Girls with faces buffed smoother than dressed stone and cushioned, nude-glossed lips ushered Opal through a caramel maze of blonded veneer, past orchids poised in bud vases set into recesses. In the unforgiving grasp of her pale pants suit she cared not for meridian synergies or lymphatic coaxing, occupied instead by the ferric taste persisting in her oral crevices, sour little allusions to the meal retained within the infinitely capacious reservoir beneath her ribcage and slowly suffusing her cold tissues. The smocked girls showed her to a massage suite beneath a glass-block ceiling; the evening had turned it rufous grey but she scowled up at its transparency before stepping underneath it. Rachel lay face down on a plinth of padded marble while attendants trailed garlands of herbs over her naked skin, avoiding the chakra stones set at careful intervals on her oiled torso. Opal looked over her proportions with a jaundiced eye, aware how shortly gravity would start exacting the full price of its connivance in their splendor. She lifted the gold-chained tote from the neighbouring credenza and tipped its contents onto the wood. Rachel's eyes flew open. "Invading the Lamb property again, in your endless quest for degredation. You really are determined to ruin the chance you might have had with any Sotherby-Curtis, aren't you?” Scrolling through the calls on Rachel's phone, Opal walked slowly around the plinth. "You thankless little bitch." “Nicholas Sotherby-Curtis is gay." the former reminded her as the attendants shrank from her shoulders and began devoting themselves to her feet. “Which is why he needs someone to marry, produce two viable offspring and smile until their face hurts while he runs for governor. I didn’t pay for those teeth so you could wear them down on deviant genitalia." Opal touched a hand to her immobile hair, inspecting a vial of white powder from amongst Rachel's belongings. "You are beyond pathetic. What's next? Snorting up this garbage until a frat boy wouldn't jerk off onto your face unless you paid him? If the columnists pick this up I'll make sure you spend the next three seasons in residential care. Stay away from that house.” "Wil-liam is obsessed with me... he won't stop calling. What am I supposed to do? And who is that person they have over there? Some kind of crazy dwarf?" Opal frowned at the lilies in their wall vase, each bloom plucked of its velvety anthers so that they seemed blinded. “I sent over a housekeeper. I want the place cleaned up before I use it for the group show. And yes... she was petite... had a kind of... I think the word I’m looking for is milkmaid.” Opal turned her head as she swallowed down the flush of pink saliva in her mouth. “That love of your life is probably so exclusively obsessed with you he's bending her over something as we speak.” She shot a glance toward the masseuses as they stood with wide-eyed stares, hands stilled upon their subject's ankles; the smaller girl knocked a bottled candle from the corner of the credenza with a nervous elbow, though Opal's reaction was tempered by the appearance of a receptionist at the panel door. “Ms La Rue, there’s someone here for you... a Mr Lamb. He’s uncomfortable about waiting any longer...” Opal glanced back over her shoulder and addressed herself to Rachel. “Go talk to him. I have calls to make.” “I have an irrigation, and he hates me...” Rachel insisted, bare flesh shuddering like refrigerated consommé. Edward’s sphinx-like features brought her worst anxieties into focus as she espied him from the doorway of the courtesy lounge; Rachel mouthed an affirmation and lifted the collar of her plush white robe, crossing the quiet bar toward him as if he had been waiting for her all along. He sat alone in a mood that stained the air around him like a halo in forboding reverse, a low glass in his hand. “Opal’s taking care of something. Why don’t you get me a drink?” she smiled, lowering herself into the club chair before him. “She told me about the group show... kudos. Sounds like you're really building a name.” When he did not reply she repeated herself, to no apparent avail. “It's so weird... I mean, wherever I go, I hear somebody talking about your pieces, or about Wil-liam... it just feels like fate, you know. And with Opal getting behind your work, that's... I mean..." She tossed her golden ponytail back over a shoulder. "You don't know where Wil-liam is, do you? He's always wanting to hook up, and now I have some time for him I can't raise his damn phone... that thing is always broken...” Edward set down his single malt and stared through her face into the space beyond; she blinked tightly. “I knew it... he's with that hooker again... that son of a bitch...” “That’s my mother you’re insulting.” he replied. The thought of the two sharing an origin was a notion that disturbed her deeply. "What do you want me to say? You think, out of all the people in the fucking world that I actually chose him?" Rachel snapped, glaring at him over the vegetable juice that had been set down on the table. “You don't choose your soulmate, you fucking find each other..." Rage deranged the stiff, pursed poise she had maintained despite her dread of him, pushing her down in her chair and darkening the tone of her petulant utterances until she became once more aware of his scrutiny. Edward reviewed the