And I don't care if this was a one-off production problem or characteristic formula issue because it was by no means the only thing I hated about this pencil.

Currant probably stays on for a long, long time but five mins was more than enough for me and I could never make it past the half hour mark before running for the tissues.  I don't know what possessed me to buy this execrable product (yes I do- someone was offloading it cheaply) but let my pain light your path to righteousness- if you're looking for blue-leaning raspberry red without the vulgarian factor, pick up ye olde MAC Red (just buy a primer), MAC Salon Rouge, Nars Red Lizard, Nars Charlotte or one of the Bite pencils (maybe Cranberry).

nice project.  see more here

A car pulled back into the garage, rousing her, and two figures emerged instead of the one she had expected.  She glimpsed them in section through the half-closed door, Edward securing his belt buckle, his dark shirt open beneath his jacket while Lilian closed her coat about herself.  Neither spoke, but ascended the stairs in the thick of the goad that had driven them back to the house.  

Another hour had passed before the presence at the French doors registered on the back of her neck, declaring itself officially with a scratchy little knock.  Susan recognized the caller through the glass and slowed her approach, raising her hands to her hips and stopping short.  Siobhan’s smirk left no exhalation on the glass, but it perceived her intransigence and crouched lower, chuckling through the keyhole. 

“William's not here.” she muttered.  “But the other one is, so bugger off before he gets wind of you.  He's not in a good mood.”  The vampyre shook its little head in mockery of her warning.  

“Do ah look like a fuckin stranger t’ tragedy?"

"I told you he's not here."

​"Ah cal-clate ye precious petal’s downtown en-dearin himself t’ th’ fuckin populashun as per usual, an ol Ed’s up there, makin Streetwalker Barbie wish she weren’t never fuckin born.  Ah know that hoe bah repu-tashun, an she’s wern nasty fuckin glass a bad news.  Word is she durn shot out a pimp's brains, but, so she kint beh all bad, heh heh heh... ah’d a payed handsome ta git a peep at that shit.  Bitches venta’latin bawds... s’what fuckin Jesus woulda wanned if he'd stuck around.  Anyweys... it aint them ah durn peddl’d out t' see.”  

She frowned, skeptical as she attempted to digest its discourse.

“You're here to see... me?”
“Ye ketch on quick.”
“Why?”
“Well hell, ah got mah reasons, but if ye sweeter on critter dick then ye are on th' fuckin tea ah got fer ye, don’t let me tear ye away fr’m sittin on ye lonesome cooch suckin down crispeh cremes!” Siobhan sneered, clutching its glittering shoulder cape to its chin and turning to shuffle off.  The gibbous moon glared like a spotlight, arranging the garden into layers of funereal colour; the dead wood that William had massed at the foot of the house lay like sticks of giant kindling in their lazy pile.  She rubbed her arms while the visitor trundled on over the cold grass toward the orchard, the coruscations playing across its beaded black cape drawing the lines and hollows of its bony shoulders with ruthless precision, the corpse beneath the doleful finery never more wasted or pathetic.

“If you’ve got something to say, let’s just be having it.” Susan advised, closing the door behind herself and standing with her arms folded.  Siobhan swung in a U-turn and came back toward her in one conjoined motion.

“Item... ah deal credit where it’s fuckin due.  Ah fuckin seen ye, frontin 's well as any homely piece a pink with a taste fer strange'n nasty... got meh thinkin... she don't look too fuckin crazy bout goin down fer th’ count when th’ tahme comes round.  An whah shud ye?  Aint no fuckin shame in shiftin fer ye’self.”  Its features lost something of their pinch as it satisfied itself that they were not overlooked from any window. 

“You came all the way out here to tell me I’m a minger and I’m going to die?” she laughed.  

“Ah weren’t fixin t’ put it on th’ table without a fuckin ribbon on it.  Truth is, ahm comin down hard on th' bitches comin cryin t’meh fer it, thinkin it’s gonna git em outta saggy paps n’ hot flashes... there aint much worse in th’ whole fuckin world then some dead hoe whinin bout how she jest kint suck no more.”  Siobhan reassured itself of her attention before continuing.  “But that aint yew now, is it?  Ye got what ah lahk t’ fuckin call po-tenshul.”

