Graphic sequal posts for social media.
Words: Chris Lee Ramsden
BALCONY
Eyesore. A cliff of balconies, its grey monotony broken only by a pair of abandoned underpants flapping on a line, a child’s plastic tricycle, faded and brittle, and a dusty plant, surprisingly large, shoved out to shrivel in the dry wind. Grip the railings. Tighter. The breeze is strong, and streaks of sunlight cut through gaps between the flooring’s rough wooden slats, affording a glimpse of oh-so-distant ground. The railings are parallel bars. And swinging between them, turning somersaults, my stomach. With a sudden wail, the wind whips up something below into a frenzy. It’s twists, flails, flaps. Now falling. Upwards. Towards me. Try to step back, away, but my fingers lock around the balcony railings, flakes of rust crumbling around my grip. Notice the growing numbness and, in that moment, realise that the object is nothing more than a supermarket carrier bag, twirling wildly in the turbulence, rising to eye-level in a dance of pure abandon. Hands release their grip. I soar.
Eyesore. A cliff of balconies, its grey monotony broken only by a pair of abandoned underpants flapping on a line, a child’s plastic tricycle, faded and brittle, and a dusty plant, surprisingly large, shoved out to shrivel in the dry wind. Grip the railings. Tighter. The breeze is strong, and streaks of sunlight cut through gaps between the flooring’s rough wooden slats, affording a glimpse of oh-so-distant ground. The railings are parallel bars. And swinging between them, turning somersaults, my stomach. With a sudden wail, the wind whips up something below into a frenzy. It’s twists, flails, flaps. Now falling. Upwards. Towards me. Try to step back, away, but my fingers lock around the balcony railings, flakes of rust crumbling around my grip. Notice the growing numbness and, in that moment, realise that the object is nothing more than a supermarket carrier bag, twirling wildly in the turbulence, rising to eye-level in a dance of pure abandon. Hands release their grip. I soar.
FOOTBALL
Lunchbreak. The tang of the grass is still wet after the morning’s downpour. Slimy strands cling to foot and ball. Rubber soles squeak as you execute a deft Cruyff turn. Your opponent goes one way, the ball the other, and you spin out of play, your left foot sliding beneath you across the turf until you land with a jolt on your back and feel the wetness seep through your school uniform. Dizzy and gasping from the sudden chill, you press your hands into the grass and clover and push yourself up in time to see the other team’s striker, Dave, the ginger, freckled super nerd from the class below you, launching himself at the ball and toe-punting it with a thunk past Pursey, who watches it skid past him between the piles of grey jumpers that form the goalmouth and on towards the distant perimeter fence. It fizzes through a gap to the road beyond. And as Pursey continues to munch on his drooping grey sandwich the football rolls nonchalantly out of sight.
Lunchbreak. The tang of the grass is still wet after the morning’s downpour. Slimy strands cling to foot and ball. Rubber soles squeak as you execute a deft Cruyff turn. Your opponent goes one way, the ball the other, and you spin out of play, your left foot sliding beneath you across the turf until you land with a jolt on your back and feel the wetness seep through your school uniform. Dizzy and gasping from the sudden chill, you press your hands into the grass and clover and push yourself up in time to see the other team’s striker, Dave, the ginger, freckled super nerd from the class below you, launching himself at the ball and toe-punting it with a thunk past Pursey, who watches it skid past him between the piles of grey jumpers that form the goalmouth and on towards the distant perimeter fence. It fizzes through a gap to the road beyond. And as Pursey continues to munch on his drooping grey sandwich the football rolls nonchalantly out of sight.
