The brandy burns and turns in her stomach, and as the snow swirls and curls around the weathered trunks of the watchful trees, the animals moved in circles leaving tracks that were soon covered by another layer of soft snow. It’s as if the belly of the sky had been sliced wide-open and the world was readying itself for the coming of a new age, and the appearance of the animals was a sign that life as they knew it would never again be the same. Or perhaps they had sensed she had been in a moment of need and so had come to show her that she was still the one that danced within their animal dreams. Swallowing the rest of her cup, she grimaced then grinned before poking him in the ribs causing him to yelp out in mock pain. Fetching his pack of smokes, she lit one for her and then one for him, and as she placed it in his mouth, he inhaled before blowing smoke from his nostrils that was sucked out the window where it vanished the same as the mist of their semi-desperate breaths. The animals could now hardly be seen. Their cries were still heard, but with every passing minute, they dissolved into the sparse and brilliant whiteness that stretched from the ground up to the heavens. Flicking ash into her empty cup, she buried herself in his embrace and together they looked out at the world that now resembled the static of an old TV screen. She remembered reading something once that the static on those TV’s was leftover from the creation of the universe. It made sense. They were all leftovers from that time. Children of the greatest fuck in the history of everything, and now here they were, watching the fallout of that fuck, billions upon billions of years later. It was a beautiful thing. One that left them content to sit in silence, warm in each other’s arms as the milk of wonder before them swirled like the arms of the Milky Way that in turn spun in the arms of its eternal mother, slowly so slowly as time ticked-tocked away.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US