Edward had lost count of the vaguely acquainted women that had broken from Opal’s preview party to attempt over-familiar congratulations, the most insistent dressing his clean pallor with itching stains in pink and coral gloss.  That braving an early arrival to secure an audience with the artist was a tactic lacking originality became quickly evident, and having expended the advantage to no avail they were left to clutch their drinks and keep their offers open via wretched bouts of hard posing.  Opal had selected Edward’s official consort for the evening carefully, burdening him with the daughter of prominent patrons in a salute to their lack of discernment and pecuniary restraint.  Leighton Sotherby-Aldrich hovered beside him looking every second of her eighteen years, smelling of her stylist's perfume and the blood that oozed from the margins of her bitten-down fingernails.  Her high-school ponytail had been recently amputated and she marked its loss by stroking at its ghostly length before returning the hand to her mouth; she shied at unexpected movement, stretching Edward’s nerves toward the limit of their considerable elasticity.  Opal cast several pointed glances toward them, standing before the largest of his paintings wrapped in black, swagged chiffon.  Leighton lifted a hand and ripped another strip of saliva-softened fingernail from the raw quick of her thumb.  


The tiny silver hand seemed to sweep too slowly around the face of Susan’s watch; she looked up from the earrings laid out between her elbows into the dressing table mirror, popping her jaw.  The black straps of her dress kept sliding from her shoulders and she tugged the neckline down to keep them in place, then decided that the result was too revealing, picking up the hairspray can to add another dose of lacquer to the pinned-up style she had already begun to regret.  Philip had effected the shade of willow-pattern blue she had requested but the alteration sat uneasily in her reflection.  She chose tiny diamond drops and pushed them through her ears.

The bed legs groaned across the floorboards as she dragged them toward the windows, pushing the frame beneath them with her knees and kneeling upon the mattress to lean out over the sill, toward the casement William had patched for her.  The breeze sweeping upward from the wall fluttered the thin silk velvet of her dress against her body; with her hand on the latch she held herself in grim, determined stasis until fear lost its grip and fell away, allowing her to gaze down at the ground with a word in praise of her own fortitude.  Still smiling, she stooped for her shoes on her way toward the door.

William stood in the hall before the line of picture windows, watching the hot white face of a three-quarter moon through the tallest branches.  The solemnity of the suit that he had peculated from his brother's collection surprised her; she stared at it as she walked past him, pausing, then sitting down on the chair that had escaped the disused room.  Her reaction perturbed him, persisting as he came to her and knelt to fasten the straps on her shoes, his hands conferring a small cascade of incidental pleasures that distracted her momentarily.  

"You look..."

"Like I'm here to collect the body of your great uncle?" he proposed, grimacing slightly.  "I don't know about this get up... it's always Halloween for Kala'amātya..."

"Be quiet... I’m trying to think of the word.” she told him.  "You look lovely, actually."  She lowered her head and her voice together, looking down at her toes as they wriggled in her shoes.  "Too lovely."  He glanced up but she shook her head with her eyes screwed closed.  "I can't... I mean..."  She brought her hands to her mouth.  "It would be bestiality...wouldn't it?"  

“Oh... you mean... oh.  If you like...”

“It’s not funny!” Susan insisted, putting out her foot again.  “The left one’s still loose.”  To her relief the demanded amendment removed his gaze toward the ground.  He smoothed the silver-shot stocking down over her ankle, the sensation annulling her rebuttal, and his hands ascended and closed on her velvet-clad rump, drawing it toward him over the seat.  The silken lining of her dress slid beneath her as her knees parted wide on either side of him, her protestations falling spineless and propitiated.  The sight of him so close made her blood lurch in the darkness of her vessels, flushing through her chest and burning in its empty spaces as though she had held her breath too long.  

