The Typewriter

I imagined what I had to do was come up with a story

that wasn’t real, but nonetheless true. To pretend

my sheet of A4 paper splotched with paint

represented something fabled.

The teaching assistant’s electric typewriter gave off

a certain awe with its low hum and the tap, tap, tap

as he typed out the sentences recited by each student.

These he would hang beneath our paintings, like labels in galleries:

Medium: Acrylic with employ of potatoes, carrots and celery sticks.

Artist: Simon Bryant, Age 5

As if the messes we had made with sliced roots

dipped in thick paints

could mean something. Patches of blue

and streaks of orange were interpreted

by my classmates as trips to the beach

or as games of totem tennis.

In my mess of splattered dyes

folded in four like a Rorschach

I saw nothing but shapes and colours:

a patch I had stamped with the blunt end

of a carrot might be a sun, the orange triangle

a woman’s body,

the green-winged creature in the centre, a bat or moth.

(I could have said the woman was my mother in our garden on a warm day.)

Instead it was a battle—what else could something that messy be?

I imagined a tale of equal disarray, of revenge killings

spanning generations, part Taras Bulba, part Ali Baba,

scenes from weekend matinees where Hollywood extras

appeared to take real swords through their chests

and were thrown from their horses by live bullets.

(I imagined the actors had agreed to die; the pay-packets

left behind for loved ones, a form of guilty compensation.)

‘That’ll be enough,’ the teaching assistant said

and invoked a two-sentence limit—

as if two sentences might be enough to describe a war,

or as if he was rehearsing for one of those movies

where a teacher seizes up over a child’s drawing.