Though she had risen slowly, Susan had to stop halfway up the stairs to catch her breath, leaning over herself as she struggled with the asphyxia pursuing her amid the ascent into her throat of the contents of her stomach.  When she emerged into the clear air of the yard a distant sunrise had slid fingers of gold and ibis pink beneath the cloud sealing the valley, its light striking Sachiin's face as he looked up from cutting wood.  With Petrouchka's voice still rolling in her head like a black draught from the gorge itself she closed her eyes at the sight of him, the vampyre's gifts clasped to her chest.  He smiled and set another piece of wood upon its end.

"Hungover?"

When the inquiry was ignored he interrupted his swing and turned back to where she stood, plaster-white and breathless by the parapet, her hair confined to a strange, confluent web of braids.

"She’s underneath us...”
"Ça va, cloudcheeks?”
"Do I look like I'm alright?" she exclaimed.  "This is doing my fucking head in.  We're not staying here.”

Putting down the axe, he came to her and took the bundle from her arms, looking over the mirror in surprise before setting it down upon the row of stone; he lifted a garment from the shroud of disintegrating linen, its shattered atoms drifting around them in a haze of white while a dress fell open from his hands.  Composed of heavy lunar samite, its high-waisted bodice was densely figured with a nebula of hand-cut gems, finch-yellow and violet sapphires and rock crystal, as coldly lustrous as Olympian ichor where they were clasped to the silk by gold thread curling into buds and tendrils.  Susan closed her eyes, its cynical splendour so much more a cage than an adornment that it overwhelmed her.

"I'll have get it altered.” he lamented, regretting his flippancy at the sight of her reaction.

“If we had a toilet I would flush the fucking thing.  She doesn’t want us here, I told you... why do I have to keep saying it?  I'm not spending one more night in the same building with a... a fucking dead person, in a downward bloody spiral who lies awake at night and listens to us fucking...”

“You have to let the drama queens bust a move, Christabel... just wait til they get it out of their systems.”

“They’re not drama queens, they are psychopaths!  Psychopaths who can't stand the sight of me."  She dragged down the fabric of her collar to reveal the scars on her neck.  His eyes drifted over their ragged topography, though he knew every ridge and hollow.  “You can be as stupid you like! This is how I end up."
"I don't think staying where we..."
"You don't think, that's your fucking problem!  I can't spit the fucking bullets out, and I can't take someone else trying to kill me, Sachiin... we are going.  I'm not asking you!"

He took a took a slightly flattened pack of cigarettes from his pocket, holding one between his lips while he retrieved his lighter, never more aware of her gaze in spite of his deliberate silence.  

“I’ve never really done this before, so it might lack credibility." Sachiin admitted.  "But this is my foot, and it's coming down.  There's too much snow.  I’m not losing you to something as fucking stupid as hypothermia... so c’est comme ça... you'll just have to trust me.  Nowhere for a week."

She clasped her own face, everything she had stamped down in her chest emerging in tears.  He looked out over the parapet with a hand on his nape, his struggle manifesting in a deep tic that worked across his shoulders, deforming his resolve.

"You didn't hear what she was saying... for fuck's sake, what am I doing here?" she demanded of herself, sucking a broken breath through her hands.

"Christabel..." he exclaimed softly, immersed in her dismay.  "I’m saying no to you... be proud of me.”  

She struck at him as he touched her arm, turning to stride across the roof into the darkness of the ruin, snatching up one of Petrouchka's forgotten coats in the midst of tripping over its crumpled form and following the steps down to the postern door.  The effort required to heave it open checked the blurred impetus of her descent; she sank down into a crouch against the stone of the mountainside where it neighboured the weathered timbers, wiping at her eyes with her parka sleeve.  In doing so she caught sight of Kala'amātya returning from a solitary foray.  He ascended toward her slowly with no need to question the colour of her face, standing with his rifle on his shoulder while he waited for her to compose herself.    

“You hate this place as much as I do.” Susan murmured.  "And your fucking brother’s morphed into a fascist who knows what’s best for me, so can we please take him to a town where he can buy drugs and go back to being no fucking use to anyone?” 

"You'll lose too much condition trying to walk in this, and there's more to come.  Wait a week." he told her, his study of her referring him to the unspoken elements of her distress.  Looking up into his illegible features, she knew she could not command everything required to disclose Petrouchka's admission, the failure sitting like lead inside her stomach.  

"You must want shot of me more than ever."

“You could have stayed in Gévaudan.”

Susan shaded her eyes from the sky, shaking her head and expressing an arid obscenity.

"If you don't know why I didn't, I can't even feel sorry for you.”

He slid the rifle from his shoulder and made an offer of it, which she ignored until he took her wrist and pressed it into her grasp, meeting her glare without a word.  Susan threw it down onto the snow and dropped onto her backside to push off the edge of the steps, carrying on stiffly down the hill alone.  

A tumble of dry powder descended the slope with her, settling on her lashes and catching on the lush pile of the coat around her shoulders from which it shook loose, banished as it might have been from the back of an animal.  She marched on down the incline, making long bear steps that compacted the crusted snow.  It was not until she was reminded of the river by the sound of unseen water that she slowed, standing on a narrow piece of level ground and looking around herself.  Cold crept into her sleeves but made no headway against the warmth haloed about her neck and chin by the fur; the gorge accepted venous tribute from the slopes on either side of its sunken, blackened crevice and she followed the tiny streams of melt to the edge of the drop, sitting down on a drift to take in the sight of the half-buried river.  

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Are you like me, i.e. impressed against your will by slick and/or gaudy graphic design changes on the basic-arse items that've haunted your shopping list for years?  My senses were both assaulted and delighted by this amazing Macleans toothpaste update featuring-

- new highly-embossed aspirational tooth with superimposed science grid
- full metallic lustre on main body printing
- realistic gold segments in a faceted ring of protective assurance
- eight incredible benefits delineated by tricuspid symbols and individual rainbow swoosh
- golden fulcrum resolution of all rainbow swooshes indicating comprehensive beneficial integration

Holy shit.  All this for sub $3 on special.  I thought I'd bought the wrong toothpaste.