“Christabel, this is the woods, we are all animals, and that is all there ever is.” he told her, taking her hand and pressing it to the side of his throat, where her fingers settled, sensing the slow, eccentric cadence sounded by the chambers of his heart, a variant of her own, the rhythm that underscored all discourse.  He bent to kiss the eider-soft slope of her neck and the warm swell of her cheek, the quiet colour of her eyes disappearing beneath their lids under the influence of his impalpable curare, so subtly narcotic that she wondered if he had been devised by some opprobrious authority to stamp a face on sin.  Her hands opened on his shoulders and came together at his nape, bringing his mouth to hers before some conflicting notion intervened.  He felt and tasted as he looked, cool and lunar, faintly honeyed, inviting so much more that she forgot herself and wound her arms and legs around him.  Opening her eyes, she saw that his were closed, his artlessness chastising her.  Susan let him go and sat back slowly.   

“We should go...” she smiled, belying her own suggestion by unbuttoning his shirt.  “I mean... to this thing...”  She wiped her pink gloss gently from his mouth, her own lips parting as her thumb slid between his teeth, exclaiming softly at her own immodesty.  "We could... no.  We should just go.  I think I used too much hairspray.” 

“Your hair is making my hair jealous.” William assured her.  She glanced down at her cleavage, tugging at the bra that rode too high beneath the velvet and pinched beneath her arms; reaching back, she swore, loosed the catch and shucked it off, pulling it from the neck of her dress and throwing it away along the hall.  Susan consulted her reflection in the window pane, then his expression, his wide-eyed, blinking smile mutely applauding the measure.  

"Come on." she insisted, striding away down the hall.



Edward watched his phone ring unanswered in his hand, and slid it back into his jacket, feeling his own perverse resolve transforming into a regret of far greater mass.  None of the dubious interlopers of his worst expectation had showed their faces, though the night was still emerging from its infancy.  Not even the addicts and alcoholics in the invited crowd had begun to exhibit the behaviours for which the small but determined corps of paparazzi loitering outside were patiently waiting, kept from the gallery entrance by an equally dedicated phalanx of security.  Leighton Sotherby-Aldrich stared at him like a laboratory monkey sucking on the bars of its cage, her shallow breath drawn past an abolished overbite.

“I’m not allowed any pets but I did have an alpaca... I came home from school last summer and he was gone... no one'll tell me what happened.  I asked the maids and they won't say... they know, though...” she murmured, shrinking again inside her gaily-hued, single-shouldered gown.  “I guess you’ve never lost anyone you cared about.  Some people are lucky.  You probably have a really pretty girlfriend waiting for you.”  The idea seemed to at once depress and console her.



Lilian stood before the rack that housed her working wardrobe, her black crocodile suitcase lying open on Edward's bed, patient and empty.  Together the two objects stood against her intention to decamp and declared it token.  Too many of her belongings had found a home for her to effect the cauterised departure of her desires; with both arms she pulled her clothes from the stand and dropped them onto the case, where they slid away amid their plastic garment bags and lay like loose, discarded skins. 

The scarlet counterpane was cool beneath her cheek as she knelt and lay her head and shoulders on the bed, reminded of its owner even in an absence still notionally preferable to his presence.  The sunless heat and enslaving duress of their engagements mocked her like a scourge, limned in black-lit detail when she closed her eyes.  With his voice still in her head her hand pushed down between her legs but found no welcome; so completely had he come to embody physical exaction that the thought of administering it herself had degraded into counterfeit.  Her phone flashed again on the beside table, throwing gentian light against the wall, and she turned her face from it, Edward’s tortious resolve, both in refusal and pursuit, heaping stones on her desire to leave and lighting flames under the need to stay.  

Seeking a path between the two, she rose and made for William’s rooms.  In his black coat she found the turquoise capsules that he had kept from her the night before and turned the heavy garment upside down, shaking it until the thud of his silver zippo and the flutter of a small packet of foil came to rest on the carpet at her feet.
​
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe

I know.  Morbid vintage angel shots need to die in a shitfire.  But I like the weirdly coherent strata in this one.
​Don't know if it really was cut from the one piece of stone or if it was just a dud batch of concrete.

Anne says: British people should move here because they have a great sense of humour.  You're going to need it because the general local, behind-your-back view of English expats isn't particularly favourable.  Just saying.  Everything is really expensive.  A qualified yes to this, although you can buy our seaside cottage on half a scenic acre 10 mins from a major centre in a gentrifying town for about $300 000, which is not too bad from a worldwide point of view.  A decent muffin is around $4 in a cafe.  You pay about $3 for a cauliflower in season.  Dog registration is about $90 per year.  Auckland is stupidly expensive commute and house-wise, but you're a dumbarse to want to live there anyway because it's everything bad about any given place squished onto a soggy isthmus.  And yes, public transport is either nonexistent or barely worth the bother.

