After the drudgery of work, I retreated through windswept streets to my bed, where dreams pulled me under the second my greasy head hit the pillow. I dreamt I was a whale. A small one. There were many of us, and we swam in circles upon the tongue of our mother. We were by the coast. The water was dark and mysterious, like the memory of something that once happened but now so long ago it seems as though it never did. Laying eggs upon our mother’s tongue as she roared into the clouds, one by one we dove into the waters below. The ocean floor was littered with bones, like a birdcage straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Sunlight washed over them even so deep down. The world was sepia. It stuttered like Nosferatu. Waking with blood pumping to my cock, I thought of all the random streets in London I walked in my youth in search of art galleries that might show me the way. Those streets have long since forgotten me, but on quiet evenings such as these as I scrape off my dreams having eaten a microwaveable meal tasting of cardboard, I remember them as if they cradled my weary shell only yesterday. Food doesn’t mean that much to me. Not the taste of it, anyway. But the smell… Standing in the kitchen, I sway as the aroma of a saucerful of secrets whips around my feeble body. The fleeting realm of scent is one of the only things I care for. I forget so much, but the smell of love and the people and places I have known is in my bones. I shall never be free of them, and nor do I wish to be.

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