Zoe Cummins

The coy nature of these phrases give form to confession, contracted for trade.

Shorthand snaps for more detailed expressions, elegantly made than exchanged.

We share, walks and books and bed, and I withhold, entire family histories.

I think of my sister, crouched under her blanket at the window in hospital, in crumpled silhouette.

You work in logistics, labelling and shipping masses of widgets across the world.

You're in charge of systems designed to manage large volumes of critical data, high levels of transactions, security, complex systems.

Big machines talk to big machines.

So this is just for the top of the programme.

Would you mind, could you just introduce Marconi for me?

With all genius, there's in it rooted a little madness?

No?

He became convinced that sound never dies.

Sound, it was thought, just becomes too quiet for our human ears to detect.

It decays.

I remember an old Vedic mantra that a presenter whispered into my ear once.

The world is sound.

We were at a drinks night out and it almost worked until I remembered his wife and three children.

His middle-aged breath decayed on my cheek and I found a new drinking buddy for the night.

Who could take a census of the sounds that have sounded?

Even a fixed mind would find too many footsteps marching, hands clapping, thighs slapping, knees knocking, P's and Q's dropping.