From somewhere on its repellant person it produced a gold-tone tube of lipstick and circled its sunken mouth in the strangely compulsive gesture Susan had already come to revile, looking so much like a Reformation caricature that she almost expected flames to gush from its mouth and ears.  Despite the moonlight’s unflattering clarity, whoever the vampyre had once been remained completely imperceptible, buried as surely as an ember under a yard of mud.  Susan shuffled her feet against the sudden sense of lassitude that had settled on her, weighting her clothes like dew as she complained.

"I cannot understand a word you're saying."
“Well ye aint hangin off meh lahk a ten buck slut cause ye lahk mah fuckin per-fume.” Siobhan chuckled, reaching under its cape and slipping the catch loose.  “But seein as ye are...”

Susan had barely moved before the vampyre was on her like something lunging out of water, securing handfuls of her hair and clothing even as they crashed backward onto the wet grass.  She lay winded; its thin arm prised her head back from her shoulder when she hunched against it and opened her mouth to scream, clamping her windpipe closed until she could neither breathe nor utter sound.  Kicking and twisting in its grasp, she saw the stars and moon swim thickly on blurred white tails, knowing the coldness of the ground and rage at the hand sealing her throat as suddenly distant forces while the dead face watched her struggle fade.  With its knees stamping its bedstone weight into her stomach, the vampyre fastened its gape on her neck, punching teeth so deeply into her flesh that their dry gums bruised the skin between them.  It shook its head to worry the wounds open, the hot taste of her blood shot against the roof of its mouth by the pounding of her heart.   

A vacuum scoured her brain, licking at her spine and organs like low flame creeping over liquor.  The grip on her neck slackened slowly as the vampyre gorged, greedily ingesting throatfulls of her blood until it sputtered and ran from its ragged nostrils and she sucked a single choking breath, the air like acid in her starving lungs, her ear cupping the stream from her throat as her head fell back.  The creature snarled against her skin, cursing her ruined vein and forming words that rattled in her windpipe, pushing the arc of her neck so far that she heard her small bones shriek and grind against each other as it tore at her again.  Pain slapped at her, shaking her awake and she lifted her hands, fumbling for purchase and digging her heels into the grass, pitching herself toward the house until they fell together against the woodpile and were struck by toppling branches.  She rolled free of the tangled wrack, blood draining away into her dress, rising again to swing at the vampyre with one of the broken branches and catching its shoulder as it swayed in crapulous disorder.  The creature staggered as hopelessly as she did, unused to the uncontaminated potency of the blood rolling in its gut, cackling brokenly and pawing the air as it lay like the cape it had abandoned.  Still clutching her neck, Susan went down on one knee, then keeled onto the grass, the scents of damp earth and broken green departing on the tails of consciousness.  

It was in this attitude that Petrouchka discovered her, the cloying stink of Susan's wounds rising as though fuming from a brazier, bending the vampyre like a charmed serpent.  She knelt and rolled the girl onto her back, hissing exclamations; Susan opened her eyes, accepting the agony of being dragged by a single arm to the house and propped against the plaster as a disinterested observer.  The white linen of the vampyre’s peignoir exposed both the delicacy of her limbs and the caruncular scars that encircled both her knees and elbows where someone had long ago used a thick blade in a rough attempt to partition her.  She turned quickly from the supple crimson pooling in the hollows formed by Susan's flesh and took up the length of red-greased timber she had abandoned, towing it toward Siobhan and using it to batter the stirring predator's prone form into a gratifying silence.   

"Kala'amātya...” she entreated, returning to its victim.  "Biyastra!"  Bending low, the latter pressed his fingers beneath Susan's jaw in search of her pulse, studying the volume of blood still coursing from her injuries.  Siobhan had vanished, leaving a dark trail of its own upon the grass.  Susan brought a hand up to her neck.

“Go away.” she murmured hoarsely, beginning to cry as the pain closed its fist, her sobs squeezing more blood between her fingers.  “I’m cold...” 

