MEREDITH MILLER

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I fear                 

my honeydew melon quietly atrophies,
the divine with the intensity of a lightning storm,
the ghost of a lover in the pit of your stomach,
a disco, alone at dusk,
black mold & old clutter when you point that gun in my face,
love boldly underfoot,
space-time on a Sunday,
the trembling earth remembering its name.

Feels like           

the ghost of a lover, alone at dusk,
a disco in the pit of your stomach,
my honeydew melon, with the intensity of a lightning storm,
the divine quietly atrophies,
 black mould & old clutter remembering its name,
love on a Sunday,
space-time boldly underfoot,
the trembling earth when you point that gun in my face.

A silence overtake           

black mold & old clutter quietly atrophies,
love with the intensity of a lightning storm,
space-time in the pit of your stomach,
the trembling earth, alone at dusk,
the divine when you point that gun in my face,
my honeydew melon, boldly underfoot,
a disco on a Sunday,
the ghost of a lover remembering its name.

What if you forget          

space-time, alone at dusk,
the trembling earth in the pit of your stomach,
black mold & old clutter with the intensity of a lightning storm,
love quietly atrophies,
the divine remembering its name,
my honeydew melon on a Sunday,
a disco, boldly underfoot,
the ghost of a lover when you point that gun in my face?

 i fear black mold & old clutter on a Sunday,
feels like love when you point that gun in my face.
a silence overtakes the ghost of a lover
with the intensity of a lightning storm.
what if you forget the divine boldly underfoot?

SHEHZAR DOJA

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LESLEY IMGART

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RUTHIE KENNEDY

MARIA SLEDMERE

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I count out cherry tomatoes. They are hard, squeezable raw as sores of the body. A fork is poised in the air, inexplicably shaking. The fork will come down on my tomatoes, one by one. They are laid in crescent formation across the bone-white plate, trembling with juices. A hundred chews in-between, unseasonable. Softly the skins are peeled back to reveal a paler flesh. This is squashed into the peppery leaves of the rocket. Lemon is added, for acid effect. A salad is made of the days.

Those in recovery debate the question of numbers: is it better to calculate, to ensure nutritional intake; or is it better to forget you even began this game? The page of a calendar curls in the dark. 

The tomato not eaten is a misunderstanding.

Ana never ends. Existential labyrinth, red-threading itself through the gut. Bacterial morality. Proliferating statements, warnings; choices to make between items whose intensity burns at the simplest of moments, defining the daily. It erects a constant hologram around the body which only sometimes ‘gives’. It is exactly what it is, which is what is not. The ana point is that which simultaneously exceeds and is in lack with its definition. Try telling a tree it is fat, and you will know the answer. Try telling a tree and you will learn the forest. The ana[1]

point is not so much a point at all as a kind of emulsion, a thickness, a movement in flux, a proposition of constant return. The body is wrong, and how do I make the spreading, the swelling stop. And where the body becomes other. It is the slide of a scale into darkness, blindness, and finally silence, where it is she. 

Something ferments in persona, porosity’s lifestyle/pathology. 

Rings around the rings of my life, a colourless mood. 

& if there is no milk left to write with? 

[1] Ana: ‘repr. Greek ἀνά ‘up, in place or time, back, again, anew’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

Standing in lieu of the rose trees
with nothing to drink, same space
(in)differently glows. No mention of apple
grooming the red back out of a weight
that thumps to carpeting moss, black
in the clearing.

The air perplexes its taste of justice. 
Men came before with razors, now 
they cut themselves instead. Watching
the crimson light recede, a lecture
kept its wind on the freeway
talking opposites

Trace capacity: the concrete turquoise
made over wise, ripple of mid-afternoon
by standard measure. Nothing of oil
could fuel our life, we lay 
with winter sun; the air 
is a cheat code.

Across the streak of international orange,
angels lose their veils,
in the cave we examine the coccyx 
logic of fall. I eat confusion
and it blooms in me a quiet health
that nothing of a pearl could manage. 

