Hot coffee, a slice of toast, and a cigarette that drips from fingers that only last night danced across a belly full of seed. Me mine and yours. Have you ever seen Jaws 2? Have you ever seen a guy sprawled out on a Brazilian sidewalk with his brains leaking from a hole in his skull? The brains leaking out remind me of semen. The hole, her hole. Pinky and red and flowering the way a sunflower flowers beneath a sun as yellow as the sepia haze of a drunken memory from my time at university that’s now not time at all but a figment of a temporary imagination more fleeting than a puff of smoke outside the kitchen window of a house you’ll never know. In the middle of the road, on a night guided by wine and cigars, I lay down looking up at the stars. I was giddy, and the air was cold. Cold so cold the tips of my fingers went numb. So did my arse. Kneecap. Toe. Brunette curls buried beneath a beret belonging to feet that tap tap tap the sidewalk like the paws of a dancing monkey. In the shower the morning after the weekend before, I see the droplets of water as snow. They circle my hips the same as they circle hers. There’s a Baphomet in there, and a frozen lake that exists in a bubble of time as perfect as the smile of a newborn. Back to the Future. Flies. The ‘80s to the ‘90s on my stomach before the electric radiator with Polo the cat and Monty dog by my side vying for every inch of heat they can snatch. They’re bones now, too. They always were. In a shopping trolley in a parking lot the likes of which your teenage self knew only too well, an empty can of cider is all it takes to remind you that everything you know is gone, and all that is gone exists forever out of reach, the same as that beach you long to surf. You remember it from a childhood trip to the seaside from when your age was a solitary single digit, and a bucket and spade was all it took to convince you that the magic of make-believe was real and worth seeking.

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