Thought you might like to see them since they are so beautiful.
We picked three kg of gooseberries and got a shittonne of jam from that, then R decided to go crazy and pick the other currants, which we usually leave for the birds because laziness. The hot month before xmas has turned them into something worth bothering about so we rounded up every remaining Ribes for committal to jars. Thought you might like to see them since they are so beautiful. Hope you're having a break. We know not everyone is so lucky, but try to take some time to fucking relax over the new year. This is the lovely native Rata (Metrosideros umbellata) in the front yard of our section next door. It is flowering profusely for the first time, being only about 2m tall and previously shaded by the enormous thuggish Ngaio tree that overhangs the house. Rata are the finest Metrosideros, being more graceful as a whole and in their parts than its skankier, more obvious cousin, the Pohutukawa. Myrtle Rust, a pathogen deadly to this family, has arrived in NZ and threatens to wipe out some of the rarer members, which is fucking horrible. Hopefully the temps this far south will keep it at bay. I stood barefoot on a hunk of dry blackberry thorns to get this shot. You're welcome. For me personally, 2017 has been pretty fucking horrible and I know that's something many of you will empathise with. It's also the year I decided, once and for all, that Homo sapiens can fuck all the way off over twenty Ks of rusty nails. For real. I'm mid-forties now and have seen enough, quite frankly. People do definitively suck, that hasn't changed over my lifetime and I don't think it ever will in any fundamental sense. So- what can we do to at least feel like we're not an integral part of the worst thing to ever happen to this planet? We're devoting our resources exclusively to supporting environmental and (other)animal charities from now on. Which is a relief, actually. Whatever you're doing to reorganise your priorities next year, good luck. Thanks for sticking with the blog and we hope you're still enjoying it. We're intending to continue as long as the loss of net neutrality doesn't make it completely pointless. On a positive note, Felix is still happy and healthy. Our guest house is finally lurching into something resembling reality and the garden has really come together, so all that's something to look forward to. 2018 better smarten the fuck up. Cheers queers, K, R & Foofie. R was trimming the weedy vines coming through the ivy in the front yard, and an hour or so later noticed this fucking monstrous stick insect hanging from one of my tree aloes. Stick insect doesn't really cut it- it's more of a log beast. It's the biggest one we've seen and after consulting the literature, about as big as these things actually get. They are utterly harmless, but life in the tropics has left me with a lasting reluctance to tangle with anything larger than my hand possessing more than four legs. It's a lady Argosarchus, because the males are far less impressive and, in some populations, entirely absent; parthenogenesis renders them obsolete. Lady Argosarchus have it sorted- if a male tried any shit with this big bitch, she'd just stamp him into a paste and go back to munching leaves. Sounds awesome, doesn't it? The detail and accuracy of their mimicry is astonishing. This is just one of the rewards of going spray-free, so please consider it in your own horticultural practise. We returned her to the remaining vines, and found another species wandering the yard a wee while later, so perhaps we should all be a bit more circumspect when we're hacking away at something. ![]() Two hours after nightfall, Susan called a halt to their progress along the game tracks that followed the spine of the ridge, the baffling darkness reducing her pace to a crawl amid the rocks and rain-worn hollows despite William’s guidance. Blood dried black between her shins and the fabric of her jeans; when she sat down on a stone he was relieved she had conceded where his own objections could not prevail. “This alright?” she murmured as he set their gear down, refusing the chocolate that he slid from his pocket. “God no, I can’t face anything.” “If you don’t eat and drink you’ll feel like hell tomorrow, and if you think Ed’s going to stop to rub the cramps out of your legs every two clicks, I have bad news.” he replied. “Eat it. Eat it... eat, you little baggage.” She turned her smirk from the foil he pressed to the corner of her mouth, relenting and biting small pieces from the block. The prevailing wind had blown thick drifts of dead leaves and needles into the aeolian curves of the stone underfoot; he kicked a mound of them into one of the sculpted shelters and Susan drew the sleeping bag up over her legs and dropped onto his lap, sliding her hands down into the quilted cover while she leant into the curve of his arm. She looked out for the first time from their hard-won elevation; the valley below lay as a dim, distant impression, a deepening of the darkness