Drawing Rings Around the World, Onion Rings Around the World, Phone Rings Around the World

"Miss Ketterway, I'm here to tell you that you have been tested positive for the HIV virus."

"What? Oh no... oh... oh god..." her head fell.

"What are you talking about? Miss Ketterway, don't you get it? This is a cause for celebration! This is a breakthrough in your life! You have been liberated from the tedious bourgeois shackle that is HIV negativity! So many people on this earth envy you right now." Miss Grace Ketterway looked up at the doctor, confused.

"But... I thought... HIV? It removes your livelihood... deteriorates you body... marks you with a shaming social stigma... leaves you feeling alone in the world?"

"Psh," the doctor waved his hand dismissively, "that's what the lifestyle magazines and cleverly disguised metaphors in bubblegum pop songs want you to think. You've been made naïve, my girl." He turned her head lightly by the chin to look out of the hospital window, onto a beautiful, flowery meadow, on which a woman was giving birth unaided amongst a small group of uninterested sheep.

"Look at the world from here, Miss Ketterway. Your horizons have been broadened. The world is your highly-disease-susceptible oyster. Look at that lady," as he pointed the lady in question strained further and began to excrete all over the patch of grass she laid on, screaming. "She is one with nature. Just think, if you had been refused entry into the hospital, you could have been there too.

Grace noticed the entire ward was empty save for a caretaker laying on one of the beds, pumping morphine into his arm at an exorbitant rate and watching in awe as a vein in his arm began to swell. Suddenly, she was clasped tightly by the doctor.

"Embrace it, Miss Ketterway, embrace it! You must see how glorious life is with HIV positivity!" The doctor's pocket began beeping.

"Well, that's my shift," he handed her two suppositories. "Be sure to take these three times a day for three months. They're not necessary and probably won't do much more than fill your body with testosterone, but my bosses aren't really happy unless something is inserted rectally. Which incidentally is the basis of the overtime I'm about to undertake in the boss's office. Please stay in this bed until tomorrow morning so we can make a few check-ups and you'll be good to go. Well, be seeing you!" He realised that everything after 'testosterone' had been said while he was starting his car and driving off to the local store to pick up a few things, i.e. lube, condoms and some rather seductive groceries. Well, mostly tins of beans. Luckily for him, the only people that had heard it were his doting wife and two young sons who had been waiting for him.

Grace was full of unanswered questions. How could HIV positivity be a good thing? Why didn't the doctor explain anything? How was she supposed to take the same two suppositories three times a day for three months? Why was the caretaker beginning to froth orange at the mouth?

She looked out of the window at the woman, who was lying, pale, blood-encrusted and clearly dead as her baby cried and one of the sheep nibbled on the expelled placenta.

Yes, she decided.

This christmas had been a pretty good day so far.

The Plot (verb)-ens!

Bored, Grace walked out of the hospital in her pyjamas, completely uninterrupted despite the fact that she was still a patient. She wandered across town. She stopped off in a newsagent's to buy a tuna-sweetcorn sandwich and a pack of tarot cards she thought was a box of toothpicks, to remove all those delicious slivers of dolphin that always got caught in her teeth when she ate a tuna sandwich, so she could put them in a tin she kept with her at all times, hoping one day to be able to assemble an entire dolphin in case of emergencies. She skateboarded down a sloping road, her hospital PJs blowing all over the place. She eyed a fruit stall. At one point she got mixed up in a street group beatbox-off and won one of the guy's bandanas off them. All-in-all, it would have been a satisfying evening were it not for the narrative dictating that she remember she has HIV.

A man in a dishevelled suit approached her with a grin and shook her hand.

"Hello, madam. You look like the kind of woman who has HIV. Would you mind if we were to swap teeth?"

Where Grace would normally have been obliging, she was suddenly shaken and ran off home, bandanna and all.

"Mum, dad, various younger siblings I don't really want to list. I have AIDS." The result was as she had imagined. Her mother screamed, her father fell off his chair and the vague younger relations began crying loudly. "I also bought a puppy!" she said, releasing the 9lb bundle of joy she had hidden behind her back into the hallway. It seemed to have the desired effect as her father seemingly defied gravity to fall back up into his chair, her mother punched the air and her ambiguous brothers and/or sisters began sucking at the ground before their tears were soaked into the rug and lost forever. "That's brilliant dear, and a Yorkie too." beamed her mother, taking potshots out the window at passers-by who had heard her scream. "I've completely forgotten the first thing you said". Grace heaved a huge sigh of relief.

"So Grace, is it a pedigree?" asked her father from across the room, not altering his gaze as he flicked through a section on elk-baiting in the local paper.

"Well, actually dad it's a hybrid." Almost instantaneously her father flung the paper into the air and came crashing down on to the floor as if shot. "OH MY GOD YOU HAVE AIDS!"