High over a gigantic canvas spattered with strokes of pernicious green, William hung inverted from a silver lighting truss, knees hooked into the aluminium frame that was itself screwed into a ceiling soaring fifteen metres from a floor of polished concrete.  In one hand he held one of the black lanterns to have been installed by a crew of professionals before Opal and Edward’s conflicting demands had seen them walk out of the gallery, three quarters of the way through their commission.  In the other he grasped a screwdriver that had proved a poor choice.  His brother stood in the midst of the titan annex with a newspaper in his hands.  William let a glob of saliva fall to strike the pages with a sound that echoed in the adjoining chambers.

“If I could read German I could probably do this without shorting the whole fucking building, but I can’t, so call those lighting queens and tell them to get their flapping arseholes down here.” he called.  Edward did not look up.  “Okay, I’ll just wire it in and hope nobody dies.”
“What does it say?”
“Something achtung and... dreiphasig... fuck, I don't know, alright?  I’ve got a fight in an hour so can we get on with this shit please?”
"Who's your mark?”
“Some ding-wing skinhead.”  William twisted and reached for the other end of the truss, pulling himself up to peer into the sockets.  “I'm down to take a dive, but I've had it with these fucking supremacist cocksuckers... I'm going to défoncer his blanc arse in front of all his little bunk bitches.”  The gracile structure supporting him emitted dour groans as he repositioned himself to install the orphan lantern.  A trickle of white dust sifted from the ceiling through the struts and onto his forehead.  "Can I get a fucking wrench up here?"  Edward continued to read, moving slowly toward the rack of tools and tossing the implement upward; William swung out to catch it and pinned it to his shoulder with his cheek.  He frowned again and squinted down at the central control desk with its snaking multiplicity of cables.  “Is it off?” 
“If you say so.”
“Go over to the distributors and stick your tongue in one of the holes.”

William hung to glare down at him, hair a medusoid collar to his inverted head.  The rig groaned again and began to deform, sagging like a skeletal python under his weight; he cursed, turned to face the loggia set into the distant wall, then let his arms fall and began to swing, gaining momentum while the truss lost another anchor point.  It gave way, dragged free of the plaster to depend from its extruded wiring in his absence, and on the ground Edward shifted three steps sideways.  In place of the sound of flesh impacting concrete William’s bitter expletives rejoiced in the building’s superb acoustics, not from the loggia, which he had missed, but from the end of another, longer truss directly beneath it.  Its lanterns rattled like a tray of glasses in a train car.

“Let go.” Edward directed.  His brother's unorthodox, sesquipedalian profanities were amplified as his second vantage began to fail.  “I will flip the switch and hit you with the fire hose.” 

William untangled his wrist and dropped the remaining distance to the floor, where he made a scowling bee-line for the bar, hissing obscenities as he bumped the door and helped himself to a bottle of gin.  Edward tossed his phone at the technician’s cart and turned his back on it.  

“I’m out of town until the afternoon before the show.  I want you to keep an eye on Frost.” 
“What is it this time?”
“She’s being harassed on calls.” Edward admitted.  
"If Opal's coming after her it won't be with a fucking feather duster... and where the hell are you going?  You were just gone."
“Toledo.”  
William shook his head, grimacing at the mediocre spirit.
"Never thought I'd see Iberian alujha pay someone else to give their cousins twelve-gauge facelifts." 
"La vie est un mystère qu’il faut vivre, et non un problème à résoudre.”
“This's why these eurotrash shitpumps want to sign you up.  Everything they've heard makes you sound like a walking kill room with the social conscience of a block of fucking marzipan.  How does it feel to have fascist bloodsuckers coming in their pants over your headshot?"

Edward took the program from a previous exhibition out of his jacket.

