I had the butcher bone this piece, which I highly recommend as it reduces the weight considerably and bones are a pain in the arse.  The slightly creepy pale substance you can see on the right there is the skin of the pig, singed of hair; this sort of marinated pork belly doesn't really rely on crispy skin although you can achieve it if you wish, so feel free to trim it away (being careful to retain the underlying fat) if you're not keen.  It softens and becomes delicious in the pan anyway.

Not every piece of belly is going to be meltingly tender and there's not a tremendous amount you can do about that.  Marinade usually helps but I think its ability to break down gnarly meat grain is vastly overstated.  Lower your oven temp and extend the initial cooking time if you've got a bit of home-kill that you think will need extra attention.

Okay so it's the next day and we're cooking.  Set the oven to about 180-200 ºC of conventional, non-fan heat.  Find yourself a relatively flattish baking dish that won't be affected by the acidic marinade i.e. not aluminium la la la.  Lay the pork strips out on their sides, pour the marinade over, add around a tablespoon of butter or oil and cover with foil or a lid but don't hermetically seal the shit out of it; you want some steam to be able to escape.

​When the oven's up to heat, put the pork on the lowest shelf and turn down to between 150-180 ºC depending on how mad your elements tend to be.  You want medium-high heat for around 45 mins for this amount of meat, a little less for a smaller batch.  You know the drill.

beneath the streets  dustaphoto.tumblr.com

The opposite of England ​leaving the European union is cooking ginger and orange pork belly at home.  That has been scientifically quantilionified, so that's what I'll be posting this week.  

I'm all out of thoughts about the Brexit, except that it's a fucking ugly portmanteau.  On one hand, I know the dipshits who voted leave are a bunch of hooting xenophobic throwbacks and angry couch humpers who frankly stunned me by eschewing Sky Sport en mass, admittedly to vote for something they didn't understand which must have made them feel at home, I suppose.  On Team Remain we have the feckless dumbarses who base their favouring of international overlordship on St Vincent tweets and wanting to spend six months taking drugs and fucking hot foreigners on the Continent with minimal documentation, man.  

​We live in New Zealand and have enough problems of our own, so it was nice to sit this one out and just enjoy the fuckery while it's still a distant abstract.  On a personal level I hate most people, so part of me wants to sever all relations, deport everyone and lock the gate.  The other part wants Germans to pay for urban renewal projects, to enjoy liberal narcotic legislation and inexpensive cheese and fuck Spanish guys too; the conflict is real.  But we're all doomed either way so I don't worry too much about the deckchair shuffling.  

On a completely unrelated note we were in our favourite Indian grocery the other day.  It’s Ramadan and every observant date fancier in a 20km radius is freaking out about supply. We’re not observant but we were freaking out when the shop owner explained that the date boat was held up in bloody Wellington. ​ Fuck that lazy date boat right in the arse!

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

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

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

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

“You were dreaming.” he told her.

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

“Work.” he told her finally.

​“Yeah... about that.”

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

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

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

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

She barely blinked at the sound of his name.

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

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

“Use your phone... send me pictures of them.” he told her.  His hand found the black stretch of lace under her breast and pushed beneath it as he walked her to the bed, where she halted and glanced back at him, the hot colours shifting in his gaze speaking so plainly of his intent that she almost failed to pull her blouse closed.  

“I have to work, motherfucker." she smiled, buttoning the silk.  "United Arab Emirates asshole.  He likes shoes, nail polish, karada.  Sits, eats dates, watches me tie up his bitches.  I know more about him than I do you.” Lilian sighed.  “Oh yeah... Susan had a thing on her arm.  Said she took a dive off her bike or something but I think she sprained it on your brother’s hard-on.  Did you tell him about Orb?"
"Has he said anything to you?"
"Nothing straight up, but he's not stupid."

Edward nodded slowly to himself.

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

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

​True story.

'Why diet and exercise don’t work’ shrieks the headline from a fairly respected local magazine as I stand at the supermarket checkout with a bunch of fruit and milk.  It's lunchtime, and I'm experiencing the still-novel sensation of being the least-fat person in the building, having lost around a third of my bodyweight a couple of years back.  It’s not that I’m anything approaching slender- thickset is my morphological middle name- it’s just that everyone around me is fucking enormous.  

​As a forty-something punter I've been party to the entire extraordinary arc of personal expansion afflicting Western society, but still, it's scarcely creditable, even when explicitly exemplified as it is today.  Every last one of the variously fat people nearby are unloading home brand fizzy drinks, shitty icecream, bags of biscuits and frozen yellow-encrusted shit from their trolleys onto the checkout conveyor, having completed the most strenuous part of their day- collecting that rubbish from the supermarket shelves and wheeling it to their cars.  Diet and exercise don’t work.  Someone should have told that to the junk I lost, well... dieting and exercising; it might have stuck around.  Or come back. 

​I watch some of the significantly oversized people around me read the same headline and wonder if they take comfort from that declaration or despair at its toneless finality, trying to remember what I thought about that stuff when I was fat.  A little bit of both, I suppose.  Then I bag up my shit and walk home.

