The coffee machine refused Susan with a parched and gurgling complaint despite the vehemence of the curses she addressed to it.  She looked around for a clue to its sudden malaise, pushing back the sleeves of her nightgown and scratching at her neck.  The box of drinking chocolate that she guddled from the confusion of noodles and pasta at the back of the cupboards proved virtually empty and she swore again, tipping the crumbs into her mug and heaving open the refrigerator.  The milk carton stood in a similar state of denudation.  Behind her, shadow stroked across the gingham curtains from the night outside, rain hissing on the glass at the behest of a sudden burst of wind.  She walked into the entrance hall, stood listening for a moment, then turned her ear against the door, striving to decide if there was a presence in the porch until the handle moved and opened against her.  

"Ms Christabel." said Shaw, pushing back the grey hood of his sweater.  "You don't mind, do you?  It's coming down pretty hard out there."  He smiled at her visible dismay, following her into the kitchen where he occupied the doorway, leaning against the frame and blowing the steam from his flask of coffee.  Rain had painted brief, almost digital falls of darkness across his shoulders though the rest of his clothing was largely untouched by the downpour.  "That damn thing..." he added, shaking his head at the coffee machine.  "Let me look at it..."

"I can sort it." Susan muttered, pulling the hood from the appliance herself and standing on tip toe to peer inside.  She glanced back at him over her shoulder when he advanced despite her assurance, and he returned to the doorway.

"Sure not much of a night out there.  That driveway's going to ice up pretty good in a month or so... hope they get some grit out here.  I don't want to leave my ride out on the street when the snow hits."  His observations redoubled her annoyance as she discovered the reservoir tube stood disarticulated, unscrewed from the base of the steam wand.  "Thought about catching a movie tomorrow... want a ride into town?  I'm just down the road and I could use..."

"I can't.  We're busy tomorrow."

"Stepping out with Mr Lamb junior?  You two seem pretty tight lately..."  Susan looked back again at his knowing smile, slapping the cupboards closed overhead.  "Where you headed?"

"Where are we headed?" she iterated, scowling up at him when he did not oblige her approach to the door.

"Did it come out like that?  I'm just trying to make nice.."  She tried to press past him; Shaw put out an arm and stayed her.  "Hey, that's new." he exclaimed, tapping at the site of her scars on his own neck.  "Did that happen here?"  His scrutiny became more acute.  "Come on, you can't tell me this was nothing... you should talk to someone."

"Will you get out of my way, please?" she told him, turning sideways to shove past him.

The same rain lashed the tall panes that lined the studio, drumming on the roof, spewing in freshets from the broken guttering and gouging at the ground below.  The lengthy chamber was perfumed by precious woods, polish and storage dust, and Edward stood, looking down at the scabbard in his hands, its dark, discreet lacquer sheathing the last odachi in his possession.  His protracted reach allowed him to remove the blade from its housing unaided, a smooth, dry shucking sound attending its removal; he lay it across his palm, frowning down at the nicks and gouges marring its edge, though the steel still bore the lustrous damascene grain of its painstaking assembly.  It predated the zenith of the swordsmith’s art, its imperfection a brittle, unforgiving thing that he had always exploited, keeping his proficiency in spite of it.  

The last of the oxblood bags hung from the ceiling; the web of tendons in his left hand contracted, pulling tight as he closed his fingers on the clothbound hilt.  Performing no guard or formal posture, he set off in the midst of his purpose, blade blinking with the colour of the ceiling as he whipped it backward and swung its length through the bag; the lower half fell with a short thud to the boards, cleanly severed, the impact bleeding through his feet as though he had stamped them hard.  Lilian's scent drifted past him as he sheathed the blade, a sweet guest amid the notes crowding the studio.  She stood, tying a black robe about her waist while he replaced the weapon on one of the cabinets earmarked for sale.  A mass of furniture and objet lined the window-bearing wall, its diverse shapes and surfaces exaggerating the distance between them.  

“That was hot." she said quietly.  "You should have come got me.”

“I hack alone.” he replied.  Lilian looked around herself and chose the carver he had taken from his room, sitting down slowly and casting her speculation over their belongings before turning it on him.  Her scrutiny met little resistance; he took a chair for himself from the wall.  

“First time you brought me here, know what I thought?” she asked.

“No.” he admitted. 

“That you were a bad trick.”  The polished floor reflected her as she reached up and lifted her silver hair from her neck with both hands, twisting it into a knot upon her head.  

“And yet my money was as good as anyone’s.”

“Sure it was.  You were the first guy I wanted to see naked since I was eighteen.  That, and you were double tapping Orb's ass, right there in your head...”

​“I don’t remember.”