Reading the Serialization?  That last scene was another that emerged almost fully-formed some time after the seminal so now you are dead dream I had a few years back.  Petrouchka speaks from the darkness in the back of the throat, my own worst regrets and with the unholy, unexpurgated perception of depression, which keeps you just as locked out of your own life as her condition.  She's the taste you get when you split the inside of your cheek against your teeth.

Do you write?  Are you ambushed by your characters' sometimes unsettling ventriloquism?  It's fucked up, isn't it?

Anyway- some divine climatic concierge heard my bitching and decided to indulge me last Thursday with a little sip of Spring.  I did this hasty collage in its honour.  I call it viral blossom in my head because that's what Spring reminds me of- crazy cell division, luminous revelation, destruction, consumption, novel expression and enthusiastic disorder.  The stuff going on in this tree is basically the same as the influenza blooming in your chestal area or the vessels flushing in your nether regions at the thought of anything handy with a pulse that special someone(s).

I purchased Spanish Bluebells for the garden.  They're supposed to be invasive but I've always enjoyed impressive volunteers.

Amid all this effusion I was reading something somewhere about the slow demise of online comments and as you might know that's been my policy virtually from day one on TBO.  Which is something I've regretted, on and off, since I'd really like to A- know what all the other freaks are thinking and B- well, interact upon occasion like a fucking normal person. The big-eyed, pudgy-deerpark-doe-like part of me would certainly like to lick your hands.  I get more visits now than I ever, ever expected despite my retarded, perverted refusal to self-promote or social-mediate.  Our estrangement is a matter of great regret to me and I press my tits against the screen more often that you know/your educated guess is fairly accurate.

But then the other bit of my brain smacks the troll food out of my hand and reminds me of the pointless shitstorms of utter grossness on the few sites I enjoy that still allow comments.  It goes on to remind me about all the things I go without so I don't have to give too many fucks about externals i.e. money, free shit, invitations to places with free shit, slutty randoms- the list goes on, and I really don't lose sleep over depriving fuckwad shut-ins of their only chance to be noticed at everyone else's expense.  

It's hard enough out there for a weirdo.  Moderation is an option but we all know you can't unsee some shit.  Or roll back the emotional impact of abuse, or even just the smelly juggernaut of popular opinion once it's hit you in the face.  Far larger sites than this one are tiring of devoting precious resources to fending off anonymous twats and that supports my initial, instinctive position.  If you enjoy my shit there's a good chance you already have a fair amount of unblushing iron in your soul, but the thought of someone finding themselves the target of abuse here really bites my fucking nuts.

There's also the nature of your readership and it's my guess that a lot of my regular punters are self-contained introspectives who enjoy a bit of bloody peace and quiet.  Don't we all?  The opportunity to independently peruse and consider, enjoy or revile without the drone of other people's bullshit impinging like a stranger's penis squeaking against your side window is fucking important.  All of these anonymous cakehole emissions are polluting our intellectual privacy.  No Comments = you + the sound of your own brain thunking thoughts.  I wish mine would.  I'm such a vacant, aggressive nose picker at the moment.  

So enjoy the sound of silence.  Also, and  I may have said this before, but let me reiterate; the Contact portal is just as futuristic as it sounds and will definitely whisk your loaded remarks, submissive gestures, naive generosity, artistic unsolicited nudes, gay for pay shit and best kohl for the fucking waterline suggestions to my doorstep.  We really do welcome whatever you have to say as long as it's flattering and magical.

Elsewhere in depraved old person news, Slash and Axl are BFFs again.  Totally would've them both way back when (i.e. not now) because generous with my favours and the future has always been just a mute and pinkish blur to me.  And now I'm going to stop procrastinating and read The Dirt even though I always fucking hated Motley Crue (deliberately witholds retarded umlauts).

You've probably been all over this shit already but the Guardian has some good stills.

I enjoy a bit of Banksy but wonder if just sayin is subversive anymore or if we're past that point.
If you see something, say something, of course, but... then what?  Exit through the gift shop.  Laugh about it over a craft beer.  Go back to what you were doing.


(Let go of the balloon)

To take the steps that turned down into the ruin and away from its starlit yard was a choice that Susan made with imperfect grace, shaking her fading torch and hoisting the piglet that had sagged under her arm as she descended.  

The lowest row of cells within the monastery had been hollowed into the mountain's fundamental stone and shared its exanimation, the spinal passage lined with cells declared by the same blank style of arch that pierced the colonnade.  The cold air stood in staled suspension between smoothly-hewn walls that threw back the shuffling of her boots as they bundled settled dust.  Time was chastened by the entombing geology, the cool reptilian smell of the stone lying heavily under a paler note of incense cedar, the ghost of an expired consecration.  Her own scent seemed so invasive and inapt that she grimaced to herself, shuffling onward in a darkness relieved only by the docent beam before her.  It swept over a stout plank bench against the wall, the worms fretting its timbers betrayed by the mound of frass sifted beneath its legs, and she paused, bending to push a finger into the wood and waving away the powder that flew up at her face.  Beneath her arm the pig began to grunt and move its soignée legs, impatient with her circumspection.  She scolded it softly; the torch beam met a mounded form upon the ground that stiffened her with fright until she recognized it as one of Petrouchka’s furs.  With the dying orange light she examined the arch beside it, lifting a hand and knocking upon the granite, ruing the stupidity of the gesture as it bruised her knuckles.  Something in the dark beyond assured her of an answer.

"I brought Fyodor...” she offered.  "I thought you might be missing him.”  The remark was greeted by a period of deliberate silence, then an equally tenebrous reply.

“I don’t miss."

"I just... I feel... bad." Susan admitted.  She stepped beneath the arch, only to be checked by the failure of her torch in a gloom so complete that she would not have seen a hand before her face.  The pig’s hooves scurried against her arms, the animal leaping to the ground and trotting swiftly back the way they had come in an action no more diplomatic than it was ambiguous.  

