Herbie knew about a scheme where you could breed black widow spiders for the U.S. Government and they would pay you handsomely for your contribution to the whatever-it-was effort. He thought that sounded like a legal, easy way to make money growing something at home, and he was talking about it to anyone who was interested.
He still lived in the little Sears Roebuck house, next to the big oak tree, with a lot of other people, including an odd and beautiful girl named Susan.
Susan had pale skin and long thick dark hair, and a curvy womanly body. She didn’t always finish her sentences, which didn’t always turn out to be about anything anyway, and it was hard to tell if she really liked you or not. But she was trying very hard to space in, from a very long way away, and she was beautiful, and really those two things combined can make a person perfectly worthwhile.
By Jessica Ruby Radcliffe.
He had stood on tiptoes and used his weight to push down and in, but the sticky stuff meant his cock slid all over her right buttock leaving slimy snail trails of lube and Cowper’s fluid – he’d looked it up the day before – pre-cum. ‘Fucksake,’ his girlfriend had said, looking up from the yeasty duvet. ‘It’s not like this in the movies,’ he had said. ‘What movies would that be?’ His girlfriend had replied, ‘Dumbo? Bambi?’ I was thinking more, ‘Anal Housewives 4,’ he had said, his cock now limp and embarrassed. ‘Maybe we should try a different position.’ ‘No,’ his girlfriend had said, ‘I’m not in the mood now,’ and had turned over, cocooned herself in the duvet and turned her back to him.
The young woman slowly peels the thin moustache away and lets it fall like a hair-slug onto the ground – and her beauty is revealed as if by a magic spell. ‘Do not judge a book by its cover, Chris. Do not let your lute lead you into quarrelsome ways. And try not to discriminate against public performances involving dwarves called Andy and women with false moustaches.’ ‘No-one has ever called me Chris before,’ says Christopher Christopher with a look of happy dismay. The young woman smiles and Christopher Christopher feels his heart swooning and his cheeks redden. And so he pulls out his lute and starts to sing.
We came across Derek Jarman’s wooden beach house with its strange natural, sculpture garden. Jenkins said he’d met him once, that he’d been something of a local character. I was eleven when he died, and I remember his film, Blue, being shown on television: a beautiful blank Klein-blue screen with only his commentary for explanation. My mum had turned it off saying it was ‘filth’, my stepfather adding that it was ‘a waste of a fucking licence fee’ – his words. ‘It’s channel fucking four, actually’ – my words as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, leaving them to their whisky and shouting. I lay on my bed, sinking my head back into the pillows to drown them out, and looked up at my poster of the southern oceans, and dreamt of swimming, swimming way out to sea.
Ms. Stevens had requested that nobody be notified after she checked out. Her room was full of cellophane. It was possibly from things she got at the gift shop, like the Russian dolls and the miniature car set, but that didn’t account for the rest of it. Slithers of the stuff kept attaching themselves to me, and whenever I took one piece off, another immediately replaced it, as if they were asexual organisms hellbent on reproducing no matter what the outcome or the point.
Lukas holds a lit match to Adam’s urethra as Zach ducttapes his asshole shut. The priest shaves off all his asshair and shoves a fire hose up his daughter’s snatch, then blasts her wide open. Lukas jacks off apelike on Adam’s face. The violated rugby player shoots his own mother in the mouth with a beebee gun and rapes her ass. A midget comes out of the alleyway with a sword and stabs the whore in the face while she’s sucking Adam. Lukas’s humungous balls tremble as Zach hungrily tosses his salad, then adds a white creamy dressing to it.
And so later, after going there a few times and fixing myself against the woodland floor and watching them eat and play and fight, I knew that I belonged to them. No matter where I was, I belonged to the badgers. In the bright day, when I was looking for a job now school was done with, or doing my mum’s housework, I thought of them curled up in their set underground, a crumbly, paw-dug cave, with tree roots for a ceiling and a fur and grass nest. I was there, breathing and eating and scratching. There was no lack of warmth or love. No need for a job or a boyfriend or social workers or police or truancy officers or the dole office. I had everything and I was everything.
Elise had dark eyes, and a deep cleavage. She could skin up one-handed and she read French novels. Her real name was Jane but she had changed it because of The Cure song. She was mystery and wonder. We were all in love with her. We’d all tried to make her at one stage or other too. We’d all failed. But that didn’t stop Bill from repeatedly trying. “Hang on,” he said and thrust his glass into my hand. He caught his shoulder on the kitchen doorframe as he swayed into the hall and stumbled right into Elise. It almost looked accidental. ‘Fancy bumping into you here,” he said .
All is dark except the sky’s shadow reaching from Kiki’s bedroom window. I walk out of her apartment. Down three flights of wooden stairs that narrowly curl like a snake. I’m going to walk down Lower Decatur Street. The door to the apartment building is at the bottom of these steps. I come to. I open it.
I staggered down the metal stairs of the fire exit, the cold night wrapped its foggy fingers around me, pulling me from the hot energetic fug of the club, and into the heavy night air. My head still buzzed from the thumping bass, muffling my ears to the sharp sounds of a Saturday night in the city. It had been a heady night of beer and girls, a night that gets the adrenaline pumping through the veins, an antidote to the drudgery of the week. The alcohol reinvigorating life, invincible you command the night. And invincible I had been as I had surveyed the floor, mine-sweeping for drinks and scouting for girls. But the night had waned, and now I walked down the dim alley, the night slowly absorbing the alcoholic haze from around me, rediscovering my senses, and reviving my mind. I stopped with a jolt. He wasn’t with me.
