Despite all the good intentions bestowed on their creation, fire areas are rarely entirely successful and I'm glad I noticed that in advance.  We're happy with ours after a couple of test drives but we already had a terraced hillside to work with.  We can hear and see the ocean.  We're not overlooked by a thousand unsavoury neighbours.  The moon is usually visible.  So we can't snatch all the credit for our atmospherics.

Here's a few things to consider.  There's a mysterious seclusion-to-convenience ratio that will make or break your fire area.  Don't put it a mile away from the toilet/fridge/woodpile, or you won't use it.  Conversely, setting it too close to the house will kill its secret sexiness.  Also, you need it to be somehow surrounded in order to define the space; not necessarily walled, but meaningful physical demarcation is important.  A line of fancy pebbles will not achieve this.  The seating has to be slightly tight so the privilege of a decent berth around the flames is appreciated.  Nocturnal airflow at our place means the initial smoke is reliably ushered away downhill, but you need to think about that too- don't put yours in a dead air zone.  And last but not least... if your fire pit still looks and feels fucked despite your best efforts, it's because you cheaped out on the brazier, to within a 99% probability.  That central element is crucial.  I'm a stingey bitch who abhors those stupid overbuilt pizza oven/crematorium/half a fucking house-type installations beloved by sad outdoorsy wankers, but nothing looks cheesier than a shitty, budget, flimsy-arse brazier in an otherwise nice setting.  Stop looking for vintage bunting and artisanal tealight ephemeral bullshit.  Spend that extra hundy on something proper steel and handmade.

​And thusly our scant wisdom hath been imparteth.

Fir tried to lie right under the damn fire so we brought his bed out.  A guy in Christchurch makes these awesome corten braziers- I forget his name but you can look him up on TradeMe.  ​

​SO JUICY.  See more here

​Dressed stone had never seemed so close to comfort beneath her sleeping bag as Susan opened her eyes, to dust-grey walls and light made feather-soft and reticent, as though held between two hands.  A long night and a day passed over her amid the cold smell of wind and water; a pulsing pain redoubled in her mouth when she turned upon her back, encased in the stale warmth of clothing that had dried around her while she slept.  Shuffling sounds and faint, blown smoke curled in through the arch that stood open to a formless, cloud-coloured sky.  She paid them as much heed as the hands that sometimes parted her cocoon to wipe at the smears on her face and chart the bruises mottling through a dull, plumbaceous spectrum on her left side.  Dimly, beneath hooded lids, she saw fresh scars sawed into the skin of the attending arms.  Water swayed in a pail set by her side, its thin steam redolent of greening metal.  She ignored her name and was allowed to, and went back to sleep.

Through the arch another day declared an end, recalling the colour loaned to the vaulting overhead and leaving them in variated monochromes.  Her gaze followed the fluted shapes in stone toward the wall, noting for the first time that it bore an image in the plaster elsewhere dissolved and sloughed away, the robust and wide-eyed figure of a mounted saint.  His halo seemed no less sturdy than his plicated robe, its royal blue deposed by natron grey where the tempera proved as perished and forgotten as the order that had raised the remote redoubt.

From somewhere overhead the smell of another fire issued its primal invitation, en suite with the echoed, disjunct sounds of someone moving with a purpose she could scarcely envision, pain and torpor having pupated into something far more comprehensive.  In its depths she was grateful for the enclosing seclusion provided by the surrounding structure, a quality promoted from its former station as the blandest facet of entitlement and beatified alongside the faded saint.  Her pack lay against the wall, half-gutted of its contents.  Banks of needles crowded the corners of the chamber, sere tokens of abandonment and solitude.  

She rolled onto her side and was struck immediately by a sensation like the intrusion of a blade, an outward-looping vertigo drawing back the walls and floor as though on rubber bands.  They swayed, one version doubled over the other, returning only as the agony began to slacken, leaving her tightly knotted.  Susan opened her mouth to breathe and inched backward onto her shoulders, the taste of festering gore flushed from under her tongue as she stroked her broken tooth and the flesh that pounded all around it.  Though startled by the hinges grinding by the rust-streaked door she lay still as Sachiin eased a dark shape balanced on his head around the partition, a copper pail in each hand, nodding the bundle of fraying fabric onto the floor and arranging its cache of fresh pine needles against the wall.  With the same discretion he set down the carton of cigarettes beneath his arm, letting himself onto his knees beside the smaller pail.  

"It'll be warm for about ten more minutes."  Allowing for her apathy, he waited half that time before reaching back into her pack for her face cloth.  "The drool is fucking with your bloodstains now, poupée..." he added, attempting remediation from which she rolled toward the wall despite the toll exacted by her tooth.  Sitting back, he sighed and took up the box of cigarettes, plucking the golden tab encircling its cellophane and drawing out the crisp, beguiling sounds of its removal.

"Just give me one and go away." she croaked, clearing her throat.

"I thought you were giving up." he smiled to himself, sitting the damp, balled flannel on the side of her head when she did not reply.  Susan turned again toward him, dark stare framed by strands of rain-washed hair and fluvial deposits, then dragged herself onto her hands, leaning over the bucket to lap the water from its rim.  "How's your tooth?" 

"Where is everyone?" she murmured, lapsing back against the stone.

"He's out jerking off somewhere.  Haven't seen Pet yet."

She lay still.

"Now I can't call him Edward."  He waited for her to elaborate with the same forbearance, two fresh cigarettes parked between his teeth.  "It sounds... wrong... once you've seen him... doing things."

​“I know.  It's like calling Satan Toodles.  Kar-lar-amaat-yah…” he suggested in a lugubrious tone, though she did not seem to have heard him.  Squinting, Sachiin lit the cigarettes and piped the smoke from the corner of his mouth.  "Allez... a problem shared is everybody’s problem.”  He shrugged at her lack of response.  "Well, I've got nowhere else to go, so y..."