She made a small, exculpatory gesture.

​“You probably don’t even know you’re doing it.”

Edward turned his hand over on the arm of his chair and opened it slowly, in an invitation she obliged in her own partial, ambiguous manner, easing herself onto her feet and walking toward him alongside the consigned effects, pausing to examine their components.  

“Can’t believe I ever got in your car.” she said, almost to herself, fingers moving over the busy grain of an old coffer.
“You must be sorry you did.”  
“I’m saying it was fucked up... I’m not saying I regret it.  Jesus, you’re so fucking literal.”  His hand renewed its gesture of demand; she moved closer still, examining a low bronze censer.  “Do I look like her?” she asked.  He took some small time to himself.  
“Yes, and no.  You seem younger... everyone does today.”
“How old was she?”
“Thirty-eight when she died.”  

Her expression altered slightly as she nodded.

“How are we the same?”

Edward closed his eyes.

“Your voice.  And your skin." 
“Did you love her?” 
“More than I thought possible.” he replied, watching her struggle with his responses.  
“I guess... what I want to hear is that, whatever happened, it was worth the stitches...” Lilian admitted.  "That you made each other happy."
“I'm happy now.”  Her glance was heavily shaded with disbelief.  “I'm perverse...” he reminded her.  “It has its moments.”  Watching him say the word led her to ponder his facility across that involuted spectrum, her compulsive taste for it and her own fatalistic discipline, the prospect of confining herself once more within detachment awaiting his absence like a jailer.  He spoke her name; the approach of someone along the hall outside made him defer the question, though it longed for her.  They looked together toward Susan, who felt the heat of unwitting intrusion, remaining in the doorway until Lilian created a small, makeshift distance between them, turning to two paintings propped alongside one another at her right and lighting a cigarette as she considered them.

“Flicking both?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet.” said Edward.  “Some things you can’t give up, no matter what you tell yourself.”  

“Everything gets old... just give it time.” she sighed.  “Personally, I got a hard on for the Delacroix.  Who doesn't love a lion beating up a fucking jaguar?”  

"Leopard.  New World felidae were entirely absent from the Rive Gauche during the period in question."  Susan rolled her eyes, and Lilian directed a mocking look at her. 

​“Are you accusing my associate of being a humourless freak?” she smirked.

“I’m not saying anything.” Susan promised, venturing toward them despite the lingering atmosphere that prevailed.  Their possessions were laid out in careless, barbaric splendour, like a three-dimensional Lascaux, a panorama of lavish, orphaned beauty and disordered ornamentation, randomized by its loss of context; though she had seen many of the pieces about the house, Susan found herself gazing on them with new eyes, recognizing qualities previously disguised by domesticity.  

"What's happened?" Edward asked her from his chair.  She was reminded of Shaw, and startled to think his importuning might have told upon her features, but shook her head.  Behind them William dragged a half-rolled rug into the studio, his arms stuffed with artifacts chosen from his own rooms; beside Edward’s already substantial body of selected pieces he deposited fragments of Parthian gold in a plastic shopping bag, a cigar box stuffed with uncut sapphires and a smoothly planate Olmec mask of mottled olive jadite.  He and Lilian glanced briefly at, then away from each other, their silence persisting.  Susan glanced at him pointedly as he reached back and switched on a half-dead bank of lights.

“That’s white man’s electricity.” Lilian observed.  William smiled.

“Tell him to come and get his women next time you see him.” he replied, his vulgarity drawing both of their disapprobation.  “They’re wearing down my best inch.”  He sat in the vacated chair and patted a knee for each female companion, lighting a cigarette when the invitation was refused and glancing over his shoulder at Susan departing the studio.  "That's my fucking Delacroix.”

"Auberjonois is late." Edward muttered.

"Eight's alujha for nine forty-seven.  Okay, so, town meeting." William proposed, clicking his fingers in a desultory call to order upon Susan’s return.  "When all this shit is gone we'll have some liquide, but then... what?  Then we should g... g... starts with g, say it with me..." 

"We should leave." said Edward.  

"I was looking for get the fuck out of here, but I'll take that.  I'm not waiting around for whatever found Cay and Annick to kick our fucking door down."

​"And go where?" Susan demanded, chewing on the corner of her thumb.  He shrugged.

"Mmm... let's just peel out and decide where afterwards.  But hey, we've got our very own sinister self-appointed egomaniac in charge and it's traditional to dignify that shit with some sort of sham election, so all in favour of bugging out, in principle, hands up.”  He raised his own, as did Susan and Lilian.  While he spoke, a well of diminutive darkness gathered in the doorway, Petrouchka standing before the Delacroix in a black dress with her hand touching her chin, gaze rising from it to the rain that still threw itself against the windows.  “What do you want to do, Pet?  Coming with us?” William inquired.  The vampyre avoided Lilian with great decorum, alighting on the arm of his chair.