length of thigh she extracted from her robe and draped over its twin, the two shallow creases that crossed her throat, and the lips that he had never seen naked; she offered them willingly, infusing the display with a languor that tightened the skin around her eyes and pointed her toes downward. “Do you dream, Rachel?” She laughed and looked up at the ceiling, the contents of her glass oozing over its lip. “Of course I dream. I just... I don’t have the time to sit around remembering that crap.” Emboldened by the question's obscurity, she licked her glass and favoured him with her best side. “Ed-ward, how can you even be this messed up? You're scared, I can see it. You're scared of having to be your authentic self around another human being." His gaze remained with her as her smirk developed. "We all have to start somewhere. What are you thinking right now?" His pupils were cinched into stationary shards of darkness. “I'm wondering how you look when someone fucks you. When they're calling you Rebecca. Thinking of their stepdaughters.” She glanced away, flashing toothy acknowledgement at a passing attendant, tugging nervously on an earring. Returning her blue eyes to his face Rachelle laughed, its pointless modulation an unwitting reprisal. “No one talks ever talks that way while we're making love.” “Do they ever say anything?” She leant forward in her chair, grasping both its arms in a renascent fury. "You really think you can run me off? You don't have a fucking hope in hell." "Have you ever heard a tungsten blade passing through an adult femur? I get the first four notes of Ode to Joy." Rachel shrank back, glancing around herself as he rose. "Come to the house again and I'll put you in three holes." In the privacy of his sedan Opal removed the cosmetic dentures from her mouth and slid them into her handbag; without them, her voice took on a lashing sibilance, hissing past the points of her remaining teeth. “Where have you been? I had to tell the buyers you were at a treatment centre.” “Argentina.” "Whatever it was, I hope it bled euros." Opal remarked dryly, drawing the tips of her finger and thumb over the corners of her smirk to catch the lipstick in the creases. “I was happy to correct a power imbalance for the good of the general community." “Is there such a thing? Power is like Armani, darling... not everyone can wear it, but that's just nature in her wisdom.” She chuckled and picked someone else’s hair from the collar of her jacket. “Nature’s wisdom informs my lack of enthusiasm for vampyre juntas.” "One day you're going to say that in front of the wrong crowd. You of all people know that it's coming and it doesn’t care for your preferences. Why not make it easy? You may not be blood, but with your skill set I’m sure we can arrange to adopt you.” A voice came to him as he slowed before an intersection, drifting over the shoulder of a woman remembered as she sat in sunlight on the steps of her house, braiding her own fair hair. “To bow down is to die by your own hand.” he murmured. Opal rolled her eyes at his disembodied prose. “Everyone talks that way while they’re alive. Crossing over brings clarity. The Europeans have their own death squads... domestic ones, committed to their program, and they won’t charge six figures to implement it.” “Peanuts, monkeys.” “Darling, I think the winged ones are different. Things like this should always look like a choice. It's lucky those stars on your knees are all in your head." He pulled up outside her building and watched the doorman grimace to himself as he assisted Opal onto the footpath. CONTINUED NEXT WEEK © céili o'keefe do not reproduce BUY THE BOOK HERE The Stellar Other I sometimes meet the lost at night and stepping over Cerberus's chain, you were returned to me I took your hand and held it to my face I saw you through our fingers your eyes always the colour of the scholar's dissertation their darkest blue reserve once more mine to remember. And from the first I saw the muses all attendant at your birth Fortune had bitten you and left her kisses ringed around your neck her favourite son, you were her gift to all who never knew her. And if you had been raised by erring wolves no one would have ever known to look at you you errant Adonaïs, your perfect clay proclaimed you from afar while the smoke rings took your fox-like laugh into the blacklight. And if your mother never heard you and your father never saw what they had made forever deaf and blind may they remain. They threw an alpha, ne plus ultra and to me your gifts all seven wonders and I knew you were my people born with stars upon your knees, and even from your height you would go down on them for me. You heard with one, but smiled with both our harmony a whole wordless and perfect as the moon ilargia, todas las estrellas y la luna. You gave Strange Fruit to me, her voice, and not its portent and in your bed your body spoke the language of its blessed shape I felt the word poured forth amid the dark miles that I passed all broad and full-blown driven deep against the slow roll of your hips your hand a sweet guest and my private whore Enkidu, incandescent milk-white, midnight shameless and unlettered you loved like you had never seen the sun but had been made to show me stars and as I lay under your shoulders your wordless mouth could mute the bard. You graceful bright and