weather white

The weather continues white. The streets are featureless. A light grey is the predominant colour. Again, no cast shadows, and the faintest of attached ones. Clumps of spring flowers brave it out in a private garden I cycled past. Our lawn is straggly, with clumps of brown dead leaves curled up between the green.

Cycling made my ears turn red.

felix felicis what now?

So that's what it was about.

So that's the kind of man this was.

What chance did Felix have? What chance did he want to have?

After affable smiles and polite good-byes, Felix took his leave and his cap and made his descent back into the chasms of midmorning. It was only when ge got down to street-level, that he noticed he was still clutching the bag of croissants.

He pulled the pastry forth and chewed as he meandered. He flowed with the rhythms of the one-way traffic, buffeted by carbon monoxide, propelled on the winds of emissions. The traffic tasted spicy sweet, like gas tandoori.

He hadn't really left. She had left him. And he had said, "Can I come too?" And she. She had said.

She had said, "Yes. If."

"If you want."

But he hadn't been allowed to stay in her bed. Not in her white bed, behind the white gauze veils, among the white satin-clad walls, in the white white heart of Barbara's nova.

'So what will you do?' whispered the voices. 'What will you do when she finds another man?'

Why nothing. I will walk the streets. I shall bed down in my narrow brown fold-down camp bed of a night. I will lay me down my head and dream me formless dreams.

But the past. The past, it has gone away. It lost its contours and did a flip, turned a corner, and was gone.

In a glassed-in office building, high up on the sixteenth floor, there sits the person who will try and get it back for you. That unwanted.

That unwanted thing.