​“Stop being so fucking nice..." she snapped.  He glanced around himself uncertainly.  "I ran away and left you, alright?  They could have been... ripping your fucking arms off...”  The feeble glow from the arch diminished again as the sun dropped beyond the unseen horizon.  Sachiin folded his legs.

“I can't say how it looked to you, but I don't think we were ever going to be dancing around with their nutsacks on our heads, so don't feel like you stole our chance at glory.  If you hadn't been there, personally I’d still be headed downstream like there was a fucking inboard up my arsehole."  He smiled and offered her a cigarette.  "We made it out in three good pieces... pas de probléme."  A glance related the inadequacy of his assurances and he reclaimed the damp cloth, warming it once more in the bucket.  She did not protest its application.  "I've always thought the chick who wrote The Art of War should have done one called the art of not getting into shit in the first place, but then none of the hot mess headed for the front line actually fucking read, do they?  I mean, I look like I fell out of a fucking cement mixer and I didn't get that way smoking a bowl in a titty bar after bugging out of Nuristan before I got my head kicked in..." he laughed.  "And that's because I'm a retard.  But like I said, pas de probléme... if you live, pick up your ninja wings... you just qualified.  As for running like a little bitch, I think that was me powering right past you.  I probably pushed you over trying to put on speed."  

She closed her eyes again against his arguments.

​"You're not fucking useless... I am.  I can't carry my pack, you had to go back and get it... I can't do fucking anything."

"Silence, mortal." Sachiin pronounced.  "Would I steal a box of home-brand Ukranian cigarettes from a vampyre for a useless person?  I went back for your pack because I'm too much of a fucking gimp to watch you suffer."  He lifted the end of the sleeping bag and made a quick survey of her feet.  "That's not heroic, and it's all bullshit anyway... heroic people are just impatient cowards.  The dickhead who throws himself on the grenade is the same dickhead who would have bolted like everybody else if he'd thought about it, but then boom... he's human stucco, and stucco can't express regret.  So stop feeling bad, immediately.  How's your tooth?"  

She drew her feet beneath the covers.

​“Pet doesn't want me here.” 
“Did she say that?"
"She didn't have to."
"Ouais, she's suffering you in silence because politeness is like a religion to her." he laughed, rolling his eyes.  "Christabel, you just startled her dead arse.”  He reached back toward her boots.  “Come on... you can bring your hump upstairs.”

​
 CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
​© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

It goes on like a dream from the tube and smooshes obligingly around the mouth without streaking, settling into lines or balding out in the middle of your cakehole.  That latter effect really pisses me off and I've come to expect it from these shades, so Pepper's obedience and impeccable coverage on my dark lips were a nice surprise.  ​It's the lightest opaque shade I've found real-world wearable due to both this fantastic coverage and its nuanced colour profile.  So to summarise- look into this one if you're in the market for a cool neutral and own a face that usually bucks them.  It's probably not even your fault; these shades are so often poorly composed, ending up as visual yawns or just unalloyed face-gack.  Pepper is the closest I've personally come to satisfaction in this pursuit.

​Bite has issued a number of these modest, organic pinks and in my opinion does a better job of them than MAC, perhaps because they serve a slightly more sophisticated demographic.  Yeah, I'll say it; MAC's neutrals are outclassed on most fronts these days.  Seriously, stop buying fucking Velvet Teddy, people.  You can do better.

​awesome little series, clock it here

Standing in the almost alien brilliance of a clear mid-morning, Susan's companions reserved the content of their discussion via the interfluent galop of their hands, arguing silently at the edge of an incline.  She turned in her sleeping bag, wincing as the flesh that had stuck to the inside of her boots tore free.   

"I told you not to fucking carry me..." she called, climbing out and rolling up the bag.

"I didn't." Sachiin sighed.  Her gaze flew to Edward, who looked back at her wordlessly.  “Pet’s place is up that gully and halfway down the other side.” the former advised, pointing out the neighbouring ridge while she waded toward them through matted, rotting fronds.  Her expression brightened to an uncertain smile until he drew her attention to the ground at their feet.  It dropped away in a deep concave, then a monstrous swathe of tumbled, bramble-choked tumulus where the hillside had lapsed wholesale into a gorge a century earlier, undermined by a spring buried in its shoulder.  Cottage-sized blocks of rock studded the jagged, compacted chaos, some still garnished with randomized fragments of the original forest.  The gradient alone rendered it impassable except to the slowest and most conservative descent, a prospect further complicated by the maze of nightmare boscage.  Far below, like some dreary and imperfect déjà vu lay another river partitioned from contiguous view by the ridges running down to it, appearing dully petrochemical in its sunken course.  The plateau on which they stood had been carved in half by the water's taste for its pervious stone, the distant eastern face of the cloven formation still rendered in the colours of night.  "It used to be straight down to a ford from here."

"This is why they let us through." Susan concluded.  "Now they can really have some fun with us."  Neither of them contradicted her, watching her struggle back toward her pack.  

"There's no way we can make it before dark." Sachiin called.  She ignored him.  "Christabel... it's too far and too fucked up.  You'll go two clicks and fall on your face... we need a def pos."  He peered at his brother through the hand he had pressed to his eyes.  "Just say we have phosphorous... I just want to hear the words.  I don't fucking care if it's true."

"Seven six two, some hollow point." Edward replied, laconic.  

"He's an artist so he can disappear up his own arsehole, but I don't think there's enough room for three of us!" she laughed bitterly.  

​"Listen to me." Sachiin told her, tugging on his own ears.  "You can not make that distance in the time we have.  Not if you ran all the fucking way, and you're not running anywhere on those."  He nodded down at her feet.  She dragged on the rest of her clothes, bent to haul her pack onto her shoulders and walked past him, bowed under its weight.  They watched her set off along the hill top alone, looking to each other until Sachiin hurried after her, bringing her back.  

