The city burned, fire lighting up the night sky.

There is petrol, of course. We need that. It makes perfect sense that we have filled jugs and buckets, and even old jam jars, with that.

There are also half-empty squirting tins of lighter fluid, which still smell faintly of barbecues from the summer before last. These have been brought out from the backs of under-sink cupboards. They were kept in amongst the shoe polish and the old feather dusters that nobody could bring themselves to throw away. We might as well have.

We'll never use that lighter fluid for any other purpose now. There were no barbecues last summer. No picnics: planned or impromptu. So out the old tins come. With them, we bring the bottles of White Spirit. Not as good as turps or meths, but we all have plenty of it. In our time, we were good homeowners. We kept our paintbrushes clean in between annual touch-ups of both the interior and exterior walls of our houses.

Not last year though. Last year was when the insects came. They travelled into town in one thick black cloud. Where they came in from is a question that nobody seems able to answer. They started down in the bad part of town. We didn't care too much about them then, besides the change it made on the nightly news. It was nice to get a break from hospital superbugs and the dubious qualities of overworked teachers. We are, for the most part, educated people, and we enjoyed the opportunity to learn about something new.

But then they started to move.

When they got to the river, those of us on this side of it felt confident that they would not cross the water. We had no reason for this certainty. Nothing had been able to stop them up until that point. But for some reason, we were absolutely sure that the river would keep us safe.

It didn't.

We didn't leave our houses aside from essential trips from the front door to the government trucks and back. Stay in your houses, they told us. We'll keep you well supplied with resources. Those weren't their exact words. We only got the gist of what they were saying through their loud-speakers and protective suits.

Beneath those words though, we knew what they meant: you are contaminated, keep back. Nobody knows exactly what the insects do to people, but it certainly isn't pretty. We are already a town that has forgone mirrors.

Now we are a town that is taking back control of our lives. We have stockpiled our flammable liquids. Drained every engine we have and raided every high-shelf. The wind is just right tonight. One match is all it will take.

Nobody knows what the insects will do, but tonight the fire will light up the sky. One way or another, a black cloud will roll out from our land and we will be free.

Playing with Fire

The wax melted down between us, and your fingers tugged and played at the edges of the candle. Your eyes had been on me at the start of the meal, but after miss-steps on both sides into topics we had meant to avoid, my gaze turned down to my plate and yours became fixed on the flame. You played with softened pieces of wax between your fingers, and every time you shaped it into something beautiful I thought that you would extend it in an open palm towards me. Instead, you squashed and broke your small statues, and then looked confused about the mess you’d made.

My feet twitched under the table, and I exaggerated the movement in the hope that I could connect with your leg. I felt sure that some small touch between us would be all it would take to get the evening back on course. For a while, I laid my hand immobile in the centre of the table, waiting for you to take it, and when you didn’t I felt as foolish as a schoolgirl, and I hated you again.

My anger at you was contained in a box of fireworks concealed in my torso, and the fuses had become delicate and slight, whittled down to almost nothing by the many injuries we had inflicted upon one another. A touch from you at the wrong moment, or even a slip of the tongue could set one off. Then heat and light burned inside me, and I was blind to your attempts to earn forgiveness.

That night, I wanted for the fireworks to be gone, for the box to have emptied from all the useless bad feelings between us. But you played with the candle and did not reach out a hand to mine, and then later you asked me in such a painfully tired voice what it was that I wanted from you. A Catherine Wheel turned slowly, with a dull burn that seemed as though it would last forever.

Tickling!

