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Back Paradise Rot
Chapters (26)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Halftitle Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Contents
  6. Milk and Silk
  7. The Chest
  8. The Shadows
  9. The Apartment
  10. The Apples
  11. The Fruitpearls
  12. The Double Sleep
  13. The Moonlip
  14. The Spores
  15. The Brewery
  16. Pym
  17. Seasnails
  18. Prune Skin
  19. The Honey Mushroom
  20. The Lighthouse
  21. The Storm
  22. Goldapple Stems
  23. Eden
  24. Black Fruit
  25. Under the Sea
  26. Epilogue

‘I’m leaving now,’ I said, and glanced at Carral by the pool table one last time before walking out the door.

The trip home was chilly and my hands were cold and slippery, but my fingers did not stop throbbing. On the mezzanine while I waited for the sound of Carral, I could still feel it. I felt the throbbing against my pyjamas and the seams of my underwear, through epidermis, dermis and hypodermis.

Then I wake up: there’s a smell of musty paper. I haven’t noticed anything, not a sound; it’s as if she just appeared here. This is the first night we sleep in the same bed. Carral had snuck up here; no questions. There’s no hesitation, no reason, no fear. There’s nothing. Only springs creaking tentatively and the contours of a hand in the dark.

‘Hi.’

Or maybe I’m just dreaming when I hear that.

‘Hi.’

Carral’s face is silver-white in the moonlight. We’re not close. Our bodies watch each other, keeping their distance. We’re like two strangers, in different rooms, at different times.

The Brewery

The Brewery

WHEN I WOKE up, CARRAL was gone. The space beside me on the mattress was cold and smooth and the duvet was wrapped around my body like a sleeping bag. There was no trace of her, as if she’d never joined me up here at all. Still I remembered last night in small fragments: the sound of the creaking ladder, the mattress sinking under the weight of our bodies, her warm breath in my hair.

I played music and turned the volume up as high as it would go to push Carral out of my head. In my headphones, noise and effects enveloped a simple vocal melody. Surrounded by the naked factory I got the feeling I was in a church, a sense of space and grandeur, almost dizzying. The vocalist sung with a mysterious, veiled timbre:

Alison, I said we’re sinking

There’s nothing here but that’s okay

Outside your room your sister’s spinning

As the song transitioned into an interlude, the melody paled. The echoes of the words remained, as if they had fallen into themselves and continued to be there, smaller and smaller:

Alison, I said we’re sinking