Neil Rollinson

For Matthew

The ache in my leg seems worse, also that mole on my arm, swelling a bit I’m sure. I drift through the bookshop reading The Family Health Practitioner. I carry it round like a priest muttering a benediction for himself. The doctor won’t see me any more. I run through the symptoms of unpronounceable diseases, horrors jump off the page: fibrositis, Aids, mad cow disease,...

It lies on his thigh, dribbling, dead to the world. She kisses him, she’s not finished yet; she squeezes the limp flesh like a pastry cook between her fingers. He groans. He’s had enough. She takes the slob of it into her mouth and tickles the head.

He grows in spite of himself, swells in the moist blowhole. She’s good at this, bringing him back again and again...

I descend on Holborn’s escalator watching my wives pass by on the opposite side, smiling, waving at me; they shout in Swedish, Russian, Urdu, that they’ll always love me. Even my English wives croon in their dialects. My Japanese wives bow low, their kimonos showering the stairs with the scents of Hokkaido and Kanto. My wives are everywhere; pacing the corridors, rushing to...

Your coffee grows cold on the kitchen table,which means the universe is dying.Your dress on the carpet is just a dress,it has lost all sense of you now.I open the window, the sky is darkand the house is also cooling, the garden,the summer lawn, all of it finding an equilibrium.I watch an ice-cube melt in my wine,the heat of the Chardonnay passing into the ice.It means the universe is...

Who can think of sex at a time like this, in a toilet a mile up in the troposphere? You won’t find that in the Kama Sutra.

I sit in this cheap seat and rub my clammy palms all the way from Gatwick to JFK 30,000 feet above the grey Atlantic, every bump

and shudder sends my pulse racing: the turbulence, the sudden pockets of air that leave your stomach a hundred feet

above you in the...