“Is kind, darlink, but I go with Gideon.  He have aeroplane, so... is good for me.  You, Susan?  What do you do?”

“Going with him.” she sighed.

“She needs some reliable heat.” William told his brother.  

“No!  I don’t want to be a stupid macho gun toting arsehole...” she complained, perceiving just as rapidly that she had lain the unflattering designation upon the bulk of her companions, and that they looked back at her in silence. 

“Ever hear about the awesomeness of being a live gun toting arsehole instead of a corpse with a really clear conscience?” William inquired, watching her walk to the calamander table behind the painting and draw her Mughul pendant from the pocket of her robe.  “Christabel... no no no... qu'est-ce que tu fous?” he exclaimed, leaning out to catch the chain and stuff it back into her hands; she fended him off and replaced it on the table.

“I’m not going anywhere if I can’t pay my way.  If you touch it, I will flush it down the toilet.” 

“I’ve got maybe three K left.” Lilian said slowly as she blew the dust from the blue gems William had purveyed, the ragged stones rolling in their bed of cigarette paper.

“Your money’s no good here, sugartits.  You paid the rent the hard way.” he smiled to her look of displeasure.  

“These are fucking primo.  I know a guy who’ll like them.” 

“They need to er... stay low profile.”

​“I get that they didn’t fly out of your asshole to the sound of fucking trumpets.  Do you want me to call him or not?”

Susan watched Edward devote his unqualified attention to Lilian and wondered how they could have immersed themselves in one another to such an extent without satisfying the directive impulse.  Something even more elemental than desire altered the colour of his eyes and kept him silent, even when she looked up and saw it in him, their shared privilege requiring nothing more explicit.  His phone buzzed in his pocket and he stood, leaving the ballroom to attend to the call; in his absence, William stretched out a leg and gently kicked Lilian’s calf.  She looked to him but did not speak, and he shook his head to himself.  

“Go with him, Frost.  Who else’ll duct tape you to a clothesline and paint you with Tabasco sauce?  You were lucky to find someone who shares your interests.”
“Some day my prince will come.” she murmured.  “Maybe he won’t be fucked up or foreign, but I guess he’ll be human.  What's more important?”  She looked up from her own flattened affect to the morbid exclusivity of Petrouchka’s stare, glad of Edward’s return.

“I’ll dismiss the guard in the next few days... say nothing to him.” he told them.  Susan looked up as though she might speak, but remained quiet.  

“Put it back.” she insisted instead, perceiving the absence of her pendant upon the table; William offered her an expression that might have convinced anyone else of his innocence, letting his head fall back in dramatic concession when she persisted, allowing her to drag the secreted jewel out of his pocket.  

"What the fuck kind of time do you call this?" he demanded of Gideon, the latter admitting himself with a smile that he passed around the room, sustaining it even at the sight of Lilian, though she gave him a long and visible pause.  

"Embouteillage." he explained with a shrug, taking out his phone to briskly photograph the larger pieces and tallying their wholesale value.  "Edward, the Ziegler Mahal... you don't want to wait for Sotherby's?  This size, it has done very well..."
"Now is better." Edward replied.
"For us both." he smiled, making notes.  He made further inquiries regarding several of the more obscure items before pushing his pencil through the gold chain and lifting the pendant slowly, setting the loupe from his pocket to his right eye to read the elegant inscription faintly etched into the reverse.  "Êtes-vous sûr?" he inquired, looking to William almost warily.
"Do you think you'll get anything for it?" asked Susan, slightly discomforted by Gideon's expression.
"Un peu." he smiled, obscurely.  "Edward..." he continued, shaking his head briefly at the unaccustomed and entirely inapposite honorific as he walked back toward him.  "Per'aps you can settle something for me... you have seen these?"  Accepting his phone, Edward looked through the images of the hahdri massacre as though they were holiday snapshots, Susan watching their dark, bruised hues projected over the gold of his eyes.  "What, ah, does this look like, to you?"
"Lacklustre grouping."  
"You don't know who?"
"AP, seven six two, spent flares... governmental." Edward related.  Lilian ran a hand up the bare length of her neck while he spoke, the small moment of intimate self-contact drawing his gaze; Gideon frowned, awaiting the remainder of his conclusion while she passed behind Petrouchka and disappeared into the hall.  Edward returned his phone, remaining until the necessary will began to fail him.