He rolled over as if in getaway and I lunged after him, pinning his leg with the weight of my thigh. My body tingling with the afterglow of his teasing hands, I tickled him in triumph&in speed. The fast arches of my fingers pressed their tips flat into his skin til they clashed with his ribs,
with both flailing elbows.
His gritted, gasping teeth: “Get.....off....of me!”
He moaned, his mouth wide, thrashing his head from side to side. He kicked at me, his hips rising helplessly like the sea as he fought for balance.
A gasp as if in pleasure. I threw words into the space. “Oh....yeah?” I too was breathless. Light, teasing, focused, it almost hurt.
I shifted my weight down on his torso, seized his wrist and felt him respond by clasping mine.
He was trying to pull me down. The dead weight of my pulse sped thick and foggy to his grip.
...These upper hands, they were struggling. I withdrew them, a stubborn and sudden backing off. I stumbled slightly as I crawled off his body to sit at a safe distance.
“Fine, fine,” I murmured. As if I had stopped in victory; that this was me relenting.
I smiled to myself, smiled at him. Sweet, teasing,
but exhausted. My eyes felt like pinpricks.
Still on my knees, I turned to face him, tucking my ankles under me and letting my hands fall to my lap.
He closed his eyes. Where he had sat up, he lay back down. His breathing slowed, he lay flat and still.
I took my eyes off his face and looked at my hands. I held one before the light. Its colour, the pinkish shade of dawn, was fading back to white.
I glanced at Aaron. Still he had his eyes shut.
On the sleeve of my jumper was a loose thread. I brought it to my mouth and pressed it to a tooth, pulling it free.

An experiment without a title

We walk through the trees. There is no forest, just the dense cluster of trees around us and hints of muffled birdsong far away. These trees hate us for the noise we make - the cracking of their discarded branches underfoot and our heavy, awful breathing. They hate our breathing most of all - they loathe those sorts of things - our punctuated in-and-out natures. Breathing and eating are awful to them.
The trees make their dislike of us clear. They throw up roots to lasso our tired feet, and they flick at our poor, cold flesh with the fine ends of their branches. They throw down leaves ahead of us to disguise the way, and when we occasionally find a path, they tip themselves down onto it and make us clamber over their fallen trunks.
We are lost again, and when one of our party drops a tissue accidentally from his pocket, I quickly dash to pick it up. I hope that the trees will notice this and will leave us an easy path out of this forest. But all they see is the dropping of the tissue, and out of anger at our litterbugging they twist and pull at the earth until they have run a rocky stream straight across our path.
We walk through it and accept the wetness of our feet. I make faces that show the trees how very little we like having wet feet. Later, if necessary, I will remove my shoes and socks in order to display the painful pruning of my soles to them.
We walk through the trees. The others do not notice the ways in which the trees show that they hate us. The others are careless in their treatment of the trees - they climb and swing on branches to "keep the spirits up", and I begin to side with the trees.
I dawdle behind our group - let them get several feet ahead of me but never out of their sight, or else they would stop and wait for me. I keep a careful eye on the trees and try to make my steps as quiet as possible. I believe that it is possible that I can begin to breathe both in and out at the same time.
Suddenly a holly bush snags my top and stops me short. I take that as a sign, and as soon as I am free I run off sideways into the forest, leaving my friends to their fate. I run so quickly that I create a wave of movement amongst the dropped leaves on the forest floor. With a final push of energy, I create a wave that is big enough for me to ride upon it. The trees blur past, faster and faster, as the leaves and twigs rush through the forest and carry me far far away.
In the distance I can hear the screams of my friends. They call my name - wanting my help and protection against the trees, but I am no longer one of them. I am part of the forest - travelling through the trees, not around them. I am inside of every tree and leaf that there is and ever has been. I hate the people and their noise, and I join the other trees in crowding around them. We encircle the people - weaving our branches together to create a wall that traps their soft, weak bodies. They scratch at us and try to climb onto and over us, but they are not fast enough. We blind them with flurries of dropped leaves and flick at them with the fine ends of our branches. Finally we tip our heavy trunks over - ripping and tearing at the earth beneath us to do it. We land heavily on their hot sweating bodies and finally we silence them.
They cool beneath us for hours. When night falls, we straighten and leave them for the beetles. Later, the bacteria which will break down their bodies until the parts are small enough for us to suck up through our roots. We will grow taller and stronger from the nourishment they provide.

Prompt: 'This is what's under my bed'

(Not for grown-ups, just sillyness on a tired evening.)



