He drank Perrier water during the night to wash away the scum of words he had not used the previous day. He woke at 4:am from untroubled dreams and burped out ‘I love you,’ which floated to the ceiling and was lost in the rivers and valleys of the polystyrene tiles. He turned over, wrapping his warm body in the bedspread and, closing his eyes, he drooled ‘I miss you’ across the yeasty sheets. The room began yellowing and the cop-crow of a police siren silenced the chorus ruffling its feathers in readiness to begin their song. He sneezed, a photic reflex full of air and mucous that spelled out ‘I need you’ in the mini-rainbows that scaled the room. He ran his hand over the wide and cold desert expanse of the sheets next to him, sat up, rubbed his eyes and reached down involuntarily to scratch his testicles, finding something sticky there. He pushed back the covers and a small bubble of opaque liquid shimmered on the top of his erect penis, in it, in mirror writing, he could make out the words ‘Home Sweet Home’ in bright pink embroidered on a rose-and-heart-ridden background.
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Steve Finbow is a writer and lecturer. His fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London, 2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press, 2011), Nothing Matters (Snubnose Press, 2012). His biography of Allen Ginsberg in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series was published in 2011. His latest works are Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014) and Down Among the Dead (Number Thirteen Press, 2014). He has been a writer for Quarantine theatre company and his work appears in many international anthologies and journals.He is now writing a non-fiction analysis of physical illness and creativity for Repeater Books.