I would say the same of the anthropocene, what Joan Retallack calls a ‘radically unfinished thought’. To think is to stretch it further, until your own muscle gives like a sigh in the lay of the land. There is an obsession with data, we get closer to a raw experience of ending. Others say, let the world burn and enjoy it. Others say, why don’t you just eat? Someone is always trying to burn something back to a prior state. Someone flicks cigarettes into the sun. They make of us a singed transparency, plural. What you really want to eat is colour, the look of your beautiful friend in green, a contingency. You see adverts for exquisite sandwiches and you think about lettuce as metaphysics. The melted brie is almost irrelevant. Numbers of grape deduction. The almost is a granule of salt you slyly place on your tongue, spitting it out before full absorption. The sink has swallowed innumerable expenditure.

How blue are you, bunny. Would they include you as statistic?

Dream I am laid upon marble surface, and quietly the darkness cuts onion-crying eyes into slivers of inverse seeing. I awake with allergies that carry less sterling, presenting fistfuls to you as if to say, how many frigorie? Is this sufficient? I become mineral human; my iPod is dying as I listen to ‘Lua’:

‘Supplies are endless in the evening / By the morning they’ll be gone’

Lettuce green, American dream. You follow a woman who travels the country in a quest to shed her arpeggio. She wants to get ‘back into her skin’. Superego is sequence, rise and fall. In the photographs online, she is painfully thin; a fact accentuated by the length of her Silk Cuts, or the oversize McDonalds bags she clutches in the manner of exquisite 

accessory. The second tab reads ‘We are having a greater impact on the planet than all the natural systems combined’. This question of impact draws you back to the assignment, the essay for the world you are trying to write. Impact conjures the smashing together of planets, how could it mean anything less now? The ongoingness of we are having; as though to say, We are having lunch now. It is stated, it is occurring as much as it is going to occur. The air smells burnt but no one questions it. Why we eat meals in lieu of the present. The doctors say your bones grow brittle.

It had an impact, sure; but I wouldn’t call it lust, would you?

Cut 

     /

       Silk

                        We move tectonic, still.

The little tomatoes are cherry planets, galaxy fruits. What is to be said of the stone of a cherry? Held under the tongue for a moment prolonged in which the human is mineral. We are mineral already, but the chewer of cherries supposes a difference briefly elides in the act of taste. I count the tomatoes like god; I know exactly how many are in the packet, how many I intend to eat. Heavily cherry. The woman online was mostly a silicone woman. We grew up with her images splashed, her algaeic eyes, her ersatz breasts. The headlines could not show the arms, bare as they were without studio makeup, exposing dark red scars, like burnt undulations of earth, dredged from a mine. It was more like she dragged something out of herself. At night we all dreamt of those arms, to be held in them. 

Skinny Cookie

Symbolic air is exquisite porosity
and the feel of your hip bone
infrastructure. Brittle stars cling
insolent to the ferric eternity.
The redundant class of former selves
arranges itself on the lawn for pictures; 
we see each other, golden-haired without men
needling beachgrass between our fingers. 
We were then entirely grace, 
no impulse towards supermarkets.
You could pull up tufts of language; 
nobody interrupts the montage weather,
or tries to force your face into soup. 
Most brutal occurrence of kilos
on the Euclidean diet again, 
Florida drops us. We draw lines
of our body to make upright day; 
writing a treatise on mensuration,
arguing for cloud and light. 
Our bodies are scorned and infantilised. 
We speak a sustainable future, 
it croaks in our bones
and we have nothing to say of death. 
The sea draws out a sigh
that we slip through;
every hour has its calories. 
Nothing within us is scared to go
untitled, rattling organic nightmares
searing the sun.
We are everything you ever had to say
of our sex.
That was the best mustering
salad bar girlfriend,
milkshake the snow of the sky.
Prise us off the rust that holds us. 
Let us select at the checkout,        
our choice is forever.

