Mosquitoes live on another time plane: their rain drops slow and easy and plain, bulging balloons of liquid, to be skirted like cars that skid on a one way street. Skirt around them on dancing feet, never touch their liquid goo, and no sticky end may ever befall you.
Dorothy wants to slow down time: wants to have time to reach out and touch the sky, to feel a part of another soul, time to be allowed to be whole. But morning comes too soon, it shrugs off the moon, more letters through the door from strangers, stranglers, ripping up the floor and strangling time.
She wants wine, she wants to glue up the letterbox, to buy new socks, she wants to hold her breath and the world stop turning, unto death; but the sun always rises and slides back behind the high houses like a promise made and easily mislaid.
Dorothy leaves the house, and walks up a street filled with rushing strangers, stragglers, stranglers, freezing her, robbing her heat. This is supposed to be the day she gets the world right, puts the world to rights, stop the world turning so fast and so loud, a giddy spinning dizzy pinning her down. The moon also rises, but things are never the same at night, she goes to his office and there's demons at the gate, barring her entry into the binary world where boy meets girl in a whirl they keep pushing like drug dealers in cheap magazines; they keep on telling her, yelling at her, never letting her say stop and slow down and take a deep breath take five, you're alive, never stop the waterfall from cascading in the hall, where dust keeps on falling and stains keep on forming with perverse minds of their own.
This is what they called home. Dorothy wants the world to stop. So she window-shops, sits in a café where it's all right for a while, they bring her a coffee and even a smile, and she forgets his alien ways and the devils on the desk, monsters on the corner by the launderette.
But her coffee goes cold and smiles freeze her soul, so she leaves the café, walks back the other way, away from his building where he taps out bored tunes on toothy keyboards, she goes to the park, sits on a bench where the mad ones spark, tries to imagine a world without time. Sublime.
Time means nothing, she means nothing, so she walks through the park into a strange part of the city, where people with faces can't help sneering in pity, they follow her to the underground they don't like her here, she doesn't belong, no money, no time. Somebody loves her but she loves another; her family are dead; apart from her mother.
Her best friend moved away. No-one else will come and play. But still there's money to find, and there's clothes to be ironed, and all this while he's growing inside, making trouble from within; the devils don't scare her, monsters have teeth but she's got tanned old hide, he was there when she cried, but she can't stop that gnawing sensation in her belly, buzz saw butterfly inside, no way to expel him till he's good and ready. He said that he loved her, and he lied.
