Best British Short Stories 2020 by Nicholas Royle (best novels to read for students txt) 📕

The soft-bodied women uproot from all corners of the island bearing drunken tongues from wine spilled in the island’s earth for seven days before proceedings. They rush towards the mating cries, nipples puckered, mouths softened, momentarily curbed by night dew. They are of the earth. Kiru has an advantage, being of the water. She bends down to lick blood off the scroll, blows her breath inside it to see how the cream-coloured paper will interpret it. Small orange blobs shaped like tiny micro-organisms shimmer on the scroll. She smiles; she has come to fall in love.

For now Kiru

Is a woman

From Algeria

With dark hair

swishing down her back and an easy, charming smile. She is wearing a black bikini. The blue shift over it is damp at the bottom, occasionally clinging to her thighs, bearing small trails of sand.

After the burning ceremony, she picks up Matthew, a scientist from a makeshift bar on the beach; light off the huts casts a warm glow on their skin. The soft-bodied women pair off with men who are still high from their ritual. There is alcohol flowing, a social lubricant that makes any gathering less awkward. Kiru assesses these women clinically, knowing their flaws will rise to the surface of clear water before breaking through. She listens for it. Matthew is talkative, eager. They laugh, carrying their drinks to the back end of the beach, deep into the belly of trees and land that feels joyously remote. There is the occasional rare white orchid and empty bottles of alcohol containing formations of past nights. Music from a stage at the far end of the beach filters through. Gulping rum, they are joined by iguanas eating sap from the pale trees that makes them dazed, and one-eyed water crickets from a tale man forgot to include in the Bible.

I’m so happy I burned the clothes I arrived in! Matthew flicks a petal from his Hawaiian-patterned shorts. Oh yes! It’s liberating, as if a shackle’s been broken. There is something in the air here. I feel like another version of myself. And the women fuck!

We can do anything here.

You are like Einstein, Kiru offers, pulling him closer. Like his equation of general relativity, mutating in the fabric of space and time.

Yes! he says, a look of wonder in his eyes at her, the surroundings, the possibilities.

I am Gpv = 8 π G (Tuv + p n g v v).

He knocks back his drink. Matthew considers himself a eunuch because of his impotency. She tells him about the shape and girth of an invisible penis he will gain by the time the night is over.

Do you know what betrayal tastes like? she asks.

There is a burden to carrying salty alphabets on my tongue.

Matthew blinks up at her, heady, tipsy, a little confused.

Three hours pass. Kiru becomes annoyed. She cannot imagine Matthew reaching for the sound of bones tumbling in water, succumbing to being realigned in the frothing white, stark against it, brightly lit, and carrying mouthfuls of seaweed with stories of their own to tell. She realises she cannot love him. His receding hairline elicits sympathy, not attraction. His snaggle-toothed breathy revelations about science had begun to grate. He would yammer on endlessly until she strangled him on the shoreline.

Catching him unaware, she sticks her fingers into his chest, melting flesh. The charred scent rising up to their nostrils as a pattern of smoke unwinds from his chest, shaped like small nudibranch. She reaches through bone, a blueprint at birth washed away by the pumping of blood. Her fingers reach further in, finding his misshapen heart. She runs a finger over the muscle, over the pumping rhythm she has already caught with the damp folds of her vagina. He is hypnotised by the gleam in her eyes, the baring of her teeth, the lightning-blue lines of light running beneath her skin as though she is a circuit.

Her fingers grab his heart, pulling it right out. A sucking sound ensues, followed by a vacuum.

He makes an aaargh noise. It is surprise. It is relief. It is tender.

A carrier pigeon hovers above, shedding a feather that tumbles into the vacuum in his chest, skimming the last conversation he had with an air stewardess once on an easyJet flight about the weight of atoms. The feather tumbling in the dark will change colour once it hits the bottom. The carrier pigeon will report this to others in its flock.

Kiru finds a quiet spot to eat his heart, beneath a tree oozing sap, enjoying the shelter under its drooping, white, palm-like leaves. She is ravenous. His heart tastes of cigarettes, red wine, tiny bits of aluminium, of small murmurs machines hadn’t detected yet. She polishes it off in four bites, licking her fingers clean. Then, she stands beneath the ghostly tree holding her arms up to the light; she sheds her skin.

Now she is

Afro-haired

Long-limbed

And brown-skinned

with the pretty face of a young woman in Cuba who runs a stall making small art pieces from food, who has a beauty mark on her face that changes position slightly depending on the humidity.

She finds Patrice smashing a lobster’s head on a rock. He has an elaborate, cartoon-like moustache which tickles her funny bone, and a Romanian accent.

Are you enjoying the festival? Kiru asks.

Oh, yes! Very much. It’s nice to be around other men like me.

You mean other eunuchs?

Well … you know, men who understand. I’ve been celibate for five years. Now I want to break that vow.

I am understanding. I understand that people who die through sudden accidents don’t know they’re lucky because it’s quick. I understand when you destroy something you give it the opportunity to be born again.

I’ll take your word for it! What an unusual creature you are. He is drawn by the smoothness of her skin, the beauty spot he cannot take his eyes off for some reason.

I can re-enact one of your strongest memories. Would you like to see?

Surely there’s only one answer to that!