by Luke Dunne

Alert, as ever, to the possibility that it was all a game, you snatched my favourite glass from my hand and let it smash on the kitchen floor. It had been my favourite because of the crack across one panel of the glass’ octagonal base which, though quite deep, appeared to pose no threat to the glass’ structural integrity, and was quite gratifying to run a finger through. This groove in the glass was sharp enough to feel immediate in the way pain or the awareness that pain is imminent does, without doing any actual damage. Or at least, it didn’t have to; the choice felt important. That you could, probably, press down hard enough or rub fast enough to draw a little blood made this a kind of exquisite test; how best to extract benefit without cost, pleasure without pain.

Why, I asked.
I’m sick to death of that thing, you said.
Why, I asked.
I don’t want you to cut your hand on it, you said. I haven’t.
You haven’t?

I waited to feel anger which never came. Instead, I felt debilitatingly fragile. A pervasive sense of threat infected the world around me, and I began to worry that anything I touched (displaced, ruined) might, at any moment, emit a screech of displeasure and pain, as though my touch was poisonous, like that of a jellyfish or nettles. (How many millions of years separate us from the fork in the evolutionary path which led to nettles on the one hand and jellyfish on the other? And how strange that we should treat them much the same?). In my imagination, this screech was not an organic sound. It was more like a fire alarm, and although a fire alarm is itself a kind of abstraction and intensification of real screams – the screams of babies who are hungry or tired or scared, the screams of wounded animals – the sound I imagined was more abstract and more intense still; not just the sound of a fire alarm, but the sound of a fire alarm set off by a fire. Not a drill, not by accident, but unmistakably real.

You said sorry and sat down and started talking at me about something (Work maybe? Lots of names anyway) and whatever I was feeling before seemed to have let me be, but now there was an edge in your voice which made me nervous and when you asked me to pass you something (I can’t remember what, exactly) you practically hissed the request, and (perhaps I was angry all along) I complied so forcefully that whatever it was slid right past you and over the edge of the table. It fell slowly at first, then all of a sudden faster than normal, as if gravity was slow on the uptake but then hastening to catch up, hoping we wouldn’t notice, but we saw what we saw, we saw it fall just a moment later than it should have (my memory renders the object as a bag full of water, or maybe just wet things – oysters, mussels? – none of which seems plausible). The condensation which clung to the surface of the bag created a seal between it and the table’s glass cover, so that the air which was once around the bag became trapped between it and the table. Most of the bag hung over the edge before it fell, which elongated that moment, making it as long as a moment can be before it splits in two, like an amoeba or a white blood cell.

You call the moment before something falls and breaks ‘The Cusp’. This is the name you give to any mental picture that precedes a definite change. “Top Ten Pictures Taken Just Before Disaster”. On our second date, you told me about your Mum and how she’d died. It wasn’t sudden, but nobody told you she was dying until she was almost dead, so it was sudden for you. You told me how your Dad had picked you up from school and started driving in an unusual direction and was silent until you had to stop to refill the car, which meant that The First Cusp was and would forever be a service station on the M26 near Kemsing, or more specifically the synesthetic admixture of visual and emotional data that once arranged itself to mean ‘the cock of the guy next to you at the petrol station urinal’ and then came to mean ‘your Mum is about to die and nobody’s got around to telling you yet’. I remember you recounting all of this on the verge (the cusp?) of tears, and then bursting into laughter so loud and sudden that the people who were sat around us flinched in unison.

The floor was covered in pink chunks, which means I must have been trying to pass you beetroot. That makes sense, both because the beetroot we bought came in a plastic bag, and because on the rare occasions when you took charge of a meal, you tended to go AWOL and produce a multi-course extravaganza of pink food – pickled beetroot mashed together with tuna or sardines, spam over rice, assorted berries, strawberry ice-cream. This was, of course, delightful, and meant you were in a good mood. A diagram comes to mind, with an arrow from ‘play-fighting’ to ‘really fighting’ to ‘mutual sorrow beyond all reason’. The next term in that sequence was almost impossible to predict. I imagined you getting up and cutting your feet on the glass you smashed. Justice without mercy. I imagined slipping and falling on the beetroot I’d spilled and breaking an arm in the process (probably my left arm, in which I’ve broken every bone including the wrist). I imagined us both laughing, becoming hysterical, throwing food at one another, deciding not to care, calling it a draw, stamping around on the glass and the beetroot with impunity, leaving not a scratch on either one of us.

Luke Dunne is a writer from London. He won the Jane Martin Poetry Prize in 2024. His work has or will appear in various magazines, including Ibbetson Street, SHIFT and Counterpunch. His first play, Eden, debuted at the Neues Schauspiel in March 2024.