I was talking to you and not paying attention.

Whenever I am not paying attention, I do strange things.

This time, without realising it, I had lifted the inkpot to my lips as if it were a bottle of perfume.

You frowned.

I did not understand why.

I kept talking.

You took my hand and said:

That is an inkpot.

If you bring it any closer, you’ll stain your lips with ink.

I panicked.

I put it down.

I did not even know what it was.

When I got home, there was a mark on the palm of my hand.

It looked like a continent,

or a stone,

or perhaps some kind of sea creature.

I washed it.

It did not come off.

Nothing I did made any difference.

I called and asked.

You said:

It does not come off.

It only fades with time.

There was a party that evening.

With that ugly stain in the middle of my palm, I could hardly bear to show up.

I had to wear gloves.

At first I put on white ones, but the stain bled through.

So I had to wear black.

That party was a nightmare.

The stain had left its trace everywhere:

on the palms of the people I had shaken hands with,

on the table,

on the glass,

on the cake stand.

I was not supposed to use that hand, and that only made the torment worse.

Keeping it still left me practically helpless.

I called again.

You said:

It should have gone by now.

But the stain was still there.

Alive. Unmistakable.

Even on my phone.

Even on the palm of the hand that had never touched the inkpot.

Even on my lips.

Perhaps on yours too.

It was 4:58 after midnight.

A whistle was coming from somewhere indistinct.

A sour smell, like vinegar, stung my nose. I woke.

My eyes and nose were burning badly, and inside my head it was as though someone were beating a drum as loudly as they could.

The damned orange ants were upon me.

Slapping at myself and rubbing my eyes, I ran to the bathroom.

Everything around me seemed split into two images, slightly apart from each other.

Still dressed, I stepped under the cold shower.

I wished I had sprayed myself with insecticide first.

The ants fell with the water onto the bathroom tiles. Others still clung between strands of my hair.

I drew water into my nose and forced it back out, the way I used to when I had a nosebleed and had to wash the blood away.

Ants came out.

Small clots of blood came with them.

My stomach churned.

The room spun.

It felt as though I had been riding a swing, or a fairground wheel turning too fast, for hours.

I vomited.

Orange ants and small red clots of blood lay in the green acidic liquid across the white bathroom tiles.

The drum was still pounding inside my head.

I stood in front of the mirror and tilted my head back.

My eyes, lips, and nose were swollen.

I looked like a child who had thrown a stone at a wasp’s nest.

The corners of my mouth and the sides of my nostrils had turned a sharp pink and burned fiercely.

So did the spaces between my fingers and toes.

Water dripped from my clothes onto the carpet.

The drum inside my head.

The whistle from nowhere.

The old spider was spinning her web as always.

She did not even look at me.

She had begun spinning it many years ago. I could not remember exactly when.

Perhaps before I fell in love.

Perhaps even earlier—

before she did.

Her motto was simple:

My house.

My rules.

My word.

Perhaps the ants had come because of the dream.

Had it been a dream?

Had I been awake?

I had been eating a sweet fruit, something like a grape.

Heart-shaped.

A little larger than a cherry.

Its pits tasted of cardamom.

Perhaps it had been a dream.

But dreams have no smell.

No taste.

Then her voice came.

“What’s wrong?”

That was all I needed.

The drum inside my head was not enough. Now I had to answer her too.

Of everything that had once been her, only the voice remained.

I wanted to say,

“None of your business.”

But my throat seemed to be on fire, and my voice burned before it could escape.

Terror took hold of me.

What if the ants had already reached my brain?

What if they were inside it?

Like the man in scripture.

He smashed his head against the wall until he died.

Again her voice came.

“What’s wrong?”

I became furious.

How was I supposed to make her understand?

You are dead.

And I ate you because I loved you.

I ate you because I wanted all of you for myself.

I wished I could have exchanged your heart, your lungs, your brain for mine.

But I could not.

Eating you was the only way left to reach you.

You would become part of me.

Flowing through my veins, my blood, my bones.

Where you belonged.

There had been two days left.

Only two days until our wedding when I lost her.

A rainy day.

A black car.

Four dead.

One injured.

They thought I would go mad.

I did not.

I did not shed a single tear.

I even tried to comfort her mother and father.

That night, I opened her grave.

She was mine.

Why give her to the soil to rot?

A dog barked somewhere far away.

A shadow moved behind the trees.

I seized him by the collar.

The grave-warden.

His voice shook.

“In an empty grave, dogs piss.”

“It won’t stay empty,” I said.

He tried to run.

The pickaxe silenced his scream in his throat.

When I lowered him into her grave, his bladder let go.

In the empty grave, a dog pissed.

The wind carried away the bloodied cotton.

The rain began again.

I was hungry.

Thirsty.

Afraid.

I drank red wine all the way home. Red.

The more I drank, the thirstier I became.

I roasted pieces of her.

They smelled like roast pork.

They tasted like pork.

I thought of the prophet who had forbidden it.

I could eat him too. His god as well.

I ate her.

Piece by piece.

Every part of her.

I even ate her bones.

And I defeated death.

I laughed.

I drank.

I raised a toast to the health of my loneliness,

and to the old spider, cursing through the web she spun:

My house.

My rules.

My word.

The whistle came again from somewhere indistinct.

Louder than crickets.

Lower than the drum inside my skull.

My vision blurred further.

Sleep.

Pain.

Shivering.

And the fear that the ants would come back.

They must not come near me.

They must not eat me.

They must not scatter my pieces into a thousand places and carry me farther away from her.

She had gone far enough already.

Sometimes I still hear her murmuring.

That is all that remains of her.

Whispers made of no earthly words.

Sometimes she speaks to me. Sometimes.

It feels as though her heart is no longer with me.

I locked the door.

The spider read scripture for more flies.

I sprayed insecticide everywhere I could think of.

The drum pounds inside my head.

“What’s wrong?”

The whistle from somewhere indistinct.

My house.

My rules.

My word.

Amen.

The ticking of the clock.

4:58 after midnight.

Inside my veins, the ants are walking.

Running.

Overtaking one another.

Clashing their antennae.

Damn them.

They must not go near her.

No. No, not her.

I mated with the bougainvillea.

In this mating, no sexual organs played a part, nor was there any flush of arousal. There was grief, and longing.

I placed the bare sole of my foot on the damp soil of the garden bed. Green veins emerged from the sole, entered the earth, and joined the tips of the tree’s roots.

A strange coldness and numbness came over my foot, and through my body, an infinite emptiness.

I said: This foot will never be a foot again. Wherever I go, I will have to drag it behind me like a dry stump.

It was as though a thin white root had entered my heart. It was cold and sharp, like a sliver of moonlight passing through the dense branches of a cypress.

The tree began to flower.

Its blossoms resembled the Oni masks—the demon masks worn during the Japanese Mamemaki ritual. Masks of rage. Wrathful blossoms lashing in the wind.

I heard someone breathing behind me.

I knew it was you.

I closed my eyes and held myself tighter.

Your hands crept around me. They were icy, made of tiny, rough scales.

I curled further into myself.

The wrathful blossoms rang in the wind, as though a thousand rattlesnakes were sounding their warning:

Hissssss.

Do not come near.

Your hands crept around my shoulders.

The thin white root had now crawled into my temple.

It began to throb.

The wind blew cold.

The dream of a cypress tree sighed.

And suddenly, you became hollow.

Like a clay statue, you cracked. You broke at the waist, and your earthen fragments fell into the damp garden bed.

The blossoms with their furious faces dropped from the tree. They rushed towards the shattered pieces of you and covered them.

The wet earth was filled with angry Oni masks.

And then the cicadas began to sing.

As though every broken shard of your clay body had become a cicada.

Slowly, I turned around.

The sole of my foot was light.

As though I no longer had a foot.

I could no longer feel the white root in my temple or in my heart.

Only your legs remained—or what remained of the lower half of you—turning like a compass around itself.

One leg fixed.

The other in endless motion,

drawing a circle.

A circle like the face of a clock,

and from its seconds, small grey moths,

hungry,

flew towards the sun.

The room was filled with electric-blue light.

Someone was touching my face lovingly.

His fingers slid across my skin, and with every caress, I grew colder.

He kissed me.

Pleasure and fear rushed through me at the same time. It was like kissing a blueberry. His breath was fragrant but cold—slightly tart, with a bittersweet aftertaste.

He was murmuring something under his breath.

I didn’t recognise his voice.

It wasn’t earthly.

But I understood it.

I pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want him to know I was awake.

He was slow with me. Not hurried. Not even violent. As though my stillness were permission.

His body was muscular, but he looked as though his feathers had fallen out.

He looked like one of those beautiful drifters with an addiction—people who still carry something of their old beauty, but seem to sleep at night in places where God cannot see them.

Old scars marked his broad thighs. His shoulders and arms, too.

He had pulled my underwear halfway down.

The blue light in the room grew stronger.

It was on the walls.
On his hands.
On my face.

It was as though he wasn’t entirely in the room. He moved between this room and somewhere I couldn’t see.

I didn’t know why I wasn’t moving. Perhaps I couldn’t. Perhaps if I moved, he would realise I was awake.

When he tried to lie down beside me, I reached for the cross around my neck.

The cross was there.

With my mouth twisted and a voice I could barely force out, I said:

“God, do you know him?”

The creature stopped.

For the first time, he seemed to have heard something he was never meant to hear.

His muffled voice rose in anger.

At that very moment, the sound of a motorbike echoed along the road.

The blue lights went out.

I woke up.

The room was dark.

The sound of the motorbike was fading into the distance.

My hand was still at my neck.

There was no cross there.

I stayed like that for a while.

Then I lowered my hand.

My underwear was halfway down.

They had shelled the bank.

People lay scattered here and there across the ground. I could not tell which of them were dead and which were still alive.

We were hungry.

We were looking for food.

Shreds of paper and dust were still suspended in the air.