to her weary gaze, its bounding hills at one with the trees standing about them, their black shapes masking the hushed violet and blue of the stars thrown over their heads by the turn of the earth. “One day and I’m shattered. I've got to give up smoking.” “You’re not tapped out, you’re just uncomfortable.” he replied. Her weary dubiety prompted him to elaborate. “When you’re at the last water before the Taklimakan, you have to be able to look over two hundred people and three hundred pack animals and know who's tapped out. If you can’t, you get to explain to Kala'amātya why half the slaves he paid good fucking money for are feeding crows instead of tricking out his bottom line.” He lit two cigarettes and handed her one. The orange flame atop his lighter illumed a low recess beside them, waist high and hollowed into the rock as though by the tireless working of some animal. Susan bent down to peer into its depths, which had been scoured for a surprising distance into the the cliff; something gleamed against the low curvature of its furthest wall and she frowned, leaning on her hands to make it out. It was an Orthodox crucifix, crudely fashioned in silver or plate, the colour flashing fitfully through the tarnish where it had been affixed to the rock. “A cross, in a hole, in the middle of nowhere.” "Atáthik... for vampyres, when they’re caught out on the road.” he said quietly. “Church used to bless them, hoping it would keep the bloodsuckers out, but Jesus isn’t their guy.” “I cannot think where they come from.” Susan admitted, watching him ponder the query while he flipped the lighter through his fingers. “It’s like trying to find out who started herpes. If you’re in Ulan Bator, vampyres come from Shanghai... Paris, and it was those Italian bastards. It’s the oldest bargain, to be ridden by something that needs flesh... to strike that kind of deal and get the shit end of the stick. It could have happened anywhere." "It felt so disgusting, to be bitten. Sort of..." She felt his arms and legs tighten beneath her and smiled to herself faintly. "There’s nothing strange about it in a spooky way... it's just... not being able to stop it, I think. That's the worst part... that and the teeth." Susan curtailed the account in deference to his empathic discomfort, glancing up at him. "When did you first see one?” He shrugged. “Not for a long time. There’s nothing for them in the mountains... they're city slickers. Kala'amātya was set up in town a long time before I was... he had a place in Samarkand, when it was still Paršvãb, which is a fuck of a long time ago. He was dealing with vampyres before I even knew how to eat off a plate.” Like the dust that blew in from the neighbouring wastes, the presence of a significant stranger in the most affluent quarter of Paršvãb was a taste in the mouth of the vampyre, a colour other than those of parched summer stone and cracked mud. That the house beyond the gate across the empty way was the town's most luxurious private residence was universally acknowledged; that a foreigner had purchased it was also widely bruited, given the train of slaves and beasts and retainers that had filed in through the north gates like an oasis town afoot. So populous and laden had it been that some thought it a harbinger of catastrophe and taken fright. There was no sign of this mighty entourage as the vampyre brushed the dust of diurnal repose from his best robe, heavy velvet arbr stained with jade and pomegranate dyes. Splendid though it was, the garment, like his fortunes, had suffered the indignities of the grave, the creature exhorting himself with his old assurance before striding on across the road, passing between the untended gate posts, each thicker than four men stood back to back, their pargeting deeply carved with lion masks. He found a walled garden planted with arching apricots and roses, beneath which lay benches of skin-smooth marble, their pallor undimmed by the hour. A red horse, bell stilled by its suspicious stance, regarded the intruder from beneath one of the fruit trees while their carefully-tended branches were barked by a pair of desert goats. The vampyre frowned and entered the house, blown sand grating underfoot upon the turquoise tiles. Grandeur surpassing his most hopeful estimation awaited in the first hall. He smiled at the frescos executed by Hellenic and Egyptian artists, their staring nymphs and rigid bestiaries forming the last word in taste and luxury. The great anteroom lay bare of furnishing but this did not perturb him as much as the flickering of a naked flame, reflected dimly down a passage lined with gleaming green stone. It opened to the star-littered sky beyond the pillars of a peristyle; they were coloured drowsy gold and roseate by a small fire, as might have warmed a desert camp, two figures seated at the blaze. Beside an empty water skin sat a male figure dressed in sombre homespun, black hair tied in a tail, contrasting both his austere features and his wide-set stare. In antithesis, a smoke-skinned crone in