“She has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her”

One day you’ll meet her, like a memory half-buried. Her voice is nothing more than a distant echo and surer than that you remember the surety of her hands on your skin when she drew you up into the bright, white heat of the sun, drew you up and took your heart in fair trade for your breath. You recall her tremulous smile and the strength of her long fingers, her hair like a cloud of ink around the delicate bones of her pale face, her huge hollow eyes blown pupil-dark. When you meet her again, you will learn the architecture of her spine and the elegant, eloquent curve of her throat. Under your fingers her heart will sing its hummingbird beat and your mouth will discover the salt taste of her skin. But you will find that that the long line of her torso is the same grey as the rocks she rests upon and that she is serpentine, swift and sly. Her teeth are pointed and sharp as needles and the  sinking sun flashes bright from the hundred thousand tiny scales which begin just below the sweet curve of her belly. One day you’ll meet her, and this time she will draw you down, down, deeper down, until the sun is distant and half-remembered and all around you is the ceaseless motion of the dark sea.

by Rachel Monte

His eyes were always bright. Yet they were always slightly too wide, too open, too alert. That was what gave him away. That, and the way he would tap his left foot to an inaudible beat. Then, as if self-consciously, he would roll his shoulders back, grin widely and delve his hands into the musty jacket he always wore.

You couldn’t call him nervous. He was sure of what he was doing although perhaps not why he was doing it. Criticise him though, and he’d pause, and stare at you. Narrow his blue green-flecked eyes. And stare. It was enough to unsettle the most confident. He did it to me once when I questioned him if he ever kept in touch with anyone at all. You can’t live like this forever, I told him. It was the most still I’d ever seen him. Until they found his body on the edge of the Thames.

Living on the edge. It’s such a bloody cliché. I can’t help it if that’s what described him perfectly. It just seemed like he deserved something more. He was someone so vibrant that it was as if his body couldn’t quite contain his life. I half-expected it to jump right out, vibrate off lamp-posts and bounce its way down the streets, blacking-out the whole city. He sapped my energy – I couldn’t breathe trying to keep pace with his walk; my head ached trying to keep pace with his conversation; and my nose bled when we spent another night cutting coke with the edge of a razor. He’d be at triple-speed then of course, and my nervous twittering would go up an octave, especially when I peered at the spattered mess I didn’t want to call my face.

He turned up at my flat the day before he disappeared. I could practically taste the trouble in that manic smile. I begged him to tell me what was going on, too afraid even to cringe inwardly at my own hysteria. Please, Michael. Please. Please. His eyes were wider than ever as he gabbled through his placatory script; I’d heard his talking-by-numbers approach before. Then he threw me his jacket, told me he’d see me soon and left. I want to say that it was a grand exit and that he strode forth as if into battle. But it wasn’t.

When I got the news a week later, I repeated his last words to me. See you soon, I murmured. I spent a few days staring into space but it is only so long before space can stare back at you. And there he was, as vibrant as ever. Startled to see me, he yelped my name and launched a fantastical tale, hoping I’d snap at the bait. After a while, he noticed I was silent. We looked at each other for a long time. You won’t see me soon, I said.

The next day I chucked his jacket into a skip, went to work and thanked the gloomy sky for being completely unremarkable.

by Phoebe Amoroso