The Pocket Chronicles

In C's left pocket, there lives a carrot.One morning the pocket contained a phone and a set of keys. The next morning, it also contained a carrot. This was not planned. It was not, strictly speaking, explicable. It was, however, permanent. Carrot becomes sentient within the hour. He establishes furniture, founds a national holiday, and commissions a shoulder platform through three rounds of formal correspondence, which he considers the minimum acceptable basis for any structural decision. He takes his duties as pocket steward with a seriousness that borders on the heroic and sees no reason to apologise for this. He also meets E. C and E are soulmates in the oldest, most inconvenient sense: completely certain of each other, temporarily on the wrong side of impossible. E is not physically in the pocket. But some essential part of her has settled through the seam. Warmth. Laughter. The particular quality of someone whose presence, even at a distance, makes everything more itself. So the three of them look after each other. Carrot and E look after C: keeping the pocket warm on the days he most needs it, doing their considerable best to ensure that a man carrying the ache of missing someone he has not lost is never, at least in his left pocket, carrying it alone. And C looks after them in return. Without admitting it. Through the precise rightness of every object he has ever sourced, and the way his hand sometimes comes into the pocket not looking for anything at all. Just resting there. Patient and present and entirely his. The Pocket Chronicles is a love story about absence and small devotions, about what it means to carry someone with you when you cannot, yet, bring them home. About being cared for so precisely, so quietly, so completely, that you grow. It is also, formally, about a carrot. 'Four corners is civilisation. Three corners is camping.'