A MODERN ROMANCE
Kiss of DEATH: twenty-five-year-old woman suffocates and dies after kissing LESBIAN lover who had eaten PEANUT (and her face swelled up to size of AMERICAN FOOTBALL). I could see my destiny spelled out and capitalised across The Daily Mail front page: “The twenty-five-year-old, whom friends and family describe as a kind-hearted, outgoing person full of life, was left unrecognisable after suffering a severe allergic reaction that caused her airways to block up, skin to break out in hives and facial features to become distorted due to extreme swelling,” it would go on, the friends and family being a standard quotation from the Daily Mail repository of how-to-describe-the-deceased-tactfully –the truth was a much less publishable “introverted, gossiping bitch and somewhat disillusioned with life.” I held higher hopes for a kinder epitaph from the Guardian –perhaps a think piece on how millennials with potentially lethal peanut allergies are suffering from microaggressions from corporate food producers that fail to produce anything anywhere that does not parade traces of nuts, milk protein and gluten.
“Would you like a pair of woolly socks?” Ingrid threw the woollen ball of socks tightly spooning each other at me, her aim slightly off from tipsiness. The socks were a dark brown, with a light blue and yellow zigzag making an uneven circle around the ankle. They reminded me of my efforts in school craft classes, where my attempts at carving a clock out of wood had standardly resulted in something more Dalí than anything resembling reality. Still, I was grateful for the odd offering of socks over the more conventional “would you like a drink?”: a foot fetish was not my thing, so even if the socks had a trace of nut protein lodged in them,