“I feel nothing.  You’re banned from this show.”  
"Look at all the fucks I give."
"From your mood I assume Ms Christabel exhibits taste beyond her years."  His observation was greeted with morose silence.  "Frost mentioned her arm."
"She put it through a window." William sighed; his companion's stare caused him to stamp the bottle down and glare back at him.  "No, she wasn't embracing death trying to escape my fucking advances... yes she's okay, thanks for asking."
"I have a flight to catch.  Spit it out."
"I've been on speed dial to come hospitalize Frost's psycho tricks for five years... every time she called I'd think, one night I'm going to turn up thirty seconds too late." William related, lowering his voice instinctively despite their solitude.  "Have you thought about being in fucking Toledo when you get the call to come pick up whatever Opal's left of her?"  
"Did I not ask you to watch her?" Edward reminded him.  His companion pushed a hand over his hair.
"I don't want to see her in a black bag, mahatma.  Don't hang a bullseye around her neck then disappear... if you're not going to take it in the face for her, leave her alone.  And while we're doing favours, I need you to put Petrouchka up for a while.  She’s thinking of coming over.”
“Belyaev?”
“You’re saying that like it’s going to be a problem.”  In Edward's silence he could feel the shift of heavy elements that had suffered centuries of relegation, and knew that he could not expect unalloyed delight.  “She got bounced from the ceverny mesto by the fucktard gestapo.  They took her house and most of her shit, so she’s pretty hard up.”
“That’s what happens when you kick against too many pricks on a greasy pole in front of a hostile crowd.” Edward replied.  William capped the bottle and tucked it under his arm as he collected his belongings from the floor.  
“Pet doesn’t have a fam or a weapons cache or an eighty-inch reach.” he reminded him, scuffing on his boots as he set off across the gallery.  “And how much longer are we going to take shit from vampyres?  Quarrel, putain... I will back thee.”  
“Tell Petrouchka I don’t want to see teeth.”
“You’re the fucking buddha of compassion.”
“I will be back on Friday.”

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce.
IF YOU BUY THE BOOK I'LL BLOW YOU (a big kiss).

I'm going to start this category as a subset of 'Selected Ravings'.  Blogging tips you off to just how many misappropriations you've been cheerfully trotting out to the sound of tumbleweed impunity, simply because no one else knows what they mean either.  So instead of nodding like you're forty and of course you know what didactic means because you're so comprehensively erudite, or gently weeping for the future of prose in private, let's stop being too fucking lazy to look them up and start with one that's been biting my nuts for a while.  Je ne sais pas it well enough to throw it squarely at some other pretentious arsehat in an argument.  For shame.

I've always been attracted to its crispy patrician sound and authoritative shape without ever knowing exactly what it meant because let's face it- the only people who use it in conversation are the ones you stopped listening to ten minutes ago.  I did suppose it was associated with manner or rhetoric, so I was close.
According to my Apple dictionary it means 'intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive; in the manner of a teacher, particularly so as to treat someone in a patronizing way.' 
Synonyms include instructive, instructional, educative, preceptive (0_0), pedagogic (hot), moralistic.
Remarks.  If Didactic was a person.  They'd be intriguing from a distance of say... half a hallway, but they'd turn out to have really exuberant ear hair or smell like cabbage or Thai fish sauce close-up and would probably wear birth-control Birkenstocks that started off black but now look brown.

I got you flowers.
Stop crying.

If this review seems a little disordered let me admit that I'm not inclined to compose it with any more care than Scorsese did his movie, so if you're feeling shortchanged, write to Marty.  Lemme fart the plot into your hand; broker-guy gets rich ripping off his fellow suburbanites with a B-Team of unlikely associates and together they launch into a typically Scorsese douche-o-rama with a side of lippy broads, free-flow blow and frantic materialism that inevitably sloughs into legal entanglement/inevitable philosophical take-home across the shallow arc of the central protagonist's adventures.  Deep breath.  Atypically, it is also a great big sloppy fucking mess of undercooked and overheated fail.  Don't get me wrong; I enjoy and even respect most of Scorsese's work and wouldn't stick the boot in gratuitously.  It's just that he's been on a downward slide for a few years now and I'm not cool with the critical bukkake that seems to be greasing the rails.

The Good: Hill's performance as Azoff, a creature infused with so many of the unblinkingly grotesque peculiarities exhibited by our species that it's little wonder he was ring-fenced and we were charged admission.  I don't usually care for Hill's work and while this portrayal was greatly served by its adjacency to the charisma vacuum that is DiCaprio, it still deserves polite applause.  The female leads were shrewdly-cast and well executed by both Milioti and Robbie, though I believe the latter adequate rather than stellar and don't really understand the hype around her portrayal of the dread Naomi.  I enjoyed Chandler's FBI agent, and the notice paid to what must be the queasy surreality of extreme wealth.  And I suppose... some of the observations around the Alice/Wonderland nature of conventional morality were accurate enough, if not earth-shattering.

