Graham Spaid

_he__ assumed their relationship would go on forever. It was going on now, but in another way, like the rearrangement of the stars, which were all still in the sky, just burning in unexpected places.

I wouldn't dignify it with the name immoral.

Were the stars against him? A woman's fingers are quicker in the sky and shine more brightly.

We put our flags in soil when we arrive, as if it now belongs to us and we know where we are.

Olga was better, in the sun, where he could see every pore in her skin. Get closer. Feel her next to him. It was all he wanted in the world. It was the last thing in the world that he could do.

The sexual contact before this?__t was the first time.__he woman looked at Rat again, harder. The silence was more painful than the words. What she had just heard went beyond plain immorality. It was ridiculous.

You know what people are doing on the other side of the world, what__ happening on another planet, but not what__ going on inside the person next to you.

We just move on, don__ we, with traitors still amongst us? But there was one thought that wouldn__ go away. If I loved him, I would forgive him.

The expected battle hadn__ taken place, yet something else had. Images of the entertainment which had just gone down were already coming back into Rat__ head. It had been wonderful to watch, unbelievably wonderful, the enactment of several plays at once on a single stage, and Rat was sorry it was over, but in a way it was even better to relive it now in the privacy of his mind. He hadn__ believed the boy-doctor and that stuff about the condom being used or warm, but he had gone along with it and the emotion which it powered. Everybody had. The emotion was the most important thing. He wondered how he could ever put such a chaotic, hilarious, sad thing down on paper, organise it into scenes or verses and fix his own pewiod at the end. He could never do it justice. He would never get that emotion back.

I guess if you get too close, the twinkling stops; they don__ look like stars anymore.

But this bus was a bit too full. The driver only appeared to control the glass and metal around him. In reality, he was at the nose of a travelling paroxysm.

Some people say he engineered his own arrest to gain an insight into modern methods of policing for a thriller he had planned. But you know what happens to artistic rats in prison: they have their rectums stretched, and not by overindulgence in Michelin-star food; they have their columns examined, and not by internet humorists or a qualified medical practitioner. I__ sure Rat knew this, too. Although he likes to accumulate a wide general knowledge, he would rather have a narrow rectum. A colon comes in handy here, before examples: two dots on top of one other, like the cowboys who copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to see them properly. In prison there are too many insights and examples. Rat would never risk it.

A nose is ordinarily naked. A nose isn__ nipple, although there are similarities.

The emotion was the most important thing.

The world is indeed a cold, hard stone.