Oregon Zoo has pub'd some radiographic images of its residents.
​
We support well-run zoos and sanctuaries for one compelling reason; for many species, they are their best and last chance at maintaining a viable, diversified population.  You can quibble all you like about born-free ideals and the evils of captivity, but there's not enough time left for those sorts of scruples.  There just isn't.

top to bottom: Chameleon, Flying Fox, Python, Beaver, Toucan.

Susan was grateful to be able to lie on her side in the darkness, carefully tonguing the smooth new vacancy between her teeth and wishing the scent of the needles padding her repose had proved more soporific.  Beside her on his naked back lay Sachiin, arms strewn beneath his head and a rifle set between him and the dark legs of the painted horse, as indifferent as ever to exposure in his somnolence.  Her restive gaze wandered across his softly glowing pallor until his arm slid out around her seemingly of its own volition; she shrugged it off and spread her sleeping bag across him, sighing as it sloughed away.  The wind had dropped and settled stasis on the gorge, allowing her the sounds conveyed beneath its auspices; fluting south-bound trains of migrant birds, the tiny, squeaking-wood cries of bats hawking across the colonnade and the languid repeat of her companion's breathing.  That he would never be conscious of the beauty he wore in repose was a notion that added to the mass that held sleep so steadfastly at bay.

Between her own slow breaths came a distant, concerted strike or clatter, strangely repetitious and insistent; she sighed, sat up and eased her feet into her boots.  He handed her the rifle without opening his eyes, which she accepted and then abandoned by the door.

The zip tab beneath her chin chimed as she climbed down the outer steps, her hand against the cold wall of the hillside.  Low clouds leant the night its sequestered nature and pallid reflet, loosing harbinger flakes that dissolved against her outline as they drifted earthward, under no apparent duress from gravity.  At the bottom of the flight she sat down and pushed off the landing stone with both hands, onto the broken suggestion of a path that skirted the base of the pile toward what might once have been its kitchen gardens, the stretch of half-leveled slope upon which the alujha had stood to issue their complaint.  Blocks of toppled parapet lay strewn across its width like pieces swept from an enormous chess board and stamped into the ground, casting little shadow.  

Edward stood amongst them beside a great cache of windfall timber.  He swung skyward then hurled down the head of an axe dragged from a store in the bowels of the ruin; the ancient implement sectioned the limbs with little aid from its dull edge, driven deeply into the wood with a force that shuddered through his daunting frame.  His pullover hung from a waiting branch like the upper half of a form he had abandoned.  The crack of the blows flew back at him from the wall then away into the encroaching forest, the trees standing as though they had climbed the slope to satisfy a morbid curiosity.  Susan stood hoping for an acknowledgment, but he did not pause to look at her and she sat down on a cap stone in a hunch against the cold, her mood settling around her like the sleeping bag, imposing its dense black presence between her spine and lungs.

Within the fixed frame of her stare and its own mechanized trajectory, his shape suffered shade-like alterations so fluid and persistent that she was forced to blink them away before they became too disturbing.  They led her to ponder what he battered so unceasingly when the wood began to blur; through his eyes, she saw so much lie down beneath the blade that she ceased to wonder at his dedication and began to make her own grim offerings, throwing the aborted shapes of spite and insufficiency under the steel.  The snow did not melt on his shoulders as he worked, but lay in narrow drifts until it slid away along his back under its own weight.  Susan could not bring herself to examine the disfeatured archives on his arms, her stare falling instead to the naked foot with which he pinned the branches and its narrow adjacency to the point where the blade cleaved them.  That she minded its atrocious potential more than he did seemed a thing of inexplicit poignancy, referring again to their dispirited impasse until clarity urged her to her feet.  

He had set down the heavy haft and stooped to toss the cut wood over the wall, where it cleared the parapet and clattered audibly on the floor of the yard.  Her careful navigation of the slope toward him caused him finally to pause, albeit with an expression that should have halted the intrusion.  Frowning to herself as she stepped over the branches, Susan encircled him with both arms, turning her head against him.  

“We do love you, Kala'amātya.” she sighed.  “Please don’t be so sad.”  

He smelled of the night and green fir balsam and stood completely still, feeling so much like and yet unlike his brother that she suffered a moment of baffling agnosis, meeting reserve where Sachiin wore invitation, a desolate parity with the granite of the ruin and the snow that fell around them so that she might not have distinguished him from either. 

“Let me go.” he said, almost in resignation. 
“Make me.” she replied, frowning in the expectation that he might.  “Thank you... for my tooth, and... everything.” 

