Leaping into the air, I thrashed my tail while taking a bite out of the sky. Chewing a mouthful of stars, the fox followed my lead, propelling himself upwards. Yelping as his feet left the ice, he plunged his teeth into the moon as if it were made of cheese and gulped it down before he touched the ground. When he landed, I prepared to go again, and upon steadying my paws, jumped as high as I could so that the hands of the angels lifted me up, up and away. Yelping frantically, the fox jumped after me. Clutching my tail in his mouth, he spun himself around, and together we floated over the frozen lake. And just in time, for a second or so later the cracks in its surface began to zigzag and widen, and the ice soon broke apart revealing the lulling water beneath. Glistening like oil, it swallowed the light of the stars and hummed as if stirring from a deep sleep. It was the womb of mother nature, and although I was frightened of falling, there was a part of me that wanted to plunge into the void and swim with that which for all my life had remained unseen. Sensing my desire, the fox let out a muffled cry. Looking down, I saw him spinning his tail with his eyes locked onto mine with my own tail gripped firmly between his teeth. In the cold night air, I could see the way his whiskers twinkled, and how he snorted two streams of mist through the nostrils of his long, twitching nose. Feeling the celestial hands of the heavenly ones guiding us along, I looked back up at the moon and saw not the fox’s teeth marks but the silhouette of a flock of birds, and although they were distant and barely visible to my beady eyes, I could sense one of them was X. She was so near, and yet the beat of her heart was far from my grasp. Calling to her, I willed myself forward, trying with all I had to let her know she was the light I called home.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US