GLUED UP
Pick at the cardboard box with blunt nails. Sniff (ahhh...) the first wave of solvent. The slim, metal tube slides out of the box. Lightweight. Slippery. Shifty. Plays tricks on the mind. Not easy to trust. Or hold on to. Watch helpless as it skeets across the table, flies momentarily then hits the hard boards and skids across the floor. Scrabbling blindly under the table, fingernails claw through fine grains of dust and the husks of dried insects. Don't want to bend down and lock the creaking back into a permanent U-bend. Instead, twist in straight-legged gyroscopic contortions – anything to avoid raising the backside even a millimetre from its seat. Finally, fingers wrap around the tube of glue. The top is stiff. Squeeze hard and twist. Its ridges bite into the whorls of finger and thumb. But still the tube is shut tight, its aluminium nipple intact. Grip the tube in one hand. Nipple in the other. Crack. It. Open. Glue, clear and shiny, gushes from the tip in a perfect strand, covering candles, coasters and crinoline in an icy web of quick-drying adhesive. As the fumes rise, the body freezes at the thought of this newly formed glacial landscape – an affront to geological time. Enough to raise a giddy smile, already, at the edges, cracking.
Pick at the cardboard box with blunt nails. Sniff (ahhh...) the first wave of solvent. The slim, metal tube slides out of the box. Lightweight. Slippery. Shifty. Plays tricks on the mind. Not easy to trust. Or hold on to. Watch helpless as it skeets across the table, flies momentarily then hits the hard boards and skids across the floor. Scrabbling blindly under the table, fingernails claw through fine grains of dust and the husks of dried insects. Don't want to bend down and lock the creaking back into a permanent U-bend. Instead, twist in straight-legged gyroscopic contortions – anything to avoid raising the backside even a millimetre from its seat. Finally, fingers wrap around the tube of glue. The top is stiff. Squeeze hard and twist. Its ridges bite into the whorls of finger and thumb. But still the tube is shut tight, its aluminium nipple intact. Grip the tube in one hand. Nipple in the other. Crack. It. Open. Glue, clear and shiny, gushes from the tip in a perfect strand, covering candles, coasters and crinoline in an icy web of quick-drying adhesive. As the fumes rise, the body freezes at the thought of this newly formed glacial landscape – an affront to geological time. Enough to raise a giddy smile, already, at the edges, cracking.
SUITCASE
The three-section, telescopic ladder creaks in protest as I tug it into position beneath the opening to the loft. My father stands by, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Ten years ago he would have fetched the suitcase himself, quickly and efficiently. Now he’s an onlooker who doesn’t know where to look. He places a hand on a rung to steady the ladder and it begins to shake. I pretend I haven’t noticed and begin my ascent. Every step unleashes a cacophony of loose rattling as if I were shinning up the spine of a giant skeleton. My head penetrates the dark, and I fumble for the light switch. A bare bulb, smothered in dust, pings into life inches from my left ear. A pool of light the colour of ancient newspaper reveals rafters stretching into the gloom in every direction. And just in front of me there’s a pile of suitcases: a patchwork of silver gaffa tape, baggage-handling stickers and frayed zips. In a dizzying rush I remember squinting after them on airport carousels at the end of childhood holidays. I tug at the nearest one, pull it through the opening in the loft and try to offer it to my father, but although his hand is still on the ladder, he’s turned away. He’s making delicate spitting noises as if something dry and gritty has settled on the tip of his tongue. It's just dust, I tell myself. Just dust.
ROWING BOAT
You clatter into this hollow vessel, every sinew in your legs straining as the horizon goes haywire. Water laps against the sides, frothing beneath each timber, threatening a drenching with each slurp and bubble. And your every movement rings with a submarine echo. From a distance, so peaceful, so fluid, but get close, pick up the thick shafts of heavy oars that turn your hands into toddlers’, and rowing becomes a conversation with a stammering uncle, or a trudge through deep snow in threadbare socks inside wellies that are two sizes too big. You push off. The boat creaks. Your knees too. One oar bites into the water, but the other skims the surface, twisting you on your seat and spraying you with water laced with fragments of all the dead things that once lined its banks. But then you find your beat and the boat picks up speed, a lascivious tongue licking the water, and your pulse locks into the cyclical dip and pull of the oars as gulls wheel overhead, crying.
