Blog Archives

NZ Bellbirds & Tuis in the Bull Banksia (Banksia grandis )

1/2/2017

I think I might have mentioned it before, but our Bull Banksia is a triumph both of neglect and comprehensive ignorance regarding the proper cultivation of this treasured and infamously temperamental genera.

Native to a fairly restricted area of Western Australia, B. grandis likes to stutter along for a few years in exotic climes and then abruptly perish, just when you were getting your hopes up.

I planted ours in memory of my Aussie dad in a patch of crappy cliff spoil and it's been leaning outward and exploding in all directions ever since, throwing out these giant velvety candle flowers once a year in summer. They are literally traffic stoppers, inducing tourists to stand gawping in the middle of the road outside our house; Asian visitors in particular seem especially appreciative, dividing their enthusiastic clicks between this plant and our giant Aeoniums. I don't blame them. We look forward every year to these eccentric inflorescences.

Our local honey eaters don't really distinguish between native flowers and introductions from Australia, which is unsurprising given the fact that many plants from Oz existed here until relatively recently, geologically speaking, and must feature in their ancestral memories.

This is the Bellbird, happily ubiquitous around these parts, the adult male featured above with one of his older chicks sitting to the left there.

This young bird is currently tooling around the garden warbling its way furiously through the entire Bellbird songbook, its garbled phrases becoming slightly more polished and coherent with each passing week.

Following its progress is a privilege we both treasure. They are pretty accustomed to us, ignoring our scrutiny and only occasionally flitting off to avoid R's camera.

The Tuis visit the Banksia but seem more enthusiastic about the Pohutukawas (Metrosideros) coming into flower in our upper garden, along with every bee and wing'd insect for a mile in all directions. On a warm, still day during its luminous scarlet declamation the whole tree hums and shivers with a host of nectar-seeking visitants. Pohutukawa honey is bloody delicious- pale, thickly gloopy and almost salty, loathsome in its deliciousness. Try it if you ever come across it.

* More Photoessays * Port Chalmers, New Zealand * R's Blog *

Monday slash Tuesday slash the dirty bomb of police & legal sanction against protestors & journalists

31/1/2017

I know everything feels like wading through giant pools of dreamlike batshit at the moment, but this here is really happening and we need to pay attention.

The US isn't alone in attempting to curtail coverage of environmental and anti-corporate action. We've had this creepy bullshit here in New Zealand for a decade now, beginning with the farcical Urewera clusterfuck, a typically bungled attempt by police and intelligence factions at two sinister objectives- to install the concept of a domestic terrorism threat in popular consciousness and to legitimise the detention, intimidation and legal persecution of journalists and activists.

I wonder if a lot of people understand the real mechanisms in this kind of fuckery. It's not the handcuffs that matter any more.

In this country, our politically naive human biomass has been groomed to believe that protestors are troublemakers; NZers, broadly speaking, are deeply trouble-averse and inclined toward hostility at disruptors of any status quo, regardless of its nature. Your average local unit believes, either secretly or otherwise, that punitive actions are the logical consequence of disturbing the fragile balance of conditions they depend upon. They gladly traded equity and will definitely surrender freedom for permission to keep mooing into the buckets over their heads and juggling their phones and credit cards in peace. They have little curiosity regarding what looks to them just like eternal threads in the mysterious fabric of idealogical conflict, and no idea how this cliched drama is being used to disguise new forms of arbitrary sanction and oppression.

Though they often seem so... how do I say this nicely... unsophisticated, our local police have become increasingly emboldened to employ their punitive attentions however the hell their local hierarchy sees fit. Sometimes it feels like someone's district commander has just been watching too much Scandi noir with all the curtains drawn. But their aggressive off-reservation shit is becoming a mallet wielded with sinister political purpose. 'Visiting' participants in notified, benign and entirely legal protests. Conducting illegal searches of journalists' homes. Using roadblocks to identify and intimidate people attending voluntary euthanasia meetings, for fuck's sake, and these are just a few of the instances that have actually been flagged by national attention.

Journalists and activists are just regular people. They don't operate in some sort of rarified impunity ether- they depend on freedom of speech, travel and association to effectively investigate and oppose the seedy garbage exploits fired at our society and environment every fucking hour of the day. Just like everyone else, they have incomes and debts and personal obligations. With the retreat of formal, accredited journalism and the encroachment of employer regulation into our personal lives, arrest, detention and even notoriety can render them (and any of us) unemployed/unemployable, uninsured, homeless and bankrupt, unable to travel internationally and even alienated from the friends and family who will be tarred with the same inexorable brush.

While it might sound trivial and even titillating from a distance, a little bit of police attention- legal or otherwise- in our digital record can go a very long way toward shutting people up forever, about everything that matters. Any drift toward arbitrary police and state involvement in the affairs of those who question their conduct is a terrifying assault on all of our fundamental freedoms.

The Nazis weren't particularly intelligent and did not enjoy our contemporary technological advantages so they have limited value as an explicit comparison to our own situation. But they didn't kick shit off with Krystallnacht in '38.

They did it with bullshit civil service legislation five years before. Most Germans didn't really know what was coming. What's our excuse?

* More Selected Ravings *

liked these forest images by Julien Coquentin

29/1/2017

l'aval

see more of his beautiful work here

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization: Pathei Mathos 10

27/1/2017

Susan gripped the banister and peered down into the entrance hall, watching William admit himself quietly. He glanced up as she flew down the stairs toward him.

“Where have you been?” she whispered furiously. “Where's your brother? Is he here?” She kept hold of his arm and crept around him to listen at the door to the garage.
“He left me in a vault, and now his fucking phone’s off. Christabel, he’s not here... why? What’s going on?”

