At four in the morning, she torques my jaw. There’s wax in her ear. It’s like honey in a beehive, and as I stick my tongue in, I wriggle it like a worm. The flesh of her neck is as golden as the clothes of sand that hang from my bony limbs. The sands where I was born. Not in Engerlund, but Bethlehem. Some stable. Some church. The hay is satin-soft. Like her skin. Like her grin in the photographs I’ve mesmerised as if they were pages from the bible. I’m not religious, but it’s a holy book and her body is a passage I worship without question. I’m a snake, y’know? I slither here and there. In the present. In the past. Sleeping with ghosts. It’s a bad habit, but one minute you’re doing the dishes, the next you’re breathing in the funk of a time and place long considered gone. I’m riddled. Riddled with sin and doubt; with a thirst for what others consider arbitrary, but to me, the little things are the building blocks of life. As our bodies lie entwined, I drift through the window to the town beyond. In a phone booth plastered with porno cards, I’m a phantom red with rage. The wind and rain whip me into a frenzy. They reach through the cracks in the glass and tickle my cheeks. Yesterday was a few days ago. Ten years a heartbeat back as the streets disappear in a downpour that leaves me in a drunken stupor that’ll last for weeks.

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