a.funnytimeofyear.com

A constipated dog with a passion for gay boys slides onto your bed, her withering frail figure gliding onto the fresh, virginal sheets barely touched. A smell exudes from her awkward position and you notice her backend barely touches the ground, trickily bobbing between the abyss of air and the reality of matter below her. You stir and move sharply because the phone rings, as if by routine, at 09:59, the loud whoop whoop of the caller’s attention ringing through cranial matter. It continues its emergency siren until you stumble; arms outstretch for the offending object and wearily begin conversation with an entity that has been flicked onto repeat. Words over and over, whilst you say okok, and hang up.

The smell hits you harder than the putrid stench of a roast dinner you once found in the fridge, two weeks after it’s original date, untouched by the human hand (although not by other creatures.)

And you realise that, those sheets? They ain’t so white any more – more a deeper shade of a dinghy 60s communal house, the smears spitting psychedelic patterns. Brown on white, you follow a sporadic trail that leads you to her feeble body and her rigid, uncomfortable figure. You think of the baby you found, its wings so small it resembled a cherub, delicate skeletal features so minute and barely formed. You recall its bloated belly, the soft hairless skin of a ceased animal curving into the sky as if to be asking back the gift of life. As you push its stomach gently, you hear the last breath of a life seep into the atmosphere, becoming a funeral director for the animal kingdom.

You collect petals on your days off, scouring the crisp grasslands for wilted onion skins in a variety of colours – purple stripes, the soft intricate patterns offered by a once flourishing crimson rose. Your feet are dirty in the dusty mud of someone else’s front garden, your hands darting around thorns for treasures of aesthetic beauty, each one possessing its own blooming uniquity in style. A pocket full of petals, and that’s always going to be the boy you are.