She did not seem to be able to accept his assurances, keeping her voice low as she beckoned him toward the stairs.

“Lilian came back from town and then these idiots arrived with a truck... I have no idea who they were... she went and got a gun and she would have used it on them if your brother hadn't come home...”
“Was she high?”
“I don’t know... yes, probably! I hid up here. I heard another car come up the drive, and then I heard a fucking gun go off..."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes! I was too scared to look... when I sneaked down finally, everyone was gone and there was nothing."

William stood for a moment at the base of the stairs and collected his thoughts.

“If anyone was dead we would have tripped over them by now. Frost’s probably with Ed, so she’ll be okay. In one sense.” he sighed, climbing past her while she stared at his phlegmatic response. In the bedroom he emptied his pockets onto the quilt, dumping a folded wad of documents and notes scrawled to himself, and slumped down in the chair to kick off his boots. Taking his phone from him, she found Edward’s number and stood chewing her lip with the appliance to her ear as she was advised of the latter’s unavailability.

"Lilian's not okay... she's taking clozapine." she confessed, handing back the appliance. He pressed two fingers to his forehead and swore down at his lap. “Petrouchka said to make you tell me everything.”
“Yeah well, that’s fine for her to say. Vampyres don’t have any fucking skeletons. The people I’m talking about have more closet space than a Narnian penthouse. Christabel..." he groaned. "I’ve just spent the day at five different fucking banks arguing with the world’s scariest nitpicker over which bits of our stash we should involuntarily liquidate, because he’s just had the money he earned as an international apocalypse ripped off by someone he already wants to force through a fucking shredder... please don't give me waterboarding eyes. You will not thank me for telling you.”

She watched him slide down further into his chair and push his feet along her legs, inviting her hands to them with restless movements of his toes. Pushing them aside, Susan rolled over onto the bed and settled with her back to him, taking the magazine from beside the lamp. William sat for as long as he was able without speaking.

“Lilian’s not crazy.” he confessed. “Sometimes clarity is not your friend.” Turning over, she saw that he sat on the verge of significant disclosure. "If I tell you where all this comes from, you have to tell me what to do.”

The faces of the multitude were like bobbing sea-ice over their dirty, cattle-coloured tunics and thick stitched furs. Sachiin scanned them all, standing at the end of the cordon that divided the flagged square while the guards grouped beneath their pointed helms lost patience with the restive mass, barking and striking at them with cudgels cut for the occasion. The sky threatened snow, casting a sickly, cinereous illumination that drew in black and white and the unclean colours of their union. He glanced toward his companion; Gideon Auberjonois seemed more rueful than he had expected, the greedy, agrestic gloating of the crowd that pressed them on three sides reviled by every facet of his person.

“Why did you not tell me before now?" he muttered, shrugging his greatcoat around himself against the cold. "With your brother, we might have taken her from here.”

“She made me swear that I would not.” Sachiin confessed, Gideon's gaze upbraiding his adherence to such onerous terms. Both creatures craned their necks to catch sight of Kala'amātya, some twenty metres distant along the way cleared by the guards. He stood immobile and impassive amid the contingent drafted from Gideon's own circle, the latter flexing their wary hands and murmuring to one another as they watched the crowd around them. Before them rose the dark frame of the gallows beside a massive stave of oak rearing over the assemblage like some hungry idol. A thick skirting of bundled osier had already been laid head-high about its footing, stacked and kindled with wreaths of straw figured into crosses by the busy hands of charwomen. Alongside the stake a ditch, large enough to accommodate a tall man, had been dug and filled to its lip with freezing, opaque water.

On a lofty dais the gross figure of a catholic bishop, swathed in the complex, burnished finery of his office, sat upon a cushioned throne listening to details related by a pair of dark-garbed drudenhaus attendants. In the robes commissioned for the great occasion, he resembled some couchant and sedentary magi; behind him sat Rana in her own gilt chair, a dress of brilliant golden velvet beneath her bright red mantle, a cup of wine standing in her grasp. To the rear of her vantage roosted the wealthy burgher clans and guild men who had campaigned so long for the offender’s apprehension, cloaks drawn up about themselves as they exchanged confidences behind gloved hands.

Without fanfare the gates were prised open to admit two mounted wardens in scarred cuirasses to the square. They forced the mob backward into two thick ranks while the horses’ smoking breath and the sharp, hollow clatter of their riders' plate echoed unchallenged by jeers or shrieking catcalls, the ploughmen and mill girls standing in a dour silence nursing the stones and clods of offal they had brought to fling at the enemy who had held them subject for so long. Behind the riders and before another company of guards, pikes held upright in a bristling surmount, three women walked in single file, chained hand and foot to one another and forced to match their pace to that of the checked and stamping horses. Sachiin closed his eyes at the sight of them, his distress shared by the creature alongside him who expressed his dismay in soft gallic vowels.

The first woman wore an overgown of ravaged hellebore purple that flapped against her shoulders in the wind. Helaine's pale head had been crudely shorn and left a blistered, harrowed waste; around her throat deep-bitten wounds echoed the battered colours of her mouth, the same damp welts encircling each branded arm. Filthy linen bound each hand, preventing the remains of her fingers from disgorging enough blood to subvert the purpose of her detention. In defiance of her circumstance she displayed neither hauteur nor desolation, but walked in the direct and unfeigned manner that had always been her wont, wrists chained at her waist. Behind her, the two apprentice girls Adelle and Agathé proved less resolute, weeping and stumbling, their distress rousing a more demonstrative response from the crowd, the braver amongst them hefting the stones meant for their mistress. The hurled debris soon added its dire colours to those already staining their bloodied shifts of white linen, a vestige of their former station. The rear guard abused Agathé as she faltered at the sight of the rearing stake and the crowd pressed home the advantage, enclosing the two girls with their spitting faces and jostling limbs.

