6.

This is what you see when you close your eyes. You see her spinning and spinning like a top, arms flung out wide and head thrown back. Her hair streams around her like ribbons and her mouth grins wide. She stamps and whirls and sends her drink spilling down her chin and throat, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She is frozen in the camera flash, giddy and gilded and always laughing.

You can smell her, animal and scent and smoke and wine. She blinks up at you, eyes sleep-hooded, lips barely parted, and falls back into darkness. She murmurs as she dreams.

She is alive in a wash of colour and a tumble of sound. You were dazzled by the sunlight that fell across her, slicing her into dark and light. She danced with strangers as you stood at the bar and waited for her to come back to you, panting and glazed in sweat.

This is how you remember her then, the glowing girl in a sea of black. She is the focus of all your rooms and the walls fall down like a house of cards.

She is the girl sitting on the platform in the snapshot. Every time the shutter drops she is further away, hands folded in her lap, watching the train pull out. She will always be there at the vanishing point.

5.

London Fields is quilted in fog, piling up in a great soft eiderdown. Crossing the park I am isolated, caught between the orange pools of the streetlamps. The mist dissolves the landscape, tricking the vision into premature blindness. I can see my hands and my feet quite clearly. If I stray from the pathway I may drown in quicksand air or vanish in the grey. There are shadows moving in the distance, lone walkers and beasts darting low to the ground. The hum and click of a bicycle leaping into focus and fading back into the emptiness. The Fields are eerie in the ghostlight. This is where one place slips into another in the quiet corners. This is where murder lives. This is where soul and body are divided and wraiths gain life. There is subtlety in the darkness. I stand bathed in amber, washed in syrupy light. The dark and the fog rise up around me and I breach them smartly, clicking heels telling the tale of my passage. I open my mouth and my breath spills out in a great rush: my lungs are empty and I breathe in smoke. My shadow is lost in the sodden evening.

4.

Her reflection peers back at her, hair scraped back and making a pale oval of her face. She is intimately aware of her mirror self, the side that only she can see. Moving closer, she inspects herself, the white paper skin, the tracery of lines as fine as spider’s webs, the faint down of hair at her ears. Her breath fogs the glass and she turns away, the misty Rorschach fading.

The table is littered with pots and tubes and glass bottles of perfume. Her make-up spills out of pouches and dusts the wood with glittering ash. She wields her tweezers with military precision, stray hairs seized between pin-sharp tips and ripped out by the root. The skin stretches and reddens below the perfect arch of her brows. She pats tiny pearls into the shaded hollows beneath her eyes and smoothes cool cream over her face.

She builds up a mask with her foundation, a smooth beige plastering. The dew of a highlighter dotted along her cheekbones and at her temples where she can feel her pulse and the clench of her jaw, blusher roseing the pads of her cheeks. Her eyelids are as bright as beetles and her lashes are fattened and sooty black. She draws in her eyebrows with sharp dark strokes and they slash her forehead.

She paints her lips a deep bitten crimson and lacquers them in sticky gloss. Her scent drapes her with violets and musk.

In the day she is a gaudy butterfly, powder dropping lightly from fragile wings as she spreads and trembles in the sun.

Alone her lover peels back the layers and sees her tawny in the soft light.

3.

The ghost of you lingers in my bed. The memory of you curls around me. The sheets have been washed again and again but I catch traces of your scent in the thin strange morning. You are in my head and burn like acid in my veins. I breathe your breath like I’m drowning.

We lay with our foreheads touching, our lips a whisper apart, eating words.

The night is long and sweltering and your hands trace lazy spirals along my back, count the railroad knobs of my spine. I reach for you in the dark and hug the quilt into your shape. I swim in the deep twilight before dawn and melt and dissolve and lose myself. Your arms wrap me in the muddled place between sleep and life. I have tossed and turned for you for hours, sweat radiant on my brow, running between my breasts and my thighs.

When I turn the pillow to cool my cheeks the imprint of your face presses against mine.

This bed is empty without you in it.

2.

The desk toy clicks smartly, sending the silver balls swinging in shortening arcs.

He is a fidgeter, a foot-tapper. He bounces his pen on the desk and brushes his hair back from his eyes, the specks of dust from his shoulders. In the flat beneath him the couple complain of the constant footsteps that punctuate their evenings and track their dreams. At work he paces and gesticulates and fizzes with frantic energy. He has never slept in the same bed as a lover as he twists and turns like a fish in the net of sheets.

The man is never still.

He says, I am in perpetual motion. He says, I will never die. He says, I am a part in the machine and the machine never stops.

They roll their eyes and clap him on the shoulder, and inform him that what he says is impossible. They indulge his ticks and whisper behind their hands and notify the people who know what action to tale.

He bounces off the walls of his cell. I am not a physicist, I am not a philosopher. I am not mad. He says, there is no such thing as the impossible, only that which exists beyond the known rules.

His eyes are wide and steady and unblinking, deeper black than the sky at night.

1.

I can’t remember the last time I opened my eyes. I am alone in a glass room and if I look the reflections will drive me mad.

The birdsong trickles liquid over my shuttered ears. The snow bird in the crystal cage, its diamond beak prised wide, swollen throat spilling the endless trill. The notes pierce me in places I had forgotten and, needle-sharp, wound me. My soft flesh is warm and alien in this palace of ice, abraded by sharp edges, blushing blue and pink. This is a grand place, and empty.

The tiles on the floor are ivory white and my feet ghost them. My fingers are twigs that snap in the hard frost; my ribs are meshed blades. Every breath hurts, every heart beat rips with simple savagery. I gape and the steam cloud of breath sinks into a pool of mist. I could hide an army with my hot, red mouth. The chandeliers drop light and gems in cold shards.

I peek out from behind the bars of my lashes. I carry my own cage. My shadows fall long and crazed against a maze of mirrors and march in geometric patterns to that point where sight stops and the world disappears.

This is the clock that never stops. I peal with the mad low tone of a striking bell.