a chapan of thick blue felt sat on the far side of the hearth, her white hair knotted in a high wisp. The pendant sleeves of her coat almost concealed the wrinkled stump of her right wrist. The vampyre could discern her origin amongst the clans of the eastern steppe but it was by her great age, tattooed chin and infamous manual deficit that he recognized her personally. She seemed no less appraised, clucking harshly as she lifted a branch from the flames and waved it in the intruder's direction with a scowl that bared her blackened teeth. She railed at length to her companion before dashing her glowing wand back into the fire. With that, the sagacious crone returned to stripping dried meat from a length of antelope bone, gumming it with one slitted eye still on the vampyre. “I am come to meet the master of this house. Where might he be?” the visitor inquired loudly, using the few words of bandit dialect he had acquired. The pair tried his patience further with their silence until he prepared another botched address. “I speak the Sogdian tongue.” the male figure muttered, demonstrably. “Then permit me to remind you that this house is the foremost in Paršvãb, and you are boiling soup bones on its floor like karavansarai rats.” His execration seemed to puzzle them, and the vampyre drew on the dignity he had worn in life as a well-born son of the city. “I am Arimnat, of Paršvãb, its oldest citizen and most learned advisor...” “I am Kala'amātya, of nowhere, and this woman is I’Tiang-na, of...” Kala'amātya glanced at the crone’s interruption, and amended his remarks. “I’Tiang-na, lately of Paršvãb.” Arimnat's distaste revealed his knowledge of the ancient reaver’s reputation, lapsing somewhat with the passing of her ruthless crew of feminine fugitives, which she had survived in defiance of those dispatched to subdue her inveterate rapine. “Another, lately of Paršvãb, is the great man who has brought, to the edification of this fine city, his entire household to dwell with us, having made purchase of this very house... if you are among his retainers, be good enough to tell him that Arimnat has come to make offer of himself for the position of Master of the Gate.” The nomad pair entered into conference halfway through his declaration, Kala'amātya standing suddenly and advancing on the visitant, seizing his arm and stripping off his mantle in the first act of a thorough and determined physical exam. With his hands he satisfied himself of the creature's inelastic skin, of the sluggish plasticity of his flesh, grasping his head and peeling back his lips to view the remaining teeth and sniffing at them unwillingly. Content with his conclusions, he walked back to the fire, speaking over his shoulder. “It was I who took this house for I’Tiang-na, who could not contract for it on account of her sex. She will die before the end of winter, and it is a small thing for me to aid her in this. She says that you are a revenant abomination, and I myself can see that you are no living thing. What business can we have with one another?” “Well said by the worst of all the Tiger Women. You have killed more men between you than I could ever hope.” Arimnat assured them, the pitch of the response conforming to the trajectory of his pique. “Perhaps, but I am not a man, and do not prey upon my own kind, and as a woman, I’Tiang-na has far more cause than you.” “It was you, who came with as many slaves as a town could feed?” “I came thus, but I have sold them. There is nowhere for them in this little place.” said Kala'amātya, glancing around at their confines. “This is the largest house in Paršvãb, and you might have procured all the stabling and barracks you needed if you had not robbed yourself of half their price in Kokand.” “You would have lost half your slaves in a week, with this devil’s help.” remarked the crone. “For once in her evil life, she is correct.” Arimnat announced. “The governor would have taken your finest women for himself, because you did not know he had come for his bribe, and that he must be paid in silver, and not the local gold, which is so poor as to be worthless outside the desert... I could have argued down his price for you. If you had sold your train in Merv, your black camels and your Khotan girls would have made twice what they did in Kokand, where they prefer the toothless brats from the Korezhem... all of which I might have arranged. And living here with my aid, you will know which of the cartmen relieves himself in the water he delivers, which oven girls steal dough, which whores are worth paying and which tax collectors are not, where to buy clothes fit for yourself and your house, so that you will not be laughed at as either savage or simpleton. You m…” Kala'amātya drew a hand across his forehead in a gesture of impatience. I'Tiang-na expressed a curse and heaved herself from the camel-hair mat, pausing to straighten up before shuffling off along the hall on her saddle-bowed legs. “Your price?” sighed Kala'amātya. The vampyre began a hedging preamble. “She has