There was no bread in anyone’s bags or bundles.

Once, in a woman’s blood-soaked basket, I thought I saw a loaf.

But it was not bread.

Only a piece of cloth folded to look like bread.

We were hungry, and it made no difference to us whether the bread was clean or covered in blood.

My older brother went inside the bank.

He came back and said the safe was locked.

There was no money.

Even if there had been, it was no use to us.

Through the dust, I saw a boy standing perfectly still, staring at something in front of him.

He did not even blink.

He looked like one of those dolls in shop windows, dressed up and put on display.

One of his hands hung somewhere between his mouth and his stomach.

In it was a lollipop.

I walked toward him slowly.

He did not look at me.

He really did look like a doll.

But he was breathing.

I ran my tongue over his lollipop.

It was as if a bomb exploded in my mouth.

My stomach began to growl, and a pleasant ache seized the sides of my jaw.

Saliva flooded my mouth.

Sweetness ran from the tip of my tongue to the tips of my toes like a singing current.

Forgotten tastes came back to me, one by one, as though they had been hiding under the rubble.

Milk.

Cream.

Strawberries.

Sugar.

Blood.

I tried to take the lollipop from his hand.

His fingers were locked around the stick.

My brother called out,

“There’s nothing here for us. Hurry!”

I left the boy and his lollipop on tiptoe.

I felt as though I were flying.

The boy was still staring at what lay in front of him—

twisted, shapeless pieces of flesh that had once been called human.

Slowly, the boy disappeared into the dust, the smoke, and the scraps of paper twisting through the air.

The half-ruined bank.

The road.

The noise all around us.

The pounding of feet running this way and that.

Something had awakened in my mouth.

The flavours were in an uproar.

One by one, I remembered them.

Milk.

Sugar.

Strawberries.

Cream.

And blood.

“At least turn on the light,” I said. “Let the plant believe there is still light.”

He did not answer.

I went into the kitchen and hit the switch.

The bulb flickered on.

The poor pot was hunched in a corner.

Almost all its shoots had turned black, except for one plant with four narcissus-like stems.

Pale green, they looked back at me.

I gathered the pot into my arms.

We had to go.

Outside.

Into the sun, the light, the fresh air.

We had to forget the sorrow of the blackened shoots, and the narcissus stems would grow dark green again.

I was in a hurry.

We had to go.

The pot slipped from my hands beside his feet.

It shattered.

The sound was sharp.

As though my skull had shattered.

Soil spread across the floor.

The stems scattered.

He did not move.

“Bring me something,” I said. “A bowl. Something I can carry the soil and the plants in.”

No answer.

“What am I supposed to do, then? Pour it into my blouse?”

Silence again.

Angrily, I gathered the soil and the plants into the fold of my blouse.

I went to the door.

Outside, the sun was shining.

There was no trace of darkness, damp, mustiness, or that poisoned air.

I knelt and began separating the blackened shoots from the narcissus-like stems.

The crushed black shoots soiled my hands.

More carefully now, I unbuttoned my blouse.

I pushed aside some of the damp, sticky soil and moved the narcissus stems gently, looking for their roots.

They were in my navel.

My stomach tightened and went cold.

I tried to pull the plant free.

Pain rose through me.

The roots held.

I could feel them climbing.

Up.

Toward my throat.

Farther.

Into my head.

Behind my eyes.

Grey and cream-coloured roots.

Full of longing.

Full of images.

The four stems had turned dark green.

They had flowered.

At the end of each stem, a small hundred-petalled narcissus shone in the sunlight.

I breathed.

The sun was breathing in my lungs.

My chest longed to drink from that endless blue.

My body grew lighter.

Clear.

Transparent, like clean air.

Cool air flowed between my fingers.

The scent of narcissus ran madly through my veins.

I touched the four stems.

I had to choose names for them.

I turned toward the doorway.

He was there.

Farther than before.

I wanted to ask him what he thought.

I called his name.

My voice sounded strange to me.

Bright.

I called him again.

He did not answer.

Then, without looking at me,

he turned his face away.

We were lost in an endless purgatory.

The sun was painfully bright, and sullen men stood along the borders of the land of the living, keeping us from going back.

There was no water.

In the shadow of a burning ruin lay a cracked green jug. A wrinkled, angry snake had made its home inside it. Its hissing was enough to kill even the thought of going near.

My feverish palms wanted the jug.

Reason did not.

We moved through the mud-brick ruins of an abandoned village. People wandered among them, slipping this way and that.

There was no water.

But there was the smell of bread.

I knew there was a baker somewhere.

No one ever saw him.

He gathered thorns and fed them into an earthen oven, and from them he baked bread.

Bread that never grew cold.

Bread that never took hunger away.

He gave a piece to everyone.

The wandering shadows moved through the ruins.

Feverish shadows.

Trembling shadows.

Like a fevered mirage in an endless purgatory.

Ahead, a child lay on the ground, wailing.

His hands were full of thorns.

No one stopped.

“Why doesn’t anyone help him?” I shouted.

A man turned.

The sun was lodged between my eyes.

In the middle of my skull.

It seemed several times too large, its painful light keeping me from making out the lines of his face.

Everyone looked like a shadow.

“His mother was trying to smuggle him across the border,” he said. “Back to the other side. He fell from her arms during the chase.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was finished.”

I looked at the child.

“Why doesn’t anyone—”

The man looked at me.

“If you feel that sorry for him, help him yourself.”

I went closer.

The child reached towards me, his thorn-filled hands trembling.

I reached back.

There was no child.

Only a small thorn bush bending in the heat.

The hot wind moved through its weak branches.

There was a sound like sobbing.

From one of its thinnest stems hung a piece of bread.

Still warm.

Bread that never grew cold.

Bread that never filled a stomach.

I stood there.

My hands empty.

The smell did not leave.

We were coming back from the cemetery when she suddenly appeared in front of me.

I don’t know how it happened. I lost control and ran into her.

Mother’s eyes widened.

The witch-woman’s staff fell from her hand with a strange, wet clatter. She caught hold of me before I fell.

Mother came closer and picked up the staff.

It was short, hung with several small skulls.

“A rainstick,” she said to herself.

The witch-woman whispered,

“Recognise it?”

Mother said nothing.

Her silence was full of disgust. No one could break Mother’s silence when it became like that.

The witch-woman limped back toward the cemetery.

Mother gripped my hand harder and hurried me toward the house.

In the courtyard, my brothers were whispering to one another.

Father was tending the young trees in the inner courtyard. With all his size and presence, he was kneeling before the little saplings, filling a white pot with soil.

It was a strange sight.

Mother hurried past, trying not to cross his path.

It was as though Father had eyes in the back of his head.

Without turning, he said quietly,

“Go skin the chickens.”

Mother returned to that same disgusted silence and went straight to the kitchen.

Two of my other mothers were skinning chickens.

Their hands were red with blood.

One was pulling out the entrails. The other was slowly peeling the skin from a rooster, slipping a fine knife underneath wherever the skin refused to come away.

Two servant women stirred the boiling rice-water and moved between the firewood, the salt, and the soaked rice.

When Mother and I entered, everyone stopped for a moment.

They lowered their eyes so they would not meet hers.

The eldest mother, the salt-and-pepper-haired one, said to me,

“Go on, my flower. A man doesn’t belong in the kitchen.”

I held on to Mother’s skirt.

She pulled it quickly from my hand.

“Go play in the courtyard.”

The middle mother, the mother of my sisters, gave me her usual cold, frozen look.

She was like a pink snake that smelled of ginger.

Outside, each of my brothers had found something to do.

Sami‘ was shaving a forked piece of wood into a slingshot. One brother was talking to my two younger sisters. Another was helping Father. The other two, as usual, had gone to the pigeon house.

I could hear wings beating and the boys whistling to the birds.

“Tomorrow you won’t take the school car,” Father said. “A few streets up, Abbas’s father will come for you.”

Why wouldn’t Father look at me today?

Usually, whenever he saw me, he lifted me and threw me into the air.

But today—

He turned toward Sami‘, my eldest brother.

“Nanna is late. Go find her.”

I deliberately stepped into Father’s line of sight.

He saw me.

For a moment, his eyes smiled. His thick dark eyebrows, joined in the middle and drawn into a frown, lifted.

“Take this one too.”

Sami‘ put the forked piece of wood into his pocket and took my hand.

We started back toward the cemetery.

Father called the witch Nanna.

On the way, Sami‘ said,

“It’s going to be a magnificent slingshot. Mulberry wood. Osman was pruning today, so I asked him to saw off a branch for me.”

Just to have something to say, I asked,

“Will you make one for me too?”

His sharp voice softened.

He stroked my head, took the forked wood from his pocket, and handed it to me.

“Here. This one’s yours. I’ll make another.”

It was impossible to ask Sami‘ for something and hear him say no.

I never understood why my other brothers did not spend much time with him.

Sami‘ was the eldest.

He beat all of them if they did not listen to him.

At the cemetery, Nanna was leaning against the tamarisk.

The tree was called Pir Baba.

It had been planted inside our family enclosure, and its roots had gone down through the graves of twelve generations of our dead.

It was so large that its shade covered the whole family graveyard.

Nanna leaned against Pir Baba, whispering to a man made of smoke.

The smoky man was thin, weak, trembling. One side of him seemed to run into Nanna’s staff.

The dusk trembled through his body.

Sami‘ stepped behind me.

His fingers dug into my shoulders.

I tried to pull away.

Nanna noticed us.

She looked in our direction.

The trembling face turned toward us too and gave us a sad look.

Then it began to fade.

Fainter.

Fainter.

Until the dusk behind it could be seen without trembling.

Nanna picked up her rainstick.

As though she could not see us, she said,

“Tell your father to come tonight. A few fresh graves are needed around here.”

Then she walked away, striking the ground with her stick.

We gave Father her message.

“However many there are,” he said, “tomorrow we dig.”

My brothers were talking among themselves, frightened.

