Pond: Stories Read Free

fundamental redundancy to that extent since. The hopelessness of everything I was trying to occupy myself with was at last glaringly crystal clear.
    But the potato plants were still growing! I went over to see my upbeat boyfriend many times and the potatoes and spinach and broad beans didn’t mind one bit and sometimes while I wasaway I would lie in bed next to him unable to sleep and think of the potatoes and spinach and broad beans out there in the dark and I’d splay my fingers towards the ceiling and feel such yearning! I could recall the soil very well, how dark it was and the smell of it—as if it had never before been opened up, and the canal was nearby, and the moon was always overhead, and spiders would get off their webs for a bit and tentatively come into contact with the still edges of things. We didn’t get along very well but this had no bearing whatsoever on our sexual rapport which was impervious and persuasive and made every other dwindling aspect of our relationship quite irrelevant for some time. We wrote each other hundreds of lustful emails, and by that I mean graphic and obscene. It was wonderful. I’d never done that before, I’d never written anything salacious before, it was completely new to me and I must say I got the hang of it really very quickly. I wish I’d kept them, I wish I hadn’t become quite so unhinged when finally we acknowledged that eighteen months was pretty well as much as we could expect from a relationship based almost entirely upon avid fornication, and thereupon rashly expunged our complete correspondence, which, by then, amounted to almost two thousand emails. I won’t be able to write emails like that again you see—that’s to say I won’t be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting—using language in a way I’d not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I’d never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I’d like my brains to be fucked right out.
    It wasn’t all one way of course. He came to see me, and in fact he ate some of the vegetables I’d grown and he said they were lovely, which they were. We ate oranges too, quite often—in fact eating Spanish oranges became a bit of a thing. They are very nice to eat, oranges, when you’ve been having sex for ages. They cut through the fug and smell very organised, and so a sort of structure resumes and then it is perfectly possible to make a plan, such as going out somewhere nice for dinner.
    Still, as I’ve said, none of this has anything to do with now whatsoever. I don’t know what it has to do with and as a matter of fact I’m not sure what now is about either. I can say that I’m waiting for the delivery of two Japanese tapestries I bought in France earlier this year, but even that is off-the-mark and could very well proffer a misleading impression of me, a rather grand impression perhaps, as if I were supremely but subtly well-off and presided over quite the sequestered emporium of exotic whatnots and recherché objets d’art . Castles in the clouds I’m afraid, truth is, they can hardly be thought of as tapestries at all—they aren’t much more than two pieces of old black cloth in two separate frames with some rose-gold flecks here and there, amounting, in one, to a pair of hands, and to a rather forlorn profile in the other. From what I remember of them it seems there had originally been many more stitches and thus a more complete and detailed image but for a reason I cannot at all decipher most of the stitches have been removed. Yet the trace of where they once were is discernible with some effort, as of course are the very small holes, where silken thread, presumably, moved deftly in and out of