Popisho

He sought out cold waterfalls, small thick forests, and thought about nothing at all.

Generally, men told stories to boast, but women were different. They wanted to look at their words in the air and extract the meaning, and if you shut up and listened, they'd tell you very interesting things indeed.

Don’t trust anyone who keep telling you what’s wrong with you,

There was something quite correct and right about a man so sad he made bad decisions.

Compassion was a kind of magic; listening was at least half the task.

All the time she had been grasping the air with her hands, in an impassioned effort to express herself. 'Here was not just food, but an experience. It was all of Popisho, the smells and textures, it was - it was - all our love and our losses and our beauty, struggles, history, our childhoods ... it was perfect, it was perfect for me.

Touch me, he thought, and all he could think was: love me, and all he could think was: why I never prepare for this moment better? Look how I had all these years of life to ready myself for your arrival, and what I did with them? Wasted them on other women, and other ideas, and now you here, I not ready. He wanted to sit in front of her and have her tell him everything she'd ever experienced in all of her life.

Boxes of fireworks - she remembered them filling her childhood, at every occasion she could think of, gods, where had the Popisho fireworks gone? Mad swirls of silver-blue lightning and crimson stars. A whole sky of melting yellow moons that trickled into their hair and faces and turned into caramel.

He could hear the exact moment an argument frayed, when it became about feelings, still pretending to be facts.

Butterflies were like alcohol. The heat of a good wine in a burnt orange butterfly. The cool swallow of rare ship-bought vodka in clear, white and blue beauties.

If a man want cook, he hire one, nah? Or do it himself, if he have a mind.

I don't understand why you throwing away something so important.' 'But I never asked for your understanding. The pums is not important to me. I tell you already, you just don't like my answer. It feel good to me that it gone. I am going to have a new life. I don't have to feel like you. I don't have to be like you. And just because we different, that don't mean I wrong, either.

A final giggle slid off the side of his mouth and fell into the sand, foaming. They watched it for a while.

The world was stirring awake again, and he had a list of things to do today in his green notebook. Fish delivery Fuckery