This isn’t Pretty Town. The streets are filthy, the buildings grey. I passed a pile of rotting hearts today. One of them was writhing. I picked it up and listened. It called out a name incessantly. The blood and gore dirtied my hands and coloured them purple-green-red. It slipped out my hand and fell to the ground and broke into a thousand pieces, each one writhing, each one screaming. If this is love, I thought, I don’t want much of it. If this is how life eventually turns out, I thought, I don’t want no more of it.
Title from Ode to drowning by Tishani Doshi
