Guy Mankowski

You looked me up and down and I smiled, bemused by the way you so shamelessly considered the quality of my presence.

. I looked at you as though you had already taken me; you looked at me as if promising you would try.

It struck me how natural it felt to move into your space.

I’m running from silence, I thought. From being treated like a human punch bag. From being told I am disgusting, so many times that I sometimes even hear the voice say it at night. I even sense that she is in the room, saying it to me. But of course, I could not say that. So I shrugged.

The two of us. I rolled it around on my tongue. You pressed your hand against the base of my spine and a tingle reached from there, knifing up through my body, and glistened around my cheekbones as we began to step inside.

But the look you gave me suggested that with me at your side, for the first time you did not feel like an alien in this place.

Dark, dusty, and littered with half-buried skeletons.

The wind was blowing hard against my back and it was inevitable that soon I would be pushed off the edge. But I wanted to choose the moment when that happened, and only once I had worked out how best to fall.

That generous sprinkling of promising moments was the glitter that would soon illuminate our relationship.