SPACE

        Very long ago, around the time I was born, my Daddy took me in his arms. I could smell the hair oil and the Players Navy Cut, but these had no names then, they were the smell of love.
        My mother was not happy, except for moments and somehow in these moments she would be wearing a blue dress with white polka dots.
        In my room with a cracked window, with plastic airplanes hung by threads, my father would still hold me though he was already dead. But I could be there and he would come and fold me in his arms and smell of love. That is why my mother never wore the dress of happ- iness except when I imagined her.
        There were fingers full of tears clawing at ribbed glass, voices crushed with things that had no need to be there. Hammers, vases, briefcases. Blood from wounds, dogs eating skin torn from legs, black mackintoshes, broken teeth and pain covered with blue liquid and cries of hopeless anger.
        Being sick in a black car whilst the smell of love drove and a blue cloth with white polka dots cleaned my face, as a girl whose face was as shiny as the leather seats waited patiently to leave home.
        I knew she was waiting. As I became separate it became clear. Ten years or more she waited. People became so small, as if the weight of their lives pushed all their molecules closer together. I did not see a big person for fourteen years, and when I did it was me, and I was ten acres wide and full of blue sky, trees and infinite space.