I want to see you he said but I didn’t want to be seen. Only to feel. My body rubbed itself against his hardon until I found the right place and pushed myself down on him until it hurt inside like period cramps. We lay still for a while. Like mating beetles. 199Or maybe like nothing other than a pair of excited people in a bed. I started to move. He groaned beneath me. Pleaded with me to go slowly but I didn’t want to slow down and upped my speed instead. I wanted him to come. Wanted to hear him howl in my narrow girl’s room and feel that I freely decided to make him do it from sheer desire to feel his large coarse cock chafing against my moist inner membranes.

Afterwards I slipped off him. I wanted to be beside him because I never could resist the pleasure of lying embedded in someone’s body.

Then I put my hand in his like a child. As I had many times before. Then we slept.

On an ordinary day the tapeworm’s whining would have woken me up at four but this morning I slept. I woke when the alarm clock rang at six but went back to sleep. Woke again at quarter past six called the homecare voicemail service and said I was unwell. The next time I woke it was because I had registered a noise I didn’t recognise.

John had got up. I dressed and went downstairs.

The noise came from outside. Looking through the window wasn’t helpful so I pulled my jacket on and went out. John had dragged the splitter out to cut the blocks of wood into halfmetre billets. He was working with his back turned my way and didn’t notice I was there.

Once split chopping the billets into shorter logs in the woodshed would be straightforward. He had his release. I got a pile of cut wood. We were both satisfied.

I made coffee and went to pick up the paper from the letterbox outside. He carried on splitting. The pile was growing large. He would be a while. 200

I turned the pages randomly in vk the local paper. It seemed thin and dull or perhaps it was me who was thin and dull. Local news never interested me much. Just reports about little people who had done little things. Cultivated a special tomato. Created lampshades from ostrich feathers. Won a beauty competition in the bahamas. The culture pages weren’t exciting either. The book reviewer penned uninteresting reviews about uninteresting books. He liked crime novels best. The opening of the picture exhibition at the adult education institute. A painter of icons had painted icons.

And then I saw a small rectangular advertisement framed in black and tucked in between ads for antique shops and mushrooms for sale on the second last page. It announced an art exhibition.