Once upon a time I realise that it is happening now.

Not then.

Then, I am someone else. Today, I am myself. Tomorrow, I am someone else again. And so on, all happening now: yesterday, today, tomorrow. The same thing happens to other people. Anne is painting a cornfield using my palette of paints. George is running on the spot for exercise, while pretending he is me. Lesley is outside looking in through the window, amazed that the room is empty. The yellow paint runs out - cornfields are heavy on yellow paint. George sprains his ankle. His ankle is paining him. Painting his ankle. I convey the pain with false blood red paint. He cuts his ankle with my palette knife to make it real. Lesley's face is no longer in the window looking in. She is in the room massaging her ankle surprised it is covered in red paint, not blood. I am outside walking towards the cornfield. The cornfield is beautiful despite some of it being blue like the sky. I suddenly slip on an untidy plot or spot and break my ankle. But there is no pain. The pain's still inside the house. Three separate times of yesterday, today and tomorrow grow to a single focus, a single spot - and the focused time paints the pain with a colour not yet invented.

A pain colour.

Once upon a time I am George and Anne's baby, not now, not then, but forever. Painted for pain, covered in a colourless bodily substance running on the spot like a funnel of nothingness seeping into the once yellow ground, the cross-section of then, now and never.

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written yesterday in the random speed-writing exercise at the Third Thursday Writer's Group in Clacton.