New prose by Bobby Parker

There were no cakes in the tin, but it was a very pretty tin decorated with rainbows melting into the electric image of people laughing in their adult world… And it was all a con. We wanted something sweet, and the tin was so pretty; however we couldn’t know for certain that it was empty… just had to reach inside for ourselves, feel around with itchy fingers, hope for a crumb, a chocolate chip… A heartfelt letter from the cake tin maker explaining everything . . .

I’ll sell my soul to the way you all move around, press your lips and bodies together, make sounds with your mouths and expect others to do the same, earn enough money to be able to sleep without that sensation of falling through the mattress, waste love on those who that do not deserve it, stay friends with people out of habit and not because they are particularly interesting or you care how they feel… I’ll sell my soul to the way you pray and laugh and scratch your heads at the stars, the way you look in mirrors at your bodies and wonder what a little muscle could do, the way you talk to people you don’t really like because it would be rude not to, and the way you bury your dead and bring them flowers instead of apologies, and OH MAN I’ll sell my soul to the way you think and breathe mass media manipulation

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Sentimental Crap, what?


It was my turn to walk old Frank home. The snow outside had been falling steadily, tremendously, for most of the night. A white world untouched. Three o’clock in the morning, pub lock-in, everybody drunk and high and singing along to The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel. It was warm in The Comberton Arms. Cosy. Old Frank smiled into his ale and nodded to the door, ‘Come on, we’ll sing The Old Rugged Cross…’ The old swine! The old crook everybody loved! I rolled a cigarette. Slapped my face a few times to the bemusement of hardened drinkers. John mopped the bar with a filthy little cloth, his eyes rolling and streaked with red.  Kath pulled up her top and her middle-aged breasts bulged out of her stained bra like massive marshmallows. What a night! Winter 1999… seven days until my birthday, eight days until a whole new century. Hang on, Frank, hang on! We shuffled out the door and he hooked his frail arm round mine. I wanted to tell him how much he reminded me of a dickens character, with his crumpled hat, crumpled coat, crumpled eyes, crumpled ways! But when we saw that snow outside we gasped, and the air froze our lungs, and it felt good and clean and the closest thing to being pure. Not a footprint out there. No tyres had ploughed the roads. It crunched under our feet. Heaven! Heaven! And we didn’t say a word. We crossed the road. Staggered past the shops and the church that looked wonderfully eerie among the falling flakes and wind-blow-howl so cold. The booze seemed to have rushed from out the top of our heads and into the wink and shine of crystal stars… we didn’t say a word… his arm hooked round mine… his little shuffled steps slippered with layers of fluffy snow… we were sober, I could tell; by the time we approached the gate to his little bungalow our steps had become steady, even professional; we could’ve walked up a mountain and hugged a frozen cloud, or brushed the brilliant inky dark with our eyebrows! He unhooked his arm from mine and opened the wooden gate. At the same time, we both looked back from where we came, the cosy lights of The Comberton Arms that seemed, now, so very sad… our footprints in the white, white, white… what are we here for? What am I going to become? How did you get here, Frank? How did you find your way to such a magnificent age? But, still, we did not speak… he leaned his weight, light as a paper bag filled with feathers and tissues and cigar smoke, and he looked around: the wonderfully eerie church, the snow, the snow, Heaven!… our footprints… the sad, yet cosy lights… freezing air in our lungs like the breath of the beginning and the end – Old Frank looked at me with shining eyes, wise eyes, ‘Don’t grow old, Bob. Don’t ever become old like me.’ But there was a hint of a smile. He tottered up to his front door and didn’t turn back to see me biting my lip. I lurched around and sang The Old Rugged Cross, suddenly drunker than ever, and the cosy, sad lights of The Comberton Arms disappeared in a world of white, world of age, world of wonder…      


* Bobby Parker lives in Kidderminster (England) has poems published/accepted in/by Agenda, Obsessed With Pipework, Fire, Iota, Rain Dog, Cauldron, The Coffee House, Curlew, Krax, Weyfarers, Purple Patch and Urban District Writers.