"Per'aps we should all go blonde." Gideon remarked as their host left them.  "I think his queue put you in charge, Sachiin, so... voilá, my offer."  He tore a leaf from his note pad and handed it to William, who screwed it into a ball and leveled a critical gaze at his companion.
"Monsieur hermétique... constipé du morlingue." he mused. 
"Trés diplomatique." 
"Don't be so fucking tight.  You're choking the moths."  
"Another ten, that is all I can do.  Ça va?"
"Another fifteen and I'll blow you in the garage."
"Ten it is." Gideon smiled, taking his chequebook from his pocket.
"I said cash, damn you."
"You say a lot of things, chouchou."  The visitor smiled again and handed William a note on his way out.  “Be happy.” he urged.  “Now you can buy her some good taste in men.  Ladies... bon nuit, eh?"
"Mes couilles sur ton nez." William called after him.

“Do you have no clue where we’re going?” Susan sighed as he closed the door.

“I go where I’m told, cloudcheeks.  Mr Itinerary just put up the do not disturb sign, so I wouldn’t count on getting anything out of him for twelve hours.”

“Anyway, you can not always know.” Petrouchka observed.  “You think, I am going to this place, but, something happen, and then you are in the Ukraine on farm with chicken, and there is no Paris.  Sometimes is five star, sometimes goat barn... sometime no barn.  These day, if you want to be free, you must go where no one else want.”

“Aren't we there already?" Susan smiled.  "At least tell me when we’re leaving.” she added, shrugging her shoulders suddenly as William traced the back of her knees with his fingers from his seat in the chair.

“Ed’s got stuff to choke off downtown, so I’d say we’ve got another week."
​
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
​© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Flight of the Rays, 2010. Florian Schulz said: “During an aerial expedition over the coast of Baja California Sur, we glided high above the water looking for whales, when a large dark spot caught our attention. As we got closer, we started to discover its nature: an unprecedented congregation of rays. The group was as thick as it was wide, all heading towards the same direction. I have asked around why this took place but no one has been able to explain it to me.”  Photograph: Florian Schulz/Ciwem Environmental Photographer of the Year

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​Tilde brushed the blankets on his bed with a rustling sprig of sage and shook it toward the south, while William sat hunched over his legs, sloe eyes reading the creases in the witch’s face as the latter withdrew from her inspection of the patient.  Reaching past him, she glanced behind the curtains at the morning that still glistened with the dew arrayed the night before.

“You say four days, and no sign?” she asked.

“Nothing.” he assured her.  She shrugged and clapped her calloused hands together softly.

“If she was to turn, should it be from being bitten by this wickedness outside your door?”  She let him plead silently with her for a moment longer as part of the penitence she considered due.  “But you are lucky, child... I think you will keep her.” the witch pronounced with a gap-tooth smile.  He whispered to himself and rested his head on his arms.  “Someone has chase this evil out of her for you.  And that is dralna handwork.”

“You’re one hundred percent sure she’s going to be alright?”

Tilde shrugged again, gathered up the hem of her purple, braid-trimmed dress and worked her feet back down into her sandals.

“Ja, well, put her in the sun and you will know.  I think she will be good... that is my word on it.”  She reached out and patted his face, smiling back down at the figure beneath the bedclothes.  "Such a lovely girl, so strong and blooming... a shame you won't make her fat and happy, on a farm with pretty babies."
"I know, alright?  I'm a worthless incubus... might as well be a vampyre myself..." he sighed dramatically, to which the witch rolled her eyes.
"Chocolate, milk with honey, and gravlax with juniper.  You feed this to her, and pancakes.  Honest food.  Don’t turn your nose or I will come back here and make you eat it.  And keep her away from your brother... when we are healing, we don't need his sort of energy.”
"He's the one who helped her."
"Hm!" she murmured, patting the top of her own head.  "I suppose we all must begin somewhere."

Beneath the blankets Susan listened to the witch lead William into the hallway, rolling over onto her back with the caution previously instructed by her wounds, still troubled by the ghostly delay between her own commands and the faltering obedience they exacted, as though she floated in her own flesh.  The bandage taped to her neck and shoulder tugged her skin but there was nothing of the drumming pain that had woken her the day before.  She lay still, her idea of the bed as a land of insulated absolution blackened by thoughts of confinement to that very state, prompting her to throw back the covers with both hands.

Edward’s gaze awaited her as she burst into his suite.  Though he stood before the bed with a newspaper in both hands, Susan lunged at him from beneath a cashmere blanket and secured his arm, hauling him down the stairs and slowing only in the grip of vertigo, reliant upon fervour to deliver them to her intended destination.  She marched out into the bright morning and stood staring about herself from beneath her cowl; the cold ground under her bare feet made her wince in its shelter, the weave glowing pink at the edges where it shielded her from the sky.  He stood where she had left him in the doorway.  

