Mrs. Kerrigan said that when you look up at the stars, close your eyes for ten seconds, then look up at the stars again, you will see more stars than you previously did. There is no patience that brings more stars from a wall made from sheets of chipboard, it's just the amount there is.

Anyway, she was teaching a class on story writing, telling the class that when she was a child, she was crawling across the floor of her home in France, she had picked up a nail and slotted it into a plug socket, the shock flung her across the wooden floorboards.

After this telling she set the children in the class homework, to write their own story of an accident. One boy presented an abridged version of Mrs. Kerrigan's own electrocution tale, she made sure to let the class know of his misjudgement. If he had any sense he would have told the story about the frugal Texan lawyer, who put his foot through the bathroom floor. He then tried to fix it himself with Polyfilla, wedged stacks of books and a big teddy bear to hold it in place whilst it dried.

But now all there is are images that appear when people tell stories, and all there is, are the images that appear when people tell other people's stories, and books so easily become material stripped of their contents, something sturdy to write on, a stack of them to raise a laptop, and whether they are fiction or non-fiction is irrelevant, their spines just facades.

Like the walls are cosmos, covering any chance at seeing a real cosmos, blocking the stars with an idea of stars. However, the fish is just a fish, and the sofa is just a sofa for the fish, the trees are smaller branches from a bigger tree. Something real suggesting something imagined, or something you can only imagine and making it real.

Biography