Bruised skin crisscrossing her wrists. A cigarette or two sat squeezing out a turd deep in a pocket of sleepy morning. In some faraway land, a guy ate a bat, and that was that. The streets stretching from her belly to her knee are neon black. They’re smooth and taste like milky vanilla. The kind that dribbles down your chin as if it were a sin not to. Objects lift. Hang suspended. Like her short black skirt as it rides high above her knee, and the bouncing chain around her crushed pale throat. She longs to speak another language. Arabic. Latin. Welsh. She was last seen leaving a hotel clutching a brown paper bag with a slip of paper in it reading I love you. Only the wind knows where she goes now. Only the lonely who have walked these paths before. In the back seat of her car, she snores as the engine idles and dies. Beneath a light in a parking lot that time forgot, candy wrappers dance in the darkness, as do the animals. In the lingering exhaust fumes that spill into the cold night air, their outlines blur with the mist that comes creeping in from the rivers and seas. When she was a kid, they overflowed every spring, the rivers did. Now they run dry. The cracked and dusty floors resemble her skin before she puts on her face for the world to see. It won’t last forever; the world nor her face. Nothing ever does, but when you add together all the little nothings, they create everything.

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