“Tout le plaisir est pour moi.” he assured her.  Susan released him, but grasped the arm he offered as she stumbled backward over unseen timber.  She stooped to pick up one of the lengths, shuffling a small way down the slope and wheeling her arm in a circle before letting the piece fly in the hope it would clear the parapet, which it did not, hitting the wall and bouncing back at them.  He put out a hand and caught it before it could strike her, committing it to the yard himself and shaking his head faintly at the smile she turned to him.  Her gaze followed him to the edge of the cut wood, where he began to sort the pieces too large to throw.  

"Do you mind... being called Kala'amātya?"

"Not any more." he admitted.  She was led toward her few coherent notions of Helaine de Marchand, imagining her voice as the analgesic agency that had cleansed the word of its pernicious connotations.  She bowed her head and blew warmth against her hands.

​"I am sorry, for calling you a sadist..."

Dragging another branch from the pile, he shrugged in a brief concession.

"Never apologize to one."  The set of her mouth changed with her appreciation of the remark as he took up the axe again.  The first log flew in two directions across the snow; Susan watched him halve another dozen lengths.  “You look cold.” he added with his back to her, and she smiled at the unsubtle denotation; the crack and buffet of the wood proved so sapid that she was loath to leave it, but he looked to her and changed his grasp upon the weapon, and she shuffled off in the direction she had come.


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

Texturally Janet is a 90% opaque, medium-sheen satin which doesn't bleed, stays put and applies evenly straight from the tube.  There's no caking or drying, two minor blights that knock points off the muddier, stodgier UD After Dark.  My only real technical gripe is the typical Nars Audacious line's consistent skipping on the midst of my turned-out lower lip, but this shade will cover there if you take the time to drag it slowly over that area a couple of times.

We have Nars Janet (left) and MAC Flat Out Fabulous (Retro Matte) for comparison in the triptych below.  Trying to get Janet's blue duochrome to show up without the sensor splitting it into glitter is next to impossible.  The pic at far left if probably closest.

Many of us love magenta but need assistance if we are not to look unwittingly editorial.  I've learnt some tricks.  Most importantly- hide yo problems: go for a medium coverage foundation or at least take your time with a good concealer.  If you really covet that low-information, freshly pissed-on in a fuck tape realness, by all means go hard with the ditchpig contouring and industrial highlighter.  I can only advise against it.  Related: magenta + asphaltic Instagram dirge-brow = mistake.  Stick with a minimal, tightlined, mascara-heavy eye.  If you don't have a truly appropriate blush to hand, don't just slap on a peachy random or you may discover there are worse things than looking a bit monochromatic.  

​Finally, don't succumb to the temptation to pencil a magenta outline, even in the utterly, inconceivably unlikely event your liner matches perfectly.  In fact, wipe a fingertip lightly around the edge of your application or do the same with a transparent primer stick to blur it out a wee bit.  Extra wearability is achieved just by taking down that margin contrast.  

But whatever.  I love Nars Janet.  She can sit on my face any time.

Chaos reigns here in the Blackthorn kitchen on this most sacred of nights.  Whilst rain
​swept any soliciting children back to their homes, we macerated our intellects
with Resident Evil and stuffed our gullets with unsightly profiteroles laden
​with home made ganache and passionfruit cream.  I am lactose intolerant and not too
good with grain starch either but life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
These are the ghosts of profiteroles past now.

Halloween is our anniversary.  26 fucking years in close proximity is a long time not be
stabbing each ​other with whatever comes to hand.  I have learned a few important
things about relationships: there are no soul mates, just the people you choose to
be with.  Good will is everything.  Apathy will sour empathy.  No one really emphasises
boring shit like this, but they are the pillars of enduring regard.
Just thought I should pass that on.

