What would happen if you took a rose, plucked out all its petals and tossed them into the air, just as a gentle breeze blew by and carried them away? Would a single petal land on a gorse bush somewhere? A tiny pink island in a sea of prickly green and vibrant yellow! Would it feel at home? Or stranded? Will the gorse flowers accept this flat petal? Or forever comment on the lack of neck and the lack of mouth and the lack of lip? A 2-D creature lost in a 3-D world! Unable to leave because there’s nowhere to leave to. Unable to stay because there’s nothing to stay for.

And what about all its brothers and sisters? The other petals. Would they land on a shallow puddle to be ground into the dirty water and soil beneath by the heels of children’s Wellington boots as they hurried to school? Already late as an overturned strawberry van caused a mighty traffic jam that morning, scattering several tonnes of strawberries across the Finchley Road. Rain and squashed strawberries causing many cars to skid uncontrollably and collide. All that squashed red fruit creating a massive tailback. A two-mile long jam in a river of strawberry jam!

Or may be one would float away so far and land in someone’s noodle soup as they sat eating outside in a Hong Kong street market. Totally unaware of the tiny trace of unintended aroma that had drifted in uninvited. An illegal alien. An illegal alien meeting its sudden death. Instantly killed. Instantly consumed.

Or it could be that they would all just float into the neighbours’ garden. One or two toying saucily with Brenda’s bluebells, some mingling with the apple blossoms, and some just landing between the cabbage patches to be eaten by confused slugs. Or just decompose. Decay. Disappear.

What would happen if you tossed me into the air? Would you need to pluck me first? Would my eyeballs drift away with the ocean currents to be picked up by children collecting crabs in Madagascar? Would they explode them on hot stones? Just for fun. Or smash them onto the ground to see all the liquid run out? Or perhaps they would never get there. Instead be swallowed up by sharks off the coast of South Africa. And what about the rest of my body? Bloated and swollen. Would cleaner wrasses still be interested in a dead woman’s teeth? Would barnacles attach to my breasts? And manta rays take fragments of my fraying flesh? Would my discarded skeleton then fall to the bottom and form the foundations of a new coral colony? Which later grew to be a reef. Would they call it the Shaquilla Reef or would it take on the name of the nearest country or the nearest seashore town? Or may be my body would be nothing new. Just another ghost in a reef full of ghosts!



---Jib, 7.55am, Tue 04 Sept 01, sat on my hotel bed in Taihuay, Wutaishan, China. Narrator: Shaquilla. From: ‘Shaquilla’s Papers’