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

It was a bad summer in that Felix's illness and the building project coincided, so we had no time for the poor old plants.  The garden has gone to shit in autumn and now lies, unsightly and betrayed, awaiting a pretty nuclear winter cleanup that I am not looking forward to.  Armfuls of mouldy and worm-squirming mush dripping into your shoes as you dump them on the compost heap, etc. etc; fuuuuuuck.   

R managed to get a few nice shots regardless, so I thought I'd share as part of warming up to regular posting in the near future.  Jesus christ I am a lazy bitch these days.  Well, lazy and depressive; I might as well use the old mental illness shit as a crutch and get some fucking value out of it.

I hate it so much, but it doesn't surprise.  I'm dealing with a pretty rough seasonal affective episode myself; you hear someone else has gone down and you know why, but it doesn't make it any easier.

As I get older, the realisation that I can only really enjoy and respect men who can't deal with this world of shit as it stands is a really cold fucking comfort and makes me dread the years to come without them.  Our species is losing the individuals it needs most at an unsustainable rate.  I don't know what to say about that, other than I am worn down to the bone with being sorry for their loss. 

If you're considering tapping out. and I don't judge because the allure is certainly real, please consider this a plea to think it over one. more. fucking. time with the knowledge that- if nothing else- your loss will make it harder for the rest of us.  You know us- we're your people.  The more of us there are, the easier it will be to stay around.

Give it one more fucking day.

R made this nice little triptych after catching the bird feeding on this, one of my favourite plants.  Bellbirds and Tuis also visit the blooms.  Waxeyes are not my favourite birds because the little fuckers tend to ruin a lot of fruit with their incessant pecking, but they do make pretty cool pets when hand raised.  

If you dont get too much frost, I highly recommend the Canary Foxglove; it flowers almost year-round here in NZ and is fairly unfussy as to soil as long as the drainage is good.  I have three or four plants now and would happily install 20 if I had the room.

Yes I know, still no new material.  So I'm just going to say what you've been thinking and call this an hiatus til we get the new place totally finished.  If you've ever built a house, you'll understand how it takes over your entire brain and squashes all your creative neurons like some sort of uninvited hippo; if not, well, that's exactly what it feels like.  We'll be back soon enough.  Cheers for your patience.

I love this Globe Thistle for its obnoxious singularity.  It really does follow its own star, as much as any plant can.
​Must get the white version.

Josephine’s white blouse came away from her body as though it had never consented to the association, leaving no impression on her tanned skin even where it had been tucked into the waist of her skirt.  The plain fabric of her underwear agreed wholly with the lean asexuality implied by the rest of her clothing; she wore it across the glassy floor of the testing lab toward the chair allocated by her technician, a south-east Asian woman of avian proportions.  She seemed almost a facet of the room’s modular inventory of drawers and stainless, swipe-card shelves in her pale blue scrubs.  The polished glazing behind her reflected both women; the technician consulted the inoculation program specified on the screen beside her and sat down on her own wheeled chair, arranging the hygienic appurtenances on the trolley before her.  Refrigeration units lining the walls filled the dead air with their cyclic hum and sighing respiration.  

Before the woman had finished laying out her tube racks the light beside the sliding door summoned her to a cosseted exchange behind it, and O’Connor returned to Josephine in her stead, turning back the white cuffs from the end of his shirt sleeves.  She looked from him toward the instruments on the trolley between them, skeptical at first that he intended anything more than to disturb her.  For a moment he appeared to consider the box of latex gloves, but passed them over, tearing a white swab from its wrapper.  Taking up her arm, he inflated the cuff about her bicep and awaited the streaks of venous blue that rose in answer to constriction, his grip warmer than her own skin, his narrow thumb raising her vein and holding it proud.  The cold swab struck like a snake bite against the inside of her elbow.  

He chose a syringe and slid its point into her skin.  It blurred against the wall of the vessel and rolled off to one side. 

“Let’s just go with the butterfly." O'Connor suggested, holding her arm against any instinctive contraction.  "It’s a nice gauge.”

“I want to know where we’re going.”