"I want you to... if I'm... just do it quickly, if you have to..." she called, exclaiming at his laconicism.  “You were going to kill me anyway, so don’t stand there like it's never crossed your bloody mind!”  Her face grew smaller, circumscribed by her grasp on the blanket as it tightened under her chin.

"Exsanguination or decapitation?"

"What's faster?"

“I can decapitate an adult human inside five seconds.” he replied.  She stared blankly.

"What, like... one pineapple, two pineapple?"  Edward folded his arms and Susan screwed up her frown.  “But will I... do you really burn?”

"Yes."

"Is it..."

“You become thermoreactive.  The skin blisters on exposure to sunlight, at any point on the body.  Your ankle might burst into flames before anything else.”  She swallowed the bilious mass that rose in her throat and stared down at her amorphous shadow on the grass.  “You might have asked if I had a knife.”

​“I never really feel as though I have to.” she assured him ruefully.  “Alright... if it goes badly, I just want to say thank you... for helping me... I know it was you, and I'm grateful that you tried.”  

She loosed her hold on the blanket and threw it to the ground.

From the balcony William watched her stand in the midst of the grass in her T-shirt, looking back to his brother; Susan shed her few items of clothing while her companion turned his back, recommending she inspect herself.  He turned again at her repeated insistence to look over her back and shoulders, parting her hair and searching her scalp before declaring them asymptomatic.  As a final test she looked up and sought out the white disc of the sun, finding it no more dreadful than before and scrabbling at the dressing on her neck, ripping it free; it stuck to her fingers while Edward handed her garments back to her.  

Once more clothed, she stepped forward and seized his hands, holding them tightly in the violence of her gratitude.  Though he did not fend her off the sunlight made his features almost intolerably effulgent; in spite of it she glimpsed in him an expression divergent from the cool dissociation that he wore like skin, and further still from that behind the gun that he had held on her, and in a moment of chastening insight it occurred that he was neither as uncommunicative nor impervious as ignorance had insisted.  William put his hands on his hips as he came to them.   

“Don't do that, Christabel, you’ll get lead poisoning." he warned.  "And if you were wanting someone to cut your head off, you could have come to me.”   

“Oh shut up and be overjoyed that I’m alive!” she grinned, turning to grasp him comprehensively, then exhibiting the lesions on her neck.  “Look at this scar... it’s fucking Evil Dead... at this rate I'll be so hideously ugly in a year’s time I’ll have to start living in the attic with a mask or something... you can tell people I don’t exist and I’ll jump up and down on the ceiling while you’re having sex with models.”  

“She’s turned." Edward remarked, leaving them to one another.  "There’s an axe in the garage.”  
She called thanks to him again, but he did not look back.

I feel like I've taken most of these frames before.
​But it's midwinter and not even the wind can be bothered.
​There is a personal as well as meteorological lacuna involved.  Novelty is unwelcome. Commentary suffers.
​

When you live near the ocean, you notice that the water is almost always hungry for the sky.
As though it is a younger sibling; vigilant and imitative.
​Except when it is busy
​rejoicing in its own turmoil.
​

I would usually crop people out of the shot and I've only just noticed that tendency.
We are such ugly animals, by and large.  Grass is more beautiful than the average human unit.
Which is sad, really.
​

This lovely old boat and its shag-shedding burqa.
​​Looks so bridal.  ​She is a
​special lady.

These geese survived the shabby, heartless cull that extirpated their more trusting compatriots.
We're far more in favour of a reduction of the demographic that demanded their deaths.
But no one listens to us.

So much yes, so much no.  I can't decide.

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"Thus spoke Arjuna in the field of battle, and letting fall his bow and arrows, he sank down in his chariot, his soul overcome with despair, and grief.”

William’s unheeded narration died a lonely death amid the quiet of his rooms.  Rain hissed against the panes behind the heavy red drape, though he had forgotten the inclemency of the night outside, sitting with his back to it; in his hand the little book from which he read had folded closed almost of its own accord.  He stared at the talismans stitched into the ancient felt he had laid over Susan’s legs in the low-burning light of the candle, her body almost lost beneath the blankets.  The scent of her blood recalled the damage done; he gave over trying to read, and sank more deeply into the chair, letting his eyes drift shut.

They opened again to deep, glowing fuchsia and the sensation of something aliform against his face and hands.  Long pink plumes, gently bouffant, slid across his eyes, one after another; he turned his head and saw they formed the recherché raiment of a double line of lissome show girls as they passed by on either side, heads held proud.  They were crowned with cocktail-coloured festoons, shimmering diamanté chains swinging from the cups of their bustiers, powdered flesh spilling over the seams.  He was bewildered, by their number and their silence, buffeted all the while by the glitter-dusted shoulders and outstretched arms that rose and fell with the count of their routine, their gazes fixed to the distance, eyes outlined in peafowl blue.  As they danced, the shadows on their faces swung upward and immersed them; William closed his eyes again, since they were no longer of any use to him.

Another light waxed roe-red over a course of buildings, strung in the distance across a broad lagoon.  The air was densely moist; insects danced atop the water, and doubtlessly in the dim lacunas before the distant porticoes.  The city lay beneath an idle sunset, its blazing colours lying heavily upon the domes and spires that formed the long spine of its profile.  Looking down, he saw that his bare toes lay only inches from the tongues of water that licked toward him over a narrow, silty beach, straining the bounds of a full tide.

He recognized the famous lagoon, and the flank of the crowded city lying some small part of a mile distant, but not the cemetery isle on which he sat.  The mausoleums of bronze and marble were crammed as closely as the houses of the living across the passive shoal, testament to the affluent merchant caste interred within, though their seals were undone by saline mist, their walls washed with streaks from the greening corners of their plaques.  He sat down on a grave, perplexed.  One of the tombs before him stood cracked and leaning, its door prised open.  By its footings lay a white gull’s severed pinions.

A female figure appeared, gliding as if borne on air.  She leaned forward in an expectant manner, hands clasped at her breast as she neared him, though her features darkened slowly with disappointment and she halted a few graves distant.  A rattle scorched his ears, as harsh and sere as a gale whipping salt from a soda lake, dying away into a sullen, hissing chatter.

“Have we met?” William asked.  Discerning the style and substance of her garments proved difficult; her dress altered with her movements, appearing one moment as faded palladian drapery, the next as some quilted court gown blurring into fleur-de-lys brocade, then patterned velvet.  Her hair fell past her shoulders, its true colour as furtive and indefinable as her clothing in the twilight.  Her frown proved more substantial.

“Will you never remember my name?” she sighed, voice dulled by boredom.  Her face was a gentle, rounded oval, her skin the colour of sugar melting over fire.

“Sorry...” he admitted.

“I am the lamia Amernis.”

He groaned.

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”

​“When we meet I know that I am dreaming.” she remarked, raising a hand to her mouth as she yawned.  She stepped around the stone between them, leaving in the earth behind her a tapered furrow, as though something trailed in her wake, and she took a seat beside him on the grave.  “A woman with the look of you about her brought you across the water, and when her demands did not prevail, she treated you roughly and flung you to the ground, naming you the worst of all earth’s creatures.  She rejoices at the misfortune of your mistress, and hopes that she may perish while you are sleeping.” the lamia informed him.  “Perhaps she is your wife.”

Jumping up, William seized an intagliated headstone and ripped it from the ground, wielding it in both hands to smash a pair of slate crosses, then flinging it at the head of a porphyry cherub.  He continued his destructive spree until there was little left of the stone in his hands, coming to a breathless standstill.  The lamia toyed with a strand of her own hair, twisting it around her fingers as she observed his frenzy.

“What would I not give to have a lover curse me with such conviction?” she lamented. 
“It’s fucking overrated.” William assured her bitterly.    

They looked up at a strange, attenuated grunting.  To his surprise, a glabrous, pithecoid creature shuffled out of the salty mist and halted before the sepulchre, blinking and snuffling like an idiot cast from a dungeon.  Its head was broad, planate and bald; tufts of coarse black hair protruded from its wing-like ears, and its thickly-fleshed arms reached almost to the ground.  It came closer upon twisted legs, peering at them with eyes like balls of lignite, grasping half of a human arm in its right paw.  It was certainly the most olid beast to have troubled William’s senses; it pressed the knuckles of its free hand to the ground and lowered itself onto the moss before Amernis as though invited to, where it took to crunching on the dismembered limb, stripping it of flesh and regarding William opprobriously in the midst of its gnathic labours.

“This is Dadjin.” said the lamia, watching it ingest both flesh and bone.  “He is a Khorezmian ghoul, but comes here, for he esteems its dead above those of other folk.  They are kept savoury by wine, usury, and whoremongering, even into their dotage.”  William nodded, opening his mouth to breathe so that the visitor’s odour would not sicken him.  

“I’d offer you my hand but it’s got sentimental value.”

The ghoul snorted, and addressed him in a thick pidgin of corrupted Latin and his own ancient tongue.

“Why should Dadjin desire your rude thews while a seasoned bounty lies all around?”  He recommenced his unsightly repast; Amernis watched him fondly, and the trio sat together for some time, William watching the fabric of her dress change from mazzarine to royal purple.

