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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

Then I draw the nights in my bed out of her,

Our legs twisting together,

Eve and the apple,

the story of the hardened girl:

And then I blow,

I fill her body with air until not a single trace of

Pym, or me, remains.

I’m leaving now, Carral.

Then everything starts rushing around me, as if I’ve pulled a plug, as if all the saltwater is being drained out of the beer barrels, the bathtub, the house. Carral doesn’t open her eyes.

I cross the bathroom floor and open the door. I stay standing there for a while. Then I go outside. When I walk down the street, it’s a struggle, as if I have roots in the house that are stretched long behind me, and no matter how far I go, no matter how many corners I turn on the way to Franziska’s flat-share by the beach, they are stuck. They stretch, get thinner and thinner until they are as fine as thread. Slowly but surely I imagine that the brewery crumbles and follows me, threading itself on my cord as though it’s a house built from small gleaming beads. The front door reaches me first, then the floor panels from the kitchen, the enamel from the bathtub and the steel covering from the taps, glass-splinters from the chandelier and the apple cores from the compost. And Carral follows too. She crumbles in the bathtub. Tooth by tooth, nail by nail, bone by bone. And new beads grow, threading themselves on my roots. The beads appear from her mouth and eyes, her crotch, hip socket and fingertips.

Epilogue

Epilogue

I IMAGINE CARRAL behind me that day, while I pack clothes and books. She stands by the windowsill as if she is on a long quay. Her body is wrapped in faint white fog, blurring her silhouette. I barely remember her, and I imagine that she could be gone at any moment, swallowed by the fog, but she remains in the same position. Later, when I don’t hear from her and try in vain to find her name online or in phone books, I imagine that this is a moment I’ve duplicated again and again, like a scratched record, but right now the moment lasts so long I worry she’ll disappear. If she would just turn her head, blink, shift her weight from one leg to the other, but she doesn’t. The silk dress clings to her body in the wind. Everything is quiet, so quiet I later forget why we came here, why we are here.

Only the wind moves her. And then she is gone.

There,