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The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:   Leviathan 7

28/4/2017

 
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In darkly-shadowed abeyance lay the sere and undulant land encircling the two great lakes, their water lying upon the plain like lovers in sated repose.  The proud head of the sentinel peak to the south wore the first snow of the season on those narrow, serried strata still favoured by the rosewater rays of the departing sun.  As she walked alone over the isthmus between the water, Nyāti strove to conceal her struggle with the lowly altitude, though its influence clutched at her chest and dragged on her long, cloaked limbs.

She gained the summit of the rise and was confronted by the object of her journey.  Two score figures clad in wind-worn, cinder-coloured homespun employed the shelter of the hill to assort the grim tools of their trade in preparation for winter, discarding those stolen knives and short bronze swords that had dulled and retaining those fit for the campaign that would resume in spring.  Such were the sole conveniences claimed by the bai'issātva; neither hearth, nor tents nor even slaves enlivened their bivouac, all such considerations superfluous to their dour mandate.  The dust ground from the mountains by their heavy robes of ice had settled impartially upon them, conspiring with their unvarying stature and aspect so they seemed a raft of sullen corvids grounded by the very misfortune they embodied.  A length of horsehair line, strung across the hollow between pikes, sagged under gruesome, flapping festoons of sunbleached brown and shining black, scalps stripped from the heads of their victims.  Nyāti was grateful that the scudding wind took their smell toward the west.

Loot from overtaken caravans and campsites lay in disarray upon the ground; robes and bales of silk, items of virtu and adornment contrived from polished turquoise, ivory and brand-like corals, the dowery silver so favoured by the doyennes of her own high order, small chests of precious woods and banded agate vials of scent beguiled from flowers that bloomed beyond the mountains to the rumoured south.  With her betters she would select those items most suited to sacerdotal dignity, the bai'issātva themselves being wholly ignorant of such criteria.  She could discern those newly consigned by the ire still brightening their gazes, the veterans having given themselves over to the conduct expected of them in triturating perpetuity, wearing disgrace as they did the dust of the plain.  They were wary of the crocus-yellow shroud she wore as mufti over the snowy robes of her rank.

“I am come for Kala'amātya.” she informed them; they spoke amongst themselves in the glances that were their silent argot until one of the elders lifted a directing hand.

A string of horses stood drinking from the dark edge of the lake.  The moon had risen, vast and blindly white and rolling on the low waves toward the shore.  Kala'amātya swept a felt over the back of one of his mounts and tied it fast.  The rude habiliment that sufficed his companions smoked upon the fire he had kindled for the comfort of his horses; he had bathed in the lake, tied his hair and donned a blue silk tunic purloined from the nomads he had executed.  Alongside those weapons he had stowed the luxuries looted during the sorties under his direction lay bound in four neat bundles, readied for the backs of his animal train and not the discretion of the Sthali'sātva, so profound a transgression that she could not recall its punishment.  That he was not preparing for removal to the furthest station of his corps' orbit was obvious, even to her assaulted sensibilities.  

“You do not go north?” she asked.
“You do not keep avai’sha?” he replied over his shoulder, in reference to the robe concealing the compulsory garb of her order. 

She looked over the horses.

​“Why do you imprison these beasts when it is against the first words of the Mother?”  

He enjoined the equine contingent to stay close to the fire before turning finally toward her.

“It is my evil nature.”  His mood admitted no further equivocation.

“Ana'siām'ilye requires that you walk with me.”

“Tomorrow I ride for a day in one direction and then two weeks in another.” Kala'amātya muttered before she could elaborate.  "I walk nowhere tonight."

"You go to speak with Sachiin before the snow..."  She watched him reserve his glance from her, though she could see well that her knowledge of the rendezvous surprised him.
“Ana'siām'ilye has two good legs of her own.”  
“Why should she trouble them on your account?”
“Why should I trouble mine on hers?”  

She lifted her hands to the white-daubed hair at her temples.

“Come with me, or do not.”  At his silence, she turned into the wind and wound the yellow scarf around her head, departing over the rise that sheltered his encampment. 

Nyāti was forced to look back more than once to reassure herself that Kala'amātya had indeed set out after her, though whether he satisfied curiosity or some other perverse precept was as obscure as his distant person.  The moon climbed to its apex and had begun its descent into the west by the time she paused upon a eminence and waited for him.

“If not north, where do you go?”  He said nothing, drawing a hand across his nape and turning his head slowly in sympathy with flesh worked hard since the first days of an early spring.  “When you meet Sachiin, speak of me to him.” she murmured, reminding him of those ironic debarments preventing her from conversing with his brother while saying nothing on his own lowly account.  

The moon met the serrate horizon as they came to a line of abraded cliffs, its dry, fluted, wind-carved divagations an echoing maze for the unwary.  As a discreet conduit to the bai'issātvas' northernmost theatre of operation, it had been favoured by the priestesses for millennia despite being haunted by the cackling, esurient shaitani cast down from the mountains.  Nyāti led him into a crevice barely wider than his shoulders and far darker than the night outside, their footfalls rasping softly in the sand.  It expanded sinuously into a slim ravine, banded walls dimly limned in charcoal grey and violet; at its widest point the sky was glimpsed once more between the overhanging stone, the stars like macula on the black skin of some cosmic archetype.  He examined their familiar arrangements in preference to the tall, swathed figure awaiting them beside a boss of sandstone, its textural qualities reiterated in the plain weave of her mantle.  The glowing pallor of the robes beneath were scarcely distinguishable from the person of the wearer, their hands transfigured into emblems of her station by the symbols scarred into the backs of their palms.  They impressed Kala'amātya blackly, stamped over the earliest of his conscious memories, and he felt himself once more a reviled subject.  Nyāti left him to receive instruction from her mentor, spanning the distance between the parties in a sanitary measure, between the sacred and the walking depths of desecration.

“Ana'siām'ilye would know if the foremost among bai'issātva can tell us something of this past season.” she told him. 

​“I am foremost?” he asked.  

Nyāti turned to hear her sovereign’s reply.

“Is it not harmonious that something born to transgress might excel all others in such matters?” she related.

“The rain has failed to the south and east.  We have had hard work to clear these southern i'ss’it, even from the driest places.  They bring their litters and their animals, and they mean to stay.”

“And it is true that you kill more than you ever have?  And though you leave their heads and skins as warning, still more i'ss’it will come as soon as the snows permit?”

“You seem already satisfied of this.”

Nyāti strove to uphold the formality her position required, raising her hand in a careful gesture that regained his attention.  Ana'siām'ilye overruled her tact by folding back her veil and looking to him directly, her distaste for the measure related in its execution. 

“What would you say of your time as bai'issātva?” she asked.

“No one has ever asked if I did like or dislike anything, and I can offer no opinion.”

His reply seemed to delight her.

​“Kala'amātya... was I not wise, to know you for what you were?  When you left your mother’s body and lay upon the ground it was your silence, as much as any sign, that apprised me of your nature.” the priestess admitted, watching him receive the news with familiar impassivity.  “With all I know of you... and I know more than you imagine... I greatly regret that you would not accept reform... in you, there is so much that is lost to us.”  Between them, Nyāti listened with the discretion in which she had been so stringently instructed.  “Are you not weary of execration?  If you could walk again beside your brother, your mother... be promised to a high-born wife and know her children will regard you as worthy of their mother... if you could be known by the name that you were given, and not that which was hung about your neck... would you not think yourself favoured?  Out of my great love for our people, and of harmony, I have chosen our daughter Nyāti as a wife for you.  Under her auspices, you will be guided and reconciled.”

Even in his armoured heart her words burned like stone under the summer sun.  The sight of Nyāti standing without interceding only intensified his disbelief; though they were the same age, the brilliance of her youth was barely cowled by the austerity required of her.

"You would have me?" he asked her, deeply disquieted, looking back to Ana'siām'ilye's implacable features.

“She would set aside a great deal more than vanity to please us.” the priestess replied on Nyāti's behalf; still the naked elements of the proposal encircled him, no more real for the reiteration.

“I thought my sins as certain as your judgement.”

​“Who are we to cherish or abhor an absolute?  In entailing your birth so heavily, the Fates were tempering you for a long-intended purpose, merely obscure until now.”  From within her robe the priestess drew a piece of fraying bronze silk, roughly cut and tied.  She lay the object on the sand, returning her hands to her garments while Nyāti bore the bundle to Kala'amātya, in keeping with his threat to consecration; a smell rose from its depths, a murky, burnt and writhing green assault from which he turned his head.  “There are three places where the water rises on the plain.  Divide this compound between them.”  He glanced down into the fabric and examined the substance for himself.  It was shifting and dully farinaceous, molded by the silk then falling open with the movement of his hand beneath it, exhaling another taste of its appalling potency.