Breaking with the onlookers Sachiin stepped out into the way and helped Agathé to her feet, only to be shoved back by the pike bearers. Moving quickly along the face of the crowd, he walked at the shoulder of the senior witch and addressed her as discreetly as the tumult would permit.

“I could not persuade him to leave.” he told her, keeping his head low. She glanced at him, one eye shot red by a blow that had blackened her brow as far as her hairline, but made no reply, and was forced onward by her jailers. Gideon caught him up; they went ahead of the captive party to take their places beside Kala'amātya.

Helaine suffered no visible struggle as the guards led her past, finding Sachiin's bright features against the brumous crowd before his brother's. The sight of Kala'amātya caused her to falter briefly before wresting back control, every moment she had suffered visited upon him in an agony that would have turned another from her. With no other opportunity remaining to him he was compelled to commit even the indelible horror of her wounds to memory, before the mounted guards swung down onto the cobbles to take her arms and march her before the dais, her two maids arraigned in like fashion behind her. All demonstration from the crowd ceased as the bishop rose with the help of two attendants who then crouched about his robes, busily composing them, and looked out across the square, to his cabal of clerical associates, and finally to the small party before him, his head haloed by the misted sun.

“In the name of Christ, we sit in judgement upon you, the Countess Helaine de Marchand and your various serving women beside, in the matter of the murder of your lawful husband, and charges of the most horrible maleficia, too numerous, and infamous, to utter in open company.” announced the enormous priest, his tiny, cupid-bow mouth moving in the great flat bulk of his face beneath bagged grey eyes. “The word of your two novices has been duly recorded, naming you as foremost amongst witches, and naming the acts by which you, Countess de Marchand, compelled them into your service so that they might do your bidding in all things and prosecute infamies in your stead. How do you speak to the charges laid this day against you?”

She stood between her guards, staring into the shadows beneath the dais. The crowd began to murmur and some demands for her confession were voiced from its more substantial quarters, those preserved by prudent distance from having to confront their great bête noire in person. Behind the bishop, Rana leant forward from her chair and came to the latter’s shoulder, laying a hand upon his arm as she confided something to his right jowl.

“It is a vulgar custom.” he announced to her suggestion. “But I shall permit it.” He issued some short order and watched, as the senior guard drew a bodkin from his belt; Sachiin caught Kala'amātya's arm as they took her head and sliced the skin between her eyes with the blade, treating Agathé and Adelle in the same way, though they seemed insensible, standing with the blood streaming down their faces. The crowd began to cheer, emboldened. The bishop called for a charger of blessed water, which he tossed down in the direction of the prisoners, splashing the cobbles and their bare feet. In her gleaming chair, Rana settled back to search out Kala'amātya's face.

“Before I name your sentence, I call on you to confess your crimes and prepare your soul for the judgement of your living saviour.” he informed her. Helaine looked for the first time to the prelate’s rose-flushed features; he read her mute refusal. “The fate of your corrupted sisters may move you better.” he predicted.

The weeping novices were dragged from behind her and hoisted over the faggots by a line of scowling pike-bearers, their chains drawn rattling round the great oak, three times about their bodies until they were imprisoned against it and each other. The girls began to petition the last of the guards who leapt down onto the flags, their sobbing entreaties rising into wailing as the flaming, tar-soaked torch was passed to the hooded executioner. The anonymous figure mumbled his half-articulate entreaty for the safety of his own emperiled soul, and without further ceremony touched the smoking flame to the foot of the pyre.

White smoke was whipped away from the girls by the same wind that fanned the flames until they flared up about their legs like licking tongues arising from a brittle phoenix nest. Their wailing rose into wild, avian screams as the fire climbed over the fuel toward their legs, the heat engulfing them in a shimmering silver column that ate the clothes from their bodies and began to consume their steaming, blistered flesh. The stench swept down over the crowd as though on blackened vans, the burning women thrashing in their chains until the bright veil of flame rose about their bloated shoulders and the crowd drew back, pressing sleeves and kerchiefs to their faces. With their remaining charge the horse guards retreated from the heat of the conflagration against the ranks of the onlookers, where a single voice in a low and vehement language scarcely earned a moment of their rapt attention. Standing out of sight behind her shoulder, Kala'amātya dragged from his empty chest, sending them as emissaries across the cold arm’s length between them.

“You know well... they care for your land and not your life... confess and I will buy you from them.” He reached out, unable to contain himself, and slid his hand beneath her arm. She looked down at its strange shape against the threadbare silk that clothed her side, remembering his knowledge of her flesh, the way in which his body was but a province of her own.

“I cannot live another hour in this skin." she told him softly. "Kala'amātya... we may fashion our own gods but we are subject to their judgement." His sorrow filled the last redoubt inside her heart and blurred the immolation as it spilled down her face from her lashes. "You are all that I have loved. Let me go, or I will never learn to leave you.”

Before him, the white breadth of her shoulders moved, and she lifted her head, looking up to burn her pale eyes upon the corpses chained against the sooty stake, bent double by the flames that had consumed and transmuted them so horribly, their blackened, oily skin and sinews contracting as they cooled, the fuming mound of charcoal and ashes beneath them doused by wardens. The womens' twisted forms appeared far more ominous and malefic than at any living moment, like something dragged smoking out of hell; the assembled clergy kept their linen to their faces and awaited a change of wind. When it came, the bishop heaved himself once more from his throne to deliver his final address.