You pass along the street, very simple. It is not ‘running an errand’ but it is leaving the house. Wired doesn’t cut the condition we share. The messages received concerned the twig-like appearance of arms, but your friends could not put it to language. Treatment was government-funded, in arms. Never enough characters in the day. I run away with the feeling of shooting our fantasies back to smoke. Nightly I’d lie in the light of my laptop, let something of its air pull me in. Scrolling the forums. We are between times, you say, as if that were sufficient. The tendering of figures between us. There is the me before, fat, the me after, thin. There is no being-in-the-present; we are only on the way, transiting, skeletal twists. We leave nothing on this planet, we don’t even eat. We are snow without footprints. They are putting the internet deep in clouds. All of my data, rain down on me.  

Lack/apple, lack/apple ~ applet. Shiny minor chord when you speak from the app:

Then it hit me – and I might be wrong about this – but I think that is the difference between someone who has lived with an eating disorder and someone who has not. All this talk about energy, scaling right up to infrastructure, technology, the future, has this other, small and dark side, that unforgettable desire to know and control what is in the body, as if it could be powered some other way.

(Anonymous, Gmail. 18 October 2018, 21:25)

And such extravagant syncope / Was only the world’s bad mood again. 

Bernadette Mayer: ‘At 3:35 a.m. on April 2nd, I recorded that I had eaten too much food.’

Three days later I cut my thumb, in lieu of the avocado. Opt-in histrionics. We plot whole outlines of Earth, just as a test of surface, love-apple red. Blood sucks itself back into sleep. Send globe emoji fast, flicker-ball, wake fastening tongue, dry salvage of light. 

This clavicle continuum… 

JEEHAN ASHERCOOK

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LAUREN CLARKE

Its 11:03 am 
and I am off my tits on codeine

it barely takes the edge off

a titanium plate has become part of my body now
the fibula by the tarsals has
(involuntarily)
made itself redundant, and so
an outside contractor has been drafted in to fulfil the duties 
of being my leg bone

nerve endings and fascia
have gathered round the newcomer 
to babble and grumble
and demand to know who this foreigner is
like those creepy munchkins 
round the inexplicable house that just landed in their postcode 
improvising choreography
in a wake of confusion
…
wonder what they done with that house afterwards, 

maybe it solved a shortage

genuinely didn’t even mean that joke, there
    I’m funny when I’m high, 
 noted 

the titanium is stoic, I’d imagine
stable and stoic
like American Psycho
but not like the psycho one from American Psychomore like board member number four from American Psychoinherently functional, and silent
dull, but now essential

not like the muscle munchkins who are going apeshit, 
I’m meant to have morphine too, 
aren’t I, 
          where’s the 
                      where’s my morphine
I have this thing in my arm and no bloody drugs in it, 
                                                               what’s the point of that
…
               I’ve got that tune in my head
the one where the monkeys discover something
the wheel, 
          or time
                             or something

                                that moment when they’re suddenly more than monkey

I’m more than monkey now, too

                                   0.08 per cent robot

guessing the fractions

                                         meep, morp

…

I’m in a bad mood

my ankle hurts and my eyes have dried out skin
from tears that squeezed out despite gritted teeth and
                                                          trademark tough-cookie grace,
                                               stoic face 

that’s twice I’ve used stoic now
…
three times

…bad form that

then again,
I think it’s only fair to remember the current relation

of my tits

                         to the level of codeine in my bloodstream

I ahm bealin’

…

this is pish

…

I’m going to take a nap

…

It’s 11:19am, 

and I am off my tits on codeine

SUKI HOLLYWOOD

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T. PERSON

[spu      wi        ck        es         we         te        oon       un        ot         muh      kw       ph        ache]

SIOBHAN MULLIGAN

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JAMES COFFEY

At today’s team meeting we were told about the forthcoming system changes. We smiled and nodded our heads appreciatively. We all know that when the changes have been implemented everything will be different and everything will be the same and we’ll go back to our  familiar routines where nothing ever seems quite real. 

Mabel has had it in for me since the time I agreed to feed her cat while she was on holiday. When she got back the cat wouldn’t come into the house for a week.  I don’t want to think about Mabel’s cat so I think about something I’d read about there being as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.  