But there's just too much bad and I could shovel that shit all day.  The story is too familiar and all the more tiresome for circling DiCaprio, who seemed to me to embody a soulless porcine nadir somehow not germane to the material.  Yes, Leo.  Having scoured every inch of his performance in search of finesse, authority or even just plain old accidental mid-life competence, it proves as elusive as something rolled under a car seat at 2am.  In fact he has killed stone dead everything Scorsese has fashioned around him.  What is it about him that seems to capture the directorial imagination- is it a macho thing, the challenge of actually screwing a performance out of him?  The only thing he convinced me of in three fucking hours was that he can ham the shit out of a 'lude hole and make like a sociopath on a big fucking boat.  No props for that.  I'd also be gratified if someone could explain the acclaim that greets McConaughey wherever he deigns to show his spooky face these days, because he too is as mediocre/faintly embarrassing as ever and I was utterly unmoved by his turn as senior coke weasel in the first act.

Visually, TWoWS looks cheap.  I know the decade in question was infamously tacky (I was there), but looking over Scorsese's back catalogue supports my accusation.  There's none of that sneaky underlying discipline that's always been so fundamental to the success of all those looser elements.  The Wolf of Wall Street is achingly bereft of that monkey-grip on drama that was always the jewel in the crown.  It just looks... uninspired, underproduced., and amid all that flabby overextension I'm still puzzling over whether the editing was culpable or heroic.  Winter's free-form banter just flops onto the floor at our feet without the wheezy velour verité of Goodfellas or Casino, neither of which were penned by him and god, that is so horribly obvious.  The voiceover just made me want to choke a bitch and I usually give that lazy shiz a pass.

Rendered down, TWoWS  is just a shallow story about arseholes and I'm tired of arseholes.  I'm sick of their greed, their shitty marriages, their retarded personal development; everything, basically.  I get that they're supposed to make the world go round and I get that Martin's pointing us at the fact of their gumption and initiative like a dog directing our gaze to the last sausage on the plate, but it's not enough when we've been led to expect lasagne.  So don't believe the hype.  The Wolf of Wall Street shouldn't be award-bait and it's not even particularly good.  I sincerely hope Scorsese pulls finger some time soon.

Kereru consume all the choicest parts of a wide range of native and exotic flora, gobbling plums, willow buds, berries and flowers whole and then retiring with bulging crops to digest at leisure. It's never a good idea to stand underneath one for any length of time.  What might not be obvious from these muted images is their incredible, almost gratuitous beauty; their eyes and beaks are deep garnet red, their heads an iridescent foiled green, flashing sapphire blue and rich oily bronze that grades into a beautiful satiny violet cape with a plush creme belly.  They are extremely portly birds, their heavy, laboured flight sounding like whoop whoop whoop and when a large male crashed into our bedroom window last year at full tilt, the whole house shook.  (He was fine.)  Despite this aerodynamic disadvantage they regularly perform spectacular display flights throughout the course of spring and summer, climbing hard and almost vertically on broad wings to a great height before tipping up and dropping like a swooping stone toward the ground, conspicuous for miles around.

We can ill afford to lose the wood pigeon; it is the last species large enough to consume and distribute the seeds of many important native trees.  With it lies the future of our remaining forests.  Thanks to initiatives like the Orokonui Sanctuary the kereru is still moderately abundant in greater Dunedin, regularly invading even the most urban areas.  The best place to view them is probably the Bot Gardens, where they will sit, happily devastating a favourite shrub, at arm's length while you snap away, quite unconcerned. 

A single tree presided over a hole set deep and darkly into the ground, the tortured pistacia leaning away and then back over the spring as though it could bear to neither stay nor leave.  Casting little shade, its branches spread like the splayed fingers of a court dancer in a rigid affront to a sky hung with faineant black vultures, their circling shapes pulled around the well that was the dead eye of their orbit.   