"I can't sit here and wait for forty fucking... for them to find me.  I want to make them put some effort into it."  She stared at him while he walked away from her to stand at the edge of the drop with his hands clasped on his head.  Susan sighed again.  “Sachiin…” she murmured, letting the pack fall.  “Don’t get into a flap... think.  What would you do if I wasn’t here?”  He took out his lighter and began flicking its wheel, throwing it at the ground when it provided no relief.

“You are here, and if the wind blows the wrong way once the moon's up, sai'ith ah'na essir.  Bon fucking nuit.”  Edward reached into the pocket of his own trousers and drew out a coin, to which his brother raised a hand in sarcastic appreciation.  “Hey, why the fuck not?  Nothing says backwoods clusterfuck like a fucking rouble toss.  Kiss it with your dick first.” Sachiin agreed despairingly, the thought of the coin’s impartial decree making him curse again under his breath.  “She can't make it... they'll fucking run us down."  His gaze fell to Susan.  The brass case of his lighter lay by the toe of her boot, golden and impervious, a gleaming sigil to her irresolution.  She nodded at Edward. 

"Prends ton courage á deux mains.  That's what Gideon told me.  He said to never run."

“That’s because his fucking knees are shot.” Sachiin complained.  She looked up at him and took his hand.

​"Be quiet.  It's up to me."



The weight of Susan's body conspired with the impetus arrested by the noose of bindweed on her ankle to pitch her violently forward; her hands closed on vegetation that slid wetly through her fingers until her face struck stone.  She lay still.  Blood ran from the tear her teeth had cut into the soft flank of her cheek, and from a stabbing pain alongside it.  She spat a fragment of enamel onto her palm and shook rosy saliva from her fingers, rolling over beneath the arching canes and dripping hellbine, its glabrous filaments draped in tentacles of septic pink and slippery amphibious green.  The vast pallium of coldly-glowing shadow thrown down by the retreating sun was like a hand upon her shoulder that could no longer be ignored, the river seeming no closer than two hours before.  She spat blood again, head pounding and hands full of fended thorns, blinking eyes red with dust shaken from the brambles.  

As her breathing slowed it let her listen to the tiny sounds around her, of the miniature animals moving stealthily beneath the briars as they recovered from the fright of her crashing descent, birds flitting overhead, darts against the dim sky, the small creaks and rustles in her clothing.  The pistol kneed the small of her back and she drew it from her belt, setting it on her stomach and noting for the first time how little of its dull stamped shape seemed devoted to the workings of its purpose.  She could find no real aversion to lying lifeless where she had fallen, solitude attending her as faithfully as ever.  In its quietus, she overlooked her scattered bones as they lay, streaked soft matte grey amid the briars, their enduring forms dusted slowly into obscurity, her flesh flowering once more in the blossoms proffered by the thorns.  Tiny insects couched in points of emerald green and ebony hove into the vacancy created by her passage, swept away when Sachiin leapt down from the boulders behind her; she sighed as he hauled her up, blood spilling down her chin.

"I was wrong and you were completely right.  Not about everything... just this.  I thought I'd force myself to say that." she admitted, smiling.  He took the gun from her and checked its load before slapping it back into her grasp.  Edward ducked beneath the veil of vines, climbing back toward them as a flash of fluted rays farewelled the day, the sun sliding behind trees silhouetted on the ridge above.  She opened her mouth to query their unbidden confluence but Sachiin urged silence with a hand and they crouched together, listening intently.  

High on the ridge a pair of widely-separated birds exchanged a mournful cry, repeated twice, almost in unison with the white crown of the lunar disc surmounting the eastern scarp, staining the shadows on her hands a deep, transparent amethyst.  She expelled another mouthful of blood; Sachiin caught it in his palm before it could hit the ground, wiping it onto his clothing, then slid the pack from his shoulders and launched its awkward weight into the brambles beside them.  He caught the two magazines Edward threw to him, stepping aside to let her down the tumbled rocks.  

"Where are they?" she whispered, to which he divided his fingers and used them to point over his shoulder in two directions; the ache in her face was replaced by a sudden burn in her back and shoulders as though someone had seized them, fear wiping her mouth dry.  She turned to scrabble onward through canes that opened to an uncertain drop, forcing her to let herself down onto bare stone, cracking her tooth along another axis as she landed badly.  Stumbling over her own momentum, Susan dragged it up through her legs and used it to plough along a boar-track, regardless of the tendrils that whipped and tore at her hair and face and outstretched hands.  With eyes screwed closed against them she stumbled out onto a sudden plane of flat ground peopled with the standing hulks of deracinated elms; as she skidded to a standstill a sound ripped free and rolled down through the living trees behind her, a hoarse, bloated, saw-like roar flushed from deep in something terrible and newborn, taken up by others until the gorge thrummed, charged with its nauseous harmonic.  Sachiin seized and turned her around, drawing down the zip of her parka.

"They won't come all at once."  he shouted over another burst of the sound as he wound the garment around her neck, knotting it thickly.  "When they hit us, go down, keep your arms in, in, like this..."  He tucked his hands under in demonstration, forced to lift his voice again over the roaring that rattled through the fluids in her throat and eyes, so close that she heard the raw breath dragged in before it.  "They'll flank us... watch our backs and don't run, no matter what.  Do not run."  Edward dumped the ammunition from his bag and swung his rifle from his shoulder while Sachiin pushed her into the enormous tree, ripping out dead wood and honeycomb from the empty bole and showering her with black debris.  They took up a guard before it, exchanging brief advice while Susan stood in the dead air of her hide, clasping the pistol in both sweating hands.  He glanced back at her once, though anything he might have said was obliterated by the hellish chorus that hit them on the full, filling the tree and the caves in her head until she screamed with it, toppled backward through the rotten wood, and ran.

