Cities like fish breathe the night into skin. A memory of citrus in her nostrils—a taste of morning in midsummer. It isn’t autumn she smells.

Never having loved a woman (except her sister and the old dog they killed), she hears its shadows chanting. And if her lover was always holding her hand to someone else’s in the bathroom, why does she feel a prick of conscience like shattered mirror glass?

She remembers the weight of dead mackerels, how they jerked through her arms, scale-pocked, cold as the river. The last summer before puberty her grandma would cook them whole or fillet them and fry strips. At her nanny’s home in some half-forgotten seaside village called Mercury—a place where dead things coiled under seaweed or rotted in stagnant back-lanes—the aunty and uncle spoke in whispers late at night while children were meant to sleep. Something in the moonlight cast them in deep water. It tasted like citrus, the sense of leaving someone behind, somewhere in the blue. A muteness in words is an eloquence. In those blue-tinged night visions, she tastes vague things on their lips, feeling them through a gossamer pane.

Her skin hums with a sense of inevitable partings like a river surges through sandbanks, nocturnal forces unseen or misunderstood. By morning it is always someplace different, sometimes moving upstream, other times dragging the past down with detritus from her nights out with friends from work (the ones whose names she can never remember), cigarette smoke from cheap dinners. Once it tasted like silver. Other nights when sleep was impossible like ice, it would hang in her throat like an absentee ticket-holder waiting outside locked doors. On summer mornings with clouds, she would come alone through a haze that washed clean all evidence of what the night meant.

Now, she sees it dissipate, frayed borders unraveling, fragmented. A receding tide leaves scattered its facets—star-pale flakes of fish skin.

Citrus tastes metallic. It makes her think of his fingers on the faucet—and some distance. One afternoon, tainted by oysters, she walked alone under an awning of clouds (past a stone church with a broken door). The gutter beside the street gulped down the rain. The taste of memories always rushes into her mouth: rancid shrimp chips at the children’s home where they had packed her away, wicker trays of dumpling skin piled with cutouts of tangerines and chicken-carcass, or those nights at Mercury in her grandma’s cabin, catching mackerel with dead-fish stained net-hands and cut-throat lacerations through sleeves, the blood screeching like rusty gates and birds fleeing low-lying reed-beds. Once she found a shell with a pearl inside (an old fossil but who was she to say otherwise?) she hid it from her nanny but then the train came. And the aunty and uncle with the bad teeth. Someone pulled down her pants to sniff at her behind as they said she should grow up quick or be packed off like that. The way they had smelled that time made her sick to her stomach, but not what was promised by her tween-age body, scrawling the message on her crib-rails with smudged crayons.

Among these things it isn’t summer that never returns, or love that left but lingers unconfessed upon one’s tongue like spit. It is time and all the faces left behind, as if someone or something were slowly disappearing, unbidden into an absent evening (when half-savored breathings of other nights become entwined around memories of mackerel or her nana’s tinplates) and melting from memory like ice on hot concrete. They cannot be called ghosts, but the impression that someone remains in a secret place—between one breathing and the other—lingers. Her taste buds glossed with absentee tickets that might one day come home in the night or not at all, there remains no evidence of a queer love inscribed on the city in its breathings. It is not a case of disappearing with a secret, she tells herself; it simply has no address to which one could be tracked. Perhaps not every feeling needs to be expressed or has the possibility of finding a resolution?

There was no one waiting to go through the bathroom with her when she felt the slight scratch of a mustache against her cheek. She had merely imagined it (although something happened between those two bodies). Yet now the taste of the morning lingers: of a dream abandoned at the platform after the train has departed and memories are no longer worth hoarding. In the end, we are each alone with the unknown or what the unpainted walls call silence, no matter how we turn away to face its others, or what is written between lines that have been unspoken. Perhaps desire exists only as the taste of something we can no longer place in an instant. A blue is unveiled in that precise instant. In the morning, her lover held her hand before going into the bathroom, and she let it happen.

Cities like fish breathe the night into skin. She tastes a memory of citrus and thinks of the ones left behind, somewhere in an evening, their faces half-submerged in blue light.