Identity

Waitressing in the off-season, her friends sit at the Ikea tables tossing fries at eachother, waiting for no customers to come in.

The path to her house has just been resurfaced and planted-up with low birch bushes. It's nine degrees out, mild. She's wearing her white coat with the fake-fur trim, bought from an Indonesian man from a bankrupt stock sale at her school's sports hall. South-west wind blowing in over the island round her tights, reebok and the municipal planting.

Her mum's made lamb stew for dinner. She's not happy with this, pushes her fork through to the bone, imagines a medical cross-section, or a museum display, this taxidermied sheep spins in three dimensions, rotation about its forelimbs.

..

Two white trains running out in a grey-blue twilight, red lamps on a cab anthropomorphised to a lego figure by design: a black visor scanned by oblique tracers of yellow light form the other, a sky like emulsion and a steel wire of a horizon.

Juvenile-sweet alcohol in a bottle askance, girl in an orange tulip-dress witha black up-do, too much for this crowd. Todd Reise picking shots from Carousel, smooth, turning with a lickable black-gloss sheen and surface reflections. Some girl in wet-look leggings, one hand aloft, sittting on some headless kid's shoulders, lips in a pout of a roar of appreciation for the implied band, or DJ, or act. Her hair blonde and bias-cut like her tshirt. Two young males in suit jackets, jeans and skooshes of hair faomed on their heads, in a ruck, or an embrace. Flashlit on a backstreet, set to the right of frame: a bollard and unrelated mutt, head cropped off to the left. Anders on the train, four seats in front chatting incomprehensibly to a student friend in Reykjavik, they've some space in a bar to hang his technically adept but null paintings. Todd doesn't know why, but hes seeing the town a level 'up', on a plateau. There's a grit smell coming out of the over-cool air-conditioning, like rain on dry tarmac.

There's a rod along her trigger-grip on her fork-in-the-meat; a visceral dowser; a leyline defining her, her identity, she's rotated with her moorland familiar around this hairline axis. She sees herself; the lamb in its layers, shank-bone, muscle, skin and fleece; in in hunch at the kitchen melamine; icon and signified; rotating slowly around a bore through the terrain, gets comforting glimpses of children playing farm games on a dirt floor with knucklebones. The line like a pin to the earth, extending out vertiginously behind her to God knows what.

She puts down her fork.
"Mum, I'm not hungry".
Anna wafts I-don't-make-this-food-for-you-to-waste-do-you-know-how-much-this-costs? aside and picks up her coat to go to the petrol station, see if there's anyone there.