She was struck almost deaf as she fled by a high, tuneless tone in her ears.  It drowned the roaring and smoothed her blind, scurrying flight into something she almost observed from without, wiping all notion of her companions until they caught her up and she glimpsed them as lateral blurs, sliding on her hip down another drop and crashing into cracking green and purple.  Behind them alujha poured through the thickets like huge beads of mercury, fanning out to run them down from either side.  The moon had breathed upon their skin, charring and dragging it taut over a frame that answered four feet as well as any biped could; they lurched horse-like but for their graceless weight and tailless quarters, long, ponderous heads hanging low and flat and earless, black holes gaping behind their blank white eyes, devouring sound.  They pounded the ground as their voices had throttled the air.  She felt a grasp on her clothes, Sachiin catching her and fending the dark shape that leapt at his shoulder, fist twisting in her sleeve.  The ground failed under them both, falling away, and they plunged with the undercut earth and disarticulated litter into a torpid vacancy. 

The tone in her head let her watch her two companions straighten out and meet the water with their hands, a moment before she smacked on her side into its black face, arms out against the bucking shapes hurled down on her, their braying cut short as the freezing darkness burst and swallowed them impartially.  The surface soared away overhead, lost to her as she fought to disengage from her pursuers; her clothes flooded, plumes of silvered, beaded air crawling over her while cobblestone knuckles pounded and raked at her face and chest.  She twisted and tore free of them, kicking desperately against the boots that dragged on her legs like sacks of stone.  The night above proved a fouled and battering hell of choking spray and scourging limbs and she was trodden under again, gasping a throat full of water.  Clutching the creature floundering beside her, she saw its great head swing back over its shoulder at her, jaws slamming with the sound of snapped bones; she braced her boots against its flank and dived back under. 

Within the river's echoing bourne the blackness was a backcloth against which all pale shapes were rendered in plastic, bloodless white, her hands corpse-like before her.  The water had carved itself a depth too great to reckon by the moon; she lost her bearings and pulled around toward the crack and rumble of submerged violence, using all four limbs and brushing back her snaking tendril hair.  From her remove she watched Edward ascend from the obscurity beneath one of the struggling beasts and stroke his arm across its belly, drawing a wound that birthed a gravid flush of serpentine entrails and stained him marbled shades of cold, sweet pink.  With no need of the surface he read the rhythms in the champing jaws and toiling limbs, moving to their dictates, becoming one more of the water's horrors with a knife that opened their assailants as though their bloody contents longed for the release; he joined his brother as the latter drowned the last uninjured beast, dragging it beneath the surface with his arms locked around a head that spun slowly in a grinding circuit.  Hooked claws in his feet tore its taut skin as he punched his knife into the silver-flashing eyes and the gleaming, knotted flesh behind its skull.  Turning away, Susan caught a draught of air and sounded again.  Through the gloom the far bank loomed as ashen and uncertain as a distant sea mount, rising steeply beneath an unseen shore. 

The shelved stone offered little purchase to boots that skidded hopelessly against it, forcing her further along the ledge.  She kicked herself onto a stretch of silt, humping over mud until her knees found solid ground.  One and then another of her companions hauled up on either side of her, Sachiin grasping her with a torn hand while the last beasts pawed at the far wall of the gorge, vainly seeking egress.  Overhead and clearly limned for the first time, their remaining fellows loomed atop a cliff no longer entailed by shadow.  Where she thought of the wolf, they scarcely obliged her, both canine and hominid subsumed by a churning fusion that confounded the sum of its parts; they crouched, held down by the weight of their saurian heads, funeral hues caping their minotaur shoulders before flanks stratified with heaving musculature.  They sucked the breath from her mouth with their argentine stares, maws lolling open and thickly spiked with fat, flared tusks.  

Sachiin boosted her over rocks she could not negotiate in her mud-greased state toward Edward, and they climbed into the trees where she sat down, the river pouring from her bagging garments and the mirror bag still hanging round her neck.  Her arms and shoulders shook, but he lifted her back onto her feet.

"Thi'i sai'inae." Sachiin told his brother, wiping his face on the torn sleeve of his shirt.  She watched dumbly as he headed back down to the river, Edward catching hold of her arm.

"He's going for your pack." he advised, anticipating her demand as she gasped its first syllables.  Taking the rifle from his shoulder he chose a clear line through the trees and targeted the beasts still leering on the cliff top, scattering them back into the scrub while she closed her eyes against the muzzle flash.



On the far side of the ridge top Edward let her lie against a tree and catch her breath, though she continued the broken song that she had droned during their march uphill, her damp clothes still sucking at her skin.  The moon's shadow leant out across the tiers of broad, sedate nocturne beneath them; the river, having curled south and looped behind the ridge, passed eastward, seated deeply in the basement stone of the wider valley.  Conifers once more usurped the broadleaves of the hills behind them, clothing the windward mountains with their dour, balsam-scented recurrence, thin arms held out as though in an expression of dread.  When he glanced at her again she was staring back at him, unblinking, and he replied with a look that should have discouraged her, though it did not.  He took up his rifle and moved off and she fell in, catching and pushing past him on the narrow way and trundling down into the swept and dusty vacancy beneath the pines.  As if something had tripped her Susan went over on her face and lay flat out on the ground; he stooped to catch her parka, standing her back upon her feet and watching her continue on without a word like a toy he had set back onto its tracks.

A thick pelt of dead needles had blown across a narrow way before them, its regularity evolving into a crooked line of hand-cut steps pouring like a frozen cataract from a crevice in the stone.  Their cracked, decrepit increments could not have been more welcome if they had been clad with carpet and lined with rails; she leant over to inspect them minutely, first scowling suspiciously, then laughing to herself in macabre delight, the sound tumbling away into the valley.  Blood ran from her mouth and spotted the stone, her cackles giving way abruptly to gurgling expectoration.  She followed them to a divergence where one flight headed down into the gorge, the other cutting across a cirque toward the north and its termination in a basaltic redoubt, the formation standing like the lonely corpse of some slab-sided pachyderm.  A shallow curve of hollowed shapes crowned it in the waning moonlight, a plain, perfunctory colonnade staring through arches toward sister peaks on the far side of the gorge; Susan trudged the path across the slope to its agreement with the flank of rain-streaked stone, where it barely allowed the width of her companion's shoulders.  The steps ended in a mound of alluvium washed from the cracks in the rock overhead and the studded ruin of a postern door, its black timbers fretted with finger-deep cracks.  Leaning against the abutting stone, Edward spoke in Russian, as though to someone standing on the other side.