I’ve already banged out a few pieces on this painful and highly contentious subject.  Before we begin this particular series of observational ramblings about weight loss, fitness and the sustainable habits that have worked for me, let’s get one thing absolutely crystal clear.  This is not a fat-shaming, concern-trolling exercise.  But I’m not going to pull any fucking punches, either.  Being fat sucks arse for most people, despite the mass of fan-fic and commodification that is steadily gathering pace around it.  I write for all my fat-and-over-it contemporaries and I certainly intend my observations to be a positive contribution to a topic soaked in hatred and disputation.  Everyone else can go about their business without paying any of this a single speck of mind.  This is just what I think.

If we want to be... I don't know... really fucking transgressive, why don’t we ditch the idea that even relative perfection is worth pursuing?  That you don't actually have to be the very, utmost best you can ever be.  Instead of this frantic axiom, perhaps genial, moderate health is a welcome and desirable state.  Maybe our physical attributes are meant to be an honest reflection of our habits and personalities, and that unless they are actively injurious, we should be satisfied with what they say about us.  My waist says I give a shit about the food I eat.  My arse says yeah I ate that fucking croissant anyway.  Legs say I do I lot of hard walking.  Bingo flaps say I used to be fatter.  Tits say my eyes are up here.  Is it not better to be a complex conversation than a single slogan or a monotonal groan?

WHO IS FAT, THEN, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
If we reject a ridiculously exclusive ‘beauty’ standard, what is fatness, really?  

I suggest overweight should mean you are carrying too much fat to be as happy and as healthy as you would personally prefer.  We could be stricter and more objective and say fatness is all about whether or not your health and potential are negatively affected regardless of your personal opinion, because that’s relatively easy to establish on an individual basis.  Your fatness isn't a matter of communal aesthetic judgement; it is your distance from wholistic wellbeing.  

After reading the literature from both a fat-apologist and a more health-inclined angle in accordance with my own venal imperatives, the evidence is pretty unassailable; being too fat really is comprehensively bad for us.  I wish I had better news; I wouldn't have felt compelled to write all this shit for a start.  Believe me when I say I scoured the studies and busted my arse trying to interpret their conclusions in my favour when I was fat.  But there's no getting around it.  While being slightly overweight can actually improve some of your health outcomes, especially recovery from crisis (this makes sense in the context of any animal that has reserves onboard), anything more than this can have effects that reach far beyond sartorial frustration into profound systemic disorder; clinical depression, hormonal and mitochondrial dysfunction, wholesale inflammation (perhaps the most serious precursory state), cancer, infertility, dementia, disability and grossly premature death, depending on circumstance and phenotype.  

I'm not making any of that up.  Looking good in a pencil skirt is cool, but knowing your bloodwork is fucked up, your knees are going to blow out and your fupa is rolling the cancer dice is what should concern you most.  My dad died of oesophageal cancer and I watched that happen.  He didn't know being overweight was a significant risk factor; I do now, so now I'm telling you.   
​
Being too fat is also harmful psychologically.  It fucked with me, and I don't really take shit from anyone.  For one thing, I could never have written truthfully and positively about my own experiences if I was still nursing all those extra kilos and that is just one small, moist crumb of the experiential cake I was missing out on.  You could argue all day that the mental/emotional impact is an artefact of the social toxicities currently being swept away by fat acceptance.  But celebrating detrimental fatness is like congratulating someone for burning holes in their arm with a magnifying glass for the above-stated physiological reasons, even if you want to leave the less quantifiable psychological shit out of the equation.  While it is socially vital to embrace physical difference, why are we attempting to legislate against the use of grotesquely underweight runway models whilst (increasingly) fêting the opposite?

Have you read Michael Gira's interview in VF?  

​I know, right?  The fucking Swans in Vanity Fair- we were freaked out too.  

​Is it just me, or should that Spike Carter guy um, check out a dictionary or some shit before his vocab's reach exceeds its grasp like that again in public?  I scanned a couple of his questions over and over and felt like I was experiencing early onset dementia.  Luckily Gira knows his way around journalistic bumberclat by now and supplied some succinct observations, about process, switching brain lanes, getting old (he said dotage lol) and not wearing earplugs.  He has always repelled me for some reason but all those mature, unvarnished insights make me want to buy his brain a drink and maybe fuck it in a toilet stall out back.

I've always liked... no, that's not the word.  Enjoyed- no, not that either.  Respected?  Respected the Swans, mostly from a distance.  R is far more into them.  I can only take 1.5 songs at a time.

who isn't?
slyhigashi / daysrunaway

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

“What’s all this?” she called, pushing back her visor.
 
“Gates close at eighteen hundred.” Shaw replied through the iron.  “Order of Mr Lamb senior.” 
 
“No one gave me a key...”
 
He smiled, unlocking the chain.

“Guess this is your lucky day.  Go see Mr Lamb about getting yourself one.”  A look of profound reluctance swept her face as she walked her scooter past him, struggling with the front wheel as the weight of her grocery bags forced it sideways.  His gaze followed her bandaged arm when she took hold of the throttle once more.  “Not someone you want to run into every day?”

​Susan assumed a faint, inquiring frown.  

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

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

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

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

“I won’t lie to you, my dear... none of this is good.” she sighed, her wheat-coloured lashes fluttering in an unconscious expression of reluctance.  “That is not to say I am not confused, because this is exactly, exactly what I am.”  Her provincial Swedish accent formed a lively counterpoint to the gravity of her words.  “I am seeing great confusion, and er...  målmedvetenhet... a great purpose.”  She looked toward Frederica, who brushed windfall smuts from the sleeve of her black dress.  “Dotter, you thought this?”