"Where're any of us going?  Where’s Trent going, now that he’s at one with all that aluminum siding?”  No flicker afflicted her gaze, even when he stubbed the lip of a tube against the buried needle.  His smile loosened up as her blood raced through the canula and flooded the glossy vacuum, hot between his fingers.  “Honestly, I opposed your transfer... I didn’t want another token floater reaming me with her gender card... but you held your fire, and I told myself you were too fragged to come at me that way.”  He shook his head.  “But you were just wearing that skin to get by me.”  She lifted her shoulders, caught between objection and restraint, one barely constraining the other.  A third recourse presented slowly as though with the colour that streamed from her arm into the glass, standing in the rack before her eyes like strikes against her.  Josephine lay back in the chair in perfunctory invitation.  “And there it is.  Relax.  I don't put my dick in my mistakes.  But while we're being candid, can I just ask... was carbonizing Mr Trent business or recreation?”  When she declined to respond O'Connor chuckled, capping the canula.  “Guess I just volunteered for a mystery vehicle fire.”  

Boxes full of vaccine ampules tinkled against each other as he eased open the refrigerator door, making his selection with a smile, perusing labels and collecting dilutant.  The oily suspension in the first vial shimmered, shaken quickly in his fist then drawn up by the hypodermic.

“Terminal cams in Frankfurt picked up the British girl on her own, heading east, then we were blessed by a local snitch, diming foreign nationals around US interests.  Let’s see... what else can I tell you in good conscience?  You’ll head out in two teams... attached to a four-man hub… small arms, unsupported...” 

"Interlaken knows you're sending us on deuce gear?"

O'Connor frowned at her, closing his hand around the syringe.

“What kind of obsessive, homicidal narcissist needs to ask if she’s on a doomed bag run with every other walking liability I could muster?”  He stabbed the vaccine down into her thigh.  “Happy trails.” he added, leaving it standing in her flesh.


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

Pale mouths and/or primer will provide just enough of a white cast to make Tannin possibly go all flat and literal.  So your native tonality  is the crucial interjection.  Keep that in mind.

You need a bit of mana and personal heft to pull this shade off, or you could find yourself worn and not in a good way.  My most meaningful recommendation is this: I'm a fucking tough bitch to please and Tannin surely doth please me.

Losing Felix was a throat punch from hell.  I just can't overstate how hard it's been for us these last few weeks without him to make life worth getting out of bed for, but you've probably lost your own dogs and know only too well how that feels.  It suffices to say that things have been bad.

We began looking at NZ poodle kennels just to get a feel for how long we'd have to wait for a pup from a reputable breeder (don't buy random/backyard dogs, people).  We would like to have taken a rescue poodle, but there aren't many suitable candidates around.  We also love the breed in particular and don't think it's unethical to support the people responsible for maintaining it in good standing; it's pretty glib to condemn show kennels when they seem to be the only ones who give a toss about genetic testing, appropriate matings and breed integrity.  Those things matter.  While some dogs are definitely being held to ridiculously extreme and physiologically deleterious standards, many more of the canine strains we love are with us today only because of the diligence of dedicated breeders.  I just wanted to say that because they get a lot of hate from some quarters, much of it founded in ignorance.

We liked Inchcolm Poodles for their black miniature-only program and emphasis on health and confirmation, but we were resigned to waiting months.  As it turned out, one little fellow was looking for a home and we were overjoyed to give him one. 

These pics are about a week old and he's grown so much in that time.  He had his first big boy haircut in the last couple of days and looks so much like a tiny adult that people stop and stare, unable to decide exactly what the hell is going on with him.  Like most poodles, he is freakishly- some say malignly- intelligent, inherently militant and hero-worships the long suffering Hamish, my mother's Bichon/Maltese/Schnauzer veteran who has had enough of his shit already.  

He sleeps in the bathroom (toilet training necessity) and brays like an angry helium-huffing werewolf when placed there.  Fir shows great promise.

