AT COSTCO YOU SIT AT A TABLE with your knackwurst and as long as you can produce a membership card no one accuses you of loitering, even if you sit writing to your mother all day.

I always rummage in the Lost and Found to see if anyone has left something I can use. Last September I found a scarf woven in the Scottish borders. So far no one has left me an umbrella.

This place, dear Madam, I write as a woman hollers into her phone near a pyramid of paper towels: “Arnold! Where’d you disappear to?”

This place from which I write to you now is in need of attack by French fire-ships: I know you feared those more than any other weaponry at my Enemy’s disposal, but I thrilled to their conflagration. It was so easy to quench them that I deliberately let them float toward us longer than necessary…

“I’m over here by the Bounty. Did you get Jasper’s food?”

I know my mother does not want to hear how the approach of Montcalm’s fire-ships thrilled me at night on the Saint Lawrence. One flame-lick to our vessel and molten oakum would rain fire on my hair. I loved how the fire-ships lit the embankments, unleashing smoke and turpentine from the spruce overhang. The incense filled me with lustful purpose.

“No! I read that one has ground-up tumours in it. Get the Kirkland.”

I try not to write to my mother about mortal danger, nor erotic thrill, nor my days of meaninglessness and despair. How many letters have I begun to her, only to crumple and fling them in the fire?

This place is crying out for a conflagration now….

Around my Costco table, which has been bolted to the floor, the walking dead appear. They move slowly, heavily, and have lost all animation or verve. Are they French? English? Was it for them my blood poured out of three ragged holes?

Where is the splendour I envisioned?

Mother, remember when I said I believed there would grow a people here, out of our own little spot in England, to fill this space and become a vast Empire, the seat of power and learning?

The man named Arnold rejoins his vocal woman. Together they wheel an enormous cart. It holds dog food, chocolate, marshmallows, bottles of Pepsi and crates of electronic equipment, a fifty-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes and eighteen loaves of sliced bread in cellophane. It holds fatty meat ground up and crammed behind film bulging over foam trays. The meat glitters under the lights in this echo chamber of disparate and towering imports.