At the bus stop I pick leaves from a tree. In my hands they crumble before falling to the ground in pieces. It’s summer. You can taste it in the air, just the same as you can taste the honey from the bees that form a halo around our freckled heads. After tea and cigarettes in some greasy spoon stuck in 90’s London, we dart in and out of charity shops looking for treasure. Old videotapes. Ornaments of cats. Jigsaws with missing pieces. The town we inhabit is located on the rim of a meteor crater. The sky is painted with strange motifs taken straight out of Venice, or maybe New York just after the apocalypse. What do you think Brooklyn will look like in three hundred years? How about Venice? Or even Dunstable? Nothing will remain of our sorry hides that’s for sure, and yet if there’s a chance, I would like very much to haunt the subways and overgrown zoos that litter such future landscapes. Churches and playgrounds, too. Did you know I was once a boy who loved watching cartoons after school while my nan rustled up dinner as my grandad and I shared ghost stories? Can you see me eating arctic roll before going out to play in the garden with that tree that would appear in my dreams night after night? If you got on all fours and crawled beneath the lowest branches, I was certain you could reach a path that would lead to yesterday, and that if you were to keep walking that path you would find yourself back in the womb, and from there you would be able to move freely anywhere in the universe and that time’s arrow would dissolve mid-flight upon your tongue the second you spoke your truth.
Author S. K. Nicholas 
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