Ten minutes passed before he was answered by the tapping of miniature feet.  The door was hauled back off its giant latch and Petrouchka retreated with it in the folds of a black fur, murmuring a greeting to him while Susan stood humming tunelessly, her own blood dried around her mouth and chin, hair and clothing hanging like a drowned pelt.

"You are very, very strange girl." the vampyre remarked as the latter shuffled past her.  ​


CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

from the front yard.  I love the bay in winter.

Feeling somewhat better, mentalhealthwise.  It's easy to forget how much exercise levels you out if you've been skipping days; if you're feeling low, start with some hard walks or go back to the gym.  Seriously.

The colour that had opened her eyes rose from the wrinkled floor of her tent, a nebulous Pleiadian blue glowing on the back of her hands and what she could see of her own face in the darkness.  Beside the foot of her sleeping bag, as though surprised in the act of encroachment, a string of lights lay crowded on a knotted black cord, emitting the powdery glow that had roused her.  With her eyes narrowed she saw that it passed through a gap at the base of the zippered door, and slid out of her sleeping bag, crawling with them into the quiet night.  

The bulbs ran tendril-like along the ground between trees heavy with a felted nocturnal blackness; through them she could feel the sound of water scouring stones, its lapping babel translated into pulses expressed by the globes in a strange, staccato transcription.  The venous cord diverged like some engulfing tropical vine, climbing and hanging in snarled loops from the branches, dry violet dust spilling from their frayed ends as she passed beneath them.  A scent fell with it and lit upon her, of mingled, pungent lilies and a sliced and sappy green, strangely unrelated to the glow that deepened to the flickering hue of holographic shade on her arms and in passive trees fruited with bulbs blooming almost as round as her head.  The cable had begun to express the same cyanic hue, lighting the undergrowth until the leaves gave way to round grey stones where the lights climbed down and ran between her ankles into sable water.  It swallowed and slowly dimmed them; she stared into the depths while they spiraled around the cord, its luminescence pulsing slowly, the water rising in slippery black fingers, tendrils swaying before her like a hundred eyeless serpents.

No birds chimed the hour as cold soaked through Susan's socks and lapped her feet.  Dawn pierced the dilettante mist over the river of her luring dream and cast its spiritous gold through her lids while she stood, shivering fitfully, no glowing vines slithering between her ankles when she looked down.  Her teeth clattered together in her head; the forest ran up a slope behind her that she did not remember, though the mud streaking her knees and forearms recounted her descent of it.  She waded back toward the shore over clinking river cobbles blue with cold.  Her own weight brought her down on a boulder while cloud shouldered out the sun, its condensing mass once more portending rain.  In their shadow she felt her eyes well, bled by a despondency that pushed up through her throat, and she leant over to weep into her lap.  

William wiped at his own face when it began to stream in sympathy with hers, sitting amid grass-green aigrettes of ferns at the edge of the trees.  She heaved a broken sigh at the sight of him, shifting to make room on the stone and nodding slowly to the sleeping bag he lay over her shoulders.  They sat while she pondered his unquestioning constancy.

"Something blue was glowing... I think it wanted to talk to me." she murmured.

"The river... they do that sometimes.  What did it say?"

Shrugging, Susan shook her head and gazed down at her arms amid the quilting.

"Yesterday, when I was by myself... I found out why your brother wears suits."

"Long sleeves." he admitted, surprising her with his grasp of the allusion.  "If I had told you, would you have believed me?"  She shook her head.  "He stopped doing it for a while, I think, with Helaine, but..."  He suffered a moment of conflicted silence.  "Is it better to know?"

​She shrugged again, unable to assort the wreckage of her own sentiments.  

"I don't know... but I don't think I can call you William any more."  

He leant over to puff the dew from the length of their last cigarette.

"Ala'il sha bai.  I don't think I ever was one."



Her feet forced her to a halt at noon when she was tripped by a web of buried branches into a crackling mass of bramble canes.  Sachiin lifted her out of them and set her down, plucking the broken lengths free of her parka and leggings.  The birch bark dressings dropped off in heavy rose-pink wads as she peeled away her socks.  

"Fuck!" she shouted, enraged, lying back in the ferns with her eyes closed while he swore softly to himself at the sight of the damage.  As quickly as her heels mended the new skin was soaked and bitten away, leaving wet pits of angry scarlet flesh to reproach him.  The sight of him poring over her extremities as though they were dying animals proved briefly, obtusely amusing, though she screamed when he ripped open a stretch of dead skin crammed with debris.  They both looked up at the sight of his brother emerging from the slope before them, rifle in his hand, exclusively intent upon their captive.

He shoved the youth onto his knees and tore a sleeve from the latter's wet pullover, stuffing half into his mouth and knotting the remainder around his head as an emphatic gag.  Frowning, he kicked the scout hard, satisfying himself that he was unable to emit any significant vocal response.  

"How many?" Sachiin sighed, getting up.

​"Twenty five, thirty." 

Susan pulled on the heavy khaki anorak she had abjured thus far when it was handed to her, keeping a close watch on the far more subtle visual elements of the brothers' exchange.  

"Alujha." Sachiin admitted.  "Have a look for my balls in your bag... I'm going to need them back for a bit."

"Could we not just... go round them?"

​"They know we're here and they're sitting on the only way through this shit in any case.  If we front them they might jump us but if we don't, they definitely will."  He began to look over his weapons; Susan gazed around herself, expressing dismayed expletives, rolling onto her feet and sucking an agonized breath through teeth clenched against any further exclamation.  On his knees beside Edward, the scout smirked around the fabric in his mouth, shoulders shuddering in a gloating chuckle as he watched her deplore her own failing flesh.  She grew still, staring back at him, then took up her boots, sitting down to stuff her bleeding feet into their sodden confines. 

