Clapping hands mixed with tell-tale moans and groans coming from an open window above a Turkish bar and grill. Not Dino’s, but Jills. There’s a Japanese ballet dancer. She has no feet, only stumps. She has hair down there, but you’ll never see it. She’s prim and proper; a champion sucker of gobstoppers. She has stretch marks you can trace your finger over. Some of the distorted lines that connect come together most splendidly. They spell out words and show images of torture and mutilation. Heavenly gardens running red with the blood of squirming, squirting virgins. That kind of thing. She has hairs in her eyebrows that resemble the legs of crushed spiders as in a bar several years in the past she sways down a stairwell with legs that never end. As white as milk—as bone—they move through the manufactured mist like fingers through leaves of snow. In rooms full of empty chairs, the insects worship whatever. It’s a t-shirt of the week. It’s a phantom pregnancy of talent—of illusionary lust. Bottles clink and then fall before cracking like ice on the sticky dancefloor. The lakes in her womb are as deep as the deepest of ancient seas. Her sex is prehistoric. As old as the dead wombs of the dinosaurs in the hours after their sudden deaths at the hands of an angry, calamitous God, bored with having got it wrong yet again. He created the planets and then he fells asleep drunk in his sofa of stars. If at first you don’t succeed, and all that.

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