“Helaine de Marchand... your estates, dwellings and title shall be forfeit to the church, with any coinage, relic or treasure in your name. I call upon you to repent your crimes before your fellow man, so that you may be freed of the corruption that binds you to the Adversary. What say you?” Her guards stepped back from her, as though their presence might impede her will. Helaine looked up at the dais, at Rana’s smile and then at the bishop, studying him for a term.

“I would say these few things. The first, to this distinguished company... without your greed and your abiding hatred of each other, I could not have prospered as I did. To the women, I say abasement is your desert for as long as you submit yourselves. To the men, I own I should have set more of your heads upon my gate. And to this church... you cannot cast me into the void... in death I will go where I please, as I have done in life, and I will die in any manner you devise before I kiss your book and live by your consent.” Helaine looked over the faces staring back at her. “I leave you in each others' hands.”

Gideon shook his head at Sachiin's side, smiling in spite of his regret.

“An we are to lose this woman, while your beloved lives.” he observed, looking across the clearing at Rana. “A bitter day.”

Beside the pit that lay between a score of lifted stones, two guards took up a lengthy wooden instrument, as long as a pike and forked at its end, fashioned from a bifurcated bough; another like it had been handed to them by the priests after it had received a hasty blessing. Helaine considered her dim reflection in the milky ditch, an image shattered as she stepped down and sank to her waist in its midst; the dark silk of her skirt billowed out around her, drinking in the water and falling with its weight. With her back to the crowd she lay down in the freezing pool, its depths biting hard as they soaked through her gown. The feeble sun was once more engulfed by clouds, their soft shapes floating on the surface of her gaze until she closed her eyes against the day and descended, leaving only ripples to meet and cross each other until waning into quiescence. In their nervous haste the men plunged their staffs into the pit, leaning heavily upon them. If she struggled there was no sign, though they were careful to keep their eyes from the water. Sachiin turned to find his brother had sunk to his knees as though run through by eviscerating iron, holding his dark head in his white hands.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce

* Read the Book onsite * Go directly to this chapter *

liked this timely pisstake by Christian Girotto

26/1/2017

social animals

see more here

Monday slash Tuesday slash painting shit slash yes we're still breathing slash jumping trump in

24/1/2017

And who doesn't love some shiny black trim? We have a shiny black habit and are finding it hard to relinquish the idea in favour of cedar trim on the new build (more about that later).

If you're wondering why our posts have been so sporadic, look no further than this bitchy little new project.

I took these at the end of our house painting adventure and have only just gotten round to looking at and posting them.

Enviropaints manufacture locally/responsibly and were having a special so we picked up 20L of their roof paint in 'Red'. (Just FYI, if you fancy deep or strong shades but find the tinting too expensive, most roof paints come in strong standard colours fo cheep and you can slap that durable shit on just about anything.) We only really needed 10L: doh.

So we went from smoky old patchy dark cherry to a brighter, hotter shade that was supposed to be a sort of barn red and turned out to be more of a blood orange or MAC Lady Danger situation.

But you know, sometimes fate farts in your face and you don't mind the smell; I'm enjoying this colour a lot. It morphs from sulky ochre red in the shade to eye-fucking tangerine in the sun on a constantly-shifting gradient and forms an awesome contrast to all the garden plants.

It's a shitty screaming baby of a thing and I'm already considering sneaking across the road and tossing it over the cliff taped up in a garbage bag, almost as though it were a real infant.

Ha ha! Juuust kidding. I could punt it out over the drop from my bedroom window, no problem.

We're going with a a passive house concept made from SIP panels which are fabbed down the road from us in Cromwell. The company is Climate House and no, I'm not getting any kickbacks because begging comps and discounts from everyone you blog about is tacky as shit. Goodwill and word of mouth need to be liberated from the stinky taint of paid-for praise; that's one small thing we can all do to make shit better. I think so, anyway.

We've been enjoying the details of the munted trump (doesn't warrant shift key) inauguration. Cake appropriation. Logistical tantrums. Melania K-holes. CIA rage fumes (sometimes karma smells like bubbling hairpiece glue and sweaty pubes): it had it all, really. A cursory if somewhat jaundiced armchair diagnosis of his behaviour, with all that limited vocab, paranoia, acting out, disordered circadian stuff and cheese-holed memory etc certainly looks like early-stage dementia, doesn't it? Fun times ahead. My only black-hearted comfort is that at least his stunted, oinking family will wear some of the fallout. Wait til he starts spitefully shitting his pants whenever someone tries to take his phone away.

Don't feel bad for not wanting to understand his supporters. They say everything they're thinking so there's nothing to discover. It's not like we haven't spent the last fifty years trying to bring them up to speed on some very simple concepts, many of which we grasped in our first years in primary school, for fuck's sake. Come on now. No one alive and cognisant today in the western world can reject social and environmental justice informed by intellectual endeavour out of ignorance.

They just don't care. As R just observed, they've been tricked into publicly wearing the uniform. Now we can see who they are.

* More Selected Ravings * Photoessays * Read the Book onsite *

liked these Lovecraftian images by Guillem H. Pongiluppi

22/1/2017

esoteric order of dagon / cthulhu / shadow over innsmouth

dope illustrations- there's more here

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization: Pathei Mathos 9

20/1/2017

Black gloss walls contained and softly reflected the shapes and colours of the crowd moving between them, roaming columns of blue and luminous green turning the passing faces paler shades of the same. Lilian and Edward shared the ambient bass, the stygian frequency passing through her flesh into his own. She glanced up at the waitress delivering their drinks; she was blessed with a pliant, abstract loveliness that filled her rubber skin like something cast to fit its slickly gleaming limitations, her features wrapped in a studded mask from which two slender horns curved back over her brow. Around them in black demi-lune chairs sat the many faces of exclusive perversion, collared, shaven, dripping chains and other tokens of humiliation, or sitting, stiffly ornate, in figured, custom leather, some wearing homely heads over their fierce and intricate finery as though they were randomized amalgams. Civilian associates leant over their drinks in the anonymous attire required by the more quotidian segments of their neatly-partitioned lives.