“I’m no good with this stuff...” said the younger woman, reinstating her glasses.  “I just don’t go there unless I know for sure.  And I don't."

​“You don’t go there?” the Swedish witch exclaimed reproachfully.  “You’re a haxa, and that is what we do!  There is where we go!”   

Frederica shrugged under the elder’s gaze.

“It’s heavy... I don’t like heavy stuff.”  The latter abandoned her reproof and urged another light from William, and the trio looked together at the security guard as he crossed the front garden toward them, hands in his pockets.

“As I say... I can not lie, Villiam, it is no good.” she advised.  “So, come... what would you know?”  The witch’s gold-streaked hair sat in two coils on her head, resembling horns or supernumerary auricles; she watched him with her lips slightly parted and her eyes half closed, extolling him to question her oracular facility in a manner that would satisfy them both.

“Female?” he asked.
“Female,  ja,” 
“Happy?”
“Happy?  Nej.  Oh no.  No no.”

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

"Mr Lamb, it's my job to document this incident..." Shaw exclaimed, shaking his head while William pitched the camera into the shadowed orchard, muttering over his shoulder as he walked back to his companions.  

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

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

“Thank you, Tilde.” he said quietly.  She leant closer to him.

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

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

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

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

“Something's wrong." she told him.  "I can't get this thing off... you'll have to do it for me."

He looked up from the crepe to her expression almost reluctantly.

“It's too soon... you need to wait five days.”
"Who was that woman?  The one outside my room, burning branches?"
"Tilde..."
"Who was she?"
"A friend."

Susan shook her head with her eyes closed.

​"No, I mean... what was she doing?"  She gave up the demand that drowned anyway amongst the hundred others scrabbling for precedence.  "Everything keeps... I can't remember it, and everything I do remember runs away..." she murmured, running a hand over the dressing toward her wrist.  "There's something under here... I can't feel anything.  I have to see it."
"Christabel..." he sighed.
"Take it off now.  I mean it."
"Nothing good will come of this.  Five days is all I ask."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite what you might see in the swatches, I just cannot bring myself to call it a brown, any more than I would use that word to describe my own lip colour.  The shot against the grass mat above right there is probably about as close as you're going to get to its median on-face reality without actually applying it.  You can see both its dirty half-rose and its cooler, muted qualities.  I say median reality because Verve morphs dramatically according to the light source and time of day, as you can see in the block of four shots below.  Keep in mind it is slightly pinker once applied.

Like Whirl, there is a lot of shadowy river-stone dust/cool taupe buried in its DNA.  Neither shade is very cutesy and Verve borders on looking slightly patrician on a non-bimbotic face.  I've included a swatch at the foot of this piece from the Whirl review for comparison, although the light in that one is slightly brighter.  Verve is easier to wear just because of the forgiving and malleable nature of the Satin formula versus the matte; that lustreless finish can make Whirl a pretty fucking dusty prospect, which is why I moved it on.  All things considered, I prefer Verve. 

If you look at the shot above right and the Whirl swatch above left, you can see how much they have in common.  Verve is a smidgen browner, but it's not this much darker in reality and they give a very similar impression on the lip.  

Hope I've not just added to the confusion with this somewhat garbled monologue.

​la la la la doves
​

​shit gets dark
​

real dark
​

remind me to reject doves and all their works
​

I'm only half a fag, but I've had to waste precious time inside the buzzer 'airlock' door of gay clubs until the drunk mouth breathers, waiting outside to hospitalize the first person who emerged, forgot what they were doing and drifted away.  I've been assaulted, verbally and physically, by bigots who knew they were acting with something like impunity because the local police and judiciary broadly shared their ideology.  When I tried to report the explicit death threats a male stalker had made against me in- a public place to many witnesses- police asked me, and I quote, 'don't you think he would have already done it (i.e. killed me) if he was serious?'  About a guy who had a crossbow and a history of violence against women.

Don't roll your fucking eyes; this really isn't about me and I am going somewhere with all this.  In relating some of the experiences that inform my personal distrust of the normative edifice, I mean.  But as much as I detest masculine privilege, aggressive shitlords and organised religion, and as much as I tire of having to observe the damage they perpetrate and as much as they have aggressed me personally, I can't imagine busting into a church or a court or a sports club etc in order to kill them.  Consign them to obscurity and powerlessness by dismantling their hegemony one mind at a time?  Yes.  Hell yes.  Spray them with high calibre ordinance?  No.

Horrors like the Orlando club shooting are sadly inevitable as long as fuckwits have access to assault weapons, but in some ways, this ability to secure weapons is a peripheral consideration.  What makes someone feel entitled to impose the fatal judgements determined by their janky and utterly undistinguished internal discourse, be it with a rifle or a breadknife or a broomstick?  

Few documented shooters can have been in much doubt about their own social and intellectual shortcomings. Few of them were capable of autonomously devising the bullshit they supposedly espoused, and those empty miles of internal durr are the real estate religious and racist doctrines have always exploited.  Those racist, homophobic and misogynistic scripts need be fired into the sun, for sure, but that shit's just post hoc window-dressing most of the time.  We need to make sure we are always looking in the right direction.  If the Orlando shooter (I refuse to name him) targeted gay peeps, it's my educated guess that it was because he was a low-functioning, self-absorbed fuckwit, not because being gay is intrinsically troublous or provocative or risky, any more than me being a woman walking home at 3 in the morning is.  I don't know what it's like to be a gay man facing a shitbag's gun, but I do know those two things have no logical association.    

