Initially, she can’t quite comprehend it. Well, she does, but she doesn’t. She’s touching the fox, and yet the fox is her. It’s simple, really, and yet all she can do is shake her head and frown the same way she does whenever her parents try to make her eat her greens. Squinting like a ninny, she pushes her head forward and sees his coat of fur beneath her hands, and yet the shape of his body is the shape of hers. Looking upwards at the exploding stars, she sees castles made of crystal and spirals of light resembling giant strands of spaghetti that seem to stretch from one side of the sky to the other. The Ferris wheel, spinning so wild it seems as though it just might spin into the outer realms of outer space, is there one second and then gone the next. Like a flash of smoke produced by a magician, the fairground, trees and mass of charging animals vanish like the exhaled air in her lungs. Everything is still. Everything is beautiful. Like her mother’s holy womb, or the moment before the Big Bang, when nothingness was all there was, and all there was, was an ocean of sleeping gods, drifting out to sea on their backs chewing stalks of corn between their yellowed godly teeth.

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