BooksBarbecue
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

He looked a little hurt. A muscle contraction throbbed in one of his wrists, under his skin like a little caged animal, and when he got up from the kitchen chair he looked shrunken. I picked up the book, pulled my fingers across the cover. It was a lot bigger in my hands than in his. The paper was faintly yellowed.

‘Thanks, then,’ I said without looking up, and when I eventually did look up, I was alone in the kitchen. Carral was back on the mezzanine with Moon Lips. Later I got the sense that more had been said before they left, as if something had dissolved and disappeared before it reached me.

Outside the day was paper-white and dry. I walked down the street, stepped over the asphalt under lampposts that were blind in the daylight. At the top of the winding silo stairway, I stood by a shattered window looking over at the brewery roof. Inside on the kitchen table Pym’s notebook lay, still unopened, and I thought about it as I leant over the empty window frame and spat a warm white glob down onto the street. That was Pym I just spat out, I thought, and that idea helped a little. I kept spitting, trying to form a little puddle on the concrete below. The drops hit the ground with faint splats, and I could hear them humming: ‘Pym … Pym … Pym …’ Afterwards I walked to the brewery and looked at Carral, still reading Moon Lips on the mezzanine. Her head was so close to the book that the paper grazed her nose when she turned the page. I could see a faint damp stain on one of her breasts.

When I went to get ready for bed that night I’d got my period. I sat on the toilet staring at thick blood clots dripping down into the bowl from my crotch. The blood was old, like it usually is on the first day of my period, and the drops had coagulated into little sticky black lumps. It has always frightened me that I can’t stop the blood. It just drips and drips from me to a rhythm I can’t control, and now, too, every drip was wrapped in an echo from the porcelain, from the plasterboard, from the firm concrete walls. They whispered to me – Jo … Jo … Jo … Jo … – as if I was leaking into the room and dissolving, flowing from my own bloody crotch like black juice from a rotten apple core.

Prune Skin

Prune Skin