AFTER THE FLOOD, everything swells. Life. Alive. Wood that is pregnant with us. All the air is birth and sex. All the genders I could couple with, and those I can’t, take flight. We fuck in air currents, hurled into the sky like tiny rockets. We fuck on the surface of trees. We fuck in the pelts of animals and dig our bodies deep into the soil, looking for the dark places where we might copulate and spread. Knots of our gorgeous bodies unfurling pale little cocks towards the intermittent sun. More rain than our tangled collective brain can remember. More rain than we have had in a thousand years. All of it at once. Everything becomes water. We live in it as we have lived at the bottom of the ocean floor and in streams and in tears. 

The rain stops and sex riots up like laughter and we lodge in every place imaginable, colonising footpaths and houses and forests and riverbanks. This singular being, this human who calls himself Raymond Tallis, takes a breath in and we tumble to darkness, lodge in his lungs. There is another with me. We land in a huddle and touch each other for compatibility. Some of us are not the right gender, but this one is right for me. None of my type have ever coupled with this type. We shudder with the possibilities of newness. What will we become when we grow into ourselves together?