I watched the river of lights as the ghosts of my breakfast played over the dashboard and hummed along to the radio. That’s what my father called them: the ghosts of our breakfasts.

I called them farts, but then I’ve always called a spade a spade.

If there was one consistent complaint people have had about me it was that. The killing of the poetry in things as Carrie once put it. Only six hours ago we had danced, her feet on mine, so that our footprints only showed one dancer and half a waltz. Outside a storm pushed the trees around and choked the gutters. We danced whilst the radio played Viennese waltzes.

And if there is anything more holy than music in this world of never ending sadness, I have not found it yet. But I’m always looking.

I am a drinking man and a gambling man, but no big win or icy-cold beer ever beat dancing with a pretty woman into my heart. And Carrie is a beautiful woman. She can place a hand in my hand and it feels like I’m holding a wild animal, something I don’t want to let go of because I may never hold it again, like the first time you hear a joke.

I’m sitting in my car outside work and the evidence of our dance will probably still be there in the spilt flour. One set of footprints, mine, in my workplace, all over the floor. I’m the only one who works there with feet that big and I’m on a final warning.

I fell asleep here in my car and had a strange dream. I wrote down my thoughts when I woke up and now I want to send them to Carrie somehow but I know she’ll be asleep and other people’s dreams bore her. Carrie gave me a poem that she said she had written in her dreams. I read it over and over looking for some kind of meaning, but it only becomes more opaque like watermelons in the rain.

Offer your father

to the mouth of the cave,

walk through

the fields before us.

The reaching hearts of

science carry the animals

into the lake.

Its all in Denver:

the peoples collection.

So I go to eat. The restaurant was empty apart from one table of waiters and a table of risk analysts negotiating with the manager. They are all smoking. This morning I feel like a coffee and a club sandwich could save my life. Last night the storm blew so much fruit off the trees that the pavement outside is covered with half-crushed apples. The waiter wipes down the tables whilst eating an apple with his left hand. He takes large bites and it doesn’t last long. Between the bites he’s singing something to himself I don’t recognise. None of the fans are on and the vast space feels frightening. It is so hot in here that the packets of sugar in the ashtrays have melted into hard lumps, a few loose granules in the corners. After a shower the coffee before me is the single most perfect thing I could ever have. I am a customer.

I look out the window at the wide brown river. The trees that crowd along its bank dip their branches into the water. It looks like all the trees behind are jostling the front row, nearly forcing them into the water like winter swimmers at the edge of the ocean. Once I swam with napoleon fish, giant and blue. They swept across the coral grazing with their beaks, biting off chunks. I swam amongst them in the clouds of debris. They didn’t mind my fleshy presence. They were huge. It was like swimming with dinosaurs. I feel like that now, sat here waiting for Carrie.

In the bakery the bread will all be burnt by now. You can’t leave things in a hot oven for that long without something beginning to combust. If I were there I would hesitate before peeking inside, scared of the sight that awaits me. I’m never usually this careless. I have been late for work, half asleep, drunk even, but I never burn bread. The bread is the entire reason I am there. I may not own the business any more but they keep me on because no one else can make the bread like me. I have a secret ingredient. I carry it in my pocket so nobody can steal it from me. It’s precious, it’s why people queue around the block for my bread, and it is priceless. It keeps the bakery alive and me in my job.

Carrie told me she wrote her poem in a dream. She was dozing one morning, trying to stay asleep, trying to hang onto her dream when she decided to try and remember all of it. And that poem is what came to her. She told me she went over each line in her head, saying it repeatedly until it was committed to memory, and then she moved onto the next and the next until finally she could remember all of it. Then when she woke up she wrote it down on the pad that she keeps next to her bed. I love her but she can be a little woolly sometimes. Me too, I suppose.

I don’t think I’m going back to work. I have my secret ingredient and I have my car. I have Carrie, too.