They said a man in bloodstained clothes had arrived at the guesthouse.

Father was heading there.

I quietly followed him.

His strides were long, and soon he was far ahead.

By the time I reached the guesthouse, no one stopped me.

Sometimes, when government men came, the servants would keep me away. They would promise me things—a bicycle ride, a donkey ride—anything to make me leave.

Not tonight.

Inside sat a man with a huge moustache.

Each of his legs seemed as large as two watermelons.

His clothes looked stiff with starch. Dark red stains covered the sleeves and collar, and another ran from his chest down toward the hem.

Whenever he moved, the cloth rasped.

I thought his trousers were stained red too.

The man saw me.

“Hyder Khan’s grandchild?”

Father cut in.

“Hyder Khan.”

The man finally looked away from me.

Father said,

“Before sunrise, we begin the hunt.”

“What are we hunting?” I asked.

The bloodstained man answered without hesitation.

“Chickens.”

In the morning, we all set out for school.

The boys walked ahead and the girls behind.

Not even a sparrow moved in the alleys.

From somewhere far away came the song of a Nowruzak bird. A field must have been freshly turned twice by a tractor.

Father’s servants stood here and there along the streets.

Silent.

Sullen.

At the upper side alley, in the darkness, the bloodstained man was standing.

Something hung from his waist.

A sword, perhaps.

Or a long cleaver.

My brothers hurried on.

Sami‘ said,

“I wish I were with them.”

Farther up the street, I felt as though the houses crouched in the shadows were watching us suspiciously.

Even Mehran’s half-finished house, with its marble steps and tiled front, no longer smiled at us.

Someone ran quickly upstairs.

I think it was Mehran.

His mother appeared at the window.

When she saw us, she immediately withdrew into the shadow behind it.

A little farther on, Abbas’s father was waiting.

When we reached school, the principal’s eyes were unusually wide.

He could not keep still.

He paced back and forth across the yard.

The supervisor was nowhere to be seen.

When the final bell rang, everyone ran.

But they were not happy.

They tried to pass us without touching us.

Only Sami‘ laughed as usual.

My sisters kept their eyes mostly on the ground.

My other brothers moved around between me and Sami‘, looking ahead, then behind.

At the mouth of our alley, the mullah was smoking his pipe.

Sami‘ asked,

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for the gravedigger.”

“You haven’t said the funeral prayers?”

“No.”

“How many?”

The mullah looked at us through his thick magnifying spectacles.

He was trying to keep his voice from trembling.

For a moment, his stare reminded me of the bloodstained man from the night before.

“Eleven.”

Sami‘ asked,

“The twins’ father?”

“The twins’ father,” the mullah said. “And Ustad Nasir.”

I was glad when I heard Ustad Nasir’s name.

He was always trying to find some excuse to hit me, even though he was not my teacher.

We ran toward home.

Nanna was coming down the alley.

Her rainstick struck the ground.

That strange wet clatter again.

Closer.

Closer.

We passed her carefully.

There seemed to be new skulls hanging from her staff.

Small ones.

Chicken skulls.

The First Day of Freedom

It was the eleventh of June. A Thursday in 2026. The first day of freedom.

It was a little frightening. But now that it is evening, I feel happy. Or at least something close to happiness.

Strange things happened that day.

When I woke, a piece by Ólafur Arnalds that had sprawled across my dreams all night was still turning in my ears. A little depressed. A little disgusted. A little tired. A little nothing.

I blocked you.

Without tears. Without trembling. Without grandeur.

I simply said to myself: if you want to come, you know the way. You know the address too. And I know very well that you will not get lost. A man that tall, with a beard like that, does not get lost in the world. He only sometimes loses himself.

I went out to collect a parcel. I had ordered hair dye. The first of my life.

It was only shampoo, of course. I have not yet reached the stage of madness required to bleach my own hair.

If I tell you what colour it was, you will laugh. Julien did. My sister did too. You would have laughed as well.

Purple.

Yes. Purple.

The favourite colour of homeless people, old women, and saints tired of life.

But I like purple. What does it matter who else likes it? I like it too. That is all.

Stranger than my love of purple hair was running into you in that bitter rain.

You were walking towards me. I was walking towards you.

I was wearing a yellow Easter Chicken T-shirt. Since the sun clearly had no intention of showing up, I decided I would be the sun myself. White-and-red shoes, sky-blue shorts, a blue-glass gothic cross, and a dark mustard raincoat. A small riot of colours.

You were sad. Without light. As if someone had drained all the brightness from your face and handed back only the shell.

I know your sad face. Damn it, I once loved you.

This time, everything you wore was dark. Your shoulders had fallen. So had your cheeks.

You looked like chocolate ice cream on a sunny day in an impatient child’s hand.

My heart ached.

One of those noble aches that humiliate you.

I did not want to see you so sad. You once loved me too. Or at least you loved something in me close enough to love to ruin a person.

The cat inside me gathered me in. It did not let me stop in front of you, did not let me kiss the tip of your nose with my finger, did not let that old stupidity rise out of my mouth again and call itself kindness.

I came home.

I still think of you. And of those amber-green eyes that no longer burn.

But you are staying blocked.

You know the road back well. If you want to come, you will. If you do not, nothing will move you.

Stranger still, the first song on my playlist was the same one I had been dreaming all night:

Back to the Sky by Ólafur Arnalds

And on the first day of freedom, with my purple hair still sealed inside a parcel, in the rain, after seeing you so sad, I understood for the first time that a person can, at the same time, feel her heart ache, be happy, and with her own hand close the road back.

Mr Earthquake

Do you know why I still write to you?

Because you arrived like an earthquake

and ruined something

that had been standing well enough without you.

I had someone.

He loved me

as much as he knew how.

It was not good.

It was often awful.

But awful, it turns out,

is still warmer than nothing.

I even miss the way he rolled his joints.

Not mine.

I never learned.

Then you appeared

and shifted the whole order of my life.

Now I cannot picture anyone.

That frightens me

more than I like to admit.

I am not drawn to anyone.

And I still cannot swallow

the way you treated me.

It sits there.

Unresolved.

Like something left in a room

I keep entering,

even though I know

exactly what waits for me inside.

That is the damage.

You do not even have to admit it.

Perhaps that is the strangest part.

Destruction does not always arrive

wearing ugliness,

or violence,

or hate.

Sometimes it comes

looking like beauty,

sounding like kindness,

answering to the name

we so confidently call love.

Adios.

Ciao.

Mr Earthquake.

And somehow I still have not worked out

how not to hate you

with a devotion

that feels dangerously close to love.

Acceptance of Thirst

I’ll admit it:

I wasn’t a good lover—

though I believed I was.

I was deleting old messages and photographs

when I came across one line from you:

“I’m definitely yours if you want me.”

I did.

But you never became mine.

That is still where it burns.

I was thirsty.

I lay in the spring of your body

and did not taste a single drop.

I wanted to grow thirstier—

for your body,

for your presence—

and that thirst was too much for you.

And I was at fault too.

You wanted silence between us,

and I spoke.

I thought words might reach you.

Instead,

I kept putting them there

where silence should have been.

So here I am,

still carrying the aftertaste

of a spring that would not let me drink.

Perhaps you did become mine,

in the only way you meant it.

Now I find you everywhere—

even in the dark behind my eyelids.

Angel of Peace

I ran from the Peace Statue to the runners.

By the time I reached you,

I was breathless.

You kissed me—

deep,

as always,

as though such things were meant to last.

You would twist the ends of your moustache

with that calm of yours,

then pull me into those deep kisses.

What little breath I had left,

I lost.

I remember wishing

I had not run so much.

I told myself

these kisses would last forever.

Then I pulled away for air

and, flirting,

tried to leave you wanting more.

I leaned back.

What did I know?

I had watched too many ridiculous Instagram clips.

Be sexy.

Be distant.

Be safe.

Be independent.

Be a thousand other damned things.

I became all of them.

I wish I had become myself instead.

At twenty-four,

with my breath still broken

and my cheeks flushed,

we walked towards the sea.

I wanted to bathe in it.

You refused.

We walked through a river of silence—

you already inside it,

while I somehow stayed above the water.

I bought a milkshake.

You only wanted Fanta.

That day of being twenty-four

tasted of sunlight.

Of broken breaths.

Of a double-cream milkshake.

Of your heavy footsteps.

Of you letting go of my hand

in the middle of the road.

Of you leaving.

Three years have passed since then.

Whenever anyone asks my age,

I say thirty.

I know I am twenty-seven.

It is not enough.

I wish I could say forty,

fifty,

sixty,

a hundred.

Some part of me remained there,

inside the broken breaths of twenty-four,

still wanting

that depth of kiss again.

Now every night

I pass the Angel of Peace.

I pass the runners held in the air—

grey,

dull,

tired.

Sometimes a drunk shouts abuse at me.

Sometimes a teenager screams for attention.

I am too tired for the drunk,

too tired for the teenager,

too tired for the relentless howling of the wind

through the Angel of Peace’s empty wings.

I only want us

to walk through those waves again.

Even if you let go of my hand

again.

The Number I Still Carry

It has been a year since you left.

A year ago, your last message was this:

“I’m sorry, Bella. I couldn’t match the weight of loving you.

I urge you, please delete my number.”

A year has passed.

I do not know how—

only that it did.

I did not think I would make it through.

I did.

I did what you asked.

I deleted your number.

And still—damn it—I carry it.

Without permission.

Like a splinter the skin refuses to push out.

So here is my toast—

quietly,

without applause—

to life,

to repetition,

to this stubborn routine

that keeps dragging me into tomorrow.

Today a classmate asked me,

“What will you do?”

The same question my heart asked all year,

while my eyes answered in silence.

This time, I answered:

I will go on.

With my heart or without.

I will make something of what is left.

Not as revenge.

Not as proof.

Only because I have nothing left to lose—

and I am tired of losing.

I fell.