Edward's fist drove their captive down the steep, greasy descent, through a last stand of jostling saplings and onto the floor of a valley crowded with great skeletal copses of black-fruited bramble, shaded even from the glimpse of sunlight allowed by a rift in the clouds.  Walking behind him, Susan found in the hard-blown sound of her own breathing and Sachiin's murmured appeal to those antediluvian objectives still enjoying his regard an almost somnambulistic state; it drew from her companions and even from their captive, his hatred permuting into a fuel that set her bitten feet down and picked them back up again.  The smell of smoke through the trees troubled the chains that circled the eidiré's black piles and conjured the sudden, airless notion that she might find their wretched inmates amongst the party they approached.  It crashed into her obliquely, opening her eyes wide, grinding against the impetus that pushed her onward, every step she stamped down in the alujha's muddy wake threatening to crack her bones.

A clearing, like the hollow of a bird's nest, had been fashioned using dead limbs to pin back the thorns, rendering it almost invisible from without.  A creek wound, a flat, sluggish shade of bronze, past the salix that overhung the bivouac, the camp divided by a narrow course of smoking, half-green logs.  On it lay the remains of a doe, the foul smell of its scorched hide rising from the pyre.  The blackened corpse lay torn in two, innards raveled over spitting branches, and strung along this focus were the alujha themselves, squatting beneath dappled cowls like the members of some barbaric mendicant order.  Their faces were pasted with soot so that the whites of their eyes glared in glassy contrast, the variances parceled out by nationality and fortune as shallow as the pigment smeared over their skin as they ate from their hands, chewing blue flesh and sucking dripping marrow from fractured bones.  The nearest rose at the sight of their youngest member staggering before the strangers as the scout was thrown down on his face at the end of the blaze, discarded as soon as the gesture he embodied was perceived.  He sprang to his feet and wiped off his gag, scowl contracted around a furious denouncement that brought the rest of his tribe off their haunches as Susan stepped down between their mirrored ranks.  Their blackened faces crowded out the sky, the youth's rage left behind in slurring pantomime.  

He was the smallest of them.  The remainder were limned in unwonted clarity by her survivor's gaze; the colour drained from their eyes at the sight of her, hands knuckling up and curling under, their breath and bodies stinking of spilt seed and offal and oily, unheeded sweat.  She saw the clear ground at the distant end of the hearth disappear behind their heavy shapes and almost faltered, forced to step into the embers by a shoulder that struck her own.  Though her hood secluded her face, the milk-white smell of her body lofted from her clothing with the heat of the coals, lapped and swallowed by those crowded on either side.  The brothers' great forms framed her own; their strange affinity and the crystalline animus foiling their gazes prompted the older alujha to make protective gestures, passing the peril of their stare over their shoulders.

"Yásta utut na ábita... jáma wel hasitt sha sittra náfan." one of them advised his fellows, displaying more complacency than the rest, his silvering hair and short, striated beard an obvious device of seniority.  To their astonishment one of the intruders replied in passing, his grasp of their secretive tongue like a blow to their faces.

"Kút ifa ján, in sejju na mujjin sootcha hastná vech wel ídv." Edward warned them.  "Na nachát isin na najún if íyet hahdra, jáma sin itujrr lá Belyaev na vampyr."   

"Ídv tuj vech plajúr kuchani na Lúnar." the alpha replied, containing himself. 

"Shata kushir ján mitha nán vech." promised the stranger, something more personal confided by his eyes and the teeth that had shaped the acuate contention.  The hood flapped back from Susan's head with the wind that broached the trees, her damp hair, woad-blue, pressed to her neck.  A guttural response passed about her as the creatures seized upon the glimpse, tongues creeping from their mouths, hands glowing hotly through her clothes as they snatched at her, eyes crawling over her skin and dragging her stolen shape behind their faces.  Thick fingers rose at her face, groping for her mouth, but she punched them away and Sachiin shoved the offender back.  Another caught her trailing hood; she threw herself forward, wrenching free of the last of them and ploughing into the mud and rushes at the edge of the stream.

Susan thrashed her way over the slimy rocks and dragged herself out on the far side of the water, terror marching her on up the face of the abutting hillside like some sadistic numen.  With both hands she hauled herself over the slick, latticed roots and twining creepers, tearing her bleeding feet free and snapping what remained of her nails against the buried rock.

"Christabel, slow down or you'll blow something..." Sachiin called, catching her leg.  She jerked it free and pushed on, scrambling up onto a game trail that cut across the slope between the narrow tiers of trees.
"What did they say?" she urged.
"Nothing you want to hear."
"What did he say?"  

He thought over Edward's address, climbing alongside her.

"Fuck with us and it'll be the last dumb shit you do... this woman is my brother's wife, we're guests of Belyaev."
"And?"
"He flipped them off with something.  Christabel..."  In the light of her comprehensive disregard he watched her pull up before a fallen trunk, then squeeze under it where the roots had propped the bole clear of the ground.

Midnight passed before a moon yawning almost to the full began to set, remaining all the while in an ironic, starless purdah, leaving them only with the promise of her next appearance.  In the ensuing darkness Susan conceded to his demand for surcease, crushing whorls of bracken as she keeled onto her side.  He spoke her name and waited for any sign of comprehension before collecting her bag and summoning his brother.
​
​
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

From earlier in the year.  We're sitting on a tonne of images that never got posted because of the build and Felix's illness.  I will get round to putting up the better ones.

It clashes with the broken veins and redness on my sad old face, so consider any scarring or pigmentation issues you might have before splashing out.

Vento's charm lies, counterintuitively, in its lack of graphic heft; it is subtle, casual, vintage, conventionally pretty, completely SFW and a nice foil to a big eye.  It offers a nice alternative to those of us wanting a bit of polish without the slimy grossness of lip gloss- Vento's lustre is low, satiny and durable.  It's just the smidgen of sneaky pastel that strikes the wrong gong for the warmies; oh well.

