Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

you are particularly obsessed with piss huh

I bent over the sundial to see if it showed the time, but the long dark shadow from the clock tower fell across it, and the sundial was rendered useless, a face without features.

But my dreams are full of apples, and in the dark my body slowly transforms into fruit: tonsils shrinking to seeds and lungs to cores. I dream of white flowers blossoming under my nails, as if under ice. Then my nails break, opening up like clams and in the finger flesh there are little sticky fruit pearls.

Outside the house the world was dry and sharp and normal, and it didn’t quite correspond with what seemed to grow between the brewery walls: something moist, skinless and quiet.