Author S. K. Nicholas

His first act in the world saw him strangled by his mother’s umbilical cord. The next was to suffer the pain and humiliation of having both his legs break when he slid out of the midwife’s arms before falling to the floor. Those poor, little legs, reduced to butter-smelling jellification. His first nervous murmurs escaped his lips with a rasp, and as the nurses wished for an end to his breaths, their wishes were left unmet. His mother did her best to rid the world of him, but alas, things have a way of never playing out as you imagine. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just how it is. If God exists, our trivial lives don’t mean shit to him; if he doesn’t, then they mean even less. When the broken baby grew into a broken kid, the other kids choked him in the playground until his face turned blue. They threw his clothes into the urinals and jumped him after the last bell. Their knuckles buckled his already less than perfect teeth, and when he collapsed under the trauma, yet again he felt his mother’s other arm wrapping itself around his pale neck. She’s been dead for years now. As dead as his teenage dreams that met their demise when he discovered that love wasn’t the meaning of existence but an excuse for people to exist. They poured bleach over his testicles—scrubbed his balls with sandpaper lifted from Wilko’s behind the back of an ageing security guard trying to remember the meaning of virtue. Life as it was, will never taste as heady as it did back when the prospect of tomorrow was just a whim and not a probability. That’s what fucks you more than anything; the realisation that bliss turns to shit quicker than a donkey drowning in quicksand.

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