You clatter into this hollow vessel, every sinew in your legs straining as the horizon goes haywire. Water laps against the sides, frothing beneath each timber, threatening a drenching with each slurp and bubble. And your every movement rings with a submarine echo. From a distance, so peaceful, so fluid, but get close, pick up the thick shafts of heavy oars that turn your hands into toddlers’, and rowing becomes a conversation with a stammering uncle, or a trudge through deep snow in threadbare socks inside wellies that are two sizes too big. You push off. The boat creaks. Your knees too. One oar bites into the water, but the other skims the surface, twisting you on your seat and spraying you with water laced with fragments of all the dead things that once lined its banks. But then you find your beat and the boat picks up speed, a lascivious tongue licking the water, and your pulse locks into the cyclical dip and pull of the oars as gulls wheel overhead, crying.
SALMON
A disembodied muscle stretches across the stainless steel counter. Salmon: skinned, gutted and gleaming orange under IKEA spots. The aroma is oily, but fresh – not the vile-smelling dead fish oil that splashes over your fingers no matter how gingerly you open a tin of tuna. I slice through the flesh, letting the knife follow each sinew and curve. Meat slips off the spine and slides onto the plate. Bite down and let it melt into the corners of your mouth. Or keep your teeth at bay, the way gulls, the fish experts, do. I picture them craning their necks, opening their gullets and tossing back slivers of fresh fish whole. And in that moment I’m back on the deck of a moored fishing boat, a small boy watching a herring gull perch on the hawser, terrified. A mouthful of salmon sandwich lies forgotten in the corner of my mouth. I’m transfixed by the gull’s single immobile yellow eye. My mother calls. I snap out of my trance and turn my head. With an explosion of beating wings and a violent blast of fishy breath the gull launches itself from the deck. Then it simply goes still and, with the kind of nonchalance I’d love to emulate, drifts away on an invisible updraft, the remains of my salmon sandwich drooping from its beak.
PIPE
An explosive scrape of sandpaper, a flash, and my father dips the match into the pipe’s bowl. It begins to crackle as his purple lips suck oxygen out of the room with a delicate phut-phut. The air becomes heavy and warm with clouds of resinous smoke and, just for a moment, the world forgets its furious rotation and gently nudges the door of the living-room to. Still, there’s tension in the room, mostly in the space between his armchair and the sofa where I sit, legs curled beneath me. Although his feet, sheathed in slippers, adopt an ‘at-ease’ stance, he is a coiled spring, never more than one step away from leaping to attention. But gradually, I feel the tension slacken, the spring uncoil and his presence dim until he’s no longer really there. And, as the sweet smoke curls through the room and fogs that faded photo of grandpa in naval uniform gazing out over the docks, we continue to draw breath beneath our forgetting.
An explosive scrape of sandpaper, a flash, and my father dips the match into the pipe’s bowl. It begins to crackle as his purple lips suck oxygen out of the room with a delicate phut-phut. The air becomes heavy and warm with clouds of resinous smoke and, just for a moment, the world forgets its furious rotation and gently nudges the door of the living-room to. Still, there’s tension in the room, mostly in the space between his armchair and the sofa where I sit, legs curled beneath me. Although his feet, sheathed in slippers, adopt an ‘at-ease’ stance, he is a coiled spring, never more than one step away from leaping to attention. But gradually, I feel the tension slacken, the spring uncoil and his presence dim until he’s no longer really there. And, as the sweet smoke curls through the room and fogs that faded photo of grandpa in naval uniform gazing out over the docks, we continue to draw breath beneath our forgetting.
LEAVES
Tidy piles of burnt leaves line the pavements. Kick them in a frenzy and they crackle and spit. Rustling in life, now they crunch and crumble. But the smell bears an undertow of musky, sighing dampness that is turning the pile’s underbelly to slime. I love the free-form jazz rhythms of the broom’s dry bristles whisking clouds of orange, gold and fading green into ziggurat-like edifices. On the other side of the road, a guy in blue overalls, trucker cap and ear muffs waves something like a hairdryer with a length of guttering strapped to its nozzle back and forth across the path. He mimics the early autumn breeze to construct his stacks, but he knows the first true gusts will undo his neat piles in seconds. Perhaps that is why his focus is so complete, and he is deaf to the gleeful shrieks of toddlers in wellies and bright anoraks grabbing great handfuls of leaves and casting them high into the air in his wake.
