Hard backed, jam-packed in condiment colours: cocktail sauce, Colman’s Mustard. A sepia tang rose from inside, pages the colour of old men’s fingers. Time travel of deflated prices: 80p for a novel, more in US/ Canadian dollars. Kneeling at the shelf behind the sofa I fought the tedium of long afternoons slack as space; the drowsy clock; sear of sad, squandered sun on my back. My father lay dozing. Sometimes, his snoring would stop and I counted the s e c o n d s a sick fear he was dead making my toes tingle. Only his Norse blasts resuming released my own breathing, the task of the antiquarian. Philip K. Dick. Dunes sprawling dynasty. Asimov’s mysteries – taut and lovely – a box of gems held up with tweezers in a stark white light, the jeweller a squinting cyclops. I liked Bradbury, collections compiled from 50’s magazines. The best story hurled me
like a pod from a spaceship into a vacuum of infinite dark folded onto itself like velvet with absolutely no
stars. A man on a long haul space flight. He was convinced his sole companion, Wilbur, was an android, assigned to save his mind from the crumble of solitary confinement. Wilbur was detached, aloof, impersonal. Our narrator: charismatic, inquisitive, jovial.
Then they switched him off. They. Switched. Him. Off. The narrator was the robot all along.
That was a kick in the guts.
That was when I realised there were stairs in my head and I had to stare straight ahead not to tumble down them, get smashed at the bottom.
The covers were frightening: A prickly jewel stared out from one, a sort of pincushion with eyes hanging in a sea of yellow. The worst was a man with a bald head cracked at the top like a boiled egg, out of which rose a moth. The moth rising out of the man’s head had a man’s head. And it was bald as an egg, cracked at the top with a moth rising out. The moth had the face of a man’s bald egg head, cracked...
Louise Peterkin has had poems featured in various publications including The Dark Horse, New Writing Scotland and The North. In 2016 she won a New Writers Award for poetry from the Scottish Book Trust.
She lives and works in Edinburgh.