by Amy Child

The Milkman 

There hasn’t been a morning since the milkmen left. Since they migrated south on wings that sound like windchimes and took their bottles with them. I like to imagine that somewhere out there, there’s an island of milkmen. That when airplanes fly over, they just see white hats and gleaming white bonnets. I like to pray that I won’t walk into a museum in twenty years’ time and see a milkman in his own glass bottle alongside the likes of the dodo and the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. I hope they never find archaeological proof of the milkman, never dig up bones, never try to imagine how he might once have looked. I want to say to my kids: you have Father Christmas, yes, but I had the milkman. Milk didn’t come from cows in those days. It came from the moon.