"You feel bad?" Petrouchka murmured.  "Maybe you have disease."

Susan stepped back as she perceived the darkly-glassed shapes of the vampyre's eyes, gleaming in the blackness like the inlaid gaze of a funeral effigy.

"What you want?"
"Just to talk..."
"You people... all so in love with your voice.  Go away.  I don't want talk."

Tiny rasping sounds informed Susan's drifting stare that her hostess had shifted, though she could not locate her black-draped form until a white, abortive flare hissed and died against the vampyre's hands, her outline suddenly elaborated as a bundle of matches held their flame and lit a slag-like mass of tapers on a socket in the wall.  Their lazy glow illumed a face that still wore the slack, livid vacuity of solitude, and an unsuspected shape beside her that proved a tall expanse of shelving, the upper and lowermost compartments deeply shadowed by the candles.  Each aperture was neatly stocked with a row of human skulls, flensed and desiccated to a narrow range of flecked and ashen eggshell and pallid sepia.  Susan stared wordlessly at the baffling array, their order and spotless aspect damping the horror they might have otherwise inspired.  Their hollows shifted with the flame stirred by her breathing as she examined the sutured features of each cranium until the blind orbits became a leitmotif far too relentless for sustained perusal.  She looked from them to the surrounding cell, the space proportioned exactly as their own, though half-buried and windowless.  While her eyes adapted she made out sounds of movement through the vaulting overhead; footfalls, then Sachiin’s chuckling address to Fyodor as the pig returned to the object of his transferred affections.  His words were, for the most, part distinct.  She closed her eyes at the thought of everything the vampyre had been party to while Petrouchka observed her mortification with a lean amusement.  

Some of her coats hung, faintly delineated, on the wall beside the arch like the mortal leavings that they were, beheaded and transfigured as though by maleficia.  The vampyre muttered, looking over the ossuary with a proprietary eye.

"Some, I kill.  But most, they die.  I saw them come into this place... little boys, then old, so soon.”  Behind a dark length of the heavy woolen stuff that had clothed the tenant monks lay her makeshift divan, composed of worn furs heaped into a pile.  At its far end a doting little doppelgänger arrangement lay upon the floor by an earthenware bowl half-filled with water; Susan’s heart sank further at the sight of it.

“I’m so sorry about Fyodor” she lamented.  Petrouchka sat back down.  

“I already say... everybody love Sachiin.  Nobody love a dead thing.”  Her accent embellished the sentiment with macabre dignity.  “If you won't go away, then sit.” she added, offering a bearth.  Susan quashed her reluctance and accepted, hidden timbers creaking beneath her weight.  They remained too long without speaking while the candlelight settled like dim water around them.

“There’s a lot of snow out there now.” she ventured.

“Where I come from, snow is blue, like eye, and hard, like jewel.  If you are still, the winter take you... put arms around, and crush.  This... is only pretty snow.”  To her increasing discomfort the vampyre’s glances, so slow and grudging, had coalesced into deliberation and Petrouchka rose, crossing to the sagging bulk of a leather-bound coffer beside the ossuary.  From this she withdrew two objects, a brush and hand mirror in silver that wore the orthodox red and halcyon blues of Slavic enamel, thickly studded with bosses of cabochon gems.  “Sit sit, like this.” she urged, beckoning her sideways.  “You are big mess.  I fix.”  

Susan ducked as rigid yellow bristles sank into her hair and snarled amongst its knots.  She pressed her hand to her scalp before it could be stripped by the vampyre's stiff, perfunctory attentions, though Petrouchka paused to examine the side of her neck where it was exposed to the candle light.  Her voice had descended to the volume of a prayer murmured over tightly-clasped hands.  

“So many scar now... ugly, kotik... make you look like camp whore.  Lucky Sachiin have so many himself, he don’t care... I don’t think he care, from what I hear at night.”  Her narrow little fingers snagged the hair that they had massed into a tail.

"It could have been worse."

“You think was good that I beat this creature who try to eat you?  Some time, when you are old... grand-mére, with no petits-enfants... you will be sick and sad like me, not even with the blood of others as a comfort... you will lie as I do now and hear what you can't have.  When Sachiin finish with you, you will wish I met you first.”  Susan sat amongst the silence while it served the vampyre like a hand pressed to her mouth.  The cold, dry points of the creature's knuckles drew a line beneath her scars in a mute coda to her admission.  “You see I am more evil than the man I run away from, but I make no secret... I tell to you.  You know sometime, at night... I think, while you are sleeping, how good to cut you open, see everything come out of you... make Sachiin and Kala'amātya dig a hole and cover you with stones.”

Though she had been leaning forward slowly, Susan grew still as the vampyre's fist closed in her hair, unwilling to allow evasive latitude while she indulged herself.

"Don't run..." Petrouchka whispered.  Her chin touched her guest's shoulder as she stroked down the restive shedim roused by the prospect of blood-warmed skin, even as it twisted in silky knots inside her throat, muting her counsel.  "Be still for me.  I don't want to smell your blood here."  The rows of empty skulls swam as one of the wicks perished in the wax.  The joints inside the vampyre's fingers clicked as they slowly unfurled, partitioning her hair and commencing a narrow braid.  Susan let her eyes lose their focus on the black wall before her.  "You are so much your blood, milaya moya... you call sweetly to the knife.  Look how good my english become when I imagine taste of you."

Susan murmured, tilting her head as her hostess worked the hair behind her ear.

“How long have you been like this?”

“I die before the devil come for Ivan Groznyi."

“How did you know?  That you were dead?”

Petrouchka's hands grew still again, but the time she took to furnish a reply, the perils inherent in retrieval did not diminish the inquiry's imperative.