Have a good time tonight or whenever you're celebrating.  It's the start of summer for us
so there are no fucking pumpkins.  Only flowers.

homegrown canary / LA hybrid lilies 

port otago / european wasp on banksia

dinghies / arctotis daisies

spider and streetlight down a macro lens / geum

pet shop goldfish / osteospermum

Daylight caught her eyes with its slanting, assaultive slivers as Susan leant out across the stone footing the archway.  The contents of her stomach poured in a long slick down the rain-streaked rock below; frothy golden bile signaled their end, its way greased by the liquids she had already divulged.  Coughing out the last of it, she lay in silence on the broad sill with her arms compressed beneath her, the bass pounding in the hotly bloated sections of her face racing with her heartbeat.  Her knee crushed a box of UHT milk lying on the floor and the thought of it pushed her out again over the drop, the rolling heave answered only by stained saliva and she slid down to lie against the wall.  Though vertigo had abated, its violence was redeployed by the infection in her head until light and sound began to distort at its evil behest.  Susan heard hinges grinding as something distant and academic and felt the hands beneath her arms as half-imagined adjuncts to her desire for her makeshift bed, but she was laid out on stone instead of mounded needles.  She lifted her head to cough again and dry-retch, spitting out the taste of the necrotic tooth.  Someone wiped her chin with something soft and warm.  In the midst of screwing up her face she looked into the bright colours of the brothers' stares and grew still, breathing slowly.

"It's better..." she croaked, trying to rise between them.

They ignored the shabby perjury, the cordon of fait accompli closing in an arc as she was forced back down, Sachiin taking her head and shoulders into his lap until the stripe of silver in Edward's hand became a knifeblade and she cried out, scrambling from torpor into desperate rigor and kicking out.  Her feet caught a hold on Edward's trousers and shoved him backward, surprising him with the strength that was left to her.  He reached across and seized her left arm, using it to drag her toward him and secure her head in the crook of an elbow while he pinned her flailing legs with one of his own.

"Get off me, you... fucking sadistic mental case!" she snarled, still twisting in his grasp; his hold tightened until she conceded and lay stiffly, breathing hard and shying from the hand he laid against her cheek.  It found the buried heat and brought his fingers to the broken premolar directly despite the clenching of her jaw, a measure she was compelled to give up as blood poured from her gums.  Susan screwed her eyes closed.  "Don't let him do it... not him, please... I don't trust him..." she sobbed.  Sachiin glanced up at his brother as she lapsed into despond between them, tears pooling in the hand he slid beneath her cheek.  Edward loosed his hold, settling her head on his thigh and stowing her hair behind her ear. 

"Prends ton courage á deux mains." he told her.

​Blinking up at him slowly, she looked to Sachiin, who closed his hands around hers.  Edward slid back her lip with the side of his thumb and in his free hand flipped the knife, swung the horn stock downward and struck the dead tooth loose.  While she coughed out a cry he tore it free and Sachiin spat a wad of bark into his hand, watching the new blood well and flush the wound before applying his palliative chemistry, taking her in both arms and speaking again into her ear.  The task discharged, Edward drew the face cloth from the pail and dropped the extracted tooth into the water.
​


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

​My god I love Aroids.  Will post more pics when it's fully out.

My apologies to Edgar and vintage Daniel but with great hotness comes great responsibility.

Language.  It's interesting, isn't it?  This may not be a particularly original observation, universally speaking, but I only just noticed the other day that right wing fuckwits always have to have some sort of euphemism for who they are and what they're doing.  While Antifacists are just plain AntiFa, liberals are just liberals and feminists are feminists, white supremacists and male tears outfits always have to call themselves something else, don't they?  Skinheads.  Futurists.  Nationalists.  MAGA.  All those puzzling acronyms.  The Proud Boys.  Why not Proud Men?  You guys are all about super-literal interpretations of fucking everything, so your tricksy reticence confuses my feminine perception.  I think we've already established that you're not too concerned about looking/quacking like massive wankers.  Surely your self-evident and inherent truths require no such verbal ganache.  Why not just stand on a corner shouting white people/men in general are inherently superior and the best at everything please reinstate every nanogram of our unjustly-revoked privilege immediately or we'll kill you?  It's your only real  thing.  Why be coy?

I urge all interested parties to just go on with their bad selves, stop treasuring their ballbags in private and summon the courage to call their arsehole parties Men Are Furious At Even These Token Concessions And Will Rule Over You Again or something equally forthright.  Just go for radical honesty and demand full Viking funerals with 10 teenage girls assaulted and incinerated with every drunk high-value citizen who falls through river ice chasing a dog that looked at him wrong.  Don't ask, don't get.  Jesus fucking christ, even Incels, that most reviled, maladaptive and fucktarded of demographics somehow summon the fortitude to moosh two brutally explicit descriptors together and wear them with the kind of petulant abandon that underpins their assaults upon randoms.  Who's more chickenshit than a fucking Incel?  

​Logic.  Invented by men, for men.  We can but spy it dimly.  There is a moral to this story and that is never get involved in something that needs a euphemism the way dirty fingernails need a dark polish.  

