Author S. K. Nicholas

It’s cold. Almost winter. Her hair is long, not yet short. I run a bath for her. She refuses to get out of bed, so I yank the cover off, and she quickly makes a run for it as naked as the day she was born. In the bath, in the water, she is submerged. Read more

In the woods next to the quarry, on an old blanket in a clearing between tall trees, red ants crawl through the curls of her hair. They bite her scalp as I touch her. I touch her because I like her. I massage her feet and suckle her big toes as she writhes around on Read more

There was a boxer. Cliff Fields. When I was a kid, long after his boxing days, I often saw him walking the streets of my hometown scrounging for cash. He was a boozer. It was the boozing that got in the way of the boxing, although he still liked a good fight by all accounts. Read more

There was a bridge in my hometown that towered over an abandoned train track. In my teenage years, I buried a broken computer console beneath it near the base of a tree so my parents wouldn’t find out that the birthday present they gifted me had met a grisly end at the hands of another Read more

I took an inkblot test and saw the hands of a woman fondling my infant penis. There was another of me in a pram, choking on a gobstopper. My tongue swollen, like a plump maggot. The pram and the world outside were drowning in a sea of Middle England sadness. Nothing’s changed. Nothing ever changes. Read more

She has circles around her eyes that remind me of smoky fires on late winter nights watching a firework display at the grounds of a local football club. As we collide, the water splashes out of the tub. She holds me tight. She plays me like a flute. The tiny ocean that cradles our limbs Read more

It’s 2 am. There’s a ladybird in the trunk of a car and nineteen bodies burning down a dirt road in a town that shares its name with a girl I once fucked in a club by a river. The building that housed the club was old before I was born. During the war, it Read more