The spider responds to my inroads upon its personal space by making its life all about the word akimbo, attempting to spell it out with his anatomy. He seems proud in his great bulk.

For example, we're missing a snail insisting that he's in the haulage business , we're missing drinking hot chocolate in the continental way, kissing in a gorse bush , we're missing chewing gum until my jaw is black and blue and the world is tired mint, District Line-coloured,

I told my doctor, and to use the words that he committed to his case files with excited exclamation marks: quite literally every thought of you sends me reeling. This is the root of my fear, however—that if we met again you might perform something incidental and catastrophic. I want to message you and politely ask that you do not, for example, tip

I think that I clicked my fingers in irritation and said, 'I'll get it eventually,' and you had said, 'Oi oi, you can bet you will get it eventually,' because you cannot help yourself, your filthiness, and I had said, 'That's not funny,' and you said, 'You don't know what funny means any more,' and you looked at me, knowing or hoping that I would l

The Brothers Grimm wrote a huge, popular dictionary that outsold all their famous monster tales—with its first edition reaching something like eight volumes it was far from itsy-bitsy. They wrote a fairy story that began "A SPIDER and a FLEA dwelt together in one house, and brewed their beer in an egg-shell". Since reading that at an impr

In isolation, one of the holes in the phone's plastic looks like a full stop. An exclamation mark is a full stop with a cockatoo's crest. Full stops, three full stops. Had you been waiting for me to finish your sentence and to join the dots? Lichtenstein or Seurat or the sign of a therefore's stacked notation, used to indicate the conclusion of a s

For what it's worth, concentrating, I can say that you altered me in non-trivial ways. The pursuit was anything but trivial, at least. I remember that.

I completely lost it (the plot, not the glasses—they're only mislaid) about two weeks ago around the same time that I mislaid you. If you were here you would make a filthy joke about my use of that word, about you being miss laid. Scratch that, then. Screw it or unscrew that word out of place. Two weeks ago is when I lost it—the plot—round about th

His voice was still a whisper and it sang with alcohol. 'She worms into you the way that smoke gets into your hair.' He nodded and would not stop nodding until I nodded too.