_A spinning imprint appears on the surface of his phone, its shape akin to the two initial waves of a blossoming ripple frozen in space. Two colours, spiralling. He grins, eyes lazily tracking the revolutions, not quite quick enough to match them._

Faster than I expected.

_He doesn’t touch it immediately, choosing instead to savour the moment. It had lost some of its novelty, but was intoxicating nonetheless. He’s sitting tightly against a spread of cushions on a platform purpose-built to give a view out of the basement windows. Rain lashes the pavement, making up for its lack of urgency with great force. The sporadic drops shatter neon reflections into jewels of every hue; he watches them fail to bounce back to the clouds. His street is empty. Time to go out._

\*

_He is uncomfortable. Having appraised the familiar luminous signs and the structures they denote, he picked the one with the most occupants. Sat once more below street level, but now with his view of the weather obscured. Not only this—he is surrounded. He was ingested by a larger set as soon as he took his seat, deliberately alone. Now, he is cautiously tending an overfamiliar exchange with the group’s designated heads. All doors are ajar, but the gaping do not interest him._

_This is not a situation he can navigate to his satisfaction. The flow of information is too much to track; too many are involved. He chooses the door with the tightest opening and asks if he’ll come out for a smoke. The rest narrow in reaction; spurned. No matter. The slim margin he had his eyes on grew by a fraction. A receptive target._

_Once alone, it is textbook. The moves are not like a dance, such romantic notions long abandoned. They are a concrete set of algorithms, each with cases that necessitate their application. There is no consistent order, but once the triggers have been identified, reaching completion is trivial._

\*

The gravity well bisecting my interlocutor’s mandible has become too much to withstand, and I feel myself slide free of flesh, accelerating towards the unsealed entrance. All momentum is negated as I pass the threshold, pushing headfirst through the opening, a thin film coating my form, moulding into my every pore. I swallow lungfuls of amniotic safety and acclimatise to the added weight of altered gravity.

A passage ahead, I move through it, feeling shuddering breath and the vacuum just outside. Adrenaline focuses me, and I press on. These days, this journey can be circumvented; it no longer stores the proleptic glee of antecedent intrusions. The passage’s breathing walls narrow into an exit—an entrance? Dull green light ebbs through, silhouetting the perimeter of the portal, which resembles a circuit of taut cord sleeved in bunched-up flesh. The sickly fug seeps into the passage as I seep into him, this evening’s muse. Behind, I know the cord has constricted, my exit enshrouded in skin.

\*

The fug fills me, and I am alive, racing, raging and imbued with determination. A heady concoction of arousal and hate stir in my breast, powering me forward, surging past mannequins and impressionist scenes, bored by their cliché. Barrelling through buildings, pounding through parks, eyes keenly attuned to the corporeality of my surrounding structures and statues, my footsteps marking the shortest possible path through a maze of mental monuments in ascending order of opacity and dimensionality, until I am halted.

Clearly, my charge fancies himself an artist. Towering into the gloom above, basking in its biotic curves and resplendent growths, his essence, his self, presents for my pleasure. A Gaudi fan, it looks. Its magnitude and splendour briefly sober my frenetic mind, but sighting an entrance renews my vigour. Dwarfed by animate arches, curvilinear crenellations and sumptuous struts, I forge on, breaching an appalled doorway with no consideration of its grandeur.

Inside: a small room. An iPod is docked, projecting tinny post-punk into bibulous, sagging walls marred only by a few pinned sketches and some posters from youth. A granite impression of an older man, the sentinel at the entrance. Father, I’d guess from the likeness. The only other figure is closer to the centre of the room—closer to my throbbing purpose, my aching _raison d’être_. She has a melancholic look, a wistful smile that he probably never saw. This image, a shibboleth betraying his quotidian media diet, sees him drop further in my estimation. With acrid palate, I move to the centre of the room, several notches of haste lost in distaste. However, the proximity of my prize serves as a sorbet, and my mind clears, crystallising in anticipatory ecstasy. I gorge on the parts of him only he knows. I devour his guilt, his shame, his dreams. I file a crumb or two of trauma away to peruse later, should I have a quiet night. A private chuckle reverberates through my frame, and I realise gravity has eased. I’m out.

He’s mopping tears and mucus with a sleeve, no doubt disgusting all who peek into our booth. I inform him my taxi is outside and am out the door, up the street and down the stairs to my flat before he extricates himself from a dull anecdote about his first “true love”. Curling into a foetal ball on my platform, memories of the last “quiet night” stubbornly defy recollection. I shut my eyes, and when they open, it’s morning.

Routine Night

Luke Scanlan

she sits on the bed, forcing her feet through a pair of tights and i am transfixed. as she stands, extending the fabric along her thighs, its crotch meeting hers, an impression of shocking clarity manifests behind my eyes. a ladder from my childhood, one i would often put up for my dad. the shape those tights made as they ascended her legs was identical. the ladder had a hinge in the middle, and either side could extend to double its initial length. i would use this ladder to grant my dad access to the loft, always in its folded configuration. when viewed from the side, with neither set of rungs visible, the lengths made an acute angle like an ‘’A” without a bar. set up beneath the hatch, i would work against the resistance of infrequently exercised aluminium-on-aluminium. the peak of the ladder—the crotch of the tights—ascended gracelessly to its destination. she is speaking to me and i am not here. this image, this memory is splitting my mind open and i cannot respond to inanities. i get out of bed and pull my trousers on—

i pull my trousers on. and as their crotch rises to mine, i scream.

Fiction

Routine Night

The Ladder