With Gretchen’s eyes dazzled by the sight of this strange and wonderful apparition, the fox continues to stare at her with what resembles a smile on its whiskery face. It doesn’t need to look at the wheel. It’s seen it before. Turning with aged precision, the paint of its metal frame appears new and yet unmistakably old. Not just old, but ancient. As if somehow it’s part of the fabric of time and space itself. Like a natural satellite to a planet or a gas cloud roaming the universe since the age of the first stars. There are no funfairs around these parts; the only one she knows of is by the sea many miles away. She’s never visited it, and only knows of its presence in adverts that appear in local brochures and billboards. This Ferris wheel, while an unknown entity and decidedly out of place, feels strangely familiar though, as if she’s once stood in its shadow on a night where love and life linked arms like two drunken lovers on a sheet of thin ice. She hasn’t—that’s just plain impossible—and yet it definitely seems as though she has. Feeling the lone filling in her mouth tingle from the zapping arms of electricity overhead, there are memories in her head that shouldn’t be there. They’re coming through to her the way radio stations do when you search for them amid a sea of static. She hasn’t lived these moments, and she’s certain she hasn’t seen them on TV, either. And yet, somehow, she knows they’re hers, even if they havn’t yet come to pass. It’s all terribly confusing. Later in life, she’d compare it to being drunk, but right now, it’s an unfathomable brain fog that’s descended on her as quickly as the storm. In the gaze of the fox, however, the beat of her heart is steady.

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