“Everything that draws breath lives by these wells.” Kala'amātya reminded them.

​“As do these i'ss’it, who will whelm us in the summers counted on a single hand.  We could not keep them at bay if we were all to pass our lives in putting them to death.  Do this thing… they will not return, and you will be reborn to us.”  

Kala'amātya considered the two women with equal emphasis, his wonder at Nyāti's abnegation balanced by the pedagogue's consummate cynicism, its shape reared like a tulpa, faceless and commanded.

"Ana'siām'ilye... if you wish me to poison the wells, ask it of me plainly." he told her.  When she demurred, he set the poison at her feet and turned to leave.  The elder priestess turned to her remaining companion.

"The Mother smiles on you today, as ever." she promised.  "Had you been bound to that worthless, soulless waste of skin, I would have thought us all accursed."  She began her slate-black anathema, ensuring he could not depart without its sonorous commencement in his ears.  “Anamān, called Kala'amātya, you are nameless and forgotten.  Give up your life and on your dead feet walk into the South until you meet the water from which you may not return...”

Nyāti went swiftly after him in her determination that no rash impulse would prevail.

“The poison will find the wells without you...” she whispered at his shoulder, keeping pace with him.  “Your family cannot speak to this... it will fall on them as surely as it falls on you.”

If her entreaties gave him pause there was no sign of it.

​“When you become Sthali'sātva, these things will no longer trouble you.” he told her.

Kala'amātya found his horses watered and in harness by the time he walked back into camp, the neat brown features of his erstwhile partner regarding him from behind a narrow pipe loaded with hashish, her dry white hair tied in a plait over her spotted brow.  His train had been redoubled by the ancient bandit's thickly-hirsute camels and piebald dzo, all heavily laden, bells chiming on collars of red leather and woven hair.  I’Tiang-na heaved herself onto her feet from the hearth and began to douse it with sand, her few remaining teeth, carefully blackened, emerging with the deep squint that she turned on him.

“Kala'amātya...” she began, taking a contemplative tone.  “Should I think now that you have finished with this foolishness?”

He threw a water skin over the neck of his red horse and climbed up into the saddle.

“It has finished with me.” he muttered.  “You have water for two days?”  She nodded briefly from her own horse.  “Take nothing from the wells.  I will meet you by the Kali ford.”  

She took the pipe from her teeth and leant over the pommel.

​“With all this new wisdom, you must have a mind to take a house in Paršvãb for the winter!” she called after him.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce


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


Photoessay: 2016/17 Summer Garden Shots

26/4/2017

 
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Many people labour under the misapprehension that you have to have a conventionally amazing garden to enjoy plants or have a nice outdoor experience.

Our garden may be large but its a long way short of the kind of manicured porn-type situations you see on tv and other, fancier blogs; its more like a doss house for both the plants that take my fancy and the ones we're too lazy to weed out. 


Looking at these shots, it's sometimes difficult to picture how they could be part of a messy or indifferent landscape but believe me, it's possible.  We've never had the money for large scale landscaping and I doubt we would be inclined to make those wholesale changes even if we did, preferring to devote our time and admiration to the individual players rather than the entire facility.
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So don't be put off getting things started if you don't have some sort of grand baronial vision.
Just let what's there remain and add some more stuff as you go.  This is the best way to
maintain a love relationship with a large bit of ground and not come to resent the slavish
efforts that whack notions of perfection will require from you.


​That's not to say that our garden is a disgusting place to be; on the contrary, it has the sort of faineant, deshabille charm that can only come from a genuine lack of consideration, experience and forethought.  I am never as bonelessly relaxed in a neat, deliberate garden as I am in our own shambolic tract of half-arsed wilderness.  Hopefully the other inhabitants are similarly contented.
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The only horticultural talents I can claim are the ability to spot the half-priced gold buried
amongst the shrivelled dross at nursery sales (an acquired skill) and to instinctively know which shit's worth getting out of bed for as far as species and variety are concerned.  

But we don't have a lot of undue concern for vistas or harmonies. My rose collection looks
like it ​was sharted out of a My Little Pony- if it's vulgar or stripy or pink and stinky you'll
​probably find it clashing violently with a neighbour at our place.  It's safe to say that
​Winchester Cathedral, posing so demurely
 directly below, is not completely representative.
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If you're starting your own garden with few to no clues under your belt, or if, like me, you have been blessed with vulgar sensibilities but would like to present a more cultivated face to the world, my first and most important advice would be to stick with the older plant varieties.
​
​I wish someone had told me that twenty bloody years ago.
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You can't really fuck up a quarter acre of Old Roses or a courtyard full of heritage perennials.  They've lasted this long in cultivation precisely because idiots can't easily kill them and their aesthetic values are robust enough to withstand the trifling tides of fashion.  And they're the kinds of plants you can score a start or sucker of from friends and old public plantings such as graveyards etc.

<  Example: this is Tuscany, a ancient Gallica rose and one of the oldest still in general use.  In its first year it has doubled in size and flowered quite profusely despite indifferent sun exposure, a gross wet season and competition with nearby tree roots.  It flowers once a year, but in return requires virtually nothing from you and will grow in positions that would defeat 80% of modern varieties.  Gallicas have taught me that valuable lesson about old plants generally being good plants
.
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I was going to start a rose review series this summer but the weather was so foul we barely
had any bloody material.  Hopefully I'll have time over winter to cook up some notes with
the few decent shots we did manage and kick that shit off, because I've personally had it up to
my tits with being duped by shady breeder and nursery descriptions.

Thanks again to the Lovely R for his lovely pics.
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*   More vegetable goodness   *   Photoessays   *   Selected Ravings   *   Kitchen Bitch   *


Monday slash Tuesday slash Four Fucking Years of Blogging like I have nothing Better to Do

25/4/2017

 
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This is the first thing I ever posted to this blog and that was four years and three days ago.

Which is a fairly long time.  Blogs are like companion animals in that you have to feed and look after them and generally give a shit if you want them to live, though it's hard to decide what constitutes a vital sign.  

Is it the size of your audience?  I get, on average, about a thousand looks a day; I think my biggest day was over three thousand.  That feels sort of alright for an non-promoted, noncommercial site that won't fuck for clicks, but whatever; maybe it's pathetic and all the cool people on snapchat have trilliony billions of views and this blog is a sad little bitch sitting at home licking the last ice-cream off the lid because nobody loves it.  You decide. The only time I was ever particularly surprised or chuffed by my figures was back when R proudly announced at I'd had fifty clicks a day for a whole week.  I still think of it in allegories like the whole open mike night in a shitty club thing- you'd be happy and in all honesty stoked to the tits with fifty people not leaving
 and even making the effort to look up from burning their names into the tables with their cigarettes or privately reviling their companions.
As for the future, your guess is as good as mine, constant readers.  We started this thing in what felt like a ghostly prelude to the skanky juices that have hit the fan now.  The unpopular theory about depressives just being more attuned than your average flesh unit to the smoke from social and environmental rubbish fires looks a little less nutty these days, doesn't it?  Not that everyone finally seeing the tyres burning in the darkest heart of the landfill feels prescient or vindicatory.  It doesn't.   I feel... nothing, really.  Perhaps not nothing; more like a strange, vacated calm.  It was interesting to see, at a very large extended family gathering a little while back, how sort of stunned and subdued a lot of formerly loudly oblivious types had become.  They were quieter.  Drinking less.  Listening, even.  There's less judgement toward outliers from their densely conventional nexus since it has taken such a structural battering.  I think the world has really bitten a lot of previously insulated people hard on the arse for the first time.  How does that feel, I wonder?  Depressives spend their whole fucking lives trying to adapt to the pendulous bodyweight of inky disaster; it's not news to us.  Maybe someone should put us in charge.    
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Blogularly, the impact of net neutrality circling the drain in the US looms large.  Of course it's repulsive corporate piracy and will possibly relegate sites like this to cobwebby oblivion.  But both R and I view this site as more than just a flea market table for our most presentable ideations; sharing knowledge and observations is a responsibility that falls to the people who have the time and ability to do so, and we take that seriously, given the cesspit of stinky mental garbage we're all forced to wade through online.  Neither of us would have made it this far into our lives without all the many people who have cared enough to share their private commonalities, both homely and exotic, and shit they learned to do the hard way, whether through music, text or visuals.  
​

The internet should not be the exclusive domain of ratchet narcissists, neckless racists (who should study that familial group shot in good light before wanking on about endogamy) and unsavoury Youtube cat maniacs (it does something cute, or it gets the hose again).  We might be a wee bit ratchet, somewhat neckless and quite unsavoury, but we don't trowel our eyebrows on in the morning*, fuck our cousins** or pimp our associate animals for likes***.

