Khalid Abdul-Mumin

"'Floating, as if submerged beneath black water, arms open wide as she trailed her fingernails across the glass. Pale as moonlight. Cold as death. No breath on the window as she brought her heartbreak-shaped face closer and whispered.
‘“My lion.”
‘She wore nothing save the wind. Her hair was silken tar, flowing about her body like ribbons on a moonsless tide. Her skin was pale as the stars in a yesterday sky, her beauty born of spiders’ songs and the dreams of hungry wolves. My heart hurt to see her – that fearful kind of hurt you couldn’t hope to bear, save for the emptiness it would leave if you put it behind you. And she looked at me, out beyond the window glass, and her eyes were black gravity.'"

"I WOKE IN darkness. Blood in my mouth. Blood in the air. And I wondered if this was hell. No flames, no fallen, no lake of brimstone. Just dark and silence unending. But then I moved, and pain lanced through me, broken bones and bleeding meat, and I realised life, cursed and hateful, still coursed through this wretched body."