One by one, each of seven orange tabby boys and six calico girls came out of that tiny, rapidly-deflating, yet of course still quite hate-filled kitten.Įach one, he took and introduced to her, so she could do her thing, with the licking and the umbilicus-eating or whatever the fuck it was i couldn't see from my vantage point across the empty bedroom of our empty apartment, watching him with a kind of horrified wonder. He took all thirteen of them out of her with his hands.Ĭats are sexually mature at six months-and if she was even a day older than that when she got enkittened my name is maggie smith and i am a treasure. Prego-prego: thirteen kittens came out of her, two weeks after my boyfriend made me fetch a box and some kibble and seduce the evil bitch into our home, which took like two hours and is another story entirely, mostly because i still love him for this, wherever the hell he is right now, loving and/or abandoning other people in spectacular ways or just, you know, being whole without me. With the hissing and the-i mean, she used to poop in our bathroom sink, because actual cat litter confused her? so i had dogs.Īnd one night he was walking the dogs, and he saw this kitten in the park, about as pregnant as it gets for a kitten, like an orangey tabby basketball with a sweet face and a ridiculously perky tail and a deep distrust of all things with either more or fewer legs than she.Īlso things with exactly as many legs as she. The dude i moved into this place with? he had dogs. I'm not- was not-a cat person by any stretch of anyone's imagination. I mean-yyyes, i actually have three, and they're all crazy in fresh and exciting ways*, but one in particular.

I have this one cat who's well crazy, right? Just-just lemme finish seeping fluids for a minute. Can a man who doesn’t trust himself ever trust in happiness? And how can a man who doesn’t believe in happiness ever fight for his own? By his own admission, Darian isn’t the crispest lettuce in the fridge, but he cooks a mean cottage pie and makes Ash laugh, reminding him of what it’s like to step beyond the boundaries of anxiety.īut Ash has been living in his own shadow for so long that he can’t see past the glitter to the light. Then a chance encounter at a stag party throws him into the arms of Essex boy Darian Taylor, an aspiring model who lives in a world of hair gel, fake tans, and fashion shows. He lives his life between the cycles of his illness, haunted by the ghosts of other people’s expectations.

Once the golden boy of the English literary scene, now a clinically depressed writer of pulp crime fiction, Ash Winters has given up on love, hope, happiness, and-most of all-himself. The universe is a glitterball I hold in the palm of my hand. Alternate cover version for isbn: 9781626490246

Glitterland by Alexis Hall