Nomads had built the little wall around the water and strung the branches with charms of shaggy red homespun in the knowledge of its dominion over their fate.  But Kala'amātya's memories of the place had been overtaken by the novel features of catastrophe, so that the votive offerings hung forlorn, like gallows fruit.  All around beyond a full day’s ride, a thousand dying animals had gouged the dusty sand where they had thrashed amid their fatal throes, the elegant limbs and necks of horses and great bearded camels frozen in grim arcs against the ground.  The bone-white sun had scorched the eldest into sunken, blackened things, nosed and shied from by their living kin on their way toward the spring, but further out into the dunes and seen by no one but the vulture, tethered goats lay transfigured into bloated, fly-blown parodies while their owners decayed in silence in their black tents, insects consigning eggs to their eyes and gaping mouths. 

Behind him he could hear the croak of the birds still standing amongst the brittle, wind swept tumuli of feathered corpses, tall white cranes and tawny eagles, their great wings hanging as though broken as they stood panting or began to stagger in flapping circles.  The stench of putrefaction boiled around him, its choking weight enough to have prostrated any creature less inured to it.  While his red horse brayed and pounded the ground in an affrighted dance he folded the cloth back from his face and put a hand into the icy water, drawing a palmful toward his mouth.  There was no bitter scent to warn him; only after he had spat it into the sand did the sly smack of poison flower in his mouth, the barbed, copper-green twist that sparked and faded.  The flash of sun-struck metal in the spring recalled him and he reached down to lift the object from the water.  It was pierced and hand-chased silver, its pendant elements chiming on a long pin that had once ornamented black hair thickly dressed with white clay.  Kala'amātya shook the water from the pin and tucked it deep into his tunic, unwinding the cloth from his head and using it to bind the weightless remains of a dead crane that he gathered from the dust, committing them to his saddle bag and turning his horse toward the mountains that stood witness to the calamity.

Though not yet wholly conscious, Lilian saw the line of sacred peaks flicker and fragment as physical sensation demanded precedence.  She looked up into a white ceiling; bringing her hands to her eyes she tried to dismiss the face transposed into flesh as Edward stood at the foot of the bed with a black case in one hand, stayed by her expression.  She rolled onto her side and pushed back her hair.

“You were dreaming.” he told her.
“I was fucking sleeping.  Had to chug a case of Halcion and then I get dead animals."  Her voice was dry and weary.  "Your fucking phone’s been off for four days.”  Lilian looked over her shoulder as he pushed his case into the tall black chest.  
“Work.” he told her finally.
“Yeah... about that.”

Edward sat down in the sabre-legged carver and began to unlace his boots before leaning back to close his eyes for a moment, returning from the hazards of his journey to the rooms around him, in which she was a new and superlative luxury.  He braved her frown to watch her slide from the bed and walk into the bathroom and heard the slow roll of the drawer beneath the basin.  Lilian pinned up her hair and ran herself a glass of water to speed the passage of the amphetamines she hoped would dispel the heavy, tranquilised mantle rolling like a clutch of bearings in her skull.  He pulled his shirt and its smell of other people over his head.

“With all the spooky long haul and radio silence, I figure you’re either an ice mule, professional assassin or international über-whore.” she suggested, folding her arms as she leant on the doorframe.  “There’s two ways this can go.  You can deal me in... full disclosure... or I can bill you.  But you need to make up your fucking mind.”

He leant down and picked up a pile of document bags from the floor beside him.

“When did these come?” 
“I don’t know Lamb, they don’t fucking stop coming from your manager.”  Unzipping the garment bag that hung from the side of the chest, she shook her head and reached across to lift his wrist and consult his watch.  “Bitch Fed-ex’s crap to the door every three hours.”  Lilian plucked a stray thread from the waist of her pencil skirt before stepping into it, the straps of her camisole spilling from her shoulders.  “She’s a fucking creepy predator.”
“Aren’t we all?” he murmured.
“We don’t all send dead-eyed throwbacks to tail people when they’re out trying to make a fucking living.”
“You’re being followed?”
“Either yes, or me and my drivers are having exactly the same paranoid delusion.  If it was all in my head the douchebags would be better looking.  So tell your manager to stop dogging me or I’ll do a three-way with Rachelle on her front lawn.”
“It’s not Orb’s people?”

She barely blinked at the sound of his name.

“He didn’t have guys.  This is Opal trying to run me off.”

The scent of her skin and the fleet glimpse of her back as it disappeared beneath her blouse drew him from the chair while she passed a thin patent belt around the waist of her jacket.  He followed her hands with his own and smoothed them down her skirt, pulling it up over her thighs and reaching between them.  Lilian lost the silver buckle and closed her eyes, until the temptation to abandon her obligations began to accrue too much momentum.

