THE QUEER PRAYER BOOK

Tag: fiction

  • the passing of mountains

    I remember most, his sweaty brown fingers and the way they’d hold a fag. The curl in his hips as he leant in the half-way of the porch door and the kitchen- always looking in, listening to everything. He always wore wrinkled shirts tucked into cargo pants- and with his flop of white hair and his thrilling red eyes- he was always like a beastly creature in disguise to me- like a lost wolf who had formed into a man. 

    As the kettle whistled he’d gather the porcelain mugs- a selection of charity shop ware with phrases like ‘in this family we love’. There’s nothing more special to me than the cheerful dance of making tea for your guests- and he loved it. The rare flash of a smile as he bounced on frail feet- the concentration- the head dipping into the front room- his finger counting us- and the biscuits he’d put on a small plate for us to eat. And just like that he’d disappear into the kitchen to read the broad papers. 

    I don’t remember when he died- or the way his skeleton started to rip out from under his skin- or the sadness that hung on the walls of that house after he passed. 

    His daughter would trample in and kick the chair back in a tussle and huff loudly with a story to tell- the drops of an Irish folktale about to spill out- what would it be today? You’ll never guess who I just saw- the description of how sickly they looked- how that it’s awful sad what happened- and the beautiful head nods and silly laughs spared at the cost of a stranger who would never know that they were food for an afternoon of howling. 

    I am losing the specifics of the small memories- the colours of their bedroom curtains- and the car parked in the driveway. The doorbell sound and the snap of the porch door. And even though I hang on- I know they are leaving me. 

    To be honest, I never really knew my grandad’s brother- only the few times we visited his house. I remember arguing with my mom saying how I wanted to stay at home. 

    My Grandad (Right) and his brother (Left)

    I miss the culture of sitting in a small room in a small town in Ireland talking about someone I have never met and cracking jokes at their near demise. The hot tea cuffed in my hands and the warm rosy cheeks of my nan. 

    When I go home now I visit my grandparents house and I sit for a while and we drink tea and I watch as they grow. And every time it makes me sad. 

    My grandad 

    As I write alone in London, turning to look at the cold June sky, I think of home. I latch onto small memories- and they make me feel warm. The long car-rides home sitting in silence after a big fight with my mom, both of us sour with red faces. The smell of the burnt Sunday roast and the tinfoil wrapped around ugly plates, and my nan standing barefoot out the back smoking a fag- off balance and dejected- the weight of all her sufferings hanging from the clouds in the blue sky. 

    I click down the kettle as I look around an empty room of a house I will soon forget. And as the kettle whistles I experience the blaze of a home that is no longer mine. I think of the Excelsior can in my grandad’s hand and my nan’s fluffy housecoat. 

    I think of my grandad’s hand on my shoulder after reading my book- his fingers like shovels in mud. And I knew, even though he didn’t have the words to say it, that he was proud of me. 

    I search my mind for scents of homemade bread, the curly smoke coming from the burning end of my gran-uncle’s fag, and the image of my nan in the doorway watching our car leave- knowing she won’t see me for months. 

    I weep like the rain for the passing of mountains. 

    He stopped with a cheeky smile on him, and he said ‘now, one day that’ll be me that’s dead and gone- and you’d better be laughing at my downfall’.

    Tears in our eyes, we did. We laughed, and we still do.

    Ireland. I miss you.

  • My unfinished 3rd book.

    CHAPTER ONE.

    You have an itch, to grab the pack of razors off your bed stand and swallow them. You are unsure why you feel like this, but you do. What’s the worst that could happen? You grab a handful and toss them into your mouth like a fresh packet of paracetamol after a night out. They rip through your body and you smile.

    You are everything they wanted from you, yet you feel so fucking wrong. You are spinning- and your eye starts to twitch. You remember when you were hit in the eye with a croquet bat and had a big bruise. And once it healed you ended up with a nervous twitch for a year.

    “Almost”, He says looming over you.

    Your doctor pulls the last razor blade from your belly. He looks at you like you are insane. You want to grab his face and kiss him- something about a man standing over you that makes you submit.

    “Swallow this glue once a day”, He tells you.

    You try to speak but the air hurls through the holes in your throat and you cough blood onto the tiles. 

    “It’ll (probably) fix you”, He says 

    You swallow it every night for six weeks, and at first, it’s sad, and you feel so miserable and so broken down. But, it starts becoming easier, like brushing your teeth. And suddenly, after six weeks, you can speak again. The holes have been filled. 

    The metallic reflections of the city shimmer in the rain. You hurry through the puddles, wiping the drowning from your eyes. Spiders crawl up your legs, but you keep running. You are holding him in your hands as you run. You slam inside and stand in the doorway. The rain swooshes against the neon pink signs. You take the cloth off him and wipe the rain from his face. You are late.

    “Are you okay?” He knows you’re not.

    “I will be” You lie.

    You tug on the fag, and it fills the void. The smoke entering you like a delivery of good things in fine packages. In the corner of the room, your cow costume hangs on a bent metal rail.

    You are a dancing cow in the background of a Japanese milk commercial.

    “The best milk ever created” He spits. 

    You have worked together for five months, he is frail and weak just like you. And even though you have just met- you are sure that you love him. You must, otherwise why is it that you feel like jumping off the roof of the building for? Obviously that’s the definition of lust.

    “Milk to make you move” He shouts louder. 

    He pulls your fake udders and splashes your fake milk on his perfectly crisp jawline.

    After the shoot, you rise from the sweaty head and catch real air. There is a madness in the art of commercials. Everything is blurry, like the way the mist crept out from the beach water when you were just a kid. The seashells twinkling at your feet. The terrible patches of dirt that clog your mind, seeping nearer and nearer. And then the mist bursts, like maggots out from the still heart of a decrepit old corpse. And the reality kicks heavy like a jazz drum. The snare and the kick.

