the Blackthorn Orphans
  • B L O G
  • The Blackthorn Orphans: read it onsite
  • The Blackthorn Orphans TRANSLATIONS PAGE
  • Lovely R BLOG
  • PHOTOESSAYS
  • SELECTED RAVINGS: essays & opinion
  • RUBYHUE Lipstick Review
  • blackthorn ROSE REVIEW
  • KITCHEN BITCH: Recipes etc.
  • verse
  • Hostile Witness FILM REVIEW
  • ALOES & SUCCULENTS
  • Blackthorn Perfume Review
  • B I O
  • C O N T A C T

The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Gnosis 2

25/6/2016

 
Picture
A single tree presided over a hole set deep and darkly into the ground, the tortured pistacia leaning away and then back over the spring as though it could bear to neither stay nor leave.  Casting little shade, its branches spread like the splayed fingers of a court dancer in a rigid affront to a sky hung with faineant black vultures, their circling shapes pulled around the well that was the dead eye of their orbit.   

Nomads had built the little wall around the water and strung the branches with charms of shaggy red homespun in the knowledge of its dominion over their fate.  But Kala'amātya's memories of the place had been overtaken by the novel features of catastrophe, so that the votive offerings hung forlorn, like gallows fruit.  All around beyond a full day’s ride, a thousand dying animals had gouged the dusty sand where they had thrashed amid their fatal throes, the elegant limbs and necks of horses and great bearded camels frozen in grim arcs against the ground.  The bone-white sun had scorched the eldest into sunken, blackened things, nosed and shied from by their living kin on their way toward the spring, but further out into the dunes and seen by no one but the vulture, tethered goats lay transfigured into bloated, fly-blown parodies while their owners decayed in silence in their black tents, insects consigning eggs to their eyes and gaping mouths. 

Behind him he could hear the croak of the birds still standing amongst the brittle, wind swept tumuli of feathered corpses, tall white cranes and tawny eagles, their great wings hanging as though broken as they stood panting or began to stagger in flapping circles.  The stench of putrefaction boiled around him, its choking weight enough to have prostrated any creature less inured to it.  While his red horse brayed and pounded the ground in an affrighted dance he folded the cloth back from his face and put a hand into the icy water, drawing a palmful toward his mouth.  There was no bitter scent to warn him; only after he had spat it into the sand did the sly smack of poison flower in his mouth, the barbed, copper-green twist that sparked and faded.  The flash of sun-struck metal in the spring recalled him and he reached down to lift the object from the water.  It was pierced and hand-chased silver, its pendant elements chiming on a long pin that had once ornamented black hair thickly dressed with white clay.  Kala'amātya shook the water from the pin and tucked it deep into his tunic, unwinding the cloth from his head and using it to bind the weightless remains of a dead crane that he gathered from the dust, committing them to his saddle bag and turning his horse toward the mountains that stood witness to the calamity.

Though not yet wholly conscious, Lilian saw the line of sacred peaks flicker and fragment as physical sensation demanded precedence.  She looked up into a white ceiling; bringing her hands to her eyes she tried to dismiss the face transposed into flesh as Edward stood at the foot of the bed with a black case in one hand, stayed by her expression.  She rolled onto her side and pushed back her hair.

“You were dreaming.” he told her.

“I was fucking sleeping.  Had to chug a case of Halcion and then I get dead animals."  Her voice was dry and weary.  "Your fucking phone’s been off for four days.”  Lilian looked over her shoulder as he pushed his case into the tall black chest.  

“Work.” he told her finally.

​“Yeah... about that.”

Edward sat down in the sabre-legged carver and began to unlace his boots before leaning back to close his eyes for a moment, returning from the hazards of his journey to the rooms around him, in which she was a new and superlative luxury.  He braved her frown to watch her slide from the bed and walk into the bathroom and heard the slow roll of the drawer beneath the basin.  Lilian pinned up her hair and ran herself a glass of water to speed the passage of the amphetamines she hoped would dispel the heavy, tranquilised mantle rolling like a clutch of bearings in her skull.  He pulled his shirt and its smell of other people over his head.

“With all the spooky long haul and radio silence, I figure you’re either an ice mule, professional assassin or international über-whore.” she suggested, folding her arms as she leant on the doorframe.  “There’s two ways this can go.  You can deal me in... full disclosure... or I can bill you.  But you need to make up your fucking mind.”

He leant down and picked up a pile of document bags from the floor beside him.

“When did these come?” 
“I don’t know Lamb, they don’t fucking stop coming from your manager.”  Unzipping the garment bag that hung from the side of the chest, she shook her head and reached across to lift his wrist and consult his watch.  “Bitch Fed-Ex’s crap to the door every three hours.”  Lilian plucked a stray thread from the waist of her pencil skirt before stepping into it, the straps of her camisole spilling from her shoulders.  “She’s a fucking creepy predator.”
“Aren’t we all?” he murmured.
“We don’t all send dead-eyed throwbacks to tail people when they’re out trying to make a fucking living.”
“You’re being followed?”
“Either yes, or me and my drivers are having exactly the same paranoid delusion.  If it was all in my head the douchebags would be better looking.  So tell your manager to stop dogging me or I’ll do a three-way with Rachelle on her front lawn.”
“It’s not Orb’s people?”

She barely blinked at the sound of his name.

