A place to eat where the words ‘fresh food prepared on the premises’ seemed more like a warning than any kind of advertisment or inducement to consume. Indeed as a statement it only seemed to flag the need for more detailed enquiries, suggesting questions like – where exactly on the premises was the food allegedly prepared, by whom and when?

 *

A very strong new story from M John Harrison here at 1001 Nites Cast from the great prompt "not a hint of irony".  Maybe it's my jetlag but this one seems more melancholic than the others Mike's done there. Perhaps it's all in the narrator's distance from events, and in his articulation of a world in which certain possibilities cannot or should not, or can no longer be explored.

 For no good reason (I think) the story brought to mind these lines which I'd cut and pasted from an online guide to Beijing, a few of years ago.

 After the destruction of all the capital's dogs in 1950, it was the turn of sparrows in 1956. A measure designed to preserve grain, its only effect was to lead to an increase in the insect population. To combat this, all the grass was pulled up, which in turn led to dust storms in the windy winter months.

I'm writing again for the 1001 project on Friday - I have the feeling its going to be a strange one since because of timezones I'm getting the prompt first thing in the morning and I have to have it written by noon.  

In the walkway down to the plane, the guy behind us says:

"Clinton won't be elected. She has such high negatives". 

There's a collection of white plastic garden furniture stood beside the pool in the hotel basement. Six chairs, a couple of loungers, a trio of small tables (maybe footstools, its hard to say). On one of these, in any case, set at an angle like the earth titled on its axis, is a green apple, from which several bits have been taken. A man is swimming with his daughter, some blokes come and go from the steam room. Nothing happens.

Later a woman wearing some kind of semi-uniform (in the general area of nurse/dental hygenist/pharmacist), comes out from the health-spa reception and dons a pair of the white latex 'Inspection Gloves' from the box that's lain on the floor near the entrance. She walks over to the small table, picks up the apple in her gloved hand, and takes it - held at a sceptical distance from her body - back out towards reception for disposal I guess, or some kind of forensic analysis.

On that day and in the days to come, when a boy was going to die, he would first stop talking. His throat would be too dry and to speak required too much energy. Then his eyes would sink deeper, circled in ever darker shadows. He would no longer answer to his own name. His walk would slow, his feet shuffling, and he would be among the boys who would rest longer. Eventually a dying boy would find a tree, and he would sit against the tree and fall asleep. When his head touched the tree, the life in him would fall away and his flesh would return to the earth.

The narrator of Dave Eggers' What Is the What circles the subject of death concentrically - recounting terror, outrage and anger by turns, as he both fears for his own life and watches his Sudanese Lost Boy compatriots die in an endless variety of awful, sudden or slow, often shocking ways; by slaughter at the hands of Arab horsemen, attack by predators, aeroplanes, disease, infection and starvation. Mainly though he's resigned to the fact that he can't predict which of his companions will survive the terrible journey, cannot know for sure if he himself will make it through. Obsessed with this question Achak tries for while to use a friend, another lost boy walking beside him, as a kind of index of his own health.
In the mirror of William K, I did not look well that day. My cheeks were sunken, my eyes ringed in blue. My tongue was white, my hipbones were visible through my shorts...

Very often through the book (which I wrote about already here) Eggers returns to the topic of the flimsy separation between life and death, puzzling at the all-too-easily passed border between survival and extinction, existence and disappearance. Its a distinction that he sees can exist even in life itself, when at another comical and chilling point in the book he meets a solitary adult living alone in the jungle, hiding from everyone. The un-named adult gives him food, and jabbers continuously as he eats, lecturing Achak:

I don't live anywhere, and you should learn from this. Why do you think I am alive, boy? I'm alive because no one knows I'm here. I live because no one knows I'm here. I live because I do not exist.