“For the first time in my life I don't give two fucks about Rana.  It’s Susan... every time I look at her I think... what the hell am I doing?”  He let his arms fall laxly.  “She gets eighty years, I get ten thousand.  Pourquoi?  I can't even keep a vampyre off her.  I’m such a fucking loser.”
“For shame, that you did not guard her against this night creature.” Dadjin scolded.
“I know.”
“Who will defend her if you can not?” the ghoul insisted.
“You don’t have to rub it in.”
“I know not how you can speak of this disgrace.”
“She had told me to fuck off...”
“Do you follow a woman’s word in everything?”
“Yes.” William declared, glaring wide-eyed at the censorious creature.  Amernis interrupted her colleague’s reply, leaning forward to cough gently into her hands, then shake spittle from her fingers, in which sparkling diamanté chips and fuchsia feathers were inextricably immured.  The ghoul concluded its own meal and bent forward to wipe his face upon the pillowy moss, first one cheek, and then the other.

“Why do you never bring me happy tales?” the lamia complained, frowning down at William as he lay his head in her lap.  Her eyes were called toward the water, and a small, shallow-bellied boat of dark wood drew up into the shoal, its prow pushed against the sand by an unseen current.  She cast him from her lap and slid down over the beach, wading out into the water and clasping her hands to her chest as she peered into the hull.  It was empty.

“I would leave this island, but what of Amernis?” the ghoul confided in a voice like the slow grinding of a hinge.  “Few come to seek their doom with her, but she will not join me in my victuals.  Dadjin says let it be your need that steers your hand, for soon your wants will follow, but she will hear nothing of this, and in her pride she does surely suffer.”  He scratched his side with claws blunted by excavation.  “These black dogs come to us all.  It profits no beast to wring his hands on their account.”

The furrow carved in the lamia's wake began to fill with seeping water.  Across the lagoon the buildings seemed to sink into the horizon as the evening consumed its mantled hues, narrowing the spectrum until only black and blue survived, like smoke steeping from the ashes of a bonfire.  Amernis spoke with her face half-turned toward them.

“As for your wife, the dead are best left buried.  Dadjin will tell you.  And of Susan... her brief years are blessed as yours and mine are not.  We are stone... she is a new thing every morning.  Remember always, in your foolish imperfection, you are her beloved ideal.  Now, go back, Sachiin.  You are missed.”

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

This is a tricky, tricky shade, both technically and aesthetically.  It's the sort of super-rich, ganache-like colour that's very high-contrast on the majority of white peeps and can make many of us look like disappointed clowns.  You know; Rooney Mara Syndrome.  As though your mouth is wearing the rest of you like a hat.  

​How do you know if you can pull this stuff off without ending up in a puddle of oh honey no?  Strong features help.  My rule of thumb- the visual weight of the Liquorice (et al) on your lips should be equivalent to at least one other element on your face.  In my case, my dark googly eyes are a match for a heavy lip situation.  Conversely, deeper complexions, particularly of the cooler persuasion, can carry Liquorice with gay abandon.  It just might be that HG secksy midnight red you were looking for.

The same goes for MAC Sin, which is similarly matte/blackened- once applied, the effect is very similar.

But you know what really sells me on this shade?  The tenacity of the opacity.  Deep lip devotees know it's one thing to achieve a righteous level of inky darkness- keeping it that way is a whole nother kettle of bananas.  The moment you smile or blink or press your lips together, it starts with the janky stunting, receding from the midst of the lip, settling into lines and separating out into ugly patchiness.

​Nice detail by R.  I think this is an Aloe x Gold Tooth bud

There was nothing nobly disinterested about my wanting to finally watch this thing.  I had a cold, was in a shitty mood and was more than happy to slake my puffy gaze with the spectacle of karma as administered by angry bears.  Grizzly Man is admittedly a gratifying watch for a number of reasons, not all of them socially irresponsible.  Herzog's measured, compassionate observation and genius for winkling the shiny-eyed lunatic out of complete randoms (that coroner) are generally worth a squiz.  We're always down with bears and mountains and foxes.  But most alluring was the absolute, cast-iron, aforementioned certainty- obvious to anyone who's ever spent time around other animals- that the bear-bothering Timothy would end up as sticky grist to the Darwinian mill.