The Blackthorn Orphans.  Dripping homemade syrup on a world of shit since 2013.  It's black so it might not show up very well, but we hope you can taste it.
 

* any more
** to the best of our knowledge
*** Felix is all like say my name, bitch.  It's his idea.
Still love this album.  And this is the perfect version of this song only it has to be a lot louder than your device will probably allow.  

Nasty nostalgia ne plus ultra.
  Inspiration, going forward.

liked this winning pic by Will Burrard-Lucas

23/4/2017

 
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​great Hyena shot
one of the Sony World Photography award winners in the G

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Leviathan 6

21/4/2017

 
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Their guest fulfilled his narrow mandate with all the mute impersonality that he could have wished.  Demanding directions along the freeway, William drove them into the darkness of an affluent hinterland stretching away from the city and its northern hills, where the night grew cooler, scented with the discarded foliage of roadside trees and freshly-clipped lawns.  Bede confided the fact of their imminent arrival quietly, Susan glancing up at his melancholy profile in the rear view mirror as the Jaguar left the seal for a neat gravel drive, the half-naked crowns of lissome silver birches meeting overhead.  It widened out into a turning circle before the terraced steps and chalk-white porch of a mighty neoclassical facade, sky-bound columns sheltering a glossy black door and lampless fanlight.  She leant forward, gazing at its immensity through the windscreen.

“Christabel, please stay here." William entreated.  "You don’t want to get into this.”
"No, I don't." she agreed heartily, folding her arms as he kicked open the door.  "Don't start anything..." she called after him.

Having laid her head against the rest, Susan opened her eyes when darkness proved too encouraging to the images from Gideon's telephone, looking once more to Bede with the aid of the mirror.

"He thinks you knew about Rana." she told him presently, the remark reflected back at her by the windscreen and sounding slightly more accusatory than she had intended.  He looked down at his legs.

"I can only apologise... I had no idea that she... I mean, that you..."

​"Just... never mind." she sighed, passing the pendant at her neck through her fingers and staring up at the portico into which William had disappeared.  Certain subtle alterations to Bede's expression were relayed by the mirror; his features possessed a curious cast, intensively familiar and yet estranged, its difference from his remaining kin as small as those between her own two hands.  She glanced back at him.  "Can you hear them?"
"I can."
"How bad is it?"

He surprised her by allowing the impetus that troubled them both to remove him from the vehicle.  Susan dragged herself out after him and they climbed the steps together, Bede pausing beneath the fanlight to consult her.

“I can assure you that this is likely to be neither attractive nor prolonged, so perhaps you'd prefer to stay inside.... I'll send him back for you.”  

She nodded, and he made his way alone across the steppe of black and white tessellation flooring the enormous formal hall.  It confronted her with naked and remorseless scale in lieu of furnishings; she looked up into the chandelier, its alien, lead-crystal galaxy chiming softly in the midst of the ivory vault with the breeze that had accompanied her inside.  Walking forward, she aligned herself with its nadir so that the tear-shaped terminal would have crashed into her forehead had it fallen from its chain, its arrangements' occult perspective filling her stomach with a swooping, silver-hued nausea, her eyes with clades of artful stars that were replacement at least for the broken, streaming horrors of the hahdri.  Wandering on, she found the rear doors opened to another glowing stone terrace and a plain, elongate acre of new-mown meadow that immersed her in its ponded ether, the colossal tulip trees on either side casting off their canopies of clear, untroubled gold where they depended over the field.  A table and chairs had been set at the edge of the drift and Susan found their almost abstract remove immediately familiar.

In William’s first language the sound of anger was as fluent and uninhibited as the emotion itself, his voice relating grievance with the speed and address that his hands might have conveyed a more tangible offensive.  Bede sat at the table with his back to the trees beside the target of his invective, the latter standing before the chair she had vacated.  The stranger enjoyed the same stature as her accuser, the same lengthy composition, though still more elegantly made and as luminously indifferent as if she had been wrought of relict ice.  She wore a fall of loose black hair, sleekly reflective like blackened plate, and a tunic dress of Japanese red; the colour gained such drenched, electric intensity beside the bare skin of her arm that the contrast shifted Susan’s eyes to the objects on the table, a black phone and a tumulus of knuckle bones, from which a soft gilt had been worn away. 

William seemed to see nothing in her but the genesis of his objections.  The stranger replied, apparently unmoved, the words glittering in her voice like the hueless crystal of the chandelier, the conflict escalating until its incisive syllables prompted Susan to press her hands to her ears, drawing William’s gaze and returning him to English.  

“Nyāti... you have known me my whole life... you know Rana better than I do!  She is a violent fucking lunatic... she's the worst shit that's ever come down on us... what did you think she was going to do?  Talk it over?"  

Despite the fervent nature of his objection it was Susan’s stare that turned Nyāti around.

“What is this?” she inquired, after a cursorial inspection.  She imparted scorn with eyes of spotless yellow, set too far distant from each other in a face so full of harrowing, animal extremity that Susan wondered how discretion or apparel or even secluded privilege could have protected her; beside her, William represented drift from the ideal that she embodied to such a daunting degree of perfection.  She wore no jewel, no superfluous token of the distinction that was more native to her flesh than even the black totems begun at the base of her throat, their tattooed figures disappearing beneath her dress.  “Your companion animal, I presume?  Avi'ashān has also acquired one... he would keep it in his sleeve if it would fit, but it does not.  If I had told you of Rana, you would have run from her.” she said finally.  

"Kali'niyah.... I've earned the right to run from her!”

“This entitlement of yours... is it license to disavow any of us?  Your brother, for instance, should he challenge you too persistently?  Or does it only repudiate inconvenient spouses once you’ve expended their last atom of regard?  Help me grasp the intricacies of your argument.”  

William laughed bitterly.

“If this was a fucking argument I would have won by now.”
"Your failings are not my concern, Sachiin.  Or they would not be, if you did not leave them standing on my lawn.”  Nyāti drew her chair and sat back down.  "We have nothing, if not each other."  Bede looked as though he might address them, but William leapt on the visible impulse.
“Now you want to talk?  Too fucking late.  Just sit there like a little bitch.”  

Nyāti glanced up at his remark, visibly offended.

“I have never cared for that term.”
“It would piss me off too if I had to wake up to it every fucking day.”
“I object to the notion that Avi'ashān has been overly deferential... on the contrary.  He's busied himself with the kind of indiscriminate promiscuity of which you might be proud."
"So now he's my bitch..."
"Do not presume to stand and speak to me.  You may sit, or you may leave."

When Susan refused the seat he offered her, William dropped into the chair before their hostess and leant heavily on his elbow, the posture claiming almost half the table top and defeating the deference she had sought to exact.

"If my brother gets hold of Rana he will kill her all over again."
"I could accuse Kala'amātya of many things, but he appears at least to have learned from his own unfortunate experimentation.  I regret you could not absorb the lesson yourself."

Susan and William looked to one another ruefully.

"Ny, I think I should stop you right there..."
"I'm certain you would like nothing more." she snapped, the two recommencing their unintelligible arraignment until Susan lifted her own voice to surmount it.

“Just stop gobbing at each other!” she exclaimed.  “Whatever this is, really... I don't care..."  William opened his mouth and she silenced him with a gesture.  "But Edward's not as sorted as you think he is, believe me.  And if you knew about Rana and didn't say anything, for god's sake... were you being evil or stupid?  She's a nutter!"  She lit one of William's cigarettes, drawing deeply as she rubbed at the bruise on her forehead.  "We had a right to know she was here."  

​"I myself have a right to privacy and anonymity, as do Avi'ashān and Kala'amātya." Nyāti assured her.
"If Rana hadn't tried to take her arm off, you'd still have your fucking privacy." William hissed.  "But thank you for forcing my hand.  Christabel..." he called, leaning back in his chair toward her as she walked away, muttering to herself.
"I've had enough rubbish for one night.  I'll be out in the car.”
"I want you to hear this."  
"William, I told you, I really do not care..."  
“I'm perfectly aware that your discretion has gone the way of most things you’re entrusted with.” muttered Nyāti.
“I just want you to hear it from me.  Yes, I've jumped Susan in, and yes, I've told her everything, pretty much.  Every time something drops into my head, boom, out it comes in triple X detail... sha'a'inii'tra.  It feels... stupéfiant, incroyable... and no, I’m not sorry.  She's already picking up the language and yesterday, I touched my eyeball with my tongue right in front of her.”  He smiled at Susan, who reciprocated faintly; Nyāti too gazed at her, his anecdote bleaching her stare until its inhumanity became a nauseous, almost chemical imposition.  

