With her cheek against the ground, she sees clumps of hair and lumps of dust among drips of freshly splattered paint. The floor could almost be a work of art in itself. It’s certainly better than the work those on her course are capable of shitting out. Not that she wants to be a cunt about it, but most of those she rubs shoulders with are a dim lot, and what they have to show for their efforts is neither striking, meaningful, or memorable. The accidental imagery on the floor is more powerful by far, and so being a cunt was about the only thing she could be. Sticking out her tongue, she dips it into a streak of oil paint. Bringing it to her mouth, she swallows the blue hue and closes her eyes as the stench of the streets outside tickles her nose like the searching tongues of drunken lovers on a dancefloor. The dancefloor in question exists neither in the present or the past, nor the future. She’s known such dancefloors for quite some time, and even though she hates them and those that inhabit them, the lack of reality they bring is a drug she craves the same as alcohol. Picturing dissolving bodies grinding before monstrous flashing lights that swallow their icky souls, she rubs the paint over her teeth as if it were cocaine. She once snorted the stuff off some guy’s dick. It wasn’t nice. Neither the coke nor the dick. But it was something that broke up the monotony of these grey days quite well. She wouldn’t do it now, though. No, now she was more interested in disrupting this numbing plain of existence with pleasures stemming from the realm of the obscure. Like eating paint off the floor or giving the Elephant Man head. Or wishing to spend her life not chasing the romance of relationships, but rather the romance of walking the lonely roads others spent their lives doing all they could to avoid.

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