1662, Taiwan
I couldn’t answer if you asked me too.
We were all arranged by height order outside the training ground gates. I recall a sort of hazy atmosphere, pick-pocketed with stars. Night was the only definite line. I think we were ready to go.
‘There’s something here for all of you, to be returned to me by midnight.’
A grey moustache signalled authority, a sort of strangled integrity balancing on high-waisted trousers. I tried to decide between five-a-side football and poetry, a wind grazed a number of houses. My heart beat, had I had a heart.
‘I’ll see you back here in a number of hours.’
What he really said seemed irrelevant. I’d never experienced real flying, really falling between castles, floating islands and nodes of superreality. This was so much more than rush hour. I once sicked strawberry milkshake through my nose, only now were my arms, legs made of sugar and dissolving beneath me. School trips are all tableaus and tannoys and too sweet ham sandwiches. This was thicker than reality.
Red ! stage; Green ! stage; Blue ! stage; gliding.
God we were up there for days. Light was the only definite line; peach cheeked and breathless eating only oxygen, I was nothing but the residue and mini milks, flying round sand castles arms wide, action man nylon trunks mum reading John le Carré and work on Monday, the tide going down and little limpets god hanging on like they could never ever change, I swear we’ll go back there one day.
Imagine little limpets hanging on to sand castles, concocting this notion of ‘siege’.
I think we were up there for days.