Also: in light of the historic weight of judgement regarding feminine presentation, and with his consistently puerile execration of us in mind, I'm pretty sure it's equitable for me to note the endless gratitude we should feel toward Trump's physiological and mental repulsiveness.  I know it's hard, but consider this; imagine the extra legions of sloppy apologists there would be for his shit if he was even remotely cute or smooth.  There are a lot of shallow cunts out there who would vote for him in a trice if they could bring themselves to identify with or aspire to him physically.  I'm happy he has a face like a sunburnt toe wart and the conversational skills of a dead dugong.  That he has to walk, in public, like a poor person, for fear of getting perigluteal with a mobility scooter and losing that thing forever.  

Especially post-politically, when no one will ever go hunting in that cleft again. 

I want all of these pieces.
See there rest here.

With the night settling around them she could not reconcile the ruin’s shape with her uncertain memories, following a curving case of steps cut into the boss of stone shrugged out from the mountainside like something worn upon its shoulder.  The pain in her skull flared with the effort of the ascent but she kept her hand from her face and her head down, mouth pressed tightly against any verbal demonstration.  The colonnade shared its contour with a surmounting parapet, castellated by ragged failures and dressed with supple, intrepid birches, their white shapes persisting in the darkness.  It hemmed the eastern edge of a roof yard, bare but for an orphaned bench and narrow wooden table silvered by the elements.  The supporting ridge rose sheerly to the west in a face like blank ship steel before leaning once more away.  Behind an arm of rolling cloud the moon paid scant regard to the land laid out beneath her, couching it in flattened shades of sooty black and benthic blue.  No light or road or sign of habitation troubled the darkness.

“Where is this?” Susan asked, the sleeping bag still clasped around her shoulders.

“It’s all Dacia to me.  But it’s very roomy and scenic, poupée, honestly... no rent, no…”  Sachiin extended the syllable and then smiled again, gesturing toward the steps.  “Look, they have piglets...”   

A small and strangely-formed intruder skipped up onto the roof with an air of slight, inquiring disapprobation, quadrupedal, jacketed in longitudinal stripes of creme, sable and russet and wearing a pair of bat-like ears on its narrow head.  Small bronze eyes followed a questing snout; the piglet paused, peering at her suspiciously before trotting across the flags on tiny hooves and placing its nose against her leg in a brief, assertive nudge.  Susan bent down to touch its back but was checked hard by her tooth, an imposition it scurried from anyway with its tail erect.  From the same steps came the ruin’s heavily-swathed chatelaine, coat fastened about her neck as though the swiftly-settling cold demanded it.  An almost clockwork transit took her along the parapet, though for a moment the vampyre paused and frowned at the sight of her porcine companion standing on its hind hooves and gazing up at Sachiin, who stroked its velvet ears and picked it up.

“My little darlink Fyodor.” Petrouchka sighed.  Her stare settled on Susan, who had sat down on the stony margin and embraced herself beneath her quilted cloak.  “You... walk to here?"  Her guest nodded without looking up.  “My god.  Now I know why you look such a horror.”  The observation finally commanded Susan's attention, but the steps projected the small sounds of Edward’s approach, distracting them both.  He carried a pair of loosely gracile shapes in the crook of his arm; two hares twitched stiffly in the rigor of their recent deaths when he lay them in her lap, the warm blood oozing from their mouths soaking her jeans while one kicked against her stomach.  Susan sat imprisoned between dread and disbelief, looking up at him with both flagged in her expression.  His mouth drew back over his teeth in a strange, embryonic expression of contempt, its brevity integral to its power.

“Where would you be if nothing ever died for your convenience?” he asked her.  Across the yard the vampyre tisked and rolled her stony eyes, both of them watching Susan rise and let the dead beasts slide onto the flags before retreating to the corner of the parapet.  Sachiin berated him acidly.  "Sis'thle vahd'ya si srihyaan." Edward muttered as he quit them.  Fresh tears slid down her face as she turned it toward the gorge, her misery unwittingly compounded by its spectators.  Petrouchka regarded Sachiin implacably from across the yard as he concluded his admonition.

"Avai'sahdi..." he sighed, looking back to Susan.  "I'm sorry... I do have to go and walk the river.  If we have to get out of here we need to know where to get across."  She sat hunched as he kissed her head and took the stairs himself.

Her hostess came forward and shooed the piglet from the dead game where it had fallen on the flags; she took them up and set them on the table between them, producing a folding, pearl-handled knife from the pocket of her sable.  Petrouchka used the blade to strip the hares of their elastic hides, turning them over and dressing them without pause, except to lick the fresh blood from her fingertips.

