Lifting my fingers from the flesh of her shoulder, I trace them over the buildings either side of us. Smudging their outlines, I smear them upwards against the moon, giving the pale rock a ring to match that of Saturn’s, although this one is more beautiful by far. Smearing the road as well as the streetlights overhead, life is at once how it used to be—a drunken riot of glorious abandonment not felt since my teenage years. Laughing as the world swirls about me, I see how intently Meeko is following my gaze, and it dawns on me that she sees the same things too. Reaching out her right hand that glows with translucent wonder, she wipes away all trace of the grocery store to our left, leaving behind fingerprints that trail high into the sky. Further along, she obliterates the office block where she was fired earlier in the year for poor timekeeping. Wiping it clean out of existence, she grins a grin as mischievous as I’ve ever known.

“Take that, fuckers,” she hisses.

Smiling at her as she scrawls her signature in the neon remains of a bar sign, I can almost taste the alcohol as she rubs her thumb over the barstools floating about as if someone had turned off gravity.

“Do you think this will last forever, or go back to normal in the morning?”

It’s a pointless question, I know, and yet one I find myself asking out of habit.

“Does it matter? We won’t be here, so what concern is it to us?”

Holding her gaze as the ring around the moon drifts into space like the smoke of a cigar, I curl my lip in a sneer.

“Exactly,” she says, “fuck this place. It means nothing to us now. It once did, but not anymore. The only thing that concerns us is the light coming from the forest.”

Clenching her fist, she slams it down in the middle of the road, and just like that, it explodes the same as a puddle does when a child adorned in a brightly coloured mac and oversized rubber boots kicks it the fuck out of their way.

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