Thank you for coming. Goodbye

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I heard how your name was properly pronounced
and practised it all the way to your home.
But by the time I got there it was gone from my tongue, forgotten.

And I had to get it right, get everything right.
Because if I got everything right
and everything else turned out alright, who knows?
We could have had it better.

But I blurted out your name and your parents
– or your children –
couldn’t help it and laughed.

But that’s a girl’s name
– or a man’s name – they said
and hid their laughter behind their hands
but not from their eyes.

So that was the last time I saw you until today.
Thank you for coming.
My life has been good
and now is complete.
Thank you for coming. Goodbye.

I explained to the stranger

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I explained to the stranger how he could kill my ex-wife’s lover and not get the blame or get caught because there was no connection between the two of us except this random conversation between the two of us in the ill-lit toilet of a Soho club and that I’d forget we had talked when I came down from the coke and the speed and I thought I had given him all the information he needed but no reward, no, no reward, what reward could he need except for the joy of killing a bad person he had never met and getting away with it scot free, scot free, and that was quite funny because now I lived in Scotland but now was down in London and I laughed and I laughed and the man’s eyes widened still further and he said ‘no entiendo’ and ran out of the men’s room.

They embrace clumsily

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They embrace clumsily and he turns away. As he walks down the first flight of stairs he hears the door close. He does not look back. Instinctively, from force of habit, he puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out his phone. Two flights. Three. No messages in the last two hours. Five flights. Six. He pauses on the mat and breathes out, presses the exit button and pushes the door open onto the night. Cold air sweeps in.

He steps out and his phone vibrates. Another step and he turns and looks up at her window. Her silhouette is there. He breathes again and looks down at his phone.

Lickadocious

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“Lickadocious. Furbwurble. Stellamantricate.” She said the words slowly, savouring them as she released them in the autumn air. The upturned faces followed every move of her lips. The words seemed acceptable so she wrote them in her book. One day soon, in the next twenty years or so,she would have completed the anthology of feline adjectives. She smiled.