Josie Connor

There is a bucket in the colour of your choosing — let’s say red — to hold the rain for an empty day. Behind the bucket is a camellia bush in pale-pink bloom. Beyond the bush, to the north, a vista of silhouetted trees, fanned like peacock tails. At the end of the bucket is a pizza oven — hot! To the right of the pizza oven is a terracotta foal.

His name is Dixie. Grazing his front leg is a pile of beach stones, still wet with salt. Always close is a beeswax candle and its twin flame. The flame is melting a pound of butter, trickling its gold way towards a stealth heron, ash-grey plumage. The heron is facing south. A parrot is screeching, the white noise of a car radio. The birds and animals all get on.

In the foreground, by the wet stones, lies a bright book. On the cover is a middle-aged woman. She is wearing an emerald-green dress and stares off towards the east. She adorns a headscarf of caught stars and a pin of haloed saints. She holds a bittern with the silent boom. Near her ankle lies a miniature basket. It boasts a spotty quail’s egg and a sprig of rosemary.

A vacant snail’s shell — the feeling of a writing desk. To the far west of the basket, the book, the oven, is a sultry pile of discarded things; hose pipes, pumpkin skins, baby clothes, sodden-coffee table books, of which — despite doing the hard things every day — are too wrong, too wide, to fit in the bucket and carry on.