"When it fall on you, you don’t think now I am dead thing..."  The vampyre avowed, as though dismissing an assumption.  "You think... something has happen... maybe bad... but you don't know."  She doubled the end of the first braid back into the weave and began another.  "Some time at night, I go from my husband's house and walk along the road.  I want only to breathe with no one to hear.  A upyr, he find me... he do to me.  I go, on hand and knee, back to the house, with nothing where my throat should be.  At first, they nurse me, but... when I do not grow well, my husband, he bring an old priest.  They take the covers from my body and in their hands..."  The sound of Sachiin easing the door closed overhead pushed through the stone.  "In their hands they have sword.  That night, they kill the pigs before the winter.  I wake in that hole, under the dirty pieces of a hundred swine."  Susan pressed her eyes closed as the vampyre tore out a knot from her nape.  "I run, back to my old home, thinking my father, my sisters, they would have pity.  But no... they scream for god and do not know me.  Was like a knife into my head, again."  Her hands slowed.  "Then, I know.  The living put you in your grave.  They say that you have died, and are accursed.  Until they do, you think it all a dream."

"Did they never talk to you again?"

"I saw them no more, but for one time.  My young sister, Galina... at ball, in Ostankino... she so old I could not recognize, but she see me.  All her beauty gone, so few pleasures, but she look at me, and...”  Her voice grew lower still.  “I don’t go back.  The places that were alive to you are gone... you cry outside the door... nobody hear you.  So I find new places... to Paris, and to Frankfurt, then... why do you want to hear?  You are tourist...”

"I live here now." Susan assured her.

"You don't say that to upyr.  This death, it never finish with us.  You die, but is beginning... you are still losing, so much... you lose feeling... for thing, for people... I try to keep a memory of feeling, but I can't have.  I kill people for their feeling... but it fall out of me, like I am made of bad cloth.  Life is shadow on my face.  My body serve only the evil that is in me, and I sicken myself to please it.  I am charogne.  I drown, in my hole, with the pigs.”

Again the vampyre lapsed into a silence thick with her own battered spectre.

“When I think everything is gone, I meet de Marchand.  If she was not evil, she was not good, but she find a way to live so you are not sorry.  She say to me, Trouchka, what is death, but the breaking of our only chains?  For a time, I hold her hand, and her face was the star that I had lost.”  Susan touched the antiquated composition in her hair, and the vampyre took the mirror from her lap, holding it before her.  “There.  Pretty now.” she pronounced, turning the blackened glass upon her own flame-lit features.  “They say we cannot be seen like this, but is only dead who cannot see.  The truth... the one that make you more than you were a day before... is lost to us.”

“As much as I don’t know him, or Helaine... I don’t think Kala'amātya loved her to spite you.  I don't think we have a choice.”

“I lie when I say she would not choose him.  Would she choose me?  He walk into her house, enough life in his great body for one hundred people, and no fear of what she was.  From the first, they were vyehs' to one another.  Helaine live, and then she die... I was dead, and try to live, but you can have no more when it has gone... not another moment, if you beg one hundred saint and paint their feet with blood.  You have only time.  Ask Kala'amātya, if time is good for company."

Leaning back into a curl against the wall Petrouchka gathered her skirt over her legs, regarding Susan with her darkest aspect.

"I lie too, to him, in what I say last night... Helaine find that she was enciente, and could not believe... but when she tell to me, she smile, and say... we never thought ourselves enough for this small creature, and I am happy to be wrong... I hear these words, and I want to cut it from her.  I cut it from her heart.  I tell her everything she dread... herself, of him, of what could come, and in a week, she drink the cup, make me promise never to tell.  When he come home from Paris, I take his hand, I smile, and I wish him joyeux noel.  But vengence taste like blood you lick from hole in your own skin."  She touched her own face as though doubtful of its shape.  "If Helaine come back to him... udači... I wish good luck.  The darkness love her and has no patience.  Of her Art... I don't know what she find, behind a door closed so long.”

Rising, the vampyre hoisted the lid from the trunk once more and leant over to lift something pale from its dusty bowels.  The gesture redoubled Susan’s desire to escape, throwing a ripple through the candle light that made the creature's small shape slide out of focus with her attendant shadow.

“I want for you to have.”  Petrouchka handed her the bundle; she mutely refused, but the vampyre grimaced and raised a hand to her head as though to ease some harping pain and spoke through heavy, torpid loathing.  “Don't say you can't take... you already take from me... but I want for you to have.  If you stay, and I hurt you, I won’t feel bad.”  Her face lapsed into a smirk, the black holes in her eyes licking at her face.  "If I do, it will not be for hunger... I don't feel.  I will do because I am écœurant, et affreux.”  

Her smile blackened again, blooming horribly and sending her eyes backward into her head.

“I love so much your great disgust.” Petrouchka soughed, looking down at herself.  "This... is not even the worst I could be.  In Praha I see this thing... never hungry, but always at the feast, where it devour, and exalt itself.  I thought there was nothing more, but soon I will wake in that garden, where black flowers turn toward you, and the trees are all aflame."  She dropped the mirror into Susan’s arms.  “Sachiin will stay long enough to make you hate your own face, and Kala'amātya, he will leave you when you need him.  Be careful.”

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe   do not reproduce

wetplatenudes: Mercedes Esquivel
6.2015 ambrotype on oval glass. Headgear by Caley Johnson/Miss G Designs, Los Angeles CA.

While I can sort of/not really/fuck it I'm wearing it anyway get away with Margherita if I pat it on lightly, I really bought it to blend with my oranges and corals- gradients, or lifting the tone of things like MAC Lady Danger and Bite Zinfandel- infusing them with a new demure, icecreamy interest.  So even if you know it'll look like arse on you straight up, consider its potential as an idiosyncratic amender.

The overcast light makes these reds look quite a bit closer than they are in life, as you can probably tell.  The swatch below in more neutral conditions nails them.  