It was not my first time.

Tears dry.

Pain learns your address.

You pretend the wind does not know your name.

In the gamble of a kiss,

I lost an entire year.

A year.

A heart.

More tears than I care to count.

And still,

I steal glances.

Some nights I allow a dream,

quietly,

like contraband.

I let my chest tighten for a second,

then I tell it to behave.

Like a mother who has weaned her child:

she knows exactly what the child still reaches for—

she holds them close—

and does not give.

I am leaving.

Whether or not I closed the door behind me

no longer matters.

If you return,

I will not recognise you.

You will not recognise me either.

At least—

I hope so.

Goodbye.

Christmas and the Wall of Glass

I wrote to you only once that year:

Merry Christmas.

I wished you peace and happiness.

I meant it.

Some names do not fade.

They remain—

like lines of code abandoned halfway through.

I hoped the year would be kinder to you

than we had been to each other.

I told you I had got into university.

I wanted you to know I could do it without you.

I did.

Still, sometimes my chest fills

with missing you.

That fault is mine.

It does not leave.

I lived too much in the clouds.

You were tired of the world and took shelter in me—

and I made that world heavier.

You left.

Of course you did.

A black cat walking among clouds—

of course it frightens people.

Before Christmas, I saw you.

That night Leo came over.

We drank beer, blew out vape clouds, and talked until morning.

He slept on the sofa; I stayed where I was.

In the morning we watched Zootopia.

I checked my phone.

Your photo was there—

as always.

The one where you are turned away,

looking back over your shoulder.

I checked again.

Just to see if you had blocked me.

You did once.

It felt like something made of glass shattered inside me.

I can still hear it—

like a binful of bottles

tipping into a rubbish lorry

beside a crowded pub.

I said we should go out.

So we walked.

We talked about whether anything is real,

whether time is an illusion,

whether we are only code.

In a shop, a child with golden curls kept repeating one word:

“simulation.”

We left.

Then I saw you.

In a restaurant.

Two blonde girls with you.

Leo felt it before I spoke.

He took my hand.

“It’s you,” I said.

You were looking straight ahead.

Between us—

glass.

Not air.

Not distance.

Glass.

You were there,

and I was there,

and the world had arranged itself

so that even seeing you

had to happen through a wall.

Leo pulled me across the road.

I do not remember the day.

It does not matter.

It was you.

And a glass wall

where your arms should have been.

A glass wall.

Simulation.

Last Christmas I was happy.

Far too happy.

As if I had made God rise from his chair

and stolen his golden throne for myself.

You said you would come.

You did not.

I had your painting waiting for you.

Now it lies unfinished in the corner,

turned to the wall.

Just like that,

the warmth broke.

I saw you once more—

on your bicycle.

I was wearing my cream-and-orange boots.

For a moment, admiration.

Then recognition.

Your face changed.

That was enough.

You said you would come.

You did not.

And now—

your unfinished painting in the corner,

turned to the wall.

The restaurant window.

The phone screen.

The glass wall.

Everything that should have opened

remained transparent

and closed.

In my cold hands,

only your shadow.

The Green Crossing Light

Today I was walking down the street.

You were sitting in the barber’s. I was wearing my purple hoodie.

You recognised me. After all, who else in Brighton would be mad enough to wear that purple hoodie?

I pressed the pedestrian crossing button. My back was to the window. Still, I knew it. I could feel you watching me.

But I did not turn.

I told myself: let him look.

The light would not turn green. Your amber-green eyes were waiting for their colour.

I crossed anyway—safe inside my own decision.

So thank you.

Your absence hardened me.

By the way, that pinstripe coat suits you. Though watching me in secret suits you even better.

To tell the truth, your Fibonacci equations and your careful little sums still ache where they landed. The skin closed. It does not bleed. But it is still heavy.

So, Mr Nerd, I will go on.

And still—without looking back—I can see you.

Let him look until he turns to salt.

Let him stand there, a pillar of salt, while the light changes without him.

I kiss you goodbye—in green, for the length of a pedestrian light, with no one crossing.

Walnuts Beside His Silence

This morning, when I woke, the mouse was in the trap.

Thank God it was still alive.

Otherwise I would have carried its death with me.

My memory is about as reliable as Dory’s in Finding Nemo.

I caught it and let it go.

Calmly.

It can take its chances now in the park by the sea.

I even left it some walnuts—

though it had already paid half a block of cheese

to leave my home.

I lived with that mouse

longer than I ever did with you.

Yesterday, on my way to sculpture class,

just as a shaft of sunlight struck between my eyes,

someone who looked like you

stepped aside to let me pass.

One arm hung in a sling.

Something inside me rang—

like a temple bell

drowned in spring blossom.

After five months of silence,

I wrote to you.

After five months,

you said nothing.

After a year,

I finally moved you to the archive.

The next step is probably to block you.

Why not?

If I could let go

of a shared life with a mouse,

I could let go of you.

I still do not know

whether that small, tired mouse,

left with its walnuts by the sea,

is you—

or me.

Like Luna,

I loved a sleeping man.

I kept leaving walnuts

beside his silence.

He never woke.

I hope that one day,

in another letter,

I will write:

I found him.

Someone more real.

Someone who stays.

Gooseberries with Salt

Now I know spring is here.

Why?

Because today I saw gooseberries in the Turkish shop.

Gooseberries belong to the kinder part of childhood.

I remember it exactly:

school would break for the holidays,

the first gooseberries would appear,

and the rich children would already be crowding the fruit stall

while we swallowed and kept walking.

We ate them with salt.

God knows who invented that cruelty.

Middle Eastern children are peculiar little creatures.

We are not born with that soft, fragrant, strawberry-sweet temperament Europeans seem to arrive with.

Even now, I cannot quite believe baby monkeys eat green gooseberries with salt.

I was meant to write once a week.

What does it matter now?

You will not read this.

I write whenever the ache rises.

Spring has come, and with it the talk of boyfriends and partners everywhere—where I run, where I study, where I work, where I go to meetings, even in the street, where people move past in pairs as if being two were the simplest thing in the world.

I tell myself:

Bella, it is time.

Find someone.

And another Bella answers:

With whom?

Then comes the shame.

First because I have no answer.

Then because I do not even want one.

I am no longer that laughing creature who thought the world had made room for her.

I have lost my appetite for love, for attention, for money—even for food.

And still I laugh.

Still I walk.

Still I run.

I watch the bright skin of the water.

I listen to Chopin.

And still, when people speak of partners and boyfriends, they sometimes look at me as if I have come from somewhere else. As if I missed a lesson everyone else attended, and the bell rang, and now I am standing in the corridor with the wrong book in my arms.

That look stretches the heart.

Last night I dreamed I had gone blind.

Only when I faced the sun could I see anything at all—a white blaze.

And I heard people laughing:

Look at her, the blind one, staring at the sun like that, hungry for it.

Inside myself I was crying at the cruelty of it, because there was no colour left to me except the sun.

I had a dream like it a year ago, just after you left.

In that one I had no eyes, only empty sockets, and where my lashes should have been, where my brows should have been, even where my hair should have been—there were white feathers.

I touched them with my hands, and my heart tightened with the grief of never seeing again.

And yet even then, I thought of flying.

Anyway.

Today is Friday.

The sun keeps breaking through.

I am taking my scooter and going everywhere.

I do not care what people think, how they see me, how they judge.

It is a beautiful day, and I have the right—like everyone else in this city—to enjoy its beauty, even if I am alone.

Who said solitude cannot be sweet?

The day you are forced to split your ice cream with a partner, you will understand:

being alone is not always a tragedy.

Sometimes it feels like mercy.

Styx Water Works

Today Brighton had an important day:

marathon day.

I still do not understand how a human being can run forty-two kilometres for the love of running.

It is like eating a kilo of hot chilli because you “love spicy food,”

or going to war because you “love peace.”

Strange world.

If anyone asked my opinion,

I would reduce the marathon from forty-two to thirty kilometres.

I have my reasons.

I am not telling.

Today I was on support duty:

handing out water.

It is a funny job.

It gives you the sudden feeling of being a queen.

You smile at people

without knowing who they are,

what wounds they carry,

what they hope for.

Just a smile,

and a half-full cup of water.

And yes, I am obliged to think half full.

It is life’s fault.

The handover itself was basically a martial art:

eye contact,

then a kind of kick-pass cup transfer.

Like football,

but with water.

That only works at the beginning.

By the end, precision is useless;

people are walking,

and their souls are already ahead of them.

We had to be there at 7:45 a.m.

The cups were everywhere:

twenty across,

eight rows deep,

three tiers.

Enough to make you feel as though you worked in a water factory.

I named it the Styx Water Works.

First came the 10k runners.

The rule was simple:

this water was for the real marathon runners.

There was, however, a secret footnote:

10k runners only in case of imminent death.

For breakfast I bought French bread and a cocoa milkshake.

Necessary.

After shopping at Sainsbury’s, I made a philosophical discovery:

Sainsbury’s is a miracle because it seems to have nothing to sell,

and if it does,

it comes in shot-sized portions.

Milkshake?

A shot.

Perhaps Sainsbury’s follows the same footnote rule:

one shot,

only for passers-by dying of chocolate deprivation.

When I got back, everyone was in uniform.

This year’s uniform was a disaster:

light grey-green jackets,

blue hats,

and yellow Easter Chicken T-shirts.

Martin showed me where to get mine.

Martin is a good man,

which is precisely why he frightens me:

he hardly ever smiles.

Lunch was provided too:

tuna-and-sweetcorn sandwiches,

chicken-and-mayo,

cheese-and-pickle.

Already gone.

If hope were a sandwich.

The pack also had a Mars bar,

an apple,

and apple juice.

Probably another hidden rule:

apple and apple juice,

to prevent sudden death by apple deficiency.

Honestly,

I do not think an apple would have got me thrown out of Eden.

