A Desk Will Let You Sit There Until You Die — By Ashley Mangtani

Passion by Bella Wu

Godfreys, Highbury Barn, London N5

Forty-one Saturdays at Godfreys and I have not eaten one thing I bought.

The ticket comes out of the machine warm, which is the high point of my week, and I have made my peace with that. They are on thirty-six. Five ahead of me, so four minutes, six if the van runs late, and four minutes is the only unit of time I can write in anymore.

A desk has no man behind it breathing on my neck.

A desk will let you sit there until you die.

Yours is still against the window, and I have not moved it.

Forty wants her chicken spatchcocked and says the word twice, the second time for the room.

This is the Barn. The place next door sells one kind of candle. We are all lucky to live here.

Behind the glass sit a tray of hearts, a tray of kidneys, a tray of something the label calls mixed meats.

Forty-one Saturdays and I have never asked. Not asking is a discipline.

You would have had something to say about the spatchcocking.

Tom takes the shears to the spine, two snaps, out it comes, then leans on the breastbone until it cracks.

Sawdust on the floor, clumped where it has taken the drip.

Behind me, a man is talking about the rain. Nobody is watching the chicken come apart. Nobody in this shop has ever watched a chicken come apart.

They have Last Christmas on in August, and the extractor is winning. Tom sings two words and catches himself.

A small boy puts his forehead to the glass above the hearts. A hand comes down on his shoulder, moving him on. The print stays there a while, and then it doesn't.

I write it down before my number comes up. Eleven of these now. Eleven first lines, and every one of them is about you.

Forty-one.

Half a shoulder. Two kidneys. The ox cheek, if there is any. A chicken, and no, it can stay whole.

Anything else, love.

He used to ask after you here. He has stopped. He still puts the bones in.

The weight goes on the paper in pencil. The blue bag comes across with both hands, and I take it with both of mine, the way you would hand over a bomb. He says, "See you next week," and he is not wrong.

Nine minutes, the bag knocking my leg the whole way. Down past a red door that is not my door, into the bottom of somebody else's house.

The freezer holds forty parcels. The top drawer will not shut. The middle one frozen solid, one parcel welded into the next, the paper furred white over the writing so none of them says what it is or which Saturday it was. I put the forty-first on top and lean on it with my hip until the rubber sucks its lip back in.

It breathes out until the breath turns. At the back there is a warm patch and a red bead dripping down the wall, another one behind it, a rust-coloured clump on the floor of the drawer where they have been landing, freezing, and landing again.

My hands go stupid.

I sit on the floor with my back against the freezer and write the twelfth first line. I could write it at the desk.

Sawdust in the tread of my shoe.

The hum goes up my spine, then the warmth, and it is the warmest thing in this flat.

You always said I would let it go to waste.

Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. His work appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, Expat Press, Thin Skin, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Third Wednesday, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at ashleymangtani.com