The single fundamental that most of these said shitbags are expressing isn't, at its core, homophobic.  They are expressing intense dissatisfaction- not with their own obvious and demonstrable mediocrity, which would be the intelligent and insightful response- but with the fact that they are viewed as mediocre by an ununderstanding world; one that gets laid and parties and rolls on without them.  Masculine privilege and doctrinal platforms hand them all the juju rationale they're too stupid and/or lazy to come up with themselves, and bingo; another mass shooting.  

Thus I think it is probably just simple homebake narcissism that gets most of these stunted units across the line into homicidal attention-seeking.  Their stated motivations are usually so illogical and asinine that they might as well be random, so whilst they might inflict incalculable harm, their imperatives are trivial.  They are unspectacular people insisting that we notice and remember them.  

So let's forget their pathetic arses.  Religious and political authorities have always used these guys as crowd control in their endless quest for profit and sovereignty; let's not hand them the win by modifying our behaviour or shushing ourselves.  

​Fuck everything you need a gun to get done.  

​And fuck the pissant losers who can't get noticed any other way.

HOCHSTÄNDE
 
'In my series “Hochstände” I went to the German forest to capture hunting blinds. The forest itself is something very quiet and peaceful but with the hunting blinds in the pictures you can almost hear the shot and barking dogs going after the deer. The addition of these hunting blinds turn it into a scary and brutal location.'
Robert Götzfried

Josephine sat behind the wheel of her jeep while men in khaki circled it with black dogs and passed mirrored poles beneath it before retreating to their armoured station.  A boom laden with biometric sensors passed over the vehicle, constructing a detailed scan.  When it had been cleared, the massive steel drawbridge in her way fell into its footings, the sound shuddering through the ground even as she drove away from the cordon.  Though the soft black bitumen was wide enough to allow only the slimmest margin between two passing cars, she preferred to keep her speed up on the last leg to her destination.  

An endless host of tall, cloned cedars pressed up to the edge of the tarmac, their symmetry crowding out the sky, their pointed crowns like the floor of a pit trap, drawing the rain out of the clouds.  It struck her windscreen and the road on its way into the granite beneath the snaking roots and the corpses of the animals poisoned by the vegetation's engineered toxicity.  She slowed, though she could make the turn into the carpark in her sleep.  Cameras soaring overhead on pole mounts, motile and cyclopian, maintained their omniscience with sensors tuned to thermal signatures and movement; they followed her to the entrance, with its staged doors and mechanized rituals.  Institutional paranoia had invested the facility with attributes reviled by its inmates and infamous amongst the free-living communities from which they had been excised.  Its massive footings, set two metres into bedrock, and impervious construction turned back sound and excluded every circadian cue so that the concept of time and seasonality died an airless death.  Heading north at the first juncture in the corridor, she blinked against the brightness of its brushed silver panelling and negotiated two more checkpoints, finding that she was the first to arrive to the briefing.  

She ignored the figure sitting behind the observation window in the adjacent cell and sat down on the table by a high slit window and its view of the dull green, stable-like barracks.  Its residents submitted to a search by guards, the bunkhouses stripped, spartan effects dumped in the midst of their caged yards to be soaked by the rain.  The field crews were easy to distinguish from their wardens, having been ordered at gunpoint from their clothing so that they stood with hands clasped behind their thick necks against the razor-wire.  Like yarded steers they bore their treatment with thwarted rancor, their undress exposing prison tattoos in black and dirty green, laced with gang code, illiterate obscenities and misshapen cartoon whores acquired in the institutions from which they had been recruited.  Those surviving recent duty sported fresh contusions and taped-up fleshwounds.  A few entered into abortive scuffles, grimly trading taser shots and prostration on the tarmac for the chance to express their rage.  Most stood dumbly, steam rising from their shoulders while the rain dripped from their elbows, quelled by the prospect of collective chastisement via the devices buried in their mastoid processes, the scars descending from their left ears.  A screaming white tone punished dissent at the behest of a radio frequency and at the discretion of their betters, and its veterans knew better than to court it openly.  The sight of them recalled the thick, rank smell of their felonious mass, tainted by feedlot rations crammed with protein and dosed with prophylactic compounds.

Josephine looked away from the glass as she was joined by the head of her division.  He possessed a given name, but she could not imagine a mother mustering enough enthusiasm to bestow anything beyond some arbitrary homage to undifferentiated forefathers.  Behind pristine silver rims O'Connor's narrow features held an untried teenage blandness that had tailed him into middle age; in aspect, he was the anthropomorphic expression of the facility he served, thriving in its gleaming viscera.  He stood still before the soundproof door awaiting the acknowledgement that always tasted so sapidly of submission and having gained it, he turned his attention to the adjacent chamber.  A stout metal chair was bolted to its bare floor and an elderly woman occupied it, tightly wrapped in a thick, pilled coat of flowered green; her night gown and bed socks betrayed the circumstances of her apprehension.  Sparse white hair rose in a flame shape on her head.  She began to pat at it slowly, misted eyes half closed.  The heavy door re-opened before Trent, shambling in his solitary, threadbare navy suit.  Shaw wore his own gunmetal two piece into the room with all the poise that it required, setting down his briefcase and laying out the contents of his dossier in careful sequence.  

Trent was drawn toward the window by the barrack search.  

“What’re they tossing for this time?” he muttered.  O’Connor replied without looking up from Shaw's material.

“Weapons hoarding in C house.”

“You expect those boys to live out there with those damn things runnin round the woods?  And they all know what you're pointin them at next... that fuckin word's gone round.”  

His superior smiled at his concerns.

"While their personal difficulties will always touch me deeply, I suspect their time here is more fulfilling than twenty to life in SuperMax, however brief.”  

Shaw cleared his throat and closed his jacket, standing to present his findings.

“Female civilian secondaries.” he began, reaching down to tap a surveillance shot.  “The maid.  Susan Ellen Christabel, British national, literate, twenty-three, five three, no visible distinguishing, expired visa, no medical records, no green card.  She’s a little adversarial, but at this point, I’m confident she's green.”  He moved on to the next file.  “Lilian Natalia Frost, native born, literate.  Twenty-nine, five nine, one tattoo, trackmarks... a couple of ER visits early on, no recorded admissions for eight years.  Came out of Ferngate Juvenile at eighteen... her records are sealed, but we’ll have them soon.  Ferngate was high security for adjudicated minors... whatever she did, she missed the pen, but only just.  We can assume there was significant violent offending in her background."        

“Adult convictions?”

“Two prostitution misdemeanors, one for possession.  Nothing recent, no meaningful time served, no warrants outstanding.  I can confirm she’s still active, probably heavily connected, but we don't know which precinct she’s paying into.  Sub One could be running her game now.  I dumped her accounts... averaged over a six month window, she’s pulling six G a week.”

"Have you been able to do a psychometric pass on this one yet?”  O’Connor’s dark eyes were hidden behind reflected streaks of ceiling light on the surface of his glasses.  

​“As yet there’s been no verbal... she’s an unstable alpha, highly evasive, off the scale issues around authority, narcotic use to go with... right now I can’t engage her without overstepping.  I like the housekeeper a lot more for disclosure.  She's totally green, cleanskin... not too sharp... she'll give us what we need when I go to work on her.”

Laying out the next group of photographs, Shaw looked to Josephine.  If O’Connor perceived the intimacy already obvious in Susan and William’s documented exchanges, nothing in his face betrayed it. 

“Why has there been no meaningful headway on their finances?"

"Sub one's got it locked down, solid visible means, snow-white flow... someone's burying their black market action deep."        

"I want another asset recovery team on this, and I'm thinking we should use the housekeeper’s immigration status to extract her.” O'Connor remarked, re-examining the photographs.  “It’s a federal beef.  They'll let her slide and thank their stars no one came for them.”

Josephine shook her head.

"If they got a taste for maids and whores...” Trent snorted, looking to her as though the objection was fantastic.  “There's plenty more where they came from.  Pick her up and put her in the damn chair.”
“I understood my recommendations would be considered wh...”
“And that very generous leeway was contingent upon whatever you turned in.” O'Connor reminded her.  They looked to Shaw together; he shrugged loosely, framing support of their superior's position and Josephine replied just as he cleared his throat to do the same.

“I’ve put three hundred hours into this site... we can't uplift the female secondaries.  They’ll see it for what it is and run, and so will their associates.  We can't have that kind of panic.”  

O’Connor responded with a strange warning smile that was clearly audible in his voice.  

“Anything else you’d like to critique, given that they're now fully aware of your outstanding surveillance detail?”

​"What we have is good... we don't know why the second sub shifted to the compound, and we don't have all the relationships tied down, but we could not have asked for a better distribution... why go in and disrupt that?” she insisted.

Beneath its weathered tan Trent’s face held the congested colour of a small boy mired in defiance.  Behind them, the elderly woman had gotten stiffly out of her chair and walked to the barrier that walled her from the bickering party; she knocked slowly on the glass, awaiting their attention.  Trent's barely-contained disaffection distracted O'Connor from his intended monologue.  

"Mr Trent, you are here as a professional courtesy..."
"What’re we gonna be using on them?  Word is these freaks spit out tungsten and green-tip... what the fuck’re we supposed to do if we can’t light them up?” 
“You'll get your game plan and ordinance if and when you're tasked."  O'Connor scowled, irritated at the speed with which such restive apocrypha had disseminated.  "And while we're on this, their classification and taxonomy do not concern you, so do not continue to promulgate misinformation.  I won't warn you again."

Trent snorted back a sinus full of mucous.

“Have y'thought about how you're gonna to keep them locked down before you roll them off the goddamn truck?” he muttered.  "Or are you just gonna pray nothing makes it past the Bambis?"

"We're done here."  Watching Trent slap his knees and rock forward from his chair with a narrow stare, O'Connor glanced at his watch and stood up.  "Work hard.  I want you both back here with a whole lot more."

Trent smirked at the elderly detainee behind the partition and lifted a fist to drum a rhythm on the material that separated them.  With ophidian swiftness the woman sprang from her chair and threw herself at him, mouth open wide, jaw folding back into deep creases. From her throat a thin black liquid spattered in violent emission against the glass, almost concealing the bifurcated tongue that fell over her lower lip and was sucked back with a slow, rattling hiss that did not escape the compartment in which she was sealed.

“Shit... what the hell?" he chuckled.  O’Connor did not bother to look up as he walked past them.

“By-catch.  It’s headed down to the labs this afternoon.”