In its cryptic, pristine harmonies of form and saturated colour the forest might have seemed to Susan a sympathetic refuge, at least to that part of her most weary of her own shape.  Its disregard was perfect but its anamorphic scale, crowded so unremittingly over watershed ridges and stream-hewn valleys, resisted idle appreciation and began by late afternoon to inspire sentiments that shared their hue with its sombre, tannic shade.  Dryad saddles, iron-grey and corpuscle-red, flourished in tiers upon parasitized boles footed with golden hordes of leather shanks.  Sullen, bronze-eyed vipers basked on moss mounded like velveteen malachite, their muted livery overlaid with glossy opaline under scattered scales of sunlight, unseen as she followed William beneath the canopy.  Its deciduous component was bleached tired lime and livid golds by the late season, borne on stout, diverging rafters that sheltered both their callow saplings and perishing progenitors.  The latter were pressed deeply into the earth under their own ponderous weight, taller supine than Susan stood on both feet, shorn roots and broken crowns draped in moss and absinthe-coloured lichen, indistinguishable from each other in decay.  Fallen boughs were lesser shapes amongst the dead leviathans and lay both arched and lax like old mens’ arms in infinite variation.

Her tread had long ceased to remind her of the burn in both legs; stripes of smudged mold on her forearms were tokens of missteps arrested by the flashbulb timing of her companion’s hooked grasp on her clothing, the ease afforded by his profound physical advantage throwing her own breathless efforts once more into unflattering contrast.  William walked with his head slightly inclined, draped by a lace-like line of sunlight where the leaves were cast in ornamenting shadow over his back and down the length of his arms.  Appetence pursued her, the rhythm of her stride and breathing speaking to inclinations gratified but not assuaged by the taste she had enjoyed under the votive oak.  She felt herself naked and sunlit, and the gorgeous, transportive pleasures of his mouth and hands, enjoying them privately while he braced himself against a nest of bramble canes and pinned it back for her.  Turning sideways, she shuffled past, halting with her back to him; his free hand slid into the warmth between her thighs as he leant down and licked the nape of her neck.  

"How do you know?" she smiled.

"It's my job."

"Don't... I'll be picking out thorns for a year." she murmured, the slow stroke of his hand staying her almost to the point of disregard for her own caution.  She sighed and ducked out of the brambles, waiting while he extricated himself and allowing him ahead of her again.  He helped her over a steep case of rock onto the apex of the hill, a long plateau shouldered by two greater masses.  Susan wished heartily for some view of their wider surrounds but the rise afforded no particular outlook, waist-high grass crowding the level ground between the trees.  “At least look knackered.” she grinned, drinking from her bottle and wiping at her chin.  William lapsed back slackly, flattening the grass beneath him and lying with his arms upturned beside his head.  “I said knackered.” she complained.  He encircled her calves with his legs then rose on his knees to hook his fingers into the back of her jeans, biting softly at the flesh on her hip.  She whispered over the chiming sounds of his teeth on the button of her fly and the zip descending, her mouth falling open as he used his own to its greatest effect.  A small stone sailed across the clearing and struck the trunk of the tree overhead, then his skull, prompting him to curse and rise; he held up a hand to her inquiry while she closed her jeans.  Twenty metres distant through the overgrown glade the manual elements of Edward's silent communique earned a reply in kind.

“House, half a click north, empty... stay behind me, I run, you run.” William related.

Susan mouthed the first word back to him as he picked up her pack, but swallowed her frowning incredulity, crossing the grass behind him and keeping her head down as they discovered the narrow suggestion of a path.  It led into the trees, the intensity of the gloom beneath compelling her to close and accustom her eyes while he stood and scanned it for himself.  William crooked a finger to her, picking up a stick to trace the spoor that deer had trundled by a large stone in the midst of the way, directing her attention to a small russet shape amongst the leaves banked behind it.  When she shrugged, he stroked back the litter to reveal another brown point, then two more, until she recognized them as the rusted teeth in a pair of grinning iron jaws lying armed beneath the featherweight debris.  She whispered expletives; he used the twig to indicate again the discursive tracks of the other creatures and Susan nodded at the exemplar, appalled by the size of the gaping snare as they stepped around it.

