English muffin

It's Sunday and the three of us (husband and daughter) are sat around the dining table with our muffins and screens. English muffins and lap tops, or iPad. The muffins are stuck sideways in a silver toaster rack that swirls like a tunnel, they look dry but somewhat decorative; they are the colour of pale, dead flesh.



The white lace table cloth underneath all of this extra weight is wrinkled and rumpled, as if it has been confused for a bedspread. 'I'm a table-cloth here folks!' cries out the table-cloth: 'I don't want to be a bedspread!', and I know how he feels.

The margarine is low fat and the jam tall, slender and stylish red, no sugar added, all the way from France. But still the daughter resists...



I am writing my piece on Memphis ('The black bus'). Two thousand-plus words on our two days there, December last year. I have finished it, in fact. M says it's ready. I wrote it faster than I've ever written anything. In hours. I will have to go back to look at it again after a brewing period of two days or so, then send it, probably to the States.  I have sent pieces to The New Yorker  before and received commendation (They once mistook me for a man! when I was writing as Sal). I might submit it here in NZ; everybody likes hearing about the States.