You wake up, with coffins in your head, you shake them off pat the turf of happy thoughts over them, squeeze the pillow over your face, have several drops of that stupid plant-based thing that’s meant to help but doesn’t, you toss and turn and toss and turn, read some news and the coffins become real so you stop the scrolling, you check your email and there isn’t much apart from the one reminding you to renew your insurance and the one you’re sure you unsubscribed from but somehow keeps coming back uninvited.
You go for a glass of water, trip on the cat, call him a cunt, unnecessarily, he’s a good cat most of the time, wonder if you should sort the laundry, maybe pair all those lone socks instead of wasting all this time not doing anything productive but you go back to bed. And you whip your phone back out from under your pillow, wonder what you want, what would make you happy, how to stop being numb; you order some new shoes that you don’t really need, and a suitcase you really don’t need, where the fuck do you think you’re going? The only traveling you’re doing now is in your head, in the past, skiing down the once eventful slopes of your memory. You bring Italy back, in its glorious sunshine dress, and make yourself sad and think you should have some beer to blur the edges of young you, drown the old young you in ice-cold relief brewed by Belgian monks.
But you realise it is now morning and too early for beer, so you get up and pour too much ground beans and too little water in the coffee maker, and watch it percolate and you wonder if you should do something crazier than buying shoes and suitcases to keep you from falling deeper into this insufferable corpse-like numbness, wonder if you should maybe kill someone and as the coffee sparks your brain you think that yes definitely you should kill someone so you whip out your phone from inside the kitchen draw and scroll through your contacts and wonder who you should kill even though you know exactly who you will kill and you realise that the last 972 days have been leading to this moment and that yes it’s a dish served cold, but with a side of hot coffee, though you don’t even have your second cup because you’re already on your way.
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B F Jones is French and moved to the UK in 2002. She lives there with her husband, three children and two cats. She has poetry and flash fiction in various online venues and her poetry collection The Only Sounds Left published by Alien Buddha was released on 12 June 2021.
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image: Peter Gutierrez
Rejection Letters 