​"Why not douse yourself in kerosine and declare yourself the messiah?" she suggested blackly.  His expression altered slowly from the smile that Susan understood into something more subtly articulate, though still guileless as it was directed at his adversary, remaining brilliantly persuasive.

​"Il kama sai'inae..." he sighed.  "I am so happy, Nyāti... and I am still your favourite, so be happy for me.  I promise not to tell anyone."

Nyāti's reply seemed so measured that Susan almost forgot to take offence, even when the latter looked back at her as though she were completely insensible

"She seems such a childish gesture, Sachiin... like a bad tattoo.  When you’ve forgotten her name and she’s ceased even to decompose, witless girl number twenty-six will stand there, baffled by my hostility while you carp in this same manner.   And what can she expect from you?  Eighteen months of your undying devotion, until someone drags her into a van, if she doesn't go to the authorities of her own accord.  And who could blame her?  If she devoted her last breath to you, you would still belong to us."  She watched his attention extend across the park toward the house and through its empty fastness.  “I can only add that in your need to disseminate this wonder, you neglected to inform your brother.”

Susan's arms fell from their folded guard.

"I'm glad we've not been introduced, because I've just got horrible bitch stuck in my head now." she told William, tossing a hand at their hostess; he rose from the table and murmured a distracted reply.  "Lovely to meet you..." she called over her shoulder, scowling questioningly at him as he walked her back toward the bank of moon-white steps and Anakim columns, a breeze raining spent leaves from the trees onto the turf as they strode past.  "What?" Susan demanded, the inquiry echoing about them in the enormous hall as she struggled to keep pace.  They sat down together in the car before he replied, pausing in engaging the ignition wires to hand her the phone from his pocket.
"If anything happens, don't go home... call Auberjonois..." William advised gravely, speaking as though they might be overheard; she looked up at the sound of a vehicle coming at speed toward them along the birch-girt way, black and lampless as it took shape between the pale boles, whispering profanities as she recognized it.
"William..."
"I know..."

She threw herself across the console and stamped his foot down on the accelerator with her own.  Their undercarriage collided with the lowest step and sparked as it dragged free, the Jaguar forcing the incoming sedan from the curve of the drive and pelting it with gravel as they sped past.

Out in the park, Bede rose to intercept their latest guest; Edward's aspect was dragged closer to Nyāti's by unexpurgated wrath, his anger bearing him across the lawn like something she had summoned from an underworld.

"Avi'ashān." she called, recalling the latter's attention.  “When you told of Sachiin’s indiscretion, you neglected to detail your own, which astonishes me less than his fidelity to you, given the circumstances.  I renounce you, with Kala'amātya as my witness.”  Edward sat down in his vacated chair.  “Enjoy your liberty.” she added.  Bede looked back at her in the wordlessness that remained to him, then departed in accordance with her will.  

“I'd repudiate Sachiin, but I would rather beat him with a tyre iron.” Edward told her, voice full of vicious qualities as he pushed a hand back over his hair; he gazed at her with unmodified intent.  "Rana." he said simply, forcing it on them both.

"She barely knows the sound of her own name.  But doubtless, you will serve her now as you once did."

"As she did de Marchand."

“Your witch is dead, and the dead require nothing more from us, which is why we cherish them so unreasonably." Nyāti informed him.  "Sachiin claims full disclosure to this girl.  Given your own history of calculated transgression, I find your failure to perceive his difficult to accept.”

“We don’t answer to each other.” 

​"And now we must all enjoy the exhilarating fruit of this laissez-faire approach.  If he is not forced to watch her die on the side of a road, she will have succeeded only in enduring long enough to be abandoned.  Kala'amātya...” she sighed.  “You live still with your own loss... keep him from the same, while there is time.  There is nothing he would not forgive you.”

He looked into the trees behind her.

“Forgiveness is far more complex than it appears from a distance.”

“Will he forgive himself when someone is beating everything she knows from her?”  His own experience laid out all she had described, bringing the elements forth like votaries to the god of possibility, faceless and infinite and bitterly familiar.  She drew the gilded bones into her hand and turned it over, letting them spill back onto the table in a new arrangement.  “One day he will be grateful to you for taking her death from his shoulders.  If it were not for the times, I would say that it falls to your honour.”  If Edward did not feign deference, he at least received her arguments with something resembling stoicism.  “You are bai'issātva, and death is your gift... to those who fall to you, and those that survive them.”

“They are never grateful.” he observed.  “He’ll hate the both of us, and have no one.  So sit there and ask me to kill her.”  The words turned like a hidden blade, drawn unseen in the shadow of her argument; he watched her recall them from elsewhere, satisfied that they had served him.

​“It is the lesser evil.” she asserted.  "But, do as you please.  You know nothing else." 

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

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Programming note

19/4/2017

 
Lots of construction and design stuff happening, peeps, so I don't have time to post much this week.  Normal shizniz resumes next monday.  In the meantime...
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Excellent Photoessay in the Guardian: Chadar, the end of the Ice Road on this little-known winter river route in the Himalayas. ​Mateusz Waligóra and Michał Dzikowski

liked, or rather was traumatised by this character design by Christian Girotto

17/4/2017

 
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I will still eat blueberries, but they will probably taste different from now on

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The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Leviathan 5

14/4/2017

 
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A tiny and impossibly elderly Algerian woman led them from a door with a closed sign in its glass through an upturned forest of bentwood legs, to a bistro table simply laid for one.  The lone diner rose from his confit de canard, riz rouge and fougasse to greet them, and their maîtresse shuffled back into the quiet kitchen in her slippers.  Gideon Auberjonois was not entirely as he had been inside his photograph and the disparities surprised Susan, though she strove to conceal it, smoothing down her disordered hair and dress after she had shed her bloodied coat.  He was neither tall nor otherwise as he pressed a kiss to each of her cheeks, his face as warm as hers but almost atavistic in the pronouncement of its features, their bossed and dramatically pagan structure recalling the carven masks of imps and green men amid ecclesiastical oak.  He was so strongly made beneath his clothing that the impression almost defeated its notional modesty, his hair dark and short and half-curling, his skin a henna brown by virtue of both the summer sun and his southern blood.  

"Mademoiselle." he smiled.  "Ça va?"  He indicated with a discreet turn of his hand the state of their clothing, and they replied with the same weary expression, dragging out chairs on either side of him.  Pouring them each a glass of robust white, Gideon sat down to resume his late repast and turned to Susan eyes of deep, impure green, like the ore of some obscure metal, inviting if not rewarding interest.  Three rings of battered gold clasped his tanned fingers; a chain of the same metal hung from the breast pocket of his suit, a rustic shade of heather and doe that struck a careful balance with the atelier finesse of its construction.

​Between mouthfuls of tender confit he conducted a leisurely, serialized survey of his erstwhile acquaintance, his private smile growing in inverse proportion to William's frown as he chewed thoughtfully.  The latter pushed a cigarette between his lips and sought his lighter amid the black bulk of his coat but Gideon leant forward and plucked it from his mouth, sliding it into his own pocket.  Presently he turned and began to appraise Susan in the same unhurried fashion, her features, raiment, and the fading red marks on her face offering the conversation she did not, William slouching back in his chair until the frame complained beneath his weight.  Susan perceived his umbrage and looked down at the table to contain her impolitic amusement; their host leant slightly toward her, directing the fork poised at the edge of his plate toward their scowling companion. 

"It is good, no, that we have so much in common?" Gideon observed, lifting the napkin to his chin.  A faint scar that began in his hair quartered his forehead and followed his nose downward before turning out over his upper lip.  He edged a bowl of fat black olives toward her with his elbow.

"I'll let you know." she chuckled, glancing with him across the marble at the subject of their exchange.  
"Comment allez-vous?"
"I just got the shit kicked out of me by fifty barking arseholes at the Moth."

Their host shrugged, scooping up a forkful of rice.

