Clouds cook up trouble in the sweaty kitchen of late afternoon, swearing under their grey breath, and I’m sizzling in my skin like a prisoner’s last meal. Still, there’s work to be done, and I lean my ladder against the air and climb into nothing with my posters and paste. It’s a scene from a silent movie, as seen through an opaque lens: a small man at the wild frontier, gumming hand-coloured flats into a one-horse town. Piano music rises like flies, time flies in a montage of births and deaths, and I’m a statue in the centre of a dusty square, with my wife, my children, and all their friends and lovers gathered around the base of the ladder that by now has seen better days. Someone—a son, or a daughter, or a passing neighbour of forty or fifty years—lifts me down, as if I’m an heirloom crafted from antique glass. Look, they say, and the clouds are steaming, cars full of serious faces criss-cross the glittering city, and the evening air between each loving palm is crackling with hot fat and ozone.

Bio: Oz Hardwick