Fatigue slowed Lilian’s arm when she lifted the bottle from the table, spilt liquor pooling around the foot of the glass from which she drank as though to slake a thirst. The alcohol did not immediately medicate the heavy disarticulation that had overtaken her, but burned on the way down; laughter from an adjacent chamber drew the eyes around them into its throbbing, red-flushed darkness. When she looked down she saw thin, dull lines of the same colours jammed under her fingernails. She tugged her dress shirt free from the waist of her skirt and felt for the bruise that had risen beneath it, pressing down into her ribs to feel an echo of the impact that had marked them. In recalling the assault she almost did not perceive the body that sat down on her right side, spreading arms across the seat behind her. The intruder was tall and powerfully made, his sharply-cut features punctuated with an array of stainless piercings, snakebites and labrets dressing his lips like drops of mercury. Edward knew him for the alujha assassin that he was, recalling his name and affiliations from those in which he maintained an interest.

“I know who you are, so... I’ll tell you this, as good manners.” the man began, his Berlin accent flattening his English. He paused to light himself a long cigar, looking back to Lilian with an undisguised and almost wistful appreciation. “There is one hundred U.S on the table for her. Opal La Rue, and Prague.”

One half of a song passed before Edward replied, having consulted his companion silently.

“I will ligate and section whoever takes the contract.”

The killer considered his response and nodded in wordless accord, looking up into the blue strobe passing overhead, then down to count the fingers around Edward’s glass.

“I'm thinking I don’t need this procedure. Good luck to you both.” He eased his large form from the chair, aware he had outstayed his welcome.

A line of narrow booths, like the domestic architecture of some giant communal insect formed one wall of the passage beyond the apparatus room, each outfitted with a padded black ottoman and a soundproof door. Lilian pushed the one behind her closed, excluding the murmuring traffic of the corridor and returning the booth to its seclusion. Over their heads a beaded lantern cast brazier red and violet blue in carnal semitones against their skin, the sombre points of colour swimming like cells in plasma, black lying like a wolf's mouth in the shadows to devour all remaining hues. Edward watched her sit down on the ottoman from the back wall. She leant forward to pull off her jacket and shirt, the sleeves of which were dressed with mouse-grey mud.

“You can’t go back to work.” he told her, unbuttoning his own shirt and wiping it from his arms, the skin from his wrists to his elbows streaked with a far darker colour where the fabric had dried against it.
“I can't not go back. I got notes all over town.” she replied, lifting the vodka bottle to her lips. Her fatalistic logic was at once familiar and exhausting.
“I will pay them out.”

A frown developed as she examined the statement.

“They didn’t get it all, did they?”

He shook his dark head slowly. The sight of his body dappled in sullen ordinal colours merged with the memory of its horrific aptitude, its effect on bone and flesh and glass, his great shape's containment of a void so easily mistaken for the strictures of inhibition. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck, looking from his stare toward the floor in an effort to arrest the adulterant influence of lust, fed by all that she had seen of him, black flames rolling away from their buried source. Her eyes rose to the cinder-coloured depression punched into the skin of his left flank.

“How can you stand there with a round in you, like someone cut you off a fucking cross?” she murmured, her grasp sliding on the bottle. “Same way you put two cops in a fucking hole like you were flushing goldfish, you... fucking psychopath.”she whispered, bringing a hand to her face as though the light damaged her eyes. “Think I can come to you for an allowance? You don’t have dependents. I’ll end up face down in the fucking woods like everyone else.” The blue light on his skin began to fail and lose itself until all around became cold-blooded red, their pale stares soaked through with it, their shapes drawn with strokes of that perfected darkness worn by long-expired stars. She rose and came to him, turning her hand against his wound as she opened her lips on his neck, exchanging the smell and taste of his skin for the heat of her own. “What I need to do is just... I just need to leave you alone.”

In doing so she took up her jacket and walked to the door, but he pushed it shut from behind her, shifting his weight to pin her with his shoulder and reaching down with both hands, fingers leaving white trails in her flesh where they dragged over the silk of her stockings toward the warm, bare skin where they concluded. She stood with her cheek to the wood while he kicked her feet apart and lifted her skirt, drawing her back against him with an arm pulled tight around her waist. His body beside her own and the proficiency of his hands together wrested her whispered permission, and she closed her eyes and caught the door frame, letting her weight drag through her arms. Her feet slid down into the toes of her shoes, heels lifted free by the first shock of pleasure as it struck her hard, sucking the tension from her legs.

“You can't fuck me and say nothing." she breathed.

“I kill people for money.” he told her, pushing one hand down the front of her skirt, the other reaching around between her breasts to grasp her shoulder so that she could evade nothing of what he did to her. "I enjoy it more than I should. There is something badly wrong with me." Her forehead slid against the door as she bowed her head and bared her teeth, rolling her hips to allow him the full measure of her body in which he moved with ruthless resolution. “I should walk into the sea, but the more I have of you, the more I need. Don't ask me to let you go. I have never known how." he promised, the words cool on the back of her neck, releasing his pinioning grip and turning her against him. He grasped the soft reverse of her thighs, sweeping her clear of the ground and setting her back against the door where she pushed out from it, meeting his mouth with her own and receiving him there as she did everywhere else, heels biting into the small of his back. Her hands still clutched the framing overhead but the crippling intensity of his method brought her so close that she lost her grip and writhed between him and the wood until constraint was torn away, ripping free like thorns through flesh.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce

* Read the Book onsite * Go directly to this chapter *

untitled

19/1/2017

Yes I know I haven't posted much this week but I'm busy, yo.