    When you see his dead body hanging from the bent metal, you hate that your first thought is- ‘It’s not fair’.

    You blink and try and understand the weight of death. The swing of a human body. The bent toes of limp feet. You hurry, with a hope of saving him. You are dressed as a cow, with fake udders, and you are holding a dead Japanese man in your arms, with your robot brother watching. But you have hope, hope that slowly dwindles. 

    “Is he dead?” Your brother seems scared.

    Your mouth is sticky, and when you speak it crashes and pulls and you feel alive. You want to start dating again, but lately, you have become a glory hole for leftovers. You used to be full, and now you are empty. You picture your ex as you eat a pop tart naked on your kitchen floor while listening to sad music. He left you alone, that’s what you keep telling yourself. You find it so hard to say the words out loud. You are so afraid of yourself. You want to die, but you also want to live. You want to cry and you also want to dance. You want to fuck and you also want to fall in love and die in the arms of someone who knows your middle name. But you find it so hard to admit, that you are in so much pain. 

    You remember his huge hands and his cold eyes. The way he would grind his teeth at night, and the way his mum would always text funny cat pictures. And his dad’s bowel cancer. You wonder if his dad survived. For a moment you hope he didn’t, but then you feel bad, and you do that thing in your head where you say ‘I didn’t mean that, that was stupid’ and you don’t ever think of it again. But he was nice, and sometimes you miss him. 

    And as you stare at the dead body- you wonder if you are cursed. And one thing is for sure- it’s time to go.

    CHAPTER 2.

    Your eyes are pinned to that grey sky as he pulls every last breath from your lungs. Your ears slowly pop and your feet tingle and he pulls harder and harder.  You want to feel more like this- this half-formed thing. 

    When it’s over your body feels fresh, and your hand has a new home on his sleeping chest. You have forgotten everything about his face, it’s all but blank shapes now. You wish to remember better things than this, but you do not control your thoughts. 

    His chest hairs are tangled, and you place your head on ‘em. You slowly and softly say:

    “I don’t want this”

    But he is fast asleep. 

    The tree in the middle of the lake glows in the night. You wash the cuts on your arms with the water and some old rags you found in the back of the van. Your brother is running diagnostics for your location, and his screen flashes with random sequences of numbers and codes. The van is full of odd parts and boxes, some curdled milk bottles warming in the metal-trapped back. You tipple the bottles over and watch the curd droop.

    “Looks like we entered an anomaly” He says.

    “So it just spat us out at random?”

    “Looks like it”

    “I was afraid this would happen”

    The sparkle of the cold water makes your eyes whimper as you edge closer to the lake. You are stuck in limbo, a mad and whirling game, one where the stick is on fire and the old people playing along are singing ‘how low can you go’ but off-key and out of tune. Nothing like damn near human moments in a different space dimension. 

    “There’s a beam fifty miles out,” Your brother says.

    “If they see us we’re dead”

    “Then we try not to die”

    “Easy for you to say” 

    You stand in a puddle of your blood as the cut on your ankle is exploding. You are holding the pink razor blade in your teeth as you scurry to roll toilet paper with one hand while applying pressure to the wound with the other. Your body is shaped like a made-up letter created by a kid.

    Your eyes are pear-shaped as you catch your drooping face in the mirror. Half of your left leg is shaven, and the top half is covered in shaving foam. You bend down and wield the blade and you watch the blood fountain, and you know it’s stupid, and you know you really shouldn’t, but you keep shaving. The hairs fall into the blood, like leaves into cold wet rainwater. 

    You are cut open like a bad peach, and the mirror is a picture of a child you don’t know and you run the hot tap and you dry your toes. You push your penis behind your legs, and you stand tall and you look down at your broken and beautiful half-self. 
    Why do you keep writing this, she said it would fix you, that it would make you understand, but you are so far from that, why do you keep writing this? 

    The next day your legs sting, and you rip your pants off to be sure there aren’t bees living inside your skin. You have red pimples all over your thighs and the holes have clotted over and your legs are shining. And your penis looks at you, and it speaks: 

    “I am still right here”, It taunts you.

    You slowly pull up tights, they are the wrong thing to be wearing just after shaving, but you want to prove your penis wrong. You meet a cute girl for a walk and she talks about babies she has in little test tubes and how there are three kids on the way, three of her offspring in other bellies, three kids swimming in womb juice, three half things, three mad animals.

    And in a faraway place, there’s a mother with blood running down her leg as she squeezes and pushes, and the lights are steaming and the doctors are dressed in blue and white. She is just a woman, but a head slides into the world and now she’s a god. Her wife holds this new thing in her hands, and she doesn’t say it out loud, but she thinks it to herself, she thinks ‘Now this is magic’. This child will not need to shave for a long time, and for that it is lucky. And when the kid is finally taken home to its new house, and placed into the new crib for the first time, it won’t know it yet, but one day it will, that this is the room where they one day need to escape from. This beautiful little room where every bad thing will happen. 

    CHAPTER 3.

    It is dark and the glass of the van is frosting. The headlights burn into the black, like fireflies in a jar. The stretching void seems to keep going. If you turn back now, you risk being lost forever. You don’t want to be a sad kid on the side of a milk carton. Little pictures you could enjoy while having your morning coffee.

    Out of nowhere, your earthbound body hurls forward, as an object smashes against the front wheels. You quickly slam the brakes and you come to an abrupt stop. The void stays silent and your throat tenses and closes. You feel droplets fill inside your mouth. The milk bottles rattle back and forth. Your brother wants to say something, you can sense it, but he keeps quiet. 

    You graze the flood of blood with your shoes. And the limp body kicks your toes. Its beak is cracked in half from the impact, and the strike has sliced the middle of its head open. You sink your eyes low at the dead animal. A duck. And then in the intense silence, you hear a noise. A tiny crying. You see its twig legs tumbling towards the accident and its glistening big eyes glancing up at you. The duckling warbled to its mother. 

    You drive through the void for hours. The duckling sitting on your lap. The darkness bursts light. A sunset inside of an eclipse. 

    The duckling has golden glazed eyeballs that give it a fumbling innocence, a kind of child playing hide-and-seek. The destruction of the mother by the milk van was human nature at work, and it was this interconnection of vehicles and animals that made life worth living. 

    You are nursing the last drops of your only bottle of Becks. You have been peeling your eyelids back watching a pixelated screen. You have the look of an angel awaiting a hand job from Jesus. Curiously on edge to find out if his hands are soft, or if they are callous from all his time carrying that heavy cross.

     With an eagerness to get it done, you proceed to count the remaining seconds before he enters the room. This makes you nervously laugh, and the longer it goes on, the more it humours you. You purse your lips trying to hold it in, desperately afraid to cackle in the face of the divine lamb, worried that if he enters the room to see you spitting on the floor in tears, he will be horribly disappointed.

    So, you gulp the air and compose yourself, hoping that time will somehow reward you with an entrance from the prince. But the awkward lull continues, your laughter has vanished and now you are just chewing thought after thought, anxiously twiddling scenarios in your mind. I should have shaved, you mutter as if you are telling your mum that you love her. But nobody is there to listen and there’s not enough time to run off and do it now. You sit listlessly and hairy, your nails look like the carvings on stone-age caves, and your teeth spear out of your gummy lips like the Giant’s Causeway.  

    You twist the two strings of your grey track bottoms and let them twirl back out, and you repeat this many times because your therapist said that repetition can keep you calm when you feel uneasy. 

    You repeat the phrases you learnt from doing daily YouTube meditation videos, but now your mind can’t stop thinking about her big red ass, and now it’s baboons, and the band Blue, and it’s why there are so many words but so few letters and finally your mind rests on a still picture from a moment in your childhood. 

    You are little and your dad is pushing you on a swing, by a pebbly beach and the windy water trembles. Your mum watches. You are swirling in the air like a balloon full of happiness. But in the picture, the one you are now highly focused on, it is still, and you are halfway smiling. Your dad looks at your mum. There is nothing special about this still image, and you are not sure why your mind has decided this be the final thought you have.

    You don’t remember it, you were too young, but something important must have happened. Why was your dad looking at your mum like that, why were you out in the blistering cold? But then as you almost start remembering it, the door slowly opens. But it’s not Jesus. It’s someone else, they take a seat and barely look away from the floor when they talk. 

    “You’ve been in here all-day” They say.

    It’s weird when they say it, the words find it difficult to come out, and there’s a shrillness in their voice too, one that makes you uncomfortable, like you did something wrong. And they look at your crude notepad, but it’s too quick to read anything, they are telling you something in that glance, but you ignore it, and you wait. 

    “Your dinner is in the microwave.” They say.

    And then they leave. And even though you’re hungry, you’ll leave that dinner turn to mould, because the thought of leaving here is too much for you to handle. 

    The light blinks as you return to a solid road. You stare into the fizzing sun, two brilliant gold eyes.  

    “I killed your mother.” You look at the duckling.

    She bites down on your finger. And now you have been imprinted. You have become a mother. 

    CHAPTER 4.

    Your body watches a projection of yourself, the real you, sitting fiddling with paperwork in tired hands. A woman with a smiley face waiting.

    “I need to be real,” You say.

    This is new. You are not the type to blow your life in a stranger’s face. It is the first day of a new job and here you are crying to the HR Manager. The paper remaining empty next to the pen. You tell her what happened. 

    “I am in the sandbox” Is what you come up with. Always the poet.

    You spent all of yesterday in bed. Under the covers. Swiping on dating apps, and sending messages: 

    “Wanna come to mine?”

    And when they grab your body, you hurl in circles like a sad ride with every seat empty. They push you against the wall. With their fingers inside you. And their other hand wraps around your neck. They pull out and grab you. They gaze into your eyes like they are peeking into the microwave to see when their hot pocket will be done. They finish you off and you grab the packet of wet wipes. Then they lay on your bed naked, out of energy. You tell them how you are starting a new job. You tell them about your ex, how you hated him.

    You wait for the bus together. And when they get on the bus you can’t help but remember how many times you’ve been here. Watching a stranger leave you and never coming back.

    Your walk home is familiar. Your bed is messy and even though you have just fooled around for four hours, you are still restless and needy. Like something’s wrong.

    You’re sent home. You call your mom on Oxford Street, avoiding rushing London-town ants. You tell her to shut up and listen. You tell her everything, how you have been lying about how you are feeling and that she was right. You are feeling fucking shit. But you feel positive about it like you are sick of the assembled pattern you have been falling into for years now. You are ready to properly address things and make a change. Like, what if Arthur just dug up the stone with the sword inside it, would Merlin be impressed or disappointed? 

    “How’s the milk book coming along?” She asks.

    “Like a cow on aggressive steroids” You joke.

    She laughs and you stop and turn the video on. You look at your mum, and even though the connection is bad and her video keeps stuttering- it’s like seeing her face makes you feel safe.

    “I am going to get better.” You promise.

    Your battery is dying, so you say goodbye. You make your way back to the Oxford Street tube. You know that your life is at another vital moment, a chaos point. The people in the city have no idea what you are chewing inside your mind.

    She sends you a message:

    “We should do that again sometime”

    You message them afterwards and you tell them how they actually make you feel and that you can’t see them anymore because it hurts too much. 

    In the reelection, they see your cracks, the open wounds that their nails carved. You are as white as a ghost. You realise that this isn’t love, it is a pattern. You never like to look away, and your hands always touch, and you chuckle, out of nervousness and because you need the silence to stop, or maybe you just want to let them know, that even though this is still just two people after many glasses of wine, that you liked them. And, you needed to tell them this because you are afraid they didn’t like you, which sounds mad, because you just shared skins, your breasts in their face, and your lips like magnets, but still you needed something else.

    So, as your mind burns like a fire and your chest scratches sting, you unfurl their fingers out from yours and you look away. They check the bus times, and it is only five minutes away, so you get dressed in a hurry, almost as fast as you undressed. 

    If you ever feel confused, unable or estranged, don’t panic. You may feel lost or drunk or high above all things, but that’s okay, you are broken, but that’s your mind playing follies. A broken human is just a human.

    CHAPTER 5.

    The duckling plods behind you. Your jacket is tied in a knot around your waist and take interval breaks to rest your arms. The golden sun dips and the sky turns dark. Far in the distant, blurred but beautiful, the yellow lights of the Beam. You put your brother down and you fall to the ground in exhaustion and relief. You take the pack of fags out and inside only one fag remains. You put it in your mouth and spark it up. You inhale like it’s medicine and your knees twitch.

    It is beyond fundamental to address your and your brother’s relationship before the accident. You were always a bratty kid, you had a big personality and wide cheeks – so you could always keep more words in the barrel which gave you an advantage over all the shy kids.

    Your brother was the complete opposite, he liked puzzles and organisation and numbers. He was a crystal clear window that looked out into scientific perfection. Your windows were smashed and groggy and full of grime. You were bird spit in a lollipop jar.

    When he was 12 you gave him his first drink. You sat him down on the kitchen table and it was well in the night after your parents were asleep. He knocked it back and squeezed his nose, curling the folds in his mouth. The slow burn of fresh lips to dank beer. The next one was a lot smoother. He was still turning by the sour taste, but with each sip, he gained confidence in himself, like he was making you happier, and that was worth the suffering.

    I guess you weren’t the world’s best sibling, and probably more times than most you were an utter pea brain. You taught him the importance of dirt, how the monsters can live freakishly solemn in the mud but if they stepped on the shatterproof glass ceiling for even a millisecond, it would fall through, breaking it in one fell swoop. That prolonged pain was of the utmost importance. You had always seen pain as being peptic. The longer the digestion period the more numb you would become to future situations. And you taught this to your brother like you were a preacher. 

    You were slowly becoming, bursting out of the chamber you had built yourself into. You had hairy legs and you used your mom’s fanny razor to shave them smooth. You covered the place in blood and it made you woozy, but afterwards, when you pulled your secret frilly white socks up and looked at your shiny legs in the mirror, your dick got hard. You were excited and you were so full of emotion. You were looking at yourself for the first time. You were halfway between, and you would fall into any crevice that presented itself to you.

    Your body has the potential to absorb magic. Your therapist looks at you, and they see the cracks in your skin. ‘You are diabolically shaving the soul out of yourself’, is what they might say. You are problematic, and the damaged codes of other problem children will pretend that you are the evil that brainwashed them into thinking that they were once bad too. You want to be finite, to experience the exhilarated violent light. You would very much like to have never been born.

    CHAPTER 6.

    The motion sickness bubbles from the windpipe to the fingernail. Flimsy like a butterfly butchered on barbed wire. You yearn for tenderness. You are honeymooning. You haven’t eaten today. Your belly screams for food. You swipe at the hair of your pits and twist them cutely around your little finger.

    The beam levitates your spaghetti body. You are drenching in the glitch of yellow light. Your brother in your arms and the duckling by your side. The beam bucks at you, smashing your feet into the floor. And just like that, you are whizzing through realms. Your brain feels like jelly wobbling on a one-pound dinner plate. Birthday candles slop out your ears like sad wieners.

    The chaos catches you thinking. You see his prickly chest, the belly button and the road down to his left-turning penis. His inky black hands caress your milky ribcage. He cracks the bones and reaches towards your heart. You feel at home, with his hands squeezing the blood out of your organs. But as his lucid touch expires, you find yourself swerving.

    You’re a child whooshing around a washing machine. You’re not alone. She is with you. Her orange pimpled face leans in to kiss you. Your friends used to call her pizza-girl. And as your cheeks crash against the pepperoni mountains, the ooze covers you both in liquid.

    Out from the washer and into the dryer. You lose the bond to past lovers and instead, you begin to race through the fractures of your brother. You are exposed to the spinning wheels of the car. The smoke rising. You can make out the shapes of the two bodies in the front seats. Yours and his. You have this nightmare every night. The flavour of the nighttime moon and the noise of the blinkers going off. You remember it all so vividly. This was the last night you drank. But the lingering stab of whiskey remains in your mouth, even after all this time.

    You have been tagged by the beam. Existing in an anomaly. Your brother explained the science to you as you were half asleep. From what you can remember, the way it works is simple. But to truly explain that you must go further back to before the worlds were all connected. 

    You are five, kicking your feet in the backseat. Your mom tells you that you have to go get a special big boy shot.You half smile, because you are five and you don’t know what else to do. The doctor steadies the needle and stabs your bony arm hard. The microchip enters your bloodstream. You don’t feel any different, but you are excited when the doctor gives you a lollipop and a sticker. 

    When the aliens arrived on Earth they came bearing gifts, marvels of technological advancement. You grew up with it, so it didn’t ever feel alien to you. The chip allowed travel between worlds, a way to keep your physical form from diluting. But it came at a cost. All the chips were tracked, and that meant that the beam always knew where you were, and if you were a threat. 

    So, your brother had explained to you what had happened. You had been tagged. And now the beam was blasting you through a timeless anomaly. A loop of lost things. You were trapped in a spacetime limbo.

    And it keeps getting more and more confusing. You look up from the pages and you sigh. It’s all too much. Now you know what the fuck it feels like.

  • THE BIRD MOTHER

    We rushed through the overgrowth of thorns, our torches burning in the spill of night. This wasn’t our first time trying to escape the orphanage, so we knew how to stay quiet and had to hurry.

    “They won’t be far behind,” Sebastian whispered.

    The orphanage was by no means a wicked place; it was, of course, where we all met. The three of us spent every waking moment together. And truth be told every good memory I own belongs to the times in the orphanage with them by my side.

    They told us of the beauty of the outside world, the flowers in their many colours, and the green grass that stretched far and wide. How one day we’d see it for ourselves, but not until they were ready to accept us. For you see, this was no ordinary orphanage; this was an orphanage for monsters.

    We made it to the surrounding walls, the furthest we had ever come. Sebastian reached his fingers into the mud, and the stems started to pull up from the ground. They chased up the wall in a cross-hatched pattern, forming a ladder for which we could climb. He heaved over, baring his teeth.

    “After you,” he huffed.

    I handed my torch to Nori, and I scaled the wall. When I reached the top, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The fields were dry, and the trees were without leaves. It was as if a forever winter had come to haunt the land.

    “Guys,” I yelled.

    But before I could get their attention, the howl of dogs filled the quiet. They had found us. Nori caught hold of the ladder and quickly made her way beside me. She grabbed my shoulder and let out a giddy laugh.

    “Close one,” she smirked.

    We jumped from the wall and down onto the dry fields. We fell heavy on the ground, and it left our knees bruised and bloody.

    “You okay?,” she asked, dusting herself off.

    “I’m fine,” I said, wiping the blood with my shirt.

    Atop the wall, Sebastian stood looking at us with a cheeky grin. He gripped the side with his fingers, and he kicked himself to the ground.

    Suddenly, the orphanage gates swung open, and the hounds were on us! They were terrible creatures, vicious, crawling skeletons with searing red eyes. Their yellowing bones sparkling in the halfmoon.

    “Stay behind me,” she squeezed my hand, as she said it.

    Nori was a girl who appeared like a lark. As she swanned her wings and furled her back, there was little space for anything to exist. But in the middle of the blur, the scarlet flare of torchlight flickered. My
    eyelashes blinked as she burst the sky open with fireworks of magic. She grabbed my arm, and before I knew it, we were hand in hand, soaring through the fields and away from the orphanage.

    “Hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about,” Sebastian shouted.

    The hounds scratched against the barrier of fire magic but couldn’t penetrate it. THE BIRD MOTHER looked on as we fled into the distance.

    Even though I had seen this all before, every moment and every detail, holding her hand and running beside her was like a dream that never ended. I wished to live here in this place, in this memory, with her, forever.

    “We did it,” she squealed.

    “This isn’t how they told us,” Sebastian said.

    A darkness was growing like a plague, turning tree barks into blistering shards, blades of grass into pools of mud, and causing the flowers to wither and die.

    “Did you know?,” she frowned at me.

    “No. This is new”

    I had the power to see into the future. When I was born, I saw how I died. When the nurses wrapped me in a muslin tarp, I saw how the rats would eat their bones and how their children would mourn at their death beds. I was cursed with a wickedness that I couldn’t understand.

    Up to this point I had known how everything would happen, but I never saw this in my visions. A great well of sadness took over me as I wept at what I saw, for the feeling of not knowing was too much. The tears in my eyes made my sight blurry. When I came to, it was her face that I saw.

    “It’s okay,” she said with a warm smile.

    “We should keep going,” Sebastian called out.

    We all turned to face the orphanage, the home in which we found each other and where we grew up. It was small from this far away. And even though none of us said it, we were sad to be leaving it behind.

    For hours, we walked through the dry fields, with no idea where we were going. We kept our heads down so as to not stir up attention, but no matter how long we walked, we didn’t come in contact with anyone.

    “They really wanted us hidden away,” I joked.

    “Knew we’d be too much trouble,” Sebastian laughed.

    Eventually, we came to a broken-down farmhouse. The porch was covered in larvae spooling out of a dead horse carcass. They circled around the dry blood like a marching band. I watched as their shiny bodies glimmered in the last of the sunlight.

    “We should take rest in here,” Nori kicked down the door.

    The floor creaked as she stepped on it, and the wood snapped in front of her feet.

    “Careful, watch your step,” she warned.

    Underneath the rotten exteriors, there lay a beauty unlike anything I had seen. Picture frames with family portraits, patterned wallpaper, and a golden brown spinet piano in the corner.

    “What is this place?”

    “Looks like it’s empty,” Sebastian drew open the piano hood.

    The keys left out an untuned cry as he hit them hard with his fingers. He quickly jumped to his feet and rushed towards the kitchen, and pulled open the drawers.

    “Ha! Enough tins here to feed us for weeks,” he yelled out.

    I bowled over onto the bed of the upstairs room as the night fell. I couldn’t help but feel scared, for I had no idea what was out here and what kind of future awaited us.

    Nori knocked slowly on the open door before she came in and lay beside me. We stayed in silence for a long time until she spoke.

    “I wish I had some place like this growing up,” she said.

    “You had…me,” I let out a short laugh.

    “You know what I mean,” she was serious.

    I leant in and faced her; we were so close that our foreheads were touching. I pushed my thumb into her chin, and she shook her head and smiled.

    “What are we doing?” she asked.

    “If there’s a house, there has to be people” I tried to be hopeful.

    “But, what if…,” she stopped.

    I swept my hand through her hair, and I looked down at the top of her nose. I was so scared that she might be right and that we could be the only ones left. Our whole lives, we had been lied to, and my powers had betrayed me. This was the only thing I knew that was real, being here beside her.

    “Never let me go,” I said softly.

    She placed her hands on my hips, and she held me. And I knew that everything would be okay.

    THE BIRD MOTHER would come looking for us; there was a reason she kept us hidden so far away from everyone! I had seen it the day I was born, the reason why she’d stop at nothing until we were found and taken back to the orphanage. For monsters were not welcomed in this world.

    Nori looked into my eyes, and it was true, love is the most ultimate monster of them all. For when I was born, I saw how I died.

    I saw her kill me.

  • A NICOTINE PATCH ON A FIBROMYALGIA RASH

    Author Note: This is a hard story to tell. And the only reason I’d like to share it is that maybe it makes someone else feel less alone. This is a story about the height of my eating disorder in 2023. I would like to say that I’m doing much better now. The disease still exists of course- but I have learned to handle it a lot better and I’m in a much healthier place.

    I was heaving over the toilet bowl like a fiery skank. I was fingering my mouth to try and make myself throw up. There were shit stains and baby powder around the insides of the toilet. I gagged, twisting my fingers aggressively. Suddenly, I coughed out all the sick I could. Spit dribbled down my chin as I stood up, and the blood circulated back into my legs.

    The bath curtain had a brown mildew tint, and the bath itself was a duck yellow. I stripped off and stood in. The water was hard and unforgiving as it hit my back, and the tea-tree smell of the soap was making my eyes water. I rubbed the minty gel on my eyes to see if it would sting, but it must have been made with this in mind because it didn’t hurt at all. I splattered shave cream all over my body and hacked against my skin with a cheap razor. I bent over and made odd shapes trying to shave my hairy arse, but I ended up making it look all patchy and like a clown’s haircut. Afterwards, I dried myself down and dressed inside the toilet. This wasn’t my house after all.

     I had been living with a Venezuelan couple in their late 80s on Madison Street in Brooklyn. I moved to New York on a whim in late 2023 to try and find myself. Carlos was a pointy little man who put baby powder on his dick every night, explaining the dust on the toilet rim. I’d put money on the shit stains being his too. He whistled around the house like an openly gay prison warden looking for ass. He watched me cook and told me stories of when he was a gunner in the war. He said it was the perfect role because from all the way up in the sky, it was impossible to tell if he killed anyone or not. His eyes filled with blood as he held his hands together and rapped out ‘pew-pew-pew’.

    Maria, the poor woman who had to take care of this wiry little man, was a retired university professor who rarely stepped foot outside their room. She watched a lot of telenovelas on full volume, the sounds of overly acted arguments and cunty sad piano ballads always filling the house. When I did see her, she was always ill-stricken and looked very near death’s door. But truth be told, they looked after me, and we became a kind of fucked up family.

    New York was the height of my eating disorder, and it started to really take a toll on me physically. I had suffered the mental effects for a while before this, but the physical tiredness, my bones touching, my breath being short, and my stomach unable to break down food, meaning I ended up with chunks coming up as baby vomits, were all new additions.

    Early-stage eating disorders are hard to notice at first; you understand that something is wrong, but you don’t expect it to keep getting worse. At first, you just don’t eat as much as you did, but not enough for anyone to notice. You’ll stop having two biscuits with your tea and only have one. You know you’re making your stomach smaller, and that means you won’t be as hungry, and therefore you’ll get skinny. But it doesn’t feel like a bad thing until you notice it.

    But eventually, it catches up with you. I went days without eating a substantial meal, drinking black coffee whenever I could to fill me up. I lived off jelly sweets, pasta with no sauce, and a croissant. Eating disorders are funny because they allow you to feel okay with eating some things and make you feel sick to your stomach eating other things. I could eat sweets and pastries, and for some reason, it wouldn’t get to me, but I couldn’t stomach real food. People started to notice, and so I decided to tell people I was a vegetarian. That would buy me some time to keep it hidden. Meanwhile, my clothes started to hang loose off my body, and the bones of my ribcage started to pop out. I would eat meals and purge them back up, and I wasn’t getting better. Something had to change, and quickly. I was losing all my energy, and I desperately needed help.

    My sister and I were forced to drink health-kick smoothies every morning before school. Let’s be honest: that works great for two kids with early-stage eating disorders. I remember getting together as a family to watch VHS tapes of Billy Blanks’ revolutionary Tae-Bo workouts from the 90s. We would work out with my dad in the sitting room every day, and he would get us to do the splits against the corners of the room. He would push one of the dining room chairs up against my thighs and force the stretch as much as it could go.

             “Turn around, don’t let me see the tears,” he would yell.

    I faced the back wall, and I cried so much I wet the collar of my t-shirt. My sister was always stronger than me. I wiped the tears quickly with my sleeves, and I joined back in. My sister looked at the drips of tears in my eyes, and the wet of my collar. And I remember feeling like such a disappointment.

    My dad was hard on me, but he taught me how to be strong. At the time he didn’t know how badly I would need that strength, and how often my thick skin would come to save me. My dad made me a scrapper. He taught me how to bite, and how to draw blood.

             “Did you forget about me?,” my willy interrupts.

             “Not everything is about you,”I say.

    Everyone’s eating disorder can be different, but for me, I knew I was skinny, and being skinny made me feel desired, and it made me sexy. And to eat would be to lose all that magic. I was treating myself like an underage model in line to sleep with DiCaprio. He’d only have me if my belly looked like the curve of the letter C. Heave into me, Leo; you can take everything.

    My eating disorder made me feel like I was winning at something for once, and that was really fucking nice.

    In another life, my dad would have looked at me and said, ‘It’s okay to cry’ and maybe I would’ve told people sooner that I was sick. But he didn’t say that. I sometimes wonder if things would’ve been different. Or are our lives set out like storybooks, and either way, no matter what, even if the chapters are mixed up, eventually we end up on the same path, like that’s what’s meant to happen to us.

     I took the E train uptown to Queens. It was 11 pm, and the train car was loud and reminded me of a party bus. New Yorkers were always one inch away from getting into a fight. I was on my way to meet someone from a hook-up app. When I arrived at her place, it was dark, and the streets were busy. Food trucks were grilling burgers and dogs, and older women were dancing at the intersections. The energy was palpable and delicious. It made me perk up and want to join in with the festivities. That’s the beauty of New York; every day is a fireworks display of people who, despite their hardships, can’t help but smile and dance together. There’s a real sense of community, unlike anything I’ve known before.

    Her building was huge, and it reminded me of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. We climbed four flights of stairs, and she invited me inside. Her place was homely and cute, and she had a year-round Christmas tree in the corner of the living room.

             “We keep it up all year,” she pointed at it.

    She poured me a glass of water from her fancy Brita Filter, and I slugged it back, not knowing how thirsty I had gotten. She lured me into her room and showed me around. She had stuffed bears on the bed, and she made sure to tell me all of their names. She took off her top and leaned back against Henry the Teddy Bear’s head. She had pure white skin that seemed to almost sparkle in the bright light. She slipped off her pants, and she tugged at my neck and pushed me down, and between her knees. My heart started to race. Things were moving too fast, but I didn’t want to disappoint. I tried asking if we could slow down, but she just ignored me. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her hands were forcing heavily on the back of my head. I was. unable to move and my breath became short. I pushed against the weight of her fingers, and I sat on the edge of her bed in silence.

    She put her top back on and said that I should go and that she had work she had to do. I wanted to tell her how she made me feel and how she had forced me down on her. I put on my shoes, and I left without telling her any of that. On the train home, I cried, pushing my head between my knees so nobody would see.

    The nicotine patch that I had been holding down was peeling off, and underneath, my fibromyalgia rash was getting worse. I was covered in tears, and my belly was rumbling. So I did what any normal person would do in that situation. I walked for 4 hours on an empty stomach in the middle of a panic attack, and afterwards, I took a train home and forced myself to get sick into the toilet. I heaved out the acid lining of my emptied stomach. And look, it would be fun to lie, but this was my life, and it’s important that I tell ya that.

    Carlos insisted that he would cook a traditional Venezuelan feast tonight and that I had to join them! Their kids had travelled from Ohio, and he was excited to introduce me. I hadn’t had a real dinner with people like that in months, and so it made me nervous, but I said I would. Maybe it would be nice. He made Arepas, which were corn flour baps with ground beef and beans inside, but he made some with fish too, as he knew I didn’t eat meat. He made Guarapo, which was a sugarcane drink, which was very sweet but delicious. And we all sat down and said prayers and shared stories and food. It was nice, and for the first time in ages, I forgot about the eating disorder, and I just enjoyed the tastes of what I was eating. They all cheered for my success in the city and said that I would do great things, and I really felt welcomed and loved. Looking around the table that night, I realised how much I missed home, and I acknowledged that I had an illness that I needed to get on top of before it destroyed me.

    I took another bite of my food, knowing full well that I’d make myself get sick that evening.

    This is a picture of me from that time smiling enjoying my favourite coffee ever – Dunkin’. I miss it a lot and the one in London isn’t the same. Please look after yourself. Sending you all my love and hugs. It’s a tough world out there but it’s also the most magical and amazing gift of all- to be here and to be alive!

  • ALL WE DO IS CRY

    AUTHOR NOTE:

    I wrote this 4 years ago.I adapted this story into a TV pilot that BBC and LA Productions both really loved called ‘Children of Milk’. It’s something I’m very proud of, and a good introduction into the kinds of stuff I write. Maybe one day soon, you’ll see it on TV.

    There’s a petunia plant screaming in the middle of a rainforest and not one poor fuck knows where it is. I wonder if the plant cries when it’s alone, or does it just scream loudly like a toddler being pulled into a hurricane? The petunia is stuck in a pot of muck, destined to die, a poor dwindling mess.

    Aunt Maude (from the chip shop days: when you were little and used to squirt ketchup on your chips. You don’t like ketchup anymore) moves your hand from twelve to six and scowls at you. You try and concentrate on the road, but your eyes are so tired.

    You’ve been learning to drive for the past six years, but this is the first time you’ve properly said ‘I am getting that fucking license’, well this time and of course the first time when Philip Crusoe told you he’d wank you off if you had some wheels. But you were young then, and now you’re older.

    You swerve a left, perhaps too frivolously, but you stay sharp-eyed on the road. You say something like ‘I won’t do that on the test’ followed by one of those ‘obviously faces’ you always make followed by you saying ‘obviously’. You’re driving, and your hair furrows in the breeze of the open window, and Aunt Maude smiles.

    She looks proud of you, for once someone looks fucking proud of something that you’re doing. You think back to something someone once said about this feeling, but you can’t remember it word for word; it went something like, ‘Now I see you, well-done bitch, now keep driving’.

    The highroads are being painted, so you stay low on the ground-level roads. No high flying today. You stare up at the winding roads and at all the strange people painting the yellow lines on the black tar.

    Philip Crusoe was a good painter; he painted you naked one time. You were spread out on his single bed with coffee stains on the bed sheets. His eyes were potholes that you tripped in, and he watched your folds of fat swivel in a gay panic. You remember feeling free and also feeling trapped.

    “Pull over for gas maybe soon” she said.

    She gets out and sticks the pump in, and you wait, biting your fingernails. This aloneness feels like an old friend. You want to learn to drive, ‘Cus what else is there, like no jokes, no fucking about anymore, like seriously, what else is there?’ You wanted to be a fisherman when you were a kid, but you had never even gone fishing back then. You went with Uncle Tom last Summer, but he spent the whole time carving pinecones and telling you all about different sex positions you should be doing to lessen the chance of back pain.

    “You gotta try the Alternative Otter” he says.

    But, now that you are twenty-five, you just want to feel more normal, and the first step (you think) is learning how to drive. Imagine the possibilities, the freedoms, the open roads. You could go anywhere. Why the fuck are you still here, in this place, feeling like a sausage covered in mustard being thrown into a soggy bin bag. Does this ever get easier?

    Aunt Maude slurps at the bottom of her empty can of worms as you turn the gear into reverse. You want to say ‘I think it’s gone’ but you stay silent. You nail the parking, and she gives you that same look, she’s proud of you, parking is hard. You open your door, and you step out and she crosses over and gets into the driver’s seat.


    It’s silent for the drive home. She knows you don’t want to go back there, so she takes the long way. When she takes the third exit past the second butcher shop, you smile because she knows, and you know, and you both know. And it’s just so nice when you both know, you know? She pulls into your drive.


    “You did well today” she smiles wide.

    You want to tell her everything, like fucking everything, like pin me down to hell itself, because I’m gonna be here a while. You want to explode, like an atomic fucking thing. You want to tell her about your body and how it hurts when you look at it. How you have convinced yourself that your eyes are silly mirrors. You want to tell her that you have been hearing a voice inside of your body and that most people hear the voices in their heads- but not you.


    When you open the door, it’s super quiet, and you take a breath, as if to say, ‘This won’t last. ’ You creep up the stairs, and you collapse into your bed, and you pretend that you’re miles away from every little thing. This is the same room where you promised yourself you would be something. It was here on this bed that you would stay up all night and say ‘I’m gonna leave this town’ over and over in your head.

    One day, you will drive wherever you want to go, everything will be better, and you will finally be happy.

    But life feels like this: A milkman drops bottles outside your door, but they forget to ring the bell, so they curdle in the heat. And by the time you get to them, they are all sour and warm. You open one and you supple at the tip. It’s gloopy and roasting hot. But you drink the whole thing anyway, and afterward, you puke into the toilet bowl. You rinse your mouth and behold that same face in the mirror.

    “Why did you drink it?” she says

    You want to say ‘I drank it so I’d feel more alive than this dreaded nothingness I feel inside me twenty-four seven’, but you don’t say anything.

    The highroads are open today and you look at her old wrinkled face and you have that ‘well, like fuck, shall we? ‘look and she winks at you with her ‘Oh, so you think you’re ready?’ face.

    “All right, but be careful,” she says

    You start ascending. The breeze is churning through the open window, and it gets colder and colder. When you get to the top, you look down at the specks of cars. ‘That was once you‘, you think to yourself. You close your eyes, and you feel the skidding of the wheels. You take your hands off the wheel, and you feel like you’re flying. She leans over and squishes your foot on the accelerator.

    “What the fuck was that?”

    You don’t know what to say. Something felt right when you were propelling backward toward the edge. You have never had a suicidal thought before, and while you take the next turn and start your descent, you try and figure out if this counts or not.

    This time she takes a short way home, and when you open the door she pulls off coldly. You don’t blame her, you understand.

    Before the test starts, you wipe your eyebrow with your crinkled shirt sleeve. The instructor is a skinny thing with blue eyes and a melting nose. He looks at you, pale white skin, and he gestures with his index, and you start the engine. You try to calm your anxiety by thinking of anything but this. You clear your mind from any colour. It’s just you and the road. Red light: stop. Speed Limit: Maintain. Pedestrian: Smile and don’t knock over.

    He points up at the high road and grins. You take a breath, heavy and with restraint. You can do this. The car drags up the road, and when you’re at the top, he looks impressed. You try and ignore his note-taking; it’s probably just doodles of old-school crushes boobs. You focus on the road. Suddenly, and before you know it, you’re back in the testing facility. You’ve done it.

    The water’s burning your back. You squirt some shampoo on your dick and you start lathering. The bubbly foam seeps into the opening and your eyes burn like fucking hell on fire. This damned glory bursts your soul into new things – if you could see your insides now, you’d fucking bawl your little stupid eyes out. You turn and grab the shower head, forcing it against your slug penis.

    You piss into the toilet after the attempted shower. And the shampoo makes your pee look bubbly. And it stings. But you clench your teeth and thank the lord above that you’re here and feeling it. You think about the time he ripped the skin off your dick with his stud piercing. And how the pool of blood made you faint, and when you woke up, the doctor was laughing at you, and he said:


    “Cat bite your dick?”


    And you didn’t find his joke funny but you laughed anyway because this was the fool who had to put your peter-pan back together.

    You remember his huge hands and his odd ways. The way he would say ‘seriously’ like ‘sersly’ and the way he would grind his teeth at night, and the way his mam would always text you funny pictures, and his dad’s bowel cancer. You wonder if his dad survived. For a moment, you hope he didn’t, but then you feel bad, and you do that thing in your head where you say ‘I didn’t mean that, that was stupid’ and you don’t ever think of it again.

    How he grabbed your body and hurled you in circles like a sad ride with every seat empty. The way he pushed you up against the walls. The way he looked into your eyes was like he was peeking into the microwave to see if his hot pocket was done.

    And in the reflection of his eyes, you see your cracks and the open wounds. You squeezed his hand, and you laughed out of nervousness and because you needed the silence to stop, or maybe you just wanted to let him know that even though you were just two people after many glasses of wine, you liked him.

    So, with your mind like a fire and your chest full of scratches, you leaned closer to him- knowing too well that this wasn’t love. This was destruction. It’s all you ever knew..

    One day, I’ll go far from this place and never come back. I swear it.