FLASH OF SENSE

TASTE Miles holds one arm up and calls for Peter before vomiting once more into the Vatican gift shop toilets. Kneeling at his pew he licks the sodden flakes of lunch from his teeth and spits them into the graceless water bowl. ‘How are you doing in there?’ Miles stands up, unlocks the cubicle door and washes his gums out at the tap. He smirks to Peter, ‘How’s my porcelain grin?’ Tasting his own mouth he remembers for a moment the dryness of Christ’s body on his tongue during the Eucharist of his school days. They step back out into the forty degree heat and the light coming over St. Peter’s burns their eyes, causing them both to raise their sunglasses.

TOUCH On a wall overlooking a steep drop, Branko sits admiring the Öresund strait. The mossy cold beneath his buttocks crosses the thin border control served by his trousers and feels its way deep into the forest of nerve endings rooted on the surface of his pimply white moons. Relinquishing his cold arse, he stands to get a better view. Fumbling his footing as he rises, he contemplates for a moment what people might think should he fall. Freezing cold on a solitary night, peering out over the Scandinavian tides into longing’s abyss; what a tragic way to go. But people would never know how moved by the scene he’d really felt.

SIGHT A flash of sun brakes across light ripples through the air slips amongst the grass glistening water reflects blue sky all as in one, two, three, four, ooohsh. Black. Alison keeps her balance walking through the carriage checking tickets. Aaron can’t find his so enacts a fumble as a plea for sympathy. Ooohsh. As Alison threatens the penalty fare the ticket appears but it’s too late. The train has long left the tunnel and her interlarding has had Aaron miss an infinite fleet of flickering coloured moments. Soon after, the scenes he sees seem less living. Reeling into the unreal he steps to the platform at St. Pancras. The station clock strikes four with mean precision. Aaron is going to be late again.

SOUND Jelena cannot hear a single meaningful word rising from the matted blanket of interwoven foreign speech that quilts the dank canteen as her brief break draws to a close Ф Beyond the four corners of the imported puzzle page held between her coarse fingers, shapes of definition blur into absent liminal swirls Л She misses home but thinks only of the missing letters К Her ballpoint warms beneath the frustrated grip Ъ It’s a curse to be beaten by words У At five minutes to she returns downstairs Ч As she sweeps she remembers her uncles swept away Ы Tito’s secret mass graves Щ A moment later the sought after solution sounds in her mind СЛОБОДА

SMELL In a beautiful wooden villa an hour from Montpellier, Lily poses in earnest for the flash of a stranger’s camera. She smiles politely as Raoul inhales a deep gust of fragrant feminine air, before retracting his affection-spoilt arm slung around her delicate shoulders. He thanks her for making the memory. JC watches as the beast unhands the beauty, his knees twitching beneath the table in amusement. In the car, Lily tells JC, ‘they were very nice, thank you, the food was incredible,’ but thinks only of returning to her lover’s embrace far across the channel. The clear starlight smoothes over Raoul’s grimacing skin. Under the twinkling rhythms of a million bodies in orbit he tugs with intent, praying that the already-fading smell shall never leave the closeness of his face.