Will post something of substance next week, I promise.

liked these images by Julien Palast

15/1/2017

rise

see the rest of the series here

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization: Pathei Mathos 8

12/1/2017

In sleeping, William lay in infantile abandon, entirely unconscious of her scrutiny. He neither snored nor spoke nor shifted restlessly, sinking into sleep as quickly as he had settled with the intention. The early hour had breathed a chill into the house for the first time since her arrival and Susan pulled her cabled green cardigan over her arms at the end of the bed, rubbing at the tights on her legs. She smiled to herself as a large, thick-legged spider made its way down from the headboard and walked out over William's hip, pausing on that indeterminate region where his stomach departed his ribcage. A sudden and determined tread crossed the quilt under the pheasant that had roosted on the frame and the fowl snaked forward and snatched up the arachnid, clucking excitedly as it flapped down onto the floor with its prize. He murmured incomprehensibly and she frowned at his senseless profile.
“What?”
"It's too early... come closer." he sighed. She shuffled around the bed toward him, swearing when he belied his sloth by throwing her down onto the mattress and leaping upon her with active predacity; she squirmed and complained under the dark blue sheets that settled over them. “I said you’re sexy when you’re cranky, in Urdu.”
“Teach me something.” Susan insisted while he used his teeth to loose the buttons of her cardigan.
"Mai urdu nahi bolti.”
“Mai... ur... just tell me what it means.”
“I do not speak Urdu.” he smiled. "French is so much easier... say défonce-moi, bête de la montagne... doucement... profondément..." She cackled as he shucked her tights down, planting her feet, hauling them up then breaking free and scrambling to the foot of the bed, only to be dragged back under the quilt, her shrieks obscuring the sound of the tread approaching the door. Neither of them were prepared for the force with which it flew open, admitting Edward in a black temper.

“Get up.” he snapped. “Into town. Now.”

“What the fuck?" William complained, throwing down the counterpane. “Do you think you can walk your crazy white arse out of here?”

“Just go, it looks important.” Susan insisted, brushing down her skirt.

"Is it?” he demanded of his brother. Edward’s mood required no elucidation, and William reached across her for his trousers.

Lilian met them in the hallway in the midst of tying back her hair, scowling beside the phone held to her ear by her shoulder as she followed them down the stairs.

“Stay here.” Edward told her. She hung up and stuffed the appliance into her bag.
“I swear Lamb if you say that one more time I'm going to fucking stab you. Stay here shit... some cocksucker smashed up the store and sprayed my fucking name in dayglo over everything. Meredith just reamed me like a Dutch bitch.” They waited behind Edward while he unlocked the door into the garage.
“I want pictures.” he told her. “Send them to my phone.”
“Why’re you here?” she demanded of William, dropping down into the passenger side; he glanced up from lighting a joint on the back seat.
“He’s second key on my deposit boxes.” Edward informed her. William leant forward, trading looks with her. “Someone hacked my operating accounts.” he hissed.
“No fucking way... what did they get?” Lilian exclaimed. She glanced back to William for an interpretation of his brother’s mute demeanour; the latter sat back and sucked in his bottom lip.

Susan stood before the coffee machine as the front door slammed. Lilian stalked into the kitchen, slumping down into a chair beside the window before acknowledging her presence with a glance. The silence between them, loaded from the outset, became as contentious as any ill-chosen words and Susan turned toward the sink, casting about for something to say.

“William called a while ago... something garbled, about banks...” she offered. The blonde woman struck a light, sat back and smoked half her cigarette before responding.

“I feel like... you're looking at me a certain way." she asserted, lowering her chin and devoting her gaze to the ash she tapped into the china bowl before her. Unsure how to reply, Susan chose not to, and her companion let the challenge slide. "La Rue hacked Lamb's account, ripped off all the dry-cleaned cash. Then someone busted into the boutique, smashed it up and sprayed how they’re gonna do me all over the whole fucking thing. Whatever kind of shit went down between Lamb and Opal's gotta be bad, because no one goes this fugazi over losing a single fucking client.” Lilian's stare became bitter. “But you wouldn’t know about that, right?”

“I really don't." Susan sighed, shrugging at the suspicion that settled on her skin like soap scum. "Did you have money in the shop?”

“No... but no day job, no visible means of support. No visible means and every douche with a badge is on you like a fucking carcinoma, so no trade. No trade, no fucking money.” She delved into her handbag and a bottle of pills bounced from it onto the table, rolling and dropping at Susan’s feet; the latter could not help but glance at the label upon retrieving them but the discovery recoiled on her, souring the coffee in her mouth.

“This is..." She looked up incredulously. "You can't just take these... they're dangerous..."
“Too late. Who was that bitch last night, the Russian freak?” Lilian asked the question without looking at her.
“She's... a friend of William’s... but... you can't...”

Frowning again as Susan's reply tailed off into an incredulous stare, the blonde woman turned toward the window and the low chug of the large vehicle outside, perceiving the white bulk of a removal truck backing up to the gates. She took out her phone while the occupants jumped down and came for the chain impeding them with an enormous pair of bolt cutters. Susan left her talking to Edward and went to the porch, standing with hands on hips while the intruders guided the truck along the drive. It pulled up halfway, its three large, unshaven attendants sporting wife-beater shirts and sagging track pants.

“This is private property..." she exclaimed, walking around to address the driver, who rolled himself a cigarette behind the wheel. "What the bloody hell's going on?"

“This’s called seizing goods to the value of this right here, according to that right there.” he informed her, handing over a writ. Lilian addressed him as she descended the steps.

