Excerpts - 1:10,000,000,000

And at my misunderstanding of the exhibit, I still remember now, as if slowed to standstill or shrunk to a diorama - a scene to be walked about and the characters directed to behave - I still remember those few seconds it took Sarah, smiling, to up on her tiptoes and clasp me on the shoulders as instruction to remain, taking three paces back to demonstrate - wind-milling her arms about like a child missing her sparkler, or a conductor her baton - that Earth’s great exodus from origin represented thus: A huge sequence of ellipses through space and time. Solar system, galaxy, galaxy clusters, until - no matter the omnipotence of the geometrist - it could appear no more like maths than it could the flight of a drunk bumble bee.

Round and around me in the middle. Our planet’s skewed axis demonstrated by dint of an affected deportment: A lopsided shuffle she augmented with The Bells! The Bells! and that threatened to topple us together - that I might catch her - every time her smooth brown arms stretched into the air to demonstrate colliding comets; her poise unsettled.

Now nearing a third full circuit, she raised her hand for the last time, and motioned collision course with another heavenly body, held in the hollow of her upturned hip, bringing one fist down to the other over her strap-off-shoulder, smashing the planet slow-motion into a gently opening palm that she left there at her waist, smiling. Invitation to hold.

And she thanked me - coming in closer - for my part in the demonstration: The singularity about which she’d moved for a while.

Excerpts - Baht 'at

Yesterday's must-haves pitch from abandoned billboards on the end terraces. Torn sports cars and satellite television deals either side of tanning salons and video rentals - symptoms of the same longing that sates itself at newsagents and taxi ranks, on celebrity magazines or the cuts of some weaker quarry.

Women here amend their uniformity with cheap flourishes. Streaked hair and barely-there-tattoos testing the limit of a male sensibility that has no demand for difference. They vie for the nod to give some fumbled comfort to the bar's usual brutes, who are busy drawing on all their lust and loathing to proffer, with a pint pot hand, the final word on tits and politics. Men and women smothered in lust and lofty aspiration, kicking a blanking world because it returns them to human scale.

Through broken homes and ten fathered-families this town is barely a generation away from shared blood, for among those with a distaste for solitude is also an impatience for anything but themselves: a self-obsession based on no merit of their own lone minds, but of a sip and spit of the unfamiliar, so that partners are taken briefly to define only opposition from Self.

The constant to and fro of the limited populous has gradually formed a giant, untraceable kinship, whose components - in the vacuum of their shared anonymity - obsess over their own inner turmoil, making a script of the same small inconveniences used to excuse themselves from the crimes they commit in boredom or hate, for both here are of the same ancestor.

Reality is re-proportioned according to their sense of self worth. Blood thickens until it will clot their veins.