All the way to Poundland and back John McCullough

John McCullough

All the way to Poundland and back

At the café, small milk jugs on the shelf point in different directions, like ducks on a pond. A chainsaw taken to the elm outside is sobbing. It’s too much for the young plumber who pulls the zip up on his hoodie so it meets his nostrils. There was a tornado in his bathroom last night. He has no memory of it but this morning his toothbrush, scissors, razor lay scattered on tiles. A voice on the street is unforgiving. Don’t tell me about being fucking tired. I’ve walked all the way to Poundland and back. They’d run out of triceratops so I bought him a brachiosaur.

Time for luxury breathing, thinks the server on their break. That app with a slow, calm voice: Inhale for 1, 2, 3, 4 and hold . . . We reuse oxygen breathed by dinosaurs, they think, the same molecules going round. They could do with a brachiosaur this week, a herbivore with a heart the size of a pick-up truck who’d lift them, legs dangling, to treetop height. And now exhale – 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . Good. They float again as one more human.

It’s OK, writes the beanie girl in her journal, to stay alive because it’s March and I want to see the next season of Doctor Who. Because the cold blue flames of my succulents would miss me and I want to play BlackPink tonight.

On the verge, the triceratops hunter vapes, muscles loosening in her brow. A gust stirs thin branches, a lone crocus swaying. The season experiments with crumbs of colour, seeing how far it can go.