“Use your phone... send me pictures of them.” he told her.  His hand found the black stretch of lace under her breast and pushed beneath it as he walked her to the bed, where she halted and glanced back at him, the hot colours shifting in his gaze speaking so plainly of his intent that she almost failed to pull her blouse closed.  
“I have to work, motherfucker." she smiled, buttoning the silk.  "United Arab Emirates asshole.  He likes shoes, nail polish, karada.  Sits, eats dates, watches me tie up his bitches.  I know more about him than I do you.” Lilian sighed.  “Oh yeah... Susan had a thing on her arm.  Said she took a dive off her bike or something but I think she sprained it on your brother’s hard-on.  Did you tell him about Orb?"
"Has he said anything to you?"
"Nothing straight up, but he's not stupid."

Edward nodded slowly to himself.

"How long will you be?”
“Guess I'll be back around... three.”
“That’s five hours.” he observed as he sat down in the chair, making her step over his legs in her tight skirt on her way to the door and waiting for the smirk that she turned to him.
“Try four days alone with your own hand, asshole.”
“I just did.  So don’t make me come looking for you.”                              

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce
BUY THE BOOK.  $3.99

Buuut who am I kidding with that shit?  Asceticism?  Denying oneself a pleasure?  Lol; nope.  I caved hard, and I'm glad I did because Studded Kiss and Instigator are some of the nicest things I've seen from MAC in the last couple of years.  I kept the swatches on the 'cool' side to give you a decent idea of what they really look like, since the interweb is full of phonecam misrepresentations and I hate that myself.  Both red and purples tend to look stupidly warm unless you process them out of the camera, even with something like my Nikon D300 which has a fabulous sensor.  I know I say that all the time but it's important to remember.  I worked on these shots to keep them real; looking at them on my iMac and then at the swatches on my hand, I'd say they're 95% accurate.

Studded Kiss is a really nice, deep, complex, muddy ruby, hovering somewhere between Russian Red and Viva Glam I with a bit of raspberry thrown in.  It's perhaps a little darker on the lip than it appears here.  The finish is just off-matte and will move on the lip, so not crazy-stiff.  It shares a slightly muted, almost sepia quality with the recent Retro Matte Fixed on Drama, without its formulation issues; not as look at meeee as some pics might suggest.  It's what I wanted Fixed on Drama to be, really.  Two thumbs up- I'm very happy I splashed out on it.

Are you laughing or crying?  Is this the failure of the democratic principle or its logical conclusion?
Are we getting exactly what we deserve?  Is this what you want?  Where are those eighty five guys (because you know they're all men) and how many of them like busty redheads?  Is Marx farting on Friedman's meringue in hell right now?  Will I be able to afford Molotov cocktails when all this shit comes down?
So many questions.

[Soldeus]

* MORE SUCCULENTS & ALOES HERE *

The nose is our prow, its philtrum the proud emblem of our median or sagittal plane, that the most profound of divides and font of all reconciliation. Everything we are is arrayed behind this shallow little cleft, from the moment we are fully formed until our dissolution.  The nose is the truth in the heart of the lotus.

                                                                        G N O S I S


Susan glanced down into the body of her scooter as the motor performed its predictable swan song, stalling as she braked before the gates.  From inside her helmet she scrutinized the guard's expression, then the key with which he had locked the twin partitions.  

“What’s all this?” she called, pushing back her visor.
 “Gates close at eighteen hundred.” Shaw replied through the iron.  “Order of Mr Lamb senior.” 
 “No one gave me a key...”
 He smiled, unlocking the chain.
 “Guess this is your lucky day.  Go see Mr Lamb about getting yourself one.”  A look of profound reluctance swept her face as she walked her scooter past him, struggling with the front wheel as the weight of her grocery bags forced it sideways.  His gaze followed her bandaged arm when she took hold of the throttle once more.  “Not someone you want to run into every day?”

Susan assumed a faint, inquiring frown.  

"How do you mean?" 
"I gotta say... he's a little frosty to a brother."  When she squinted at him, Shaw abandoned his conspiratorial chuckle, looking away toward the corner of the house.  The fragrant smoke that blew toward them issued from the small party gathered beneath the elm.  “Don’t sweat the key.  I’ll get a copy made, drop it off to you say... around eight tomorrow morning?  Coffee's on you.”
 
