Notice how I wondered

Notice how I wondered: is it vomit? You walk along the footpath towards the pulped white pile and the asphalt that is darkened down the slope in the silhouette of a dried, dead octopus, and it matters how you stride towards it -- whether you pick your way over the tentacles or flatten them nonchalantly -- because it seems, even as you are alone on this street and all the windows in the houses are blank, that there is always someone who is watching how you walk and taking note how you react to the leavings of others.

Should you feel engulfed by the tenebrous

Don't you find it heartening, she asked me, that a shop called Body Stimulants should be right next door to the only funeral parlour on King Street? Should you feel engulfed by the tenebrous while making funeral arrangements for a relative yet to be deceased, you can easily slip next door to get the fluids flowing again; should you feel overwhelmed by sensations while being massaged or having your cuticles seen to one after the other, you can always press afterwards into the dark marble portal of the funeral parlour to choose the one casket that will ease, with plush, your pulsing finger ends.

And to whom am I speaking?

It is possible to believe that the receptionist at the doctor's remembered that you called the day before to ask about the details of your appointment in such a way that she had to respond, with the kind of tired, deliberate manner that you hadn't heard outside of the theatre: and to whom am I speaking? It is possible that she remembered you because she had made a caustic note against your name when your answer failed to adjust to the seriousness of her tone. It is highly unlikely that she recruited the oldest and sickest to fill all the chairs in reception so that you had to stand out in the corridor when you arrived, but not entirely implausible that she went on that day to draw strange pointed shapes in the register next to your name with the fat-bodied pen that she was not even thankful you returned.

Bankstown Stand C

Although I did not get to see Kafka's grave as I'd planned, since the cemetery was closed on the Wednesday and the Thursday that week in May, I was lucky that the Veolia buses passing through the Žižkov bus station on Israelská just on the other side of the wall from him pulled up at Stand C at the Bankstown bus station in Sydney only five days later, and so, turning back towards where, in the Prague guidebook and from the sign, his body was said to be lying -- which was 250 metres east of the locked iron gates -- I could make something of a man through the bush hazed fence walking several metres below us on a platform towards an approaching train, the figure with elbows at remarkable, exaggerated angles, as every part of a person now appears to me through the palimpsest of the diaries I've been reading, even though they are also overlaid, or should I say pinched in to initials and simple absence, by the prudery (and caution) of Max.

The burning crane

We like to sit on the narrow wooden veranda of the cafe and twist around to look at that dark, sand-strewn spot on Broadway, where the burning crane, that morning, failed to fall and so failed to crush dozens of cars, people and dogs.

Making a vista in Victoria Park

Apparently, according to the bird book, corellas aren't supposed to be this close to the coast, so even when they bleat in the trees on either side of us or take off from the grass in agitated groups, their wey faces startled, eyes smudged with the eager stupor of the follower (of course, theirs was the last complaint after the fireworks died at the end of Chinese New Year) it is possible to imagine the park without them. After all, many years ago, I remember black swans on the artificial lake (a whole side of the continent displaced) before the bottom of it was shallowed and a bridge pushed across the middle to make a vista to the Great Hall from a couple of blind-fronted buildings on City Road.

The yellow-gold stain

When the genial, gentle owner told me how to clean and look after the tawa after roasting flat bread and about the exorbitant price of cassava since the cyclone, it no longer seemed possible that the far back room of his shop, where sacks of besan flour filled the middle of the floor, would continue to stink of urine -- and nor that his assistant would know nothing at all about anything I asked him but instead keep touching the yellow-gold stain on the front of his T-shirt as he stared at my chest.