Personally I've always adored these big fat rubies.  Especially ye olde MAC Red- in theory, that is- because that shit is fucking impossible to wear in any real world situation for longer than twenty minutes.  It slips, slides, bleeds and wanders around like a drunk tart unless you lock it down with primers and powders and then, well... you end up with yet another bloody matte, don't you?  If we're headed in that direction we might as well go for Tenor Voice since it offers the same saturated, intimidating red plus far more reliability as per the MAC neomatte formula.  Pin-up, Burlesque and Rockabilly bettys should definitely acquire Tenor Voice; I wear it with a severe brow and no fucking mascara in the supermarket on a Saturday morning as an anti-basic measure.  It's very anti-basic in a world full of basic shit so two thumbs up.

The Lovely R took this wonderful image of a local Native Pigeon (Kereru / Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae) in our blossoming bird plum and I think he's going to post a couple more in his own blog if you'd like to take a look.  

In spite of these scattered moments of visual relief, the last few weeks before the last few weeks of winter are the fucking worst, man.  I may have said that before, but here we are again with the nothing happening and the sun rolling along the top of the hills like a soggy ball of toilet paper and shitty spring rain starting and mud mud fucking mud.  We don't get anything as glamorous as thick, settled snow down here and it rarely drops to 0º C, so the arse end of winter just ends up being too cold to do anything worthwhile without any of the traditional northern hemisphere distractions.  You guys up there have it sorted with all the festive overeating, presents, sparkles, cosy holidays and shit.  

None of that for us here in New Zealand.  No, we get all the fun of staying home, mostly in chronically under-heated and largely uninsulated houses, wondering when the roof's going to start leaking again and how we're going to afford that next load of firewood.  If you've got any room left on one of your eighteen credit cards you go on some fucking budget package holiday to Samoa and sit somewhere much hotter than you expected scratching infected insect bites on a saggy plastic chair while a local brings you elderly canned juice in a coconut and someone's brats fight in a pool seasoned with flying fox shit (yes I used to live in the tropics).  Decisions, decisions.  

We can never afford to go on a holiday so we just sit here and bitch and remember when we could afford to go to film festivals in town, even as students.  If you're sub-30 you probably don't believe that was a real thing back in the day but I remember hitting like five-ten fillums in one week and still being able to afford a $9 plate of tiger prawn noodles at the fucking Nanking Café in Christchurch on a student benefit.

Everything's shit these days, isn't it?  I'd fucking hate to be 18 now and I'm sorry for everyone who is.

The word pffuffehneh refers to the sound bouncing around between my ears when I hiss my twenty-ninth pissy sigh for the fucking day in the grip of that very special boredom that precludes imaginative speculation, meaning you can't write, and shits on all constructive alternatives, meaning you can't be bothered to do much else.  So I'm just sitting here revelling in my arrhythmic bradycardia and cussing out lightbulbs for being too fucking yellow.

But I prefer that to working for fucking Amazon. Read the NYT piece on their hiring practices?  You should.  It's nightmarish.  

And hilarious.  The nihilistic misanthrope in me enjoys the thought of so many compliant dipshits sucking the eyeballs out of each others' heads for the kind of money no self-respecting materialistic arsewipe would bother crossing the road to piss on.  

As far as I can see, Amazon's biggest accomplishment is duping overqualifieds into paying for their own workplace parking and diming out their colleagues for the chance to do the utterly menial shit that happens there.  For the honour of selling sweatshopped planet-trashing garbage faster than the dickhead in the cubicle next to them or hey, devising slicker methodology for doing the same because that's... next level worth-affirming savant shit right there?    If you've ever wondered why you can't buy my book from that fucking place, (I know you probably haven't because no one really does) there's a clue.

And you know that all these cage-reared people insist on free-range eggs.  Chickens start doing terrible demented things to their companions when you treat them badly- everyone knows that.

Bitches, walk away.  Get some fucking dignity and pick up some perspective while you're at it and no, you won't find it at Amazon but you might find it on the footpath after you've been escorted to the exit by security.  We may not be able to eat dignity and perspective, but we're just poisoning ourselves with the crap we amass in their absence.  And everyone happily shopping at Amazon should pat themselves down and maybe locate their bloody consciences because you're feeding that fucking troll with all your lazy clicksies. 

If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.

I don't even have kids and the thought of this blighted cowardly ingrown shite stabs me in the fucking uterus.

*EDIT  There is a leopard seal chilling on a wharf in downtown Dunedin.  I am happier.

the beast in the garden  Seb NIARK1 FERAUT                

"A runner had gone ahead to let them know we were coming, and all the women of the house came pouring into the garden... Uighur, Russian, Rajastani, Greek, local girls, all in their best clothes so that they looked... like birds had married flowers... with gold and silver on their necks and arms and bells tied in their hair, and they smelled of everything wonderful... champa and cinnamon and attar.  And they were doing this strange thing with their mouths...”  Sachiin pulled up the corners of his own into the shape of a smile with two fingers.  “They were happy to see him.  Sobh bexeyr, Kala'amātya.” he intoned, recalling the lilting, knowing fondness of their greeting.  “Before that, I could have counted the number of people who'd been pleased to see my brother on two fingers, but there they were, smiling at him like he was the sun in winter, bringing us water and asking who I was.  Their hands were warm, and every woman was a different shape and colour, which was so strange to me... even their voices were a hundred kinds of gold, the words tied like a necklace, with empty spaces in between.  

They took me into the house and fed me fruit and honey, brought new clothes and washed my feet and laughed and called me bakareh... virgin... because I was so modest and stupid.  All I could do was stare at them, but I decided then and there that exile was the life for me, and eating dirt at twenty thousand feet could go straight to fucking hell for all I cared.”

“I bet it could...” Susan laughed, but the colours of the image darkened with his silence while she drew another mouthful from the bottle.  “How long before it started going bad?”  

He sighed.

“I don’t know.  I don’t remember everything.” 
“Yes you do.”

“It took about a year.  We stayed with Kala'amātya, and he lived large.  Every summer he would put a corps together and go off fighting, then hit the silk route caravans when that slowed down... all of that paid out, and he was gone for half the year.  Rana stayed in her room at first and kept threatening to go home, but I could feel it changing... I could see, every time I tried to talk to her, that something was going wrong inside her head, I think because in her heart, she couldn’t leave the mountains.  It was like watching a wound turn bad.  I knew what was coming, but I didn’t know how to stop it.   

