Dinner time

Murky, dust-coloured broth swirls in circles of ill-defined ripples. Its stench is so thick you can taste it brush against your pores, and the tiny vapour droplets glance a candle’s light and fling it dingily about the hovel. Your toes are caked in miles of dirt road and leech swamp. Your fingers have touched so much, and will do more before the brittle bones within lock and snap. The cracks in your fingernails harbour small farms in which tiny cabbages have started to grow, and a potato patch by your thumb’s cuticle. Your breath heaves out. Halfway there, to nowhere.