quiteunexpectedly

You unhook me like a fish, still shaking and terrified of being eaten as you let me go I feel the weight of you against me my face turned seeking not to see you I am the flesh and bones of you the carcass that lies motionless and rotting outside in I have lingered on the edges of this lake, like a flower or the decapitated head of a child's doll, no longer interested in playing

I wanted seven seconds of silence, the stillness of unturned pages and leaves that are yet to be crunched, underfoot we ate with plastic knifes and forks, food blending into to the taste of it no time exists here at seventeen, we were running, full of vodka we'd bought and wine that we'd stolen from cheap supermarkets now we're here where the days chase us down like hungry wolves and the air is too heavy to smoke through we smoked a lot and dragged the ash from our dog ends across your parents new patio into the shapes of our names I wanted you to call for me in the morning and sneak into my room at night I wanted us to be lovers,

Before the coma, silence was a virtue we never indulged in we would talk until our throats bled, our tonsils burning as if speaking words were as warming as eating raw chillis we'd tuned our vocal chords finely, semi - tones were for mornings as much as black coffees our bodies were strings and sex was just another chord a tangle of limbs wrapped in copper wire after the car hit you, we stopped. the silence that took you was big enough for two

Black, Two Sugars I take tea in the afternoon as I wait to hear his foot - falls approaching I am on edge until they kiss my ears in their heavy booted sound I add sugar cubes distractedly, as my mouth adjusts to the taste of him a heaviness on my lips, upon my neck, the scratch of a scarf that looks softer I imagine the scratch of a vampire fang to be worse and breath in and out my prayers that at least he is by my side before nightfall he is a thing of paleness and impatience, I am a woman who works the dead into shapes that speak we both seek answers but know they will not be found in the arms of each other yet still, our hearts

They are trawling the sea bed for clues, as if we are simply a plane to fall out of the sky. Our last kiss, spread on meat trays, our clasped hands in body bags. the fire that started at our wingless shoulder blades proved fatal

I wake up to an itch - ripples on the surface of my skin come in waves, beating against the shell of me in the night you are no kinder slipping between the sheets like a limb, a veil I scratch, my bitten nails my body, the coarse strip, my finger the match striking the flame

My tutor told me once, just before my finals, that people were wrong about us. They thought that to do this job you needed to be hard and detached, you needed to at ease with death, to embrace and accept it. But the best forensic pathologists, he said, needed to be gentle and empathetic, they needed to fight against the finality of death, the finality that there were no answers and that death was simply something that happened to everyone.  You need to be at war with death, not at peace with it, you need to fight it for answers, and you need to make it talk. So I went off, fighting an endless war with death, and I cared about the body in fro

This is what I know about death; Sherlock is dying. Sherlock is dying and it’s his last night on Earth. Sherlock is dying and it’s his last night on Earth and he is spending it with me. Before Sherlock got sick, I thought I already knew everything there was to know about death. It was my trade, after all. It’s what I did every day. I dealt in death. I could construct stories out of bodies. I could look under bones, beneath tissue, and see around them. I could see how their heart stopped beating, their lungs stop breathing. I was friends with Death. It was my safe place. Ever since my father died, I had placed myself arou

He said that there were lessons to be learnt. all the time, passing by me, touching, reaching for my hand. He said that I didn’t look hard enough, didn’t use my eyes. He was wrong, I noticed everything, I just didn’t learn it. This is what I should have learnt; about love, about Sherlock and about myself. Love is like having a hole in your heart. I don’t mean a metaphorical gap that only another person’s touch can close. No. I mean a huge fucking hole, split, broken arteries, a gap as wide as your fist, one side filling up with blood, pulsing, draining, fatigue, shortness of breath, eventual death. Love is like