I would probably have fancied one of God’s tedious maths-angels,

and God would have said:

No, love. You are meant for Adam.

And I would have said:

Then I’ll take the apple.

The weather could not decide what it was,

so I spent the whole day stuck between putting my coat on

and taking it off.

If someone had strapped a banjo to me,

the coat on–coat off alone would have made music.

The first runner was so fit and so fast

I thought of one of those wooden pose mannequins

built purely for running.

He took water and vanished.

It was not a runner.

It was Speedy Gonzales.

Then, slowly, it became evening.

The tables emptied one by one,

and we began to resemble the runners at the back of the pack.

Maybe reptiles.

In the morning I was an eagle,

delivering cups somewhere between flight and throw.

By evening I had become a polite little bowing machine:

Bow.

Bow.

Bow.

I felt as if I had run all forty-two kilometres myself.

I probably discovered Newton’s fourth law right there:

give water,

lose your life.

In the end I said goodbye like a turtle with its mouth open.

Only to three of them, though.

Why three?

That is my business.

You cannot say goodbye to everyone

when your back is still stuck in a Japanese bow—

especially when you are trying not to make eye contact with Martin.

By the way,

our station was not far from your house.

I did not see you.

You probably follow the same rule:

only appear when Bella is dying.

Or perhaps I was so busy smiling,

concentrating on the throws,

doing the coat-banjo routine,

that I did not notice you passing by.

Either way,

I hope you did pass.

I spent the whole day smiling,

so I would not seem frightening.

Though a black cat—

with or without a smile—

does not look frightening.

If you really did pass by today,

and I did not see you,

that is very us, isn’t it?

You with your silence.

Me with my smile.

You with your rules.

Me with mine.

Only sometimes—

very sometimes—

in the middle of all these rules,

a person wants to hear one simple sound:

a short purr…

The Square Root of Hell

It was a strange day.

Too strange.

Too happy.

I did brilliantly in my GCSE maths exam.

Do you remember?

Two years ago, you were supposed to prepare me for the best result.

I ought to thank you for all that royal generosity.

Your kindness was so lavish that instead of mathematics, I spent the whole exam thinking about hell.

By now, though, I have taken the square root of hell.

I have worked out its angles.

Calculated its probability.

Solved it.

Then I ran.

Intervals.

The champions’ group.

I lost my breath.

I nearly died.

But I went.

After that came the monthly social gathering.

I spoke to Max, the loveliest boy in the group.

Max was telling me about his flatmate, Ben.

Ben lost something in the region of twenty-five thousand pounds in Thailand:

casinos and LSD.

Afterwards, he said his account had been hacked.

By now, he believes it himself.

Some people lean so hard on a lie

that in the end

it becomes the only roof above their heads.

Forgive me.

I think I laughed then and disturbed Your Lordship’s peace.

My dear, you would do better to tend to your private Hamlet.

I hear your beloved Ophelia has been floating nose-first down a white river.

Bravo.

Such a tidy little tragedy.

The harder I try to feel proper sorrow for you,

for that skull in your hand,

for all that wavering over “to be or not to be,”

the more all I hear is Ben’s voice in my head,

saying with saintly conviction:

“I was hacked.”

Really, Ben should have been called Sisyphus.

Give him another twenty-five thousand pounds

and before long he will declare again:

“I was hacked.”

So, dear Hamlet,

Mr Wolf,

please accept my apologies

and return to that skull,

to that drowned Ophelia in her white river,

and to your magnificent performance.

As for me—tonight,

having solved the square root of hell,

I would rather laugh.

The City Full of You

I once read that love makes one person stand apart from everyone else.

I found that strange.

People had always looked different to me.

But now something else has happened.

Everyone in Brighton is six foot four with a full red beard, and I cannot find a single reason to look.

A few days ago, while running, I spoke to a man. Can you believe I remember only his name, not his face?

His name was Marc.

He told me to let him know the next time I ran during the week. Later, I searched our group chat.

There were several Marcs.

I could not place a face to any of them.

It did not trouble me. That is the part that troubles me.

Last night, exhausted, I wrote to you:

I wish we had only ever been two ordinary friends.

You could have told me about your day, and I could have told you about mine.

How did this become so complicated?

As usual, I did not send it.

As usual, you did not reply.

Years ago, walking beside beautiful friends, I used to feel the ache of being unseen.

Now I sometimes feel someone’s gaze resting heavily on me. It happens often enough.

But I cannot even be bothered to turn.

Sometimes people I know complain that they waved and I did not see them.

They are right.

I did not see them.

Tonight is Saturday night.

Brighton is loud with itself: girls and boys laughing, singing in groups, cars passing, songs spilling into the street in different colours.

I know that if I go to the pub near my house, the bartender—Thunder, supposedly very cute according to everyone except me—will start talking to me again.

But I would rather watch Star Butterfly than sit in that bar full of noise and perfume and breath, making my orange juice last.

And I made another discovery: you are rather like Oscar from Star Butterfly—that irritating boy perched on a car bonnet, hammering out ugly songs and mistaking himself for the coolest thing in school.

No doubt you are somewhere now, faithful as ever to your pint of Blue Moon.

Even your taste had a way of disappointing me.

There used to be something in me that rose to meet the world.

I keep reaching for it.

My hand closes on wind.

The city is full of faces. Full of voices. Full of invitations.

And still, everyone looks the same.

A beard.

A voice.

A name.

Another Marc.

Another stranger.

Another version of you.

The city feels empty.

Empty—and still full of you.

A Boy with Moana Tattoos

I said no.

Angrily.

He deserved it.

There were still thirty minutes left of maths class when I finished my exercises and asked the teacher if I could go home early.

I got into the lift.

Then, like something out of a cheap horror film, his hand shot through the narrowing doors.

The lift shuddered open again.

And there he was—

smiling.

He asked whether he might take me to dinner,

so that we could get to know each other better.

We had barely sat together twice,

and by the third time

he was already asking me on a date.

Honestly,

it is Nicole’s fault.

She keeps bringing men into the group

as if she were stocking shelves.

According to Nicole,

all men are cute.

Even this one:

the gentleman who stays at the gym until three in the morning,

carries his PlayStation controller around in his bag

as if civilisation might collapse without it,

and has covered his arms in Moana tattoos.

From the very beginning,

he looked at me

as though he had just discovered pi.

Or perhaps America.

The idea of this hulking creature

bringing me flowers

is enough to make the soul recoil.

Not that it is likely.

For men like him,

the highest form of beauty

appears to be a tub of protein powder.

And that smile.

That dreamy smile.

And those breathless little scraps of French.

God really does experiment.

If nettles had been given

this gentleman’s confidence,

they would be producing

three kilos of treacle a year.

The best part was

that he disappeared

before I had even finished speaking.

Perhaps I was too direct.

Yes,

I said it to his face:

No.

Really—

what exactly were you thinking?

Did you imagine my forehead

came with a notice pinned to it:

AVAILABLE FOR DATING UNTIL DEATH?

Oh God.

For a moment,

I considered becoming a monk.

Then I remembered

the stone beds,

the bare feet,

the begging for legumes,

and the nightly chorus

of monks farting in the dark.

No.

Hell no.

Come to your senses, Bella.

The world has not ended.

We have seen worse than this

and survived it.

We came out alive

from a war far bigger than this.

Still—

part of me wants to curse

that overconfident little creature properly.

Sometimes I wish I could slip into his dreams

and terrorise him there.

And while I am at it,

why not slip into yours as well?

No.

That is still too polite.

Why not become a cat

and go at you properly

with teeth and claws,

so that you wake up breathless in the dark

and say:

Bella had turned into a cat.

Bella had finally lost her mind.

And perhaps your wife,

turning her back to you,

would murmur:

You’ve been overdoing the marijuana again.

Some men see you twice,

invent a version of you,

and ask that invention to dinner.

Cherubs and Buddhas

A few days ago, the neighbour downstairs apparently told her husband not to talk to me anymore.

It is funny.

I still have not properly learned their names.

In any case, the neighbour’s husband is probably the last man on Earth I would ever think about.

Well, after Adam, Cromwell, Hitler, and Trump.

I am not sure about the order, but I am fairly certain he belongs somewhere in that vicinity.

Still, making someone feel threatened is not always a bad thing.

It gives one a certain Malèna-like feeling.

After you, I had two more relationships.

The first was Mr Foxy.

The second was Forrest.

What?

Did you think Bella would sit around waiting for the world to arrange another wolf for her?

Or stand forever like Miss Havisham, clutching a single shoe and waiting for your return?

You were mistaken, darling.

Well, not entirely.

The shoe is still here.

I only hope you are quick enough.

Anyway, I met Foxy.

He was much older than me, and I made the beginner’s mistake of assuming age comes with maturity.

It does not.

Of course, maturity was not why I dated him.

The real reason was much simpler.

His whole body was covered in tattoos.

Beautiful tattoos.

Imagine waking up every morning beside a living painting.

There were other reasons too.

A little curiosity.

A little recklessness.

A little Ecstasy.

For a while, that seemed almost enough.

It was not.

According to Mr Foxy, nearly everyone in the world was guilty of something.

Everyone except Mr Foxy.

He was also very fond of drama.

And although he claimed to understand everything, he occasionally said things that left you uncertain whether to laugh or pray.

Once, with complete confidence, he referred to a sore throat as a “throat bug.”

Whenever he wanted to sound academic, he would say, with enormous seriousness:

“That is what that is.”

A phrase so empty it seemed to echo.

I did not leave him because of any of that.

I left because the tattoos became repetitive.

The second was Forrest.

Even now, I feel a little sorry for him.

Forrest was extraordinarily calm.

So calm his breathing sounded like a kettle gently whistling in another room.

He lived in a house even calmer than he was.

A house so spotless it felt accusatory.

Forrest’s mother had died of cancer two years earlier.

The trouble was that she had not really gone anywhere.

Her photographs were everywhere.

Her quotations were everywhere.