She shook her head.

"Don't bother... I'll get my own."
"Damn, now you're frosty." he declared.  "I'm going downtown right after work... it's not a problem.  So... eight's okay?"  Rather than contest his insistence Susan pushed the bike forward and began trundling along the drive.  “What happened?" he called, tapping his arm to indicate the bandage on her own. 
"Accident."
"Yeah?  You do that here?"  He watched her coast along the slope, enlisting the enclosure of her helmet to disregard the query.

Shaw awaited her reaction to the sight of the distant trio.  William leaned forward and kissed the cheeks of a handsome blonde woman in a long, yoked dress splashed with wave blue, green and mandarin, a younger, dark-clad companion receiving the same respectful greeting.  To the guard’s surprise, Susan kept her visor down and coasted quickly toward the garage.  

The smoke curling from the sage bough in the witch's hand perfumed William's clothes and hair, describing slow, violet circles in the air beneath the elm.  Frederica closed her eyes and stifled a cough, bowing her head while the rite was concluded and the woman stepped back from the foot of the tall white wall, planting the smouldering branch in the ground beside them.  A faded, woad-blue line, the ancient emblem of her sisterhood, descended her weathered forehead from her hairline to the beginning of her sun-browned nose.  She wore it plainly, eschewing the cosmetic discretion favoured by many of her contemporaries; Frederica had not yet submitted to the sacrament that would entitle her to wear it.  The senior witch patted her little cowrie-beaded bag and drew out a small Cohíba, accepting a light from William as she composed her impressions.  

“I won’t lie to you, my dear... none of this is good.” she sighed, her wheat-coloured lashes fluttering in an unconscious expression of reluctance.  “That is not to say I am not confused, because this is exactly, exactly what I am.”  Her provincial Swedish accent formed a lively counterpoint to the gravity of her words.  “I am seeing great confusion, and er...  målmedvetenhet... a great purpose.”  She looked toward Frederica, who brushed windfall smuts from the sleeve of her black dress.  “Dotter, you thought this?”
“I’m no good with this stuff...” said the younger woman, reinstating her glasses.  “I just don’t go there unless I know for sure.  And I don't."
“You don’t go there?” the Swedish witch exclaimed reproachfully.  “You’re a haxa, and that is what we do!  There is where we go!”   

Frederica shrugged under the elder’s gaze.

“It’s heavy... I don’t like heavy stuff.”  The latter abandoned her reproof and urged another light from William, and the trio looked together at the security guard as he crossed the front garden toward them, hands in his pockets.
“As I say... I can not lie, Villiam, it is no good.” she advised.  “So, come... what would you know?”  The witch’s gold-streaked hair sat in two coils on her head, resembling horns or supernumerary auricles; she watched him with her lips slightly parted and her eyes half closed, extolling him to question her oracular facility in a manner that would satisfy them both.
“Female?” he asked.
“Female, ja,” 
“Happy?”
“Happy?  Nej.  Oh no.  No no.”

William looked from her again toward Shaw, who had passed through the shade behind them and stood frowning down at a silver camera, adjusting its settings.  The witches exchanged dubious looks as he lifted the appliance to his face and began taking pictures of the side of the house, with its faint trail of gouges in the plaster and the little board of ply that had replaced the missing pane.  The women blinked at the flash in unison; engrossed behind the camera, Shaw did not perceive William's approach until it was too late to prevent him snatching the offending object from his hands and extracting the memory card.  

"Mr Lamb, it's my job to document this incident..." Shaw exclaimed, shaking his head while William pitched the camera into the shadowed orchard, muttering over his shoulder as he walked back to his companions.  
"If you don't like him my dear, I think I could have use for him." chuckled the blonde witch upon his return.  
"Tilde, I'd drop kick him your way in a second, but my brother's actually paying him to mouth-breathe the local air."  He let his head fall and closed his eyes, shaking off the interruption, and the woman resumed her look of receptivity.  “Alive?” he asked.
“Ah, hm, yes, now we come to something.  What was here... has feet in this place and feet in that one.”  Her freckled hands indicated the relative positions of the realms that she discussed.  “A thing of both."
"Merde." he sighed.
"Does that help you, child?”  She watched him nod reluctantly.
“What should I do?”
“Look at this!  You have question, and this one must learn to answer.” the witch assured him, turning to Frederica to supply a solution; the girl stared up into the sky as the twilight deepened.  
“You could try banishing, I guess.” she offered.
“Ja, and what will he need for this banish?” 
“That's an old-school type thing.  Maybe I’m not who you should be talking to...”
“Fred, it’s fine... I know I’ll need a corpse.” William replied.  She nodded as she took out her cell and scrolled down through the addresses.
“Lydia and Cybelle... they’re heavy dralna... banishment’s their big thing.  They think I’m miss pissy sunshine so don’t drop my name, whatever you do.”

