Author S. K. Nicholas

x and i: a novel

a journal for damned lovers vol 1-3

  • HG

    There are two bees having sex in a forest next to a bucket of water containing frogspawn. There are streaks of pink hair as flaky fingers lift a tulip to a chin. The bees rise. The fingers that touch the tulip that sits beneath the chin belong to a girl becoming a woman, like a Read more

  • Cold, Beaten, Stark and Silent

    Fucker, she cusses, under her wispy breath. The smoke from her cigarette forms a halo above her head, and as she floats down the street, it leaves a trail resembling a long streak of cotton candy. Not pink, obviously. Can you get white cotton candy? She doesn’t think so, but you never know. Twitching her Read more

  • Wet Air

    There’s a sense of purity in the mist. A dreamy bliss that hides the decay of the day-to-day. It brings her a great deal of comfort, and yet, she wishes it would clear so at least she can see where she’s going. Stumbling along, she’s certain that she’ll put her foot in dog shit, or Read more

  • Soggy Mittens

    The town is small, but the world beyond it is big. So big that she can’t comprehend the vastness of it at all. Not that it matters much at this precise moment. The mist is suffocating. Not just to her, but to everything that exists alongside of her. From the trees to the streets to Read more

  • Down to the Bone

    With one hand down my pants, and the other on a cold beer, the horrors of the universe are born again in the tingle within my belly. It’s yellow and buttery like sand, maybe melting plastic, or the custard-like flesh of a girl I once loved who left me for some boy with a more Read more

  • The Tree Has Cancer

    The tree has cancer. God gave the tree cancer. Perhaps he was bored, or drunk, or both. God did the gardening one day, then went for a walk. Along the way, he got distracted by this, that and the other, and his mind drifted. It’s been drifting ever since, and now we’re all just traces Read more

  • Like Come

    She’s not long gone from this world. Perhaps little more than an hour. When she comes around, her heart feels heavy—so heavy it’s almost as if it’s escaped her body and is sinking through the bedroom floor. Attached to a thin strip of flesh, it swings to and fro from her chest like a pendulum. Read more

  • Little Deep Breaths

    Stirring, then subsiding, she purrs before kicking the sheets off the bed. As she does so, the mist recedes, and her pale body shines beneath the light bulb above. Curiously, she doesn’t remember switching it on. Listening out for the sounds of others, she can’t make out whether or not anyone is in the house Read more

  • Surrogate Womb

    She wishes to shower, but decides it’s too cold to get undressed, so instead sticks her head under the tap in the bathroom sink. It’s not very ladylike. After several seconds, she resembles a drowned cat, and when she applies too much shampoo to her hair, it foams out of control and gets in her Read more

  • Through the Looking Glass

    Beneath a green sweater in the shade of a carousel, the nipples of her breasts resemble aged sycamores, and her tongue the fork on some biblical table seating thirteen monoliths smeared with sin and black lipstick. I’m afraid of what she means to me. I’m afraid of the sun. Throughout the years that are now Read more