Coinfruit

Pounds are useful for buying pennyseeds. Especially if these grow into moneytrees. Coinfruits flower in spring and ripen in autumn. Collect coinfruit cautiously. Beware of unripe ones and overripe, which may contain coinworms. If you swallow a coinworm you’ll get indigestion or worse, wake footsied in a big house. Blue carpet, light light colour of sky, thick like the hair of a shaggy happy dog. Stains easily. Eyes askew from double screens, walk on your ceiling and sleep in Addison Lees.

Coinfruit by Tessa Ditner, written 09/2017

The Human Plate

by Tessa Ditner

There is no gravity today.

It makes walking the dog tricky. He or I lift off the ground at intervals. Just when you get a firm, sticky grip in some mud and patch of grass, up you go.

I remembered to take a bag this time, saved 5p at the till. Felt embarrassed because it’s a bag from the pet shop. It’s crinkled and smells of dog chews. It’ll do. All I needed was a loaf of bread for tomorrow’s breakfast and a jam doughnut. She always ate a doughnut on our walks. She liked the way the sugar sprinkled. She’d eat it, leaning over my lap, laughing, calling me her human plate. I didn’t mind being her plate.

I didn’t eat the doughnut on the bench without gravity though. Jam might spill upwards or sideways into someone’s eye. Or worse, the whole thing could escape and float away. Who knows how high sugar balloons go. It could freeze in a cloud. Some poor sod might mistake it for a star and wish on a doughnut.

She used to put ribbons on the dog when he was still a puppy. Always red ones. She loved red. She didn’t jump. It was the wind that caught her, maybe the hem, or the strap of her red dress. She always said she wouldn’t jump but if the wind was very strong, she might let it take her.

Gravity just came back. The ground is soft, almost fluffy underfoot. We make our way home. I eat the doughnut indoors but without a plate. I am still her plate.

Short story inspired by Jon Everitt’s The Windy Day: www.joneveritt.net, written as a creative exercise during the Portsmouth Writers’ Hub July Hub evening, taught by Jacqui Pack and James Bicheno. This story features in Octomorphosis.