Her expediency made the Swedish witch throw up her hands and stoop to gather what remained of her sage boughs, clasping them to her breast and reaching out with a sympathetic smile to accept the gratuity William handed her.

“Thank you, Tilde.” he said quietly.  She leant closer to him.
“This girl that you are thinking of... dark eyes... I like.  Hot trouble for you, and bossy, but you need, so don't you fear.  About this other thing, I am sorry I can say no more, but you are en underlig uppenbarelse, and I am only from Malmberget.  Lycka till."

The silvered scent of smoke filled Susan's rooms and she blew it away from herself, hauling her grocery bags past the bed she had pushed against the wall furthest from the window.  In the kitchenette she took her time over the placement of each grocery item in the small refrigerator, swearing softly to herself as she was forced to reorder once again her memories of the night before, its fragments both lucid and elusive, exchanging opacity and translucence as mutable emphasis alighted on each and altered its character.  William's benign attendance blurred less accountable details, his company like drifts of windblown white over the facts of the assault which seemed only to recede in her estimation with the passage of the hours.  She shoved aside a block of cheese and hoisted a plastic bottle of milk into the vacancy, muttering at the sight of the black smudge on her bandage from the workings of the scooter, noting with the same frown the weight her arm had borne without discomfort.  Susan twisted her wrist, rolling it as far as she dared in search of pain or incapacity or any confirmation of the injuries it had sustained; when none would oblige her she stood up from the squat little fridge and fished a knife from the cutlery drawer, scowling tightly as she slid the blade beneath the crepe tied at the heel of her palm.  Its dull edge would pare neither fabric nor its securing knot, and she dropped it into the sink on her way to the bathroom.  

The ancient pair of nail scissors from the medicine cabinet proved no more efficacious, though she propped her arm on the basin and sawed at the impervious knot, munching the crepe that refused the pinching fingers of her left hand and drove her to shake the bound limb furiously.  On looking up into the small, foxed mirror she saw not her own grimacing features but the photograph from William's room, tucked into the framing and standing with all the sequestered dignity of an icon, though its radiance worked only to dissolve her articles of faith, bleeding the uncertain colours from the previous evening, effacing precious subtleties before they could be assorted.  While she struggled with them, the memory of the attack merged with William's ministrations and battered her with suggestions of grotesque sequelae; she struck her elbow on the door frame in her haste to flee the room and stumble down the stairs.  

Sage smoke trailed throughout the ground floor.  William sat in the drawing room before the malachite fireplace, a waxing blaze licking through tinder and lighting the imperious colours of the kilim beneath him.  The great chamber seemed content in darkness, the window glass reflecting the flames that snapped around his silhouette.  When he lifted the face that she had studied so long in stolen monochrome Susan grasped her bandaged arm as if the limb were visibly pathological, hotly-coloured and half-breathless.

“Something's wrong." she told him.  "I can't get this thing off... you'll have to do it for me."
He looked up from the crepe to her expression almost reluctantly.
“It's too soon... you need to wait five days.”
"Who was that woman?  The one outside my room, burning branches?"
"Tilde..."
"Who was she?"
"A friend."
Susan shook her head with her eyes closed.
"No, I mean... what was she doing?"  She gave up the demand that drowned anyway amongst the hundred others scrabbling for precedence.  "Everything keeps... I can't remember it, and everything I do remember runs away..." she murmured, running a hand over the dressing toward her wrist.  "There's nothing under here... I can't feel anything.  I have to see it."
"Christabel..." he sighed.
"Take it off now.  I mean it."
"Nothing good will come of this.  Five days is all I ask."

