by Felix Bill

Brixton born and dreaming, I live in stolen weekends. Back where I belong for just long enough to breathe, to grieve, before— end scene. I was twenty, the first time I saw real stars; the vast, hungry abyss of space the night sky becomes, without London’s amber glow. It still frightens me.

Most nights, I roll over in the ghost of my childhood bedroom, reaching for a light switch half a world away. Fingers closing on empty air. Loss hangs a foot above my right shoulder in the dark.

Before I left, I’d never met silence. There was always a clatter of dominoes slamming down on bin lids. Car horns. Half a hundred languages I didn’t speak, blending to lingua franca, South East London’s own. Now I know that quiet echoes. Mourns. I am not a creature designed for solitude.

On the corner of the street where I grew up, cigarette smoke mingles with clean-smelling steam billowing from the laundrette two doors down. Whenever I get back there, I put the wrong key in the front door. Force of habit. Try to call another place home. Fail. Wash down my guilt with tap water that finally tastes right.

For the man I love, I have stripped out my city boy’s heart and flayed it clean. Offered up my broken glass and cracked pavements at his altar. Moved away. It doesn’t matter. London’s underneath my skin. A living thing. A star-killing, dream-spilling thing that never sleeps, and in the streetlamp dark, it speaks to me.

It calls Stockwell spray-paint canvas. Blood-drenched, sweat-drenched artist’s crucible, skate park. Hamlet haunted, sometimes (always). Crowded with ghosts of fathers. Poised to drop in on the half pipe, they loom in silhouette against the dusk. Old friend— living nightmare—loss, a peeling scab of it— I see myself in half a hundred years. Choke on the smoke of all my bridges, burning.

Dalston’s a war cry in strobe lighting and mesh tights. Superstore, our Shadwell Stair. Community, if you can find it, tucked away somewhere between plastic shot glasses and the bar you slam them down on. Messy nights that end in laughter. Tears.

Way out east where the marshes used to be, in flats of friends and friends of friends, lovers lie entwined. Washed up by the falling tide of a night out, they sprawl, whiskey-warmed across a tenth-floor balcony— a blow-up mattress— someone else’s bed. Wake to witness London’s bird-strewn dawn.

Morning light spills through Mum’s living room, sends shadows running. I meet it with a yawn. Feasting. Drawing sweet London air in through ragged, starving lungs. If I stretch my jaw wide enough, I will swallow this city whole. It’s mine, wrapped tight around my bones. River silt running thick in my veins, I dig my toes into moth-loved carpet, pack brick dust beneath my fingernails to take with me when I go. 

Felix Bill is a transgender author. His first play premiered in March, 2024, and he has had short stories published by Cursed Morsels Press, The Gatliff Trust, and Powders Press. He was longlisted for a 2024 Diverse Writers/Diverse Worlds writing grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation, and he is a National Parks New Perspectives storytelling grant recipient.