Some more attempts at chick-lit

[Picture of legs on the front cover of a book. The customer looks down at herself and sees legs; identifies with the book. The legs in the picture need not be upside-down, or photographed in a bookshop.]

Abstractionists have no hands, and type with a knot of prehensile hair that they tie at the neck.

"Never date an Abstractionist," they told Lucy.

Bob Langham out Dalgeddie way was married to an Abstractionist for thirty years. They make amusing but sarcastic lovers. In the end they found him in a banker's box, a few typed sheets of anecdote and fear. Lucy was only a paragraph. The lower-case Es were slightly misaligned.

Abstractionists live in Loster, and play the tuning fork. Have you seen the state of my forearms? They wobble like dessert.

They say they'll call, but they never do. I held the handset under the bathwater; nothing happened. With one foot on the dial I drew a red line round the barrel with a razor and squeezed the telephone till it was limp.

My bathroom is dark and full of steam. Nonetheless I scrubbed off the dark brown drips that were left when I let the water out and burned the scourer. They'll never call now. Why are my thighs so large? They are the size you would expect; nobody could object to their dimensions or texture, yet they are large for their size.

I must remember to buy more rice.

Tezza's boyfriend has something of the quality of the loud silences between programmes on the World Service; they say it's because of the whacking great compression you need so you can make out the words in Bora-Bora or Thule.

Tezza herself is the intake of breath before the announcer speaks on Radio Three, while I've had to get used to being the piiiiep sound on German radio that brackets the traffic report. Heard on medium wave, with a car radio on the M90 in Kinrossshire travelling towards Bridge of Earn.

Shizza recalls the creative dead air on the Moyles programme. Her ex' was more of an asterism that marks off sections of text - I can see why it didn't work. I have to do something about my fingernails; they're a disgrace.