Tidy piles of burnt leaves line the pavements. Kick them in a frenzy and they crackle and spit. Rustling in life, now they crunch and crumble. But the smell bears an undertow of musky, sighing dampness that is turning the pile’s underbelly to slime. I love the free-form jazz rhythms of the broom’s dry bristles whisking clouds of orange, gold and fading green into ziggurat-like edifices. On the other side of the road, a guy in blue overalls, trucker cap and ear muffs waves something like a hairdryer with a length of guttering strapped to its nozzle back and forth across the path. He mimics the early autumn breeze to construct his stacks, but he knows the first true gusts will undo his neat piles in seconds. Perhaps that is why his focus is so complete, and he is deaf to the gleeful shrieks of toddlers in wellies and bright anoraks grabbing great handfuls of leaves and casting them high into the air in his wake.
SPOON
Light but hard, the stirring spoon slots into my grip as if it were crafted exclusively for my fingers. Ancient rivulets and cracks run parallel to the wood’s tight grain, concealing memories of dark sauces long boiled and digested. Over the years the wood’s resin has discoloured the spoon’s shaft and carved crevasses into the oval face, emphasising the wood’s fibres and, somehow, helping them breathe. I dip it headfirst into the pan of sizzling onions and garlic, and turn over the shiny strands that slip and slide through the hot oil. As the steam rises, sweet and savoury, my mouth begins to water and I can already feel the first delicate crunch of onion and mild tang of garlic setting off waves of feel-good endorphins. More stirring, purposeful, intense. I grasp a fistful of ingredients, throw them in and fold them together, manipulating the spoon with the fierce abandon of a gamer with his joystick.
CHILLI PEPPERS
Handed to me in a well-thumbed brown paper bag with the words, “Watch out for the small ones,” the chilli peppers are lined up in a row of ‘j’s and ‘l’s on my window sill. Only one of them, streaked with orange, is showing signs of turning red. The rest are a waxy green, and their smooth skins remind me of cheap plastic action figures from the ’70s. Probably banned now – figures and plastic both. Weeks later, I rediscover the forgotten row of chillies. I put down my can of Pledge and pick up a couple for inspection. Dry, wrinkled and surprisingly weightless, life has evaporated from them. Caught in their silent, lichen-slow death throes, they are the red of rage, failing hearts, wringed necks. I break one open. Seeds spill into the palm of my hand. Invisible fumes make me cough, and my eyes begin to water. They are nowhere near my mouth, but I can still feel the effects. Without thinking, I thumb the tears away. Bad move. Hot needles pierce the skin where eye meets nose. Breathing like I’m drowning. Thinking in swear words only. A thin slice of chilli is all it takes to strip away my facade and reveal the yodeller on crack who lies beneath.
ELASTIC
A tangle of bright reds, greens, blues and yellows in a tight, fibrous ball, it lands with a dull thud on the countertop and makes tiny sucking noises as it rolls across the greasy spoon surface so I pick it up, turn it over, looking for a good red elastic band that will be easy to peel off the ball without it spanking the back of my hands, and the bitter smell of perishing rubber clings to my fingers like washed out marigold gloves reminding me of grandma’s tatty hot water bottle, turning tepid in the darkest hours when, too close to throwing up to sleep, too scared to move, I nudge it slowly toward the edge of the bed, a beached fish, stinking, sticking to the sheets, where it finally totters on the brink of the mattress before overbalancing and falling to the floor with a blubbery thunk of old flesh and guts as the seams pop and rancid, rubber-laced water spews across the carpet.
A tangle of bright reds, greens, blues and yellows in a tight, fibrous ball, it lands with a dull thud on the countertop and makes tiny sucking noises as it rolls across the greasy spoon surface so I pick it up, turn it over, looking for a good red elastic band that will be easy to peel off the ball without it spanking the back of my hands, and the bitter smell of perishing rubber clings to my fingers like washed out marigold gloves reminding me of grandma’s tatty hot water bottle, turning tepid in the darkest hours when, too close to throwing up to sleep, too scared to move, I nudge it slowly toward the edge of the bed, a beached fish, stinking, sticking to the sheets, where it finally totters on the brink of the mattress before overbalancing and falling to the floor with a blubbery thunk of old flesh and guts as the seams pop and rancid, rubber-laced water spews across the carpet.