Her embroidered little sayings were everywhere.

The garden was full of Buddhas and cherubs.

Wherever you went, it felt as though Forrest’s mother was watching from a corner, quietly disapproving.

God help us.

His father, though, was warm, cheerful, and genuinely lovely.

I think I miss him too.

My relationship with Forrest ended in a peculiar way.

Eventually, I realised I did not especially enjoy listening to kettles.

One day I sent him an article I had written.

I waited for him to read it and tell me what he thought.

Instead, he spent several minutes discussing the sugar snap peas he had bought from the shop at the end of my street.

Apparently the sugar snap peas had made a deeper impression on him than my article.

So I did not message him for a week.

Forrest sulked.

He said:

“You do not care about me. I cannot continue like this.”

I replied:

“You are a good man. Take care of yourself.”

And he was.

A good man.

Just far too quiet.

And living in a haunted house.

After those two, I deleted all the apps.

No more wolves.

No more foxes.

No more Forrests.

No more ghosts, Buddhas, cupids, or emotionally unavailable wildlife.

For a while, I almost succeeded.

But wolves are strange creatures.

You throw them out through one door,

and they come back through another.

It is strange that a black cat should spend so much time

thinking about a wolf with amber-green eyes.

I still do not know what it is you have.

In the meantime,

watch your head.

And watch out for the shoe.

P.S.

I no longer write for you, dear Mr Wolf. I write for myself. For the heart beneath its black mourning clothes that still has enough mischief in it to dance.

For the part of me that still knows the address, even when her wolf has lost his way and she is pinning his missing posters to the trees of the forest. Whoever finds him has my full permission, by way of reward, to give dear absent-minded Mr Wolf’s ear a proper tug.

Bella, come to your senses. He is gone.

I know. He is gone. Though sometimes, behind the curtain of trees, I still catch sight of his legs trying to hide.

But there is nothing to be done.

So I write—

to prove that it still beats.

Nine at Four

Sarah, our literature teacher, is one of those women who make you feel as though one of the Muses of Parnassus is whispering through her throat in the classroom.

That day she asked:

What forms of punishment had we seen at school?

It was then that I realised the Middle Ages, contrary to rumour, had never really ended.

Kneeling on rice.

Pens pressed between fingers.

Walls of shame.

Dunce caps.

And being hung by the ears.

I leave that one for last, because I had seen it myself.

Or rather, to be more precise, I had felt it in my own flesh.

I was in my first year of primary school.

I was exactly four years old.

I could already read, and I could write a little too, because my mother always brought me coloured books from the library she managed.

Perhaps it was around then that I fell in love with the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.

Lucky wolves like you, I doubt, have ever been hung by the ears.

Some parts of your life really are enviable, Mr Nerd.

My mother read to me every night, and little by little, by seeing and hearing the magic of words, I taught myself to read as well.

Writing was easier. I only had to copy the shape of the words onto paper.

It took me rather longer, of course, to learn the difference between a sheep and a ship.

I was three and a half when my mother was no longer even allowed to work.

Now that I am twenty-seven, she still is not allowed to work.

She is no longer that young woman who migrated to Iran for her three children.

Our migration to Iran was both good and bad.

Because at four years old, I became nine.

My mother somehow found me the identity card of a drowned little boy.

Then, through whatever misery it took, she repeated the same thing for my two older sisters.

The three of us, under three different identities, in three different schools, all entered the first year.

And my mother, in order to feed us, had to work until late at night in clothing workshops, labouring twice as hard for one third of the wage.

That is what migration means.

I was four years old and understood very little about rules or school.

Sometimes I would stare down a corridor for several minutes, trying to remember which classroom was mine.

At the end of the day, I kept going to the policeman at the crossroads and saying:

I am lost. Our house is near the park.

Fortunately, he knew the park.

He never asked questions. He would simply take my hand, walk me back near the park, and leave me there without a word.

I remember it well:

it was a warm autumn noon.

A little kitten, under the sun, was wailing into a microphone as it recited the Qur’an, and we other little kittens, with our shaved heads, half-cooked brains, and those deliberately ugly blue-grey uniforms, were forced to listen with all our hearts to heavenly verses pouring out of the golden throat of that poor little kitten.

I was thirsty.

Terribly so.

So I went towards the water fountain.

The looks on the other children’s faces were straight out of Oliver Twist.

From far off I could hear them chanting, “Dwarfy, Dwarfy.”

That was the nickname they had given me, because I was far too small to belong in a class of nine-year-olds.

But at the time I did not understand the reason for their amazement.

I went and drank some water.

That was all.

When I turned back, I found myself face to face with a red pumpkin.

The red pumpkin was the school disciplinarian.

He was half crouched, as though waiting for prey.

I do not know what happened. I only know that my feet were suddenly hanging in the air, and my ears were suspended somewhere between being crushed and set on fire.

With those same red cheeks, he said:

What did you do?

I said:

I… I… I… drank… wa… water.

He said:

Don’t you know you are not allowed to drink water during Qur’an recitation?

I said:

Bbbbut… but… Iiiii was thirsty.

He said:

Next time Qur’an is being read, you do not move from your place.

And the spacecraft of torment slowly came back down to earth.

My ears were released.

But sssomething inside me was no longer what it had been before that sip of water.

The Beautiful Frankenstein

I had a terrible fight with my elder sister.

Terrible enough that I spent the night thinking about death.

My sister has a gift.

She can finish a person with one short sentence.

A kind of Hannibal, if Hannibal preferred words to knives.

She wraps you neatly,

labels you,

and sends you to the freezer.

That is only one of her talents.

Another is her devotion to family tragedy—

and to my father.

The fault was mine.

I said something bitter about him in front of her.

One should not do that.

My father was one of those men who called other men comrade.

He is my elder sister’s god.

And his god, in turn, was Marx.

Perhaps now you understand why he has never seemed to me like an ordinary father.

There is something strange about this little tribe of ours,

left over from some early communal age.

These beautiful cavemen are passionately fond of dying for causes,

for Marx,

for freedom,

for equality,

for fraternity,

and, apparently, for the noble redistribution of sperm.

I never understood any of those three—

freedom, equality, fraternity.

Or the fourth:

what it meant to have a father.

Before I had the chance to become a little Bolshevik,

they killed mine.

Who?

The Taliban.

Yes.

I came from hell on earth:

Afghanistan.

My father was a Marxist.

My mother was a feminist.

The result was three lunatics:

one who adores tragedy,

one who is Ereshkigal made flesh,

and the last—

meaning me—

who has never properly belonged to the earth at all.

The quarrel itself began over Nate.

After I came to England, Nate said he would help me with transition.

I told him the surgery itself would be covered by the NHS.

If he truly wanted to help,

he could help with FFS.

He agreed.

Then, in the end, he withdrew.

Why?

Because I hesitated.

Because Harley Street did not convince me.

Because the prices were absurd.

Because I doubted.

Because I was afraid.

So Nate decided not to support me.

Fair enough.

He had the right.

I had the right to be angry.

I even had the right to kick at the memory of my dead father.

And my sister, apparently, had the right to say:

No man would pass over a beautiful cis woman—

of whom there is no shortage in this world—

to choose a Frankenstein like you.

There it was.

One sentence.

A freezer door closing.

And I, apparently,

had the right to spend the night thinking about death.

In this world, it seems,

everyone has rights.

Everyone deserves something.

Everyone may withdraw,

judge,

leave,

speak,

run.

But not you.

You did not have the right to run.

Still—

the war is not over.

I am still here.

Still working.

Still saving money.

Still carrying this body

like a country under reconstruction.

Still learning where the ruins end

and where the palace begins.

One day,

piece by piece,

scar by scar,

coin by coin,

I will build the face I should have been allowed to meet in childhood.

And if they insist on calling me Frankenstein,

then let them.

Frankenstein, after all,

was made from the dead.

So was I.

But this one is not going back to the grave.

This one is going to rise,

look in the mirror,

and become

the most beautiful Frankenstein

of her kind.

A Stone Beneath My Feet

John came today.

Without warning.

I had just come back from Aldi. I was tired and lying down. My account was almost empty, and it was only the middle of the month. I had a few bags of rice and a few tins of tuna. They might even last into next month. I have never had much appetite for food. Sometimes it is only dizziness that tells me how long it has been since I last ate.

Before that, I had gone to church.

I do not believe in God.

But truly, in this stretch of sand where I am standing, I want to feel certain there is a stone beneath my feet.

That stone might be God,

or a higher power,

or myself.

I do not want to be bad.

I do not want to keep dealing with bad people either.

The people inside the church, at least from a distance, seem like good people.

Even if they are pretending.

One thing I have learned from the world is this:

Fake it till you make it.

Perhaps the same rule applies to them.

I was half asleep when I heard John’s voice.

I opened the door.

He had a bicycle tucked under his arm.

John liked to think he looked like Adam Sandler.

To me, he looked more like Ragetti from Pirates of the Caribbean—

only with the misfortune of having both eyes intact.

I could not believe it.

He said it was hot out.

I asked,

After three and a half years?

He said,

I have my reasons.

When men have no reason,

that is what they bring.

He asked,

Are you still doing life modelling?

I said,

No.

I did not feel safe.

I work at an Airbnb now.

He asked,

Cleaning?

I said,

For now, I think of it as a temporary job.

It is not forever.

I felt something collapse quietly inside me.

There was a time when I had graduated top of my law class.

But by then, that meant no honour to me,

and this no shame either.

He asked,

Can you give me twelve pounds for my train ticket?

He was used to my always paying for his beer and his drugs.

I showed him my balance.

I had no more than eighteen pounds.

I told him that if he wanted,

I could give him twelve,

but that was everything I had for the rest of the month.

The truth was that I had been fired from that job too.

I had accidentally stepped on one of a guest’s ostrich-feather fans.

It had been wrapped in black plastic and left in the middle of the room.

