extract one

g.


Cal'd wondered about the validity of the stranger's claim and felt almost as though he should ask her to cite her references. She had said it with such conviction and her colleagues had looked at each other and at her and back and had nodded with their whole torsos and expressed their agreements with raised eyebrows and bilabial nasals in a range of enthusiastic pitches. One had even clapped a little, he'd noticed, another slapped the table and the cups had rattled and a little bit of her coffee had spilled over the rim, through the foam and the foam held firm. The wonder of liquids in their many states. The wonder of coffee. Of cappuccino.

He had later, on researching, discovered that blood referred to only a specific collection of substances in very specific state at a very specific temperature and with a very specific viscosity – four or five times that of water, in fact, just as the woman had implied. Blood really is thicker than water. Blood really is thicker. Blood really is. It had moved him, this, and he had washed his hands and cried and watched them turn red as blood rose to the surface, sharply and yet ecstatically aware of the process beneath his skin and muscle tissue. He had dreamt that night of tiny men inside his veins, stirring and regulating the transfer of oxygen to his limbs from his heart and back again in the great warmth of plasma and cells and had awoken with sweat on his brow and a dense stickiness between his thighs.

That was how it began, he tells her.

a list of people I definitely couldn't stand up to even now

the girl who took my first boyfriend from me. I can't remember her name but his name was Connor. We were seven, he was Irish and I was fat and boyish. No wonder. I didn't fight her for him, though, she was really pretty and blonde and probably still is.

the teacher who stood by and watched as kids mocked me for eating blood oranges at break time. They thought they were so weird and I didn't understand. I resented my parents for years for making me so exotic.

"Secret Sam", my first true love, he kicked a football in my face and called me ugly in front of all his friends and mine and laughed and I bet if I saw him now I'd just cry or something.

the girls who befriended me as a joke in year six.

the girls who befriended me as a joke in year seven.

ditto, years eight, nine, ten, eleven.

ditto, college.

the boy who made me fall in love with him and then slept with our mutual friend in our bed when I was at work, earning money to pay our rent while he was at home claiming benefits and chatting up girls on the internet and then fucking them. They were all younger than me and he was a few years older than me and I was only eighteen.

the woman who stopped being my friend for no reason after spending months telling me the same three to six stories about her ex boyfriend over and over and over. I was such a good listener.

the boy in my English class who turned everyone against me.

the boy who never showed up.

the man who didn't fuck me when I needed him to.

the man who did fuck me when I didn't want him to.

you, probably.

lasting

The first and the last of all days last longest of all. A piece of peace's picturesque painted worth, in a sip, “id” - the egoists egotistic listening - fights and fights and metaphors met a force of fetid moors and listened to the fated whore's lips prattling with rattling floors and all this is not the end of the last's lasting. Fast fasting with water forever. Eat more nouns and frowning. I am inevitability, I am obligation, I am yours, pouring and poring over the last and littlest of all things, ring the door's bell's insides out, wet from within and startling. Disheartening. The rose's bed, the last last day.