Santa Ana Winds

  I killed my tree today. My hardy Eucalyptus, with its cut foliage for flower arranging and its wood production for firewood, biomass and paper production. Its seed was sourced from the cold and high altitude areas of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. And I killed it today. Not myself, of course; I didn’t have the backbone for that. So I took out a contract. I paid a man to perform the hit and he took the sanction, for a measly £280. I tried to be all Michael Corleone about it – Michael had no qualms, he had no remorse. I failed. I thought I might identify more readily with the hunch-backed jester who bought the assassin Spartafucile to slay the Duke of Mantua. But Rigoletto lost his daughter Gilda instead, and frankly, he wanted the Duke dead anyway - his assassin botched the job, that’s all. No, that wasn’t me either. I didn’t want to terminate the tree, I was only following orders. It had grown insanely out of control and thought to have been commanding its roots from a neig...

The old MC touched a button on the side of his seat cushion, raised the foot rest on his chair and sank into it, sighing heavily, heavier than ever contemplating, for a moment, the space where his navel should have been and how he really should phone his mother. He’d been in much the same position for days now, Radio 3 barely audible in the background, staring through the blinds at the occasional passers-by, posting whatever was going through his mind onto social media, and sipping from a can. “World War fucking 3 could have kicked off,” he posted, “and this lot would still be twittering away – hashtag for fuck’s sake.” The only time he got out the chair was to rescue another cold one from the ‘wine cabinet’ and each time he returned, he slumped back down into its sagging upholstery, touched the button to raise his feet and lay there, wheezing like a broken old calliope, worried briefly, about the beat of his heart. “It’s a navel hernia”, said his nurse wife. “First thing they’ll tell ...