Jenny Hval

I turned around, sat down on the toilet seat and looked down between my legs, where a thin stream of urine trickled into the bowl. The dirty-white porcelain was tinged with acrid yellow. Almost a shame to flush away all that colour, I thought.

It doesn’t help: inside me the boy continues to put his index finger through his hand, slowly but firmly, as if he is poking it inside my body, and then he retches again. I can’t get rid of the finger, the sound, the image. It’s as if I’m the throat that makes him vomit.

‘Oh, just a romance. Kind of stupid. I studied lit

literature a few years ago, and now I only read trash. I’m a hypocrite!

I repeated the words out loud: What we call biology is the study of the living, and after I had said it, it was almost as if I heard the words continue to move between the concrete walls, as if I stood in the wild between two cliffs listening to the echo.

I nodded. I liked the sound of Carral’s mouth as she took a huge bite out of one of the golden apples and crushed the sweet flesh between her teeth. The soft yellow of the peel was almost the same as her hair.

I wondered what was apple juice and what was her spit, and thought about licking the place where she’d bit to see if I could tell the difference.

We’re not close. Our bodies watch each other, keeping their distance. We’re like two strangers, in different rooms, at different times.

Then I stroked her arms, her thighs, her belly. Together we filled each other to the brim and lay there slumped in an all-consuming doze, like gorged snakes digesting their prey.

And for every bit of him I lick and kiss, he shrinks a little before me, as if I’m rubbing him out with my lips, as if his face is disappearing into mine and only the skin remains, white and shiny like the empty sundial in front of City Hall.