jellyfish

A stinging spike like a burn in the back of the neck, no, in the back, like an icecream cone of steel in the stick of the spine.

It happened in the sea by the rockcombed beach. We were swimming with the moss tangled around our feet, stars of seaweed blossomed at the bottom of the sea or sky as we swam in circles around the grotesque, inflatable green crocodile. We'd bought it from a dusty shop nearby, selling tat & packed with French families.

I felt the sting in the small of the spine. It bit and the pain held on, like a furious lover's parting shot. I turned my hand to my back in an admonishing slap and found soft mollusc wobble...I screamed; the jellyfish inflated to a suffocating balloon, formed a suction around the patch of skin and pulled...

I shrieked and shoved. The jellyfish lump parted like that jumped-up lover leaving, through the briny ocean of memories. Gone. I swam back to what I knew with a lump in the small of my back, wounded by the whispers of the deep.

the wine merchant

Nicolas was her local wine merchant; she visited his shop on Fridays, and when she left she always ready to step into the weekend in style, wine in tow. The shop was narrow and teeming with bottles; they crouched by the counter like clumps of wild flowers and crept up the walls like ivy, taking ownership of the shop, transforming it into an intoxicating lair. This place was a cavern of brewed mischief, where bottles of wine as sweet as ambrosia and as dark as dragon’s blood piled high against the walls. Stepping into this haven and doing business with Nicolas was the way that she rescued herself, every Friday, from the drudgery of the working week.

Is it any wonder, then, that in the bar she fell back on Nicolas, and on alcohol, to drown her sorrows once again? It was the habit of years: she had always relied on Nicolas, received alcohol, delivered from his hands. And so, once again she accepted a drink from him, and relied on him and leant on his arm and...

...and so the affair began, in that first heady sip of wine. Nicolas had a long nose and very narrow nostrils which he used to discern the flavours of a new vintage. His eyes flashed green when he was impassioned, like blades of grass caught in sunlight. He always had a hint of stubble.

But the thing that caught her most about him was the scar. A deep red mark etched on his collarbone betrayed his adolescent apprenticeship as a wine merchant, when he dropped a bottle of wine costing thousands and a glass shard caught his torso. She often traced that scar in the dark with her fingers when he was sleeping. Years later she could draw it with her eyes closed, recreate that beautiful mark of clumsy adolescence.

The bite reimagined

« Enfin, ne pouvant bientôt plus former de sons, il mordit Pauline au sein. » ("finally, almost unable to form sounds any more, he bit Pauline's breast.") Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin

They fought about condoms, icecream, family, friends, what constitutes good music and when exactly they were going to get married, but their love for each other always stopped them from stepping over the line, crossing the threshold into single life again. Until something extraordinary happened.

He bit her breast. There was a horrific sinking sharp crackling bite, as though her breast were a prawn cracker snapped by some indifferent obese restaurant goer, his forehead thick with sweaty pleasure. His predator’s teeth were buried deep in her soft flesh, his gourmet cannibalism unleashed.

She flinched and screamed; only then did he let go. She recoiled from the viciousness of it, the pain. She couldn't understand the alien destructive impulse that had caused him to snake-like sink cold diamond-cut teeth into her human flesh.
Later, in disbelief, standing by the bathroom mirror in my own flat, she inspected the two pink, ugly rims of teethmarks - one where he had drawn blood - and the bottle-blue bruise. Even though the wound wasn’t infected, it hurt. That night sucked life out of her like snake venom.
That’s why she left. Running through the night in a tear-stained dress, she wept for a love that had kept her safe for so long and finally failed her now.

gypsy girl, dancefloor

A gypsy girl, thin in a very beautiful way, came to the table. Her cheekbones glistened with sweat, her skin was luminous. She held a bottle in the hand, a roll-up in the other. Her nose was pierced, one sparkling diamond hovering there uncertainly to signal her rebellion, but without upsetting the exquisite balance of her nostrils. This girl was one of those unique beings who have something about them, a quality that makes you want to watch them and never look away, hold them and never let them go.
She wore plain jeans and a black top which revealed glowing skin, two shoulder blades pulling like wings. Her hair was pinned up at the back of her head with a pencil, as though she were an artist, the strands curling around like swirls of paint. Her eyes shone; she was wholly concentrated on her lover, the dance.

She danced nearer and nearer to him and he danced too, and they were in time to the music the drumbeats the rhythm the lyrics, they moved and they shook and they shimmied closer and closer together, they danced they were dancing closer together and their hip bones were touching closer together
and then
he takes her suddenly, catching her head like a falling star in his hands and pouring burning light into her lips with his an animal kiss, a surprise kiss, playing passion - his trump card - laying his desire on the table.

She tilts her head and kisses back, mouths moving and hands searching,
the music over,
the seduction complete.

the couple at Waterloo station

He took her hand and they strode onto the escalators, so confident and sure - so in love, so hopelessly in love. On the escalators they held hands and their burning fingers intertwined like interlacing stories, hands crumpled together like the discarded pages of lost books.

He swooped a printed kiss onto her open face, like a word of tenderness scribbled on the page of a notebook. Here. Now. They were writing their own histories, unfolding them in the damp grey morning at Waterloo station, London. There had been lovers before them, and there would be lovers after them, and in some ways they were no different. They were simply another couple on the platform stage, acting out their roles.

And yet: there would be no two people who kissed like this ever again, who looked like this ever again, who felt the same rush of love and pain. On the surface, they were the same as any young couple have ever been; yet they were also two lovers unlike any others, experiencing emotions so new, the world had no words to describe them. For all the critics and their cynicism, for all the linguists and their poems, the English language cannot adequately express love. It cannot reflect feelings in the way that lovers' faces do – in the way that his face did in that moment to hers, in the way that it shone.