"I don't think they ah, try too hard."  William's face darkened further and Gideon set down his utensils, smiling at him fondly.  "Allez, mignon... fais pas ta pute... I come all this way for your smile.  How long has it been?" he sighed.
"Eighteen years."
"You remember?"  Gideon shrugged again.  "I forget."  He nodded at Susan.  "I don't think she was born.  Have a drink, eh?"  Raising his glass, he successfully cajoled William into doing the same.
"Nique la police." the latter murmured as a toast, and they drank together, Susan swallowing the wine gratefully though she found dried blood on the hand she wiped across her mouth.

"I have something for you." said Gideon, reaching under the table for a shopping bag from which he drew a trio of plump, plicated lotus buds on thick green stalks, blush-pink and wrapped in a stripe of brown paper.  Though he enjoyed William's suspicion, he was more delighted by the involuntary darkness of the latter's eyes as he accepted them, watching him lift a heavy bud and bite cleanly through the fleshy bloom.  “It's true that he has told you of himself?” Gideon inquired of Susan.  His manner was a strange blend of confidence and insinuation, his eyes neglecting no element of her response.
“You mean about...”
"Oui.  About.  I see.  An he tells you of us?”
“Ouais.” said William, setting down his flowers.  “I gave you all up like a perdishus fucking snakeface.”  

The frenchman looked back to Susan, somewhat wistful.

“One hundred years before he would confide such things to me.”  
“Well what the fuck, Auberjonois... next time try some fucking smalltalk before you rip the pants off someone.” 
"Always so charming.  Enfin... how did you meet?  I ah, can't imagine."
"I'm... was... the housekeeper."  Susan admitted.  The intelligence returned the smile to Gideon's face and it urged her to further disclosure.  "It's hard to believe at the moment, but he was... I couldn't quite say charming, more... persistent.   Are you here on holiday?" 
"Sadly, no... commerce."
"Don't let him snow you with his fucking Pepé le Pew bullshit, Christabel... he's not out here kissing babies, he's a dirty fence and he's dumping a bunch of looted shit too hot to drop in the E.U." William informed her, picking his teeth.  "Blackmarket antiquities.  If you can rip it off, he can turn it around for sixty percent."
"Sachiin's collection of course is sans reproche, particullérement the things he would like me to buy from him... they don't go to sales because, like him, they are shy.  So, Guillaume... what do you have for me?"
"Christ, I've sent you the list twice... pull the fucking dicks out of your ears.  Ed'll probably take a cheque but I want cash."
"In that case, I will come to the house an look for myself."

Gideon's smile remained complaisant as he turned to her again.

​"Do you know, Sussan, that in the homeland of these creatures, a rainbow, it is viewed as a calamity... a certain sign of doom?”  She looked to William, who had sat back from the table with his flowers.  “I remember once... Sachiin come to the house from the parterre to tell me I must gather my horses an leave this place at once.  He had such a look of great dismay I could not think what had happen... I ask, the magistrate, he comes to collect taxes?  No, he says... it was worse... a great arc-en-ciel had appeared over the park.  When I laughed an told him many, many rainbows have come here with the rain out of the west, he look at me with his great green eye an said... an yet, you abide here still?"  He laughed to himself, warmed by the recollection, and Susan chuckled behind her hand, accepting another glass.  “I ask myself... Auberjonois, why do you go on with these creatures?  They are rude, they have no hospitality at all... they are trés égoïste, intéressé, déroutant... lucky for them they are quaint.  You don’t like that story, Sachiin?” Gideon inquired artlessly.  "I have others."  He tisked at William's attendance to his phone.

"I'm looking for Caleb.  It's fucking important."

"Caleb, du hahdri Adrahna?"  William glanced up at the tone of the inquiry.  "You ah... you don't know?"

Leaning down into his briefcase, Gideon found his own phone and devoted a moment to its library of images before pushing it across the table toward his guest, who glanced at him in a moment of uncertainty before consulting the screen himself.  The initial image was a flashed nocturnal snapshot of the towering gate fronting the familiar hahdri.  In the next, its sagging cottages loomed like ghost ride props out of the rural darkness, mutely presaging floodlit scenes of infernal, eye-gouging carnage complete with hand-held catalogue numbers and piebald reference scales laid out in each corner, the leavings of a frenzy framed by the homely plank walls of a large barn.  Sweat-darkened animals lay both in suffocating drifts and randomised disorder, their heads and flanks spotted with bullet holes, throats gaping, some of them decapitated by the force used to dispatch them upon beds of golden hay and sawdust.  The horrific files continued, documenting the yard around the barn, where resident males had paid for the savagery of their last stand about a battered utility with their heads and limbs.  In the cab of the vehicle lay the darkly-spattered bodies of a brunette woman and two young children, the latter pressed into the foot well beside her legs, the hand-held glare documenting the calibre of weapon that had been trained upon them.

"Someone come to that hahdri and murder them... finis... everyone who live there.  These pictures are en ligne... someone post them."  Gideon pushed back slightly in his chair while they digested the news.  Susan dropped her hands from her face and beckoned for the phone, and William looked up, hesitating before passing it to her wordlessly, though she could not bear what she found and pushed it away.
"We were just out there." he said.
"Yes, I know..."  

Susan stood up suddenly, looked around and dashed toward the rest room door.  Gideon caught his arm and kept him at the table.  

"I tell this to you now because I care how people speak of you... it is known that you went to this hahdri..."  His expression concluded the statement for him, though William was already cognizant of its implications.  "It is thought that Prague sent cochon noir to this place to teach some lessons, and that your brother, he have a part in this.  Sachiin, I ask you once... oui ou non... does Kala'amātya serve?"  Susan's face held a sick shade of pale as she returned between the tables, her progress halted by the shadow framed in the glass of the entrance; Gideon gave no sign of surprise at the arrival though he sighed an expression of regret at its timing.  "Your cousin... he want very much to speak with you.  I thought it would do no harm." he confessed, raising a hand in a gesture of resignation as William shoved back his chair.

Bede retreated from the door that was dragged from his hand; both Gideon and Susan caught hold of William from behind, preventing him from lunging at the new arrival only by committing their last pound of weight to the effort.  

"Stop it!" she shouted.  "Let him speak at least!"  For a moment William looked as though he might concede, but no sooner had they let him go than he seized Bede's shirt and threw him along the footpath toward the Jaguar, shoving him over the door into the back seat.  Bede bore the treatment passively, petitioning him in their own language as he righted himself; William slumped down behind the wheel while Susan broke with Gideon, bidding him a hasty farewell.
​
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
​© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

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Photos du Jour:  Port Chalmers Represent- Fur Seals and Mushrooms

13/4/2017

 
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Young New Zealand Fur Seal Arctocephalus forsteri chillaxing by the 30 sign around Back Beach.  
She was a wee bit skinny and this isn't a regular haul out spot so we called DOC in case she was harassed by dogs etc.  They said she seemed okay and we didn't see her again.  NZ Fur Seal populations are recovering which is fantastic and it's great to know they are returning to old haunts like Otago Harbour.  

​The best way to tell the difference between a Fur Seal and the local Sea Lion is the former's pointy dog face as opposed to the latter's stouter bear schnoz.  
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Mushroom season.  These are Parasol Ink caps, I think.
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Ink Caps proper.  Lol.  Rando.
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Larch Boletes.  

​Unidentified Amanita shrooms, possibly.
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Monday slash Tuesday slash autumnal DIY  Idlehouse fence

11/4/2017

 
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Got my damn quince. 
​$5 for the whole bag, which is a relief given that my young tree did fuck-all this year and our quince jelly supply was starting to look tight.  Once you've started with that shit, nothing else will do and running low on those glossy pink jars full of fruity goodness feels like the last crumbs rattling around in your dime bag. Forsooth, it doth mocketh thy dependance.  Same with the fresh chillies for harissa: we are currently staring down the barrel of real-time spice paste insecurity.
But fuck it all, I am not paying $30 a kilo for that shit when it's peak season and people should begging you to take their heaving surplus.  So if you've got chillies you want to offload, get in touch. I'm deadly serious.  I'll totally pay you, just not, you know, unicorn placenta-type money.
In other news, after a shitload of procrastination, we've finally applied ourselves to putting up the Idlehouse fence- a first strike against the intensely boring and tedious procedural inertia that generally characterises the beginning of any building project.  

If you're thinking of DIYing something similar, please be aware that this is not how you do it.
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Our methods are unconventional.  Primitive.  Arse-backwards.  Retarded, even. Our skills are mad skills and not in a good way.  Our conceptual development consists of talking at cross purposes and heavily shitting on each others' crappily-drawn ideas.  Available materials are sort of picked up and looked over but somehow never meaningfully quantified.  By the time we've upped tools and gotten underway, the veteran nit-picking and next-level pettiness is threatening to derail the whole fucking project.  