crownless Solomon I should have made your bread and washed your feet. It is a bitter thing to know our children left before we could explain ourselves there are no prayers for small things lost to ribbon red. And I did not agree to lose you to relinquish you to chemistry that Nemesis was never anything to me, but followed you until you fell into that falling sickness so unlike Caesar's malaise already crawled behind your aegis, your silver stolen, darkness knotted round your arm your hand lost to a fist and when your blue went down behind your lids no Orpheus could sing you to the light your left, that double bind your ruined side had found you. Sometimes there is something to be said for Nothing but we already knew there's no Elysium. When we go down with stars upon our knees it is to nothing and it drives the hardest bargain. Nothing could give no more offence to your creators than to offer you in pieces to return you to the Garden, with a smile, wreathed in laurel. And to whoever may have found what you had left my sincere regret, my deepest sympathies. To have laid you low and drawn the black around veinte dos veranos, twenty-two summers your bones not even grown more gifts than you would ever know laid out in shallow silver and when they weighed your heart Asclepius would weep beside the stones. Some days your loss is something fatal in itself caught in my throat to breathe or move will be to join you. That is what it is to lie with Nothing you took me down and widowed me and left me on the ground to burn my eyes out in your ashes. The stars upon your knees are on my own and I have always worn them as you wished. Inside me you have lain so undiminished Fortune finished with you perfect clay forgotten and I would trade her bitter, graceless favour for another day to lash the muses, change your name and feed the years to Cerberus, that punishment they all deserve. I found that I could play when you had gone and now my heroes wear your colours, delight their lovers with your smile. Never dream that no one lights a flame for you no sun sets on a day without my hands upon your face upon my life, you are still loved always the scholar's dissertation and my songs will wear the lustre of your endless constellation. * Sans focus, I know, sorry about that- we've both got snotty Beluga eyes at the moment. This was the most active phasmid I have ever seen. Spring must be here. Thank you, thank you. I needed this really badly. You might not think you do, but just trust me. I'd like to buy the world a toot and this makes me feel like I already have. Mortality has loomed large this year, walking up to us under a number of guises then ripping off the hood and blowing its smoke in our faces. Death is a lot of things- expected, unexpected; affecting and indifferent. Sometimes it's not about the demise, but more the life- what it was and what it could have been. Death narrows the field, both for the living and the deceased; it removes another friend, lover, familial figure, whatever from the living spectrum, and, inversely, turns off the light on everything the dead once were, so that they exist only in the impressions they have made on us, no matter how resplendent and deserving. That is so fucking bitter and almost impossible to come to terms with. No one gets a statue any more. When they're old, maybe surrounded by their own mistakes, it is easier to let them leave, even if our business with them is unfinished, because they've had a chance to represent and demonstrate. We're left to sort through it and decide how hard to cry, and that's an almost logical process. It has a map, you can see the way out from where you stand. When they are young and so full of inestimable qualities, it's like the world has marked them for destruction as some sort of crowd-control procedure; see what happens to the unicorns? We ghost them. Exhibit courage, difference, beauty, insight, any special kind of excellence and you'll be next, until it feels as though it's only the people of Walmart who remain. Alexander McQueen barely made forty and fucking Ralph Lauren is still three hundred and twenty six and breathing our air. The loss of the paragon is a vicious collective punishment, unbearable because they were never allowed the chance to find their stride; only to fuck up once, and then be zipped into a bag. The cruel and stupid grease the way; the illegality of drugs is killing the gifted even as I type the words. A plague on both their houses. We are a society that eats our young and I can't see that ever getting easier to deal with- on the contrary; I feel it more deeply all the time. The ones we love are so often taken without our consent; not always- I was content to let my father go after all his suffering. But when we lose suddenly and too soon, that rage is double-edged and splits us open even as we swing the sword. Don't pretend that isn't happening to you if you're having trouble letting go. Breathe, and drop the weapon, if it takes you twenty years. Sometimes you have to be old enough to have given birth to them, and that's a hard, hard road and very lonely. Their absence locks you into a place where you feel you can't survive without their hand. Life becomes a choice between electrocution and coronary excision, every day when they are gone. Calluses and scars become your friends, and I hate those guys. Is