Tilting her head so that the curls of her hair tumble to the dusty ground, inch by inch, she silently surveys the canvas with a look of devilry in her eyes. Positioning herself on all fours with a grunt and a groan, she crawls towards it like a cat ready to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse. Instead, she sniffs the white surface the way one would delicately sniff an exquisite perfume on the wrist of a rich old lady well past her prime. The surface has a single coat of paint on it. She bought the paint from a store in town. Sometimes, when she needs paintbrushes but can’t afford them because she needs money to buy wine, she’ll wander around the aisles of this particular store until the moment presents itself where she stuffs a brush or two into the pockets of the puffa jacket she wears specifically for such an occasion. She’d steal the paint, too, if she had big enough pockets or was faster on her feet. She never cleans the brushes she steals. She uses them once and then abandons them so they go hard, and so she has to steal more. She doesn’t even use them to paint—not in the traditional sense. She dips them in the cans of household paint and then wields them as sticks to fling the paint about as if she were a shaman. She could just as easily use actual sticks but wishes not to attract any more attention to herself than she already does. Plus, she’s developed a taste for theft, and although she won’t admit to it, each time she indulges in her crimes, it makes her womanly bits tingle in a most pleasurable manner.

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