For the longest evening, we have nothing.
The lorry is delayed, and we squat in an
unfurnished box, pine-smelling and so clean
it hurts the eyes to look. We are waiting
to hear the growl of our possessions rolling
into the gravel drive, but it’s silent here
and there’s nothing except us. Us, being
us, we fuck twice on the dusty wooden floor
and afterwards construct an elaborate
fantasy in which the lorry does not arrive,
in which the evidence of our years together
is lost somewhere in a ditch alongside the A43
and we are forced to start again with nothing,
sleeping spooned for warmth and drinking
water, like lapping dogs, straight from the tap.
We would burn scavenged wood in the dusty
fireplace, and tell stories or talk or fuck to
pass the time – at least until new things
arrived: an insurance windfall bringing us a
truck of gleaming furniture, books, blankets,
everything pristine new. And we would peer
into the depths of that lorry, and shake our
heads. This isn’t our history, sorry, you’ve got
the wrong house, and we’d live forever
In this shell, feral and poor, ourselves the
oldest things we own.
Krishan Coupland is a graduate from the University of East Anglia MA Creative Writing programme. His writing has appeared in Ambit, Aesthetica, Litro and Fractured West. He won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2011, and the Bare Fiction Prize in 2016. In his spare time he runs and edits Neon Literary Magazine. He is unduly preoccupied with theme parks. His website is www.krishancoupland.co.uk