In summer most of the women did their own thing, the witches heading up into the mountains to study, some riding with my brother or with their own crews... hoes heading west to work the Caspian boats... but with Kala'amātya gone so long, the girls who stayed home started looking at me a certain way.  I didn’t think that Rana cared or even knew... stupid, I know, but I was stupid... I had no idea that people went crazy over that sort of thing.  

One day she came to me and said ‘Sachiin... did you know that you may kill these creatures, merely by striking them?’  And I walked out into the garden and found that she had beaten one of the kitchen girls to death.  In autumn, when Kala'amātya came home, he threw her out into the street.  I tried to talk him round but he threw me out and told me... a'ma sa'anae sahai'is siith nala elaiinae... come back when you've had enough.

Living alone with Rana was... hellish, really, in ways I had never imagined, but if I ran to his house she would follow me and beat his slaves.  After a while, when I left she would just walk into the bazar and kill whoever she got hold of... twist their arms and legs off.  That would go on until I came back.  One year Avi'ashān arrived, from nowhere, and then Nyāti, looking for him... everything was coming apart in the mountains, with Ana'siām'ilye disgraced... people were leaving every day and going into the sea, but we didn't know until they told us.  For a while, Nyāti handled Rana better than I could, but it didn’t last.  Losing the mountains was the final straw for her.  Kala'amātya would ask me... nala siith i’nala elaiinae... have you had enough, Sachiin?  But I could never say yes, because I knew once I did, everything he'd do to make her go into the sea would be on my head.  When I looked at her mad face, I knew I was too weak and vain to think of myself as the one who had wished death on her."  The snow slowed in the darkness until each mote seemed shed in bitter accord with his account.  "If I hadn’t been that way, who knows how many people would have lived another day... Kala'amātya might have had the time he needed with Helaine.  Her death wasn’t even Rana’s fault.” he admitted, his voice so quiet that she closed her eyes to hear it.  “It was mine.”  He brushed the snow from his hair.  “His never saying it is hard... I wish he'd grab me by the throat and dangle me off forty storeys... but he won't.”

Susan leant over her lap and assured herself of his attention before speaking to his admission.

“When my parents died they were on their way to pick me up from my aunt’s house." she sighed.  "I was supposed to stay the weekend but she’d found some cigarettes and I don’t know... condoms, I think it was... in my handbag, something completely stupid and we’d had this horrible fight, so I wanted to go home.  I had to go and live with her after the accident.  I asked her once if she blamed me, and she said yes... she blamed me, my parents, the car, the other driver, the weather... herself… but she said that's just what you do when you’ve lost someone.  I was shocked at first, then I thought, god, I actually blame her, so I understood.  That's just... normal.”  When he opened his mouth she shook her head.  “That’s not my point, though.  Your brother isn’t normal, and I don't think he blames you.  Mostly he’s just glad to have you... you're lucky to have each other.  And I am glad to have you..." she smiled.  "You don't miss her, do you?" 

"Rana?  No... it feels like something that was biting my arm has gone away.  After everything she did, it's just... peaceful."

The dowager moon breathed her last into the clouds, her glow borne earthwards in the silver cells of every frozen element, as though the air were haunted by expiring spectres, their light extinguished as they met the ground.    

"I wonder if they knew when they first saw him..." she murmured.  "The priestesses... did they know he was the end of them, or did they make him Kala'amātya?"
"I've never known.  Helaine once told me we all take our own lives, one way or another, and I like to think Ana'siām'ilye was cutting her own throat with those blackthorn branches.  That would be..."
"Poetic." Susan smiled.  "You're very zen about the strangest things."

He shrugged.

"What can you do?  I'm not the sharpest apple in the bucket."

She spluttered liquor and wiped it from her chin.

"Well, we're probably made for each other, then.  Priestesses never get it right."

Susan shuffled on her knees toward the window with the sleeping bag, grinning at his wary face then lifting the bottle to his lips, its contents prompting him to shudder at the flash of bitter fruit and ethanol.  

"Mmm... génial..." he coughed.  "Merde, c'est bordelique."  He turned his head from the kiss she bestowed in remediation.  "Cloudcheeks, I'm too cold..."
"I don't care." she insisted, taking his face in her hands.  His mouth was perfumed by the hueless liquor, tasting of distant apple and anise, and of the newborn winter descending behind him, the season that had settled in his skin and drawn his pupils into snake-like straits.  She pressed her lips to his left lid, chuckling as their warmth reversed the transformation, if only unilaterally.  "Is this you, when you're at home?"  The cover cosseted their voices as she pulled it over their heads.  He nodded, and she kissed him again, taking his hands and drawing them beneath her jersey so that they closed upon her waist, their breathtaking differential sliding slowly into novel, delicious inverse on her skin.
"You're making me feel like an enigma wrapped in a something else." he whispered.
"I know there'll always be some monsterism, but most of you is five-star..." Susan admitted.

He sighed softly against her neck.

"That kind of talk just won you a super-deluxe trip downtown."
"Speak more French..." she urged, grasping his neck as he hoisted them both out of the window and dumped her down onto the pine needles.
"Je ne peux pas le faire... pour le principe... c'est pour ton bien..." he murmured while she dragged his shirt over his head and struggled to assist in the removal of her trousers, stifling the laughter prompted by discombobulation.  "I do miss parts of summer, if I'm honest... the only thing standing between me and la petit gâteau was half a foot of fresh air, or knicker elastic that was suicidal anyway..."  He paused to suck the cache of freckles on the face of her thigh.
"I miss mattresses.  Missionary with a mattress... it always feels like I'm going to hell for it with you.  I don't know how you manage it."  She closed her eyes as her legs were persuaded into dissociation.
"Practice."
"Whatever you're doing has to stay under the blanket, and en francais."
"Ça va sans dire."

