Fearing to look up, he caught her pale reflection and bowed it out of shape on the back of his spoon. Red curls poured over her arched eyebrows and crashed abruptly against the walls of her ruby red lips.

‘You’re not going to eat your dessert?’ he asked, still studying his spoon.

Her eyes arced across him, careless, flawless emeralds set on the silver moon in his fingertips.

‘I hate coconut.’

He wondered about taste on the lonely cab ride home.

Once, I was scolded by an elderly stranger for slashing through the hedgerows with a stick.

“You’re a vandal,” he cried, “you should be ashamed of yourself!”

As it turned out, I wasn’t sure that I should be anything. I had saved him from the dragons and the monsters and everything that my imagination had conjured them to be, casting their sweet smelling, green guts across the field.

Now, in place of a stick I hold a pen and prepare to do battle once more.…

Today I discovered a hole in my life. It yawned at me showing nothing but empty darkness and longing. I wondered how I would ever fill the void. Should I pack it with all the trash at my disposal, useless things that cluttered up the cupboards in my ramshackle existence; brimful, the hole would stop being a hole, it would be a container: constrainer. Perhaps, I could fence it off and put up warning signs, protecting curious passers by from the hidden dangers deep within; steer them away from…

He stared through the thin, blue wisps of cigarette smoke at the boy in the black and blue striped T-shirt. From the distant observer’s vantage point, the boy’s sloping back and hunched shoulders told of tension incongruous with the smiling, laughing family that surrounded him.

On the table, sickly sweet and melting, ice cream pooled at the bottom of deep glass bowls and circled the sticky mouths of the boy’s sister and brother; the boy remained still, impassive, staring through the…