Drink Me (6)

Down he goes. Not hard, but with the unexpected grace of a tall building demolished by experts. The drug in his bloodstream smiles, using his muscles, his lips, pulling him on like a disguise, sleek and pretty. Sometimes, he’s nothing but pain, but not now. Now he inhales deeply, and sighs aloud, as if launching […]

Cusp (5)

Vampires feed on blood. I feed on disquiet and decision, on rage and regret. On the decisive moment and the slow flowing syrup of bitter aftermath.  These days, I maintain a strict rule not to trigger it, but if it falls in my lap, lover, you cannot blame me for the pleasure I take in […]

reSade / T-Shit (4)

I’m going to fuck you, naked but for this artfully ruined t-shirt made in Bangladesh, holed and torn by an exhausted, bony, dead-eyed worker in a Chinese megafactory who is following the pattern of destruction to the millimeter; each hole specified by a smug cunt in a leather chair and designerly geek-glasses in a minimalist […]

Time stops at 4:35 (3)

On a morning like this, a bruised dawn, fat with rain and murmurs of far off thunder, the air is dense with spent showers. In a garden at the far end of a forty-year lane with sand instead of grass and soft white seastones marking the lines between walking paths and growing places. Snails, their […]

Light Eater (2)

He stands on the old clawfoot bathtub’s rim, towering above her. His camera lens aimed into the soup of her.  Strands of her hair undulate in the water; her face and breasts breach the surface. She’s a mermaid with almond eyes that sparkle through the vapour.  Droplets flare on her skin. Her obscene lips parted […]

A Good Woman (1)

He is dangerous. I can smell the push-me-pull-you chaos rising off him like curls of steam. He invites you in with his sharp, white teeth and all the time you’re falling, you know it’s going to hurt when you hit the bottom and wake up to find you’re lying face first in the polluted soil […]

Monster

There’s a special secret sin to desiring an ugly man. I don’t mean someone mediocre with a few too many pounds around the middle. I mean someone truly ugly. Bones that refuse the grace of symmetry. Skin ravaged by early acne or one of those fevers one hardly ever hears of any more. Or scars […]

On Love

There is a kind of love that drags itself, gut-shot and with two broken legs towards death.  It has no pride, or shame, or sense of self. It refuses all other loyalties, all other promises and obligations. There is nothing pretty about this kind of love. It turns those of us who have felt it […]

Ceci n’est pas un Homme

I have long admired D’s writing over at “Written In Pencil,” and most especially his written portraits of people he has known. Usually, I try to incorporate the people I get to know into my fiction somehow, but I don’t know the man in the portrait I want to offer you. I’ve only ‘read’ him […]

What the Bones Said

The tiny white pill tugs at my willpower. Knows the ripe and tender spot, the toothed indents where it has lodged so many times before.  Beneath the overhang of illusions, in the wet and reeking hollows, where the light of reason fears to go. “Sleep,” it says.  “Sleep and ache no more.” An irresistible invitation […]