​Practical shortcomings thicken the bitchy stew; I currently specialise in incorrectly measuring crucial items and R has not taking important observations on board down to an exquisite t.  That neither of us has murdered the other with a claw hammer in full view of passers by is a fucking miracle.  We usually need to get at least a third of the way through the thing before we stop wondering about whether we could afford to live alone (the answer is no).  

​In short, we are experts.
Don't do it our way.  Buy one of those laser sight doodads.  Go to the service station and buy nails before you get started.  Get a proper post hole spade or hire one of those giant  diggy screw things.  Find a level that isn't coated with concrete.  Don't spend half the day scooping dirt out of the bottom of the post holes with your bare fucking hands because you didn't want to make them properly wide enough for the shovel.  Don't position crucial shit using ye olde random squint-and-shrug technique, nor should you burden yourself with timbers of varying lengths and gauges, meaning your paling intervals will end up whacker than neoliberal social policy.

After 20-odd years of this, we've come to place our trust in three exculpatory principles. 1: that you can make fuck-ups and shortcomings visually acceptable with cunning retrospective improvisation.  2: that a wonky but functional handbuilt look is just as good, if not gooder, than expensive perfection.  And 3: that the cosmic goodwill accrued via repurposing salvage materials is the secret grease, the unseen glitter that makes everything cool in the end.  

This fence will be perfectly alright (that really is wide-angle distortion in the pics adjacent) and we'll have saved ourselves around $1500 in labour costs.  

​Oooh look, a native tree fuchsia flower.
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One of those awesome red-legged spiders, Nessus coloripes, came to chasten our presumptuous incursion.  It was totally badarse but then lost its nerve and ran away up the tree while we were getting the camera.
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The Paper Birch is dropping leaves that range in colour from burnt condensed milk to high-carat gold.   The Toad Lily is flowering (above) and the roses are rounding out a truly heinous fungal season by scrunching up their leaf buds into stunted little balls.  It's not cold yet, but it is getting a wee bit damp underfoot.
Not sure what else I'm posting this week due to aforesaid fence action: if it rains, I'll write.
Also: RIP the fucking magnificent John Clarke.  You may not have heard of him.  He was so viciously funny that he had to leave New Zealand (where long experience has taught us to dimly understand when we're being made fun of) for Australia (where it's always assumed the abject wankers at the heart of your tale are somebody else).  He made the world better for everyone and was instrumental in demonstrating to a younger me the awesome power and legitimacy of haute shit-ripping and pelagic deadpan.   There is nothing to fear but fear itself.
​
Finally, xylophone rampage for the win.  Gone Daddy Gone.  I am old, they are older, this is an old, old song.  Janky drug tip- get fucked up and then really bring the screen close to your face and stare at it unblinkingly when the stripy dress lady is doing her crazy dance.  

Happy Full Moon.

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liked this illustration by Rebecca Green

9/4/2017

 
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Rebecca Green

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Leviathan 4

7/4/2017

 
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On leaving the Jaguar parked in an adjacent alley William and Susan negotiated the refuse-clogged way outside the Black Moth, the latter pausing to stand beneath the alien-green neon of the titular insect and watch it fly in a halting arc toward the wall, where it was extinguished in a dry, static buzz.  The night sky pressed down upon the greening brick to either side, airless and opaque; a fat drip struck the fetid black pool inside a dumpster with a lonely, reboant note that made her queasily disinclined to linger.  He pressed a hand against a stretch of patched mortar and pulled back a trompe l'oeil partition when it sprang free, all the more convincing for having assumed the moist, shaded decrepitude of its surrounds.  She was not eager to follow him, moved to do so only by her greater reluctance to remain in the alleyway alone.

The door behind the panel hung on blackened strap hinges as wide as her thigh.  Though she found she could stand upright in the passage beyond, William was forced to assume a hunch in order to descend steps hewn from clammy bedrock, their treads worn concave beneath ponderous timbers butted overhead, so that the passage resembled the shaft of an abandoned mine.  A single naked bulb protruding from the wall like a waxy rhizome provided an uncertain light.  The chrome-like smell of groundwater seeping through the rock conspired with the impoverished air to turn her misgivings into physical discomfort.

“Now you know how the gerbil feels.” he suggested, leaning back against the wall and allowing her a view of the landing dimly apparent below.  She drew him back toward herself.  
“We need some sort of thing... I’ll... I'll touch my nose, if I want out.  Don’t forget.”
“Or you could just ask to leave."
“No!  I don’t want it thinking I’ve bottled out.”  
“Christabel, if it even looks at you the wrong way, I’ll rip its fucking head off.” he promised.  
“Please don’t ever do anything like that in front of me.” she whispered, then smiled, leaning closer to him in the darkness.  “But that did sound very butch.”  He bumped her with his hip, grinning, and they concluded their descent, Susan waiting while he pounded on another ponderous door.

It was hauled back on shrieking hinges and a pallid, knuckle-faced inmate shuffled forward to squint at them, affecting myopia in order to survey Susan intimately while it slathered a tube of panstick over its chin.  The creature stepped aside to allow them in, a flesh-coloured skull cap imprisoning what remained of its hair in the absence of a wig.  A terrible smell wafted from the lurid green satin of its housecoat.

“Heh... mighty nice a ye t’ git back th’ wernce after ah call ye three score fuckin tahmes.” Siobhan muttered, returning to a dressing table and seating its sagging frame upon the velvet stool.  Summoning the will to gaze at their surroundings, Susan found they stood inside a domed chamber almost the size of William’s bedroom, though it seemed much smaller in the stagnant darkness, the sloping walls daubed with lime and streaked here and there with gruesome splashes of brown.  The blue stone floor was intensely cold through the soles of her boots, as if sealing the pit of an obsolete hell.  A sooty encrustation marked the ceiling where it flickered orange over an iron candelabra, a floating aroid stink exuding from its icterical tapers.  The same candles stood on the crowded dresser, once the pride of some post-war debutante, sickly kitsch amid the shambolic herd of balding, uncouth colonial pieces, fashioned by farmers' sons in a twisted spirit of apathy and repression.  Nailed to the plaster were a trio of polyester rugs featuring white tigers disporting in a rainbow jungle and a band of Arab horsemen carousing through an oasis, the second identical to the third, but for a slight chromatic variation.  Their arrangement curled Susan's toes inside her shoes, as did the taste already forming on her tongue, of aged orange candy rolled in graveyard soil.  Siobhan’s wardrobe hung from a stand, the vintage gowns sagging like the freshly-flayed skins of alien fauna.  

The dresser mirrors returned a perfectly faithful, if gruesome, triptych of the creature, contrary to popular supposition, while it flicked dust from a pair of electric blue lashes and began their application.  William sat down on one of the daybeds, long arms lying in passive disuse on either side.  The vampyre devoted a jaundiced eye to Susan.  

“Thought ahd git meh a better fuckin look at lil White Dove, since ye seen fit t’ ella-vate her t’ the rank of kint say ye weren’t fuckin warned."  Its manifestly anaerobic state produced speech that was airless despite its rancour, the wingless observations flopping at her feet.

“I didn’t ask to be told if that makes you feel better." she replied.   

"S'at raght?  Guess every night's a fuckin hentai night now, aint it?" Siobhan smirked, warming to the subject.  "Mebbe ye kin riddle me this... rumour fuckin has it old Red here gits in t' double figures with his icy fuckin devil-wood... can ye con-firm or de-ny?"  William bit a loose claw from his fingertip and spat it onto the floor, shrugging at her narrow, pointed glance.  "An kin ye tell meh... do it blow hot or cold up there aginst ye chit'lins?"  It was visibly gratified by her wordless stare, and turned back to her companion.  “Fuckin lights look on, but there aint much home, ah'd sey." it chuckled.  "Used t’ be th' thing standin tween a cooter an ye private fuckin dealins was a edu-cational whuppin, but ah kin see ye aint raised a guiding fuckin hand t' this wern.” the vampyre complained.  “Ye gotta git em in th’ house an git em too full a child t' fuckin run.  Mah mammeh, she fed critters, cut corn, cook’d, chop wood an still bend over fer mah pappy when he durn whissle at her... only peep ye fuckin heared outta her were when she squit out another fuckin mouth t’ feed down bah th’ tater yard.”  Siobhan directed a thumb at Susan.  “Ye cud still set her on the path, an hev yeself a fuckin tahme into th’ bargin.  Even eight month gone, ah bet she still look thirteen from be-hind."  

