A Man Melting by Craig Cliff Page A

much in the way of solutions, he stayed alive for the next few weeks, jotting down fragments of poetry on whatever was lying around.
    ‘I’m not sure if it’s all the drinking or the poetry that’s keeping me alive,’ he told his friend over the phone.
    ‘You’re still seeing the shrink, aren’t you?’
    He started carrying around an inflatable paddling pool, which he stood or sat in to catch the water when he was stationary.
    ‘That’s canny of you,’ said the scientist. He was very apologetic about not making any headway with a solution to his new friend’s problem, but asked him a favour anyway.
    ‘I told my daughter about you, how brave you are. Her class is doing a project on “people who inspire us”, and she wants you to speak to them.’
    He was quite a sight for the eight year olds: a skeletal man sitting in a paddling pool, sipping from his water bottle via a string of straws Sellotaped together, softly talking about his poetry. He didn’t have many poems to read to the class because he didn’t collect them. He just left the napkins and the flyers and the newspapers where he found them. Disposable poetry. You can’t take yourself too seriously when you’re time is nearly up . But he read them the poem he had written on the back of his bus ticket:
    Think too much do too little
    Think too much say too little
    Do little say little Think think much much
    Too too much
    The class stared at him. To him they looked like meerkats.
    ‘I envy you,’ he said. ‘So full of life. So full of water.’ He wiggled his giant straw. ‘You retain everything at your age. I’m proud to think that you will keep the memory of me with you always.’
    The teacher stood, but before she could thank him, he shouted, ‘Water! We are so much water. We are all of us swimming in ourselves.’
    His friend from another city finally got time off workto visit. When he saw the melting first hand he was very apologetic about not coming sooner.
    ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m okay with it. I know that when I stop melting, the story ends, whether I’m alive or dead. I’m okay with melting for a little longer.’
    ‘You look like the guy from Tales from the Crypt .’
    ‘I get that sometimes. I don’t see it myself,’ he chuckled, and sucked on the straw leading up to a bottle affixed to his cycle helmet.
    He went back to the office to see how they were coping without him. They put on a morning tea.
    ‘Sausage rolls,’ he said, ‘my favourite.’
    He unfolded his paddling pool and flicked the switch of the tiny, battery-powered pump he’d bought off eBay. As it pumped, people began to separate into eddies of conversation.
    ‘You going for a paddle, Hamish?’
    He looked to see who had said it. Everyone pretended to be engrossed in their own conversations.
    ‘We are all of us’, he said loudly, ‘swimming in ourselves.’
    The eddies of conversation stopped. Everyone looked at him. To him they looked like meerkats.

Touch
    She didn’t have the underhang. Most people, you look at their face and there’s skin hanging lower than the jawbone, like the bottom of an overloaded cardboard box. But the skin inside the V of Delancey’s jaw defied gravity — actually recessed into her head.
    She wore the kind of thin, looped skirt that used to get draped over whalebone frames but is now allowed to waft voluminously around the legs and crotch.
    Her blouse was sleeveless, though the neckline was high and any assessment of her chest was further obscured by a large necklace which appeared to consist of acorns, or scorched almonds.
    Her hair —
    You should have stopped me. Too much description too soon, right?
    I felt it was important at the time: to take in every facetof Delancey, commit her to memory. She had arrived without notice — a friend of a friend of Alice — and she could disappear just as quickly.
    We were new in town, Alice and I. Me working for the bus company, overhauling the trip-planner functionality on