The Art of Becoming Homeless by Sara Alexi

people I worked with over there did not really care about me. They cared about the work, the working relationship, and the project. So really when I thought to make the choice, there was only one place that I could live happily, for the long term anyway.
    ‘ It is not bricks and mortar that make our home, it is people who love us.’
    A group of rather red-looking English people enter the port.
    ‘If you will excuse me.’ The waiter stands, and in two easy strides he is talking to them.
    ‘ Tea and toast, or maybe you have had breakfast already, in which case you must try our crab. It is the best on the island. Constantinos there catches it for me.’
    The old fisherman stops folding his nets to wave. ‘Every day he goes out, the most content man I have ever met. Now, who wants some of the best coffee on the island?’
    Michelle looks over the café door where the proprietor ’s name, ‘Costas Voulgaris’, is painted by a rather shaky hand. Owner, waiter, astrophysicist, she muses.
    Michelle lets her back curve into the chair; she, too, feels boneless, melted by the sun. Her mind is blank, washed clean by the waiter ’s stream of words.
    She considers letting go of consciousness just enough for a quick snooze when she see s Yanni the donkey man walk into the port, his one donkey behind him.
    She must do something about him. She leaves some money on the table and stands.

Chapter 8

    Yanni ’s loss is apparent in the way he walks, lifeless, slumped.
    A girl in the office in London has a horse, talks about it like it is human, and seems to spend more time with it than with her boyfriend. The whole chambers knows about its schooling, its learning progress, how some things it learns faster than she does, and she feels she is holding it back, and how, over other things, she has to be patient, repeating them again and again.
    Until listening to her, Michelle had never considered what sort of bond a person could have with a horse. It seems it can be pretty intense. This is confirmed by the look in Yanni’s eyes.
    ‘ Er hmm,’ Michelle coughs her introduction.
    ‘ Ah, nothing broken then?’ he asks.
    ‘ No, just painful.’ She is not sure how to approach the subject. It is not going to be a straight compensation discussion. ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’
    He loops Suzi ’s rein around a post. ‘I don’t drink coffee, thank you.’ The thank you comes as an afterthought.
    ‘ Look, there is no way I can express how sorry I am about what happened.’ The image of Dolly’s last breath brings a lump to her throat, she squeezes a tear back. ‘I am truly really sorry, it was a terrible thing to have happened.’
    ‘ You are alive.’ Yanni has taken out a tobacco pouch. He twists his moustache before beginning his ritual. His moustache seems odd on one so young, but most of the donkey men have them, and Michelle presumes it must denote status.
    ‘ Yes, I’m alive, thank goodness, but this doesn’t detract from your loss.’ She wonders if he will understand the word ‘detract’.
    ‘ She is gone. I will miss her. Suzi will miss her.’ He pats his remaining beast. ‘Last night, in the dark, she cried out her loneliness till nearly dawn. This is life, is it not? Life and death.’
    ‘ Well, yes, but for you it is also your living.’
    ‘ True, things will be a little harder this winter coming; we will not have so much to fall back on.’ He pauses to lick his cigarette paper before the final twist. ‘So maybe this winter we will make things stretch a little further.’
    As he uses the term ‘we’ Michelle has a sudden horrible thought that maybe there is a wife and children at home who will suffer.
    ‘ You have a family?’
    He looks at her strangely.
    ‘Of course I have a family; every man has a mother and father.’
    This gives Michelle a small amount of relief, but she knows that doesn ’t really make any difference. If someone suffers, they suffer, old or young.
    ‘ I hope your parents will not suffer