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Centre lines buzz out of the dark. A black futurity drips from highway to screen, into world, slick black on vinyl. Your words vomit on a phone, infect the intercom through a wet grain delay, mentioning some scan at a hospital. We won’t meet when things happen. Invoke the stats, watch late sun dapple concrete through trees. Drink in the solitude of the animal you claim to be. I challenge her to admit something. But there is nothing here to read and she looks back, contesting my gaze in that illegible dress.

Funny how secrets travel. You told me you will write me when conditions permit. I can’t admit how detached we always were or consent to what has happened. I made you a card from Malta: the one with skulls over a funerary urn in St John’s Co-Cathedral; a little death’s head grubbing St Ubaldesca’s arm as she converts water to wine in that restoration of Preti. But it went astray like the unanswered email concerning my father. I hesitate to mention it or cite the freedom your absence will afford. Grey tumours sprout all over your X-rays. Docile fasciae live authentically. You look damn good cumming over my wife’s photographs. You look rosy. There’s energy and declamatory fire, here.

You say I am deranged about you leaving, daring me to challenge your misprision. I do not, and what would be the point? Such Things of the Spirit are merely here to vampirize. But you get my desire for pre-emption and controlled, healthy, internalising.

Do I have her videos? I admit nothing in this game of mutual estrangement. We will hurt enough, eventually, to salvage it. You smile your best consular smile and savour the disparity of the unsuccessful repression that confers HISTORY, like ash from a cigarette butt. Whatever Freud’s debacle, he refutes the Standard Interpretation. We glissando into the red, into the shrouds; into the kiss, undulating as we hit: just boys, full of it, like there’s no collapse of the wave. There is, but it’s boned without a witness. We should spend time here as particles do when they’re unobserved. A blank house with wedged shape windows as a pointillist piano score traces in chiaroscuro. Think of Alice, or Renee, dressed to go but not going, face down and blooming, opening capillaries and veins. Think Vertigo Night. She kneads, grinds into stained concrete before our neighbours lick her away. ‘She just required encouragement. She was happy to fulfil our dream.’ The biomechanics: lower extremity fractures, with damage to pelvis and spine

You fabulate scan and metastasis with a dour, cornfed body. I fold at a contrariety. We vectorize the intercom; make jazz out of my phone. No longer just ‘playing the changes.’ This is how freedom feels. You would tell me this if you ever had a mind to speak. You show me the video, instead, press a remote, gazing at the crack between your office curtains, behind the monitor. We persist not too long after the Sun dies. Then keep on falling. We enter another corridor, whose grey walls dissolve by increments. Some beefed up male in a black t-shirt walks ahead as lack creeps up and infects him also. We watch Alice, arborescent hair over black satin. She gasps like escaping gas. We lift the gown from her corpse ankles and her wet, black pond. Spiders form recursively in spiders, quivering and, radiating in their midst, your face blanched with dead man’s sweat.

You give me permission to remember things my own way. Somehow, we both wanted more than we’re prepared to give. One day, I will call you to investigate a crime, a home invasion and murder, say. You will find the alarm deactivated and an enormous defect in the skylight to welcome the determined miscreant.

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David Roden is a philosopher and writer interested in dubious alternatives to our existence. His monograph Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (Routledge) was published in 2014. His novella Snuff Memories was published by Schism[2] Press (2021). His new collection of fiction and theory fiction, Xenoerotics, was published in 2023, also by Schism[2].