I do not usually do memes, but as I was tagged by Imogen, and as this is a book meme…
1. Pick up the nearest book.
Here I encountered difficulties. I am sitting at my desk. Directly above the computer monitor there is a shelf. Not wanting to go in search of a measuring device, I closed [...]

Mami tells me he seriously thought of -
and for one heart-stopping second I really thought she might say killing himself, he thought of killing himself of killing of stopping being there -
She watches the shape my thoughts make of my eyebrows. On some days we read each other like this.
(Yesterday when - fire engine shirt, [...]

I want to kill your hamsters.
Please stop leaving them at my door. Like abandoned babies in moses baskets on doorsteps. Only noisier. And smellier.

Strange to think you have my number when several months ago we played the Flicky Eye Game from under our fringes. Over the fringes of other, less interesting, heads. I think mutual suspicion gave way when my tongue slipped and I told you, by total accident, that I can smell your hair from three daffodil-yellow [...]

Saturday night, stumbling up curbs and snapping open shaken cans with a fizz. Two hundred unwieldy gazelles tripping past, lopsided, hobbling, screeching, fighting. A stab, a scratch, a nick, a moonlight scar running up (and down and up and) the taut skin of the back, a similar weave of silver criss-crossing tracks scritch-scratched over his [...]

I wish I were young and small enough to justify a temper tantrum.
My throat rasps roughly when I draw deep breaths.
I would like to stay at home and pick the crisp, curling strips of dried galia melon skin from between the keys of my keyboard. I want to watch Lolita again.
And then I would like [...]

God, he says, the shadow of his fist obscuring my notes, I’m bored.
He sits down before he asks if I want company. He is doing everything backwards. Even in today’s sun he’s wearing his shin-length leather coat. When he takes it off I see he’s shrouded in black.
He tells me how great A Clockwork [...]

Wishing yourself flattened between the pages of a glossy magazine never works. Nothing is ever so shiny, nor do any more than 2% of the population possess legs quite so long. Wishing yourself in small bold letters with your words italicised and everything describable and unknottable also never works. Because.
The Girl With The Priestly Admirer [...]

Hush, he says with his eyes closed, I want to be a pencil.
I hold my breath and wait for a pencil transformation.
No, he says despondently after several minutes of silence. It’s not happening. He turns his face back into the pillow.

I am sitting there inhaling the musty trapped sun in your room and trying really really hard to stop laughing at something. I’ve forgotten why I originally started, which makes me laugh harder, and I hide my grinning mouth behind a hand. It seeps out from beneath my fingers. Two hands, the fingers pinching the [...]