The other Jackson Pollock
(another from the "What on earth do I do with this?" file)
The other Jackson Pollock runs a mobile snack bar; his usual pitch is a lay by on the A5 just outside Shrewsbury. Even now, a cup of tea is only one pound ten, a burger is four pounds, a hot dog is two. There's a red ketchup dispenser in the shape of a tomato and a bottle of bright yellow mustard on the counter, and a small zinc table with two chairs that he picked up at B&M bargains for a tenner outside, though people rarely sit on them. He doesn't blame them, the traffic whistles by and there's often a layer of fine grit suspended in the air.
Business is slow, but that's fine by Jackson, he likes to stand peaceably at the counter, alternately spraying it with a bottle of pink food-safe sanitiser spray and wiping it with a cloth in slow arcs. Some days, he finds a sale an irritation, interrupting the rhythm of his cleaning. When he was a young man he dropped out of university, where he'd shown a degree of promise, and went to Goa, where he went completely berserk at full moon parties.
One night he waded into the warm shallows of the Indian Ocean and stared at the moon as it grew ever larger before him. He watched it fill his field of vision; he could pick out crevasses in the sides of craters, spot individual boulders dotted erratically around the lunar plain, he felt he could reach out and pluck a piece of scree and present it to Jenny, a trainee accountant from Hunstanton who he'd met at a beach bar a few nights before. The moon's glow intensified until all he could see was light and shade, pulsing and strobing until it grew too painful to endure. He waded back to shore and told Jenny that he loved her more than the moon.
She left in the morning to go to Hong Kong, she was sort of semi engaged to a futures trader there but they were still taking time to work out who they were and where they were at, yeah? The counter of his snack bar gleams with a light that is almost unearthly. The mustard and ketchup are always full, and there aren't any crusty bits on the nozzles.
The other Jackson Pollock runs a mobile snack bar; his usual pitch is a lay by on the A5 just outside Shrewsbury. Even now, a cup of tea is only one pound ten, a burger is four pounds, a hot dog is two. There's a red ketchup dispenser in the shape of a tomato and a bottle of bright yellow mustard on the counter, and a small zinc table with two chairs that he picked up at B&M bargains for a tenner outside, though people rarely sit on them. He doesn't blame them, the traffic whistles by and there's often a layer of fine grit suspended in the air.
Business is slow, but that's fine by Jackson, he likes to stand peaceably at the counter, alternately spraying it with a bottle of pink food-safe sanitiser spray and wiping it with a cloth in slow arcs. Some days, he finds a sale an irritation, interrupting the rhythm of his cleaning. When he was a young man he dropped out of university, where he'd shown a degree of promise, and went to Goa, where he went completely berserk at full moon parties.
One night he waded into the warm shallows of the Indian Ocean and stared at the moon as it grew ever larger before him. He watched it fill his field of vision; he could pick out crevasses in the sides of craters, spot individual boulders dotted erratically around the lunar plain, he felt he could reach out and pluck a piece of scree and present it to Jenny, a trainee accountant from Hunstanton who he'd met at a beach bar a few nights before. The moon's glow intensified until all he could see was light and shade, pulsing and strobing until it grew too painful to endure. He waded back to shore and told Jenny that he loved her more than the moon.
She left in the morning to go to Hong Kong, she was sort of semi engaged to a futures trader there but they were still taking time to work out who they were and where they were at, yeah? The counter of his snack bar gleams with a light that is almost unearthly. The mustard and ketchup are always full, and there aren't any crusty bits on the nozzles.
posted by Matt at 3:40 AM
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