Sometimes, I throw a party for no reason at all. I invite everyone — the priests, the portmanteaus, the wheelless Hot Wheels I crashed as a child, the mongoose that feasted on a snake in our backyard and left only a shiny skull. It’s Bring Your Own Poison, but there’s always enough for everyone. My guests arrive in snowdrifts at the top of the evening, they walk past me smelling of machines, milk, and pressed madeleines. Stay as long as you’d like. I put the host in ghost. I waft from room to room like fresh gossip. Like the smell of petrol, I entertain everyone. At the party's peak, some freak insists on reciting Eliot, and the crocodiles move to the backyard with their bong. Later, in the densest hour of the dark, a tinfoil soldier makes out with an anime figurine. Make me real, she says, and shards of light fly out of her oversized eyes. In the morning, they gallop their way out as a pair of colour-coded horses. Come again, I say to them and to the murmuration of swallows that follows. Alone in my dawn-proofed corridor, I bend my head again to loneliness. I have no shadow.
