Strange Fruit from the Last Mango in Paris

The Time Machine - a short story

Little Rosa had a dream. One day she’d become a queen, exploring worlds no-one had been before. She was a law unto herself; while others sat upon the shelf, she made waves. She’d stay up all night at raves and yet still have more energy than the 9-to-5 people she’d skip past at dawn, bare feet sore from hitting the dance floor hard the night before.

 The country she was born in couldn’t hold her, so she started to unfold her wings, to see what life outside her comfort zone could bring. She rocked with yoga teachers on Angola’s bone white beaches, and she dined on peaches in the Tuscany breeze.  Rosa was free, shifting shapes through time and space, tuning into drum and bass in Tokyo sushi bars, learning how to play guitars under the stars in Mexico; she’d make a nest in every land she’d come to rest in, brothers and lovers, breaking hearts when she departed in her search for warmer climes.

 Did Rosa find kissing so sweet because something inside her felt incomplete? Somewhere deep within, she started to hear chimes. Or perhaps a pitter-patter of tiny feet.  Tick tock, cried the clock. Her body rocked, ringing the alarm. Rosa heard a voice as old as time unfold within her.

 We are clocks the gods use to tell time. The pendulum swings and bells chime. Love can scar, and love can hurt. Love is buried in the dirt. In the dark and the dirt of the mind. In all we’ve left behind.

 Reality began to sting, for Rosa’s love life had been fling after fling; ‘Love will tear us apart’, she’d declare, stealing kisses from strangers in the dark. And now she needed a husband to father her child and tame her wild, she began to doubt whether she would find the kind of man she had in mind. He’d have a touch of the wild himself, but not so much that he’d run away; he’d need some feminine in him, to understand the rocky shores that lie beneath a woman’s skin, but not so shot with oestrogen that he would later decide he was gay.

 Riddled with doubt, Rosa took to sleeping about, but came no closer to locating una hermosa with the kind of sabrosa she desired.  Instead, she met boys who needed mothering; others whose idea of love involved suffocation or smothering; many men would turn their back on her, snoring seconds after they’d dived into her deepest seas and drowned.

 Time was running out.

 No longer prepared to craft a story without a stage, Rosa saw that it was time to cut the chord to her most precious dream, and shut the door to the time machine.

 And this is how time stopped.

 We are clocks the gods use to tell time. The pendulum swings and bells chime. Love can scar, and love can hurt. Love is buried in the dirt. In the dark and the dirt of the mind. In all we’ve left behind.

 It’s funny how some doors open when others close. With each passing year, Rosa’s broken heart began to mend.  And slowly, oh so slowly, he returned to the finger-licking she used to rock before she was stopped by the tock of the clock. Every day she undertook new adventures. Found time to paint, learnt Arabic and tango, celebrated scuba diving with papayas or a mango; juices trickled down her chin.

 In short, she found what she was looking for within.

 And en route, she learnt that society’s unvoiced sigh, which suggests that you can’t know life unless you give birth, is no less than a lie. We live as though we’re never going to die, and then we die having never really lived. But not Rosa. She was bolder.