​“He didn’t have any guys.  This is Opal trying to run me off.”

The scent of her skin and the fleet glimpse of her back as it disappeared beneath her blouse drew him from the chair while she passed a thin patent belt around the waist of her jacket.  He followed her hands with his own and smoothed them down her skirt, pulling it up over her thighs and reaching between them.  Lilian lost the silver buckle and closed her eyes, until the temptation to abandon her obligations began to accrue too much momentum.

“Use your phone... send me pictures of them.” he told her.  His hand found the black stretch of lace under her breast and pushed beneath it as he walked her to the bed, where she halted and glanced back at him, the hot colours shifting in his gaze speaking so plainly of his intent that she almost failed to pull her blouse closed.  

“I have to work, motherfucker." she smiled, buttoning the silk.  "United Arab Emirates asshole.  He likes shoes, nail polish, karada.  Sits, eats dates, watches me tie up his bitches.  I know more about him than I do you.” Lilian sighed.  “Oh yeah... Susan had a thing on her arm.  Said she took a dive off her bike or something but I think she sprained it on your brother’s hard-on.  Did you tell him about Orb?"
"Has he said anything to you?"
"Nothing straight up, but he's not stupid."

Edward nodded slowly to himself.

"How long will you be?”
“Guess I'll be back around... three.”
“That’s five hours.” he observed as he sat down in the chair, making her step over his legs in her tight skirt on her way to the door and waiting for the smirk that she turned to him.
“Try four days alone with your own hand, asshole.”
“I just did.  So don’t make me come looking for you.”    

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

*   Read the Book onsite   *



Comments are closed.

    RSS Feed

    Picture

    Independent Creativity
    Hi-Fi Introversion

    ORIGINAL CONTENT
    HONEST REVIEWS
    VELVETEEN VERBIAGE
    VISUAL LUXURY
    MORBID IDLING
    THE NATURAL WORLD
     
    ​photography  
    film
    flora  fauna  culinary
    ethnography  objet
    ​

    modest living
    ​vintage shit

    A U T H O R
    Picture
    K ✂︎ l l y
    congenital delinquent
    Human Durian
    celebrating
    glorious deviation in the land of
     the long white cloud

    -  New Zealand  -


    - T h e   B o o k -

    Picture
    T H E  
    B L A C K T H O R N
    O R P H A N S


    What is freedom, when it is
    all that remains to you?
    In exile two brothers pursue an anarchist's trajectory,  from an old world into the new, from East to West, subject always to the pleasures & horrors of an enduring flesh, to the ironies of karma & impunity. Love bears thorns, the lost return & the dead are haunted by the living. 
    ​

    E P I C   D A R K   F I C T I O N
    *   R E A D   *
    T H E
    B L A C K T H O R N 
    O R P H A N S
     O N S I T E  

    H e r e



    Picture

    Selected
    ​Ravings

    opinion essays observation private regret public 
    exaltation semicoherent speculation 

    Picture

    Photoessay​

    epic undertakings
    documented

    ​
    Picture

    Hostile Witness FilmReview

    Cruel but fair

    Picture

    RubyHue 
    ​
    Lipstick Review

    Lipstick: love it
    ​

    Picture

    Our Photography​

    we've seen worse
    ​

    Picture

    Port Chalmers​

    Dunedin, New Zealand
    ​

    Picture

    Blackthorn ​
    ​Rose Review

    Garden Hoe Wisdom
    Picture

    Verse​

    Loss, love, truth, beauty everything, everything
    ​
    Picture

    The  Lovely R's Blog​

    Likes photography  Knows a bit about it

    Picture

    We Liked This​

    Amazing things from other people
    ​

    Picture

    Cacti, Aloes
    ​&
     
    Flora​

    Our garden & general vegetal splendours
    ​

    Picture

    KitchenBitch

    Home cooking
    & raw ingredients
    ​
    Picture

    Ethnographic​

    Strange wonderful things from elsewhere
    ​

    Picture

    Jewellery
    ​

    Picture

    Tiny Little 
    Dinosaurs
    - a book for children -


    All images & text property of the authors 
    ​
    unless stated

    © us
    & original sources
    All Rights Reserved



    Picture

    Privacy Policy
    ​This is a noncommercial site.
    No ads. No shady data jacks. 
    No interest in your bizniz.

    ​We don't personally view, utilise or sell your data, apart from occasionally checking totally anonymous + super basic site view stats. We don't even know how to monetise that stuff, so don't worry.  Everyone's privacy is important to us.

    Our platform is probably harvesting your data, though, via their cookies. Look at their privacy page so you can see what they're up to.

    Please use Adblock or something similar.
    ​
    Google et al superimpose ads that we never see a penny from so fuck them.

    Picture

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013


    Picture

    Categories

    All
    A Thing Of Beauty
    Blackthorn Orphans
    Blackthorn Rose Review
    Cacti & Aloes
    Ethnographica
    Flora
    Hostile Witness Film Reviews
    Jewellery
    Kitchen Bitch
    Make Up Review
    Maximum Respect
    Perfume Reviews
    Photo Du Jour
    Photo Essay
    Places & Things: A Blackthorn Review
    Port Chalmers
    Remembering Dreams
    Roses
    Selected Ravings
    Softcore Rendition
    Sweetmeat
    Textiles
    The Lovely R
    Verse
    We Liked This

    Picture
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.