Mabel is complaining about staff using other people’s milk from the fridge. She says it’s not fair and it’s always the same ones who do this and she gives me this look with her mouth pursed like her cat’s backside.  Richard says it’s the same with chocolates and biscuits that staff bring in for special occasions. It’s always the same ones, the ones who don’t reciprocate, who take more than their fair share.  Pamela shoots me an accusing glance. There can’t be as many stars as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. It’s not possible. 

I’m relieved to get back to my work pod so I can spend time wondering if there are as many units of data in the customer archive as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world and after that I drift between algorithms into my own mindscapes where the past unfolds like a picture book and I go back to the time when Dad still lived with us.

Sometimes a recent retiree comes to visit. They tell us about crowded days of activity and holidays, new hobbies and friends. How, they say, did they find time for work? And how did all those years fold into a solitary memory, into a single moment in time?  We watch as they leave and disappear down empty streets and then we go back to our work pods and calculate how many years and months and weeks are left in our procession of days.

There’s another place I go. It’s an emptiness that might be big enough to accommodate as many stars as there grains of sand on all of the beaches in the world. When I go there I have the impression that I’m there for a long time but when I come back everything is exactly the same and I discover I’ve only been away for minutes or even seconds. Sometimes I think I’ll wake to discover I’m dreaming.  

Once, on the beach at Bournemouth, Dad picked up a handful of sand and told me to look closely because there’s a world in every grain.  I looked at the palm of his hand and tried to see a world but couldn’t. 

Mabel said I could do anything I like now that Mum has passed and I’ve got the house and whatever else Mum had tucked away. I know she thinks I neglected Mum and was only interested in was the house and money but that’s not true.  I did everything I could.  I made sure that all medical and personal care was in place. I absolutely did that.  

I expect I’ll stay here. 

But I couldn’t sit and watch while she wasted away. I couldn’t.  

Mabel knows that Dad didn’t show up for the funeral. 

“What s pity he couldn’t make it,” she says, “I dare say he had his reasons.” 

Maybe I won’t stay here. I can do as I please. I’ve only got myself to think about. I’ve never been properly on my own before. Not really alone, not like this. 

I wish Dad had turned up. 

I can do anything I please. There’s nothing to stop me. 

I’m looking forward to seeing Mabel’s face when she finds out what’s happened to that precious cat of hers. 

LESLEY IMGART

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VANESSA LAMPERT

NICK MAYARD

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SHARI LAWRENCE PFLEEGER

In mathematical knot theory, the ends of a knot are joined so that they cannot be
undone. But when do two different descriptions represent the same knot?

My fingers run the craggy, peeling bark,
its sinuous ridges rolling, roughened,
toughened by hoarfrost and hardened with time. 
Stately bole, regimental, muscular,
interrupted with burls as signposts for
injury. Living wood as testament.
My great-aunt’s fingers ran across my cheek.
A child, I recoiled from the calloused scrapes
born of fleeing tyranny, losing all.
She scrubbed their floors with leathered, weathered hands,
each sore a symbol of triumph against
extermination. Life as testament: 
sturdy stock, taking root.

MIRIAM METHUEN-JONES

I told her/him/them that it was fine with me. I told myself that to be the best version of myself I needed to quell the anger and the entitlement and become a breeze. There constantly, consistent but unobtrusive. Please, take my spine and wrap it around your shoulders if my breeze becomes too chilly. Please, milk me for my insight then recycle at your earliest convenience. For cap, check with your local council. I told myself this made me better. Quietened the perfection within. Silenced my sharpness once and for all. I told myself finally I was strong, independent, glacier in my elegance. 

Then splinters were thrown, and suddenly I had no points to dig them out with. My softness rolled and beached me. It waddled and cocooned me, and my only choice was to swallow the splinters whole. They split further inside me and lodged themselves in my lungs. My heart. My liver. They sat there, ignoring digestion, spreading. Lodging themselves in the ruts between my vertebrae. Sick with intention. They feasted on the bile in my sadness and ran riot in the darkness. They gathered around my tear ducts and tap-danced as I told myself to let it burn. 

