I

I’m at the Queen Vic Markets and I’m eating a Nashi pear, slowly. Everybody is looking at a man in a business shirt who is looking at his shoes. In his clenched fist is a burst freezer bag and at his feet is a goldfish. It flips its tail, flicks its head. The man is panicking. The second aisle of the fruit and vege hall is a mess of confusion and shock and heavy silence and the smell of celery. The woman in front of the herbs is pushing bunches at people and offering two for one two for one but nobody cares for her dill. The men behind the potatoes nudge each other and scoff and laugh and one of them yells special deal today buy potato get fish free! and the Potato Men erupt in laughter and a child starts to cry.

A teenaged boy steps forward with a Gatorade bottle half filled with water. Goldfish Man hurriedly bends to scoop up the fish. I draw my pear to my chest as the crowd leans forward. We all cheer when the fish is returned to the water, and then fall silent when it’s lifeless body bobs to the surface.

II

It’s three am and this house is so cold and my neighbour is watching me drink milk from the carton. I’m too tired to be embarassed and so we stand frozen, eyes locked, as I chug chug chug. He is smoking out of his second-floor bedroom window and I am standing at the kitchen sink, mentally tracing the slow, slow journey of the cold from the tiles travelling up through my bones. The neighbour looks older than me and also a bit like my brother, who I should probably call. I finish the milk, wipe my mouth with my sleeve, and nod to the man in the window. He lifts his cigarette in goodbye.

I wonder what he would imagine my voice to sound like.

III

I want to be floating on my back in a lake and for it to be summer and night time and for the moon to be full and above me. I want it to have rained last night, and for the air to still carry it’s smell.

Sometimes I think about the sky at home but I have learnt to stop myself before I compare it to the sky here.