what the birthday party did to matter

25 May 2026

popped balloons with drawn on faces shrunken into the crinkled crevises of primary coloured latex.

mushy half suckled party rings - their powdered sugar flakes marrying the fibres of a matted blue carpet.

smushed wet cake bleeding into the synthetic dye of mascot laden napkins. a particularly big piece lays decimated under the pronged foot of a plastic chair. a smiling sweet face is ripped right through, but icing dances up the leg.

a plastic pink bracelet - its beads fumbled onto stretched out string - whose wrist is painfully missed. it lays expectantly around a home of new friends - a crumbling group of half eaten crisps. their oils coat its beads with a hopeful salted shine.

a soggy paper plate enveloped in streamers. a daintily chewed fruit shoot dribbles vacantly into the core of its cardboard. a placid pulp with long gone purpose, but with a distant memory of ham sandwiches.

a sticky residue cakes the lining of stale air. there is a stillness which still remembers the noise once bounced around it.

a purple clacky hairclip - a bulbous brown bear pressed half hazardously into a thick globule of acrylic glue on its tip. the bears painted face is half scratched off, but ever so faintly, if held up to the sun, you can still see a translucent smile.