DRUM
The first hit takes me by surprise. The stick bounces off the snare’s taut skin, jarring my wrist and launching a cloud of dust and dead things into my face. Before the second hit, my nose starts itching so badly it’s tempting to prod the stick up a nostril. The tip is grubby and worn, but probably not too wide. A few sneezes later, I begin to find the balance of the stick between my fingers and, gently now, let the tip skate along the taut surface of the drum. With the deftest flick of the wrist, I get a syncopated beat going with heavy accents on the one, four and seven. I push the stick around the face of the drum, trying out different timbres and tone colours, amazed that something so simple can produce so many sounds. Getting confident now, I bring in the second stick and try and work it into the gaps in the beat. And suddenly each slap on skin sends a pressure wave coursing through my arms, through my entire body, melting bones. With my brain ringing hollow, I become fluid, wave after wave of surf crashing on the rocks, sending whitewater, sharp and salty, high into the biting air.
RIDGE
Nightfall, after a long day’s climbing in the Alps, and fat drops of rain are bouncing off the thin walls of my two-man ridge tent. On each impact, a puff of water vapour materializes inside the tent. The air is growing heavy with moisture. And suddenly I’m acutely aware that I’m zipped into a stringy cloth bag. On a ridge thousands of feet up. Alone.
A shiny black beetle, antlers dwarfing the length of its body, scuttles along the seam between the tent’s floor and wall. It edges under the flap of my rucksack. Watching it, I notice the tent floor beginning to rise and bulge as wave after wave of rainwater streams beneath my sleeping bag, raising me off the tent floor. Water above, water below, squeezing the tent like it’s a bloated boil. Something’s bound to pop.
The front pole is already bending. It snaps in two, inches from my face. The back of the tent pitches forward, smothering the back of my head. And as soon as there’s contact with hair and skin, rain gushes in, and rivulets of glacial meltwater run down the ridge. Of my spine.
Nightfall, after a long day’s climbing in the Alps, and fat drops of rain are bouncing off the thin walls of my two-man ridge tent. On each impact, a puff of water vapour materializes inside the tent. The air is growing heavy with moisture. And suddenly I’m acutely aware that I’m zipped into a stringy cloth bag. On a ridge thousands of feet up. Alone.
A shiny black beetle, antlers dwarfing the length of its body, scuttles along the seam between the tent’s floor and wall. It edges under the flap of my rucksack. Watching it, I notice the tent floor beginning to rise and bulge as wave after wave of rainwater streams beneath my sleeping bag, raising me off the tent floor. Water above, water below, squeezing the tent like it’s a bloated boil. Something’s bound to pop.
The front pole is already bending. It snaps in two, inches from my face. The back of the tent pitches forward, smothering the back of my head. And as soon as there’s contact with hair and skin, rain gushes in, and rivulets of glacial meltwater run down the ridge. Of my spine.
WHISKY
Reach for the glass. My every gulp is a creaking journey that starts with the weight of a bottle and the lightness of a glass, more measured than poured. The first peaty fumes rise. I turn the glass, watch the amber liquid cling to its sides, leaving an unearthly film. I watch it slide back into the bowels of the glass. The aroma conjures memories: running through wet grass, clambering over lichen-covered rocks after rain, striking half a box of matches to light a fire in the woods. All damp, but fresh and outdoors. The taste is heavy furniture, warm firesides, damp woollen sweaters. But when it hits the top of my stomach it turns into a wasp which tries to sting its way to freedom. I picture the Alien’s acidic blood burning through floor after floor of the Nostradamus while the crew race from deck to deck, helpless, and I gulp back the first stab of panic. Only one thing can calm my nerves. I reach for the bottle.