When she realised I had crushed it,

she let out such groans and cries

that for a moment I was afraid

it was not a fan inside the plastic I had flattened,

but her child.

John has started using crystal.

I said,

Do not touch that.

It is a loser’s drug.

He said,

I have always been a loser.

Do not judge me.

I said,

But you do not have to remain one.

I quit four and a half years ago.

He asked,

Why didn’t you tell me when we were together?

I said,

Do you not remember?

I told you about my partner.

He said,

I do not even remember yesterday.

If you can just give me bus fare,

that is enough.

I wish I could go away somewhere for a few days.

I looked at him.

How low the ceiling of a person’s desires can be.

I gave him three pounds and he left.

If he had wanted all eighteen,

I would have given him that too.

I am no longer afraid of anything.

I have seen too many rises and falls

for poverty and wealth

to be anything more to me now

than two words.

I will be starting another job soon.

I deliver food on my scooter as well,

if the police permit it.

And if they do not—

well,

a stomach cannot always be fed

according to the rules of city life.

One of those people I did not know at all

made a stupid suggestion:

take my clothes off in front of a camera.

If I am going to get naked in front of a camera,

I will have to mute the microphone first.

Hunger makes terrible background music.

I hate that.

Even when I was life modelling,

I did not like being naked.

Perhaps that is why I go to church.

Not so that God will fill my stomach.

Only so that I might have enough strength

not to lay my hunger bare.

My eyes return to the bicycle.

Now his bicycle is still in my house.

Facing the mirror.

As though one thing left behind

had not been enough.

I am not afraid of the bicycle itself.

My only anxiety is that he will come back for it,

and I will once again have to endure

his foul-smelling body on my sofa.

I am not writing this letter for you.

I am writing it for myself,

so that I remember:

life is absurd,

but not so absurd

that I should strip for it.

I still want to believe

there is a stone beneath my feet.

Whether that stone is God,

or courage,

or simply the stubborn refusal

to become another John.

The world has taken enough already.

Let it leave me

this last small thing

I can still call mine.

And until I find something stronger,

I will stand

on that stone.

Wolves Know Addresses

You left

at exactly the moment

I cut half a metre off my hair.

An unfortunate coincidence.

I had imagined loving you

with a short bob—

like some wild French woman

who smoked too much

and trusted all the wrong people.

Instead,

all I was left with

was the grief of having cut it.

Strange,

the things the heart chooses to mourn.

Not the person.

The haircut.

Not the ending.

The scissors.

For months,

every mirror accused me.

Every photograph looked unfinished.

Every reflection seemed to ask:

Why?

I had no answer.

Only absence.

Now it has grown back.

Long enough to reach my shoulders again.

Long enough to remind me

that the body keeps moving

even when the heart refuses.

Though in that half-metre

there are white strands

that were not there before.

Tiny flags

planted by time.

Three years.

Three years is long enough

for a tree to change shape.

Long enough

for a city to replace its cafés.

Long enough

for a face in your memory

to become slightly fictional.

Perhaps that is what happened to you.

Or perhaps it happened to me.

Sometimes I think

the last three years

were not years at all.

Only a cocoon.

Dark.

Narrow.

Silent.

A place where nothing seemed to happen.

Yet something was happening.

Something always is.

The caterpillar believes

its world is ending.

The butterfly disagrees.

What will emerge

from this brown cocoon?

Perhaps a butterfly.

Perhaps a wolf.

Ever since I was little,

I loved drawings of wolves.

I used to ask my older sister

to draw them for me.

The reason was nothing so poetic.

Wolves could speak to people.

And wolves know addresses.

They do not get lost.

I think that is what I envied.

Not their teeth.

Not their wilderness.

Only that certainty.

The knowledge

that somewhere in the dark

there is a path,

and that it leads somewhere.

Lately,

I have begun to suspect

that growing older

is not becoming a butterfly at all.

It is becoming the wolf.

Still carrying the forest inside you,

but finally learning

how to find your way home.

A Knight in a Helmet and the Tarot Kings at War

On Friday evening, walking home from the supermarket, I saw someone who looked like you.

Not you exactly.

A shadow.

The spring sun was straight in my eyes.

All I caught was a figure like you, an arm hanging from his neck, stepping aside to let me pass.

No matter how cruel you have been to me, I do not wish pain on you.

Not on you.

Not on any living thing.

Only red ants are exempt from that mercy.

Once, when I was a child, I fell asleep on a swing and slipped into a flowerbed without knowing it.

When I woke, my whole body was on fire.

Ants had covered me.

I was not crying only because it hurt.

I was crying because I was being punished for nothing.

Because I had done nothing at all,

and still they came for me.

So I wrote:

“I think I saw someone who looked like you, with an injured arm. I hope you’re well. You don’t have to reply.”

Then, on Tuesday, after literature class, I saw you yourself.

You arrived on your bicycle and stopped outside the cafeteria.

You did not even take your helmet off—

as if that could save you from recognition.

But who else in Brighton,

six foot four,

with that thick red beard,

rides like that?

I was in your line of sight.

You stood there pretending to lock your bike—

still wearing the helmet.

I walked through the reach of your gaze.

The same old feeling.

Even if you were standing in the dark among a hundred people,

I could find you with my eyes shut.

You looked for as long as you could.

I shrugged,

tipped my head back,

and blew out the vapour from my vape—

like a bird lifting its beak to drink—

and carried on home.

Though the world had stopped.

One part of me had already turned back

and was standing in front of you,

ordering you to take the helmet off

so I could kiss you.

Another part of me

had already wrapped its arms around your neck

and stayed there—

fixed forever on that pavement.

When I got home,

I laid out the tarot.

King of Pentacles.

The Hermit.

King of Wands.

Ten of Pentacles.

Page of Wands.

Knight of Cups.

Three of Swords.

Together—

with the bicycle,

the helmet,

the looking,

the not-coming-nearer—

they told me this:

you love me,

but your reach gives out

before it reaches me.

Not because the feeling is absent.

Because the courage is.

And strangely,

I could breathe.

As if a name had finally been pinned

to something nameless

for three years.

If I had known that three years ago,

when you left,

I would not have spent so long

trying to solve a mystery

that had already solved itself.

For the first time,

I no longer felt abandoned.

Only distant.

There is a difference.

One is a wound.

The other is geography.

Some Sounds Only Need to Be Heard Once

Saturday, 13 June 2026

Today we were out protesting against fascists. What else did they expect?

I had seen fascists before, in Iran. They smelled of socks and rosewater, and there were prayer marks on their foreheads. There, I had no right to speak against them. No right even to raise my voice.

But in Brighton, yes.

We were meant to meet near the station at half past ten in the morning. We had been told to dress normally and wear masks. I was excited. I put on my dark green six-pocket shorts, a black T-shirt, my hair tied back, and my red Converse shoes.

I went and sat off to one side, waiting for the procession to move.

Little by little, my friends began to appear. I was no longer alone.

In Brighton you can see every kind of person. A skater turned up in curlers and bright clothes. One of my good friends arrived with their partner and kindly said I could stay beside them. The crowd was beautiful: old and young, artistic and inventive, all together.

Higher up the street, a few fascists were waiting in a pub for the rest of their friends to arrive. Until that day, I had never seen an English fascist up close. I had seen their videos, but seeing one in real life was like seeing an angry grizzly bear: thrilling, and slightly stupid.

You were there too.

In that green jumper of yours.

Everything else was black.

It was strange that, out of all those people, we had ended up so near each other again.

I laughed when I remembered what you had said:

We should go our separate ways, without bitterness.

Well, the earth had turned out to be round. After three years, we had found ourselves on the same road again.

You were smiling at everyone. Even at me. You came nearer as if you wanted to say something. I do not know what.

But I did not want you to remain under any illusion.

I took off my mask and my glasses.

I looked at your smile.

Then, this time, I fixed my eyes ahead.

And walked on.

You disappeared too.

Farther on, the fascists were still in the pub, like bowling pins. Their men and women with huge bellies, narrow heads, and pear-shaped arses.

There were a few young boys among them too, boys who still looked human.

The fascists were laughing at us beneath their slogans about protecting children. Two of them stretched out their hands towards me and laughed.

No one is allowed to laugh at Bella.

So I did my Santa Claus impression and laughed back at them. When they went quiet, I gave them the finger.

Only the bowling pins.

Not the boys.

I stayed until one o’clock.

Then I went home.

I slept.

But my mind would not let go.

It should not have ended like that.

Mehran believes that the more often you throw a die, the greater the chance of rolling a six.

I had been throwing the die for three years.

By then I had even learned probability—addition and multiplication, and the difference between “and” and “or”.

At five twenty-five, I wrote to you:

“You looked well. Green really suited you.

If we ever bump into each other again, there’s no need to vanish into the Brighton wilderness.

I don’t bite anymore. I’ve even had my rabies shots.”

I sent it both on WhatsApp and by text.

At six, you read it.

At six twenty-five, you turned disappearing messages on for twenty-four hours.

At six thirty, I turned it off.

At six forty, I turned disappearing messages back on for twenty-four hours.

I told myself that twenty-four hours contained quite a lot of probability too.

Probability. Maths. God, I had forgotten.

I need to clean the—hell, sorry—the house.

There is still a mountain of maths exam papers in my flat.

I need to hand them over, very gently, to recycling.

Some sounds only need to be heard once.

The Last Letter

Wednesday, 15 July 2026

This is the last letter.

You blocked me.

Without a single message passing between us.

You decided to add me back.

You decided to close the door again.

So I can no longer blame the ending on misunderstood words.

After that last meeting—

at the anti-fascist protest—

only silence had anything left to say.

It seems even the shouting of silence was more than your ears could bear.

It was the best thing you could have done.

I was genuinely glad.

The world had prepared me for it a week earlier.

I lost my bank card.

After that, nothing seemed capable of surprising me anymore—not even finding that almost forty pounds had disappeared from my account without my permission.

