Author S. K. Nicholas

x and i: a novel

a journal for damned lovers vol 1-3

  • Feral

    Yesterday, after work, some guy was walking up the steps leading to the train station on my way through town. He was homeless, or thereabouts. He had no shoes or socks on, and his feet were cut, blistered and bloody. Pulling himself up the stairwell with the aid of the railing to his side, he Read more

  • Magazines

    Earlier today, I walked past a hair salon in an indoor market situated within the bowels of a shopping mall in a town where I spent much of my childhood. As a kid, I’d get my hair cut in this particular salon, accompanied by my nan, who would peruse the nearby clothes stalls while she Read more

  • Dead Flowers

    The sun rises in your eyes, and I am a bag lady before my time. On a beach drenched in memory, eternity comes and goes in the to and fro of each wave, and although our bones will turn to dust and one day float through the stratosphere without so much as a whimper, in Read more

  • Soapy Water

    When it’s raining, and the streets fog behind my glasses, I pretend I’m back in the womb, or if not the womb, then eating mints in a pram in Lewsey Farm, with my nan pushing me along the pavement not realising that one day, the world would exist without either of us in it. If Read more

  • 3:15 am

    Rolling onto my side, I slip an arm beneath your body. You’re so far away, yet close enough for me to feel every heartbeat. In one tick of the bedside clock, your breath is upon my face, and then the next, the two of us are standing on a street we haven’t set foot on Read more

  • Favourite Scar

    My body, just like my mind, is covered with scars, like a blanket littered with cigarette burns, or the pockmarked face of a teenage kid, transitioning from childhood bliss to the limbo lands of adulthood. I keep picking at my scars, so they never, ever heal. My scars, you see, are my memories. My life Read more

  • Silent Stars

    Without love, and a thirst to understand where it came from, we’re nothing but dog turds boiling on the sidewalk beneath an angry sun. Adulthood has never once suited me. It doesn’t fit my frame at all. I wish I had some baby teeth left, so I could place them beneath my pillow and be Read more

  • By Your Side

    Secretly, the ghost of you is the ghost of me. We’re intrinsically linked, like the ocean to the shore or the shiny sun to the weeping moon, and you should know, that even after all this time, my thoughts are bound to you and you alone. They were born the moment I first set eyes Read more

  • No Ghost in These Machines

    The leaves in the park are the faces I’ve known but no longer know. They dance and float around as I pass through in silence, head down and dreaming of a secret someone who inspires within me a secret smile. It’s been a while, and yet, what is time really, but a bland invention ushered Read more

  • Sunless Afternoons

    As I hurtle through space on a tiny blue rock with no clue as to what’s going on, the only place that keeps me safe from harm is the memory of your cradling arms. Everything else is pointless, more or less. Life is big, and yet it’s also microscopically small. Atoms are pretty much nothing—like Read more