the blueshift journal

Forget I need to speak sometimes because the sex drags on past when the water-clock fills with dark stuff, called night. It comes and goes. Now, the sky is amber and seems valuable only when we look at it; she spies, calculating. Stunning. There is nothing that she wouldn’t sell, if it had a price—nobody needs money, except us. They don’t use their timepieces and expensive things covered in gold, as they are better. More riches, more worth; we call them Midas, because everything they touch dies in one congealed patch, and we could use some death around here to spice things up. Plurals exist as a crown for her; made of tin metal, which she scavenged for. We meet our own needs. Reuse wealth.

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Breakfast hovers around somewhere between the carpet and the celling. Not in the middle, on the couch. Her hair is tangled in with the dog; her hand is passed out; she thinks she’s so crazy on coke and pregnant so I’ve got to shake her up with morning—the kind of girl that flaunts her breasts and sings the adverts off-key ironically. My mother would say she’s metal or hip. Implants to augment the body; she calls them the opiate because all you can do after a rave is sleep.

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Her arm is making her drink again. Forcibly. Lacing corsets up a broken collarbone—we’ve got metal glasses so you can’t see what’s inside, in case anyone loaded or passed out comes around. In that order: handsome and everyone else. Then the ones who are thin. Training time, for the snapable waist; she says it’s fashion. I imagine fashion (a river, sewn delicately by the eyes across a wound on the underside of a wing).

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I walk and smell her throat, which brims with something not vodka but less strong than methanol. Her trail leads me to the kitchen; our larder is the carpet. The carpet is full of broken glass from two days ago. I wonder if I can digest silica. Or poisonous crap, like rats, brimming through the attic; my tin can overflows with bitter coffee that can’t scrape off a good roll in the carpet more than death by hanging.

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Now, daytime, Greenwich Mean Time, some place in the isles. Window’s more flammable in the light, it seems. The glass filters rainbows and chucks the pieces out. I imagine the window frame as a mouth, spitting out bubba gubba gum in bits, because it takes longer which pisses off the teacher. Imagine the frame as a broken loom. We can’t let the bad gas out as the hinge broke when I threw up on it. My body stains. It’s a porthole into reality: better than a broken halogen bulb that fucks the environment over more than guns and squirrels, but pretty mucky all the same.

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Greenery’s outside, where I’m not. But we can save what we miss from within via the twitter I got and there’s birds, flying. Skylight flashes without the fuse melting. The circuit is broken —a pigeon lands and sits commando above her face. She moves her head up, chin down—breath sucks deeply, strongly. I think she’s pretending that she’s smoking. Or at least being a prostitute.

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I run out, like it’s an emergency. Roof’s cracking like smoker’s lips. Sky steals our light after we’ve run out of hot water making instant noodle, in the dark. A bruise is forming over the fair clouds. Like twenty thousand people chose to do fists at the same time; protesting against god or at least the council. Because they don’t have food, or maybe the newsagent is out of organic coconut lard. I wouldn’t know. It’s all baby fat and unhealthy; I crunch rock-candy like tumours with curves. Perhaps it’s really the air that contains oil, which makes stuff solid. I drag my fingers through it.

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Downstairs, she’s out of meth and there’s no prophet left. She wants to call the baby Malachi during fits, and when the air is spinning itself, it turns into Blue, or some other 70s name that everyone pretends isn’t real. A man dressed in powder pink taps the door to talk about Jesus. We throw him the last packet of condoms. A car revs, water gets cut off, but, still—there’s the telly, so watch something, Lovie—

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next: metastasized