At night, she smiles with a bellyful of wine clutching jelly rolls of flesh the colour of milk. Inner thighs milk also. Mountainous. Soft and creamy like butter, but as haunted as the most haunted of petrified wood. The club in my hand splinters. The splinters pierce my tongue. I talk with a lisp, and when I kiss her secret lips, her eyes shine down on me like headlights on a lost highway. On the windscreen, there are drops of rain. Drops of rain that meet the waves in a harbour as calming as her sleepy breathing upon a pillow of delirious dreams. Beads of sweat. Glowing like honey. Under my fingernails, they prise me open so my truths flow out like blood from a wound in my gut or water from an antique bathtub with the taps left on. The water splashes down the stairs. It drips from her sex as the music from The Shining bellows from a gramophone placed within a clam. The clam is coloured vanilla—like the softly soft skin beneath her navel—and within is a pearl that could be her button nose or perhaps the bean between her legs covered in hair like leaves upon an old carpet. The carpet has flowers on it. ‘70s style. Faded. Scented with oranges. Amidst the blood in my mouth, and the taste of ash, the tangy kick of an orange kiss keeps me up for days. Who needs coke when you’ve developed a taste for something you can only reach in dream. The bit under the nose—the philtrum. She tongues it and grimaces. There are leather strips around her wrists—elastic bands around her ankles. If you ping them, she comes. If you spin a penny on her chin, the universe within her head spits out her ears the same way blood splatters the bedsheets when she’s closest to nature and closest to that which made her.

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