He chomped on an apple with the loudest fruit fart he’d ever managed to muster; stared across the river at where he used to play as a child, among the nettles, gripping toy aeroplanes like boomerangs and making brrrmmming noises to scare the blackbirds … and applying dock leaves to any stings he’d inadvertently suffered in the meantime. Now a grown-up, and on the other side of the river, he yearned for the return of childhood’s simplicity – except things were simple now.
Too simple.
He was dying.
Having met the cancer ward that’d make our world an orphan.
He laughed out loud – startling fish – and wandered painfully along the bank. There was no longer any dock leaf that could soothe his current sting. He had it in his brain, his back, his chest, his … tantamount to totality. A rotter of a fruit, rotting, not to, but from, the core. Corruption came out of nowhere, it seemed, but, subsequently, went everywhere. Like a desperate cow pie.
Not that he was old. Merely struck down in his middle years above and below the waist – whilst this was his last trip out unattended. He’d begged and begged, despite the hobbling disfigurement of the counting-house rhymes in his head. So the trip was reluctantly permitted by the hospital so that he could explore his old haunts.
The water blew bubbles, like his old bathtime farts. The current stung.