"Get my phone." he told the vampyre.

"Ni khuya sebe!  Pozhalujsta... do what you must, I beg you..." Petrouchka entreated, her arms held laxly before her as though they were not her own.  "Finish this... think of your brother..."

Despite the vampyre's despairing appeals Edward leant forward and lifted Susan from the ground, shaking her briefly when her eyes rolled up behind their lids.  

​“Stay awake.” he instructed.  Her head lolled in the curve of his elbow, allowing her a blurred glimpse of Petrouchka hunched over her own hands, sobbing to herself as she sucked the blood from her fingers.



When her eyes opened again it was into flame-lit darkness thick with the stench of sweat, burning flesh and hair, and her own clotting injuries.  Over her head swung the struggling form of a fowl grasped by its scaled legs, the royal lustre of its wildly flailing wings flashing black and blue and green as they struck her face, its lifeblood streaming from the stump of its headless, dripping ruff.  When she moved she felt cold clinging to her, and her hands closed against black plastic, the rustle growing around her legs when she remembered them, even beneath the twinned chant of the women, one white-haired, the other brunette, naked to the waist and daubed in black; they passed the headless bird between them, lifting it to their mouths, the draughts they took from its severed neck swelling their cheeks.  Leaning over with their blank black eyes they spat down hard onto her body, the blood swinging from their chins in thick wattles as they roared out the names of the invoked and slapped the smoking flames in their hands over her skin, dousing her with searing embers.  Red-stained saliva flooded the back of her throat and she choked on it until someone, stationed at her head, lifted her shoulders from the ground onto their knees.  Her gaze fell backward and she saw that it was Edward who knelt behind her.  Her blood had dried in wide, crazed streaks upon his white skin, on his side and on his bare arms; they were riven with a dense and plaid-like hatching that seemed to blur and mingle as it crept back toward his body from something approaching order at his wrists.  A painted line divided and consecrated his features as he looked down at her, embers falling slowly from his shoulders.  He brushed the brands from her hair. 

The rhythm of the chant pulsed through the dead oak and the white floor of the bathroom overhead, through Lilian's bare feet, along the bones of her legs and into the depths of her body.  She lay down to meet the sound, hands and ribs and hips pressed to the glassy, ice-like tiles, her cheek sliding as she stroked her face against them.  ​

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

pineapple sage detail, Felix + concrete
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procreating dragonflies, Deng Plateau dance mask
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graveyard, Careys Bay, unseasonal tulips
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Kgomotso Neto for S Mag

speaking on behalf of all my no-neck homies and ugly skull-havers everywhere: extreme jealousy.

Full-spectrum goodness @ the Tracy Arm Fjord.

​See the rest here: it's great.

​Nice shot from a stump in our backyard by R

There was a fire somewhere over the hill as the sun was going down.  I couldn't choose the best shot.
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Lilian’s hands were as cold as the night outside the hotel, fugitives in the pockets of her trench as it settled against her in the aureate warmth of the elevator.  Edward had framed his absence as he did every lie, devoid of reassuring ornamentation, but she was pleased to be absolved from explaining her own.  Her prospective client had offset his anonymity with the size of the engagement fee transferred to her account, the promise of more exerting its terrible weight on all other concerns.  Its plastic, golden possibilities smoothed the disapproval of the concierge accompanying her, the brushed silver of his name tag holding a softly-hatched stripe of her reflection.  He informed her dutifully of their arrival on the third floor of executive suites, but did not wish her a pleasant evening.  

Panes of limed wood and flaxen limestone lined the hall outside, their bland blonde matte palliative to the weary eye.  Her heels made no sound upon the carpet as she glanced at passing door plates and found herself five rooms short of her destination; though there was nothing startling in the discovery, Lilian slowed and came to a gradual halt in the midst of the passage.  In the outer corner of her left eye the wall began to shimmer, the stone trembling, its substance loosened as though lofted forth in dust, birthing a myriad of tiny, phosphor-white motes, like dandelion seeds before a lazy drift of sun-warmed air.  They wandered out before her, forming an encircling cascade that was not only silent in itself, but drained the volume from the surrounding world until sound no longer existed.  Inhaling the brightly-glowing influence of the idling scintilla, she took a hand from her pocket at its whispered invitation and passed into the fall, the motes treating her flesh as a permeable fiction; closing her fist, she watched them drift on through its shape, unchecked, then pushed her hand into the empty air beyond.