The woman returned to her seat while her audience filed out the door, drawing back her sleeve and cleaning a bullet wound on her forearm with her curling, mallow-coloured tongue.  Shaw remained with Josephine, who had made no move to leave.  She began leafing through the files again.

“Bambis?” he murmured.

"Autonomous Defence Modules.”

His frowned deepened.

“You mean the...”  He tipped his head in the direction of the window, with its looming backdrop of encircling trees.  “I thought they were still in beta...”  Josephine allowed him to speculate.  “Why bambis?”

She turned each photograph the right way up as she examined them.

“Because they have no mother and live in the woods."

​"We should've let them extract the housekeeper.  We could sweat the whole trip out of her in five good minutes.”

​"Ever seen fake Feds blooded out with their own bodyparts?” she inquired without looking at him.  "She doesn't know anything worth telling.  I want her there until she does."

He slid his laptop back into its case and looked toward the window, watching the barrack search as it was concluded.

“They’re going to have a hard time recruiting once this rotation's been chewed up... word is even the dry matter down at ADX Florence is getting cold feet.  You have a good one."

Alone again, she stood and held the image she was studying to the daylight to confirm its minor details.  Within its shiny white margin Susan and William occupied the shade of an elm, the former on a smoking motor scooter, talking to the latter as she stood and smiled back at him, opening her mouth to speak.  The pleasure they took in one another glowed through their skins; Josephine set the photo on the windowsill and stepped back, hands settling on her hips.
​

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Danger   asbestos   B U R(?) G A    50

# 1 in the hood, G.

​With her improving perception she noticed that his suite was as hopelessly disordered in reality as it had been in her confusion, defiant of her increasingly token interventions.  Leading her around the bed, he sat her down and took a pillow from those tumbled against the headboard.  They both looked down at the blood soaking the front of her nightdress; she was gripped by the urge to be rid of it, loathing the press of it against her stomach, and he helped her up, walking her to the anteroom.  In the darkness she attempted to drag the flannelette over her head and found she could not, the pain in her arm bringing tears once more to her eyes.  Behind her, he bent down and took the gown in both hands, drawing it over her shoulders and easing the sleeve along the bandage, his presence beside her bare skin striking her at first as fraught and hotly awkward; she lifted her hands to her breasts but the gesture seemed so graceless that she gave it up.  He lowered the new nightdress slowly over her head, the fabric brushing her lids and the short curve of her chin and settling around her.  While he fastened the button at her nape the small movements of his hands fell through her like cooling embers, closing her eyes while he slid the tie from his hair and gathered hers to the base of her neck.  

With her once more seated William began rifling the stacks of boxes, muttering all the while to himself in the patois best suited to the expression of annoyance.  He departed in his distraction, returning with a small coffer bearing grimacing primate features in the timber of its lid.  

“I hate monkeys.” she sighed.  He placed the little chest on the mattress and sat beside her.
“I am fucked in the head for doing this.  You need a doctor.  What've you got against our selfless health professionals?”
“Nothing... I just... hate hospitals and doctors.  And I've got no insurance.”  
"If it's the money, I'll..."
"I'm an overstayer." she complained.  "They'll deport me."   
"Oh yeah, ça va... so am I, come to think of it.”
“What?" 
"Illegal aliens.  I don't even own a passport."
"What... your brother too?"
"He's totally fucking alien.  That's why he trucks with Opal.  He has to keep everything on the low or they'll haul him off to dick dungeon for all his miscellaneous evildoing."
"God, that’s...”
“Greasy, yeah, I know.”  He shrugged, fatalistic.  “So here we are, all free and brave and whatnot til you get mad at me and dime us out to Immigration."  William leant over his knees, pressing his knuckles to his forehead.  "Susan... is there nothing I can say to get you to an ER?  Please just let me drive you in..." 
"Stop asking me.  If you don't want to do it, I'll have a go myself." she promised, unable to ascribe the strange taste of his reluctance.
"Alright..." he sighed.  "So... how's the pain?  It's bad, isn't it?"  He reached back into the bedside drawer, lit a joint and handed it to her.  Susan drew hard and spluttered.
"Where do you get this stuff?"
"Cay, and Sticky Gerald.  Take the edge off?"  

She nodded emphatically and frowned down at the contents of the box.  A bizarre pharmacopeia was revealed beneath the thick lid; bundles of dry vegetable matter, small brown paper bags labeled with black ink symbols, tiny jars of liquid and doubtful-looking suspensions and crisp, dark wizened things that looked like desiccated fungi or sea creatures crackled as he delved amongst them.  He took out a small white taproot, waxen and glabrous like the skin of an elver, and set it aside on the bed; she eyed it warily, shuddering at its plump little midriff and tapering bifurcations.  William also selected one of the paper bags, two of the diminutive jars, one full of oily matter and the other clouded as though with dust, a crepe bandage, a curved needle and some glossy black thread.  From the bedside table he took a hunting knife, from which she jerked her arm toward herself.

“I thought I’d just take it off at the elbow... we can get you a pirate hook, or you know... one of those clip-on fans.” he smiled, taking her wrist and easing her hand open; she closed her eyes and let her shoulders sag, allowing his voice to do its work.  “You don't even have to trust me, Christabel... this is one of my few tiny little domaines d'expertise."  

"I don't trust anyone." she admitted.

​"If you fell out of a combine harvester in five hundred pieces, I could stitch you back together and you'd end up just as beautiful as you are now.  Or almost.  To my eyes.”  He eased the knife under the dressing as he spoke, slitting it open before she could object again, the pain in her arm expanding with the release of its binding.  Watching her eyes close, he got up and brought the copper tub lying under the hole in the ceiling to her feet in time to catch the contents of her stomach.  She sat dejectedly, spitting a slug of bollchu into the tub at William's insistence, its potency stripping out the sour taste. 

He threaded the needle with a discerning squint, pausing to press the curious little taproot into her hand, closing her fingers around it and smiling as her face betrayed disgust.  The small paper bag contained a quantity of something resembling brittle, sun-dried insects and he emptied them into his mouth, chewing for a moment before spitting them as a smooth black paste onto his palm.  Susan made strenuous objections while he added the contents of both jars to the masticated mixture but he caught her delinquent limb and brought it back onto the pillow.

“Don’t be so fancy.  Spit makes the world go round.” he promised.
“That's money.”  
“No it's not.  Try going out and buying someone else’s spit.”
“I’m trying not to think about that." she sighed while he used two fingers to paint the salve over her wounds, attending to each in turn so that it covered the raw flesh entirely and began a peppery chemical burn where it had sat longest.  She sucked in a breath until pins and needles signaled the onset of a comprehensive insensitivity.  Though he had tended a thousand such wounds in the midst of violence, screams and suppurating filth, the thought of pushing a needle into her flesh forced him to sit back and reach for the joint himself in an attempt to ease the torque of apprehension.  

“These can move around a lot as they heal and you get abscesses, so..."  He blew a long, tight breath.  "I’m going to have to go deep with the first few.  And I have the worst fucking performance anxiety ever... if you keep looking at me I’ll end up sewing my hand to your knee.”    
“I have to look."
"Why?"
"Nothing’s worse than not knowing.”

He made a doubtful face and used his free hand to encircle her arm and push the wounds together, arranging them to his satisfaction before testing the needle against a laceration.  

"Feel anything?"
"Why do you have a gun?”  

William fumbled, sitting back in exasperation.

“You have to stop asking questions.  I’m down to my last three answers, and believe me, you won’t like them.”  Her silence did not excuse him.  “That gun is perfect for home defence.”  Susan crept her sound hand toward his and held it until he sighed again and glanced at her, explicitly grateful.

"Go on... I can't feel a thing." she urged.  She watched him lace the narrow rows of webbed black stitching that defined and unified each wound until her arm looked like a Georgian sampler, the work so fine and even that she smiled in admiration of its grisly elegance.  

“Knowledge isn’t everything.” he murmured as he worked.  “You're burdened with it... you can’t be blissfully informed."  He leant forward and bit through the end of one line.  She could feel his breath on her arm as the anaesthetic began to wane; he wound the crepe around his handiwork to keep the sight of it from troubling her.  “Once that stuff gets into your system it’ll make you want to sleep, so I’ll leave you here.”

Without knowing if it was the loss of blood or his solicitude, or something in the occult compounds he had administered, Susan was struck by regret at his impending departure.  She lay her hand on his wrist, where it served as emissary, her stare entreating his own.  He blinked in the slowly lateral and strangely communicative manner that no longer disturbed her.

"Stay..." she said quietly, setting her arm across his midst as though to keep him.  William touched his face to the side of her head, groaning softly into her hair.

​"Christabel... you have to sleep this off, and I have to get out of here... there are parts of me that don’t care if either of us respect them in the morning.”  He placed the joint on the bedside table.  "For the heaves."  Pulling back the bedclothes, he put her feet under the covers and waited patiently for her to give up his hand, which she did reluctantly, without opening her eyes.   



Outside the wind slid through brass chimes, striking the bells with idle fingers but Susan opened her eyes to the certainty she had been roused by something more, lying on her back and wondering if her own snoring had disturbed her.  Flame-like pain licked along the arm beneath her bandage and she looked down at where it rested on the palampore quilt; the birds and lotus-hearted palmettes, hand-drawn in indigo and warm vermeil, lay as they had been, their mellow beauty apparent even in the shade of the tester frame.  Closing her eyes did not dismiss the perception of disturbance.  As she lay arguing against it the quilt began to crease, then slide slowly across her lap.  Her fist closed on it to no avail and her gaze followed the taut fabric to the edge of the mattress where the livid, half-stoved face of her attacker gaped at her, fists snatching once more at her torn arm.

The pain beneath her bandage redoubled as she lifted her head and found it clutched under her chin against her dream assailant.  Susan cursed the encounter, knowing it had destroyed all prospect of repose, kicking back the quilt and rolling off the bed onto her feet.  The faint glow of the night sky through the drapes drew everything beneath the tester frame in crowded silhouette when she leant down to peer into the void.  Finding nothing living, she looked around William's possessions until her gaze settled on the stand beside the bed.  

Its drawer came to her quietly and she drew the lamp closer to illuminate its contents; a book of matches emblazoned with the livery of a club she had been warned about, a keyring laden with a heathen figure fashioned from black wood and so imbued with menace that her delving fingers avoided contact with it and plastic identity cards shuffled by the action of the drawer.  She chose a few, appalled and intrigued to find they carried a range of names and guises.  The largest object was an exotic weapon she did not recognize as a katar, a punch dagger wrought with black niello work and scored with an Arabic maxim.  Reaching into the back of the drawer, her fingers closed on something smooth, a polished disc from which the light flashed brightly, its edges exceeding by a modest degree the palm of her upturned hand.  A kind of stone, she guessed, cloud-white and crowded with fingers of dense, pine-needle green, as smooth as if it had been water-worn for centuries and suggesting so formidable an antiquity that it might have opened in her hands and spoken with a voice as cold as snow.  

