Sepia light. A rickety garden gate that divides said light like a cobweb. The pathway beyond leads to a biscuit tin adorned with the image of flowing milk. It flows from her left breast to my open mouth. Mountain texture. Many colours. Mostly purples, but some leafy green. Ocean Park. To Venice. To Rome. Alone I roam, with the wind ruffling my hair before blowing through the keyhole at the foot of her bed. She’s warm and comatose and curled into a ball. She belongs in a zoo, such is the rarity of her kind, but to keep her in chains is no way for her to lead her life. The gate I mentioned is a wooden one. Splintered. Weathered. It no longer exists, and yet it does. In my dreams—in a place without darkness. The clock in the house is antique. Beyond the glass and the ticking hands of time is a lamb in an endless field that stretches from the city to the sea. There’s a lighthouse, too. A lighthouse leading to a rolling sea of green. In my dreams, I admire the ripened scent of flesh. I see Sandra Bullock and her spreading legs from the movie Speed. I see them in a sepia light, and as I stumble down the stairs thinking of just where those legs lead, the wind meets me through a gap under the door where the bristles of a draft excluder rattle like the bones of those sleeping in the nearby graves. I didn’t put them there, I swear; they’ve been there for years. Hundreds. One day thousands. Perhaps tens of thousands. If this. If that. The gate opens, and the many unseen trees beckon. Somewhere, a voice calls out like the static I watch in the early hours of the morning on the TV downstairs. My childhood house. Blanketed in shadow. Narrow lanes. Blockbuster Video. Videotapes at university, and then the slow descent of her head on the pillow as the wind outside licks the window like the tongue of a solemn snake.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US