The river shimmers in her mind. Her memory of its blue and green cosmic surface colouring everything she sees, and for a moment, she returns to her safe place; a place that helped her through the turbulent years of puberty. Not that her life has been anything less than turbulent since then, but at least she’s found a semblance of peace in her skin to ease the painful memories of those torturous days when the safety of a perfect childhood was replaced by the fear of being eaten alive by a world of dirty men who sniffed her out as soon as she came into bloom. She remembers the day it first happened, too. Opening the front door to rapturous knocking early one morning, she was confronted by the sight of the local postman. The same postman who always greeted her with a friendly smile and a joke that wasn’t funny but was nothing but seemingly sincere. When she greeted him this particular day as her parents slept just feet away in their separate beds, he returned her grin with a wink and went to hand her a package that wouldn’t fit through the letterbox, then, as his gaze lowered from her eyes to her nighty, his smile transformed into a look of lust. She was only thirteen and didn’t even know what lust was, but as a cold chill wrapped around her ankles, it picked away at her like the beak of a murderous raven.

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