They argued over the correct way to drain the sink. A chocolate cake buckled under the strain of their indifference to one another.

To put it another way, my coffee came a little late—the kitchen was open and large slices of carrot toppled off the chopping board stopping-up doors that had yet to inherit knobs. There was half a chicken in my direction, which turned out to be a hobby. It was a fluid chicken (I mean to say kitchen). They bred huge rabbits out of those carrots. I wanted to chop into the side of the table where the m had been removed, and I sat with the sleeve of the cook’s hand jittery as mustard in my bread. Hollywood bored-baseball-crowd scenes: spectators reluctantly standing to cheer or Mexican wave, hair in the eyes.

A palm reader parked her fringe. You could see from the expression on her face that she needed a Coca-Cola. She was a rep, day job, and immediately straightened and touched off a beetroot-coloured lipstick that had inherited the paint of patio renovation. She had had a dream of the new patio. Luckily her purse had been removed by a mole surgeon. He specialised in skin cancer and found he could pickpocket up a cheek! He poked in around vowels and his favourite centrist policies were, I suspect, for the boys’ barefoot benefit. He was old enough and smart enough to force himself to stand during the Mexican wave.

Some early personality theory of the emotions: the muscles of the face trigger emotion, full stop. The siren!

They folded out of a twist like the slice itself. As much as his hair had shifted into auburn in his early 30s. Everything was a memory. Even his hair colour came out of a friend’s overheard anecdote about his own friend who was probably the friend of my child, who had no interest in sporting events that sold syrupy cola. He, the specialist, got up out of the crowd like a sprig in spaghetti and made his way along a tunnel that led to the players change room. He hoped for an autograph, but what he got was better: a drawing of the players’ kits. The players walked off field and entered news columns (a joke to them and ghost-written out of racism, laughing all the way to the bar). Player A ordered a taut, calf-sized glass of ale the colour of the freckle he scratched as he flexed his calf. He had to release it towards a table at the back of the room where his teammates had spread out pages of Finnegans Wake—just the first few—and were passing them around. The table went quiet.