Billionaire Romance

Chloe Wilson

I will buy a ship and name it after you. I will buy a town and name it after you. I will buy an island and name it after you. I will adopt every child in an orphanage and name them after you.

Everywhere you look: your name in lights, ten feet high, and everyone saying it back to you with a smile on their face.

I will have couturiers dress you and afterwards I will cut off their hands. Your lipstick will be weapons grade, your shoes fashioned from the crash-landed engine of a Soviet rocket.

I will have dragnets dredge every kind of treasure from the floor of the ocean, and if you want to eat the dolphins and turtles bound up in those nets I will have them turned into soup and fricassee and feed them to you from spoons fashioned out of their skeletons. But if you choose to spare them I will train them to eat from your hand. They will purr and rub their faces against you, drowsy with gratitude.

Your fingers will be heavy with glittering rings. But still you’ll stroke those creatures in all the places they like: behind the ear, beneath the jaw, and right between the eyes.

Chloe Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She received equal first prize in the 2016 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2018 Bristol Short Story Prize.