I wear it around the house anyway, purely for the pleasure of its sublime texture.  This shit be angel grease, second only in my experience to the crushingly expensive Chantecaille stuff (which I must get around to reviewing) as far as conditioning and comfort are concerned.   And Vento is so visually lightweight and stable that I also sneak it under all those chalky-arse mattes that will suck you dry if you don't amend, which is why it's staying in the stash.

nice work

see more here 

Susan awoke to the same darkness in which she had fallen asleep, a damp cold as featureless as she remembered.  Her right arm refused her, weak with pins and needles as she stirred, having been jammed between her body and the underlying contours of the earth.  She rolled onto her knees and sat up, rubbing her shoulder then patting around for her torch, squinting away from its yellow beam.

"I'm going to the bog." she called softly, sitting back to push her cold feet into her boots.  William replied from a small distance outside, advising her to head downhill.

Deer had worn a way down the flank of the gully, then turned it over a small dividing ridge in favour of its neighbour, her torch hunting out its lead amid the glistening litter and the thick, slippery green of fallen branches.  Her thermals held the warmth of her sleeping bag against her skin; the fleet sound of water lead her on through frilled falls of milky lichen toward a dim lacuna in the trees.  A stream poured from some hidden font in the head of the ravine dashed white beneath the waxing moon, whipped by the speed of its descent over weirs of tumbled wood and gurgling circuitously around small boulders.  The icy light fell in a narrow aisle in both directions but she followed the descending grade, pushing her way through waist-high bracken, then pausing, rolling the elastic from her waist and sinking down amid the dripping plumes to relieve herself.  The cigarette she sheltered with both hands had been flattened by its sequestration in her clothing, but still offered respite.  Closing her eyes, she let the smoke curl before her, breathing it softly toward the stream.

Without the sound of her own movement to overwrite it, the spattering of falling water at some small distance turned her head and she ground the butt into the mold between her boots.  The stream dropped, chute-like, over a tall face of glistening black stone, losing a portion of its volume in spray and plunging into a sunken pool overhung with weeping epiphytes and ferns.  Susan stopped short when she found herself standing in tiny, snaking tributaries intent upon their own route over the drop, peering into what she could see of the dark little cirque below and pondering the likelihood of surviving any fall into its depths.  The stream resumed at a cleft in the bowl, winding onward into trees and past a figure returning water to the rivulet from its dripping hair and features as they kneeled beside its broken edge.  She might have hailed anyone else over the sound of the fall but Edward's solitude impressed her too darkly for any such mundane gesture.  For a time he did not move, then sat back slowly, eyes still on the current rushing past his knees, the sight of her obscured as much by introversion as the slope and intervening forest.  In rolling his left sleeve back he exposed skin that shared the colour caught by the broad blade of his knife.  The weapon flashed as he put it to the inner face of his arm some careless distance from his naked wrist, the fluted edge catching, then biting deeply into his flesh through the length of the stroke that he drew toward his body.  

She pressed a hand to her mouth, gaze full of the knife as it opened two more grinning wounds that tailed back toward his elbow.  He swallowed pain like a purgative draught, containing and directing it, his blood assuming the subtle colours of the darkness crouched around him.  The memory of his presence while the witches had roared over her reared up and forced Susan down onto her haunches, where she embraced herself against the grotesque and undisclosed despair, as though the greedy spirit cast from her had found ingress elsewhere.  A low, bird-like whistle looped through the undergrowth toward her and William called her name; she sat still, beginning a desultory retreat on all fours when she could not trust her legs to bear her weight.

William held a stranger to the ground beside the tent, his foot on the back of the captive's shoulders while he hog-tied him with a black rope selected from the small, camouflaged pack the latter had carried.  When the stranger looked up at her approach he seemed younger than Susan herself, though hard and tensely-fashioned; she had seen the cast of his features before amongst Gideon's tribe, their smooth width and cropped brown hair recalling junior Roman infantry.  She passed her torch over him and looked to William for an explanation.

"Alujha scout... heard him creeping up the ridge, heading back to the houses for something."  He glanced at her palpable distraction, his notice turning her gaze from him; she frowned down at the youth's preoccupation with her even as he was hauled to his knees and patted over roughly.  

"What do we do with him?"

"We'll keep him, in case we run into his boys." 

"Why is he looking at me like that?"

​"He probably didn't know girls had legs." William muttered.  Edward took a wordless measure of the lycanthrope as he returned and took charge of the rope lead while she collected her belongings.

Though they remained at a practical distance the scout glanced ceaselessly back toward Susan, earning a clout from his unsmiling warden that did little to quell his curiosity, his ruling body flashing coldly in his eyes.  She did not seem to notice, stepping over fallen trees and wandering water in silence.  They had descended the gully to a confluence with its riparian twin before the scout addressed some inquiry to Edward, Susan noting the exchange almost accidentally.

"He's bitching for water." her companion related.  She sighed and took her bottle from her waist, and he passed it on, though the stranger rejected it in unequivocal terms, spitting over his shoulder.  Snatching a length of dead wood from the ground William whipped it across the offender's head, causing him to grunt and stagger sideways.  "He won't drink anything that's touched a woman's mouth." he told her.  Little suggested itself in reply to so basic an objection and she digested it for the remainder of their descent.  The rivulet flanking their passage into the sombre valley disturbed her with its ceaseless referral to the sight she struggled to forget, reciting tuneless songs and staring at the blank walls of the forest.  She tasted nothing of the energy bars that she devoured from each hand, sitting with her eyes closed in a rift between two hillsides when they halted.  The scout crouched before a fallen trunk, his hair pasted to his forehead in short spikes lending emphasis to the glare that watched her eat; it shifted from her lips to her breasts, feasting on shapes half-secluded by her clothing, moving downward over the damp cloth grasping her thighs.  An erection stood in the crotch of his combat pants and he leant over it, letting the saliva pooled in the floor of his mouth spill from his lips onto the ground between them.

