I blushed and something unfolded inside me. I couldn’t help but picture, no, feel, the hero’s huge cock inside my own shamefully untouched body. I looked at Carral. She seemed to be asleep in the exact same position, and I turned back to the book. The sex scene continued in moans and accelerating thrusts. In the middle of all this, a line or two before the hero’s climax, a sentence was abruptly interrupted by a shapeless stain. It wasn’t dark and made the type illegible. I put my finger on the stain: bone dry and naked, timeless. A muscle in Carral’s wrist pulsated, and suddenly it was as if I could feel that same pulse in the stain, in my finger, in my crotch.

The book fell to the floor with a bang while I hurried down the stairs and up to my own mezzanine, undressed and turned the light off. In the dark the house was so quiet I hardly dared to breathe, and when I put my hand into my pants, as if to grab and keep ahold of myself, I was terrified that Carral could hear what I was doing, that, through the plasterboard, she might discern the sound of underwear fabric among the soft rustling of the sheets. Under the covers, I could still feel my pulse in my fingertip, in my hip, beating against my pelvis, and I lay awake. A noise above me made me think of a bird landing and settling in for the night. It would have to be a big bird, maybe a swan, scraping its heavy bird-feet against the metal plates up there. I imagined that it shook its wings and preened its feathers with its beak, and when I fell asleep I dreamed that the long swan neck stretched down past the metal roofing and all the way to me, and that it put its big swan head under my arm, as if I was a wing.

The Spores

The Spores

THE INSIDE OF THE Earth Sciences building was rounded and painted in earthy colours. The wooden walls in the auditorium curved upwards into a vaulted ceiling. All the chairs, window frames, and desks were variations of green and brown. The inside of the building looked like a well-kept nature reserve. I sat at the back to avoid Dr Spitlip, but today another lecturer had taken his place. He droned on about the development of local spider species. I struggled to pay attention, and in between digressions and slides of fossils, I discreetly read Introductory Mycology:

In some kinds of fungi (Rhizophydium) fusion between spores leads to transferral of one parent’s genes to the other.

I thought about the stain in Moon Lips. It had made the writing illegible and left the page coarse and hard against my fingers.