Mr Amber Wolf,

there is one sentence that has remained inside me.

Perhaps it is the only reason I wrote this final letter.

Thank you.

Without you,

I would never have grown up.

I wish the same for you.

Though not in the way I had to.

I cannot pretend I am not tired.

I am.

I feel suspended between places.

Lately, I keep dreaming that I have lost my phone.

Last night, even while I was telling myself,

You’re dreaming. Dreams don’t hurt.

Another part of me answered:

You’ve felt your body go numb from pain while awake before. What proof do you have that this isn’t waking life?

That part of me was right.

There are no guarantees.

No certainty that we are asleep.

No certainty that we are awake.

No certainty that love will stay.

Still,

I can walk to the old cemetery at eleven o’clock at night,

tarot cards in my pocket,

run into a dark-skinned woman in brown sunglasses after sunset,

feel every hair on my body stand on end,

and laugh anyway.

Perhaps tomorrow will not be a cemetery day.

Perhaps there will be no tarot cards.

No woman in brown sunglasses.

Perhaps tomorrow I will not feel like laughing at all.

It does not matter.

I want to do whatever I feel like doing.

Walk until my legs hurt.

Sit on a swing.

Buy Diet Coke.

Walk along the seafront

in pyjamas and sandals.

Put twice as much pasta on my plate,

and twice as much cheese.

Our relationship ended two Christmases ago.

I simply refused to arrive there when it did.

Or perhaps I arrived,

and then spent two more years learning what arrival actually meant.

The uncertainty principle.

The distance between words and actions.

The strange fact that some children never truly grow up,

even by the age of thirty-four.

And countless other lessons

whose names I no longer need to remember,

though I paid for them

with my flesh,

my blood,

and my nervous system.

Now there is only one thing left.

I will wait for no one.

I will love my own road.

Mr Amber Wolf,

I will not even say goodbye.

There is no place left for you in my life,

and I no longer feel responsible

for protecting you.

This is where one leaves.

And keeps walking.

marathon day.

I still do not understand how a human being can run forty-two kilometres for the love of running.

It is like eating a kilo of hot chilli because you “love spicy food”,

or going to war because you “love peace”.

Strange world.

If anyone asked my opinion,

I would reduce the marathon from forty-two to thirty kilometres.

I have my reasons.

I am not telling.

Today I was on support duty:

handing out water.

It is a funny job.

It gives you the sudden feeling of being a queen.

You smile at people

without knowing who they are,

what wounds they carry,

what they hope for.

Just a smile,

and a half-full cup of water.

And yes, I am obliged to think half full.

It is life’s fault.

The handover itself was basically a martial art:

eye contact,

then a kind of kick-pass cup transfer.

Like football,

but with water.

That only works at the beginning.

By the end, precision is useless;

people are walking,

and their souls are already ahead of them.

We had to be there at 7:45 a.m.

The cups were everywhere:

twenty across,

eight rows deep,

three tiers.

Enough to make you feel you worked in a water factory.

I named it the Styx Water Works.

First came the 10k runners.

The rule was simple:

this water was for the real marathon runners.

There was, however, a secret footnote:

10k runners only in case of imminent death.

For breakfast I bought French bread and a cocoa milkshake.

Necessary.

After shopping at Sainsbury’s, I made a philosophical discovery:

Sainsbury’s is a miracle because it seems to have nothing to sell,

and if it does,

it comes in shot-sized portions.

Milkshake?

A shot.

Perhaps Sainsbury’s follows the same footnote rule:

one shot,

only for passers-by dying of chocolate deprivation.

When I got back, everyone was in uniform.

This year’s uniform was a disaster:

light grey-green jackets,

blue hats,

and yellow Easter Chicken T-shirts.

Patrick showed me where to get mine.

Patrick is a good man,

which is precisely why he frightens me:

he hardly ever smiles.

Lunch was provided too:

tuna-and-sweetcorn sandwiches,

chicken-and-mayo,

cheese-and-pickle.

Already gone.

If hope were a sandwich.

The pack also had a Mars bar,

an apple,

and apple juice.

Probably another hidden rule:

apple and apple juice,

to prevent sudden death by apple deficiency.

I suspect Applejack was responsible for those packs.

Honestly,

I do not think an apple would have got me thrown out of Eden.

I would probably have fancied one of God’s tedious maths-angels,

and God would have said:

No, love. You are meant for Adam.

And I would have said:

Then I’ll take the apple.

I would rather that than be Adam’s partner.

The weather could not decide what it was,

so I spent the whole day stuck between putting my coat on

and taking it off.

If someone had strapped a banjo to me,

the coat on–coat off alone would have made music.

The first runner was so fit and so fast

I thought of one of those wooden pose mannequins built purely for running.

He took water and vanished.

It was not a runner.

It was Speedy Gonzales.

Then, slowly, it became evening.

The tables emptied one by one,

and we began to resemble the runners at the back of the pack.

Maybe reptiles.

In the morning I was an eagle,

delivering cups somewhere between flight and throw.

By evening I had become a polite little bowing machine:

Bow.

Bow.

Bow.

I felt as if I had run all forty-two kilometres myself.

I probably discovered Newton’s fourth law right there:

give water,

lose your life.

In the end I said goodbye like a turtle with its mouth open.

Only to three of them, though.

Why three?

That is my business.

You cannot say goodbye to everyone

when your back is still stuck in a Japanese bow—

especially when you are trying not to make eye contact with Patrick.

By the way,

our station was not far from your house.

I did not see you.

You probably follow the same rule:

only appear when Bella is dying.

Or perhaps I was so busy smiling,

concentrating on the throws,

doing the coat-banjo routine,

that I did not notice you passing by.

Either way,

I hope you did pass.

I spent the whole day smiling,

so I would not seem frightening.

Though a black cat—

with or without a smile—

does not look frightening.

Unless someone has a fever

and mistakes a black cat for a jaguar.

If you really did pass by today,

and I did not see you,

that is very us, isn’t it?

You with your silence.

Me with my smile.

You with your rules.

Me with mine.

Only sometimes—

very sometimes—

in the middle of all these rules,

a person wants to hear one simple sound:

a short purr…

The orange ants were upon me again. They swarmed my skin, tangled in my hair, crawled into my nostrils, biting, scratching, gnawing. They burned like sparks. Bastards, bastards, bastards. I washed myself with cold water across the tiles, yet they kept returning, rising out of nothing, marching back as if they owned my flesh.

Inside my skull a drum kept pounding. Drum. Drum. Drum. A rhythm without end, beating me deeper into madness.

I stood before the mirror and pulled my head back. The face that looked at me was swollen, lips and eyelids puffed, skin red at the edges. I resembled a child who had struck a wasp’s nest and been punished for it. The corners of my mouth, the flares of my nostrils, all burning pink. The fire ran through my fingers, between the toes, deep into the marrow.

Water dripped from my body onto the carpet. The drum kept pounding. The whistle carried on from nowhere, never stopping.

Above the corner, the old spider spun as always. She never glanced at me, not once in all these years. Her weaving had begun long before my fall, perhaps even before I loved, perhaps before she did. Her law was simple: my house, my rules, my voice. And she never relented.

Maybe the ants were a dream. Maybe I had only dreamt them. I remembered a fruit, sweet as grapes, heart-shaped, larger than cherries, its pits tasting faintly of cardamom. But dreams have no taste, no scent.

Then came a voice. What’s wrong. Soft, familiar, unbearable. The drum in my head was not enough, now this voice too. Of her, only the voice remained.

I wanted to answer none of your business, but my throat was flame, my voice seared before reaching air. Terror seized me. What if the ants had already reached the brain. What if they were eating it alive. I remembered the man in scripture who smashed his skull against the wall until death came.

Again the voice: What’s wrong.

I grew furious. How could she not understand. She was dead. I had devoured her because I loved her. I ate her because I wanted her whole, every piece inside me. If I could have swallowed her heart, her lungs, her brain, I would have, I would have carried them in my own veins. But it was impossible. So I ate what I could. Until she flowed within me, blood and bone and marrow, where she belonged.

Two days before our wedding, a rainy day, a black car, four dead, one survivor. They thought I would lose my mind. I did not. Not a tear. I even comforted her parents. That night I opened her grave.

She was mine. Why give her to the soil to rot.

A dog barked somewhere far away. A shadow moved behind the trees. The grave-warden trembled when I pulled him close by the collar. He was thin, his eyes yellow with fear.

In the empty grave, dogs piss, he whispered.

It won’t stay empty, I told him.

He tried to flee but the pickaxe split his scream. When I lowered him down he pissed as he fell, dog’s piss in the hollow, mixing with soil and rain. The bloody cotton swab he had pressed to his wound flew away on the wind. Rain began again, thick and heavy, washing the mud across his body.

I was hungry, thirsty, afraid. On the way home I drank wine, and the more I drank the thirstier I became. I roasted her flesh. It smelled like pork, it tasted like pork, the meat forbidden by prophets, cursed by old law. I ate her. Every bit. Even the bones. I conquered death. I laughed, I drank, I toasted to the health of my loneliness and to the spider who cursed with her threads, whispering her law again and again: my house, my rules, my voice.

The whistle rose sharper than crickets, lower than the drum in my skull. My vision blurred. Sleep came like poison, heavy with pain and shivering, and the dread that ants might return. They must not reach me. They must not scatter my pieces. They must not carry me away from her. She had gone far enough already.

Sometimes I still hear her murmurs, not words of this earth. She speaks with me, but her heart is not with me.

I locked the door. The spider read scripture for more flies. I sprayed poison across every corner I could reach. The drum kept pounding. What’s wrong, the voice asked, softer, then harsher, as if it had no end.

The whistle from the void. My house. My rules. My voice. Amen.

The tick of the clock. 4:58 after midnight.

Ants racing in my veins, clashing their antennae, beating me from the inside. Damn them. They must not reach her. Not now. Not ever.