By Eugen Bacon
Blood and sweat
The kitchen is alive with old knowledge. Red dust, oregano leaves, cockerel feathers. Dried flowers adulterate dainty cucumber sandwiches garnished with pickled shallots, arrayed on an edible cake tray. Her labour pangs strike as she is arranging warmed plates and polished cutlery on the table. On crooked knees she sinks. The baby oozes out like brain matter and opens its maw. ‘Dear mummy, just so ravenous.’
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The bury ball
It was an era of the ballers, they bounced everything on showcase. First there was the money world, a financial circuit of coins rolling across screens and sofas. And then, in a NASA special, astronauts bounced along spherical planets, volley-balling spare oxygen in cylinders across the surface. But when the talk show came, with the greatest respect, parliamentarians uncloaked and flashed the live TV viewers and in an official statement declared an important difference in the art of war:Don’t make an issue out of it. All proceeds go to a non-profit charity.This captivated the war heroes and they bounced nuclear ratings at the network. It prompted a redefined global excellence that involved optimism on a local level and it translated onto an international stage. This drew an apocalypse of intelligent aliens on extra-terrestrial visits only on circular nights, and they were not a danger to civilisations that did not argue or fight against them.
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Tugging at the waves
The water is a world of luxury, paradise where dolphins and otters rebuild their lives and sharks have leverage to moderate the price of loyalty. A million barrels a day for a few more dentists specialised in shark tooth, the sound of their plaque and calculus scrapers, the blink of their probes and operative burs differentiated from whale song. The new wave of dentist migrants on skilled visas puts a siege on the ocean in this new war that is also an existential crisis, and shoals of fish float face up, adrift along the edge of the shoreline. There is no radio.
Unprecedented
The wandering cow like a serial bomber was desperate but defiant. She added daffodils and rainbows to each masterpiece and it travelled unchewed to the rumen and then to the reticulum. Satiated from the eating, she rested and waited and thought through stuff. She calculated the right time to cough up bits of cud, now chewing them completely before she swallowed. They raced through her gut, exploded from her bovine ass and splashed pat in a polychromatic mess on the polished shoe of a visiting president just checking in on his way to the next town with a new detail — they had all mastered the perfect low ponytail, and those who hadn’t wore tail-hair wigs. As cameras flashed, the cow took back to her eating and continued to be an artist ruminating to dung the next political dunderhead.