King’s neighbourhood is a terrible place. Everything stinks. Even the birds produce such a foul odour that most people proclaim them already dead – flying rotten and spreading their sun-marinated scent around our streets. The dogs don’t mind. When I go to pick up the eggs, I see many throwing their bleeding necks against their rusted chains, attempting to break free and follow the smell. Their eyes are full of blood. At night, you can see them glittering like red stars in their kennels.

In the streets, history remembers itself. Every so often, when I go outside to buy eggs, I pass through furious mobs of revolutionaries, guillotined heads of emperors rolling like the wheels of drunken men’s bikes, or even three old believers sitting by a table and playing cards. Right now, I can see Napoleon tapping an impatient finger on a wooden war table. Blood’s pouring out from his nose and dancing on the boiling pavement. 

‘Alley Austerlitz,’ I read the street sign out loud, as I cross the road into another street. There’s a man there, with a single black tooth poking out from under his lip like a rotting finger. He’s sitting in the gutter and buried under three trench coats, with a long, woollen hat which lolls down onto his knees. As I approach him, he takes a blanket from beside him and wraps himself tight. 

By the way, the weather today is scorching, almost forty degrees. When I woke up, I heard the shriek of my neighbour’s rooster suddenly grow silent, half-finished in the sun.

‘I understand,’ I opened my window to tell him, for I woke up in a pool of sweat. But when I searched for him, he was already dead. My neighbour crouched over his colourful body and grinned.

‘Such are the advantages of the sun, lady,’ he told me, almost dancing. ‘The flesh will smoke well in the sun, oh yes, yes.’

‘I am meditating,’ explains the wrapped man sitting in the gutter. He’s sweated out so much liquid that the clothes he wrapped himself in are already soaked. His droplets fall right into the drain, tingling ever so often like a pack of wind chimes. 

‘Scurry along young girl, leave me to it, I am trying to ascend to the seventh circle of heaven, and if I see your face once more I will not be able to complete mine pilgrimage of eternal holiness.’

‘Don’t the cars smoking their way around distract you?’

‘Piss off!’ he screams.

Most of the houses in King’s are in horrible shape. But the people that live in them aren’t really to blame. They only have a few nails and wooden boards to patch them up with, and the builders claim that everything is fine and no work is needed, despite the obvious fact that every single roof in King’s has a leak.

Years ago I knew a man who lived wholly underwater, simply because his roof was so ruined that it leaked water even when there was no rain outside. He spent his days swimming and laughing and relaxing on top of a huge, blow-up plastic crocodile. The people, of course, will never admit the truth. You can’t blame them. If you ask anyone about their home they will insist on its glory.

‘Why? Because I live in a shit hole,’ a bearded, drunk man told me once. ‘I think they come in from the sky, because I’ve drilled small holes all around my floor, and hooked them up to a device I bought from Thunderbloom that drips mercury. It scorched them all to death. There’s no other option but through the windows now…’

‘There’s worms in my house,’ he told me moments before I asked him why.

But now I’m on Athens Street and I hear a bike ringing ahead of me. A woman with long hair puffs heavily, forcing the pedals onwards. Years ago, my mother told me she was a witch, but she looks mostly normal now. Her nose is crooked, there are many plastic rings on her fingers, and she wears a tight latex dress with pink knee-high boots.

‘Hello Mrs. Rotterbread,’ I call out. 

‘What are you doing in such heat?’ She screams and parks her bike before me. I can see that her handles are covered in hand cream. ‘Do you want to get a stroke? Do you want to become apoplectic? Do you want to die?’

‘But you’re in the heat too.’

‘Listen here, you have to watch out. There’s a pack of cats running loose down at the crossroad, those demons almost scratched out my eyes. One pierced my tire while another jumped onto my hair and began to pull on it with such force that I cried. When I threw him off, I noticed a disgusting little man sitting in his window and taking photographs of everything, to do god knows what with them, so you have to take a different path. And – now listen to me, girl, this part’s important – if you’re going over to Mr. Thunderbloom, then don’t. I swear the man’s placed a sigil into my eggs. I’m cursed now. Only god knows what on earth he’s cursed me with. Look, look at this.’ She stuffed a terribly wrinkled paper into my face.

‘Do you see? Do you see? He’s a madman I’m telling you,’ and she jumped onto her bike and rode away so quickly that even the meditating man couldn’t tell her to leave him alone.

As I reached Mr. Thunderbloom, I noticed that there was already a heavy crowd gathered before him. Coins glittered in their sweaty hands, and three bald, naked men danced around in the crowd, hopping from one tip-toe to the other. I heard them singing about new soap.

As I crossed the street to reach the little field where Mr. Thunderbloom always sets up his travelling shop, I noticed that the whole road was dug up and surrounded by construction tape. On big, red signs, angry words looked and yelled at me with white letters to keep out.

The streets in King’s are always dug up. I have no idea when the construction will end, but it feels alive, bouncing and prancing from road to road. It’s funny because in the end, nothing ever seems different. It always looks the same.

‘There is bones under the street,’ a man in a high-vis jacket and an archaeologist’s hat tells me, grinning, resting his chin on his hands, which are resting on his standing shovel. ‘We’re looking for bones.’

‘Hello, Mr. Thunderbloom!’ I say as I advance to the front of the queue. His whole car trunk, which he attaches to his bike as he travels the merchant routes, lies open before me. There is everything. Plastic figurines, old books printed yesterday, the ashes of famous people to set by your nightstand.

‘That’s such a strange thing. I always bought my eggs here,’ I replied.

‘Well, I can’t help you, miss. We never sold any eggs.’