“Put it back in gear you greasy fuck or I go get the ten gauge.” she warned, staring up into the cab. The men glanced at each other and began to chuckle, shaking their heads and lowering the cleated ramp toward the cobblestones, the chain stays rattling as they paid out. She disappeared into the house while Susan attempted to decipher the smeary documentation, reappearing with the weapon she’d described in both hands, smiling like a sadist at an invalid. The packers fell back onto the lawn on either side of her while the driver exclaimed profanely into his mirror, struggling with the gearstick as she raised the heavy barrels.

Edward left his sedan in the midst of the road and strode down the drive even as the truck listed heavily toward him, the driver loath to concede precious velocity. The sun emerged briefly from behind cloud as he came toward the house through the exhaust smoke, pausing to confiscate his shotgun from Lilian's grasp and shucking the cartridges into his pockets.

"Find somewhere else." he told Susan, leaving her halting explanation on the doorstep.

In the drawing room Lilian watched him stand in tensile preoccupation; he studied her closely before walking to the kitchen and returning with her handbag, pouring its contents onto the kilim and inspected three vials of medication.

“Clozapine...” he related coldly.
“The really fucking hilarious thing about that is that it’s not working." she assured him. "And you don't get to stand there and judge my ass... this is all down to you anyway.”
“What is it about me that drives you to antipsychotics?”
“Everything. It’s everything. I can’t fucking sleep, I can’t work, I can’t stop fucking myself in the head... my mother died in secure care... she was as crazy as the fucking day is long and I can’t go that way...” She took an involuntary breath and lowered her voice, speaking with a brittle, deliberate restraint echoed in the fists into which both hands retreated. “I am... I'm having delusional thoughts. They're about you.”

He stood looking back at her but said nothing as he set the bottle on the mantle. She pressed the tips of her fingers to the crease between her brows, keeping her eyes closed.

“Okay, so... Meredith fired my ass for that shit at the store, so now I’m going back to work.”

“You can't with things as they are.” he told her. Lilian found it hard to look at him, even when he turned slightly toward the doorway. “Are you expecting anyone?”

Another vehicle had taken advantage of the unsecured gates to ease down the drive in low gear, a dark sedan with the dull orange globe of a magnetic beacon seated behind the windscreen. Edward left her in the drawing room to intercept its passengers. They rose slowly on either side of the car; two detectives, one in a hooded jacket and T-shirt, the other in a tight black pullover that displayed the outline of the holster strapped to his chest, approached the door, their posture weighted with an uneasy mix of caution and swagger. He let his anger bleed out while they looked him over and made some decisions of their own.

“We’re looking for a Lilian Frost... she’s here, right?” the hooded jacket proposed, flashing his credentials. He was broadly, indelicately handsome, his deeply-creased brow marked by a hybrid state of expectation and suspicion, his tan the product of time spent on other people’s yachts. Lilian usurped Edward’s reply, walking out into the hall to investigate the visitation and they trailed her back into the drawing room. “You know Mr Lamb, we’d really prefer to conduct this interview in private, so if you wouldn’t mind stepping out...” the hooded jacket suggested smoothly. He extinguished their expectations by staring back at them as he crossed the room and stood before the French doors. They looked down over the contents of her handbag where they still littered the ground beside the hearth. “Lilian Natalia Frost...” he smirked in her direction. “It’s just a small matter today. I’m sure we can settle this without any unpleasantness.”

“What the fuck do you want?” she snapped.

“That would be the drop you failed to make at the precinct a few months back. We’re aware you just lost your position down at your little porn store, what with all the felonious activity that’s occurred there overnight... but we’re going to be needing the sum owed before we can think about tolerating your primary operation.”

“Who told you I was here?”

“A concerned member of the public provided us with your details.” The detective smoothed a palm over his exuberant, toast-brown cowlick. “Cash or bank cheque, or you can come downtown and make it right in person... I’m all set for option two, but Noah here’s queerer than a three buck note and wants a payday. Maybe we can uh, split the difference, if it’s all the same to you.”

Lilian picked a thread from her sleeve, shaking her head.

“I’m tapped out, so you crazy clowns can go right ahead and fuck yourselves.” she advised. Glancing to Edward, she directed a small, sarcastic gesture of encouragement at him. “Bent vice cops. Throw them a coin, they'll do a little dance. Hell...” she added, nodding at the black sweater. “Look at those dick-sucking lips. He’s probably gonna do one anyway.”

“Ms Frost, you ah... you need to dial back that attitude. You and this here've pissed some upstanding, deep-pocket types off hard and you’re not in a position to yank our dicks... we did you a favour coming down here and playing nice... we don’t have to play that way. I prefer not to myself. Now... we started out at twenty K, I know that, but what you just said reminded me that we got Christmas coming and mouths to feed, so now it’s thirty.” the hooded jacket warned her, standing restlessly and looking to his companion, then to Edward, who seemed to have begun to exert a gravitational effect on his attention.

“Is there something you'd like to say to me specifically?” Edward asked.

“Would it kill you to step in and cut a cheque? Best money you ever spent, I can guarantee it.”

Lilian smoothed her hand against the side of her neck, watching them discuss her position without interjecting.

“She doesn’t want to pay.” Edward replied.

“Maybe I didn’t explain this right. She pays, or she comes downtown and works off every fucking dime in the ladycage while we lose her paperwork.”

The errant detectives looked from Edward to Lilian in an effort to discover the source of the strange reciprocation that had begun to prevail, of unintelligible exchange as the pair ignored the ultimatum in favour of each other. Against the dark wall the pale woman evinced so little interest in them that her disregard became a provocation in itself, and the hooded jacket shook his head, tugging handcuffs from his trousers.

“You don’t think we’re stupid, do you, because I could easily get offended.”

She smiled, but not at him.

“I guess cock doesn't take the edge off for you like it does for me.”

He pulled up short of her.

“Uh oh... look what you just did.” Snatching her wrist he turned her around, shaking out the silver cuffs with a dramatic flourish. She stood still at first, then yanked free, and he caught her arm again and sank a short punch into the back of her floating ribs. Her arms fell as though cut from her body and her mouth clenched, biting down on the small sound that almost escaped her.

“Dale...” the other detective murmured. “Don’t fuck her up. This asshole’s going for his lawyer as soon as we’re in the car.” Neither man enjoyed the expression on her face when she lifted it and looked to her companion; Edward’s golden eyes remained on hers while her escort shoved her forward, yanking her elbows back toward him in an attempt to correct her course against the slow pace she insisted on, her cryptic smile appalling the man beside the door. “Dale...”

“Pitch a fucking cork in it, would you Noah? No one knows shit about this... it’s a free ride.” He dragged her closer to the door. “Get this crazy bitch in the car before her head starts spinning round.”

Lilian slumped onto the thick plastic coating the rear of the sedan while her custodians took their own seats before her. In the warm confines the mens' conflicting colognes fought the smell of exhaled smoke and resident, endocrine masculinity. She coughed once and tasted copper. Edward filled the doorway as he paused and glanced in both directions across the garden; from watching him intently, the second detective turned to his companion.

“Dale... key.” he urged, looking down at the strip of chrome lining the door glass beneath his elbow, suddenly cold enough to bleed through his woollen sleeve.

“Jesus, will you fucking learn to front sometime? I’m not peeling outta here because this freak follows me into the friggin lot. He’s pissed... his piece is going and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it. I’d be pissed too.” the handsome man chuckled, turning with his arm over the back of his seat to smirk at Lilian while he fished the car key from his pocket. She sat with her cuffed hands at the small of her back, head laid against the rest and her gaze drifting to his own, growing slowly darker as though with cloud shadow as her lips parted. In doing so, he missed the sight of Edward’s face as the latter bent to stare in through the windscreen at them; as he turned back the detective found that he could neither instruct him to retreat, nor admonish the voice that slid over his shoulder. The keys in his fist became as cold as winter stone, sucking the heat from his hand.

“You can’t move.” she whispered, the sound of the breath drawn through her throat thickly loaded with impelling intonation. It bled into his skull and thickened his blood, backing it up behind the valves in his neck. The second detective glanced at his side window and snapped at his companion for the keys again. Though the latter heard him, he sat locked in immobility. Edward stepped back from the car door and Lilian curled against the seat, closing her eyes.

The window glass flew inward in a burst of icy fragments that struck both men and bounced back to land in her lap like uncut diamonds. The black pullover was sucked from his seat, his body scouring the glass that still sagged in the frame, dragged out into the open air, legs beating against the steering wheel. On the drive his hoarse cry was snapped short by the collapse of his face, his assailant crushing it into the cobblestones and cracking his neck into segments. Edward rose, crossing the windscreen like an eclipse toward the passenger side, terror tearing its occupant out of inertia and pushing his heavy, stubborn hands toward the shotgun between the front seats. The door beside him was wrenched open; in seizing and hauling him sideways Edward wrested the man’s grip from the weapon; his cry was punched into a higher key by his shoulders striking the grass, where he writhed like a fat snake as he was dragged from the drive by his ankle. While on his back he recalled the pistol secreted in his trousers, and with his stare still on his assailant he tore the gun free; Lilian flinched behind her window at the crack of the shot, watching Edward knock the weapon from his grasp, stamp his elbow to the ground and snap the detective's arm cleanly, leaving it to fall at a nauseous angle while he stoved a suite of prone ribs with the toe of his boot.

He took a moment to reach down and confiscate the keys from his victim’s belt before returning to the sedan. She knelt while he unlocked her cuffs, wiping her hair from her eyes as she climbed out and returned with him toward her tormentor, the man lying on the grass with his mouth moving to shape words that would not attend his summons. Bending slowly, Lilian retrieved the pistol from the ground and passed it to her companion, and Edward thanked her, trained it on the detective’s hip and pulled the trigger. They took an unhurried measure of his agony, but when the screams began to displease her, he aimed into the man's gaping face and fired again.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce

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Monday slash Tuesday slash unseasonal coldness

10/1/2017

Shit weather. That's been our summer so far. That piss-weak little silver smudge sliding around on the water at left there is about the closest we've come to a solar presence in the last three months. It's not that I love sun- I don't- but adequate vitamin D is cool too.

A walk around Back Beach yields the disgusting/compellingly beautiful oil slicks left by the fucked-out old busses overcharging the cruise ship trade. And a flourishing musk rose.

And a penguin. In effigy. In a wheelchair. On a boatshed. It's a SJW bonanza.

I apologise for the standard of writing and the paucity of my observations.

It's just that I'm bored with my own faineant xmas blobiness, and mired in that peculiarly tractionless stage of building planning whereby one draws and explains essentially the same shit over and over again to no discernable effect. Nothing is happening, nobody can tell you anything for certain and no structures are even close to being erected.

I'm all about the erecting.

We begin the year without George Michael. Still can't quite believe it.

Photo du Jour: Careys Bay, Otago Harbour

8/1/2017

on a stormy afternoon the other day from my mother's verandah

I'll start posting (something) again this week.

HNY bitches

2/1/2017

Programming note: we're deep in the throes of painting the house and getting domestic shit sorted while R is still on (notional) holiday, so there'll be nothing much from us this week, blogularly. Unless it pisses down with rain for the next 5 days, which is possible.

Hope you had some fun and safe new year shit. Talk to you soon.

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