gone for her bow... speak frankly before she returns.” “For my service I require nothing but the dignity and protection of this house, from which the governor may not expel me merely for the habits of my nature.” “Nothing else?” "Perhaps a small libation, on festive days... nothing to trouble you. But, I must ask… how does a woman with only one hand wield a bow?” the vampyre inquired. Kala'amātya pushed a slide of embers back into the flames. “It is better seen than described.” he said. “I’Tiang-na retired his first vampyre concierge three weeks into the arrangement, and he’s had a strictly no domestic bloodsack policy ever since. I never met I’Tiang-na, and part of me is thankful for that, but I do owe her a toot, since ten solid years of nagging by an octogenarian Qing battle axe was the only thing that could have strong-armed Kala'amātya into property.” William admitted. "Bloodsucker mascots were a thing for a long time... it’s like having your own cat. Less trouble to feed one than put up with all the others.” “What is this place we’re going to?” she yawned. “A monastery... an er, ex-monastery” “All the way out here?” “Yeah, well... the further away from temptation, the holier you get.” “God it sounds boring.” “Ask Pet. She was their surioarã, little sister... whenever she ran out of money or things got too hairy on the outside, she’d come back and sit it out, eat their bedwetters, troublemakers, anything embarrassing dropped off at the door in the middle of the night…" "Ask Pet? This isn't her place, is it?" "Er... yeah." His whisper was uniquely insubstantial, shorn cleanly from the grounded, masculine elements of his voice and decaying swiftly. "She's not there now, though, is she?" He scratched at the side of his neck and murmured some half-comprehensible prevarication. “Oh god... as long as it’s not made of polyester, I’m past caring at this point." "Well... if you were hoping for heated towel rails, just be thankful there's nowhere to have a bath anyway." "Where's your brother?" she muttered, closing her eyes. “Sitting in the middle of fucking nowhere, realizing he should have gone after Frost instead of haterating all the way to eastern fucking Europe and hissing at daylight and whatnot.” “He's bad, isn't he?” "Uh huh. Beaucoup horreur.” "On a scale of one to ten?" William blew a rueful sigh. "Eight point five... no, nine. He's down to one language, looks like he has acid for blood... I wouldn't tell any blonde jokes or make too many sudden movements. I’ll say one thing for Frost... she knew how to keep a bad trick in a pretty fucking tidy endorphin haze, and that’s something you don’t miss till it’s gone." He gazed down into the slope below them. “He’s idrana á kata mehtra, Christabel, walking the black mile. Respect the cordon." She twisted, shaking out a stiffening leg. “If it comes down to it and you really are that tired, I ca…” “As long as I’m conscious I will never let you carry me anywhere for longer than sixty seconds. I mean it.” “That’s the most evil thing about Ed.” he observed. “He can freezer burn you, be a toxic premium bastard but it doesn’t matter... you still care what he thinks of you.” “I don’t care what he thinks of me.” "I care what he thinks, and he’s spent the last two thousand years alienating me like it’s a fucking olympic event.” Her annoyance slowly gave way to toleration of the concept, her breathing slowing into a steady, somnolent rhythm. “I can’t let you help me.” she murmured. “What if he sees that I can’t do this on my own?” Closing her eyes, she settled her weight and tucked her feet behind his own, too tired to insist on any amendment. CONTINUED NEXT WEEK © céili o'keefe do not reproduce * Read the Book onsite * Go directly to this Chapter *
I personally burn to crayfish red in about five minutes in this kind of UV, so Felix gets the best of it. R's not really a beach guy. He won't take his shoes off, which I find both pitiable and disturbing. Brilliant silver Mullet, like shards of lustre glass, surf the glossy little breakers about 5m from shore. The dunes manage to both erode and stubbornly persist, but no one knows for how much longer, realistically. They are clothed in spiky grass and feral flowers. Millions of snails gave their lives for this pointless tableau. The fine sand buffs the pastel crust from their outer whorls, revealing their flayed, roseate nacre. I could shoot them all day. This sort of stuff is xmas for us down here. Northern tourists seem to forget the season and slide back into summer sloth, which must be nice. Cooking a full roast on a day that might have fallen out of Satan's arsecrack, complete with fully-operational blowflies and beer bloat isn't my idea of festive. Lots of people just chuck formality and get pissed at the beach with some ham and salad. * Port Chalmers, New Zealand * Photoessays * Selected Ravings *On one of the new pieces I've scattered around the lower garden. This is our most prolific clematis as far as producing vegetable material is concerned. Warsaw Nike has morphed into a protean lateral monster despite the numerous unceremonious moves I've subjected it to. In fact, dragging its arse around the garden has seen it boil outward at the base to provide a shit tonne of splittable pieces; since these plants retail at around fifty fucking dollars, I'm not complaining. The new, thinned starts produce longer, more adventurous vines while the mother plant sits stubbornly at about 1.5m, generating root cuttings like it has nothing better to do. W Nike is a really beautiful, non-bouffant variety for the kind of nastily hot situations that would crisp the shit out of other dark flowers. I've never seen it suffer clematis wilt and that dreaded fuckery can be a problem here with our hot summers, funky soil and high humidity. This pic is pretty accurate on my monitor if you've been baffled by the mad-looking blown-out shots floating around the internet. The interior stripe is a deep cardinal red and the margins of the petals graduate to velvety red-violet. Overall, the impression is quite a bit more red than purple. I have a Clematis Etoile Violette on the same fence and that's a true deep purple; the contrast is quite marked. Very plush and luxe and no hint of frou. ![]() The cool gloom against her face was damp and clean and perfumed by both the brand new fabric of her tent and the spruce needles pressed flat beneath her sleeping bag. Her breathing sounded loudly in the close confines; Susan yawned and crawled through the narrow flap to stand on the gentle slope amid the trees, gazing down upon a deer trail barely wider than her hand. One of its creators had lain down and died in the hollow and left an elegant skull to the elements, its antlers pitched sideways, pearled tines half-buried in the clay, and she was more than pleased to share its pellucid grave in the bell-like silence. William had left no sign of himself nor indication of his intentions and she looked both ways along the curving track. The sun might have climbed over the horizon behind the modest stand of intervening mountains, but the sky lay dormant behind drifts of cloud. White feet descended from the branch overhead, their long toes venturing into her tangled hair, and she hunched and grimaced as they found the warm edges of her ears. A bar of Swiss chocolate wrapped in gilded paper fell from the tree and bounced at her feet. “If this was Gévaudan, that would be a full English, with chorizos and mushrooms and fried tomatoes and basil and relish, and amazing coffee. And croissants.” Susan remarked, turning to see him sitting on a narrow limb with his rifle beside him. "Aren't you going to say anything about sausages? Sausages in the morning?" The black hood of his sweatshirt framed his smile but he demurred. She sat on a thick mat of needles and bit a corner from the chocolate while he slid down to stand with his back to the sky; a pale volley of bleating fowl beat heavily out of the north and passed behind his look of dubious inquiry. “So... how much do you hate this already?” “I don’t hate it. It’s nice and quiet.” “So's Gévaudan.” “This is peaceful quiet. At Gideon's there were more looks and unexplained black eyes than on the bloody bus at four in the morning." She wrapped up the chocolate and threw it back to him. “Hide that or I'll eat it all. If I didn’t want to be here I wouldn’t have gotten on that vintage death bucket in the first place, but I've found out that I will travel for cock, alright? Now I even sound like you.” Susan walked with him to the tent and watched him let down its spidery framework. “I was wrong about that thing... it’s not like sleeping in a jiffy bag, it’s like sleeping between two picnic plates taped together.” “Sexy.” he laughed. “Claustrophobic.” she assured him, stooping to gather her sleeping bag. “And there’d better be water around here somewhere because I feel like... god, like a sweaty bumcrack.” A careful hour negotiating the side of the scarp brought them to the valley floor, home to the stony course of a quiescent stream, seasonal fluctuations marked in greenish algal dust upon its boulders. The sheltered aspect harboured summer’s moribund remains, holding enough heat to raise a sweat under her fisherman’s hat. Stands of giant, aromatic herbs spread their starry seed heads two feet over Susan’s own on fluted stems streaked with crimson and purple. The oily scent of aniseed arose from the monstrous plants like a spoken protest as she walked through them, the boulders rocking and cracking together under her boots. Dragonflies and ragged-looking moths, their wings like slubbed linen, fled the umbels swaying in her wake. William's shirt hung from her pack, its green cloth trailing him faithfully, collecting burs and thistledown while the polished brightness of his shoulders prompted her to again consider his body in the light that had coloured so much since her arrival. As he walked his fingers wandered through a private scale, the rhythm running from the smallest digit inward and taken up by the opposing thumb. The urge to seize his hands and push them under her clothing threatened to articulate itself, and she blew a hot breath, attempting to dispel the compulsion. He paused, turned back and pushed aside the herbage between them. “Smell.” he advised suddenly, and she did so, frowning. “Dirt, wet leaves... still water. Don't waste time looking for this if you're thirsty... you want something moving. It smells of stone and air, or ice... like clouds and broken rocks." Susan took off her hat, pressing it to her shiny forehead. "Hate to think what I smell like at the moment." He closed his eyes. “Girl... summer girl, rosemary leaves, new clothes, tent, salt, lavender... and rahat loukoum.” he decided, frowning slightly. “You’re sweating Turkish delight.” She bared her small teeth in a grin while a moth circled her face. “I ate a whole box in Frankfurt. I'm surprised you can smell anything over the five tonnes of garlic I downed in the last three weeks... that must be fantastic.” They began to walk on through the towering weeds. “I’ll take you however I can get you, avai’sahdi.” Susan clucked at the endearment, waving the breeze toward herself. “Think Lilian’s alright?" “I don't know, and there's nothing we can do if she isn't. I've lost count of the times I’ve tried to kick sense into someone who’s sat down and stuck their fingers in their ears... sai a' sai'inae ith'ya simayun... she is her own creature." The stream bed led them in a leisurely undulation, past the face of the forest stretching back over the tall ridge to the east, inset at intervals with secreted, umbrageous couloir that opened out like overgrown gates before walled gardens. Where the river had, at its spring peak, bitten a low curve into the hem of the hill, William turned and offered his hand to her, pointing out a rill spilling over the edge of the bank onto the stones. He pulled her up the grade alongside it. “That's a bit mad.” Susan observed, standing before a row of flat river cobbles that appeared to have been matched and leveled in the ground, their deliberate line washed over by the stream, though still alluding directly to the cleft-like valley from which it issued. He devoted a moment to the strange construct, his gaze rising from the antique path to consider the oaks beyond, before glancing down at the plain silver ring on her hand, unshouldering her pack and carrying it toward the trees. A flash of white was whispered to her by the chuckling water when she bent low beneath a sweep of fleur-de-lys leaves at the edge of the grove, dumping her tote and sinking to one knee in order to reach the strange foiled shape, the water breaking around her fingers. Their immersion was arrested by her companion's grasp; he lifted her hand slowly and retrieved the shining object himself. It proved a thin strip of beaten silver the size of her finger, pounded flat and still wearing the curving shapes struck by the mallet. He shook his head. “Don’t pick them up.” he confided to her surprise. “It could be taken the wrong way.” Her questing gaze followed the shaded stream and picked out more of the eccentric treasure in the water, banked in silver shoals around the stones and half-buried in the doe-brown silt. William ducked under the recumbent boughs that formed the skirts of a giant doyenne oak, its half-barked bole twisted down into a knotted, pachydermic mass under the vast weight of its canopy, roots arching from the mounds of bloomy moss like vast protean arms. It had sprouted immemorially from a fissure in the hillside, sharing this obscure nascence with the stream, the water sliding, glasslike, between its buttresses in making its way from the glade. The silver tokens gleamed untarnished on the lowest branches, some half-eaten by the swelling bark since their dedication, others having fallen, or been thrown, into the spring, where they lay undisturbed as though coalesced from the water’s own silky, argent qualities. Daylight filtered through the weary leaves; she closed her eyes against its random fulmination, too conscious of the volume of her voice beneath the branches to question him. He had sat down in the leaves and pushed an arm into her pack, producing a little bar of hotel soap and flipping it toward her. “I can’t.” Susan whispered. “I feel... like someone’s watching.” "We are." he sighed, lying down with an arm beneath his head. When she stood unmoving, he sighed again and rose, kicking off his trousers and walking past her into the waist-deep spring at the foot of the tree. She began to unlace her boots. “When do you think people stopped coming here?” “Can't tell... old ways die hard.” “Why silver?” "Trees don’t like gold.” She pulled her T-shirt over her head and gazed down at the pendant that lay almost forgotten around her neck, holding it up to him with a smile that he returned, laying his head on a stone at the edge of the pool and regarding her from under somnolent lids, eyes borrowing the colours of the fallen leaves beside him. "What would happen if we didn't have any silver?" "Something terrible." he replied. His attention slowed her hands on her underwear, the warm thoughts it confided conspiring with those that were already so insistent, the subtle, thaumaturgical persuasion recalling the earth against her back and his tireless flesh inside her own. "Has no one ever tried to burn you at the stake?” she chuckled, the pool swaying as he made room for her. She dropped into the water like a stone; its cold knocked the breath from her lungs, chasing her out, and she stood, clutching arms to her chest while it ran from her into the moss underfoot. His gaze stroked her like the back of a hand and she looked down over her shoulder at him, hair dripping as she lowered herself onto her hands and knees at the edge of the spring. She found the winter-blue flavour of the water in the cool depths of his mouth, leaning over the pool in an invitation that drew him from it, then throwing him onto the ground, smoothing her face over his skin in an avid and ravenous transport. On her back, the sinuous weight of his body devolved to her own and spread through her bones like sunlight soaking into stone. At first his ardour required nothing more from her than the perfect abandon of receipt, and she lay with her arms thrown to the ground in wordless, irradiant delight, while he spoke in the floating words of his own tongue and sucked pink circles to the damp skin of her neck and breasts. She closed an arm around him and pushed him onto his side, where he drew her thigh over himself, slowing in accordance with the indolent details of her kiss. She spoke in the small, rose-red space between them, her eyes closed. “Getting off the plane I thought... I’m in this strange place, with no money, nothing... but all I could think about was dragging you into the bushes and fucking you stupidly. I’m turning into a knickerless sex addict.” "Admitting you have a problem is the first step." She laughed, her hand sliding over his eyes so that he could not see where she employed the other; he consented in deference to her relict modesty, though all such reticence proved temporary and he moved to satisfy her whispered urging, turning onto his back and exclaiming at the slow roll of her hips. Their soft, cushioned width welcomed his hands and he rose with their slide from her waist to her breasts, their velvet skin scattered with tea-coloured freckles where the sun had strayed through the fabric of her summer dresses. She closed an arm around him, legs shuddering beneath her as she dropped into silent freefall, her breath as warm as afternoon upon his neck as her chin settled on his shoulder. He lay back with her amid the roots of the oak, her slow return immeasurably sweetened by the hand he stroked over her spine, sensation looping outward through her buried, glowing courses and circling inside her chest. When he moved again in her the pleasure had suffused and shifted deeper, like imbued opiates, his love of her flesh recounted on his face like an offering in kind. The tiny loaf of honeysuckle soap was such a rude intruder into the harmonies of scent and hue beneath the trees that Susan almost returned it to her pack, reluctant to apply its bland, industrialized smell to her skin. William caught her hand at the edge of the spring and sucked the ring from her finger, flipping it into the water on her behalf before climbing into his trousers. “Am I the only one who has to tip?” she complained, eyeing him suspiciously. “Because there’s something about this place that makes me feel as though you know the manager.” "I'm a hillbilly, not a treehumper." “Well, they’ve gotten their money’s worth.” While she spoke the youngest branches overhead began to move as though with a shift in the breeze, the disturbance expressed in the shimmer of their ornamenting silver. Looking up at them, she shook her head and began a cursory ablution while he backed out of the grove and studied the open sky. “How many girls in three weeks?" she called. "And don't say none.” “There’s not a Susan Christabel in Baku who can walk straight.” "Gideon said you were a crap liar." "Slut kryptonite, poupée. I couldn't pass it around now, even if I wanted to. How many times did you think about Heathrow?” “Never.” she laughed. "I told you, I've got cock on the brain. Aren't we supposed to be meeting your brother somewhere?" He grimaced and clapped his teeth together as he stepped back under the tree. “Alas, the er, booty call of the wild seems to have erm... taken precedence..." “How far uphill is this place, because at the moment I just want a cup of tea and a lie down.” “Christabel... you’re practically jailbait. Where’s your l'exubérance de la jeunesse?" She draped the length of her lime-green tramping towel over her head and lit the cigarette dangling from her lip as she scowled at him, squinting with one eye. “I have an old soul. It's dragging its arse on the ground." CONTINUED NEXT WEEK © céili o'keefe do not reproduce * Read the Book onsite * Go directly to this chapter * |
Independent Creativity
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