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Whatipu Pohutukawa nightscape
by duskysound.tumblr.com

(Whatipu is a beach near Auckland in the Nth Island in case you were wondering.
In Maori, wh is generally pronounced f ; as an English-speaking NZr I say FarTEEpoo but stresses do vary
according to local consensus and historical corruptions/usage shifts.)

Though I've always loved batik we possess very few examples and I was pleased to buy this tok wi or Taoist altar cloth locally for an extremely modest sum.

These stalwarts of the Chinese pantheon have been interpreted by textile artists on the northern coast of Java, working in this traditionally Indonesian medium to produce these cloths for their wealthy neighbours. 

I love the fierce acclaim expressed by the flanking qilin, the googly dragon and unapologetic palette, obviously derived from traditional Chinese famille rose (or vert) ceramics, with its brilliant interplay of rouge, fuchsia and jade. 

Batik is a wax-resist technique, the fundamentals of which are covered by a fairly decent Wiki page.  Areas of cloth are alternately protected from and exposed to dyes in sequence with the careful application of hot wax from a canting vessel.  The wax inevitably cracks during the dying process, allowing spidery seams of colour to stain the underlying fabric (below right), producing the veining that is a signature of the technique.  Some designs allow block-stamping but this tok wi looks like freehand or batik tulis to me.

Mush
His digital work makes me want to lick the screen (even more than usual)
see more H E R E

Were you a club kid slash dance ho back in the day?  Are you one right now?  An oppositional nature means I've never once put my hands up, per se, even when exhorted to do so for Detroit, nor in the air like I just don't care and I cannot meaningfully twerk except at a fitful 5 BPM (try not to picture it).  But I'm still moved to shift the coffee table and blow off a hour throwing my shit around to nasty techno compilations.  Which is cool because I don't really have any neighbours and courier drivers know by now never to look directly through the windows.  It's a congenital condition and I make no apologies.

I had to reduce the size because that dude's cheesy teeth are giving me the fucking heaves.  Enlarge at your own risk.

And lo, there exists yet another, unofficial version of this hallowed dirge, one that may yet prove more pleasing to thine eyes although that is debatable.  British Army guys busting moves of varying quality; as someone said in the Youtube comment section, war has changed them.  I like the cut of their jib.  Mr Swallow Tattoo is a special little superstar but marks off for visible consciousness of that distinction.  The ratio of dancer to nondancer is suboptimal and too sadly reflective of the public at large; points deducted also for laughing and I would have beaten the one who says smells like dick in here severely even though no one on earth would contest that assertion.  The whole world smells like dick.

Just ask Melania Trump.  Ba doomp chiiih.

After all that stinky testosterone, let's take a moment to consider the moment periods are having in the media of late, and the medieval hysterics that almost always emerge when menstruation is discussed.  Or exhibited- lol, that really gets the old heads spinning, doesn't it?  One of my very fundamental tests of viable masculinity is a male unit's willingness to publicly purchase pads and tampons when I'm just not going to the fucking shops myself.  I do not expect and certainly will not tolerate a fucking nanosecond of embarrassed quibbling or reluctance; nor should any bitch still bleeding.  If he doesn't bat an eyelid, at least he knows that looking like a gynophobe is more embarrassing than purchasing 'sanitary' (oh, euphemisms- you crack me up) supplies.  Never trust a man who lets you buy his toilet paper but refuses to pick up plugs for you.  He thinks his shit is more respectable than your blood.  In honour of our hormonal journeys, here's some bloodstained knickers from Soofiya Andry's Bloody Hell Zine as featured in the Guardian.  :)

I think we're getting a textile post this week, in case you were still wondering.

Saw this parked up out of the corner of my eye in saturated colour as I was walking through Back Beach.  It was the tiger stripes on the canoe that got the camera (Canon S95 pocket job) out, but I'm happy with all the lovely whispering textures I wasn't conscious of at the time.  And the wonky voyeuristic framing.  I used the SilverEffects Pro II 000 Neutral filter to get the B&W then pumped the Neutral/black a little bit in Photoshop Selective Colour afterwards.  

Could have gone a bit more grainy and luminous etc, but after a lot of fucking around in search of sexy monochrome it's become clear to me that a successful subject should A: volunteer and B: cooperate without massive technical intervention.  Don't get trapped in all that bad-photographer pushing shit uphill after the fact, like I do.  It is what it is. 

He brought his legs up into a lotus pose upon the sill so that he seemed like a panel from a Khmer frieze, strangely transposed.

"When I was young, we were taught to believe... and I did... that we were apart from all else for good reason.  I believed the moon was the first of our mothers... I believed that we, like all righteous beasts, were her children, given to her sister earth because she had no means to raise us.  But I didn't believe what they did to Kala'amātya was her judgement, that he had been born to it and I hadn't.  When he was made bai'issātva, I never thought I'd hear from him again.  I heard of him... rumours always came back with the baby priestesses every spring, when they went to give them instructions... they said he was in charge, and did as he pleased, but since what he pleased kept the i'ss'it from the mountains, no one interfered...

One day a message came to me... to meet him, through about a dozen people.  I didn't think he'd really be there, but I waited the whole day at the edge of the hills just in case, and at the last minute... there he was."  The dust thrown up by his brother's horse as it turned before him swept past his face again.  "I didn't know it at the time, but the sthali'sātva... the priestesses... had tried to make him poison all the wells down on the plain."  Susan scowled at such a measure, unable to encompass its vicious rationale.  "He wouldn't do it, and he'd been exiled, so he must have thought it was the last time we would see each other.  He said nothing for a while, and then he asked me... Sachiin, are you content?"  Its haunting emphasis returned to him.  "I had no idea what to say.  It was like asking a cow if they liked grass.  I couldn't answer, and then... avoir disparu... he disappeared.  No one knew where he'd gone, or what had happened.  After a while, they made it official, saying Kala'amātya had been exiled, which was the same as dead.”  

“Did you believe it?”

