Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

‘Got so cosy down there in hell I never wanted to climb back up.’

I have suspected Mum and Lyle are drug dealers since I found a five-hundred-gram brick of Golden Triangle heroin stowed in the mower catcher in our backyard shed five days ago.

Clutch in. First. Steadily on the pedally.

A framed Jesus portrait over the bed. The son and his jagged crown, reasonably calm for all the blood dripping down his forehead – so cool under pressure that guy

‘What’s Octopussy about?’ Slim asks, his right hand furiously crafting his letter in a remarkably neat longhand cursive. I pause from my letter to respond. ‘James Bond fights a sea monster with eight vaginas.’

play yourself at chess, play yourself at chess again because you’re pissed off you lost the first game,

‘Time will do you in,’ he said. ‘So do your time before it does you.’

Why would my father fuck that up? She’s so fucking wondrous my mum that it fills me with rage. Fuck any and all of those fuckers who stood within a foot of her without first seeking permission from Zeus.

‘You’re not a pussy. Don’t you ever be ashamed of crying. You cry because you give a shit. Don’t ever be ashamed of giving a shit.

‘He’s one of those autistic boys, is he? Can’t function in society but he can tell me how many grains of sand are in my hourglass?’

BAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

‘Every woman here who ever had a cup o’ milk in her tit is gonna wanna hold you.’

I’d probably forgive the man who removed my heart with a blunt knife if he said he needed it more than me or if he said his period of bloody heart removal came at a complicated time in his life.

She wears skirt suits in charcoal black and onyx black and jet black and soot black.

‘What did I tell you about sniffin’ round the fuckin’ crime desk?’ Brian shouts. ‘You said, “Stop sniffin’ round the fuckin’ crime desk,”’ I say, displaying my uncanny journalistic recollection of the facts.