I have night-time glasses. There is a pair that I wear in the day, but at night, I take those ones off and put them down carefully by my bed. Then I close my eyes tightly and pull the bed covers up over my head. I have to feel around in the darkness, but I always find my night-time glasses somewhere beneath the quilt. They are bendy, so I don't have to be careful with them. My night-time glasses always match my pyjamas and they are made of a very light material that is soft on my skin.
Once I have found my night-time glasses and put them onto my face, I can open my eyes. The space under the quilt isn't dark with my glasses on. There is light coming through the cracks around a door that opens into my matress.
I never knock on the door, but I open it slowly, because it leads to the world under my bed, and I never know what will be in there.
Sometimes my sister is there, but she goes to bed before me, and she is always a long way into the world under the bed by the time I arrive. She holds hands with an octopus and licks an ice-lolly even in the middle of Winter.
Sometimes the door in my bed opens onto the middle of a forest, and I can only explore around the nearest trees because otherwise I would get lost.
It's never night-time underneath my bed, so all the people there look tired all the time. Sometimes they are too tired to play games and we curl up in a big ball of people on the grass and get warm in the sun. But often, it's snowing, and they will play on sledges and make snowmen and throw snowballs with me.
The people under the bed love practical jokes most of all. Every chair in the world under the bed has a whoopee cushion on it, and there is plastic dog-poo hidden in all of the food. People are always offering me sweets there, but I can never take them because they turn my mouth bright blue. All of the ink disappears there, so I can never write anything down. All of the toilet bowls are covered in cling film, and all of the fruit is made of wax.
The world under my bed is full of tricks and games. I come home tired in the morning and spend all day thinking of new jokes to play on the people there........................

(I will try harder this year)

This is the prompt: "Write about eating with your hands"

We walked up the mountain. It was fun most of the way to the top, then we hit the white peak of snow and hidden ice. Even our thick-soled boots slipped. At first we were able to make jokes of it, but after a few minutes we could manage nothing more than to keep our legs beneath us. The snow had melted and refrozen into slick rivers that we worked our way over by clinging to sharp protruding rocks and each others' red, numb fingers.
The sun was still high in the blue sky and we could feel the sun in the air, but even that was somehow chilled and painful to our wind-chapped cheeks.
At the top there was a little turret of soldered girders with a plaque beneath it. We didnt read the sign, but used its low wall as a break from the wind. We sat and shivered in clothes soaked with cooling sweat, we wished for thermoses and hip-flasks, but only had icy bottled water to pass from hand to hand.
Out of your bag you pulled small parcels of brown waxed paper which we struggled to unwrap. Inside were sandwiches - your surprise, overshadowed by the difficult climb. I bit into the cheap, white, supermarket bread and felt the sweetness of the jam inside cut through my teeth.
I couldn't feel my fingers, but I could hold my sandwich well enough in their loose grip. You offered an apple to me and a weak smile to go with it. I shook my head at the thought of cold sticky juice trickling down my chin and licking ice across my face.
We took our time gathering our things back up once we were done - we were always careful to leave places as we had found them, I had even seen you once take away the litter left by other people at a pretty spot we had visited that Summer.
Then we headed back down the mountain, making careful links with our arms when our cold hands could find no place to cling to.
At the bottom, you kissed me unexpectedly. I tasted the sugary fruit of the jam sandwiches freshly on your tongue.
We returned to the car and sat inside it for a few minutes with the engine on so that your hands could warm a little before you drove us home.

He shushed me, waving my mouth shut while he crossed the kitchen and moved me aside to reach for a can, so of course i slammed my cup down and when i heard it crack, that little china chip dinting the sideboard, i said loudly over it, "it doesn't fucking MATTER" mostly to keep the echo from resounding and seeing his pitying eyes when he passed by once again. And there's a fury which is only about the present tense because sometimes you don't want to SEE the exact playout - watch him peel his dirty socks off stuck with grit and grime so i can feel the heat and moisture of his warm yellow feet from three feet away. I touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue and say, in my head, John, if i don't know what i want, it doesn't mean i don't want it.

