The first night I see her cry, my ferocious lioness, eater of bones and one that rips the flesh from haunches, it breaks my heart. She’s stooped, spine curled, bones rattling out horrid little sobs as she presses the heel of her hand into her eye. I’m too stunned to move for a moment, blinking like some thick-feathered bird, my cup of tea still between my fingers.

“I just - fuck, this is so hard.” She hisses.

The remarkable thing about Jet is that even when broken, sobbing and lost her lips still roll back and she’s snarling something fierce. I put my cup down and wrap myself around her, legs on her lap, arms around her shoulders I bury my face into her collarbone and just. Hold her. As she would do for me.

“We’ll get by.” I murmur, pressing my lips against skin. She shivers and bows her head and I open my mouth, bloodhot and nervous. “We’re wolves, aren’t we? We’re wolves.”

Wolves indeed.

Jet gets edgy, nervous, I can tell by the way she holds herself, like a creature trapped in an open field with the yellowing eyes of hawks glaring down at her. She stalks through the flat and I can feel the swell of her, a maddening current that flows with the edges of her bones - she’s the restless sea and I’m just a hapless boat waiting for the storm to come.

She starts disappearing. She goes to clubs, paints herself bright colours like gypsy kings and spits ink between her newly sharpened teeth. She doesn’t invite me anymore, because I’m so colourless and tired and my presence just gets in the way of her achieving what it is she wants. Release, sexual gratification, a new identity to get lost in for one night. I stay at home and wait for her, drink lemon tea with no honey and watch old reruns of period dramas on the television.

Monster-Jet peeks through yellow-eyes and leers.

Sometimes we don’t talk, sometimes she talks too much.

Monster-Jet gets bigger and crueller as the nights get warmer and the odd heat of approaching spring settles in her bones. On most nights she kicks me out of bed so she can fuck strangers, all dull-eyed and as empty as we are, all supping on spirit bottles like they’re the tunnels towards paradise. I sleep on the sofa-bed with headphones in, catching the sound of moans and bucking bedsprings each time a song fades for the other to catch up. In the end, I slip outside with a coat and some cigarettes and spend the night watching cars go by on our street.

I tried to quit smoking, I really did. Its not just the rush, the feel of smoke in my body, it’s the drag and pull, as relentless as the sea, I need it to keep going the way a sailor needs stars to point him home.

I flick my lighter on off on off on off and spy a group of drunken men coming home from the pub. They call over, ‘lo darling you alright?’ in some nondescript accent from up north. I wave back, feel sick and pull out my book of poetry.

her eyes hold oceans, they said,

Pull, swell, pull, swell, I take a drag of my cigarette and think oh lord, when did I get so empty?

Vodka kills a mouse one morning, presents it proudly at my feet, its little head half-crooked, spilling blood like a liar spitting words. I can see the nub of bone, surrounded by slick-red flesh shredded by cat claws and wicked teeth. I crouch down, stare at it behind my rose-tinted glasses. Vodka is purring loudly, eyes closed, so very proud at the slaughter of young things.

“Why are you staring at a dead mouse?” Jet asks, all soft and supple and purring. A bigger cat with bigger claws and bigger ideas.

“Vodka’s gift.” I grin, crooked, nervous. My stomach rolls and I feel ill. “Eat it and feel her goodwill.”

“Don’t be sick. Get rid of it.” Jet is wolfish, teeth sharp and crooked. Points and sharp edges, straight lines, they’re not natural and when she is sleek and diamond-sharp, she isn’t natural either. Its like she is meant to be a snarling, soft-furred creature, all teeth and bark and honey-mustard eyes.

“Should I bury it?”

If I were to bury every broken thing in this flat I’d be a gravedigger. I’d be the comic-relief in Hamlet, playing with skulls whilst the protagonist deals with death and mortality. I’d fumble with my words, say the wrong thing, my fingers caked in mud - the sweet kind of mud that turns red the deeper you go. I would press my palm flat to the earth and feel the bones shudder underneath.

I don’t wait for her to answer, just pick the mouse up with a paper-towel. Its still warm, revolting and strange, the blood isn’t even thick enough to press through paper its so small. It might be a baby. Vodka follows, mewling playfully, her Russian-tongue curling over her chops. She’s a monster too.

The world is pink behind my glasses.

I bury it in our front garden, which is a tiny patch of scrappy looking green, grass half-dead, a small bush growing near the wall. I make a hole just near our doorstep, wrap my mouse in its paper towel and lower it slowly. My wrist pushes against cold wet dirt and I imagine it sinking through my skin, into vein and bone, so I become a monster too.

“Gonna say a few words?” Jet smiles, eyes narrowing with her smile. “Make a headstone?”

“No.” I get up and push past her into the flat, up the stairs and into our bedroom. I feel sick again. Why does it feel like I spend most of my time feeling sick?

“Are you alright?” Jet’s hands, wonderfully cool, press against the seam of my neck and shoulders. “You look pale. Did the blood make you go funny?”

“Not the blood.” I mumble, burying myself deep into covers and sheets. If only graves were like this, warm and soft and womb-like. “I feel sick.”

“Oh baby,” then she’s all around me, pressing, her fingers working at the buttons of my work shirt, pulling it down my arms and tossing it to the floor. She takes everything, strips me bare, then goes into the bathroom and wets a flannel to press to my skull. I shiver violently, my mouth suddenly going dry, bones aching.

I wake up with her wrapped around me, breath frothing like seafoam along my ribs, spanning stomach and thighs and knees. It walks, her breath, walks across skin with pitter-patter feet. She’s awake though, because her fingers are moving up and down my hair, soothing.

“Tell me something,” I croak, aware that my throat is burning like hot pastry against your tongue, dry and crackling. I can taste vomit, but I don’t remember throwing up.

She stops stroking my hair and exhales loudly.

“In the summer the sky will be so blue if you look at it too long you could tumble straight into it. People breathe it in, take breaths of it and it will get steadily smaller, so me and you, we’ll move. We’ll move to the sea, in some exotic land, where the water is clearer than glass and we will swim naked at dawn. I’ll catch fish and we’ll roast them in tinfoil and lemon, peel back their skin and use our fingers to pick out sweet-flesh.

Sometimes we’ll sleep on the beach, on old clothes, sometimes we’ll sleep in a little wooden house painted red and white, with a porch and old wicker chairs. We’ll take Vodka, she’ll like the meadows behind the beach because they’ll be riddled with rats and birds to chase. We’d flake up fish for her to eat, she’ll live for twenty years and the local children will call her cat-spirit, ask her questions about their future and look into her eyes and see the answers. When she dies they’ll bury her as one of their own, carve wooden statues of her face and pile them up on her grave.

And the sun will turn your skin brown, you’ll grow healthy and tall, with strong bones. You’d never get sick, I wouldn’t let you. You’d spend your days making dresses and painting, reading books that they sell on the market in the village - battered and worn by too many fingertips. We’d drink wine and everything would be green and blue and white and perfect… we’d never see grey again, we’d never see a city again.”

My breath hitches, dissolves in my throat, burns my lungs.

“Sounds… sounds perfect,” I whisper. She doesn’t say anything, just hums and continues stroking my hair.

On the first day of spring I take the bus to one of its last stops, to a village outside the city, surrounded by green wet and overbearing, impossibly bright and air that makes it hard for me to breathe. The houses are small, they look like they are made of cake and sugar, sickly-sweet things with flowerboxes bursting with brightly coloured plants. Their faces bounce, like the ones in Alice in Wonderland. I imagine them singing, standing at the bus stop with the rain slowly hop-scotching along my crown.

The village is like a sleepy child, curled in on itself, shutters down like half-mast eyelids. There is more pink here than I have ever seen - pink flowers, pink shops, pink cars, pink embedded in the craggy hills that bend in the distance. I look at the sky dripping and there is pink even there. The locals are flushed pink, from the little chill that niggles into their clothes, from seeing a girl-stranger staring at them with eyes that are as empty and wide as the ocean.

I’m still sick, I think, I still stumble when standing up too long, but the bus ride was long and the gentle rhythm of public transport made me soft and fluffy almost.

I go to the little shops, the butcher and the bakers, peer at dead things, cuts of meat pink, pink, pink, pink. The butcher watches me watching his craft and offers me free ham, which I pack away gratefully. He wraps it in white paper, then string, like they did in the old days.

“I think I could be happy in a place like this,” I tell him, and he smiles. I ask for some fish, pull out my purse and spend good money on it. Fish the size of my forearm, with glazed eyes and silver scales that shine the way stars do. I imagine myself on our beach, kneeling in the sand so that it sticks to the whorls of my skin, scraping and harsh, too-hot. Me with my knife, slicing away slithers of pink flesh, barely bloody. Scraping off scales so that they fall like bits of glass. “Are we by the sea?” I ask him and he just laughs.

I buy a fresh loaf of bread and some little frosted cakes, pink icing, with bird eggs made of chocolate on top, to celebrate the coming of spring. The baker is a woman with cheeks stained red, hair greying like old stone, a vine of velvet green stringing around her bun.

“You’re not from here, are you dear?” She says, tone wise and calm.

“No, I’m from the city,” I murmur. “Felt like getting out of it.”

“Of course. I’m always saying to my husband, the city, the city is like a huge prison, except without the comfort of not being able to escape.”

I smile grimly.

“This is a nice village,” I tell her, watching her wrap my purchases in paper - again, only this time it has blue stripes running diagonally up it, spotted slightly with grease and flour. The little cakes go in a pale-blue box. “Really nice.” I love the smell of bread, love its warmth, how it sinks into you and becomes you, soft like rabbit paws against your belly.

“You should move here, love, everyone looks out for friends here, no one gets left behind.” I try to imagine Jet and I fitting in a place like this, where the neighbours wave instead of ignoring you politely, where they come over with pots of homemade jam and bread, sit out in your garden drinking tea and talking about how Joan from across the street is having an affair with the butcher’s boy James.

Its like living in the 40s, except there’s no great war and there is always going to be Big Brother on the television and cheap newspapers with tits on page three being sold at the corner shop.

“I can’t,” I mumble, taking my packages and pressing a well-earned five-pound note into her palm. “Me and my lover, we’re moving country. We’re going to the South Pacific, we’ve got a house on the beach.”

Lies are so easy when people are willing to accept them.

“Alright for some, isn’t it?” The baker says, grinning.

I put the food in a paper bag, hold it to my chest and leave the shop.

I spend the whole day in this village. I walk around the streets, watch children cycle their bikes in swirling loops around me, like hunters circling a tiger, before pelting off and laughing gleefully. I stop and talk to an old man sat on a bench with a radio on his lap, playing old Buddy Holly songs to an audience of clouds and pink bricks. I go to the fields behind, ask to borrow a woman’s bike to explore, ride around the countryside until the fresh air purges all bad smoke, city-fumes and longing from my blood. I cycle back, give the woman her bike, and go to the local pub for a pint of fresh ale and a plate of pie and chips - the food fills be better than anything has in months.

Men step around stools to talk to me, flirt with me and ask me about my interesting hairstyle. I tell them I used to be a librarian but I met a man called Fitzpatrick, who took me to New York and made love to me in his apartment overlooking the whole world. I tell them when I was a child I rode horses in France and spent my summers in Arabian cities gleaming white with oval mosques and highways. I tell them I just finished university in Japan, Hokkaido and ate fish so fresh it still gasped for air.

And they believe it. Its fun, lying, lying to sooth the ache, lying to be the trickster. For once I’m the coyote, grinning and leaping and kicking up dust, for once I’m the rabbit with long feet, tormenting chained dogs. There’s no Jet here to laugh and back me up, the girl who stole my seal-skin, trapped me on land forever. She isn’t there to skim fingers under my top, to clutch my hipbones and smirk like a fisherman holding the oily, black cover, locking it away in his house.

It begins to get dark, so I bid my farewells, bow and kiss cheeks and decline bountiful offers of places to stay, people to fuck, drinks to be had. I make my way to the bus station feeling elated and well, sodden from rain and smelling like dirt - not gravedigger dirt, but fresh mud kicked up by the tricksy coyote playing in the woods behind the village. I get the last bus home feeling tired in a natural way, not exhausted, but tired from using my bones properly.

When I get in Jet is waiting for me.

“Where have you been?” She says sharply, biting, eyes swelling with storms, ready to throw me to the deep.

“I went for a day out, by myself, to clear my head. Sorry.” Its not good enough. “I just felt like I needed an adventure, alone, to think for a while, you know? Look, I got… I got some stuff.”

I’m wet, wet jeans all the way up to my knees, my trainers wet, my socks wet, my shoulders wet behind my jacket. There is mud flaking my wrists, mud splattered on my lip from crawling up walkways not meant for man. My bag is heavy and warm, I pull it out - fish, a bag of lemons, cake, ham, bread, cigarettes and an old fashioned ale mug with a lid that flipped open like a silver mouth. I pull out the final gift, a huge bottle of pear cider, brewed in the village, organic and sweet. It was all for her, my fisherman, hiding my sealskin inside her cupboard, under the sink.

She softens, black eyes expanding like the endless abyss of the sky, her thin arms reaching out to pull me against her. We put the fish in tinfoil and smother it in lemon juice, cut the fruit into segments and stuff it in the flesh with salt and pepper - nothing else. Whilst Jet busies with that, I open the bottle of cider and pour out two chipped mugs full, cut up bread with thick slathers of butter, rolls of ham flaking at the edges where he carved it from bone.

When the fish is ready I put a blanket on the living room floor, switch out all the lights and put candles in the window (for those lonely souls lost in the woods, Jet whispers.) We open the fish, steaming billows and smelling sharp and tangy, its scales rippling in the candle-light. We eat out meal on the floor, the soft-wet sounds of teeth and flesh making me sleepy. Vodka waits patiently on the edge of our blanket and we carefully flake fish onto a plate for her, making sure there are no small bones for her to choke on.

Everything is delicious, sweet and soft, the fish moist as I tear it apart with my fingers. I pretend I can hear waves lapping at sand, pretend that just outside our window instead of there being an endless grey city there’s a paradise in the South Pacific.

After fish and bread and ham there is cake, pink icing, birds eggs, we eat everything slowly, savour the taste, drink our cider so that the bubbles warm our bellies. When we’re done Jet uses bread to mop up lemon juice and salt, passes it to me. I lick my fingers, lick my lips, pretend that in the morning Jet will go out fishing and I’ll be painting in our wooden house and Vodka will catch paradise birds in the meadows behind the beach.

We’re monsters, all of us, the tiger, the cat and the kitten. Monsters, monsters, monsters who eat flesh from bone, eat flesh with our fingers. I love it.

I wake up entangled in her limbs, with Vodka resting on my bare belly, still full from last night’s feast. My bones ache in that lovely way when you’ve walked long and not stopped. I’m warm, my heart beats soft footprints against the wicker of my ribs. Outside, the window streams with rain, pit-pat-pit like someone’s throwing rice-shells at the window. Like the children of the village are offering Vodka golden coins in exchange for answers to their questions.

“Look,” Jet hisses playfully, tickling the cat under her chin. She purrs and I feel it echoing deep in my marrow. “We’re a family - baby, mummy and me.”

“Are you daddy then?” I smile.

“Fuck no,” her nose wrinkles, hair puffed out like an owl. “Men don’t belong in our family, kitten. Wolves don’t need them.” I laugh, close me eyes, feel the powder-puff touch of her lips against mine as she leans in for a kiss - barely touching, whisper-soft.

So many times she’s had a chance to tilt me, open her mouth, make it something more than friendship. She’s never taken them though.

“You smell like mud and rain.” She presses her nose into my collarbone. “And lemon.”

Which doesn’t coincide with our dream, the South Pacific, on one of those ever-changing islands brimming with life and heat and moist air. There is no rain in South Pacific, only monsoons that crash and destroy and throw bodies into rocks. There is no mud in South Pacific, just dry dirt and sand and green covered floors.

It is ok to dream, to lie, to ease the ache and play the trickster, but it doesn’t make them real.

an;

everyone has little daydreams like that, right? i do, anyway.
thanks for all your precious, precious reviews. i always pull up the box to reply individually but can never seem to think of anything to say so i don't. don't think i'm ignoring you, or neglecting you, because i lovveee you. so, epic thankyous for you all.
(heartrace, if you're still reading, goodbye and goodluck :) i'll miss everything you write always.)

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