it wrong to want them back? Writing the book allowed me to avoid that question for such a long time, even though the theme is so overt; I don't know how that happens. So many things can stare you in the face, never speaking until spoken to, until you question them. Are forced to question them. Hope I'm not shitting on anyone's parade today. Just thought I'd purge some tarry residues while I'm still so fucking high on life with rhinovirus. Have a brown flower. * More Selected Ravings * Like Photography? *Sorry for the lack of postings, peeps, we both have the flu to varyingly hideous degrees heads full of alien mucous instead of right thinking thoughts and you don't need the details. Will be posting the next book installment as usual but don't know if I'll be doing much else this week where's a fucking shaman when you need one I ask you. Seriously. Some things are perfect. The leopard shares its beauty with the flower and the person walking past you with their lovely skin or pretty hands and hidden depths. Smile at someone or something beautiful today; they don't always know it, and should be told. |
Dear god I love the look of a brand new bullet of lipstick. Is there anything more luxe? So perfect and tactile and gourmand, somehow; I actually want to bite it. (Lol, feeling a bit teethy and demented today. You'll just have to bear with). My new MAC Diva didn't stay pristine very long, though; that sucker was on my pucker before you could say mwah. |
Diva is superb. It's a full matte that doesn't tug going on and sits lightly and comfortably on the lips. Formula-wise, it's a dead ringer for MAC Prince Noir with its buttery, velvety textural perfection. No bleeding into wrinkles even after a cup of tea. Wears around 4-5 hours without a touch up, remaining workable and therefore avoiding the ring of death phenomenon that can occur with more immovable formulas. If you are nervous about hardcore mattes and dark shades, this is something to try before you move to the more high-maintenance offenders like Smoked Purple. Colour-wise it's a deep, cool-ish, very true merlot/berry that doesn't deviate into brown or blue. Just straight up wine, really, no matter how you build it up or smudge it out; in fact, I'll stick my neck out and say this is possibly MAC's most underrated matte. No sheen, no shimmer. I really can't think of a complexion that wouldn't benefit from this shade, but it's particularly nice with green and hazel eyes. | LIP PENCILS Above from Left: Magenta lip pencil, Ablaze pencil. On white writing paper, winter daylight. |
* More Independent Makeup Review Here * Niche Perfumes Here *
Just as these images have affianced the song, the piercing of human flesh seems so perfectly evocative of the brutal ecstacies of love and lust, the rapture and peril of engagement.
Why is this mutilative impulse so universally appreciated?
Do we really suffer arrows through our hearts?
And would it stop us if we did?
Independent Creativity
Hi-Fi Introversion
HONEST REVIEWS
VELVETEEN VERBIAGE
VISUAL LUXURY
MORBID IDLING
THE NATURAL WORLD
photography film
flora fauna culinary
ethnography objet
modest living
vintage shit
Human Durian
celebrating glorious deviation in the land of the long white cloud
- New Zealand -
- T h e B o o k -
B L A C K T H O R N
O R P H A N S
What is freedom, when it is
all that remains to you?
In exile two brothers pursue an anarchist's trajectory, from an old world into the new, from East to West, subject always to the pleasures & horrors of an enduring flesh, to the ironies of karma & impunity. Love bears thorns, the lost return & the dead are haunted by the living.
E P I C D A R K F I C T I O N
T H E
B L A C K T H O R N
O R P H A N S
O N S I T E
H e r e
Selected
Ravings
exaltation semicoherent speculation
Photoessay
documented
Hostile Witness FilmReview
RubyHue
Lipstick Review
Our Photography
Port Chalmers
Blackthorn
Rose Review
Verse
The Lovely R's Blog
We Liked This
Cacti, Aloes
& Flora
KitchenBitch
& raw ingredients
Ethnographic
Jewellery
Tiny Little
Dinosaurs
- a book for children -
This is a noncommercial site.
No ads. No shady data jacks.
No interest in your bizniz.
We don't personally view, utilise or sell your data, apart from occasionally checking totally anonymous + super basic site view stats. We don't even know how to monetise that stuff, so don't worry. Everyone's privacy is important to us.
Our platform is probably harvesting your data, though, via their cookies. Look at their privacy page so you can see what they're up to.
Please use Adblock or something similar.
Google et al superimpose ads that we never see a penny from so fuck them.
Archives
February 2022
January 2022
May 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
September 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
July 2015
June 2015
May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
July 2014
June 2014
May 2014
April 2014
March 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
Categories
All
A Thing Of Beauty
Blackthorn Orphans
Blackthorn Rose Review
Cacti & Aloes
Ethnographica
Flora
Hostile Witness Film Reviews
Jewellery
Kitchen Bitch
Make Up Review
Maximum Respect
Perfume Reviews
Photo Du Jour
Photo Essay
Places & Things: A Blackthorn Review
Port Chalmers
Remembering Dreams
Roses
Selected Ravings
Softcore Rendition
Sweetmeat
Textiles
The Lovely R
Verse
We Liked This