I caught sight of myself in a wingmirror. Blood dribbling from my nose. Teeth ground to stubs in my pale gums. Fingernails snapping. Skin peeling. I caught sight of myself in a wingmirror and fled. I caught sight of my weakness and ran. I ran alongside the Clyde, choking on the stench of ducks. I ran through the Green, tripping on white German Shepherds and golden Dachshunds. I ran through the centre, snarling at familiar faces streaked with coffee. I ran upwards, past the beanie and the beard and the oversized wasteland. I ran until I met John Knox. I threw up splinters at his feet and he nodded. I took a seat. Together we waited for the gates to lock. We waited until the light crept away from us, leaving us to our melancholy. 

Do you believe in God?

Does it matter?

I watched the beetles creeping into my boots, clinging fast to the wisps of laughter I had tucked there for later. They giggled as they clittered over the strands of isolated happiness. Their feet grew louder and joyful and clacked out of my boots in heaves. They stumbled deep into our sadness and emerged on the other side, neutral. I watched an alligator in the distance, drifting and shifting until it was grey. I watched the skin sag around my elbows until my funny bone poked through. I waited.

Why are you here?

I did something important.

The light scurried to the edge of our world and sat patiently. Cumbersome in its retreat, but effective. We sat, knees knocking, waiting for the ghosts to come. The Cathedral rolled its eyes and turned over in bed. It pulled the covers over its head and pretended not to hear our restlessness. Finally, they drifted upwards from the soil and clustered on the skyline. They spoke amongst themselves, compared bug bites, sang jilted refrains, itched at eyes that weren’t there. In droves they sauntered across the grassy hilltop and sat at our feet. My feet. I nodded at the youngest. I flirted with the deadest. I took one hand that wasn’t there and clung hungrily to the emptiness. 

I think I’ve been a bit of an idiot.

Aye.

I smiled at the ghost and tightened my grip on her nothingness. I stared at the darkened sky and thought about my breakfast. Porridge – topped with cinnamon. 

LOLL JUNGGEBURTH

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a collaboration
Reading from Speil::Verstehen Welt::Gestalten (SPAM Press, 2018)

AF WONSACK

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SUKI HOLLYWOOD

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JAY MERIL

Our neighbour's name is Olive and that's why she’s a dull green colour. There’s no doubt in my mind till my mother tells me otherwise.

     'No, names don’t have to be a description,' she says in an amused sounding voice. Then she leans sideways and reaches out for a pear from the fruit bowl next to the bed. 'Olive is just a word. That’s all.’ 

     I can’t really believe this though.

     Mum is in hospital, having a baby. Auntie Susie is looking after me and we visit her every evening. The baby has not come out yet but Mum is already in there in case it does. So it won’t be like the one that died in the ambulance. 

     I still carry on seeing Olive as greenish, though I try not to. The funny thing is her food is greenish too. I go to her house for lunch while mum is in hospital as Auntie Susie has to go to work. Today she cooked me an omelette. There was an olivy look to it and a sticky something which made me think of mushy peas. I’m not that fond of mushy peas because I don’t like things that are all squished up into one heap. Also they’ve lost the bright colour that frozen peas have. Right now I am staring down at this sticky-lumpy object lying on my plate and I can’t bear it. Omelettes are supposed to be cream-yellow. I look up at Olive's roundish shiny face as I tell her I feel too ill to eat. She is soft and smiley looking mostly but now she seems put-out. There’s a vinegary something which I haven’t noticed before.  And I wonder if she has a stone inside her. You can’t always tell if there’s a stone inside an olive until you bite into it.  

     Our other neighbour's name is Mrs Tindal. Her name is a bit like metal and a bit like 

the tinderbox in the story in my mother's children's book. But as it isn’t quite either one I’m comfortable. Mrs Tindal is just herself and this means I don’t have to be scared of the 

food she gives me. Toby is her little boy. We sit at the table next to one another eating 

pink and white marshmallows from our plates and drinking cokes. It is fun and I feel happy. But all at once I feel this sharp twinge in the top of my leg and then comes another. It’s Toby. He is nipping me. I don’t tell on him though because I don’t want the happiness to stop.

     Later on we are play-dancing on the raggedy rug in the middle of the floor. As we swerve past one another he nips me again. The twinge is sharper this time but he looks so funny, like a cartoon-baby-bull, and this makes me laugh. 

     'You little devil,' I yelp out loud.

     Mrs Tindal comes over right away.

     'You must never ever say such a thing,' she goes. 'It is a very wicked thing to say.' Her eyes are steely but deep down there’s a burn in them. I feel the heat.

     When I mention this to my mother on the next visit to the hospital she says Mrs Tindal thought I was saying Toby was Satan. 'Some people take everything literally,' she tells me. 

     ‘What is litrally?’ I ask her.

     ‘Oh, it’s when someone is too serious about what’s been said.’

     So when I go to play there again I tell Mrs Tindal, 'No, it's ok. Devil is just a word. Only a word. It's not really anything. Just something people say.'

     Olive and Mrs Tindal never invite me over to theirs again I notice. At the time I wonder why.

#

You got to the hospital by going down a long straight road. Before Mom was taken in we went there so's she could have a check-up. Her stomach was sticking out because she was going to have a baby. I thought of a baby all curled round inside there. I had been inside her once too, my mother told me. Womb was the word she used. She laughed when I made an ick face.  

     At the hospital I stood next to her at the reception desk and the nurse there said, 'Will this be your second child?' 

     My mother said, 'No, it's my third, but the first one died.'

     'What did your first child die of?' the nurse asked.

     'In the ambulance on the way to the hospital.  He was born too quickly and was strangled by the umbilical cord.'

     I was shocked and had to hold onto the edge of the desk to keep from falling over. It was the first time I'd heard of this. I had a horrible picture inside my head. A vicious rope was tied round the neck of a baby. He’d turned blue.  His tongue was sticking out of his mouth. Because he was dead. 

     The desk I was gripping the side of was smooth and woody and had a kind look. I wanted to bite it to know it was real.

     'I knew you were listening,' my mother said later. 'So now you know.'  Her voice was matter of fact at first then it changed to shaky. 'Poor little Terry,' she murmured. 

          How can a dead baby have a name? I wondered but I didn't say this as it might have upset her. I could see her hands were trembling as we walked back down the long straight road towards the bus stop. But I also knew it was exactly right for a baby which had just come out of a womb and died. Because Terry was a wispy dried out sound which made my teeth go tingly. My mother would tell me that a name is just a word and everything else is just in my imagination. But I never wanted to hear that name again.

RCM

The first time they saw the sun it was a Monday. Midway through May and the heat was steady, determined to convince that it was here to stay. 

The meadow was cocooned by bushes and trees, blunting the spring breeze; a handful of towels and blankets rumpled over the grass, their occupants curled around books, propped against trees. 

I had managed two laps of the pond for the first time ever, welcoming the familiar bone-deep ache of the cold and relying on the repetition of the motion, some fizzing neural pathway that knew how to pull me through the water. I emerged triumphant, beaming, my bloodless feet scurrying me back across the muddy gravel to my camp: my towel and my jumper and my book. 

I cursed myself for forgetting my flask of tea, still steaming patiently on the kitchen counter, but the sun was seductive, persistent. My gleaming wet swimsuit morphed into matte and wrinkled over my stomach contentedly.

At first it was just the straps but, slowly, I began to peel and wriggle, my mouth taut with determination and my breathing a little shallow, until the material clung only around my hips, scrunched up and rolled below my belly, and I couldn’t change my mind. I lay back gingerly, resting on my elbows, and surveyed my Great Daring Move. 

They were there, just as they always were: small, pale, pointy. Goosebumps overran mole territory and borders were marked by darker lines of skin that had spent countless summers exposed, thrust towards the light while they themselves had remained enclosed, encased in tropical-print polyester. 

Had I thought they would look different, somehow, in front of others’ eyes? In a strange way, sometimes, I had hoped so. When I envisaged this moment before, it had always been on a romantic holiday for two or away with friends on a hot, white-sand beach. Young and carefree, I would Topless Sunbathe (somehow a whole verb) and they would look how they were supposed to: also young and carefree. The occasional rogue hair would vanish, the nipples wouldn’t soften and spread but would stay perky, alert to the attention being paid to them. 

No sooner had I gained the confidence to entertain the idea than it became twisted and uncomfortable; in most imagined scenarios, it now seemed sordid. Even on holiday with girlfriends, the eyes of any men sharing the beach would feel like a violation, draining any reckless abandon quickly away. Sometimes, my mind served up a story I once read in a magazine about a beloved actress who used to ice her nipples before filming her (clothed) scenes. This thought always made me feel strangely sad.

They had seen the sun for many years, of course, many years ago. As a child, the idea of a top half to my bikini bottoms barely occurred to me, nor to any other children on the beach. Yet to bud, my mind had yet to knowledge their existence; they didn’t occupy space in my imagination, let alone in my worries.

One summer, I made friends with twins. We were not yet ten, our torsos straight and skinny and our chests flat, barely distinguishable from the boys we raced along the sand. Boisterous and wired, the twins wore their caramel hair cropped into square bobs and their bikinis without the tops. 

Why don’t you just wear your bottoms, like the twins?, my mum suggested the following year when I tugged at my frilly top with frustration. I don’t want to, I told her, but what I meant was, I can’t.

The shift was inexplicable but it was also insurmountable. It would manifest in my hair follicles a few months later, announce itself as blood in my knickers two years after that, but for now it was simply a sense, a slight churn in my stomach. 

I would think of that summer again aged 15, when a fellow teenage girl played bat-and-ball in the sea like the twins had all those years ago, only she wasn’t as straight or as skinny or as flat as they had been. The other beach mothers raised their eyebrows and the fathers shifted their sunbeds uncomfortably away. It wasn’t appropriate, a woman on a neighbouring sunbed muttered. Her parents shouldn’t let her do that. 

I thought of her now as they finally felt the heat of the sun once again, buds open and turned towards its rays. I thought of the word, appropriate, and how it had hung in the air, clung to a latent part of my brain ever since. They shouldn’t let her.

Since then, there had been no space for them in this world. As soon as they were part of my anatomy, they were immediately unable to be anatomical: not body parts but givers of life, seductresses, protest props or page three stars.

I shuffled and fidgeted on my towel, letting them fall in different ways, lie in different positions. I explored how the light felt on one side, then the other, nervously rummaging for more sun cream when I turned to face it completely. The light felt warm and liquid on my bare back, the thin strap of skin that bore the weight of a bra each day finally uncaged and soothed.

Here, they were simply mine. This modest rectangular meadow had somehow become the only space in the world they had to be free. There was no possibility of men’s eyes, no threat of sexualisation that would rob me of their autonomy, no searing, piercing judgement – in fact, no sense that I was being watched at all. 

Here, they were unremarkable and welcome: they found their place among the soft tummy folds and tiger-stripe stretch marks and raw caesarean scars and sticky-out ribs and ballooning pregnant bellies and dimpled thighs of my neighbouring pond-dwellers. They were free to assume whatever shape or role they wanted to.

I had known how precious this space was the moment I closed the gate behind me and tentatively peered down the damp, shady path. I had dangled off the buoys, gossiping with friends, revealing late-night trysts and heartbreak, and fumbled for my socks in the changing rooms when the weather turned colder faster than I had realised. I had crumpled on the benches, sobbing out my worries, contemplated change while mindlessly following a duck through the weeds. I knew it was a refuge and I had felt how it held me, cradled me, shielded me.

But perhaps, I thought, I had never truly understood its power until now. It had taken this moment: this metamorphosis of something so politically and socially charged into something so private, tender, and instinctual.

I rolled onto my side and closed my eyes. The sharp breeze had begun to lower, finding cracks in the foliage and licking my spine. Soon it would be too cold to be topless. Soon I would pull on my jumper and my trainers, stuff my towel into my bag and rejoin the swarming, throbbing grey masses of the tubes and the buses, smelling only faintly of mud.

How was your day? They would ask when I got home. I would stand in the doorway, hair still curling wet at the ends, pondering my discovery like an intrepid explorer teleported home too fast. I found the one place on earth where they can feel the sun, I would say. And now they are free.