by CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT

I AM IN LOVE with a dying man. I look into his eyes and try to transmit my life into him. He says to me, Please don’t look at me like that baby, you are breaking my heart. Everything I do is for him and is done so that he might mend, but I know what he is and I know he will not mend. He is a dying man and there is nothing I can do.

When he tells me not to look at him so intensely because it is breaking his heart I move my gaze up to his hairline. He has both his hands on my waist when I send my fingers into his hair and he grips on tightly. Sometimes when he pulls me towards him I think a part of me will dislocate.

I wish I could find the thing that is making him die. I lie on him with my eyes closed and my ear against his belly and I imagine myself moving around inside him. Wearing a little silver catsuit with a pocket for lollipops and a small rucksack full of hooks and blades and scrubbing cloths. He is gigantic, almost two of me. I could be looking a long time. I bet there are a lot of things that rattle and give off steam in there. I bet there are a lot of things that will scald me when I touch them. I bet there is an area, somewhere, that contains a tiny glass igloo lit by moonlight, hidden inside glossy leaves of Prussian blue. I expect there will be those upside down impossible stairways, like the ones in those drawings from the calendar, and I expect too that there will be a narrow splintered doorway that opens onto a vista of pistons and cogs, flowing lava and cranking Kalamazoos. He drinks a lot of Czech beer so I will need to make myself very flat, or find a way of moving like a spider, so I can get out of the way when it comes bolting through.

Lately, when I have looked at and thrust my fingers across his hair line, I have begun to crackle with frustration.

My fingers close around warm sections of his hair, pulling and tugging, as if I want to tear his scalp away. Baby, he says, you are hurting me.

I am in love with a dying man and everything I do, I do for him, but everything I do hurts him and breaks his heart. I will put myself so near to him that I become crushed and trapped when he falls. Our bodies will break down, our bodies will break right down. Pieces of him nestling into me, pieces of me collapsing into him. I hope no one discovers us. I hope no one trespasses.

His hair, so wild and thick.

When he pulls me to him I think a part of me will rupture.

Email your Flash Fiction story of no more than 500 words to: flashfiction@irishtimes.com