A story of a clean woman; let's call her Moira.

Wiping, scrubbing, polishing
Taking away the essence of myself
Because a circular pattern of cleaning
Is taken over by the dirt on the shelf

I don't understand why it would be me. I've always kept so clean; there's none keeps a cleaner house than me. I don't know why you wouldn't keep as clean a house as me though, to be fair. Mrs Adams, at number forty-five, with ten kids (by two different men) comes round and asks me how I keep it so spotless. Well, she could keep it spotless too. She chooses not to. Life is all about choice; it makes you what you are. You choose to divert energy into lots of little crevices and pots; some for the kids, some for your man, some for your part time job in Sainsburys watching the people you can't ever wish to be, some to dodging the rent man on bad days, some on vegetating in front of the telly, some on a piece of plastic that promises slimmer hips and the world at your feet within twenty days, none in returning the piece of junk when it's only ever used as a washing draper. And in doing all that, putting all your force into all of those crannies, it seeps slowly away and leaves you with a mouldering house and steely children that it can't contain.

I devote all of mine to cleaning. Cleaning is an overarching premise that you can apply to life. I clean my house and I clean myself, I clean away all the processed junk, no clutter, nothing hanging onto my frame, no drops of dust besmirching the perfect driven white raked reputation of my life. Yet, now I find that something has crept in and will soon be devouring my clean body from the inside out.

I first decided I wanted to clean when I was young. My parents used to notice I lined up my dolls and gave them all the same hairstyle, since I could walk almost. Because I liked things to be good, to be in their place. I never wanted anything out of line, out of the border I could categorise it into. As I got older, I was never organised but always neat. My Mother worried I didn't seem to want friends, or to go out. All I wanted was to make our house neat. But I could never make it neat enough; the butter yellow curtains and the plush blue sofa all seemed too much, too rich and bright and contrasting for clean lines. Whenever I did manage to clean them, there would always be a ruffle I'd missed or something I couldn't quite smooth. So I focused on my own room, I kept that perfectly perfect. And I built up my own company, I made that successful. I started with moving myself away from the grime to where I live now. It is small and compact, like me, and it is clean.

I wouldn't mind, but where will the white be in the world then?Nobody else cleans like I do. Nobody will be able to appreciate the beauty of minimalism. Eclectic pieces of rubbish will take over, dividing and sub dividing and bringing with them all the smut and debris of their past. Coated in a slowly thickening layer of calcifying grey. Like my body is doing now, inside. Disgusting. But then again, it always was going to be. There is always something to clean because dirt is always trying to take over. The cleaner it is to start with, the easier it is to mess up and catastrophise. It's that way with me. The dirt is slowly unwrapping my shrink wrapped surfaces and crusting around my edges until I will be a white plastic fragment, a fossil incarcerated.