Rob says: It does need more people here.  Fuck off with that shit, Rob.  You're here precisely because we are relatively empty.  If there were more people, I doubt you would have qualified for entry.  With only 4.something million people, we're still dying of disgusting waterborne diseases that are a result of overcrowding and shit environmental practises.  So packing more punters into this already mismanaged biosphere sounds like a great idea.  Beer and travel are expensive.   Ya but they should be, for obvious reasons.  I recently paid $28/kilo for green beans and $6 for a cucumber.  It's the middle of winter, Rob.  That's like whining about the price of whores in jail.  The weather, house prices, salaries and traffic vary massively.  Almost like we're not some sort of homogenous theme park with hobbit greeters.

Graeme says: It's great for Brits/they feel immediately at home.  He says in a piece relating the many differences between the UK and NZ.  No, you probably won't feel particularly at home, because although we're largely white and say mum, the Brits I know are the first to tell you how different we are.  It's not inconceivable that immigrants will be blamed for pressure on services and housing.  Too late.  NZ really is as far away from family and friends as you can get.  No shit.  You're welcome.

Bob says:  Consider NZ if you want to add adventure to your life.  Not sure if serious.  I run a tennis group and get people from 20 different countries.  They're almost all white, though, aren't they Bob?  Maori represent about 10% of the population and have impressive spiritual and social values.  Bob, you slippery bastard.  The worst parts of living here include the poor infrastructure. Earthquakes and volcanoes might be a challenge too.  Touché re the infrastructure.  It's either victorian or inadequate in some other, more contemporary way.  Earthquakes- no more than half the other places in the world.  Volcanoes?  Last time one erupted someone had to move a sheep from a paddock down the road from it, but we're not Hawaii and no one is checking for lava in their garden.  Geological perception fail. 

Andy says: Auckland in particular is an ethnically diverse and exciting city with many beautiful parks and beaches, which are never packed in the way an English beach such as Bournemouth is.  I wonder why everyone from another 'ethnically diverse' place who comes to live here bangs on about how much they love that ethnic diversity.  Andy is from England which, last time I looked, is stuffed to the tonsils with people from everywhere else.  Why is diversity cool here?  Interesting, isn't it?  

But he's right about the beaches, they're great and generally depopulated because everyone's working three jobs to pay for their house.  There is crime here, and terrible congestion at times.  There's a fuck-tonne of serious crime in NZ and a lot of it goes unreported, just. like. everywhere. else.  Congestion?  See: Auckland.  In Dunedin, people lose their minds if they have to wait 20 seconds to turn the corner.

Steve from Puhoi says: everything Steve says is awesome.

Hayley says: I was shocked at the culture difference.  To be fair, though, skimming Hayley's input makes me think she's surprised by most things.

We took a trip out to the mouth of Otago Harbour during autumn.  ^ This is the view of Port Chalmers, in the midst of said harbour, looking back down the windy ribbony road to Aramoana, path to the sea in Maori.

Aramoana and its beaches occupy the western side of the heads and are a fairly decent, non-life threatening surf break, nice walking and the chance to see the local avian and marine wildlife.
Below; still on the way out there.  Some of the small bays along the road are good for cockles (Littleneck Clams) and the occasional scallop.  There's fuck-all dairying around here and very few sewage outfalls so the water is cleaner than you might think.

​My Moire / Liquid Badger
If you've ever been an art student, you'll know collage is much abuse'd.  But this work by Lola Dupre using digital printing and trad manual construction is extremely legit.  See more, including some studio pics, here.

With his attitude of engrossment in his newspaper, Edward might have lulled the less familiar observer into believing their entrée to the drawing room had gone unnoticed.  Lilian knew better, and said nothing as she set a kitchen chair against the wall, where she sat down with the bowl of crackling cereal that served as both diurnal meals.  The afternoon had pushed two broad, glowing arms into the shadowed chamber through the doors; her own indifference to domestic convention allowed her to appreciate the beauty of an empty room, though not, she suspected, to the same extent as her companion.  Resting the bowl on her bare thigh she sucked the spoon and returned it to the cereal.

“What's that called... when you can’t think what the fuck you were just doing?  Or if you did it?  Starts with D.” she asked, her voice echoing slightly.  

“Dissociation.” Edward replied.  He glanced at her briefly; her small grey T-shirt and brief skirt emphasized the condition she had begun to lose.  “It’s associated with insomnia.”

“Did I say I was dissociative?” she muttered.  An inquisitive bird rustled high in the chimney spout, the soot dislodged by its sortie dusting the tiles before the empty hearth.  “What if you get a dissociative thing, and when you come out of it you’re on the other side of the house, or like... in the garden, and you don’t know what just happened?”  

Edward stood largely in the shade of his own body; the pages cast a little of the daylight back toward his features but in profile they were unintelligible, except to Lilian, who saw his gaze shift in a slightly less methodical manner across the text.  

“Dissociative fugue."
"That's bad, right?"
"A number of discreet conditions involve fugue states and somatic passivity.  I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“Susan asked me if she should wear the black thing from the store to your show tonight.  Your brother's taking her."  She leant back in her chair, letting it rest against the wall.  "To your show.  You know... the one you’re going to.”   
“I’m contractually obliged to attend.” 
“I’m contractually obliged to split my fucking take-home with local Vice.”  When he maintained his silence she tapped the spoon against the edge of the bowl.  “You just fucking get along to that thing, Lamb... pat some scrawny ass, suck it in for the paps, make like you're not getting intrusive thoughts about spreader bars.  Opal'll love you for it, she’ll book you a whole bunch of gigs just like it and I can go get a real fucking job.”
“You told me you had no intention of ever attending anything like that.  You were very specific about it.” Edward reminded her, folding the paper over and dropping it next to the three he had already digested before selecting another.
“Fuck no, I didn’t want to go back then.  Now I do.”
“You also said something about loathing everything associated with art.”
“And you gave me the idea that you weren’t a hustling bitch who’d sell my ass out first chance you got.”  She regarded him bitterly from her chair.  “So when you’re done blowing Opal for one more fucking C note or whatever, ask yourself how flush you feel.”
“I would prefer you stayed here tonight.”
"Are you out of your mind?" Lilian demanded, incredulous.  "What am I, your butterface shamefuck?  Lock it up til you want to get it wet?  Give it to me straight, Lamb, right now, or I swear I’ll be gone when you get back.”

He looked up from his paper.

“It’s not your reputation that keeps me from taking this public.  It’s mine.”    

With her pale eyes intent on his Lilian sat still for short while, then stood, firing the bowl at the skirting board as she remembered its weight in her hand.  On the landing Susan held her tongue as she stalked past and a moment later observed the other party disappearing into the garage, waiting for the sound of Edward’s vehicle to recede along the drive before descending into the passage that led toward his library.

It took a great deal of her courage to brave his private station, its black desk and chair seeming almost to impersonate him in the static, watchful seclusion.  The narrow panes of glazing stood aloof; she gazed around herself, rubbing her fingers together before dragging the chair out from behind the desk and setting it carefully before the shelving.  At the very edge of her reach one of the small compartments yielded; she took down the closest volume and cradled its heather-brown and half-defeated binding in both hands.

The pages, far more ancient even than its protective shell, revealed the xylographic text and woodcut illustration of an incunabula, the stiff paper shedding pale matter from its ragged edges onto the inside of her wrists.  It was a bestiary, peopled with a catalogue of smiling, bright-eyed chimeras, thorny bears, monoceri, purple goats, golden, horned, hybrid panthers and sardonic basilisks, accorded their enduring colours by hand.  Scowling at the rubricated Latin she confined herself to a study of the images, though no anthropomorphi stood amongst them, no vampyres or werebeasts nor anything resembling the brothers' own confounding order.  On discovering her William stood for a short while in his amusement, then crossed the room behind her on bare feet and breathed a short remark into her ear.

“Certa amittimus dum incerta petimus.” 

Susan exclaimed and began to totter, dropping the incunabula.  He caught it in a puff of dust.  

"Stop doing that!" she hissed, keeping her voice low.  As her face regained its colour she ignored his proffered hand, bending at the knees until they were of equal stature to peruse his features from that novel perspective.  "One of your eyes is completely different to the other, like you were made from different bits..." 
"I think we were." he confessed.  She sighed, opening the volume he had handed back to her and flipping speculatively through its pages.
“That is incredibly creepy.  What do you think you are, scientifically?”  

His expression became dry and weary. 

"A rose by any other name, in the dark, still walks in beauty or whatever.  I am open to being captured and handled by Sir David Attenborough, but I wouldn’t let anyone else do it.”  He smiled again.  “Present company excluded.”  
“What do you want, then?  I’m busy.”
“Philip’s here.”
“I don’t know a Philip.”
“My spectacular folicular technician.”  He rolled his eyes.  “He does hair.  Sort of... now, so come on.” 
“What’s wrong with my hair?  You're hurting my brain.  I don’t like arty things... can we not just stay in and watch a movie?”

He took her hand as she stepped down and began to drag her from the room, then along the corridor outside; she muttered to herself as he shepherded her before him up the stairs.

“Pink elastic.” he remarked, abstractly, until she discerned the subject of his observation and slapped her skirt against the back of her legs with both hands, stepping against the wall so that he was forced to precede her.  “At least you’re wearing some." he laughed.  "I had no such good fortune when you violated my personal sanctity at gunpoint.”
“If I'd known that I would have turned the bloody thing on myself." Susan assured him.

Against her private expectations, Philip the friseur presented as a tall, scrupulously gym-fit man of forty in a fitted, wet-look T-shirt, the limpid black fabric embracing both the barbells in his nipples and the impressive girth of his toast-brown biceps.  Wraithlike, sculpted sideburns descended from a fauxhawk of the same pale shade.  He awaited them in William’s ensuite bathroom with his kit bags and glossy, transparent apron, the stern centrepiece in a scene of unimpeachable professionalism.  Philip smiled for William as he ushered Susan into the chamber, but greeted the latter with an undisguised lack of enthusiasm.

“You know I’m always here for you... why make me regret it?” he sighed in an aside, eyes sliding in Susan’s direction as the latter sat on the edge of the bath.  Pushing William down into the kitchen chair he began to draw handfuls of the latter's parti-coloured mane toward himself, bemoaning its amateur modification.  “I could put a thousand homosexual hours into this mess and a day later you’d be back to ghetto homefried.”  Philip turned to look at Susan accusingly.  “Did you do this?  Friends don’t let friends go Midnite Madder.”

“She’s completely innocent, and it was Wicked Cherry anyway.”  William chewed his finger absently.  “Wicked Cherry, Nuclear Red... and okay, maybe there was a drunken Midnite Madder incident.”
“Lucky you're a gruesome freak of nature that grows hair like nothing should.”

Susan looked up at the remark and then at William, who smiled tranquilly.

“Christabel... what do you want done?” he inquired, squinting as his head was bent forward and his hair combed out with a punitive hand.
“I wouldn’t mind a decent haircut.” she murmured, returning Philip’s glance.  “If you do those.”
“You know, she sounds like Midnite Madder.” the technician decided.  Laying back his head and staring up at him, William succeeded in softening Philip's expression, the capitulation manifested in his handling of the comb.  “Speaking of female ruination... I heard someone had to peel that Rachelle Whateley off your slutty sectors in front of a hundred weeping innocents.  Why do I now feel the need to scrub myself so intensively?”
“Rumours of my participation are exaggerated.”
“Have you seen her lately?  Don’t go looking is all I’ll say...”
“Why?” Susan inquired.

​“My god, she’s been on a hyper sci fi bender since this here weaned her off the panty pork.”  Philip warmed to his subject, shaking out a black dye cape and laying it carefully over William’s shoulders.  “Dickmatized right off the deep end.  Opal La Rue’s ready to choke a bitch... all that time she spent corn-feeding that trainwreck... can you imagine?  Where was I?  Oh yeah... she cut Rachelle’s ass off cold when all the bills came back to her... ice cold.  So then Rachelle brings it with the plastic rampage until those camel toes at D&G cut up her last card, in front of everyone...”  He winced tightly.  “I had to throw her out of Salon Philip, which is a shame... fabulous natural body.  Just fabulous.  If she dies with that rogue weave on her head I will kill her all over again for going into the light looking like something waxed right off a taint in Reykjavík.”  He began to mix up the colourant in a little black bowl.  “It’s bad, but it’s epic bad, so you can’t complain.”  Susan’s expression contradicted him.  "Bitch please... don’t give me some vaginal monologue about how much you love Rachelle... you don’t.  That sensation you’re experiencing is pleasure.  You love what I just told you.  Love it.” Philip assured her.  “My sources confirmed she beat down her therapist with a lampstand when he tried to ease up her prescription shit... which I guess downgrades her from troubled heiress to crazy crack whore.  Oh the humanity.”  With William’s hair wrapped into clingfilm, Philip turned his attention toward Susan, who took the chair and frowned into the mirror.  “I know... why don't you just tell me what to do?” he suggested.  

Despite the declaration it did not take Philip long to devise the treatment she required, nor did it impair his ability to impart the lurid foibles of his diverse clientele.  The timer presiding over William chimed an end to his confinement and he reached in to wrestle with the taps over the bath tub while Susan’s colour was concluded.  She frowned again at the distinctive sound of garments being shed onto the tiles.  

“Is he taking his clothes off again?” she demanded, bringing a hand up to the side of her face.  
“Oh god, won't someone do something?" Philip sighed, shaking his head as he enjoyed the shower curtain's nominal opacity.  "So, so nasty." 
“Have you finished this?” she sighed, pointing to her own head.  Philip shrugged, noncommital, and she ducked out of the bathroom.

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

The sole house on depopulated Ensay, looking toward its chapel
John Maher recorded abandoned houses in the Hebrides for his show 'Nobody's Home' 
See more here

The finish can be quite variable.  According to thickness of application and possibly moon phase, you can end up with a quite-to-moderately glossy satin, then an off-matte drydown with wear.  The real culprit is obviously temperature and the amount you've slapped on, but that mutability is definitely a hallmark.  Wear time is perfectly acceptable as long as you don't eat or drink, which will quickly buff it down to a sad ghost of its full glory.  So not a dinner red without primer.  My mouth is quite 'turned out' and like Deborah from the same Audacious range, I find Charlotte a wee bit difficult to work into the central backward curve of my lower lip without a bit of brush coercion.  To conquer these deep and sometimes difficult shades, I brush on a light half-strength application to set out my desired shape and create a base, on to which I pat more product straight from the tube, building depth where desired.

In its favour, Charlotte doesn't bleed much (on me) and it is pretty darn comfortable on the lip, even in the sort of dry, windy winter conditions that can really crack shit up.  I seriously adore Charlotte's clean black cherry goodness- it really is the best version of this shade that I've encountered and can be built to a traffic-stopping midnight intensity.  For that reason I'm willing to overlook a few minor technical difficulties that are anyway pretty intrinsic to this colour.  She brightens your teeth like nobody's business, too, something most of us can be grateful for. 

There's something very exemplaire about Majella, even in a crowded field of high-functioning reds; it has that same elusive, perfected Nars deliciousness that keeps me coming back to this brand and classics like Cruella, Red Lizard and Basque Red after some juicy new thing has briefly bogarted my attentions.  The first swatch image directly below is particularly accurate, although Golshan is a little browner than it might look here.

​This is our favourite rooster, an extremely low ranking bird who seems to prefer human company to that of his own species; we feel his pain.  He's probably an annoying crowing machine but he's such a card that we're thinking about bagging him up and taking him home.  We don't really eat chicken any more so he should be safe lol.

​from Surreal Worlds 2.0
that is some high-functioning shit right there.  See more here

' Rottlace is a family of masks designed for Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk. Inspired by Björk’s most recent album - Vulnicura - the Mediated Matter Group explored themes associated with self-healing and expressing ‘the face without a skin'. One of the masks from the series was selected for Björk’s stage performance at the Tokyo Miraikan Museum, and 3D printed by Stratasys using multi-material printing. '

*Rottlace is a cognate of Roðlaus (“skinless” in Icelandic).

See the entire project here