“My mother’s mother, she was old bajorai countess from Kaunas... her family have many bad time.  She say to us, know how to eat rabbit and you will never be slave." the vampyre began, small voice winding around Susan's shoulder though she spoke with an almost recessed disinterest.  "Why do you leave from Gévaudan?  Here is no place for you.”

Susan took a long time to reply.

“I’ll go if I’m not welcome.”

“Go?  Where do you go?  You know good hotel?”  Tart amusement sharpened the vampyre’s smirk.  “No... you won't go... you have what you want, so you stay here, feel sorry for you.  You bite, but you can’t chew."

“Does this look like something I wanted?”

“You come here from Auberjonois, who care for you like prince... these two, they bring you safe, fight alujha for you... Kala'amātya, who hate to kill a thing that can’t talk back, he give these, and you have Sachiin, all for yourself, who has never said a word to you in anger, who live only to please you...”  

"He lives whether I'm here or not."

Petrouchka wiped her blade on the dry fur, small teeth shining in the darkness of her sardonicism.  

"Who must we blame for this outrage?  Pauvre de toi."  A wind had risen from the gorge, climbing up over the drop and blowing their hair across their faces.  "What has happen, kotik?  You see something of yourself and you don't like?"  Her trenchant analysis met with a gaze that fell again toward the flagstones.  "I think so.  You find that face in mirror."  

Misery intermingled with the poison leaking from Susan's tooth, striking down her will to speak in her own defence.  Petrouchka obviated the need to do so by cutting sharply across the yard and scowling down over the wall onto the slope below where it lay thickly strewn with fallen debris.  

“Qu’est-ce que tu veux?” she called, the sudden, argute volume of the demand lifting Susan’s head.  “Allez-vous faire voir!  Otyebis!” The vampyre’s curt manual dismissal, tossed out over the drop like refuse, translated her remarks.  Three figures in hooded black and olive camouflage stood upon the hillside, their mirrored, skyward stares the last thing Susan could have wished for.  Two of them shared enough of their dark, parochial physiques to have been brothers while the other wore a severe, shadow-like crop and two stars tattooed on his wide throat.  In the midst of her affronting scorn Susan saw that her hostess quartered the strait of forest behind them, while the alujha persisted with their own argot, its imperfections antagonizing her further.  "Zatk'nis, you pigs!  Idi na khui!  You don’t come here to tell to me... I tell to you!  I am surioarã!” she shouted down at them, flying into a Russian tirade enlivened by the choicest local epithets while Fyodor stamped and squealed at the hem of her coat.  Susan took herself back into the ruin, unable to bear the sound of their voices even as the brothers walked out of the trees behind the visitors with their rifles in their hands, absorbing the details of a situation they had overheard from halfway down the gorge.



Their business concluded on the slope below, Edward returned to the cheerless exposure of the roof where he found Petrouchka still partaking of those qualities.  There they remained, together and apart through the unlamented hours that were the claim of the long-lived and the long dead.  Behind them the moon bore her own waning scale toward the horizon, a pitted, barren planet in place of that distant emblem glimpsed between the structures of urbanity, the sky arrayed with stars that wheeled as though pinned to her black skirts.  Petrouchka raised her head and voice together.  

“All this time, all of this long way, and Helaine is still with you.  I see her, in your eye.” she observed.  “You are not alone, at least.”  She shrugged her chin down into her coat.  “It will be ugly winter... no place for that girl.  I don’t like her always in front of me.”
“I told him to leave her in France."
"Pozhalujsta... you thought he would?"
"They won’t stay here.”
“And you?  What do you do?”
“Rebuild some capital.”

She contemplated his response for some time before steeling herself to deal with more immediate concerns.

“These mudilo wolves, they have offend you?  How many die for it?”
“No more than necessary.”
“I did not trust them, but they bring, from town for me, when I need...”
“If you need something, I'll go for it myself.”
“Maybe.  Maybe, I don’t need, anymore.  But these alujha, they are chefur govno... they crawl in from all over... next week, I don’t know which one I talk to, and you know a wolf as well as I... they will come back to you for this.”  She smiled to herself, staring up into the impassive darkness.  “You don’t care, I know… you want for them to do this, but Kala'amātya…” the vampyre urged, awaiting his gaze.  “Look at me and ask if you can wash her off your skin with blood.”


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

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