of sparkly still snap shots.
        Frozen in waves of movement.
        But later, years later, when I’m told they rang and rang and rang, I see another snap shot: Her phone unanswered in the hall. And when I’m told there were doctors and parents and police, shouting her name as they broke down her door, I see another snap shot: The stillness of the stairs. But then they found her cold in bed with blood running in her eyes and staining red her white snowman pyjamas. And now I can’t make the lights flash anymore.



All the Balloons


The road leading to the gates was greyish in its grandeur, but busy. They were being buffeted by sounds and screeches, the excitement clashing with remnants of the night before. But see there, across the grass, lying flat and limp like skins of things once full now empty. Chloe saying that the tiger one reminds her of a rug in her dad’s father’s house, and Liam smiling because of her funny way of saying it. Prickly still, but not as much. Then, whirring, flames jumping out and up and warming the air. Chloe pointing, the first one’s about to go, look! And the cheer went up in waves. Another and another, but Liam, still clinging on, was staring at the griffin flapping impotently on the ground. So she slipped her hand into his and he looked up despite himself, and saw gold red dragons and champagne bottles, giants and hobbits and hot-air balloons, rising up and up and replacing the sky with a collage of extraordinary colour.