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An extract from Blood etc (Parthian) by Gee Williams. Short-listed for the Wales Book of the Year 2009.

Weed

“You O.K.?”

He nodded. The phosphorescent moment that had flared went out.
With her beautifully slim hands, with her painted nails, she rolled them a joint and her finger ends became translucent as they flickered in the task before the bulb. The first drag he coughed out; she took it from him - Waste not want not! – and stretched back beside him under the covers, dreamy and silent. He reached for his watch.

A while later she asked, “Matthew?”

“Yes?”

“What’s the time?”

“Six – gone six by now. Are you on tonight?” One of her several jobs was behind the bar at The Pigeons.

“Nah- told Mac he could do without me.”

Six gone six. He rolled it around in his head. Lucky six. Gone six. They must’ve missed the sweet chimes of the wall clock down in the hall but his mind, a roving spy, glanced off the carved walnut case, pricked itself with the arrows of the hands and skittered down the hall to the kitchen. A tap dripped out the seconds here into the sink. The fridge intoned its collect to cold and on the gas boiler top a frail old cat, a recent stray, snoozed through the hours. And it was all ravishing: the leaves and rowan berries and stems plucked up out of the walnut grain by an anonymous craftsman a hundred years ago, and growing deeper and richer and smoother with each one of them that passed…and the crystal explosions of water droplets that lay in the sink, adding to themselves or remaining discrete, sacklets of water that mocked liquidity…and the cat. The separate colours of its tortoiseshell fur rippled apart and recombined with its breathing. In a feline dream the paw reached out, dabbed… relaxed; the sorrel curve of it across the white enamel was as precisely apt as the woodcarver’s scrollwork - and live.

It gave him a sense of deep, dizzying joy.

Another long period of quiet came next in which he felt himself lift gradually from the bed, from his own body, and hover just below the grey of the ceiling. He came to rest able to take in the entire room below (although there’d been no sensation of revolving, which his mind told him would be absolutely essential for this to be taking place). Interesting. With sufficient concentration movement might even be possible across the room. And it was: now over towards the curtained window, now back again, using the beacon of the lamp…this was what it meant to be the kestrel he’d seen this morning. High up on the shoulder of Moel Ferched, it had loitered, pinned against the sky and leaning on a nothingness that must’ve felt solid and dependable to the bird. Look down, it had goaded him – nothing to fear.

“I love you Bron,” he thought he said. There Bron lay quiescent, in the attitude of a pale corpse, the bright end of the joint like a magic ring, glowing with its own energy…and then there was his own hand, taking it from her, kindling it to extra brightness at his mouth.
This time he drew the smoke in more deeply; it stayed.

“I love you Bron,” he exhaled.

Somewhere there was a knock on a door- not the response he was expecting. He conjured in a leisurely way with the possibilities - which door? whose knock? Nobody answered, of course. For himself, it would have been beyond impossible. He stared hard at Bron, wondering if by effort of will he could get her to go in his stead - but she, absolute in passivity, was making it clear she wouldn’t be stirring.

A second, less gentle tap and – His patience having worn out – God walked in.
The recognition was instant although God was much shorter than he’d been imagining for all these years – and very casual. Having coughed politely, and cleverly avoiding the trip-hazard from the trailing flex, He came and sat down at the end of the bed. He could be a family member, a hospital visitor, someone expected and-