The structure to which Edward had referred loomed in beech shadow, the netted branches squeaking and groaning against each other in a stir from the east.  Seeming a simple black shape from its south end, it extended itself as she approached into a windowless longhouse under a single hooded gable, standing on shoulder-high piles of oak and walled with pit-sawn slabs greened with moss.  The roof and beaten paths on either side were masked from any aerial view by the limbs interlaced along its length.  Edward returned from his reconnoiter and made one more sweep of the space between the piles.

“What is this?” she asked, unscrewing her bottle.    

"An eidiré."  William exchanged more densely-phrased gestures with his brother.  "Alujha summer house."

"Old school?"  

He nodded.  A line of steps had been hacked into a trunk set against the north corner; he made a silent offer of the interior, to which she shook her head emphatically.  Edward had already set off on a more intimate examination of their surrounds, and William climbed into the longhouse on his own.  Fatigue settled on her unexpectedly as she sat down at the edge of the dirt path, inducing her to lay her head upon her knees though she regretted the shade immediately, its stagnant pall thick with floating spores sifted from the timbers overhead.  The ground between the  piles was rank and bald of vegetation.  Toward its midst she found a strange coherence amid the stale, paddled mud and drew out her torch, playing it over two coiled chains, their fat links crudely-fashioned and corroded, extended from a collar of iron encircling the foot of a pillar.  Another shape lying between them, half-swallowed by the mud, prompted her to reach into the darkness with a stick to pry it loose.  Its slack curve refused her at first, then pulled free.  It was a woman's shoe, its scuffed red patent heavy with engulfing soil, the diamantés on its narrow ankle strap stained grey and lustreless.  Susan reversed out of the shadow and dropped the stick from her grasp, taking herself swiftly to the steps in William's wake.

The eidiré’s lateral scale was far more impressive from within, daylight falling through the eaves and slatted walls to lie in stripes upon the floor, its jet-like timbers polished by bare feet and bedding to an ambiguous lustre, on which the soles of her boots squeaked loudly, keeping her still.  A flat stone slab formed an open hearth beneath a cooking frame, the iron tripod rubbed with fat.  The thatch and timber were soaked with the dirty ghost of smoke and the rude bass notes of barbarous masculinity, full of a low and shuffling fougére green and animalic elements that touched her like unbidden hands in a darkness already congested with the black taint of proscription.  Her companion's glance at her discomfort was overlaid by the silvered green of its internal structures.

“Tastes evil.” she murmured.  
"Nāmeré.” he replied, miming a pair of breasts against his chest and crossing them out emphatically.  “Heavy duty no-skirt beef." 
"There were women on Caleb’s hahdri... what about Gévaudan?" 
"It's loose in the New World, and Auberjonois is a geris alujh, a bear wolf... méchant loup... he can do what the fuck he likes."  William scowled at the smell of the hearth.  "These dickheads are sausage party fundamentalists."    
"What would happen if they caught me in here?"

He smirked.

​"Their balls would crawl up into their arseholes."

“They would chain you to a tree and use you like a midden until the next moon.” said Edward, his shape filling the doorway in silhouette.  He reached up into the rafters with one hand, sliding fingers along the central beam in a swift, purposeful sweep, his gaze briefly challenging her own until she turned from him.  Eager for the distraction, she counted off the number of berths on the floor, their presence worn into the timbers like the dim, inscrutable casts impressed by medieval saints in the course of their austerities.  The restless sounds of her clothing as she moved began to trouble her and she dropped both hands to her sides, shrugging back her shoulders uncomfortably.

“There could be thirty people sleeping here." she asserted, looking to William.  "Where are they all?”

“This is laid up... they're on their way to winter quarters.”

Outside the longhouse the afternoon seemed blinding despite the ponderous clouds that had begun to catch on the hills and gather thickly overhead.  She watched her companions step down onto the path with the same strange, remote expression, as though some fraction of their attention had departed to course their surroundings independent of conscious instruction.  Her ruminations tangled in the chains beneath the eidiré and payed their spectre out behind her, the other filthy, despairing artifact adding its weight to the drag.  A train of wind pushed through the trees and blew the moldering litter past her boots as the first cold splashes of rain dropped through the branches, striking her cheeks.  Edward glanced at the sky while William took her arm and directed her around another trap set into the final stretch of visible path.  The sight of another deliberate mass through the saplings and brambles of a second clearing stopped her in her tracks, the great black walls of an even larger alujha barracks standing not ten minute's walk from the first.  Edward walked on alone to satisfy himself of its desertion and she leant heavily against the tree behind her, sheltering from the rain beneath her parka hood; the forest shifted again, tilting southwards as the incoming front blew a sudden clout across the rise.

