Featherbones by Brown Thomas;

Author:Brown, Thomas; [Brown, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sparkling Books Limited
Published: 2016-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

In the darkness of his bedroom, Angela slowly removes her clothes. Visible as streaks of white in the city light through his window, she looks skeletal; a thin, hard shape with long bones for limbs. Naked, she slides into bed beside him.

As she begins to explore his body with her hands, he wishes that he could lose himself, as he lost himself at the bar. Her cold touch tickles the hairs down the back of his neck. They make love tenderly; a slow, reluctant kind of sex that turns his stomach. He wishes he could be sick, as though it would expel the badness from inside him; that he could continue being sick until his throat burned and everything went black and he found himself in that place Dr. Moore once warned him from, where there are tiny stars, and fish-faced figures swimming beside him, decay filling his nostrils like mouldering wood while scaled hands trace across his arms and legs, slick and silvery in the darkness –

He wakes the next morning entangled in her arms. Quietly he moves from beside her. Stepping from the bed, he dresses quickly. It is still dark outside, the sky deep indigo blue. As he hunts for his jeans, he notices her muddy clothes, in a pile by the bed, her bare footprints black against the floorboards, the chain hanging from the latch, where he forgot to lock it. He feels violated in a way he could never openly admit. Not by the softly-sleeping shape beneath his bed covers, but by himself. It is the ultimate step in social obligation; to drink, to pick someone up, bring them home and sleep with them. He feels betrayed by the bar, where for one night a week he thought that he was free from these obligations. Mostly, he does not want what has happened.

He leaves a mug out in the kitchen, beside a spoon and his last teabag. Beneath the mug he places a note, explaining nothing really at all. Then he leaves his flat and walks the short distance through the city. The streets are still littered with Friday night.

Walking past a convenience store, he stares through the rain-speckled window at the contents. Chocolate glistens in translucent packets, beside which bulge vast bags of sweets, bloated and bright like jellyfish. Vestigial raindrops veer down the glass, breaking the colours behind so that they blur, running into one another, painting a picture of kaleidoscopic chaos.

Further down the high street he notices properly a number of other shop windows, similarly distorted by the rain. Inside the window of a women’s clothes shop, three mannequins weep silent tears, their empty eyes fixed lidless on his. Scarves snake around their necks like shining eels, while floral scrunchies bloom by their small feet; fat mounds of cutting-fashion coral. Beside the clothes shop is a window filled with mobile phones, all of them voiceless on their stands; empty shells, lavish models suggesting luxury and perhaps langoustine limbs, barely concealed inside the husks.

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