Despite the plea her anxiety moved him against his own advice and he lifted a hand toward her; she stepped back, then checked herself, offering her arm again with renewed conviction.  He examined the dressing, then gazed at her intently, as if required to commit her image to memory; it almost prompted her to question him again, but she climbed down onto her knees, too quickly in her exigence, a short vertiginous spin prompting her to catch his sleeve and steady herself.  William reached into the pocket of his jeans and withdrew a folding knife, the cold spine of the blade sliding over her hidden skin as he cut through the crepe and brushed it back in silence, gathering up the dressing and committing it to the fire in a strange gesture of finality.  

Underneath the bandage the lacerations had knitted so completely that the black stitches had slackened and stood in loops over her skin.  It had gained a nacreous texture where the wounds had closed, neither the ugly, naked compromise of fresh scarring nor the passive accord of older damage, the lines drawn in a soft, pearlescent white.  The last traces of the dark salve dusted from her wrist, falling to the carpet.  Uncomprehending, she crawled closer to the fire and ran a hand over the redundant stitches, bringing her arm to her face and gazing at it as though she were not certain it was still her own.  William said nothing to her astonishment.

She stood and walked to the French doors, consulting the evening outside and wandering away from the dark panes to stand in the midst of the room, finally returning to the hearth to pass her arm over the fire in an unconscious test of its reality.  The dry, velvety flames licked the black thread in her skin and ignited rows of tiny embers, sparking and dying in a fleeting sequence until the stitches burnt away.  He took her wrist and brushed off the remaining thread, his dispassion accepting credit for the prodigy on his behalf, and Susan worked her fingers, watching the thews and muscle replying in the firelight as they had always done, the new scars throwing lines of shallow pink shadow.  He could hear her heart labouring thickly in her chest as it had done the night before as she knelt beside him, uttering sounds that began the words that she abandoned.  Her stare was difficult to endure, knowing the extent to which the nearby fire favoured his least accountable elements, but if she saw them, it was still desire that spoke on her behalf, the wonder he had effected muting all the dark suggestion that had survived it.

In reply he looked away and held up a hand, its strange biology a cypher that fell to her first glance.  Susan opened her own and placed her insufficient compliment of fingers against the six scars on her arm, watching him accept her findings without attempting to confute them.

“You said to know is always better." William reminded her.  "So ask me.”

She rose, cradling her arm, then walked to the door and ascended the stairs alone.  In the hearth, a dead branch spat a brand at his bare feet.   


C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce
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Tu es là?  Je suis là.  (Ouais, mon français n'est merde :-/ )
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We've eaten home-grown eggs after two weeks with no ill effects, but then life's pretty cheap to our sort.  If yours are store-bought they've probably been washed, which reduces their shelf life, so aim to eat them in a week; as soon as possible is best.  Store them in a cool, dark place, out of reach of pets and children.  We never refrigerate ours but if you're somewhere hot and humid you might like to do so.  Quail eggs can seem like a dauntingly exotic delicacy but don't be intimidated.  They're gastronomic gimmickry, really, tasting exactly the same as a regular chicken egg @ ten times the price and hassle, but who cares?  They're cute.  And luxe.  So let's do this.

T O   B O I L -  For 12 eggs, bring about half a finger's depth of water to the boil in a pot and then remove it from heat, spooning the eggs carefully into the hot water.  You don't want to crack the shells at this stage so a fast boil is not ideal- turn the ring right down when you put them back on the heat and just simmer for about 8 minutes.  This should get you a hard-boiled egg.  You can leave it longer so don't panic.  3-5 minutes will yield something sloppier, yolk-wise, but we don't care for this ourselves.  

T O   F R Y - exactly as you would a chicken egg, with a thought for scale- obviously they will cook more quickly.  We like to use a mix of butter and rice bran oil in the pan; this is both tasty and has a high smoke point.  Bring the pan to a good medium heat, remove from the ring, crack the eggs carefully over the fat, switch off the element and leave the pan to sit on it with the lid closed for about 6 minutes.  This will render the yolks solid if not totally opaque so if you like them runny, cut down the time.  The fresher the egg, the more cohesive the white will be; I didn't get the pan warm enough while we were fucking around with the camera, so these ones spread a bit.

The steam trapped inside the pan should sweat the finished eggs off the bottom.  Be patient and lift them gently with a fish slice.  We served these on a cracker with farmhouse brie and Interstellar Relish (recipe coming soon).