"Sachiin... if something happens, if we get split up... I don't want to end up chained to one of those things." she said quietly, nodding toward the longhouse.  William did not reply, but set down her pack and crouched beside it, delving blindly amid its contents.  Sliding the handgun he had pressed on her from the pocket of her parka, she held it out to him, wiping at her nose.  "I know you know the best way to do it, and I need to know, so just... show me how." she urged.  "Please."  He shook his head and whispered in his own tongue, and she glanced toward Edward's return from the eidiré; he took the weapon from her and replaced it, upside down, in her grasp.

"Put it in your mouth.  Angle up an inch from the base of your skull and keep that line." he advised over his shoulder on his way to resuming point.


Her breath threw plumes of thick white vapour as she stood staring dumbly at William, rain dripping from her chin onto her boots.  They marched on inside her skull as she held the end of the tent with hands that glowed, crimson and freezing, inside her wet gloves.  The wind had stripped the leaves from the tallest beeches, leaving a short black-stone bluff and its footing of bracken to offer a brake from the rain that had already worked beneath her parka and soaked her jeans, nightfall chilling it down to wet specks of slush that pressed a cold burn to her face.

They crowded the wedge of level ground, William stamping down the ferns to cushion the tent from the earth.  When she did not avail herself of it immediately he reached out and helped her from her parka, its padded folds clinging like a hundred years of dead, wet skin.  Even within the thickness of her sleeping bag she took a long time to recover while he sat crossed-legged beside her like a placid giant beneath the mottled fabric, as undiminished by the day’s travails as she was beaten by them.  Leaning over his lap, he unzipped the bottom of the bag and eased her feet onto his legs; she groaned, protesting the removal of her socks.  Her heels wept thickly, having been rubbed raw by her boots and he muttered to himself as he examined the damage, licking each short length of birch bark he had taken from his pocket and pressing them to her blisters.  Satisfied, William split a packet of soba and foisted the contents upon her.  She lay with the stiff noodles between her teeth, eyes closed, prompting him to take two cigarettes between his lips and shake his head at her pleading look, pointing sternly to the packaged meal.  The taste of cold miso was strangely appalling, thick and gamey as she chewed the gelid mass, glancing at him reproachfully.  With it swallowed down, she lay back while William tucked the cigarettes into the box.  The bag's hood puffed slowly around her ears.  He smiled sideways at her.

"Tu m'impressionnes."
"How long do I get?"
"Four hours."  He saw that it taxed her to question him and reassured her preemptively.  "I don't actually have to sleep, poupée, it's just pure fucking laziness on my part."
"How can you... not sleep... your brain must be.... it..."  Her breathing devolved into a snore before she could complete the sentence, and he listened with a frown to the slight catch in her chest until she rolled over.  Outside, the rain subsided into a cold, expended calm.  

He changed places with his brother when Edward’s watch came to an end, the latter so silent that it was a cramp in Susan’s back that opened her eyes, his seated vigil concerned solely with the ground beyond the tent.  In his right hand he held not the gun that she had expected, but a long, inornate knife, its edge turned out in an avid white plane, the black stock folded in his fingers.  Closing her eyes again, she dredged both the empirical and apocryphal for something equal to the task of getting past him, drawing a wide and satisfying blank.  How often he had been weighed thus by fraught companions, valued by the lethal ounce like some fabled poison, was likewise beyond her.  When she looked at him again, his gaze had descended through the floor of the tent, past the life secreted in the darkness of the soil and deep into the stone beneath, lending him an attitude of sorrowful reclusion so plain that she was reminded once more of its cause.  Susan wondered if that distant protagonist shivered with the same untended wound.  

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

​from morning walks

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