ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom is a poet from Devon in the UK and has been published in Punk Noir, Bristol Noir and A Thin Slice of Anxiety.
Fantasy, the earliest of all the escapisms, always lean and pure, and always just out of grasp and fading. But this one is different, and don’t they all start out like that, sending impulses on their way straight to all the good places. No need to help them, they will tickle and tease and make you salivate like a dog in Pavlov’s cage.
She walks the same way each morning, past the library over the street and up the hill, and when she climbs the stairs, you can see her long bare legs up to her staggering hips. Her long brown hair flows down her back to a little birth mark of the moon on her upper right hip. I have not seen her eyes up close but I could bet my life that they are a deep green. She smiles to people she meets in the street and is not beautiful and stuck up, but open and warm. Today I will ask her out. After she has been up to her offices at the top of the hill, she comes down here to this cafe for coffee. Here she comes now in fact. “Hi, hello, would you like to join me whilst you wait for your coffee?” I ask in a cool calm voice. “Sure why not, I have seen you in here, and wanted to say hello before but… my name is Ellie, pleased to meet you.”
We sat and talked and shared ourselves like you do when oxytocin is flowing through the body, wide eyed and ferociously, like every word is a lick of each other, and one step closer to coming. Everything shines and is vivid in colour, the glass, the light and the air.
“Would you like to go out after here and get some food?” It was 8 p.m. and they were making moves to close up the cafe. “Why don’t we go back to mine, and eat there?” I could feel the heat coming off of her, from in between her legs, from her skin, the blood close to all the surfaces.
Her place was an apartment in the upper part of town on the top floor of a tall tower block, with views that looked out over the city, that shimmered like an ocean in full moon. In the apartment she came close and kissed me and went down onto her knees and undid my belt and took me out and began to lick up me, lick my balls, gently and softly whilst looking at me. The room spun and I had to keep from falling, apply all my concentration. The apartment was black like liquid velvet and the city, as if a wave, came to its walls. Ellie put me in her mouth and slowly opened her throat and took me deep into it. The ceiling shook and lifted and there the stars, bright as an opera, on opening its curtains to reveal it cast of planets. I felt myself ageing and beginning to break up, first my arm fell from the back of her head and rolled down her bare back, and then my eyes took in the blackness of the sky and turned my soul into the night, where the gods were there to hunt. But I could not run and came and Ellie swallowed and slinked away like a jaguar into the ink.
I have died, this is death, I have been judged. The long eternal blank, there is no here or there, me or you - WHITEWASH BLEACH, NUKED.
But the eyes always open, and then the ears begin to hear and the mind finally thinks. Thinks about lists what it has to do, fear, and begins to forget about Ellie and the gods of war. Engines start up, doors close and people abuse the quiet, breaking their way into it with force. Smells, grog and pains; the human concoction, come here now, this is you, you are not the fantasy, you don’t belong there. I move my body and pray for strength to get off the bed, to leave her here in between the sheets and the warmth and the gods and put out the feet onto the cold floor and feel the pain shoot up. Stand up and walk out of the door. 9 a.m.