He watches football, twenty minutes, a big grin on his face, the murmered cheering and thucking boot of the ball soaring through our little living room against the clink of my teaspoon stirring coffee. I think: mechanical invisibility. When we were younger we'd go out dancing, which is to say we'd get all heeled up and end up on our knees in the kitchen at 10 o clock, crooning alice cooper and clinging to each other, drunk on cheap red wine that tasted coarse and of cork, vinegary spices and hot breath, smeared lipstick and stale churches. We'd change tack just like that so I do it with a shrug. I tap the spoon on the rim, hum some bars and then break out a high pitch in a faint whisper; ain't that juuurrst like a woman. He places a palm on my thigh, a firm request with a murmured smile, vacant and sticky and pretty. You want some ice cream i ask. And he says yes please.

Roads

I come here just for the roads. those endless streaks like beestung blurs of light.
When i'm having a bitch of a night, wideawake, and my fists in fits under the sheets of GOD LET ME SLEEP, i go to have my heart gobbled up.
The journey.
Usually ten minutes of soft ocean blow in my head, eyes ache and a gallon of cold water. But when i park up, switch the ignition off and head down to Movert Bridge, i'm a travelling ghost of winters good salesman. Let me sing through the motherfucking night!!

Her coffee has nothing on the quiet. Its cut like glass, clean and precise, with the circular spark of a figure eight. but it is BLOWN OPEN. it is as wide as the world.

So to God i go and God i come back, six or seven miles watching cars approach and recede, a steady hum in a dancing collage of grey. the road is alight with the chalk-white glow of night. all the fissures and the atoms bump and breathe in the air and then i sneak back -

The bed creaks when i get up. and when she stirs - six am punctured with the warm smell of her cotton close weight - i grind her coffee beans and i wait.

Blow out the candle

The smell of paper still does it. Hot breath and a careful hand, some blue ink, even adidas when theyre touched with mud and creased up from wear. I cannot still like I'm 27, because the warmth rises in my brain and i can't help but remember those afternoons like a photoshot of memory; school-thru-university and a pick of maybe three or four images i hold to the light in the flickering daytime. I see his crystal squints as he glanced over with teasing tongue, writing any number of nothings while i waved them away, tapping my pen on my ankles or chewing at its end. The top line of those pages in my bound A5s circle my brain; that header space which he shaped into ours with his crackpot blowouts and ginsbergian references. 'What are you writing' i never asked, since it was every-other time and seemed clockwork and random. So he never voiced tumbling please breaths of 'love notes for you' to make me knock out my suspicion and see through to this: the string&clips of phrases which spelled a literary heart too stubborn to break.

This is where I want to go

She didn’t mean it so I told her don’t worry and she sucked at her teeth and exhaled. There was a tiny step in her breathing, a hiccup in that whole outwards breath and she drew her hands up and through her hair to the ceiling. My heart flared a little bit and I trod down hard on the floorboards but took her wrist. Bought it to my lips and kissed it – round and damp but firm like you know me baby. She gestured outside and said we need to find something and I didn’t know exactly what she meant but thinking what the hell close enough. She was chewing her cheek and fixed me with this warning squint, sortof a wary kid-glare that makes your ears twitch for an answer which I thought was sweet because it clamoured for confidence like please say yes please please. And so I said sure and thought it’ll make sense and I let my heart take my arms to her waist-side. I pulled her in and let it out so it felt like a flurry of drifting snowflakes and plus it was cold and plus I love her like don’t you dare even look you - . And I bowed my head and buried my face in her neck which was both soft and hard and flavoured with salty discontent. My heartbeat beat three-four thinking about hoisting her up onto my hips and getting the hell out there then like prairie desperation but I held my ground and just looked round the room feeling her pulling fists and cramming close a million miles from no's. Oh oh oh hiccups, breaking little pink rosebud oh's. And I stroked her hair and thought fierce of the rain. For all this breaking of teeth we're gonna go - Amy, oh Amy, my Amy -

" 'The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon' "

She swims in the pool. Each evening, as I step out onto the balcony, newly naked and ready for bed, I look down to see her. The first cool air of the day swirls around me, it clatters the brittle summer-scorched leaves together and spreads her silver form in the water's ripples. She waits for me and she gathers herself together - drawing in her refracted silver shards and straightening the wrinkled surface of our liquid sheets. And when the pool is still, with her sat whole and patient in its centre, I dive down, my hands parting the fat 'O' of her fullness. And her silver slicks over my skin, until underwater we are combined entirely. She is the cool gasp at the end of long wilting days. She is the quiet privacy that comes after too many brightly-coloured, noisy hours.

She is shy at times - drawn into nothing but a wry smile. But she always swells - slowly, seductively - until she is ripe and grown heavy on her rippled branch. And it is then that I dive into her, where she waits just beneath the skin of the water. I pierce it, fingers first, and swim inside her - the whole silvery pool of her, so cold it makes me shiver. And she pours into every crevice of my body and stains me with her shimmering colour. I stay under there, enveloped in her love, until my lungs claw at the walls of my chest and I burst forth, erupting in a shower of silver spray, and crawl onto the damp grass to pant and quake and drift off into dreams of my beautiful moon.

"Write about capturing the image"

I’m a blanching sack of nerves, stuffed to breaking with the not know-how of this prep. I can’t face anything but sleep. The scratch of the sofa and blueish tinge of my skin beats the rising shriek of uncertainty otherwise offered by ACCOUNTABILITIES.

I’m sucking at excuses, waiting for you to twist my heart into a teasing mushy pulp and reignite my fight to let me sit, glaring, aware, upright&ready this evening.

Which is –

this is what it is.

Something needs to give before I am able to begin. This house weeps with age and I press my body to it in the silence, passing out of now – thankful and beatific – into recollection and grey dawns. I am half-conscious, pressed straight backed against the arm rest. My eyes are shut, spread thin against the worn sunshine of this/that day. A feeling of I’ve sunk myself. I love – everything –. His easy, sloping part of it ushers in half-truths. It irons flat the damp and neverending monotony of this particular day.

I don’t want to be in love again, don’t need another chasing flare of trailing conflict to stick my head and make this – these tracked lines back and forth from my head and the page – count for nothing but what they are; garbled, mindstruck rubbish.

Gather firewood, start a fire

He flings a twig at me and gestures fiercely at the hill. “What the hell….we’ve no time to waste!” He bares his teeth, gritted and black, and bends to pick the dropped pack of matches off the floor, scraping his knuckles on the crumbled mud in a snatching show of manhood. He turns back to me, spitting slightly but switching fast to a softer tone which shakes with control; “don’t you act like that’s an unreasonable request now”.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Heather and Phil stood close and uncertain, uncomfortable with their proximity to Mainey’s uncontrollable fast animal pain.

He comes up close to me, blocks my path in a show of teeth, mingling mixed lust and shooting hate in a frizzled flare that connects the both of us. I flinch and turn away with a decisiveness I don’t feel, hating myself for wanting him even now. “Fine”, I snap, though wincing with fury at my tremulous tone. I have no other option but to shoulder and freeze, toying with my numbness in these crazed curt calls of madness which he understands.

His face bites at my vision in the halflight as we stare each other down. It bears an unreadable expression that I know intuitively to be a precursor to something that is tearing and unhinged. I don’t know Mainey well yet, but we both know it is only a matter of time before I follow him to [I CANNOT FINISH THIS - !]

"Write about a woman named 'tomorrow'"

We were a good way through the summer and still had no sun to show for it. We had a sense that the sun was always just one town away and it was so close that we took to praying to tomorrow. Tomorrow was surely the day when the low-lying clouds would move on and take the hot,wet air with them. We could barely breathe in that air - it was so much like drowning that we hated to open our mouths and draw in a breath as soggy and dead as the one we were letting out. It was as though the whole town was trapped with their heads under their blankets and they couldn't find a way to get out.

Even the plants didn't like the damp air. Our weather was normally so temperate that the plants we grew were suited to just that environment. And the clothes we left on the lines should have dried in the heat in minutes, but they all stayed soaked in the still air. There was barely a shower of rain to cool us off, and in the end our prayers turned into violent shouts to call tomorrow to us. We sent our young men into the hills around the town to see if they could spot tomorrow coming our way. And they all said that the sun was just a town off and it couldn't be long till it was with us. It was only tomorrow away.

