She has a pink nose from the cold. Beneath a cherry blossom tree, she nibbles a slice of pizza. When the wind picks up, petals shower us like bubbles of thought. The petals are pink like the moon, like the lips she spreads when I ask her pretty please to let me see what she’s got. What she’s got are hooves. Her mother would be appalled. After we fuck, but sometimes before, I sit next to her as she bathes. Wishing to be thoughtful, I comb her hair and watch with infant fascination as she shaves. Each quick flick of her wrist is so precise that I can’t help but congratulate her on a job well done. She responds by calling me a faggot. The cherry tree was once but a sapling. In the belly of God, it unknowingly waited billions of years to be, and now, it can’t help but be whether it likes it or not. When I ask her to call me daddy, she bares her teeth. When I tell her that she’s a good girl, she gives me the thousand-yard stare. Her eyebrows contain mites. The mites are like those that have the ability to survive in outer space. Older than war. Older than God. Do they like music? Do they drink black coffee by the gallon to ease gruesome hangovers, or do they masturbate the evil away? When she masturbates, she grits her teeth and purses her lips as if being knifed or trying to remember some mathematical equation she was taught at school. School still haunts her. The memory. The people. The cheapness of sexual acts given in exchange for the admiration of boys who only liked her because her tits bounced when she played sports. The first time I saw her tits, she studied my features, waiting for the same signs of approval she did in the acne-blanketed faces of those boys she went to class with. I’ve never wanted to be the same as them—never wanted to be just another boy trying to be a man. If not for my sake, then certainly for hers. She deserves better. She deserves more. She has a baroque body, a lupine mind. Her nipples are as big as saucers, her hips as wide and as fruitful as the Nile snaking through the land like the whipping tail of the devil itself.

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