Squawking in my ear so that her startled cry rattles my brain, her fleshy bits feel like jelly. Pinching them between my fingers, I hear her heart rattling within her ribcage; it sounds like a coin in an old jam jar. I imagine the jar to be perched at the top of a stairwell; a hairsbreadth from tumbling down. When I exhale and the air from my lungs pushes it over the edge, the glass smashes into a thousand pieces like a meteor slamming into a planet; the coin spinning free like a neutron star knowing no other way to be. It’s Meeko’s natural state. Her perfect state. I’ve always known her cage of flesh was a prison; mere junk when compared to the rattling penny she holds inside. Sticking my fingers in as far as they’ll go, I feel heat like never before. There’s something I’m looking for. A keyhole, perhaps. Yes, a keyhole to her door. Her door, of course, being within the vicinity of the door in the tree. That is, if the tree itself isn’t a giant door. But what if Meeko’s door is the door Hachikō led us to in the first place? So she is the door, and by climbing the tree, she turned the tree into a door by her mere presence. And if Meeko is the door, does that mean I’m the key? I do hope so. Speaking of Hachikō, I hear him howling somewhere above, but daren’t look for him as I wish to see the continuing descent of my seed as it drops like bombs to those below. I say those, there’s only one. There’s only ever been one. The man on his hands and knees looks up, and as if sensing his impending humiliation, or perhaps accepting it, pushes his face to the sky and closes his eyes. Spiralling down, the droplets of spunk make a beeline for his forehead, and as the millions of tiny me’s anticipate the collision, my fingers feel Meeko tensing as I had seconds earlier.

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