In turning from the bedside table her feet brushed a large, squared object beneath the frame that she dragged out and settled on the mattress, sweeping its attendant dust from the palampore.  It was a volume bound in thick green hide embossed with sinuous vegetation, its leaves of heavy yellow card all scuffed and stubbed at their corners.  Polaroids tumbled from them onto her nightdress as she sat down with it.  

Some were smudged and all smelled faintly of wine and cigarettes, badly framed and exposed.  Someone had photographed William while he slept in an unfamiliar bed, face down in a dim room with windows draped in black cloth.  Susan made out a blonde figure reflected in the glass and decided it was Lilian; she had recorded him unconscious and semi-naked, then scowling at her from behind sunglasses starred by the flash in a bathtub, a shower cap containing his scarlet hair, an inflatable dinosaur preserving a nominal modesty.

The foxed leaves held a collection of elderly, large-format photographs mounted in some esoteric order.  From William's evasion of the topic she guessed the vistas belonged somewhere in montaine Asia, but could glean little else from them.  Their aged monochrome held views of stony slopes and flights of countless, snow-dressed peaks so pale they barely registered against the paper, white-flecked rivers grinding down through gnathic gorges and scouring their foothills.  She leant over each in her search for some visible focus, finding endless, scriptless pages of confluent landscape that slowly revealed itself to be the sole object of memorial, the sequence fusing into a knowledge of its distant whole.

In her patient foray she found two lone human figures, the first a young man; beside him on a waist-wide path stood a pony blurred by movement, its profuse mane almost concealing the sack tied to its back.  The figure sat on a rock in modest native dress, black hair tied in an unseen tail.  Upon examination he bore a marked, if not inerrant, resemblance to William and she lifted the album with her good hand, poring over the image in an attempt to fault the likeness.  If she had finally located some erstwhile ancestor, the workings of biology posed more questions than it satisfied; frowning, she turned the page and was confronted with something infinitely more disturbing.

A single battered photograph clung at a slight angle to the middle of the leaf, its two figures standing by the stony footing of a Hindu shrine, its murtis thickly-dressed with wreaths of pale flowers.  Both subjects were fair, dark haired and shirtless as though preparing for some ritual obeisance; one faced the camera with hands on his hips while the other stood with his back to it, face in profile.  The sun had shone brightly on that scene, delineating features so like William’s that she could not convince herself otherwise, and the same light played on the second figure, painting the black, shamanic complexities of the pattern covering his back in clear-cut contrast.  His unmistakable reserve, the look of fathomless consideration in his profile threw a choking coil around her as she discerned the small degree to which the characters on his back differed from his brother’s, since it was Edward who stood with such definitive indifference to the lens.  At the bottom of the page someone had pencilled a brief remark.

                                                                             'darshan, Neelkanth Parbat'

Susan shoved the album from her lap and was rewarded with a ripping pain in her arm that forced her to cradle it and breathe through bared teeth.  Another picture had fallen from the pages and lay beyond the foot that she had drawn up with her knees.  Its stippled Kodacolor degraded toward the corners, but William glowed in its midst like something freshly painted, standing on a lawn in a printed shirt and dark, cropped hair before the green drape of a weeping elm.  His arm encircled the skull of a less statuesque companion, pale hand clasping the stranger’s broad forehead in an attitude of provocative familiarity that required no introduction.  The man was dark-eyed and well-made, surely the proud indigéne of some Mediterranean state with his high-collared suit, obedient, sun-streaked coif and Riviera tan.  Together they seemed a demonstration of opposing principles, though their ease betokened intimate acquaintance.  The print would have brought a smile to her face had its colour shift not rendered it in the pastels of a summer so long perished.

Susan pushed the album quickly beneath the quilt as the door preceded William.

"Ça va?" he asked, seeking something in the chest at the end of the bed.  She stared past it at the little she could see of him.

​"When's your birthday?" she inquired.  

His posture changed behind the intervening furnishings.

"I... scorpio.  Whatever month that is."

“How old are you?”

The quiet stood between them as he slid the drawer closed.  Susan watched him formulate an answer, the time elapsing between her inquiry and his reply ringing with an elemental truth.  

“I forget, all the time.” he admitted.  “Ed won’t be back tonight and Frost's working, so I’ll stay in his rooms, but if you need me...”

“I’m alright here.” she told him.   

When he had gone, Susan plucked the captioned image from its backing and kicked the album under the bed.  Its enigmatic subjects refused to be remanded or dismissed by any defensive exegesis of her own devising, and she looked around herself, surveying again the great heterogeneous hoard crowded about her.  Amongst it there was nothing able to tell of its own fortune, nothing valued beyond utility or trade, and the pieces spoke to her in unison as though finally granted leave to do so.  They were no studied compilation but the record of a lifetime as convoluted and unaccountable as its appurtenance.  The pain in her arm became a metronomic rhythm and she sank backward, the canopy looming overhead like the great black footing of a thundercloud.


CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce