​Frost settled on the Paint Horse Trailer Park and its environs, lacing sagging awnings and the flat roofs of immobile mobile homes at the death of twilight.  Dogs sheltered in shuffling huddles at the feet of faded tin walls while pregnant women chainsmoked in doorways, their sour, shiny faces limned by light thrown down from lamp posts.  Trent’s narrow trailer had been his home for the decade that had passed since his surrender of the marital house to his former wife and her store clerk boyfriend.  Its low structure was a powdery, flaking white without and paneled with bowed faux wood within; the sink was buried in dishes grown pungent with neglect, but a tall pile of khaki tottered on the olive velour bench beside the TV table, folded conscientiously.  The glare from the street outside invaded through small barred apertures like stripes of poisoned vapour.  A clicking fan unit circulated overheated air; Trent lay slumped before the television, a dying joint hanging from his parched lip, ash sifting onto his chequered shirt.  

The park was quiet save for sporadic canine yapping and the canned laughter accompanying the shifting glow of stolen cable programming.  The insects inhabiting the grass alongside the asphalt no longer sang, quieted by the premature cold.  To Trent, their silence was a deep relief, their shrilling recalling such kindred songs from distant lands as he did not care to remember.  Despite their abeyance he had drifted into sleep amid visions of purpuric equatorial sunsets, in which the heads of forest palms thrashed in the draft of a descending helicopter as he leant out over its skids, staring downward into rippling, lukewarm darkness.

The water he was dropped into rose waist-high, thick with coffee-hued silt and jungle leaves, hemmed by rafts of water hyacinth.  He lifted his rifle clear of the river and began to wade against the sluggish current, surrounded by the burps and growls of invisible amphibians.  His captain was dropped into point upstream; he waited for him to turn and beckon before falling in at the designated distance.  The monsoon had poured the river out over its banks into the forest beyond, creating a vast, serpentine marsh plumed with the twining dragon shapes of rattan, moonlight fractured on their drooping fronds.  Long after dark the heat lay febrile over the water, heavy with the ferrous stink of living mud and fermenting leaves and choked with mosquitoes, whining in both his ears and blundering into every orifice.  He shook them from his head and waded onward, ducking branches, marking the shaggy garland of foliage that decked his leader’s helmet.  

Trent ran screeds of aerial photography through his head, dismayed to find no convincing correlations in his viscid surrounds; cutting across an oxbow in his haste, he stepped into a sinkhole, the water rising suddenly past his chin.  The log spanning the channel offered no assistance, dead bark coming away in his hands like rotted flesh as he grasped it, seeking elusive purchase underfoot.

“Sounds like you’re giving it to a fucking buffalo back here.” his leader hissed, teeth gleaming in his darkly-greased face as he dragged Trent from the hollow.
“This’s bullshit... we got the wrong fuckin ditch.” the latter murmured, climbing up onto the spongy bank.  “Nothin round here makes sense... we bug out now and go back d...”
“The intel’s the size of your mom's dick... sustained activity, one click north.”
“Who gives a fuck if someone’s bagging up old gook shit out there?” 
“One click north, so find your balls and fall in, asshole.”

Allowing his leader to drift too far ahead seemed like a tiny, crippled victory while he shoved through a guard of olive bamboo.  Looking back, he glimpsed an ordered shape amid the undergrowth, lifting the canes to reveal a carved stone block stained black by the water.  The curling feet of some clawed, half-avian figure confirmed their entry into the decrepit temple precinct that had inspired the speculative deviation from their martial purpose; he shook his head again, spat on the toppled block and turned upstream.  

A lone night heron voiced its croaking discontent.  The loss of contact with his captain perturbed him until he discovered the latter’s garlanded silhouette poised on a fallen teak spanning the channel.  He paused, awaiting instruction, and was rewarded with a manual direction; a ripple curved around his waist as he complied, moving further out into the river, his captain beckoning him toward himself and directly into another unseen hole.  Trent gasped and thrust his rifle over his head as he went under, sleighed out into the depths by sucking, sloping mud.  Through flooded eyes he saw his companion as a black blur upon the teak, overlaid again by shifting clouds of insects, relinquishing his rifle and coughing out a half-drowned call for help.  Upon the distant tree the figure looked down into the water, inclining its head in a moment that slowed Trent’s struggle until only the sound of his own laboured breathing scored its fluid descent from the bole; it was eaten wholly by the river, garlanded helmet drifting slowly downstream toward him.

The river flattened out like silk, welling against his legs and torso while he wrenched his boots free and was swept under, only to rise again some distance from the immuring hole.  He gasped, shadows lying heavy in his eyes, the river shaping his clothes against his body.  His breath rattled in his chest as he rolled and stroked downstream, glancing over his shoulder; something brushed against his thigh and he cried out, whirling backward into the fallen log that had impeded him before.  Bracing against it, his feet finding the bottom, he stood wide-eyed while in the silence the mosquitoes settled, blanketing the open stretch before him.  The heron boomed again; he ran his hand down over his belt and service pistol but had not worked it free before his legs were seized and his head sucked down under the log.  

He passed out of consciousness briefly, the water closing over his face and his skull struck by a branch stub on the underside of the decaying tree.  The blow worked with the burning eternity of submersion to enfeeble him, so that he barely knew he had been dragged free of the river and thrown onto mud like a carp flung from a net.  He groaned, and was dealt a blow that left him senseless.

Water lapped at his boots when he stirred, finding himself lying beside his commander’s body in time to watch white hands grasping its collar.  They turned the blade of a hunting knife in a circumnavigation of its neck, a gesture of almost magical swiftness that robbed the corpse of its head and left it so diminished that it seemed smaller by half to Trent’s deranged perception.  The stump slopped blood into the silt, trimmed with a thin stripe of nape and wet hair.  Gleaming red, the curving blade returned, sliding low past Trent’s eyes while a creature slit the corpse's sleeveless khakis and stroked a hand down over them, fingers tuned to the shapes hidden in the sodden garments, glowing so coldly in the moonlight that Trent attributed their number to the damage he could feel at the back of his skull.  His head lolled as his own body was treated in the same manner, every utile item stripped and pitched into the river.  He lay waiting for the hands to find his collar, croaking as they did, gravity drawing bloodied bubbles from the corner of his mouth into his ear.  The knife bit into his neck so easily that he lay still even as the blade was halted on his stiff thews.  

He looked up at its face, at its slick black mane and the long, golden eyes that stared, not at him, but away to the south.  Dropping him to the mud, it rose, taller than seemed possible, like something stepped down from the stones of the forgotten temple, symmetry surviving the hallucinatory embellishments imposed by his panic and loathing.  Turned down river from the narrow bank, the creature stood as though it had been called from that direction.  Trent screwed his eyes closed against the sight of the black shapes on its back; they moved, and yet did not, writhing like flames in negative with the water in his eyes.  It gave a looping whistle that echoed across the river, then stepped back into the water, leaving the bodies where they had fallen.  Trent lay with his blood oozing in a warm pool about his shoulders for twenty minutes before a murky noise, becoming percussive, then a slash of blinding light that jumped the river restlessly aroused him, thudding downdraft sweeping the floating vegetation against the shore and whipping at the palms.  

The worst part of the dream, aside from its historical reality, was that it revolved instead of resolving in a cycle of unblinking renewal.  Sweat soaked the back of Trent’s shirt while he saw the dusk once more, and the heads of the tall palms thrashed wildly as he gazed down from the skids of a helicopter until his plunge into the river was derailed by the sharp sound of a fist upon a door.  With his dry tongue clicking against his mouth his hand came down on an attenuated shotgun, duct-taped to the wall beside his chair, and he rolled onto his feet.

Josephine glanced at the movement darkening the glass beside the trailer door and tipped back her trucker cap.  She wore a coverall, her hair tucked into its collar; Trent scowled, glanced over his shoulder and swore to himself before admitting her.

She stood back from the doorway once inside, allowing him to press it closed behind her, sealing off the sound of barking dogs and cussing drunks.  The dry stink of the trailer hit her hard but she put the blunt snout of her handgun to the back of his balding skull before he could read the silence.  The shots flashed white and dropped him onto a stripe of plastic carpet protector.  

Stepping over his trembling body, she held his lighter flame to the edge of the velour squab and turned the fan upon the hungry little ember, watching it eat busily into the foam.  His skin was softer than she had imagined as she felt for a pulse beside the crescent scar on the side of his neck, scraped by some blunt razor and smelling faintly of laundry soap.  His heart still throbbed chaotically; she stepped back and put another round between his shoulder blades.  

In the bitter darkness outside she jerked her weight against the door handle, testing the lock, and stooped to pitch the pistol beneath the trailer.


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

​
Polar Pas de Deux by Eilo Elvinger, Luxembourg. From her ship anchored off Svalbard, in Arctic Norway, Eilo spotted a polar bear and her two- year-old cub in the distance, slowly drawing closer. Nearing the ship, they were diverted to a patch of snow soaked in leakage from the vessel’s kitchen and began to lick it. “I was ashamed of our contribution to the immaculate landscape,” says Eilo, “and of how this influenced the bears’ behaviour.”

​

Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner 2017
​(Also Wildlife Photojournalist Award: Story category)
Memorial to a Species by Brent Stirton, South Africa.The killers were probably from a local community. Entering the Hluhluwe Imfolozi game reserve at night, they shot the black rhino bull using a silencer. Working fast, they hacked off the two horns and escaped. The horns would have been sold to a middleman and smuggled out of South Africa to China or Vietnam.

10 years and under category
The Grip of the Gulls by Ekaterina Bee, Italy. Like all her family, five-and-a-half-year-old Ekaterina is fascinated by nature. On a boat trip off the coast of central Norway, her focus was on the cloud of herring gulls. They were after food, and as soon as Ekaterina threw them bread, they surrounded her. She liked the expression of the bird furthest away: ‘It looked very curious, as if it was trying to understand what was happening on the boat.’

From the narrow, half-shuttered kitchen window, no insolent Persian whores obliged Susan’s effort to picture them beside the fountain, though she stood squinting over the sink with a forgotten cigarette between her lips.  Out in the yard the morning still belonged to the surrounding trees, lying supine in their branches and keeping the stony enclosure waiting in shade, the light from the window rolling softly on the black water of the reflecting pool.  The sounds of verbal contention echoed along the wall and grew louder with the approach of the contending; Étienne, disheveled in sagging grey cable-knit and battle-stained jeans, trailed Gideon, the former attempting to impress something upon the latter, who refused to entertain it.  In pondering Étienne’s tribulations Susan almost missed the bullet-like stroke of his mentor’s arm, Gideon landing a blow to the youth's mouth that knocked the sullen accusations from it, along with some of its more fundamental contents.  His victim staggered, found his knees with his hands and let the bloody fragments trickle onto the flags while Gideon delivered his dispassionate analysis.  They broke without another word, the elder dragging his shirt from his head as he walked toward the stables, the younger taking his misery to the car parked beside the yard.  A voice behind her addressed her unwitting proximity to the kettle still breathing steam on the range.

“That’s just boiled... don’t go burning yourself.” it advised.  Susan turned to see a stranger seated at the kitchen table, his hand around a coffee cup; she was seized by the narrow, glancing idea of his familiarity but her surprise and vague embarrassment overcame it.  Before she could think of anything to say, he rose and excused himself with a tip of his head, leaving through the door to the yard and walking to a battered, bright blue Morris waiting across the bridge.

Voyeurism chastened by the visitor, she waited a discreet while before venturing out herself.  The stones were cold through the soles of her slippers as she tied the robe of violet cashmere purveyed by her host and lit her cigarette, walking on toward the stables.  One of the half-doors shuddered at her approach and the faint glow of gas flame pushed through the gaps in the weathered panel.  She stooped beneath the divided door, blinking in the darkness of a space cleared of the partitions that had once delineated milking stalls and loose boxes.  On a wooden bench topped with a stained and broken slab of corpse-white marble, the great head of a stag sat squarely on its cleanly-severed plane beneath a mighty umber coronet of antlers, their weight propped against one of the stone piles that stood like the pillars of a neolithic temple.  The animal's brass-coloured eyes were downcast beneath their heavy lids in a look of modest resignation.  Blood had wicked slowly across the low end of the bench onto the straw beneath.  Like a Hadean chorus, a row of cervine forms hung before the furthest wall, curing in the darkness, the dry blue of their flayed flanks glowing softly in the gaslight.  

Gideon stood beside the body of the stag in a black butcher’s apron, the lamp hissing while the animal’s weight swung slowly from the ceiling truss; she sat down on a milking stool with an absented gaze.

“You had some sleep?” he asked, reaching up to release the deer’s skin from its hocks with a small, leaf-bladed knife, turning the carcass slowly.  Susan had become accustomed to the polarity of his commonplace inquiries, their simplicity creating a curious ease.  Slowly he began to punch the hide down over the musculature, catching it in slack, silky pleats upon his forearm and tugging it free of the attenuated neck before setting it aside. 

“Not really.” she replied, rubbing her eye and watching the curiously bloodless process in silence until he leant toward her, soliciting a draw on her cigarette, which she supplied, the smoke thickening their already misted breath.  The dark weave of his apron formed a sharp-edged contrast to the colours of his naked arms and shoulders.

“Forgive the contrétemps.  Étienne... his boyfriend fucks his sister an the whole world is in flames.  Je m'en fous, you know?  I am not eighteen." 
“Everything’s complicated when you are.” Susan reminded him.
“So it seem.”
“There was someone in the kitchen.  Brown hair... sounded Irish?”
“Lawrence... a friend.” Gideon related as he wheeled a clean barrow up to the neck of the suspended carcass, positioning it carefully.  He paused with his blade on the narrow belly and gave her a warning glance, to which she shrugged, thoughtlessly.  She was not prepared for the speed with which he exposed the gleaming paunch of grape and olive-hued organs, nor the deft intrusion of his arm into the cavity; it was swallowed to his shoulder before the entrails emerged and slithered down into the barrow, settling into a mass in which each shape remained discreet within their elastic cauls and membranes.  He cut the liver free and offered her a slice, the feted organ's fine black grain relaxing on the blade, from which she accepted it, watching him lick the back of his knuckles.  The taste shocked her, as dark and heavily metallic as a mouthful of her own blood, pushing her back off the stool as she ejected it onto the straw; it put a vampyre's gargoyle head on the neck of the body swaying from the ceiling and returned one of Siobhan's stinking candles to her hand.  Her host chuckled.

“I thought you are the girl who like new things.”  Gideon's smile conveyed the gently contumelious nature of the remark, though she did not reply.  He stripped off his apron and left it hanging from a rafter, dousing his hands in a bucket.  “Déjeuner?” 

His retinue had abandoned empty bottles and greasy dishes on the pine benches lining the kitchen.  Cursing them in absentia, he swept an armful of debris into a roasting tray and set off along the hall, returning in a fresh shirt without it while she stood in the light of the refrigerator door. 

“Motherless salops.  If Luc can’t learn manners, he should learn to lock his door.  What have they left for us, these merde oiseaux?  Half of a lemon an some bad milk?”  When his prediction proved substantively correct, Susan took a chair and reached for the box of cereal she had secreted in the highest row of cupboards, enraged to find it empty.  
“Bastards!” she exclaimed, dropping down beside the table in an attitude of dejection.  The lycanthrope sighed and began to slice a head of garlic on the bench beside the range, feeding a piece of chestnut into the firebox and setting a pan on the heat.  The smell of toasting fougasse drifted past her without visible effect; Gideon trimmed the liver neatly before addressing the spirit that oppressed her.  

“You don't know why you don't hear from him.” he suggested.  

She propped an elbow on the table.

"Three weeks is a long time to not hear from someone who can’t be quiet for three minutes.”
“It’s not personal, Sussan... don't take it that way.  If you don't know where he is, no one can learn it from you.  It’s okay... he does his best for you.”  He laughed, the sound coupling with the flash of the meat tossed in the pan.  “You don't think this is hard for him?  What would he love more than to know you cannot live without him?  Poor Sachiin.”  
“I don’t think it would kill him to make a bloody phone call.”

He exclaimed to himself, shaking his dark head vehemently at the peevish tenor of her complaint, the galvanic strength of his arm scraping the base of the pan across the hob.  

“Young people... you have everything, but you can’t clean a dish or wait a day, or take a bad thing like a man.  So fucking impatient.  In my own day, I wait six month to hear if my family had burn to death, and was pleased to at least have the truth, but now everyone they bitch an cry for nothing.  He don't call you?  Qu’est-ce que?  Et alors!  If you don't like it, take a little piece of plastic an fly to the far side of the world.  Endure nothing.  Putain... now I burn this.”  Smoke rose from the edges of the pan and he pulled it from the heat.  The folded documentation on the table before her included one stained by the foot of a coffee cup, and he nodded down at it.  "You know what that is?  That fils de pute in Praha, last year he buy the hahdri over the river, an now he bribe the mayor to cut the trees, to fuck with me.  One time you could walk from Lensk to Rouen in the shade... now, I will have twelve more Étienne with nowhere to go, crying at my door.  Don't worry, Auberjonois, they all say... you are geris alujh... chef de meute... no one will come for you.  But they will, I know, an where do I run?  Where can I take a hahdri and these baby alujha?  You want troubles, choux?  I will trade with you."

He shook his head to himself and threw wild thyme into the pan.  The sight of him muttering over the bench drew her to her feet, and she joined him, easing two plates beneath his elbow as he dished out.

“Everybody’s pissy today.” she suggested.  

“Don’t look like that... it’s not you, ça va?  You’re okay with me.”  He sat down at the table with her and rolled caramel onions onto the tines of his fork.  “Don't worry about Sachiin.  When he wants to leave, that’s not a secret he can keep.  With me it was like this... our aventure, three hundred eighty nine years... to say au revoir... nine long month in the same argument... bordel de merde... he could have given birth.”  He ate another mouthful and laughed to himself quietly, glancing back to her.  “Allez, Sussan... you know there is no cruel bone in him... he is too lazy.  You must pay him an command him to be cruel, if that’s what you want.  Why push a shit uphill?” 

“You know where he is, don’t you?”

“They are like ducks... if there is trouble, they go up.” he replied, flicking his thumb at the ceiling.  “They are on a mountain somewhere, spitting an calling each other names."  Her hair had set in a tall curve over the clip pressed to one side of her head by her pillow, its accidental shape amusing him, though she did not notice in her frowning intent on her plate.  “My god, I sound so old and grognon.  Crazy old loup, not so good in the morning.  Keep your eyes open for the good an for the beautiful, as I told you.  Fais moi confiance.  An you know, Sussan, there’s always a place for you here.”

Her fork grew still in the ensuing silence and her head rose slowly, eyes finding his and allowing them to direct her toward the white shape beside the cup abandoned by the stranger.  The sight of her name pencilled alongside Gideon’s in the midst of the envelope caused her to rise and seize it, both fists struggling with the thick bonded paper until booking confirmations and airplane tickets cartwheeled onto the table, a flat, cherry-red lollypop cowled in fluted plastic clattering amongst them.  In her delight she remembered the breakfast left cooling before her and set the tickets down, reclaiming her seat and devoting herself once more to the meal.

“It’s been sitting there all morning, hasn’t it?” she smiled.

“It come with Lawrence, on his way back to Praha.  So ah, yes.” he admitted, watching her slide the lollypop into the pocket of her robe.  

“How much longer were you going to let me go on?”

He picked a sprig of thyme from his gravy and set it aside.

“Pendant un petit moment.”

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

A dandelion cross section showing curved stigma with pollen, magnified 25x
​Dr. Robert Markus

​A natural bridge connecting the abdomen and thorax of an ant, magnified 5x
Can Tunçer

Eyes of a digger wasp, with condensation, magnified 20x
Laurie Knight