Syreeta Muir
“Wormholes”
Last time you saw Joe he was pushing a pram through Piccadilly Gardens. “Yours?” You have time to say before he falls down an open wormhole in the pissed-stained pavement. He pops out again on the other side of the road. The baby, now all grown up, is wearing shiny, black leggings. He shouts back at you over the ‘errrr’ of the traffic: “Yes. She is! GOOD TO. SEE YOU!” and you think, ‘Well.’ “OH!” you shout back as an articulated truck goes past, “I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE STERILE!” Joe’s cupping his ear, shaking his head, ‘What?!” But by the time the truck has gone by burping out its asthma guts that smell weirdly like stale tacos, he’s already gone. It’s like that time you saw Richard Verte drag Claire across Southern Cemetery by her hair and wanted to drop kick him right in the nuts, but just stood there. She disappeared through L. S. Lowry. Should’ve seen his face: livid. Anyway, you weren’t hanging around, followed her, popping out like a wet fart in his flat right after the Future Islands gig, Joe grinding against your leg under a sleeping bag that smelled meaty and stale like old tacos. His face was all sweaty and intense, like a baby taking a shit. You can laugh about it now. Well. Have to, don’t you? It’s like that homeless guy, Michael, always said: “I’ll open you up, like a fuckin’ fruit.” Never forget that. Every time Joe pops up behind a post box outside his mum’s house while she’s screaming her head off about long, dark hair being a mantrap and he notices you looking, puts a stained finger to his mouth and goes ‘shh.’ Fuck if you don’t see her disappear right between the wet, cerise pouch of his lips. Jealous? Probably. Gross, the way some people are so close they open up wormholes right in each other’s faces. Although, one time you met yourself coming down a drain in the middle of your road and, tell you what, held hands for a bit, both thinking exactly the same shit: smells like stale tacos. Made you want to ball your fucking eyes out. Worrying about parasites, maybe. Anyway, you ended up back in your old room. Sort of a comfort, really, slipping back to your old room where you were just so sick of all this shit and your stepdad ordering fucking tacos again for dinner like he’s everyone’s best bud and you’re listening to your mum moving around behind the closed door thinking: ‘She knows, doesn’t she? She fucking knows and she never fucking says anything,’ and Joe’s hanging around by the door of the club with his suedehead saying: “Go and wait outside,” and you’re skulking up the riveted steel staircase and back out onto the street again, freezing, with your damp t-shirt flapping against you like a wet sail while you wait for the others to get kicked out. And you’re noticing that homeless guy, Michael, watching you from a little way off and he’s making eye-contact with you and coming over and getting all up in your shit like an unresolved issue and all you can think is: ‘UghJeezusfuck. Smells like old tacos.’
Syreeta Muir (she/her) is a writer and artist from the UK who has published work in Anti-Heroin Chic, Poverty House, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Misery Tourism, Ligeia Magazine, The Blood Pudding, Roi Fainéant Press, JAKE, and others. Her photography and art has been featured in voidspace, Barren Magazine, Olney Magazine, The Viridian Door. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and once for Best of the Net for her work in The Disappointed Housewife and Versification. Tweets as @phantomsspleen. Instagrams as @hungryghostpoet. Bluesky’s as @phantomsspleen.bsky.social.
