She dissolves in the steam. Her bones, they be clean so clean, and when she touch them, she get this finger of white heat at the base of her spine that sets her teeth on edge. Beneath the water, worlds come and go. Lovers flow and swirl down the plughole, and when she scrub her skin, the birds come down from the sky and sit upon the ledge of the window. They drop juicy worms from their beaks as a sign of their love, and then they watch as she glows in the steam. She be ripe. She be sweet. The birds dance on their little feet, and as the worms wriggle towards her, next door’s cat sneaks in through the open window in the kitchen, and as it makes its way up the stairs, here come the rabbits and foxes and the rain dogs all itchy for a glimpse of the one they call mother. As they creep and creep, the butterflies sweep and swoop through the air, and when they land upon the toothbrushes stood in a pot upon the basin, they sing their music, and she hears because she’s like that, you see. When the rabbits and foxes join, they sit there with next door’s cat, watching her as she glows, and although she’s got her eyes shut, she knows, she knows for she can feel them in her melting bones. Sunlight pours. It hits the mirror and shines upon her, and in the clouds, she passes over towns and cities and nobody knows, nobody knows but the animals as they follow her to a place without logic or time. Time, only those without dreams need time. They fill their lives with rules and regulations, jobs and money and other such endeavours, but like the animals, she’s no need for them at all, cause she got the magic. She got the soul. Letting out a sigh that drifts to the faraway oceans, she reaches out her arms to the ceiling, and the butterflies, they come and land on the porcelain next to her head, and taking it as a sign, next door’s cat jumps up onto the basin and looks at the one it so often hears singing in the early hours of the morning, and as its whiskers vibrate with joy, the moment fizzes and kisses like soda bubbles on the nose of a grinning, giddy kid.

A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon.co.uk

A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon.com