Author S. K. Nicholas

In spirals of ancient silence, she is a star boundless against the exploding skies that still linger over our heads even though they died centuries before we were born. In some South-American country with no name, a bus driver’s sat at the wheel with a bullet lodged in his zygomatic arch. Blood pouring from his nose, a woman with rosary beads is doing her best to comfort him, yet he’s already making his journey to the great beyond. Eyes flickering and head turned to the roof of the vehicle, he raises his hands before slumping face-first into the steering wheel. Lighting a smoke, I sit down outside a coffee shop and eye up the girl at the next table. Admiring the black stockings that cling to her legs, the tips of my fingers tingle as blood drips from the bus and flows to the girl’s feet. She isn’t squeamish, though, and as she takes a sip from her cup, she deliberately dips her toes into the crimson stuff so it stains the soles of her shoes. Looking over at me, I close my eyes and see us fucking on the surface of Mercury with flowers shooting from her sex. Heat death and Chinese whispers. The touch of my hand as it creeps up her legs as millions of miles away the bus driver’s family bury his crumpled body in dirty earth. The killer’s just a kid; some loser who borrowed his brother’s gun. He didn’t mean for it to go off, but what’s done is done, and as my mouth presses against hers and our flesh dissolves to nothing, our souls evaporate and are free at last. Her name isn’t important, and neither is mine. We are children of a lesser god, mere islands floating in a sea of imagery and feeling that isn’t what it seems. Leaves blowing in the gutter and wind kicking up enough dust to blind those around us, she stares at me so intently as I picture us travelling to the event horizon of the nearest black hole and dancing in the arms of oblivion. She can sense the two of us are alike, and even though she fears me, she can’t help but come a little closer.