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

In the brewery, I can see the kitchen over the plasterboard on my mezzanine, with the table like an island in the middle. Behind the table is the ladder to Carral’s mezzanine. The rest of her mezzanine is hidden behind a wall like my own. Yet throughout the room I can hear creaking and low voices, muted sounds. I hear them so clearly that I can see what’s happening, like an x-ray through the board. I see Pym’s thick arms move across Carral’s back, envelop her, grip her tight. He puts one hand on her shoulder-blade and the other in the small of her back and she bends over. Then she stretches out and looks right at me, as if knowing that I can see her through the wall, her eyes shining white in her warm reddish face, like splinters sticking out of a compound fracture. Under Pym her spine trembles like a white-tipped mane. The moonlight tints arched joints white, and her tailbone blinks when he pulls her away: a lighthouse signalling the way in the horizon

there, not there,      there, not there

The Storm

The Storm

THAT NIGHT I LAY with brine in my throat and the image of Carral and Pym together behind my eyelids. My mouth still tasted of Pym’s tongue. Neither drinking water nor eating Fruit Pastilles had helped. On my little mezzanine I felt like I was sinking into my own body, into a dark, tight box made of skin and flesh. After a while I fell asleep, and when I woke up a sharp draught hit my face through a crack in the concrete. From the other mezzanine I heard Carral leafing through a book. I wondered if Pym was still there, if they were reading his novel together, if he was touching her. I put on some music, but the song that started playing was from Björk’s Vespertine album, so intimate it only took me closer to Pym and Carral. The strings and voice sounded like myriads of intimate touches, and each beat sounded like it was played from inside someone’s body. I wondered if he was here still, inside her, on the mezzanine across from me. I turned the music off and decided to get up and leave.

The ladder steps from the mezzanine were damp and slippery, like on a quayside ladder. The kitchen floor was moist too, as if dew had formed on the little grass tufts that grew between the floorboards. Lime-stained water drops trickled from the cracks in the wall. And in the bathroom, the bathtub flooded as I showered. The mushroom from the plasterboard was beaded with water, like a shower head.