It was struck by fulminant agony, as though a length of steel had swung across her knuckles.  She dragged her hand back and clasped it in the spinning eye of pain, lips parting in a silent exclamation.  At the end of the corridor a maid’s cart emerged from a utility room as a muted and indefinite shape; Lilian straightened slowly though pain still pealed along her bones, watching the cart trundle toward her from the shadowless distance.  A door to her right opened inward, admitting a tall woman in a drab suit to the passage, the eyes in her hard, tanned face coming too quickly upon her own while the wall beside her head began to shimmer, its substance loosened as though lofted forth in dust.  Tiny phosphor-white motes drifted in a veil between them; Lilian felt them glowing in her eyes, combusting and dividing, and pushed her pale gaze through the idling scintilla, beyond the stranger's stare and deep into the intent that it protected, finding shapes in black and olive drab lettered with shifting glyphs with hot, portentous scarlet.  Satisfied, she allowed the incandescent apparition to dissuade her, and to walk her back toward the elevator where its open doors awaited her return.




Shaw leaned into the clammy ivy at the foot of the wall it had overrun, ignoring its sour bronze smell and clearing a narrow gap in the fallen stone.  The street on the other side glowed dirty orange through the foliate vignette, crossed only by the nocturnal insects that favoured the lamp post for the amatory and predacious sorties consuming the last weeks of their lives.  Looking back over his shoulder, he searched the windows through the lattice of branches and shoulder-high weeds that sheltered his position, bringing his phone to his ear. 

​“House and grounds are clear.” he confided.  “It’s good.”  




Josephine sat in the darkness of the rented suite, watching the woman wheel the maid’s cart alongside the bed and strip her secreted equipment from it, stuffing it into a gym bag, her mood related in the rough, clipped timbre of her actions.  O'Connor darkened the doorway.

“She came right to my station, Mercer started her run and then it nose-dived... I don’t know what it was... it felt like I was made.” Josephine related.  The operative zipped her bags.  “We need to check her out.  She’s not standard.”  

“Ms Frost is on her way to the house.” he replied.  “Traffic’s loose downtown, it’s a fifty minute ride at most, so the second team will pick her up.”    

“Inoprophenol won’t drop a lab rat.  She’ll fight it.”

​"I'm happy with what the Interlaken teams have achieved so far."

Josephine watched his face assume a smirk as they recalled the hahdri massacre photostream; she wondered how he could smile amid the disastrous scope of its dissemination, then remembered his lack of affection for the culprit.  

"Have they found Bateman yet?" she inquired.

​"They pulled him out of business class at LAX."

The woman behind them looked up from packing her equipment.

"Bateman's gone?" she asked, glancing out the door.  

"Interlaken took the bambis out and cut them loose on some lycanthropes upstate... it went bad.  They ended up having to toast the whole site.  Bateman lost it, posted darknet jpegs and fled with his hard drives."  

"Damn... I don't think I even want to know what a bambi fail looks like.  Those gross things were his babies."

​"I think the change of focus was overdue." O'Connor remarked, consulting his watch.  "Wipe this down before you leave."




A downpour swept over the crest of the hill, hissing across the tarmac and beading on Shaw's head, misting the glass of his night vision visor.  Distant headlights already shimmered in the water clinging to the roadside growth; he leant out as far as he dared through the vine-swathed crevice, pulling the windscreen into focus.  To his amazement, one of the black-clad operatives planted at the foot of the hill broke cover and walked out onto the seal, forcing the taxi to a halt on wet brakes.  Shaw pushed along the wall until he drew parallel with the stop.

