supplicium post mortem

They lounged on the chapel roof together, smoking, as a grey light faded up around them. A gradual enchantment, he thought, nothing like the abrupt arrival of Faerie in the MacDonald he’d been reading. Dawn for them was not rosy-fingered, promising sun, but rather suffocating, extinguishing stars.

He pinched the cigarette but refrained from flicking it over the edge. Certain fellow prefects were going through a zealous phase; finding it would only encourage them. He wished such people could wear their power more lightly. His colleagues could never understand the lack of contradiction in delivering a sharp and deserved sixer to a daring-do fourth-former and then passing unofficial hours with him as he just had. Why did people so insist on categories and absolutes? He massaged his jaw. His fingers smelt of cheap tobacco and sex.

Billy (as byzantine nicknaming called him) lay along the leads, his eyes bloodshot but relaxed around the edges for a change. Nothing like a good buggering to dissolve the arrogance and tension.

“God,” Billy groaned, “I can’t bear the hols.”

Mention of the holidays seemed as brash and intrusive as the notion of Latin. How he would himself endure the long, sterile summer he didn’t know. On second thought, he did know – as he had the last four years, with longing. Longing for sensation, charge, the real McCoy. Longing for return of the enchantment now obliterated by the dawn, for the return of good things.

He traced Billy’s eyelid with a fingertip: thin, alive.

Check out other stories from this week:

• vanimp
• PapaTomLA
• Rafi’s World