I haven’t walked a country road since the wolf moon, and my mind is cloudy, as all I see is this screen and the view outside of my window. The world has shrunk to a kingdom of papers and books, pictures of faraway places and a dead father, and crumb-flecked plates and bobby pins. I move once an hour, absent-mindedly, between office and kitchen.

My kitchen tells me things like I am the last uneaten peanut, and I am the pomegranate seed you squished underfoot, and I am the bar of granola that got stuck in your sofa seat, and I am the moldy bread you haven't thrown out, and I am the rind of cheese you will never clear out.

These miniature monuments to ancient repasts await the erstwhile housewife’s gaze. Meanwhile, I watch the birds feed: my heart has lost its fat, revealing its pine cone shape, and my skeletal, leafless arms dip and spring with the movement of many tiny beings. So many tiny hearts, so close to me.

My office is a nest, I realise. A nest is not a home, but a momentary shelter felted together from bare essentials into a shape that accommodates only the bird that makes it. So it is with my nest, the hiding-place of my ideas. Every word, breath. Every chapter, a new egg.




<<