When he moved to Arizona and set up home amongst the giant saguaros of the Sonoran Desert, Theobald Moon developed the habit of getting up early in the morning, peeing in a glass, and knocking it back in a few quick gulps while it was still warm and fresh. He felt it running sharply over the back of his throat, spiralling the length of his oesophagus, and flushing out the ducts and cavities of his small intestine like a jet of scouring fluid. He emitted any gases with a small and perfectly rounded burp. 

He had heard it said that people shrink when confined to small spaces and expand when let out in the wilds. Out in the vastness of the desert, with nothing between him and the horizon but the thin wands of ocotillo stranded in the motionless air like seaweed held up by the sea, there was certainly room to fill. Never one to ignore the slightest rumble or whine of his sizeable belly, Theobald indulged his every whim and fancy. He listened for the plaintive cries at night, scrambling out of bed at the first hint that somewhere, somehow, in the dark deep red caverns of his stomach, a hollow corner had not been adequately filled. He was a master of snack concoction, of putting together unlikely sandwiches at midnight. Sugary, salty, peppery, pickled. He matched and mismatched, let his imagination go. There was no one else to see, after all. 

That is not to say that he was without vanity. Discarding the tanktops and t-shirts and corduroys he’d brought in a peeling leather suitcase from England, he took to dressing in voluminous white drawstring trousers and shirts that gave him the appearance, despite his size, of something that could be wafted by the breeze. Rolled along like a ball of tumbleweed. Twenty-two stone and counting, he glided up and down the wooden steps of his mobile home as if he were royalty, balancing a crown on his head. 

The piece of land on which he settled was set back from the main road down a rutted dirt track bordered by mesquite trees and clumps of cholla cacti. Before him was the flat desert floor, the tall, stately stems of the saguaro cacti standing erect and motionless on its surface. At dawn the saguaros appeared to Theobald Moon to be facing east, patiently waiting for the first sharp blade of morning light to reach out from behind the house and slice their tops off like breakfast eggs, surprising them from their grey-green sleep and causing a band of thick golden yolk to slip extravagantly down their sides. But by early evening, without anyone noticing, they had swivelled round to face west, in order, perhaps, to watch the kaleidoscopic performance staged by the setting sun as it streaked the sky with yellows and oranges and fiery blood-reds from behind the uneven line of the mountains. 

After the initial hypothesising about why he had come and whether or not he was mad or just typically English, the locals thought of him only when they drove past in their battered pickups and happened to catch a glimpse of what looked like a cloud or the sail of a yacht drifting behind the tall mast of a saguaro. He remained in their minds simply an oddity, an overly large Englishman whose pale, almost hairless skin gleamed like a buttered bird plucked and trussed for the oven and then turned a juicy pink as soon as he exposed himself to the sun.