14.

And the sun comes out and the world changes.

We have been living in shadows for so long we have forgotten the sky and are dazed by its clarity. We crawl from our caves, our dark spaces, uncurling and blooming in the bright day. Our eyes sting and we blink back brilliance.

Washed in beams we stumble with our hands held out, newly blind, feeling our way in this remembered place. We are pierced in a million spots and littered with dust motes. Our hearts soar and our salt tears rush down, into our grinning mouths as we turn our wet faces to the light.

13.

The bird has been trapped in the cage for so long its eyes are dulled and it trembles and flutters whisper-soft against the bars. You have opened the door and coaxed it out, watching it puff its feathers and cock its head. It chirrups softly, pours out a well of stoppered song. It is slow to remember the language of flight, its wings stressed and buckled and finally spreading in a rainbow of plumage. This is what it lives for, this wild joy, soaring and jolted on the currents of the sky. This is freedom and pleasure and exhilaration, climbing recklessly towards the sun and plummeting in dizzying rushes, warbling a celebration.

You would take your bow and shoot it out of the sky, spiralling broken to the ground. You would snare it and wring its neck; you would tear it apart with your hands. You would trample it underfoot until the earth was rusty and muddied with blood. This is your sport and you play well.

Quietly I have held it nestled in the hollow of my hand, my fingers tapping the pulse at its throat. Its bones are dry twigs, finer than porcelain; its feathers are silk and its jet eye looks back at me as it spills diamond notes. I stroke its small head, its wings, and it grips me with fierce claws.

It has lost its song and its heart is still.

12.

He sits on the low stone wall, looking out. The colour has bled out of the landscape leaving dulled sand, sooty clouds, a murky sea. The air is thick with moisture and salt from the slap of breakers at the shoreline. A couple pick their way along the beach, bundled and doubled into morose sacks against the wind. He is motionless, impervious to the creeping cold.

He has stayed so long his feet have rusted and his limbs groan like tortured iron. His eyes are steel, greyed by the reflected sky and the churning water. There is no setting sun at the horizon, just the fog of the damp dusk meeting the sea. His insides have been hollowed out and scoured by the biting air. He is crowned by tangled weed and his face is streaked wet. There is a sodden scrap of paper balled up in his hand, the ink smudged and purpling.

The wind rushes and sighs and he echoes like a shell with the crash of the waves.

11.

I fall into you like a rock into a deep well,
Leaping fish, I swim in the dazzle of your waterfall.
I could drown myself in the pool of your mouth, bind my hands with the ropes of your hair.

You slice me as cleanly as a hot knife moving through butter,
My heart is a red moon against your sun.
You are there in my hidden places, in the depths of my forests you find me.

You are the salt on my ice and I dissolve beneath you,
I am lost in the maze of your embrace.
Unwound, my love spills out in great loops. My tapestry is unravelled.

10.

She sits in the window seat, head resting against the scratched pane. The carriage is flooded with fluorescent light and she gazes out at blankness. A ghost world hides behind the glass. Houses and streets bathed in orange light, fragile and trembling in reflection.

Her face in this other space is pale and smooth and her features are blurred. She is insubstantial, she is solid, reaching out long fingers that never touch, brushing the surface between places. She catches his eye in the present echo and holds his gaze steady. They are the only people here. When she looks away the world disappears and she is left with the man opposite staring into the dark. She turns her head.

There is a room inside this room. She sees it when she blinks, the corners rushing round to new angles. She can hear children chattering and playing when she closes her eyes and shadows that have no beginning creep and dance up the walls.

How does she live, this second self? She wakes up to her when she falls asleep and suffers the wrench of the morning.

9.

His heart is a clenched fist and strains and whitens in his chest. His breaths hiss in the quiet bedroom as he forces them through gritted teeth, forces his lungs to rise and fall with the painful suck of air. He is suffocated by the smell of her, choked by the taste of her.

The memory of her touch raises hives on his skin. Her voice roars in his head and dizzies him and he shudders, unbalanced. He cannot see beyond her bright round face, her stomach, her breasts.

He will not allow this to happen.

This is his cage and this is his lock, his fingers burn as he turns the key. His knuckles are tender and shadowed with bruises.

8.

The sky is heavy and grey and littered with iced butterflies that flutter relentlessly down. London has lost its edges: the city is suddenly soft and inviting. For now, the snow is untrodden and folds like egg whites over pavements and cars. My feet sink through powder, shin-deep, and I pony step through the street.

The parks are frosted expanses dotted with early risers kicking plumes out of the drifts and rolling the misshapen bodies of snowmen. People on the way to work in heavy coats and swathed in scarves, stopping to point and click with cameras and phones. Children gathering up frozen cannonballs, readying for war.

A snowflake drifts into my mouth and pauses momentarily on my tongue, the bite dissolving in a frigid kiss. I would like to roll in the snow that lies like white feathers, sink into the depths and see the weak sunlight through a crusting of crystals.

My cheeks are reddened and my eyes are bright with snow dazzle. The world creaks around me.

7.

She sits perfectly still. She is full to the brim and the slightest movement will make her spill over in a hot flood. If the dam breaks she may empty herself out in one great rush, leaving a gasping husk hollow and undone. The tears that slide down her cheeks and snake into the crease of her lips make her mouth round with salt.

She is falling to pieces again and again. Her love falls away like tulip petals, dropping softly from the drooping stem.

She is a matryoshka doll, twisted apart by careless hands. There at the centre the small solid self, wrapped in cracked layers of lost love and forgotten dreams. This is the time when she is broken again. The wrenching pain of a dislocation that shatters her and rebuilds her. It is never familiar. She will always carry the scar of the wound, buried deeper and deeper in the nested memories.

One day she will be a whole doll, a perfect egg, all the unlocking miniatures cradled inside.