A burst of muzzle flash threw the thicket of figures closing on the car into cartoon silhouette, the rain swallowing the silenced rounds and the sound of the glass trickling from the driver’s door onto the road.  They dragged a smoking body from behind the wheel, leaving it lying on the tarmac while the passenger was surrounded in the rear seat, though Shaw could see nothing of Lilian Frost until the door was pushed slowly outward from within.  The figure that rose from it and stood beside the cab explained the desperate expediency of the ambush without uttering a syllable, male instead of female, emerald flash meeting the torch beam directed into its eyes.  While it stared into the light, a figure stepped up and fired twice into its neck, then again into its shoulder, shrinking back to the verge to reload as quickly as wet fingers would allow.

The armed party retracted, leaving their victim to grasp the stainless darts and tear them free, gazing blankly through the crimson spatter driven onto his face by the murderous burst of fire.  He tossed them away and looked down at the body of the driver; even from the top of the wall Shaw saw the deliberation that persisted in the creature’s stance, the absence of the slow and reassuring tilt that was the first sign of meaningful intoxication.  The squad stood, hunched and transfixed, steam rising from their shoulders and their laboured breathing while Shaw climbed down.  Beside him the commanding figure snarled an order, prompting the foremost trio to creep forward, rain streaming from their chins.  The creature gazed over the wall toward the distant house even as they closed on him, his apathy explicitly fatalistic.  As one the squad burst forward and swallowed up the figure, like a fist of swarming insects.  

Shaw wiped at his face with his hand as he walked around to the rear of the collection van to perceive the result of their endeavours, a prostrated abstract lying on the churned grass, strapped with closely-coupled bonds of woven alloy to a steel stretcher.  The drug gunner stepped forward and fired another three doses into the flesh of its leg; he trained his torch upon the captive's profile, examining the deep golden bale of the gaze that slid toward him before a mesh hood was dragged down over its head.  A single command extinguished their torches, sent a pair of men to drag the taxi driver's corpse into the boot of his idling car and signaled the others to hoist their trussed objective from the ground, in pursuit of a swift and wordless dispersal.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce

Underlying lip colour supports Spice It Up to be all it can be; the combination of these naturally-derived shades becomes more than the sum of its parts.  You may not get the same agreeable visual payday if you're one of those ghost-lipped types who have trouble persuading lipstick to look anything but garish and unsympathetic... then again, SIU can supply a subdued dead-petal stain to light/cool lips and that sort of low-key journée gothique result can be tremendously alluring.  I'm hard-pressed to think of someone who really, fully could not wear this shade under any circumstances.  Maybe give it a miss if you're pale and yellow-toned?  

​Nars Golshan pencil is probably Spice It Up's closest tonal relation in my collection, comparatively speaking, despite the latter being darker and more intense.  Together they form a beautiful and effortlessly flattering ombre. MAC Brick-O-La is way pinker.  MAC Taupe and Mocha are a far more explicitly sandy tan.  Retro holds a lot more dirty mauve and its heavier pigmentation gives a completely different effect, so I don't particularly associate them.

I think SIU looks best patted on and/or finger-smudged which yields a nice, slightly autumnal tweak, oddly more toffeeish than the pinkish hand swatch, plus a modest sheen.  You get 50% opacity from one swipe and while that's perfectly sufficient to make an impact even on darker lips, SIU is buildable to around 80% before it veers into slippy patchiness; that's a great result for this sort of finish.  When patted on it's got a sweet little density which settles well on the mouth and lasts (in the absence of serious assault) for around half a day before needing maintenance with that bonus gentle fade that characterises all the worthwhile Lustres.  I don't experience wrinkle bleeds or that slimy de-emulsification effect that can strike down some MAC Cremesheens as well as the lesser shades in this category 

Unusually, I have nothing bad to say about Spice It Up.  It's a nice change from all those hard neutral mattes when you don't want too much look.  I don't even begrudge the fact that it won't stick around til dinnertime- it doesn't even outstay its damn welcome.  You can't claim that about very much these days.

L2R (MAC unless stated): Russian Red, Del Rio, Spice It Up, Nars Golshan, Taupe, Verve, Retro
a range of natural in+outdoor natural light

​The streetlight throws some dramatic shit down on the Fucraea by our driveway at night.

I exaggerated the spikiness but I think I love the super-degraded version below.
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