Pocket

You keep me in your pocket. For good luck I expect. Whenever trouble is in the air, looms around a corner with you in its sights, your hand closes tightly around me, your sweat and heat transferred as you take heart in my cool dry smoothness, my flinty resolve.

I take these clammy wrappings well, without a fuss.

You found me by the sea, pocketing me as though I'd been waiting for you to come along the whole time, but to be honest my mind was on other things.

My smoothness is born of the sea, she would caress me and smooth my rough edges, calm me with her deft touch. Now I sit in your pocket and am similarly rolled, similarly clenched. It's not as pleasant, I must admit, but it's nice to be loved.

Once a week I sit in a small box, thin card and smelling of new shoes, resting on crumpled white tissue paper, while your mother washes your trousers, my home.

I miss you.

***

I keep you in my pocket - for good luck. I found you on our last family visit to Brighton, when Dad was still here. I picked you up to skim you across the glass sea, so smooth I imagined it a mirror the sky had breathed upon and polished with a cuff.

My arm was back and I was ready to send you across its face, hoping for at least six bounces before you would have dipped beneath its surface, lost forever. But something stopped me - a strange sense that I would be casting off a piece of myself if I let you go. Mum called and I turned. She was waving for me to come up and join her, so we could leave. I slipped you in my pocket and I have kept you there ever since.

I get so hot sometimes. When the teacher calls on me my ears are aflame, when those boys from the estate block my path home the fire shoots up my throat to my face, bringing with it volcanic bile from my constricting stomach.

You're the only thing that can bring that heat down. Preternaturally cool - I learnt that word last week. It means you're cooler than you should be, that there's something strange in your powers.

I've never shown you to anybody, I think that's part of how you work. You have to stay mine and only mine, nobody else can know that you're here or it won't happen anymore. You won't be so cool and I will get hotter and hotter until I burn to a crisp, my ashes scattered across this godforsaken town.