“He wasn’t with us, and he wasn’t with the bai'issātva, and I didn't know that there was anywhere else you could be.  About a year later they held the T'shibai’sailye... the Green Star Night, around a little lake, a thing that everybody came to and where the sthali'sātva dropped the dime about your future.  If you were an eyeroller, a backchatter, a slightly imperfect, you were sent down... made bai'issātva.  If you’d survived the apprenticeship you made your sthali'sātva bones and became a priestess.  Nyāti was getting her pointy hat that night.  If you were just old enough, you got the ball and chain, shotgun Vegas styles, with whoever they’d picked out for you.  Rana was hot and highborn and out of my league... I was a trashy twink, and Kala'amātya's brother, and I remember not believing they had chosen me, but... it made my mother happy... I suppose they thought Rana would keep me out of trouble.  What was I supposed to do?”

“If you don't know by now, I can't help you." she sighed.

“There was no no.  So yes, I was pencilled in as Rana’s bitch and was polishing my cherry, minding my own business with Bede down by the water, when everything went quiet.  I remember it so well, and I knew even before I saw him that there was only one person who puckered that many arseholes at the same time.”  

The expression on his face became so irradiant that she chuckled into the bottle.  

“Kala'amātya was meant to be at the bottom of the ocean, and then he walked into the Green Star Night.  Ana'siām'ilye was sending the new bai'issātva down... she stopped in the middle of it and looked at him.  I could see them both from where I was, and I remember feeling as though the air had turned to stone and wouldn't let me breathe.  Everybody waited for her to say something, but... what could she say?  He was carrying a siitān, a sacred bird that came over the mountains with the rain.  I had never seen one that close, and the thought that he could hold it in his hands was like... watching someone carry Al Buraq into the Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām.  It was dead... I could smell the poison it had swallowed from where I stood.  He lay the bird at Ana'siām'ilye's feet, and then took something, from here..."  He lifted a hand from the folds of the remembered robe.  "He had found her comb in one of the wells... at first I thought no, he wouldn’t... but he took it...”  Sachiin performed the act that he narrated slowly, bringing his hand to the priestess's head.  “And put it back, into her hair."  

Ana'siām'ilye's face flickered, as black and white as she had seemed.  

"The other sthali'sātva stepped away from her, as one.  He was profane, and had profaned her, and now it was Ana'siām'ilye who had to go into the sea.  She took off her robes and jewels... everything else that made her what she was, slowly, as though she couldn't believe what she was doing, turned from us and started walking... and that was the last anyone saw of her.  I was too amazed to notice that Kala'amātya had gone too."

"I ran to the top of the hill and saw him following the stream, and then I ran until I caught him.  ‘Go back, Sachiin’ he said.  ‘They will forgive you.’  But I followed him down the valley, and he looked at me again and said ‘Go back, or I will use my knives on you.’  I didn’t know at the time that he meant it, but when he saw I was still there, he knocked me down, put me on my face and was just about to do it when Rana called out that if anyone was going to lame me, it was her.”

The soporific values in his voice had stilled her amid the sleeping bag, the bottle resting at a forgotten angle in her lap.  Snow had banked on the sill beside him, softly bouffant, and settled on his shoulders.  Susan shrugged the bag around her ears.

“What did she do?”

“Tried to drag me back... she almost pulled my arm off trying to get me across the river, but Kala'amātya saw I didn’t want to go, and wouldn’t let her take me."  His brother's features spoke the words again, for the first time in two millennia.  "He told me that if I went with him, I would never see my mother, my wife, or this place again... that it was no small thing to turn my back, and nothing I should do on his account.  ‘Do not think me blameless, Sachiin.’ he said.  ‘I am everything they say of me, and worse.’  I had three seconds to decide.

I could see it in his face... that moment he always gives you, but I didn't think him blameless... I thought him my brother."  She smiled at the profession.  "He took my arm and pulled me back over the river, and Rana really lost her shit.  She came at him, but he got hold of her and threw her on the ground like a big sack of potatoes, then off we went.  At first I didn’t realize, because I was too busy staring at the back of Kala'amātya's head, but she came after us again.

She couldn’t go back without losing face... we didn’t even really know each other.  It was just pride.  He took us past the poisoned wells.  Kali’niah... that’s not something you ever want to see with your own eyes.  We followed the river west, all the way to Paršvãb... Samarkand... and that was my first city.  Before we came to the town, we saw a shepherd and his wife on the side of the road, eating curd, and they were the first people I had ever seen, close up.  I just... could not believe it... they were so like us.  We'd always been told the i’ss’it were... you know... hideous devil creatures...”

“Thanks very much.”

“I wish you could have seen Rana’s face.  Kala'amātya asked her what she thought about the dogma now, and she said that if we had been born women we would know that the i’ss’it were created by witches, out of envy, and it was obvious that they hid their monstrous errors and deformities beneath their clothes.  At that point Kala'amātya paid them both a good year’s wages to take their clothes off, which they did, and Rana got down from her horse and examined all their parts, and said nothing more about her superior knowledge of the world.

We rode into Samarkand, and the buildings were the first that I had ever seen... the shapes were like things in dreams, and I asked Kala'amātya if the wind had made them out of stone... he said the i'ss'it had made them through their labour, which I didn't believe.  I had never stood between two walls, and I walked along with my hands on my head thinking they'd fall on me, until little i'ss'it started walking beside us doing the same.  I thought I was doing well until a camel train came in from the east and passed on either side, and I got down on my hands and knees and threw up in the road.  It was like the entire world had crashed into my head.  I lost it and passed out.  They had to carry me to Kala'amātya’s house.

It was a palace of whiteness, and... what are those things?  Rectangles... I had never seen a rectangle before.  Everything made out of straight lines... another universe, and it all belonged to him.  In the courtyard there was a kind of water that did as it was told... a chahār bāgh, with peach trees and Persian roses, and I couldn't look at them and smell them at the same time.  I just stared and stared and couldn't speak."

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce