Sunday Short: Intravenous by Luke Johnson

I'm loving Australian literary journal The Lifted Brow at the moment. The caliber and diversity of writing that they publish is really exciting, and always leaves me excited for the next issue. They recently posted Intravenous by Luke Johnson on their blog, and it really is a beautiful short fiction piece, a glimpse into the life of a couple that starts with finding a beached fish, and ends in a hospital room. Lovely stuff.

Today is Sunday. Sunday is the day Georgina and I jog on the beach. We jog from the clubhouse to the ocean baths and back, three times over. The distance is measured in time. One circuit equals fourteen minutes. After three circuits we drive home in our car and have sex on our bed. Sunday sex. We like the taste of salt on each other’s skin as well as the appearance of our glistening, frictionless bodies in the wardrobe mirrors. It reminds us of sex we had in a very humid hotel room once. On that occasion we took turns filling a drinking glass and pouring water over each other. There was a large mirror on the backside of the door and we wrestled on the bed like clumsy assassins. The next morning we left the hotel and drinking glass behind and booked into a more-expensive motel with air-conditioning and minbar. The sex we have on weekdays is more cautious than the sex we have on Sundays and more alike the sex we had in that subsequent motel room, where there wasn’t the need to refill glasses from a ceramic pedestal basin in order to keep each other cool and alive at the same time as trying to kill each other with overheated passion.

You can read Intravenous by Luke Johnson at 'The Lifted Brow' blog.