At night, the heat was the worst. We couldn't stand the feathers and foam of our mattresses and so we took turns sleeping top to tail in cool enamel bath-tubs or on the dusty stones of cellar floors. We all moaned in our half-sleep. The town was filled with a song that had just one word - tomorrow.

On one of the many days when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I was sat in the dappled shade of a wilting tree. I had spread my arms and legs, and even my fingers and toes, wide apart, to keep away the sticky feeling of damp skin on damp skin. The main road ran by the bottom of the field that I was sheltering in. It was a tarmac track that had melted weeks ago and not reset once in all that time. Cars had stopped coming to the town because they couldn't get along the road without sinking into it. But that day there was a woman walking right down the centre of the sticky black road. She wore a light coat made of tiny patches of blues and greens sewn together with silver thread. It shimmered in a wind she seemed to bring with her. And behind her she tugged a string that drew the clouds like they were a curtain across the sky. She jiggled the thread to drop a little rain on the town and then pulled the cover away from us to let the sun shine on the town. I watched her for a minute or two and then ran across the fields to my house to tell everybody that I had seen tomorrow arrive.

"Write about what you see in your rearview mirror"

The house had once been the bustling big-family centre of an old plantation. Then there had been a generation of all girls, and each one of them had perched on their daddy's knee in turn to press their pretty faces to his increasingly worn one and tell him that they were leaving to set up families of their own. There must have been boys in the family somewhere, but the old man couldn't wait out his death in that house once his daughters had all gone and he sold it, plantation and all, to total strangers.

It went through a number of hands, and by the time my family acquired it, the farm land had been sold off separately and it had gone from cotton to corn to tourist ranch, complete with the neatest corral you've ever seen, from which emerged the sounds of clumsy whip-cracks and forced, over-enunciated yee-has.

We moved into the house when I was nothing more than a slight swell on the stomach of my already over-stretched mother. There were four kids already and four more to follow me. But I had a feeling that the house was mine - that it had been bought for me. The others all left as soon as they were old enough - we weren't as close as you'd imagine. Maybe it's different in other big families, but in ours there always seemed to be enough kids to go around. Nobody worried over one leaving. Or at least, not until there was just one left. And that was me.

I was planted firm in the house while the tide of the other kids flowed in and out around birthdays, Christmas and Thanksgiving. I was shingle on the shore-line. I was flotsam and jetsam. Floating and tumbling in their tide but never seeming to get anywhere. Well, not anymore! Today, it is Christmas morning and there is spray-snow on the windows and an embarrassing mound of presents spilling out from under the tree. Today, they will be too busy to notice that I'm gone. I'm already in my pick-up as the sun struggles up over the horizon, with my suitcases in the back and no destination in mind. The truck is rumbling down the single track away from the house and in my rearview there is nothing but the past, growing smaller and smaller by the second.

"On my Body is a Story you can Read"

You, with your strong fingers and their butter-soft touch, crawl beneath the hem of my top. The tan-lines there that you're looking for talk shyly of our summer. They tell tales on us - reveal the gradual unpeeling of the layers of my clothes in the cover of the long grasses and wildflowers of the meadows that form the half-way point between our houses.

My arms are dark with the markings of the summer-hours of my resistance. But there is a caramel tint to my stomach, with its soft skin that you said begged to be kissed. You nudged up the fabric of my t-shirt with your red-blushed nose and left my chest freckled. Then you joked that one day you'd bring a pen and draw out the dot-to-dot picture that I kept secret on my skin. You said that the joining of my freckles would show my true self. And you wanted to tease out more of the orange-brown dots on my pure, white flesh. But I held firm, kept my zippers zipped and my hooks fastened. Until today.

Those fingers of yours find their way under everything, and they draw new battle lines with the sun's browning marker. And today you have exposed the bright white, the wedding white, of my uncovered breasts.

They don't show it now, but later I will notice their slight deepening in colour. And you will have won them over to your side in the war. I will concede defeat and withdraw my forces - note the lines drawn for our next battle.

"Down to my deepest depths I peered"

Periodically, I dream of you. In my dreams you are much like you appear in real-life, but softer and yet more intense, because in my dreams it is always just the two of us and we are perfectly in sync. Everything in my dreams becomes mixed: so the scene in Middlesex with the bed becomes a party heap of bodies and me waking to the crook of your arm and the back of your neck. I would never be so bold, never be so blind, and yet in my dream I rest my head there for a few minutes and what I feel – is an anchorless forever, what I distrust – is everything else. Last night you pulled away in the kindest possible way, and I felt my heart give like water through your fingers. You put your lips to my ear and whispered something secret; a powerful arching sentiment of reasonableness; ‘you know that we…..’ and I heard, but still I gripped your arm and still I breathed through my nose and felt the rise-and-fall of all the brushed aside promises which reached for me in the final moments of them living. I had two more dreams afterwards, where I was on a boat. Twice I came close to drowning. Before I was freed the second time, before I sat beside you on the middle deck, shivering with the mute cold of dream chills and acceptance, I felt the call of dying recede into that collage of senses and the mindpull of unreality sink my heart like nothing ever could.

"We walk north"

Just for a change, we decided to meet in the morning to go swimming in the Lido. Hector kept on about losing weight – said he’d try anything – so we spoke long about the theoretical practise of regular exercise as we walked through the broken up fields near the back of his house. We bumped up against the offer when his mum came home from work. She stood by the kitchen door, picking paint chips off the wall, and suggested it casually. He was surly, warm and closed when his yesses got terser and terser and my enthusiasm faltered. I had my eyes half-shut when I stood up to leave.

His silence when we were walking was built on preoccupation. It wasn’t strained but hung still, unafraid but awkward between us as we slowly swung our things on the long walk up. “Pretty weird, swimming outside in the middle of London”, I said at one point, one eye on an arguing couple on the other side of the road. His irritation was surprising, though mute and wavering. “Mmmm”, was all he had said, but it was pursed and blank and distant and I blanched inwardly, accepted, forgot.

My unease had dampened considerably by the time we got there and I danced into the changing rooms with the funny awkwardness of regular irregularity. We came out of our respective changing rooms at the same time and I caught sight of him standing with his shoulders poised fierce and upright. The rubber realness of his body…..I saw him and felt all of it. The socket punch to our love and closeness, his excruciating self-awareness, the drops of rainfall on his hotdog mouth and on my frizzy hair.

"To Set a Place for the Muse"

He was always obvious about it. I couldn't tell if he was trying to make a point or if he didn't even think to conceal his affairs. Some bold friends asked me if I minded, but most stayed quiet and joined me in looking the other way. I could never explain to those that asked anyway, not really. Maybe I changed my mind every day, or maybe I just expressed myself differently each time I was asked, but I never did give the same explanation twice. I know that the truth was somehow all of the answers at once, even though they ranged from me crying with anger to me laughing with the joy of it all - that he had me to tend the needs of his home life and his muses for his art. I didn't want to be that other woman, the one who had to be distant and diaphanous, who floated like Ophelia for hours on end until he had captured the perfect light. I prefered to wrinkle my fingers on more important things - my own expansive watercolours that threatened to drown me as they drew me in too close.

When the light faded each day, we curled our paint-spatter bodies together and fed our love in the dark. I was his vampire wife, he joked. I was his night-time, and that was enough for me. It was exactly enough. That all ended suddenly, in just the space of a sentence. It happened one evening, in the candle-lit dusk, as I was putting dinner on the table, he said to me: "Set a place for the muse."

Write of being flung up to the sky

The squinting stars, my exclamation marks and the cold air of dead kisses. We’re far like you wouldn’t believe and there’s no tongue here that will ever bat against my whirlwind heart. You think that’s not a shame? It’s a shame! Our aches span continents, for there is no time like timelessness.
My sense for you exists over every which way and I don’t splutter anymore, there are no dead weights to carry home or small steps to overcome.
No croaking love to choke on, no eyefuls to blink away. You see
yr face yr face yr face

I’m floating loveless and restless, forever warring against your crazed golden gleam and cursing the bitter taste of all this blue., ink., nothing.,.