• He/Him, Xe/Xer, TheyThem

Doing it for the gays and the goths. Writer of queer dark fiction.


Your life is the constant sound of building works and DIY. The wail of police cars and ambulances from the main road. Children crying in the night. The screaming from three doors down. You tried to call the police for that, but they never came. You’ve never seen who lives there, but then you’ve only been here two months.

It's a council place, of course, and you were lucky to get it. On the waiting list for over a year, floating between friends' sofas all that time. Everything you owned kept in a black binbag, straining at the edges.

The new place was repainted after the last inhabitant left, recarpeted. It's ok, really. Small, but you don't need much and it's better than where you were before.

The weirdness starts small. You smell cigarette smoke at random times of day. It's stale, rough in your nose and throat. You don't smoke. You never have, beyond a joint now and then. You take little walks to get away from it, figure the person who lived here was a chain smoker, that even though they replaced everything it's caught in the walls somehow.

The walks give you a break from the smell, but they don't really clear your lungs. It's all concrete and cars here, very little green. The trees that are here look sad and underfed, the few lawns scrubby and patchy. You exchange second-hand smoke for car fumes.

There's a little playground for the kids, but if any of the kids wanted to use it they couldn't. The swings are broken, and someone has kicked the slide so hard it's buckled.

So, even if the walk means you aren't breathing in someone else's years old addiction, it's still sort of depressing.

So you go back... home, you guess?.. and the reek hits you like a physical force.

Over the next few weeks it gets thicker, thicker, until you are sure you can see the smoke in the air. You call the council.They say they'll send someone round. Someone does not come. Someone keeps failing to arrive. Meanwhile, you wake choking on your own breath in the fragile early hours. Things aren't quiet here, even at 3 am. The windows don't open very wide. It's a safety thing. Your flat, your little box, is pretty high up and people throw themselves out sometimes. Easier to make the windows only open a handswidth and put in suicide netting than actually care.

Through the window you hear raised voices and someone sobbing. It echoes off the buildings, so close together, and you can't tell who is having an even shitter 3am than you.

You can't see the stars. The streetlights drown them out. You have never seen more than a sprinkle of stars, though you hear there are places where you can see the whole galaxy across the sky. Not anywhere you've lived, that's for sure.

Even with the window open you can still smell the smoke. It's like it reaches into your body through your mouth and nose, like it's finding a way into you. You've not been sleeping well lately, and your thoughts go weird when you're tired. You end up sitting under the open window, head tilted up, and passing out there.

When you wake up you start coughing. Something thick and clogged crawls up your throat. It slides out of your chest and into your cupped hands. It's a palmful of black-streaked phlegm.

You call the doctor. The next available appointment is in four weeks. You call the council again. It doesn't help.

Over the next four weeks it gets worse and worse. You have the cough of someone who has smoked 60 a day for twenty years. You can barely breathe. You aren't sleeping. You call the council again - the third or fourth time - and ask about being placed somewhere else. You're housed, they tell you, so it might be three or four years.

You might be dead in three or four years, you think. The night before the doctor's appointment, you wake up struggling for breath. And you see something you assume must be half dream, because the alternative is awful.There's a shape, a figure. It’s almost human, the shape of it, just all distorted, and vague at the edges. Like smoke. It's reaching for you, and its 'fingers' extend and waver towards you. The smoke reaches, wraps around your throat.You panic, of course, and bat at it. It dissipates, but you have the worst coughing fit so far when it's done. What comes up onto your sheets is almost pure black slime.

The doctor is a nice woman, you think, but she acts like you're lying to her when you tell her you don't smoke.

She tells you that your symptoms are concerning her, so at least someone takes you seriously about this even if she doesn't believe you about the smoking. She's gonna refer you to a specialist. It might take a while.

You don't know how to say that the thing that’ll help is getting out of this flat and you can't do that. You're poor, barely employed, and you can't get a new job like this. You can't afford another place. You're stuck.

You were already scared and stressed, but now you think clearly: You might die here, and no-one will care. They'll just recarpet the place again and give it to someone else.

So what can you do? Fuck all. It's neatly done. No matter what you do you're fucked. All your choices are terrible, and going back there is a kind of terrible that at least has a roof, four walls, and a heater.

And... you're so tired. So tired. So next time you wake up with the figure on your bed you think - what's the point? I'm dead young anyway. And you open your mouth, and let it into your lungs.


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