There’s a guy who watches a girl who finds herself with mascara smeared across her face. Looks like claws; perhaps patterned butterfly wings. There are tiny constellations clinging to the hairs that populate her chin. You can barely see them, but he sees them quite clearly. In the store on the corner of the block where he lives, he sniffs the droplets of fine mist that escape her nose when she sneezes. She didn’t catch them in time, so he caught them instead. There’s a chance he might get the virus. He doesn’t much mind however. It would be quite the honour. If no one else was looking, he’d lick the door handles she previously wrapped her fingers around. He sniffs her out. Follows the tapping of her feet as they glide down the street on their way someplace far away from him. He’d follow closer if he could, but he sticks out like a sore thumb. From the colour of his hair to the cut of his clothes, for the likes of him, he can never roam far from home. Sometimes, when he closes his eyes when she’s near enough to make his nose twitch, he imagines the dragons and beetles that must surely teem within her pubic hair. Such hair resembles the blades of bending glass that bend like the hairs on the palms of his greasy hands. Green as they touch the sky before sinking into the fleshly brown earth, it’s like the insides of a belly. All those gases; those stinky polyps hiding from the light. With a lick of his lips, he can taste them as if they were his. He has hairs on his hands through too many masturbatory highs gathered from the memory of her come to bed eyes. It causes him great shame, but the shame is all his, and no one can take that away from him.

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