Taking out a cigarette, William looked to Susan with a wide-eyed grimace, touching his nose repeatedly.  She pressed a dry smile into submission.

“You could have told me that on the phone.” he sighed.  Siobhan swore and ripped off its misplaced lashes, shaking its little bullet head; its mouth dropped open and its eyes wrinkled up into slits, and Susan watched in horror as something resembling a monstrous sneeze was propelled in her direction, a spray of cold, watery blood from its flared nostrils splattering her even as she jumped back.  The vampyre sat wracked by silent, gaping laughter at the sight of her expression.

“Did ah git ye?” it cackled hoarsely.  She stared down at the dark spots soaking into the suede of her coat.  “Are we gonna fuckin sit here lahk she aint a im-pediment t’ e-ffectual fuckin communication much longer, ‘cause yew surely aint th’ only shit ah got t’ deal with.”
“I’m not standing out there on my own.” she told them.
“She’s not standing out there on her own.” William reiterated.
“So ye fuckin what now?  Ye know bout everywern?” it demanded of her; she stood frustrated in her inability to command the silence as expertly as William, who sat as tacit and unreadable as the stone beneath her feet.  Siobhan circled its lips with orange gloss and precious little regard for physiological convention.  "This shit's got more fuckin gut-laughs than a wall-eyed re-tard with a flayin knafe... in-formin yer bitches... gittin chugged fer th' soshul pages, bein a degenerit fuckin drug fiend or de-jayin nekkid or some other hell-bound fuckin outrage... an ye jest hed t’ fuck that piece Opal were raisin up straight, then ye jest hed t’ put her in th’ river when it turn out about as good a idea as jammin ye dick in a fuckin hornet nest... brung untold fuckin shit down on us... rott’n po-lice... now ye gummin' them shitpumps from th' Old Side jest prior to 'em kickin down our fuckin doors..."  Tearing a glittering sheath from the rack of gowns, the vampyre dumped its robe and began struggling into the dress, tugging it over the bony little processes studding its sunken cadaver.  Breathing slowly, Susan moved toward the door, hoping for some merciful draft of sodden air from outside.  William lifted a hand against the sight of the creature's ensemblé.

“Siobhan, sequins are for the living.”
"Teh!  What kinda live bitch kin rock all this at wernce?  There aint one!" the vampyre retorted.  
"No one with a fucking dumpster full of missing minors and a don't-ask organ trade gets to tell me to tone it down."
"Heh heh heh, that's raght... ye don't git t'be older then Satan hisself without knowin how t' slap th' fuckin blame down on the rah-chus.  Now this cooch durn know us all by our first fuckin names, an a shit an a shave aint gonna help yew beat the fuckin line-up when she's durn yappin t' th' gover-mint!"
"Actually, I think I will stand out there on my own." Susan asserted, glowering at him beside the door.  
"Ye kin square ye fuckin tab b'fore ye go." Siobhan muttered, squinting harder as it slapped a cloud of powder onto its nose with a greasy puff.  
“We're having liquidity issues." William advised languidly.  "Opal ripped Ed Brazilian-styles, so have a fucking heart.”  
“Boo fuckin hoo.  That ol’ split-tail frauds her ‘sociates lahk a tick bites fuckin curs.  Aint no con-cern a mine." the vampyre observed, wiping a case of cocktail cigarettes from the dresser.  “Git ye asscheeks topside an settle up... ah'll tek what ye got on ye.  Aint none a us gittin any fuckin younger.”

No bouncers impeded their entrance to the Black Moth and Siobhan herded them past the doors and into the sticky, incorporated darkness, where Susan’s eyes took a while to interpret the sulky shades of sucking purple and swampy, decaying blue before she ceased to trip and stumble on the uneven floor and discarded glasses.  Leaning on their skeleton elbows, the habitués that propped the bar turned their hooded eyes on them; she glanced at William, then frowned up at the line of doubtful-looking spirits on offer overhead, settling uneasily onto a stool.  

“It all looks like it comes out of a dirty bath somewhere.” she muttered.  Her perspicacity wrung a smile from him that he turned to her in gratitude.
“How do you know this stuff, Christabel?”
“I used to think I was paranoid, but it turns out I'm not.”  

Her eyes fell a foot toward the mirror panel on the rear wall, seeking the source of her misgivings, and William briefly closed his eyes, leaning his forehead on his knuckles.

“I know..." he sighed.  "Just don’t turn around.”  She complied, forced to content herself with the reflected image in the thick, pin-dropping quiet.  The face of every stranger in the room had turned toward them, from the parched and bead-like stares of vampyres to the large party crowded about a cluster of tables against the far wall, candle-lit miens made red and shadowed black by the swaying flames.  They were silent beneath a pall of exhaled smoke, nursing their powerful green liquor, burgeoning hostility and the latent, half-inhumed equivalence in the darkness of their eyes that marked them all as kindred; Susan thought she recognized some from the hahdri, then guessed that she probably did not, perceiving that it was not their individuality that made them familiar.  She glanced back to William.  He muttered to himself and glared across the counter at Siobhan, dragging his keys and wallet from his pocket and depositing them in the crook of Susan's elbow in a gesture laden with weary fatalism.  The vampyre chuckled, pouring the sludgy brown contents from a hip flask of tarnished silver into a milkshake glass and topping it with stale champagne, creating a pink concoction lidded with pale yellow spume and sucking off the froth.  “I’m going to skin you before I chain you to my fucking hood.” William promised.

“Teh!  Kint do that!  We all family now, ye fuckin made sure a that!  This hoe maght as well beh the sister that kint fuckin outrun ye!”  The bargirls stared while Siobhan hunched further over the counter and referred a loud indictment to the gallery.  "You dummer-n-shit dogs need t’ git into ye heads he aint a fuckin rockstar just cause he kin gut a critter blindfold’d!  Nothin come easier t’ a perdishuss fuckin snakeface that got no moon or daylight nor drop a real blood t’ beh fuckin mahndful of... ye thought him cute up til t'day, but now ye fuckin knowest... he gave us all up fer a taste a fuckin weaner pussy, an if ye think what fell t' fuckin Caleb aint got shit t' do with them, yew all go right ahead an let 'em fuck ye dry, an don’t come crahin’ t’ meh afta’werd!”  

In the darkness behind them, the murmuring from the seated conclave died like a draft killed by a closed door.  William took his time over the dregs of hueless liquor at the bottom of his glass.  

"What about Caleb?" he muttered, receiving no reply from the smirking vampyre.

"What about Caleb?" sneered someone from the party behind them.  "Like he don't fuckin know."  William shook his head to himself, turning to address the restive alujha contingent as he shed his heavy coat.  

​"Mallet, are you even on my dick, because I had to ask your mother the same fucking question." he replied.  "And if you whiny alujha pricks stop sitting on your arseholes knocking back muppet-coloured horse piss, you wouldn't need my brother to do your fucking dirty work.”  He stood up off the stool, handing the Afghan lamb to Susan and cracking his neck to one side.  "Fuck it... who wants to go?"   

His foremost antagonist threw back his chair and his cohort surged across the dance floor in his wake, climbing over the tables and shoving aside the vampyres that had braved the degenerating atmosphere in the hope of witnessing just such a spectacle.  Mallet came at William without preamble, catching his shoulder and attempting to twist him onto the ground while Susan scrambled up onto the counter in an escape from the encroaching crowd, dismayed to find that Siobhan had also claimed the vantage.  The vampyre shucked up its skirts and gave a shrilling whistle of encouragement to the fracas unfolding below.  William knocked down, then hoisted the struggling form of his accuser from the floor in both hands and threw him into the crowd, seizing another contender and putting him head-first through the barstools into the counter as swift, reactive punches flew between the lycanthropes, their infective combat quickly extending to one another and any vampyre remaining in the throng.  Susan shouted herself hoarse, both hands to her mouth while he caught and punched a spray of teeth from the nearest stranger; blue strobes cut downward from the ceiling, turning the alujha stares into rounds of floating silver, casting them as whooping predators massed beneath her on some nocturnal plain.  The sight transfixed her amid Siobhan’s hacking cachinnations until the vampyre plucked liquor bottles from the rack over its head and flung them down into the fray; snarling, she punched both hands into its back and shoved it shrieking from the counter into the scrum below while William swung one of the fallen stools in a gruesome arc.  Its victims yielded a jagged stripe of blood that struck her as she jumped down herself, landing heavily against a knot of preoccupied belligerents, her boots crunching and sliding over broken glass as she squeezed through the crush.  

