I held up Pym’s book to her and continued: ‘Did you write the last page?’

‘Oh, Jo, it was just a joke.’

‘A joke?’

She laughed lightly.

‘Almost all of it. And some of it … for you.’

‘For me?’

‘Come.’

That was the first time I was on her mezzanine, and when she turned and lay behind me, firmly against my body, I thought we were synchronized, or I wished we were: that she should dream what I’d dreamt, that she should taste what my mouth tasted. And in my mouth I felt two tongues, mine and hers, licking each other’s lips and swallowing each other’s spit.

Her breasts push gently against my backbone. I can’t feel her nipples, just smooth skin, and where the nipples are supposed to be there are instead two small holes. From these two holes grow two thin stems that burrow through my skin and flesh, twisting and tangling around my spine. Along my back little yellow fruits start to grow. I feel their taste in my mouth: cold sweet sap.

Then there’s a rush through me, her stalks and fingers and veins spread through my entire body like a new soft skeleton.

Black Fruit

Black Fruit

THE BREWERY WAS QUIET, the kind of quiet that resembles sleep. Carral twitched like a dog that dreams of running. Every twitch pinched my skin, and the last thing I thought before I disappeared into sleep was that sleep is an animal, an animal body. And then I was gone, unconscious: paws and claws grew out of my fists, fur spun out between my legs and wove around our bodies.

I dreamt of two bodies, girls’ bodies, our bodies: our upper bodies had melted together and our necks twisted around each other, thin and long like swans’ necks. The girls were naked and hairless. The faces were shadowed. It was impossible to tell who was who. The cracks between them were covered in white mould fur, as if they shared a skin woven around them.

One of the girls turned her head towards the other and said, ‘Let me tell you a fairy tale,’ and the other girl nodded. So the first continued: