The sleek copper flank of the bar was cold against Edward’s knee like the hide of a torpid dragon as he wished he had issued his brother’s photograph to the door staff.  William sucked emerald jelly shots from the wrists and cleavage of the girl serving their drinks; the spillage dropped over the edge of the counter onto the slightly ragged, belted tartan of his kilt.  His blazing hair was tied up in a high knot over a T-shirt stenciled with the word kafir in petrol-pink.  The brunette smirked, admitting him under the counter to the mirrored space beyond, rebuffing a colleague’s complaint with a gesture and leading him into the stock room.

Midnight had lured a more fashionable element out of restaurants and openings elsewhere to dilute the bridge and tunnel stock allowed to exhaust their paycheques in their absence; a headcount had sealed Edward's decision to eschew the venture before he was joined by a short and zaftig woman bound tightly in burnt pink Chanel.  She used his arm to assist her onto the stool beside him, acrylic nails almost as long as the fingers behind them.  Sinister volumes of tuberose absolute fumed from her person, lifted in a vapour from the cold surface of her skin by the heat of the downlights.  She stared at him with thickly-lashed eyes the colour of carbonised hardwood.

“I've talked to the owners and they're gratifyingly desperate.  They’ll comp us for the first month during handover... anything you put through the books after that runs at the standard rate.” the woman informed him, her expression sharpening her unsolicited advice into direction.  On the night of her death Opal La Rue had been closer to sixty than she would ever acknowledge; the knit suit followed the smooth, gourd-like undulations of her torso closely, covered buttons providing little points of visual relief and underscoring the contrast between the fulsome curvature of her central mass and its dainty extremities.  In spite of her zealous deportment she possessed an uncomfortable fusion of zoological attributes, from the de-beaked angle of her tormented nose to the argute, porcine cunning that glittered in her gaze.  Her ammoniated hair had been hardened to a glassy turn by lacquer and colours outside life’s gentler palette adorned her face.  "I can run agency cattle through this place like it's a feedlot without a single DoL issue, and use it monday tuesday wednesday for wholesale... it's two blocks from Avalon so I can practically walk them in here off the boat." she gloated.  "So I've given them a provisional yes..."

“I’m not interested.” Edward replied, his voice possessing all the informative qualities of rock crystal.  The woman searched for something in the remark that might defray its obdurate nature, but a television starlet in a brief white dress stood behind them, awaiting her attention with the kind of servile patience and nervous sweat that turned Opal around atop the stool.  

​“Oh dear god Amelia.” she scolded, taking a tiny plastic package from her handbag and pushing it into her hesitant grasp.  “Drop two sizes before you come off hiatus.”  The girl’s doe-eyed face fell at the instruction, and she tucked her hair behind her ears.  Opal rolled her eyes to the ceiling and turned back to the bar.  “Edward, if you want to see what I can do for you, you're going to have to take one hand off the wheel.  And tell me please that you did not pay cash for that rat pit in the hills.”  He did not reply.  “Of course you did.” she muttered, disgusted.  "Rubber band banking again... well then, I’m going need some paintings.  I've got New England buyers coming down and they're chasing scale.  No red, no yellow.  Austerity."  The corners of her small mouth angled sharply downward.  "If you’re giving up the apartment, at least that creature you call a brother will have to find a dumpster somewhere else.  Looks like we were able to keep him out of here...”

Emerging from the stockroom, the bargirl entered her number on William's phone and reapplied her lipgloss while he wiped the same shade from his mouth, coming over to lean heavily upon the bar and offering Opal a smile laden with antipathy.  Their antagonism sprang from more than her role as impresario to his brother's public affairs, though her enterprise was as renowned for the depravity of its expediencies.  He polished two shot glasses on his T-shirt, poured two liberal measures of pale spirit then knocked both back; the woman grimaced, watching his long tongue catch a drip from his chin.

“Opal... I can understand how this happened..." he admitted, eyeing her apparel.  "It was a yard sale, you were exhausted... maybe there’s a sense of humour under that rugged exterior after all.  But why the fuck are you trying to sell him this shiny pleather überdump?"  He addressed his brother in a language Opal could not understand, its interfluent syllables broken by a single familiar profanity.  "If you really want to fight bent liquidators for money you can’t legally explain, just open a fucking gallery.”

“I know the security here.” she snarled.  He shrugged.

​“I only know their girlfriends.”

Edward had disappeared from her side by the time she saw fit to resume their lopsided colloquy, and William allowed her to stalk away without further provocation.  Taking the bottle, he ducked back under the bar and exclaimed to himself as his brain supplied the feeling that its mass had slithered forward in his skull; he waved a hand before his eyes, counting off its many avatars before they were resolved.  He stood still and pondered the voluptuous sensations, the darkness assuming secret, velvety modalities, pressing and retreating, flashing and then spiriting away the faces massed around him.  The lustre of a stranger’s bare-skinned shoulder as she passed him closed his eyes and turned them inward, upon a scene suddenly elected out of distant memory, lit with an enclosing myriad of candles and the shallow, fulminating brilliance of paste jewels, perfumed by white lead powder, beeswax and distilled jasmine.  The ghost of a smile moved the woman in his arms as they turned, swept by the great beaded skirts of other dancers, their whispering silk sliding by under the flight of the music that expanded to fill the high-domed hall with its dim panels of plate mirror.  She smiled again, making a mockery of the gesture with dark laughter from which the sound had been erased, too painful to recall.  Her white fingers tightened on his shoulder, discovering his bones.  

With the opening of his eyes the vision and its faint score faded, merging with the pulsing bass surrounding him.  It occurred to William that he had emerged from darkness largely innocent of lamplight into a burnt-out modernity where night was flushed like a pathology from its domain, and he briefly rued the transition.  A pair of acquaintances slid by and he nodded to their greeting while the DJ drew the faders down in favour of a floor show.  

The crowd formed around the pool of blue light glowing on the ground and ornamented by a single male figure, lean and unclothed and crouching spiderlike, skin draped over an addict’s framework.  The sound of the paint can agitated in his grasp lapsed as he sprayed a perimeter around himself, an acid-yellow tie of the same hue hanging from his neck.  When he stood it became obvious that few parts of his person had escaped the cannula, his penis so heavily embellished with silver bijoux that it sagged considerably; William frowned faintly, regretting the vantage conferred by his stature.  The artiste began rolling and moaning in earnest, wide eyes possessed of a bulging gelatinous rapture and reminding him of aspic, then cow's hooves, then refectory tables dressed with ponderous brocades and groaning under spitted porpoise meat and coffin-like pyes studded with plums and cloves.  A hypnotic litany tumbled from the performer's mouth in piteous falsetto; he grasped his genitals and made a prancing circuit of the stage, stretching the end of the tie into a noose and whipping his thin voice into a howling, plangent crescendo until the wave of babble peaked and he lay salivating in a feigned dementia, arms out in rigored cruciform.  The crowd exchanged whispers and retreated, while William pressed his face into his hands, excruciated by the effort of containing his amusement.  Taking one more look between his fingers, he gave it up and succumbed to a fit of laughter. 

It produced a dilemma for the most distant onlookers, some convinced he was an adjunct to the performance.  To those closest to him his paroxysm was a strange and radiant contagion, turning them toward him, their sympatric chuckles spreading exponentially until a full two-thirds of the audience succumbed to the transmitted laughter.  Though he held two hands over his mouth, their attention had shifted to such palpable extent that the performer redoubled the volume of his cries and the bouncers consulted one another, converging on the offender like elementals from the four corners of the world.  Hampered by their progress through the other patrons, they allowed evasive action; William dropped to his hands and knees, crippled by his own mirth as he negotiated the shifting copse of legs and shoes, sucking in a breath as a heel was stamped down on his hand.  The bouncers lost him in the crush as miscued music swallowed the performance.  He had gained the bar and was able to congratulate himself before two behemoths seized him from behind and conveyed him toward an external door. 

The night outside was rank and clammy and its taste assaulted William sharply as he was dragged into a loading bay, punched three times for good measure and abandoned by his escorts.  A cigarette dropped from his lips in the mouth of the alley, and he cursed and patted down his person in search of another.  Beneath the bright red canopy over the entrance a woman in a slim black trench glanced toward him from her conversation with the doorman, glaring for a moment before ignoring him.  William smiled, arms hanging by his sides in an attitude of wide-eyed solicitation; by the time she looked again he had moved the performance five steps closer and infused it with a dewy pathos that hardened her expression further.  Her eyes were pale and darkly-painted, her face washed with a slowly-flashing blue from a light across the street.  The length of her silver-blonde hair was concealed beneath the collar of her coat.

"It's shit in there anyway." he assured her, a statement the doorman was unable to contest, and she joined William on the footpath, taking a cigarette from her handbag.  He suffered another of her disaffected gazes.

"Fucking Lauren left three grand's worth of shoe in the cab.” she informed him.

"So take me back to your place and teach me a lesson I'll never forget." he smiled.
"It's like three blocks to yours."
"Frost, there's an accommodation situation... I just talked my brother out of buying this shitbox here and to show his fucking gratitude he's putting me out of A-town like I scooted on the Wall Street Journal." he complained.  They turned and began walking together slowly, stepping round the drift of steam from a kitchen vent beside the alley.  
"You don't even have a brother."
"If only that were so."
"I've never seen him... I don't know anyone who knows him... that makes him imaginary, or an autistic fucking sasquatch."
"Let's change the subject."
"You brought him up."  She shook the bangles on her right arm, knowing their metallic chatter nettled him; he caught her wrist and stilled them with a frown.  "Is he hot?" 
"No.  I got all the pretty."
"He's rich though, right?"
"No.  He's a... fiscally challenged... bukkake fiend with... two lazy eyes and eight chins.  I don't like to talk about it." he sighed as they came to an intersection.  "I should just introduce you.  You could blowtorch his discretionary income and he could scar you emotionally and you'd never accuse me of holding out on you again."
"So what's his fucking problem?"

A car slowed by her while its driver leant on the horn and out the window, expressing lascivious appreciation; she turned and lifted the front of William's kilt, terminating the exchange.  Growing impatient with the lights, they walked together into the coasting traffic, paying no heed to the abuse attracted by their transection.

​"It's complicated... with little to no nutritional value."      
"I'll comp him just for busting you out of that janky-ass building.  Avalon is full of chuds and kitten-fuckers."
"Su casa... mi casa?" he proposed.
"Did I say no?  I meant hell no." she laughed.
"One week?  Frosty... five working days?  Allez, puta..."  

When she remained recalcitrant he turned in a pall of neon and threatened her with the hem of his kilt.  

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe do not reproduce

Madame Bovary  (2014, Sophie Barthes)
In many ways, life really is an Unlikable Olympics, wherein every stripe of twat and derp gets in your face, and then you die.  Flaubert was right about that, and about us largely being volunteers in our own tours of miserable duty, but I flip flop as to Madame Bovary’s absolute entitlement to canonical status and am thusly unusually amenable to the arguments posed by each new interpretation.

Which leads me to ponder why anyone would take such a blunt set of hedge shears to some of MB’s most important elements, recklessly isolating its characterisations and setting them adrift presumably in the pursuit of… brevity?  Economy?  Dunno.  It’s not the kind of arc that can be topped and tailed; MB is like a longbow, the power of its draw dependant on the integrity of its whole.  I’ll leave the precise nature of the omissions for you to discover, but I’m still struggling to understand the point of this Rose Barreneche/Sophie Barthes edit and its cropping of that fatal curve.

So much rested on Mia Wasikowska’s portrayal and while her paintbox of low-fi pretty and naturalistic tics and grimaces is a good start, it is largely the recipe she presented in Fukunaga's Jane Eyre and I'm not sure these two ladies share much more than pinched viscera.  The guys are unspectacular.  I don’t get Paul Giamatti’s weirdly atonal inclusion as mouth-and-trousers Homais.  Lloyd-Hughes forms an okay husband out of the reduced material he was handed and Logan Marshall-Green as posh cad/budget Tom Hardy rendered himself essentially pointless by turning in something closer to rising damp than callous smoulder.  Ezra Miller looks too much like someone way too into Ezra Miller and that shit is distracting.  Rhys Ifans is captain obvious as the procurer of ruinous luxury, but then that’s all he ever does.

San Andreas (2015, Brad Peyton)
Dude.  There's like these science people and they, I don’t know, detect shit and they’re detecting lots of whatever that shit is and like all this stuff happens something something faulty, and then earthquaking, like, everything in California is fucked because it's the superquake, the one where California just like goes boom into the Atlantic or some shit and there’s this other science guy and he’s on that... that dam, you know, the old one, you know, that really big one, and then there's the earthquake, right and that shit is just gone like boom, then The Rock has a hot daughter and she gets totally wet huh huh huh yeah I'd let her suck it brah, and his wife is like, on this building that is going down and needs rescuing and then they get this boat and go all the way up a tsunami totally and after that they just like cruise through all these other people needing help but its fine because it’s their daughter and she’s with these randoms and she says all this shit about what to like, do but hey lucky her dad’s there.  

​It's an earthquake movie.  There were few-to-no expectations.  But even recreational drug use could not and did not make San Andreas right, and I don’t say that lightly.  Especially cretinous cinematic floaters like this one always make me nervous because I feel they really are reflective of the ambient human plasm, and that sluggish corpus does not typically respond well to ridicule.  Incidentally, it was almost interesting to witness the two weirdly insistent and creepily prescriptive gender models San Andreas presented.  Millennial Girlpower Exemplar can know things, but must repay that indulgence with tittays, hypercoloured eyeballs, scrupulously polite accessibility and ultimate helplessness.  Her mother can only hope for guidance from her Conventional Retrograde Patriarkhēs and his powerful ocean-besting righteousness. 

No stars.  Please leave your physics in the foyer for collection prior to event.

Southpaw (2015, Antoine Fuqua)
From the moment Jake busted out all that bug-eyed mugging in that generic Vegas ring, I knew which way this thing was headed despite the initial industry buzz.  Gyllenhaal is such a naughty pony; though we often enjoy his performances, he has highly questionable, even wilfully bad taste in projects, regularly plunging from the heights of Donnie Darko and Nightcrawler into steamy poos like this one.

Jake is Billy the heavyweight champion who came up hard; his supportive wife, loving daughter and luxe estate complete him.  But oh no- at the top of his game he loses it all- no one understands his pain, the man came took his money and shitty Fitty took his game.  He cries alone in the shower.  Tragic strings enclose him.  Helpful voiceovers delineate the skullfuckingly obvious, over and over again.  Billy must re… rebuild.

Had enough?  We’d had enough after five minutes.  I may be old/ not the target demo/ have seen this retarded parable twenty times elsewhere, but I'm also as bloodthirsty and immature as the next punter and yet Southpaw's mouthbreathing spectacle still insults and displeases me.  And leaves me wondering things like just how Rachel McAdams and Gyllenhaal could sort through a presumably dizzying array of projects then settle on this one?  Why did Forest Whitaker pack his dignity when he knew he’d never get to wear it?  Perhaps it suffices to say that this was originally intended as a vehicle for Marshall Mathers.  Yes- Eminem, who recused himself only because his lyrical muse just wouldn't let him be great as a totally convincing heavyweight boxing champion and dragged him away in mid-shoot to write another stunning opus.  Sure, Jan.

Southpaw looks somewhat expensive while managing to feel like it was shoplifted from the Two Dollar Store by hoodrats.  Every fucking genre cliché is dragged screaming let me die in peace from overdue retirement and stuffed into a narrative bucket wherein they writhe like greasy, tormented eels to no good purpose.  There is.  A fight training.  Montage.  The incessant didactic commentary made me want to punch myself in the fucking face repeatedly.  The thing rolls ponderously over the top of the talent that may have redeemed it even though there are a thousand obvious ways this jejune orgy could have been tilted or reframed to make it worthy.  McAdams is excused; she acquits herself even in this blighted context, as do most of the supporting players, but it's only when he's sat with the utterly reliable Whitaker that Gyllenhaal reminds us why we bother with him at all, alluding to just how circumstantial and reactive his magic seems to be.  Carby old Fifty Curtis Jackson Cent plays mediocre-shady exactly like someone who really has cheated a few dipshits out of their lunch money in his time on earth.  Golf clap?  

It's fucking horrible.  We laughed like ghouls and rolled around in agony all the way through this feckless shitfest whilst simultaneously mourning those two squandered hours.

According to CreditSuisse, New Zealand is the second wealthiest country in the world, after Switzerland.  And the Lovely R and I enjoy a rarified position as part of the top 10% of wealthy individuals currently encumbering the planet.  Are you as stunned as we are?

Don't be too impressed.  Let's put those revelations into perspective.

To make the top 50% in the world team, you have to be able to come up with... wait for it... about three grand.  In order to qualify as part of the top 10%, you need a net worth greater than $69 000 US.  No, they're not typos and that's where we're at as a species.

Hell, we're probably living it up with the fucking 5%, since our net worth is oooh, probably about $300 000 NZ, on a good day.  

Nouveau-riche and middle class convention dictates that one should never, ever divulge that sort of information because... 0_0   To be honest, I don't know the official rationale behind that secretive bullshit- it's probably to do with the envy and shame so fundamental to those cohorts.  But suspicious insecurity and spurious measures of status are tactics used by monetarists to keep us at each others' throats instead of theirs, so Imma never mind the bollocks and tell you we live on about $500 a week, net.  I'm a really firm believer in everyone knowing what everyone else earns because, like I said, the current seven-veils situation fosters both impunity and division.  We should have to justify our greed and overconsumption to each other- look what happens when that requirement is massaged away.  The truth is vitally important and will one day set us free.  

R and I are excess-refuseniks.  We work strictly to live and regard employment as a necessary evil to be minimised in favour of personal autonomy, in accordance with largely epicurean principles i.e. modest living, reasonable hedonism, tranquility and freedom from mental and physical affliction.  We both feel very strongly that, beyond a certain point, holding onto more than you need is fucked up and will rebound on you.  I actually believe it's psychopathic because it fits all the diagnostic requirements.  Unfortunately, clinical psychologists tend to be rich so it's no use asking them.    

​We also strongly believe that a single full-time-ish income should be enough to live quietly on, and the fact that it's usually not reveals the state of slavery and compulsion that has closed in around us.  Being quite poor by Western standards is only difficult in NZ because the cost of living here is off the fucking charts and gets worse every year; we squeak by because we do virtually everything for ourselves, have minimal accommodation expenses, no kids, no car, no holidays, no credit cards, no health conditions, bugger-all insurance and no expensive habits.  And don't come sloping round looking for $300 000 worth of pimpy swag, because the very little portable shit we own is all second-hand or er... vintage.  Our vacuum cleaner is 22 years old.  Lol.

Even though we regularly (always) run out of money at the end of the fortnight, we're still living large compared to many of our compatriots via the simple expedient of being able to pay our bills, although that ability is eroding steadily.  New Zealand is a low-wage, high-cost economy with repulsive levels of inequality and poverty, as defined by any measure you care to name.  I'd conservatively, anecdotally estimate that two thirds of locals are in spiralling operational deficit and/or already suffering varying degrees of practical hardship.

​One in four children and one in seven households are actually in officially-designated poverty, which is a gross underestimate and an artefact of sleazy criteria.  Food banks and heinous overcrowding are the new normal for a lot of us.  It costs R and I over $20 (again, not a typo) to ride a bus into town and back (12 kilometres each way).  With no tvs, no dishwasher, no electric heating, no clothes dryer, no microwave, no nothing, our power bill is still $120 per month with the cheapest, prepaid provider.  $5-600/month bills are commonplace for a family; everyone else lives in fuel poverty, under-or-not heating their houses and getting sick in winter.  When we're too old to haul and chop wood, we won't be able to afford a fire, our sole source of heat.  We personally spend 40% of our income on groceries (no alcohol), because successive governments have refused to regulate the two supermarket chains who monopolise 90% of our food supply and distribution.  General sales tax on everything (including essential food items) is 15%.  Our median house price is 6 times the median annual income (3xs is considered sort-of affordable) and rising every day, only slightly better than London but worse than LA or NYC.  Our current housing bubble (probably the worst in the world) means home ownership will never be possible for the vast majority of people not already on the property ladder, all of whom face the prospect of turning over three quarters of their take-home in rent to wealthy slumlords.

Like almost all New Zealanders, virtually all our 'wealth' consists of the ludicrously overstated equity in our house, which we've largely paid for because we bought a sixty-grand shitbox in a ghetto twenty years ago.  It exists only to borrow against, so our single meaningful privilege is the opportunity to incur debt we cannot afford to repay.  Sweet.

​We can already foresee the day when local council rates (property taxes) will force us out of this slowly-gentrifying area.  Then we're really fucked, because we'll never be able to afford to pay market rents and our current crop of *representatives* are selling off what remains of state-owned and rent-controlled accommodation.  That's if most local authorities don't go bankrupt Detroit-styles when repeat bubble collapse leaves them in a bucket of bottomless red.

​Does all this sound familiar?  Are you a 10%er too, living large, rolling around in all that carefree first world largesse?  The FirstWorldProblems hashtag trivialises the fact that virtually everyone in a similar situation to our own is or will be as screwed as anyone in sub-Saharan Africa if the fucking wind changes.

So fuck you, Credit Suisse.  If New Zealand is the second wealthiest nation in the world, it's because a single-digit percentage of the people living here are making life a walking nightmare for the rest of us.  I really, really hate them for it. 

​This week- movie reviews.  Here's something to take the fucking edge off.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (looks like he's melting), accompanied by his wife Ri Sol-Ju, seated to his right, attend a performance of the Chongbong band at a theatre in Pyongyang.  KNS/AFP/Getty

If you think your life is shit right now, stare hard at this image for at least 60 seconds and really soak it all up.  I am personally mesmerised by the fucking palpable terror behind those decaying smiles.  North Korea is an abusive marriage writ large.

A shaft of waning sunlight swam with flashing motes no larger than the dust blown from a bird’s wing by the vicissitudes of flight, floating over three warm-blooded bodies.  In the gloom it was possible to dimly mark the shapes of careless limbs and profiles arranged on the disordered bed.  In lying amid three women William had curled against the tallest in his sleep, pale forehead to her powdered shoulder, his long fingers flexing in the narrow crescent space between his stomach and the small of her back.  The sunwarmed, saline scent of female flesh, imbued in the consoling softness of her bare skin and glowing in his emptied head, kept his eyes closed and he ceased to breathe, listening to her heart throb slowly in its nest of arching vessels, the courteous reciprocation of its seals and chambers.  He listened also through the mattress and the floor to the feeble stirrings of the dead, lying not within their graves but in the storeys below, secreted like silk-wrapped larvae; then to water, trickling and coursing through the stone of the distant foundations on its ancient way toward the sea.  A copse of candles burnt down to tilting stubs atop a tansu chest at the foot of the bed, their wax spilling across the black lacquer and dripping slowly onto a little electronic keyboard, its keys already soaked with purple syrah.  Beside it stood a wooden box half-filled with kesar mangoes, the sweet promise of their sunset colours contended by their perfume.   

He was roused by the persisting vibration of a telephone, buzzing against his cheek like a pinioned wasp until he rolled slowly onto his back with his eyes still closed, fetching up against another of his slumberous companions.  She moved her feet but their spike heels were immured in the roll of dark blue linen at the end of the bed.  

William cleared his throat; he could taste vodka, eau de parfum and all three women.

“Just at the moment... I'd have to say no.” he murmured into the telephone.

"Get some scissors and cut that fucking laminate in half.  No more backstage for you.” declared the respondent.

“Frost... how can you be so cold, so early in the morning?” he smiled lazily.  The two girls lying in each others' arms beside him stirred at the sound of his complaint; all three were powdered with fine chromed glitter, a fresh puff flushed into the air by their movement.  Their hair, so artfully arranged into towering futuristic bouffants by a legion of aestheticians, had unravelled into silky, silver-streaked chaos that was not without it’s own allure.  

“It’s after six, you lazy fuck.  Peel the bitches off and put them in a cab."

He lifted his head.

​“I’ve got Lila and Mina and... I think Lauren.  I was minding my own business with Lila and Mina, and... she hit us pretty hard... have you seen her from behind?  And jesus christ... I swear she can take her teeth out.”
“Let me tell you about my day, asshole."
"Frost..." he sighed, laying a hand over his face.  "Don't be like that... détendez-vous..."
"I lost my three biggest girls right after the show, their bookers are reaming me on three lines, they’re totally uninsured and the fucking kraut designer's going into fucking labour because we’re three major pieces short for a flight to fucking Frankfurt in an hour.”  The caller took a long, audible drag on a cigarette and leant out of earshot to reassure a companion.  The concept of exigence percolated downward through the elements of his confusion.  His left arm refused to be recalled and he glanced up at the headboard's painted scene of gilt blossom and cranes to find a handcuff encircling his wrist.  
“So... er... what?"
“Call them a fucking car!”
“Drivers won’t come to this hood.”
“Where are you?”

He looked up at the deeply-stepped cornice briefly.

“Avalon.”
"Fucking A-Town?”  He shrugged while the caller deplored his living arrangements.  “The bitches can walk home, but you, put anything silver and all the shoes in a fucking car and send them to the store, right now.  And you’re blacklisted.”

He let his free hand fall back onto his forehead.

“You don’t mean that, Frosty... je voudrais que tu sois ici...” he purred, smiling again at the thought of her expression.

​“Lamb, get your whore voice out of my head and get the shit here or I’m gonna fucking cut it off.”

Still clad in some of the garments to which the caller referred, two thirds of the three stretched out together, shrugged each other off and sat up slowly, breasts lapsing against the metallic vinyl of their sinuous caprisons, their brevity serving the exactions of their infamous trapeze performances.  The girl to his left, the most ample of the three, had shaken herself free of the bed entirely and stood naked, diamonds pinned to the most arresting features of her bloomy silhouette and forming a blinking constellation as she moved.  Reaching up, she slid her fingers into her hair and shook it loose, standing with her hands on her hips to gaze at the narrow cage beside the wall and its trio of avian inmates.  She bent to fetch the silver corsetry that had been stripped from her.

“Ladyboy chickens...” she suggested.

William turned his hand in the cuff and tried in vain to free it.

“What’s the time?”  
“Six twenty eight.  Like, p.m.  I am so late for a fitting.” the girl sighed.  The difference between the cool, pelagic greens in each of his eyes became far more pronounced with the sudden change of their expression.  He inhaled swiftly and consulted his handset.
“Nai ani’iya...” he breathed.  "Keys... I need the keys.”

With the remainder of its occupants he rolled from the bed and together they tossed the sheets for the key to his cuffs, coming up instead with a fistful of tulip-stamped pills, a violet wand, lipgloss tubes and a jelly-pink, glitter-studded vibrator.  The ephemera flew into the air and clattered onto the parquet.  The trapeze girls dropped to their knees in search of their own accoutrements, forgetting William’s difficulty, and he exploited their distraction to bust the cuff chain with a swift jerk of his arm, wincing as the board cracked.  Sweeping his trousers from the curtain rail, he hustled the trio from the room, shaking the contents of his wallet onto the floor of the lounge while they slid into their coats, the margins of their fabulous ensembles still gleaming on their wrists and ankles in the sunset admitted by the glass of the balcony door.  Lauren, bag of burlesque props stuffed under her arm, caught his head in both hands and sucked his chin as he stuffed hundred dollar bills into her coat.

“Go out through the fence, then two blocks north to the first rank you see... tell the driver you’re with Edward Lamb.”
“You’re William.” Lila insisted. 
“I know, but listen... don’t talk to anyone on the street... walk walk walk and don’t stop.  Frost’s waiting at the store for your gear... go straight to the boutique.” he told her, holding the door for the smiling women.  They blew kisses and flashed a number of their bountiful gifts at him as they hurried down the corridor and crowded into the elevator.

Out on the balcony his tall shape was darkly mirrored by black stone fascia while he waited for the women to emerge from the foot of the building, leaning over the chromed railing and the eight floor drop.  With the sun's retirement the street was deeply shaded by a beetling suite of elderly apartment blocks, and empty of pedestrians; the girls formed radiant foci against the pavement and it was not long before footfalls began to trouble it behind them.  A small, dark, stooping figure took up their trail with an intent that compensated for the lameness of its gait.  William parked his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and leant back through the sliding door, lifting an air rifle free of the drapery.  The neighbourhood enjoyed the quiescence afforded by its evil reputation and a quick aural scan revealed nothing to give him pause.  Down on the street the hunching figure had begun to close on the heedless women, bent almost double over its own feet by the intemperance of its designs.  Blowing away smoke, William took aim and shot a hunting pellet at the back of it’s head.  

Spinning about, his target lurched back at once toward the building it had spilled from, lifting a sickly, chalk-white scowl toward the sky and chittering a string of interlaced obscenities.  Its persecutor crouched behind the railing, smiling as he listened to the slighted fury fulminating on the pavement, its cracked, archaic aspect lending grotesque emphasis.

“Ah harken ye, ye slimeh dink bastard!” it shrieked up at him.  "Ye durn hunker theya all ye fuckin please, cause ahm a' commin up t'ye!"

William returned to the lounge while his accuser re-invaded the foyer and commandeered the creaking, uncertain elevator.  Both hands plumbed his trouser pockets for the key to the front door until he spied it on the atrium floor and worked it into the lock, just as the sounds of turgid discontent spilled out into the corridor outside.  For good measure, he coaxed a heavy bombé commode across the door.  Thus indemnified, he stood with hands on hips and made a brief survey of the apartment.  Its cool, paneled seclusion was stocked with an elegant, if somewhat dissociative sufficiency of Georgian and French furnishings, none of which belonged to him.  Their disarray prompted him to drag a garbage bag from the kitchen and begin stuffing something of the detritus into its depths.  Grainy white powder coating a tea tray on the floor between the sofa and a daybed prompted him to lift it to his face and press a thumb against one nostril, eyes rolling back toward the door as he was addressed by its thwarted assailant.

“Fuckin cap meh, will ye?" the creature hissed into the lock.  "Well hear yee... ahm e-victin ye skank-pokin ass... yew an ye fuckin no-count absentee repr'bate broth'r!  Here ah go, nailin it up aroun six four so he kint miss a cock-suckin word.  Heh heh heh.”

William resumed his languid struggle with the room, shuffling unresolvable items into a mass that he shepherded with his bare feet, wedging handbags and bottles and takeaway boxes into the sack in his passage toward the bedroom.  The pheasants strutted in their temporary quarters, great barred tails fraying against the wire.  Throwing open the curtains, he turned back to strip the bed and commit the sheets to the cache that he coaxed toward the bathroom, stuffing it into the tub and dragging the shower curtain closed.

The tapware was silkily calmative, both to his eye and in his hands, expressing with the geometries inscribed upon the walls in veined vert marble the aloof, pre-war grandeur that so pleased him.  He lowered his head into the basin, letting the water run from hair dyed noxious parrot red and roughly cut to shoulder-length, closing his eyes against the brightness of his own reflection.  Mirror glass reminded him why people stared and he did not consult it with any regularity, his own face so familiar and immutable that he did not require aides-mémoires, though he remembered only belatedly that his brother was uncharacteristically overdue.  At his circumspect approach the commode shuddered once, then flew across the atrium with the propulsive duress applied to the door.  

Edward Lamb wore a bespoke suit of blue-black summer wool into the space that he had cleared so summarily.  His demeanour held only subtle reference to the violence of his intrusion and he carried its indifference into the lounge without a glance toward his erstwhile companion, a long grey gym bag suspended from each hand.  Congenital similitude rendered both the differences they had contrived and their remaining correlations striking.  While the human eye slid no more easily over his features than they did William's, he had taken more care to subsume their singularity, modeling his disguise on the most anonymous of their surrounding clades, inclusive of those finely-drawn brutalities and vacancies that were an easy match for his native array.  The notice to quit had been plastered to the door with packing tape and couched in a crabbed and gloating scribble by an author who had reconsidered spectating its receipt.  William took out his cigarette papers and drifted back into the lounge where he sat down, tucked his hair behind his ear and began to roll a joint.  

Shedding his jacket, Edward laid it on the sofa and ejected a long blade from the black knife in his hand, stabbing it deeply into the daybed and slitting the sombre damask along its length.  From the mask of riven flock he extracted blocks of shrink-wrapped bank notes, dumping them into the bags laid out behind him then repairing to the bedroom where he subjected the mattress to the same callous procedure.  Out in the hall, a portion of its rectilinear paneling revealed a shallow niche from which he removed a stack of ammunition boxes and a half-stripped Thompson Annihilator dressed in dust and matted silken webs.  With them stowed in the bags he set a chair beneath the manhole, using it to attain the vacant attic and drawing himself swiftly out of sight into its darkness.

From his seat in the lounge William followed the ponderous crackle and rasping drag of weighted plastic through the ceiling plaster; it passed overhead toward the east above an adjoining apartment and died away.  He bowed his head and re-lit his cigarette.  On returning to the hallway Edward subjected each room to a last inspection.  William leant back in his chair and expressed a plume of smoke.

“I’m not dragging my shit down a hundred floors because a bloodsucker has a prolapse.” he advised.  In reply, his brother set down the bags in the atrium, took the door of the apartment in both hands and wrenched it off its hinges, leaving it beside the frame.  He was gone by the time William leant out to look both ways along the passage, flicking his cigarette at the cackle leaking through the door of the opposite suite. 

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

MAC mattes still take some beating.  My experiences with both their Retro and just plain recent mattes have been pretty positive and I'd rate the ones I've encountered personally in the nineties out of a possible hundred.  You can count Studded Kiss and Fixed on Drama out of that circle of awesomeness- they are wonderfully complex colours cursed with frustrating technical issues and that really pisses me off.

​MAC D for Danger has a similar intensity to these last two offenders, so I don't understand why they look like a balding concrete driveway after half an hour while the latter is so silky smooth.  The difference must lie in the opaque brown pigments that are problematic in many MAC mattes, given that dirty reds and purples are the primary perpetrators.

Happily, D for Danger is a different beast.  I picked it up pretty blind because I love all things fuchsia and fruity; it's a safe category for me, so why the hell shouldn't I wedge yet another variant into my ridiculously oversized collection in the spirit of sober practicality?  There's plenty of sister-wives waiting to keep it company, as you can probably see from the swatches.  Lol.  Excessive.

L2R in neutral outdoor daylight (MAC unless stated)
Russian Red, D for Danger, Petit Red, Bite Cranberry, All Fired Up, Absolute Power, Flat Out Fabulous, Salon Rouge, Glam.
Please do not use these images without permission.

I think almost all these shades are looking fairly true to life in the final shot below- moderate neutral outdoor shade.

Russian Red, D for Danger, Petit Red, Bite Cranberry, All Fired Up, Absolute Power, Flat Out Fabulous, Salon Rouge, Glam.
Please do not use these images without permission.  Ta!

Hand Rolled Cigars  by Krasimir Atanasov 

Wind.  It's been blowing at a steady 70km/h here for a day and a night and that gets on my fucking tits really quickly.  It's like someone shouting over the ads on a television rather than hitting mute.  For 48 hours straight.

​This meteorological situation is especially unacceptable because we've recently dragged the ancient dump-rescue BBQ table out of the wildness at the bottom of the lower garden where it had languished, rotting, for a good three years, sat on it gingerly, decided it wasn't going to collapse today, humped it up to the top garden, slapped black paint on that bitch and then stuck the Balinese umbrella in it.  And it looks pretty fucking sexy in the middle of the roses if we don't say so ourselves.  We'd like to be sitting under it with lunch, or whilst getting tore up on the weekend, but the Southern Ocean is shitting on our dreams.  And that's poking my goodwill right in the anus.

Speaking of recreational trifling, a highly delicious friend of mine used to knock the edge off dodgy methamphetamines with valium during his time incarcerated in a prestigious Sydney boarding school, going so far as to dub the measure clash of the titans, reffing that original slice of WTF masterpiece theatre that had so deeply impressed both our young minds.

​I was relating this dreadful expediency to the Lovely R, who immediately demanded we once more subject ourself to CotTs (1981) and lo, it was as engrossing as we remembered, featuring but not limited to:  

​- lumpy Pegasus
- Larry as Bitchy Zeus
- Harry Hamlin dicksucking lips
- fucktard Andromeda
- sports injury Kraken.   

The promotional poster is... not strictly indicative of actual contents but there is magic in that discrepancy.  As it turns out, the tech who did the stop motion stuff was also one of the producers, which explains the fucking endless SM vulture action I complained of when they could have been upskirting Perseus.  I saw the remake a couple of years back and while the manflesh situation was acceptable, it was otherwise a sloppy, pointless load of motherless shite.  Lave your eyeballs with the original instead.  Experience the fantastic.

A bit of housekeeping: I'm going to ease back into the regular schedule this week with a lipstick review.  If you're having technical issues with the site it's probably because Weebly are desperately patching another update; hopefully the worst should be over soon.  And I'll be upgrading the onsite book with more direct translation tabs and comprehensive linkage asap to improve the experience.  

Jane's Addiction.  I fell into a Perry hole on youtube and cannot believe he's A: still alive and B: looks that fucking good after christ knows how many years of Perry Farrel: mach 10 crackhead shenanigans.  Life is a strange thing.
I couldn't find a straight up album version of this hallowed classic so this live thing will have to do.  I apologise on behalf and in advance for some aspects i.e. budget burlesque/random Hot Topic ho insertion.

Those lyrics.  Perfect truth and therefore beauty.

My Selections:

Rana talking about going into the sea and the bit preceding it in Iran when Edward forces her do it.
I may have said this before, but some of my favourite pieces have been the ones I’ve spat out  with very little revision, and these two scenes really do it for me in that respect.  The historic connections, Kala'amātya's igneous hatred, Rana’s overdue ruin, the fatal beach; I love them all.  And then Rana droning madly about going under into the darkness of the abyss.  Is it satisfying as a writer to kick the shit out a character you can’t stand the sight of?  Fuck yes.

Helaine's possession scene.
Another almost automatic-writing incident that I wrote out in about half and hour, tweaked maybe three words and there it was.  I wanted to stomp all over the fey, coy, porny-yet-neutered aspects that plague so many accounts of witchcraft and its fundamental references to feminine power.  Helaine is dragged by this monstrous thing she can barely contain, but her ambition, equally monstrous, and obsessive need for powerful knowledge is always paramount, and something female characters seem rarely credited with. Helaine features heavily in the second book as more of Kala'amātya's dealings with both her and Lilian are detailed.  To me there is something both awesome and horrific about her.

Susan and William meet for the first time.
I find it difficult to initially engage two characters who will be so significant to each other; it’s like arc welding or making custard in that if you don’t get it right the first time, it won’t ever stick.  But I am happy with this fateful meeting.  It always makes me smile.

Their love scene under the votive tree.
W is such a slut and he makes it easy for me but sex scenes were fraught initially.  People are always going to assume you cull shit from your own experience and that can be inhibiting, but then you just get over it and write sex as it comes to you, just like everything else.  It's hard to know which character's perspective should take precedence sometimes and that can make or break a passage, but if in doubt, I go for the female gaze simply because it is so underrepresented.  I often find my own sex scenes sexy, further proof, if it were needed, that writers are implacable arseholes.  

Susan’s delicious dinner with Gideon.
(R agrees that this is awesome.  It always makes us hungry.)  I love Gideon's uncomfortable blend of nasty rawness and civility.  I also love pondering the superhuman amount of self control it must take to deal honourably with the girl who’s fucking the ex you’re still hard for.  And I love his description of the death of the collective human conscience.  Like most good things, it came to me comprehensively after I had been thinking about ancient art, which coalesced these granular little notions about the deal with nature we’ve tried so hard to void.  It was a late addition to the scene and that might be slightly obvious once you know, but it is one of the most important things I wanted to articulate.  

Kala'amātya in feudal Japan.
​The loneliness of difference.  How it feels when none of your shapes coincide with those of the people around you, no matter what.  The low point to which William refers at the end of this scene, leading his brother to fall so hard for Helaine.  William: “You know, when you finally strike some sort of empathy and you get sucked into one another's hideous shit and things just spiral horribly downward in an endless smoking tailspin...?”  Susan: “Not really, no.”

​Their relationship is dealt with in the next book.  But imma sneak another favourite bit in here- Kala'amātya's return to Helaine's house after his first mercenary foray since their entanglement.  Gross and tender, just like the real thing.

Enjoy the book, enjoy your week.  Transmission resumes monday.

credit: me + pocket Canon.

The meal to the left there might look like something that was struck by an improvised explosive device, and it is fair to say it's not exactly photogenic.  But it's like sex in that respect; you can kill the hotness by trying to make it look good and commercial porn is proof of that particular pudding.  We make this dish once a week and I can honestly report that this is possibly the most spectacularly ugly version I can remember, I think because we skimped on the eggs this time round.  Never mind.  

I call this Half-Basque Eggs in honour of a friend (the semi-Iberian/Euskal element) who returned from a trip to his maternally ancestral Navarre mumbling fervently about... this local traditional thing, with um eggs, and all this other good shit that was fucking delicious... without being able to specify much else because hrmmmph no cook just eat: manbrain.  He was trapped in the memory of that goodness and could not articulate its particulars.

​Luckily I knew that good shit in this instance meant fried/roasted/protein; I have incorporated those and the rest is highly expedient experimental appropriation resulting in this cobbled-together inauthentic rendition of something I have never really experienced in its true form.  But don't let that put you off.  It is fucking delicious.

The really great thing about this Basque Eggs is its endlessly accommodating nature.  All you need are 5-6 eggs and whatever you've got lying around.  It can be fancy and full of expensive impressiveness i.e. exotic mushrooms and awesome charcuterie, and you could cook it in those egg ring things to attain discrete, presentable portions.  It can also be a dumping ground for 3-day old leftovers you wouldn't eat any other way.  Today we are taking the middle Way.

Another attraction of egg things like these are their omnichoronological appropriateness.  Any given sliver of the day or night is Half-Basque Eggs time.  The meat-free version, especially with roasted vegetables, is perfectly satisfying and delicious.  It can be as unprocessed, Paleo and low carb as you like.  All that and it reheats without prejudice when you make too much.

Swan study
by artsinmyheart.tumblr.com

Final week of the book serialization.  A great mass of strangers reading your work all the way through after it was such a long time in production feels really fucking weird.  In a good way.  It's something I couldn't have hoped for if I’d attempted the commercial publishing route.  That shit would have ended in an office siege while I dangled a subeditor (they tend to weigh less) out of a window by their fucking sweaty Birkenstocks demanding the reinstatement of my mandatory twenty-five obscenities per page quota/weekly pineapple delivery.  We are in scant need of such ugliness *adjusts monocle*.

While its readership has gone far beyond my personal expectation, it’s not like anyone’s paying for the book, in case you were wondering. But then that seems to be the way of things for those of us who won't buy a thousand copies of our own shit in the hope of getting noticed by the Book Club-Kindleherd.  I don't have the money or the fuckery-tolerance to undertake such... undertakings. 

Thus the eternal issue of equitable recompense for artists on the internet remains.  For whatever reason.  I think everyone just thinks that everyone else is paying, so it doesn't matter if they don't, which is how Wikipedia ends up being dependent on a ridiculously stingy 1% of users for its donation lifeblood.  Like Wiki, I don't do advertising (any pop ups you're seeing are superimposed by Weebly or Google- they may be profiting from my work, but I don't see a cent) and would like enough people to buy the book to support the cost of this site, because that is an ethical, mutually beneficial exchange of resources.  So if you're one of the several thousand peeps regularly reading TBO, please consider buying it.  It's a Fair Trade issue.

Perhaps it’s difficult to convince a lot of people that creative endeavour is not a privilege in itself.  At the top of this raving I used the word production instead of gestation, because that latter implies the sort of providential, autonomic development that trivialises the active effort required by most creative processes.  Writing a long-arse book is not a  soft-focus bullshit whimsical thing with inspirational cupcakes and placid docent fairies shitting artisanal chapters into your lap, even after direct manual stimulation; it is years of fucking hard, boring graft, as anyone who’s ever seriously applied themselves to it will know.  If you imagine a society without artistic expression, its value becomes obvious.

I know I'm probably preaching to a broke-arse, no shit Sherlock choir.  A lot of you aren’t getting paid either.  You’re probably counting the hours til your next cheque/grant/sale just like we are.  Which is why The Blackthorn Orphans is a cheap thrill with the emphasis on cheap.  If you’ve enjoyed it but that $3.99 is your food budget for the rest of the week (and we've all been there), go in peace.  But if you’re reading this on your glittering new iPhone while someone else is doing your nails, it’s time to hit the button, you fancy bitch.

Most of the very few writers I admire either made little to nothing from their work or died in a flophouse after burning through whatever their agent forgot to defraud them of.  It seems to me that, as a writer, you can cheat yourself for profit and spend your life shovelling Guardian-styles mature clickbait or tweenmance or GoneGirlistic halfshite, promising yourself you're going to write what you really mean when you've paid off that second car.  Or you can stay obscure and penniless in return for writing exactly as the dreams and conscious muse would have it.  Clarke Ashton Smith dug ditches and picked fruit so he could publish whatever the fuck he liked and the results will always speak for themselves.  Replete with hefty systemic imperfections and gritty organic jank it may be, but after reading once more through my own work I am reminded- all economical considerations aside- that the shapes you carve with the knife you make from your own bones are precious beyond pearls.

Thank you, internet, for allowing me to rub them in other peoples’ faces.  Don’t beg for mercy; it only encourages me.  

Hemnesberget, Nordland, Norway - by Tommy Eliassen


See the rest of this incredible gallery H E R E

Shaw demanded the instrument from him and examined the reading himself.

Their mirrors rose again like the stalk eyes of an insect.  The glass found a figure seated midway on the steps.  It was so much smaller than Josephine's expectation that her eyes at first dismissed it as some disfeature of the shade, until it lifted a face that had taken a bright icy blue from the sheltering umbra, floating almost in isolation over a coat of engulfing fur.  She threw down her mirror and tore a lanyard from inside her shirt, stuffing pendant yellow buds into her ears.    

Susan hoisted herself up to the edge of the stone where she caught a glimpse of the figure on the steps.  The vampyre seemed like something that might be blinked away, the distant sun dismissing her beauty like a vapour and casting her as ruined as the battered leavings of her feasts.  As she was dragged back onto the crumbling ground a voice began to flow across the clearing and roll down onto their heads like a spill of cool, heavy gas.  She watched the men stab soft buds deep into their ears and sit knotted up while Petrouchka's voice welled all around them, seeping through the cracks in the rock and soaking through the fibre plugging the passages into their heads.  Despite their cold-sweating terror it began to stroke and coax their bones and muscle, twisting them as though between two fists and sucking them, one by one, onto their knees, and then onto their deadened feet.  The voice pulsed with all the flushing speed of blood along their neural traceries until its invitation became the only course of action.  Indemnified by the scars upon her neck, Susan could hear nothing of its lure and watched Josephine shout futile commands while Shaw's hand clutched her tightly against the sucking draw that he himself resisted only with his hold on her.

One by one, the conscripts heaved themselves up over the ledge like pinnipeds striving onto a shelved beach, boots battling the wet stone, eyes bulging in their hollows.  The vampyre awaited them, seated in the heart of her smiling insistence while they pounded across the narrow clearing toward her.  She rose to meet them with a handgun; it blew sputtering holes into the foremost's chest and face until he fell against the steps, still reaching for her.  The second stumbled over him and threw himself at the same cursory fate, staggering along the wall and rolling slowly while the third swallowed her last rounds and crashed into her, crushing her small frame against the stone and wrapping around her in a sightless rapture.  Susan watched Petrouchka climb the tall man swiftly and grasp his head in her little hands, tearing at his red-flushed face and disgorging gouts of blood that doused his inarticulate cries.  He staggered backward from the steps and toppled down into the smothered daylight.

She fell with him, and the sun struck her through the cloud.  The blackness coiling in the heart of her remaining cells burst in gentian flame that garbed her tightly, leaping skyward from the crown of her head; the man's pale hair caught, his face scorched quickly to a mask of soot and yawning blisters while his clothing melted and she savaged the new shapes of his torn face.  They sank together onto his side where she let go, rising while he lay kicking, the fire eating his skin and turning his eyes a blank matte white.  Blood boiled over her chin and streamed from her gaze in two dark fingers, the stench from her flickering fur redoubling as she threw it off beside the burning man.  

The last of her supplicants crawled on the stone between her and his lost redoubt, faltering in his desperate need to satisfy the summons she could no longer sustain.  She sank to her knees in the hissing immolation, its flames breathing flesh and air and parting the snow as it began to drift around the ruin.  A black stain spread beneath her palms, hands curling inward as her form grew indistinct and lapsed into the shallow pool beneath her until it was no longer possible to discern what fueled the blaze.  It sank from the height of a woman's shoulder to that of an infant's sleeping form, and then to nothing, leaving only a darkness upon the rock like the shadow of a bird between the earth and bright midday.  

Shaw's mirror showed him the remaining conscript emerging from his suicidal transport.  Scrabbling to his feet, the man stared up at the over-looming parapet as though waiting for it to pronounce a deferred doom.  The wind flapped his clothes against his body and snow blurred him momentarily; when nothing more occurred, he murmured and began to brush himself off with mindless hands that fell once more to slack disuse while Susan searched the empty castellations on her own account, closing her eyes and dropping back onto her knees.

​Still in a crouch of his own, Shaw began to struggle out of the ephemera that was strapped to him.  Josephine snatched up the tracking device he had cut loose and threw it back at him, striking his shoulder.

"You won't get clear... " she promised, watching him upend his pack and gather what he needed.  "She'll spill everything when they get her in the chair..."  

"This place is fucking empty, she doesn't know shit and you..."  Breaking off, he lunged forward after Susan's hands, too late to stop their lashing strike.  She punched the split length of silvered pine butted in her fists into Josephine's thigh, committing her entire weight to the assault; driven deeply, the dry wood pierced her skin, skidding then stubbed blunt between the knot of bones and sheaths inside her knee.  The woman retched out a rasping cry, clutching the leg as the shard shifted in the flesh contracting round it and Susan launched herself at her, clubbing furiously at her face with both bound hands.  They slid together down the wet slope; Shaw shouted after them, but as he struggled to his feet it was the sucking crack of a bullet loosed from the ruin that stilled the women struggling below.

His head snapped forward on his neck and opened, expelling wet red and thick sodden pink through the outward dissolution of his features.  The hot matter struck the side of Susan's face; his body listed, dropping to and falling forward from its knees.  On the ledge the remaining conscript caught a second round and toppled before the sound of the first had died away.  Susan kicked back from the woman underneath her, fingers sliding on a small stretch of half-buried black, a pistol jogged from its holster and stamped into the thin snow.  Snatching it up, she planted her boots against the woman's hip and aimed the weapon at her face.

Her shot threw the pistol backward in her hands.  A knocking report swept down the hillside as a booming seashore echo, leaving a dark puncture in the snow by Josephine's left ear, but before she could amend her aim, a grasp closed on her jersey and hauled her sideways; keeping his hold on her, Sachiin swung his rifle from his shoulder and struck the stranger senseless with its stock.  

The soft sound of his voice puzzled Susan, seeming new to her while behind them his brother cast fresh snow over the ledge in dropping from it, holding his rifle clear.  The chain still bound her to the nameless woman and she exclaimed in sudden and visceral repugnance, casting up screeds of dirty snow as she pounded her boot against the latters' arm and ribcage until Sachiin cut the black cuffs from her wrists.  With her freed, he sat down on the slope as though his legs had failed him, finding the hand that hung by her side with his own and breathing a prayer of thanks, his eyes still wide and holding a ghost of their commonplace shade.  Shaw's stricken body shifted weakly in a slow, petering contraction, closing on itself with a series of little shudders, like a child wracked by the distant passage of a dream.

Susan cleared her throat and slid her hand from his to push back her loosened braids.  The snow wandered against her face.

"I thought you'd gone." she murmured.  She drew her sleeve down over her wrist and used it to wipe the thick pink spatter from her mouth.

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


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