Woman, Eating

Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and

‘I didn’t really want a race. I only wanted peace and quiet.’ His face is bright and flushed, his tousled thick hair soaked with sweat. ‘I’d prefer it being just the two of us.’ The air around us is changing colour. There are forces at play beneath the surface. There are invisible filaments reaching out from me and sparking with the invisible filam

The sight of her coming towards him roused a kind of animal alertness in his body, but he could never be certain whether that was the instinct of predator or prey.

And soon there was no difference between me and the mosquitoes. My skin was no longer a wall that separated us, and my blood was their blood. I