Picking up a packet of blueberry muffins and tucking it under my arm, I search the next aisle and find a box of toffee that reminds me of my childhood. It has a picture of a lighthouse on it and is adorned with a plethora of creamy colours that speak to my soul of an age of innocence I’ve not experienced for many years. Slyly opening the plastic packaging that surrounds it, I lift the lid of the box and take a sniff. The scents that dance upon the tip of my nose reach inside of me before exploding. When they do, such is the pleasure they bring, they make all of my fingers and toes tingle. They also give me a boner, one that drains the blood from my brain leaving me lightheaded. Struggling to contain myself, I stumble backwards as if intoxicated. For a second, it feels as if I’m high, and my vision blurs as if I’m seeing life through a new lens. It’s like I’m either ten miles high, or ten miles deep. I’d go with ten miles deep; deep inside the mystery of Meeko even though she presents herself to me as clearly as a sheet of blank paper. There’s more to her than meets the eye, and the scent of this toffee dangles before me a taste of the endless possibilities of where her body may lead.

“May I help you?”

I hear the girl’s voice, and yet she’s so far away.

“Sir?”

Meeko is the truth inside the lie—the way all great works of art should be.

“Do you need to sit down?”

She’s human the same as me; born of flesh and bone from a mother and father like any other, yet there’s something else. The more I lose myself in the idea of what she is, the more intoxicating the scent becomes, and the more intoxicating the scent, the more my head unravels until my legs go from beneath me and I collapse into a heap on the floor. As I do, I manage to pull a shelf of bread down, and I’m soon covered by an assortment of loaves in all shapes and sizes, not to mention several packets of golden waffles as golden as a beach you’d expect to find in paradise.

“Oh dear. Are you hurt?”

Eventually, I become aware of the girl kneeling by my side. She’s got a store uniform on, and a name badge pinned to it without a name. Her legs are long, and her hair as wavy as palm trees. Squinting at her, I shake away the stars while trying to get up. My limbs are jelly, though, so I stay where I am, covered head to toe in loaves of bread and packets of dreamy waffles.

“I don’t know what came over me,” I say to the girl. A blatant lie of course, but there was no way I was going to tell her I’d fainted because the scent of this toffee had brought on a hallucination centred around my lover’s womb. I may be weird, but not that weird.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US