"Who's your boyfriend?" William smiled from his seat beside her, picking beneath his fingernail with the tip of his knife.

"Vech íthut an batcha yún In thichu... yet sika wel shumúcha lá ímr kitchu lanún." the prisoner complained, and he translated the remark for her.

"You feed this bitch while I starve.  One day your cock will run off to find some balls."

"Tell him I keep your fucking balls in my handbag." Susan muttered.  He chuckled to himself and replied on her behalf.

"Shata kitám íyet fíkka lanún lá sha hina-bati."

"In yet hadu lí sha ábita." the scout retorted.

​"And my head is up in your ladyplace.  Like it's a bad thing."

Her gaze narrowed.    

"Tell him I've got a gun and I'll blow his fucking dick off if I can still see it in three seconds."

​"Shata kitám at itát in shata wel ifféla yet sika utut."  

"Sootcha ábita." spat the youth, referring another request to Edward.  The latter lifted him to his feet and stood a foot on his tether; the scout pushed down his fly with his bound hands so that she might enjoy the spectacle of both his tumescence and the micturition he coaxed past it, turning to direct the splattering flow onto the cowl of her pack.  Edward flicked up the lead and wrenched the offender sideways, though he rolled up from his fall and sprang at Susan, eyes burning white; checked hard, he hung from the rope knotted about his neck and slavered, mouth falling open to pour out his dripping tongue and a low, moaning snarl.  Without looking from him she reached back into her belt for her hunting blade.  William caught her wrist, arresting its trajectory.

"Christabel..." he confided.  "We need him alive."  

The miscreant's collar choked him tightly as Edward twisted it about his neck, dragging him through briars to a secluded remove.
​


Walking with William proved no preparation for trailing his brother, the latter’s obsessive desire for solitude diluting his custodial obligations and keeping him more out of sight than not.  They had been compelled to take a steep line to avoid the tumbling spate that flushed the valleys after a solid night of rain, Edward demanding two-thirds of the tallest eminence from her in the second half of the day.  Susan stumbled over debris that rolled and slid out underfoot, pitching her onto her face a dozen times and pasting a dirty taste to her lips and the roof of her mouth.  Her legs shook beneath her when she halted amid crazed mounds of swamped leaves and sagging fern.  Night fell like volcanic ash, sifting slowly downward and binding the trees and mountainside into a single complex, though darkness had long since descended in her estimation, the miles and trees and contours shuffling by unheeded.  As she gained the first of a line of saddles leading up to the crest of the ridge, wind struck and slammed her onto her back, ripping the scant warmth from her clothes when she tried to rise, hollowing the breath from her open mouth and slapping her hair and lashes into her eyes.  She turned her back to it and sank down.  Nothing remained of Edward’s passage; the idea that she was still following him at all blew away through the trees while she groped on all fours into a half-naked grove.  In the light of the torch tied to the side of her head a spotless cohort of destroying angel fungi stood like tokens carved from ivory where they had pushed up through the litter.  The poison so strongly suggested by their pale, sardonic shapes seemed almost to rise around her and resorb into her lungs as she panted on her knees, their pallid forms distorting sideways then scurrying back to their original positions like facetious imps.  She closed her mouth too late, all she had consumed that morning deserting her in a wave she expressed onto the mushrooms, bile dripping slowly from their velvet caps.  The mouse-grey trunks blurred like the fungi while she struggled with the tab beneath her chin and shook off her parka.  

On looking up she took too long to find Edward’s face.  They stared at one another in an impasse he did not indulge, pressing a hand to the side of her neck then taking the torch from her head and turning it into her eyes, peering intently at the sluggish action of her pupils.  Susan shrank from him, attempting to crawl away from his hands, her dread of the hidden wounds behind them prompting another nauseated emission that ran from her chin.  He pulled her to her feet and watched her lurch toward the slope with the inebriate ease that confirmed all his suspicions. 

"I will take you back and put you on a plane.  You won’t have to tell him anything.” he assured her.  At her refusal he looked away through the trees, then startled her by ripping the half-shed parka from her wrist and forcing her fists into the sleeves against her efforts to repulse him.  He lost his temper, shaking her with a tight snap of the arm that so offended her, eyes waxing bright.  "You are hypothermic." he hissed.  "You are going to die."  She froze stiffly, and he leant down to zip the parka before she could resist again.  Susan watched him find her forgotten tote and throw a plastic bag of dried fruit into her lap.  The refusal on her face pushed his fist into his trousers and he produced a handgun, directing its snout at her forehead.  “Eat.” he commanded.  

The pieces of apricot were so tough and sour in her mouth that she ejected them.  He aimed an arid whistle into the trees, precipitating William from his rear guard to their position in double time, the scout hauled in his wake.  They conducted an acrimonious exchange then set about dredging the sleeping bag from Susan's pack and incarcerating her in its depths.  Tears rolled down her nose and tapped onto the quilting as she sat propped against a tree. 

“Making you eat at gunpoint is his way of saying I care.” William told her, taking a sachet of fruit juice from her pack and holding the straw to her lips.  The liquid slid down her throat, leaving its acidity on her tongue.  “I can deal with you hating me cloudcheeks, but seeing you cry is stabbing my soul in the testicles, so be mad, not sad." he urged.  "Think what an inconsiderate prick I am for getting you into this shit.  I should have sent you back to Gévaudan with a smack on the arse for company.”

“I wouldn’t have gone.”  Her whisper prompted him to glance up at his brother and communicate relief with a gesture.  She leant her head against the trunk.  “You smell like trees.”  Her smile formed and faded in the space of a blink and she ejected the empty carton from the mouth of her sleeping bag.  "Stay here... just for a minute... I think I have to stop."  

“It’s always me me me with you, isn’t it?” William sighed, easing himself down onto the bracken beside her.  "Fuck.” he exclaimed, flinching as the stone swung from his brother's hand struck the side of his head.

​“His way of telling you he cares.” she murmured.
​

​CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
​© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce