Out of the corner of my left eye, I see the branches of the tree raised to the moonlit sky, and out of my right, a nude Meeko standing over my shoulder reading the words I put to paper while she was in the shower. It’s not much, I don’t think, but it shows a little promise. It’s got a bit more kick than most of the shit I write, so that makes it gold in my book.

“Did you write this just now?” she asks, her chin resting upon my shoulder.

“On and off,” I say.

“I like it. You’re getting close now.”

“Close?”

Stroking my chin, she takes the cigarette from my fingers. Sucking on it as if she hadn’t had one all day long, she brings my head to her chest, and there I rest like a babe in arms.

“Yeah. Close. As in you’re finally on the cusp of nailing what’s inside of that strange head of yours. You spent far too long writing what you thought other people wanted to read. It was a pale imitation, and you know it. This though—this is something only you could’ve written. I’ve no idea where you’ll go with it; I think that’s why I like it. It leaves me in a state of agitation—the same as you always do.”

Blowing smoke across the desk, the two of us watch as it swirls in the buzzing sunlight before joining the smoke snorting through our nostrils in the snow-kissed field. There’s barely any separating these realities now. I can feel them aligning within my mind, the same way the planets sometimes do causing mass hysteria among the masses at the thought of how it must spell the end of life as we know it.

“Move faster,” she huffs.

Dragging me along as my feet slip and slide upon the icy pathway that cradles the frozen lake, I heave as the beer in my belly sploshes around as if in a barrel on a ship sailing across some unknown ocean.

“I’m trying,” I manage, but the more I kick my legs, the more I feel myself on the verge of losing balance.

“Well, try harder,” she quips, “the more you dilly dally, the longer we’ll have to wait.”

“For what?” I ask.

“You’ll see,” comes her sly reply.

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