Many dead in the city. Dead today. Others dead the day before last. Not in a city, though, in a town. One I studied at when I was thin. I still am thin. In the paper, there’s a story about a kid thrown from the top of an art gallery by another kid. Neither today nor the other day, but some day a while back. The blood pumped thick on impact, was met with a mere shrug, and then the world turned regardless. With the sun comes many women. Many semi-nude wonders who bathe in tubs of milk and semen to achieve the perfect motherly glow. Báthory sort of did the same thing with plump virgins hung from their feet above opulent bathtubs. Slitting their bellies, she took what she could. She was way ahead of her time. I would’ve liked very much to have entwined with dear ol’ Bathory. Mary Bell too. A twenty-something Mary still with a devilish kick to her. Black tights. Bob haircut. Much flesh. The train station leads to one of those billowy fields that stretches for miles. By the field is a lane where women turn boys into men and men into toys. The lane wraps around the field like an umbilical cord, tight like a hand around a wispy throat. At night, in the right spot, I unzip myself thinking of the wonders of the Milky Way. The pleasures are mine, and yet what’s mine belongs to the universe. Beneath a tree, the bodies of two nude women are wrapped in fairy lights. Their torsos are full of holes. The holes were inflicted by a penknife purchased from a store in the shopping arcade behind the pub on the corner. The pub is closed, but upstairs is an open window, and from the window plays the music of King Crimson. The penknife is red. Not as red as the blood, but near enough. There are ants in them holes. They scuttle in and out unseen to all but me. Many vulvas. Many legs. Stretchmarks beneath the angry sun that tongues the lips of babies that grow old and die before I finish my bus ride home. Streets of sewage. Boiling cabbages, and the neglected sex that resides between the legs of ripened old hags who spend their days shaking their fists at the sky because why oh why can’t they be young like before.

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