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

I want to tell her that I’m scared, that this is too much, but instead I put my lips on hers like she put hers on his that night: I bite and suck them, chew and gnaw, suck Pym from her and into me, blow him back into her in big, clear bubbles where I can see our faces mirrored, Carral and Jo, two sets of lips sucking the same man in and out of each other’s mouths. Here lay two Siamese twins, bound together by a thick freckled masculine sinew. And when something pushes in between my labia I’m torn and I scream, blood trickles down my thigh like warm dark fruit juice. Whatever’s in there twists in all the way, crawls up to my black apple and bites, and that’s how we are bound together:

Carral and Jo,

Carral and Jo together:

A black, dead and rotten fruit.

Afterwards Carral rests on my shoulder blade, hipbone, femoral neck, backside of my knee. From the roof, from the walls, from all corners, I can hear the sap dripping with its silver-shimmer echo, and I think that it drips with us, for us, from us, and that I have to leave.

Together we sleep like unicorns.

Under the Sea

Under the Sea

THIS IS HOW I REMEMBER my last day at the brewery:

I open the front door with my suitcase in my hand and I can’t find the world outside. No town, no view, no lights and no islands. No asphalt or concrete buildings, no dead trees. Nothing. No air. Only one thing exists: a foggy darkness so thick I think it’s a dark wall of water pushing against my hand, threatening to submerge me, as if the house is the cabin of an old ship sinking into the sea.

Carral is awake. I’ve run a bath for her. She says, ‘Stay here a little longer. Just one night.’

‘OK, one night. But tomorrow I’ll be gone,’ I answer.

‘Are you sure you want to leave?’

‘I have to.’

She cries, and sobs the same words again and again: ‘Little Jo. Stay with me.’

Her voice follows me like a yellow beam of light when I cross the kitchen floor and up the stairs to the landing. The chandelier trembles, and the glass stalactites are dripping. I sit by the living room window and study my own mirror image. Glowing blue-white lips. Behind them I see the dimmed shadows of Aybourne’s streets and towers.