My name is Ellis Lanier. I am a twenty-nine year old gentleman and resident of the Tower Hamlets borough of London. Every day at five o’clock a.m., I wake up and take a walk from my flat down Durham Street to Bethnal Green Road. I then turn left, and set off for Victoria Park Square, which isn’t so much a park as it is just a grouping of old rusted warehouses left behind from the days when the whole East End was part of the Port of London.

     I make sure to stop off along the way to say a good morning to Eddie and Laura over on Peel Grove and Patriot. They are due for a second child in the summer and their first begins school in the fall. I am wearing the same green parka I wear every day, the one that I think radiates just right in the foggy, gray ambience of a London morning’s light, and one of this pair always has to have a go at me over it. It is Laura’s turn.

     “You ever think about shopping for new clothes, Ellis?” Laura asks. “You certainly do look awful in that same rubbish every day.”

     I grin at Eddie, only because I am too afraid to slap the Aunt Sally across her face and tell her husband forthright: “good selection with that beast, chap. But I like what I’m wearing fine and don’t care for sodding jokes.” I wave to Sam—that’s their firstborn, a good young man—and I’m off again.

     At Victoria, I spend an hour staring at the longer uncut grass shaking in the cold November breeze, and I try to decipher shapes and figures in the disorder. I’ve done this since I was eight, and I do it with everything: varying grain on wooden tables, juxtaposed patterns of shapes and colours on furniture, static on the tele—whatever remains for whatever reason still uneven and imperfect despite the supposed advances all our shallow technological gods have granted us. It remains the only way I can find beauty in those imitations of nature.

     I am standing and watching the moon die on the horizon when she steps up beside me and tilts her head like mine, spying for what I had been looking so intently at. When I turn to look at her, brilliant sunlight pours down from behind me over every delicate curve of her face. If Helen had ever lived, her beauty must have been bathed in this same sunlight, for I have never seen a wonder so simultaneously of humanity and of nature. The brown trunks of the plane trees surrounding us lost their depth as it was removed and reapplied to the dark flecks in the moist corners of her gorgeous, oval eyes; I could hear the dulled red paint chained beneath neglected overgrowth on the sides of the warehouses seem to cry out as its glory was restored on the soft pink tissue of her lips; all colours departed from dying flowers to be reborn in the faint red blush of trapped heat beneath her cheeks. She absorbed her environment, and every part of it complimented her.

     “The moon?” She wonders aloud, and taps her bottom lip. Her eyebrows are raised in marked curiosity and she looks rather small and impish. I recall my favorite Audrey Hepburn films and immediately recognise her in this woman. I am certain she died on the same day this chosen vessel of transmigration was conceived. “Why are you looking at the moon as if it will not be in that same spot at this same moment tomorrow?”

     I think for a moment, and want to face the moon so that I might rightly illustrate my defence of it, but I cannot bring myself to turn my eyes from the Audrey redux.

     “The moon dies every morning, but that makes the tragedy of its temporality all the more lovely. To move in such cosmic harmony with time . . . awakening every night and expiring with every dawn . . . I think it only right to pay something so beautiful the attention its passing deserves.”

     She places one hand over her mouth and the muffled bells of her laughter ring out over our island, separate and distant from the conscious world.

     I am started by the perfection of this thing, which manages even to be in so faulted a world. I breathe in deeply and cool. I am finding solace in the certainty that our moment will soon be gone, that this end cannot be helped. It will leave after it only its vague penumbra for the stragglers, merely there to cast the world in ghostly illumination; to curse it with a bitter shadow of its true beauty—with cold malice manifesting in those whose eyes witnessed its reality a longing that fades only with memory, that haunts to the grave all souls it leaves behind.



Victoria Park Square, by Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.