Woodpusher
- Jack
- May 14
- 10 min read
Jack: Loss is a funny thing, it does strangely elastic things with time. This piece has been kicking around in my head for what feels like five minutes, or three years, or both.
I couldn’t find a fun way of fitting it into this, but as part of my attempts to impress my dad when I was a kid, I started a chess club in my junior school. It lasted for precisely one session, at which my dad, in his guise as a county-level chess player, acted as some sort of Special Guest Referee/coach. He took the whole thing very seriously, up to and including digging his wedding suit out of the attic for the occasion.
This one is for the dads.
The back of the car must be 83°C.
There is a good chance at any moment that my bodily fluids will vaporise, become gaseous, exit my body in the form of steam. This, despite it being December outside. One ray, one single ray of sunlight, has been magnified by the window and trained directly onto my forehead. The sun is behaving as though I, personally, have annoyed it. Maybe as though I owe it a not insignificant cash debt. There are also about three people too many back here. I am desperately conscious about being the sort of man that expands to fill any available space like crude oil; but I need to put my knees somewhere. They are attached after all.
~
Mum has made egg and chips. Just egg and chips, ham is for rich people. She is an alchemist, my mum. She has stolen fire from the gods and learned how to turn base materials into purest gold. I can tell this because among other clues, the food is coloured gold. The egg yolk, the oddly trapezoid chips, the margarine soaked bread and - improbably - the egg white, are all the same colour. The colour of morning sunlight on the first proper week of spring. The colour of the shadows cast on the table as cheap pints of lager are speared by the sun. Gold.