She was buffeted onto all fours as she caught William's belt and used it to haul herself upright, only to be flattened against him by two struggling neighbours, catching a flailing elbow to her brow and ear as she kicked a fallen stranger's grasp from William's legs and dragged him bodily toward the door.  A sudden emission of bitter white gas parted the impounding crowd, the substance hissing from the decrepit halon extinguisher clutched in Siobhan’s hands.  The little vampyre cussed as it cleared a path for itself toward the bar and left its victims to beat away the unwelcome pall, choking and grimacing. 

Susan held the neck of her dress to her face, stumbling through the haze with her companion.  She could feel the fractious, pyrogenic spirit struggling beneath his skin against containment when she grasped his arm; in the alley outside, he boosted her over the crumbling wall and scaled it after her, Susan climbing over the hood of the Jaguar to avoid the dumpster by her door.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

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RubyHue Lipstick Review:  OCC Vintage Lip Tar

5/4/2017

 
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A thin, finger-type application yields the ye olde, half-shadowed scarlet implied by its name.  It's quite clean and simple at this intensity.  Pile more on and it will take you deeper, dropping down into dramatic teak-burnished depths that set it apart from the basic-red herd and expand Vintage's appeal across the complexion spectrum.  It's not as overtly grungy as MAC VG 1 or Dubonnet, but that moderate dirty undertone means virtually anyone with the inclination can wear this colour successfully (it's more apparent on the lip and with a bit of wear than in swatches).

​Vintage turns your whole face into a lip situation, the sort of red that outcompetes/minimises dermal annoyances like broken veins and recent zit scars etc.  It retains the laid-back, mid-life vinyl sheen level visible in these images, a flattering lustre that emphasises lip architecture without making one look deranged or inflatable.  It's a classic stunner that I cannot fault, aesthetically speaking.  

And now for the bad news.

​Despite OCC's extremely commendable ethical stance (they're vegan and cruelty-free), I've disposed of a number of lip tars in impulsive disgust at their general performance.  The older tube stock is a bitch to apply, even with the quite-nice OCC brush, and necessitate an annoying level of brush hygiene.  I really don't know how the new doe foot applicator will do much better given the texture, but I haven't tried it yet.  That legendary pigmentation (and it is fabulous... except when it isn't) means controlling the intensity can be a frustrating exercise.  Different shades and even batches seem to offer wildly different performance; SuperNSFW was a stubbornly separated, underpowered mess, Traffic was a greasy, patchy nightmare and Electric Grandma?  That shit desiccated my lips like some sort of hungry vampire (peppermint oil can counterintuitively suck the life out of your lip skin).  

​As
you can probably see, this stuff is oil-borne, seriously liquid and virtually nothing you can do will change that.  Anything more than the lightest application will seep outward, smudging that hypermassive pigmentation into corners you didn't know you had and staining like fucking stigmata.
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It was probably dumb and certainly lazy of me to hold off reviewing an OCC Lip Tar until they repackaged the damn things.  But no reformulations were proclaimed so my observations are still relevant.  

I've long entertained a looove/haaaate relationship with this product.  Let's go with the positives first up.  Generally speaking, the shades themselves are nothing short of purring glamour in liquid form; I delight in their high drag quotient and unreservedly adore their indefatigable intensity.  

​Vintage is no exception, exiting the tube as a thick bead of deep, arresting sanguine.  It is a medium-dark; lightly smoked red.  A sunbaked blood red.  Chocolate cake smashed into raspberry sauce red.  I can't think of another iteration of this shade that delivers quite so much boiled-down, cacao-ruby goodness, except perhaps its stablemate, that mighty bitch Stalker.  
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Without hardcore priming, Vintage will absolutely bleed, whether you're young, old, wrinkly or pristine.  Check it out on my hand in the pic overhead; its already packed its bags and headed off in every diddly doodly direction after 30 seconds.
​

I use heavy-duty stick primers like UD Ultimate Ozone and the ELF stuff (both reviewed here) to keep Vintage from wandering.  It's just a shame these stodgy products somewhat mattify and diminish this lip tar's virgin beauty.
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Bleeding may still occur anywhere the tar sneaks past the primer margin and eating/drinking is begging for trouble, so if you're over thirty and heading out the door with Vintage instead of just sitting round the house looking dope AF, take a mirror and preload, lol.  

When all's said and done, OCC Vintage is undeniably beautiful and incredibly infuriating, like a peacock perching on your washing line and shitting on your jarmies.  I still own three OCC tars and will probably pick up a few more despite their tendency to trifle with my sanity because they pack so much seductive visual punch and I like to throw dollars at ethical businesses.  Just be aware that some shades seem to suffer varying levels of compatibility between their carrier oils and their dyes, leading to unacceptably short lifespans and practical fails- in my experience, anyway.

If lip tar performance issues worry you, I recommend the Nars Satin Lip Pencils; I'm applying Majella as I write this and it really kicks just as much arse as Vintage with none of the technical problems.  Storage tip:  stow lip tars in a cool, dark place and regularly shake and sort of squish them round their tubes to keep them happily emulsified. 
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(L 2 R All MAC unless stated) Russian Red, OCC Vintage, Viva Glam 1, Nars Cruella,
​Deep Love, Fixed On Drama, Nars Marjella
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Monday slash Tuesday slash mist slash round-earth realness

4/4/2017

 
Autumn.  At some point in the dead of night the clocks lurched backward and the time on the phone display once more aligns with accepted reality.  It's not cold enough to light the fire but cool enough to fog your bedroom windows on occasion and prompt that seasonal wardrobe edit.  I love that my boiled wool and floor-length skirts come out like floppy seal skins, am relieved that I still fit into last year's shit and lament the dick-width holes in my most comfortable gardening cardigan.
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In autumn and sometimes in spring, Otago Harbour becomes a docking port for the visible breath of the Pacific Ocean.  Usually the north-easterly is enthusiastic enough to bank it up in Blueskin Bay and push it over the top of Mt Cargill, making it look like some sort of comet-impact tsunami that can apparently terrify the dim-witted and/or uninitiated.  But occasionally the prevailing flow takes a more democratic tack and gently brooms this fleecy white suspension into the narrowest waterways, settling it patiently about the knees of the enclosing hills, usually without forewarning; you will just look out of the window and see everything has been reduced to low-resolution monotone.  

​I was driving back over the hill to Port with a friend the other evening when we came upon it this time.  There had been no clue in the air over Dunedin.  Not too sure of the altitude- 400m, maybe?
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Pacific brume is thoroughly enigmatic.  Sometimes I will know it's dropped anchor in the morning when I put my bare feet down on the rug by the bed and can feel that vague signature clamminess on the surface of the pile.  But it's an oddly dry mist at this time of year, at least around our house; dew point is a dirty wizard, purveying a fine-grained, introverted sort of miasma that is like a visiting stranger, never really settling on the road and allowing you walk around inside it, experiencing its wonders without undue involvement or obligation.  And then, it is gone.  I have seen an air soup disappear entirely in the time it took to read half a page of paperback.
​

Standing on the saddle overlooking all this mysterious confluence reminded me that I don't understand flat-earthers' attachment to their retarded geographic assertions.  At all.  Twelve thousand bloody kilometres of unchecked ocean sprawls beyond this particular horizon, even when it is obscured.  It doesn't change just because you can't see it today.  Its vast energy is so palpably curved and utterly centrifugal that you can sense it humming in a huge blue arc inside your head when you close your eyes on sights like this.  The waves
 declare it, over and over and over.
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Perceptive types have long observed that stupid people are too stupid to ever grasp just how stupid they really are, and that the only meaningful measure of intelligence is the ability to at least dimly understand this fundamental deficit.  They are 100% correct.  Considering this mist, I know that I am personally still quite stupid for someone who's had four decades of literacy at their fingertips, and am grateful for this insight.  At least I've attained enough perspective to realise geophysicists know more about geophysics than I do, and that gaps in my understanding are exactly that- personal shortfalls, not constitutive revelations.  

It might be fashionable to practise empathy for people who are... forgive my fucked-out euphemism generator... differently-orientated; I mean, what is it really like to be a sexagenarian school-leaver or jejune pro basketball person who thinks they know better than 1000 consensual geophysicists strapped together?  Sounds sort of... panicky.  But at this point in our planetary proceedings I just can't be bothered to feel bad for these massively conceited garbage people and their ignorant contrarian bullshit. The earth is a beautiful, continuous curve.

Round, you fucking idiots.  Round.
 

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liked this illustration by Jung Senarak

2/4/2017

 
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Nightmare Project Book Illustration   Jung Senarak

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