Author S. K. Nicholas

Something about a stairwell. Frosted glass. The shops at the top of the road. The old people’s home and the porno mags we once found in the bushes that surrounded it. One day they were filled with earwigs, and the image of a naked woman hasn’t been the same for me ever since. All of those old people are now dead, as are the earwigs. The infant school we attended is no longer there, and many of the shops we would buy sweets from are gone. Knocked down. Obliterated. Some of the gang are dead. Most have kids. Nearly all of them now devoid of the magic they once held in abundance. I do my best to avoid them like I do my best to avoid everyone else because their doubt and nonbelievability in what should be believed above everything else is like poison to my childish heart. Fields of green we would play football on are now rows of houses that house alcoholics and rapists and the ghosts of family pets that died without ever knowing the meaning of love. Their bones are somewhere. Not sure where, but they’re in a place where the light of the sky never touches them. Closing my eyes, I see a spiral staircase and a clock on the wall. Nearby, an icecream truck plays its music that draws the local children who will rot their teeth on sweets and buy packets of stickers that come with a slice of gum. There’s a phonebooth a little ways down the block. We once called a sexline and asked how far you had to put your dick into a woman’s pussy for it to count as sex. At that age, the idea of having to go inside that thing was just too awful to imagine. In the porno mags, a woman’s breasts were the shit, but her thing just looked weird and alien, and we didn’t want anything to do with it. All those twenty pence coins we would spend trying to figure out the answer while the person on the other end of the line couldn’t understand our fears. They just didn’t know. The world has moved on. People have moved on. And yet we still hang around and waste time waiting for something better to happen. In the cold night air, I can smell doughnuts, and such a thing makes me smile. Lighting a smoke, I’m pulled forwards towards the sweet source down streets I don’t recognise and yet of which my younger self knew like the back of his hand.

A Journal for Damned Lovers Volumes 1 & 2 on Amazon.co.uk

A Journal for Damned Lovers Volumes 1 & 2 on Amazon.com