In Emu Creek, a green bottle of wine is passed back and forth between two sets of blistered hands. In the sweet liquid contained within the cold, labeless glass, the reflection of countless stars can be seen as clearly as they appear in the sky above. Below, cigarettes squirm in fingers belonging to bodies that never used to be here as the rocks surrounding bounce around the sounds of words that carry drunken meaning. There’s a little music, too, from a phone that’s got less than ten percent battery. The music isn’t quite the symphony one imagines accompanying a supernova or the memory of a first kiss, but in this moment, it’s enough. In this giddy light, the inner hills and lakes that travel from heart to tongue are just what it takes for us to shed these stupid skins of ours. There are no emus here. The moon shows us this. The moon shows many things, like the silhouette of the church in our hometown that burned to the ground the night of the London riots back in the summer of ’11. Its remains are now covered in dust and littered with used syringes. Among the dismal wreckage, we found the spreading skin of pinky lips in the pages of a blood-stained porno. It left us feeling alive and dead at the same time. It left us feeling dirty as our fingers accidentally touched turning the sticky pages we knew would never be turned again. No sun here. Only the tickling of our ears from the planetary spears circling our spinning heads. A far cry from where we reside is a Sainsbury’s built upon the site of an old music store. Scorpion Records, it was called. It now exists only in memory, like the scent of my grandmother’s hair, or the bark of my childhood dog as he greeted me upon returning home from school. Me returning home from school, not him. That would be just bizarre. The school in question, much like everything else, is no longer here. Bulldozed into oblivion, the only traces of it are the ghosts that play in the still green fields that carry the echoes of childish laughter from a childlike heart brought back to life by the wine we drink in a place called Emu Creek.

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