​It's not that large wild animals are inevitably going to attack anyone who spends time in their orbit; nothing could be further from the truth and many of us owe our lives to that forbearance.  I've ridden borderline personality horses.  Handled Oxyuranus scutellatus without knowing what it was (we were too far from any antivenom source anyway; lol, thanks dad!).  Swum in oceans heaving with Crocodylus pororsus, Galeocerdo cuvier and Chironex fleckeri.  Broken up dogfights.  Run very quickly away from angry and extremely feral Bubalus arnee.  And I'm still here.

hibernate 4

​weirdly, I had more or less this exact image in my head a couple of weeks ago
it is probably what the inside of my brain looks like while nothing much is happening, so: literal
see more here

Josephine depressed the remote button again, sitting alone in the climate-controlled darkness of the briefing room long after the senior technicians had departed.  On the sleek white screen and on the surface of her dark eyes, the playback began again at her behest, silent enamel blue and black, printing itself into her memory.  The fact of the creature sitting immured in its transparent, retrofitted cell lit such diffuse and indemnifying satisfaction that she felt almost luminous, elated beyond all experience.  It sat on the floor of its exclusive enclosure, its back to the rear wall, the elegant form of its arms arrested somewhat by the tangled mass of steppe iconography inked into the skin over its hands and wrists.  They were such a rude departure from the cryptic, scarified formality of the figures on its back that their rebel intent was declared even to her.  In reality, the footage offered a paucity of meaningful detail, suggesting rather than informing, but her private archives overpainted the deficit.  

“It is breathing, but it doesn’t use much O2.” O’Connor told her, his long face flexing into a dishonest smile, his ingress having escaped her notice.  He sat down on the table beside her with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his grey trousers, commentating the footage as it played out again.  “They deliver another round of inoprophenol...”  She watched the long, slender dart device being introduced to a sliding partition in the front of the enclosure, and saw the little missile strike the subject high on its left arm.  “Waited twenty minutes... went in...”  He took the remote from her and slowed the projection, emphasizing the caution exercised by the two large orderlies on entering the cell, densely ponderous in their body armour beside their lightly-clad objective; though the account contained no audio track, it was apparent that the two men were issuing instructions to the creature.  “It’s totally passive... won’t talk, won’t look, will not respond on any level.”  The orderlies shook their heads at each other and then reached down to hoist their subject from the floor.  “Until you try to impose contact.  At least now we can cross inoprophenol off the list of effective agents.”

The creature emerged from its fugue in a moment Josephine blinked away, seizing and swiftly dismantling its tormentors as though they were intrinsically modular, in a process that, while horrifically graphic, was rendered almost abstract by the dispassion of the offender and the employment of its vastly superior strength in the imposition of its will, as though completing the task to a game-show deadline.  It left the resulting pieces where they lay, standing with its arms by its sides, strafed by the arterial spray that was rendered in solid navy blue by the camera.  

“Look at the total lack of inhibition as it goes for the debrachiation.  This thing will literally rip your arm from your body without thinking about it.  When have we ever seen this kind of arousal and reaction time, even from a lycanthrope?”  His voice trailed off as he shook his head in wonder, reversing and playing the process over.  “As much as I hate to admit it, Bateman was right... this thing needs to be written up and registered yesterday.  It’s incredible.”  

Josephine looked from the screen to the controlling unit in his grasp.  

“What did the lab say?”

“They can’t say anything.  The samples taken when it entered the system were as unstable as anything we’ve gotten... turns to dust, just like everything else.  If we didn’t have the whole thing for context, we’d be back to square one.”  

The creature’s submission to their unwitting ambush played over in an endless loop inside her head, vindicating her suspicion of its apathy.  

“When can I put in for access?” she asked.  

He suspended the inmate's image in the act of walking back to the rear of its cell between the dismembered orderlies, who had ceased to jerk or rock in the midst of the blood that had pooled at the foot of the transparent panel.

“There's a tight circle for now... no one without a special-issue clearance.”  The anger in her gaze relegated him in a swift and peremptory process that he did not care for.  “Never demand where you can negotiate, Ms Jones." he added, removing his glasses and sliding a little cloth from his pocket to wipe them perfectly clean.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

A lovely shot by the Lovely R.

Summerinas are a recent intergeneric hybrid.  We have trouble with this plant's parents- echinacea and rudbeckias- because they tend to be dry prairie type species and we are well, a dampish coastal situation on the other side of the fucking planet.  They'll do alright in a hot year and then rot down into slimy little grey masses the next, which is a shame because the plants are somewhat expensive and very lovely when successful.  I splashed out on two summerinas this year and they dutifully put forth both marigold-yellow and these deep mahogany red blooms; it remains to be seen if they will prove as perennial as their nursery bumf claims.  

I highly recommend them if you're in a hot dry spot and like a nice showy late season daisy; their colours are pretty unique and highly saturated, providing great contrast to the fleshy turquoise and emerald of xeriscape species etc.