Status Updates From Isdal

“This is what she was after: a big light-eating slice of butternut squash for a mandible. When people offer you a slice of the action the action is surely squash-coloured”

“There was once a tree performing a reverse kerb stomp in a suburb. Undoing years of industry tarmac and gravel. Made you think about who was there
first. Updigging it was like excising a two-hander tumour wrapped around a spinal cord. Made you wonder if it was worth the effort.”

“He'll bet his life to make this jaw laugh like a castanet! No but really, he doesn't mean to be disrespectful. He says sorry to the ceiling…she'll be under earth with her skull jawless in its lower half, flaccid like a foxglove or a Jacobean. Even like this, in its acid-dried state, lithic as cuttlebone, you can imagine the wetness of her mouth. A pale mist
coating her tongue in case someone inserted a fist.”

“He'll risk his life to get up on a chair to reach this shelf. He retrieves a bag of saved jaws. We only keep the unclaimed jaws, he says. A claimed jaw's worthless. DON'T THROW AWAY MEDIEVAL SKULL
a label says. There's a noise like a mousetrap, or opposable thumbs in a sack, tap dancing.“

“The glacé cherries of the female host's cheeks swell and he watches the cerulean glass of her eyes.”

“Did you know that 50% of murdered women are murdered…by their partners, or ex-partners? ((and yet)) (The prospect of a woman dying single is a greater disheartener than this fact, though.) When a woman is killed the police should talk to the lovers, he says.”

“The colours of the houses by the port. Red from ochre and animal oil (like her throat after carbon monoxide choked her). Yellow from ochre and liver oil and white from zinc (like a coffin- the remains therein just beginning to soften).”