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The trees by the Great River had already lost most of their leaves by now, but Prince Sybll sat gazing at them from the bank as if they were still as laden as they had been at the beginning of Autumn. To her right stood her three elder brothers, filling skins with water for theirContinue reading “The Taunt of the Pale Wyrme”

It was there each day, that monster, each day and every night, an old thing that had felt the pitted hole in me and settled there, like rot in the hollow of a old tree. At once it had fed off my veins, drinking the fat and the liquor until I couldn’t stand upright withoutContinue reading “Stiltskin”

it was a bare and barren nobody,that afternoon, wet air and sodden earth the razed umber of a firebird’s huetrod in by wading footfalls, and the sunbored through the trees a red and dripping holelike a gunshot, bruising the sky yellowand the moist clouds, dragging their crumbling tails,drew words and features long-condemned to fadebefore theyContinue reading “That Afternoon”

my old clothes don’t fit anymore I try them on again, sometimes, to seeif they flatter me still- there are daysthat they do, jarring as a flowerin the dregs of a nuclear ruin, and days that they don’t- I feel like oil on a blackroad, all thin-film and refraction:this dress I hoard, another given awaymakingContinue reading “Old Clothes”

their threat was a tubeand a starch white bedas if I was some suffragettein a cell that I had chosen as if I was thin-fingered malicewith a scheme on the skinof my kneeswhen I shrieked in the mouthof the box they clapped shut but a rat can slipthrough a hole like a dimeand a TomContinue reading “Tubes”

Whenever you heard ‘Teepike’ on a Search and Rescue dispatch call you were in for a rough slog; that’s what we told the newbies on their first day, and as warden of my team a good decade into my career that opinion held strong. But nothing any of us saw out there beat the TeiganContinue reading “Old Kings”

my curse has always beento romanticise my lifewhen it didn’t deserve it that time we kissed in the rainI was an fleabite on your armthat you scratched when I turned away the Polaroid of us drinkingmulled wine in a cabinI looked at for a swollen momentthen threw out with the rest of it running shoelessContinue reading “Calcify”

we’re too alike, you and Inot by the filaments of a cellor by bone; your face is yoursand mine is paint and polymer before that I looked like my fatherso people said, a backhandwith a smile, although I was youfrom the brine of the afterbirthyour code pressed into the wrinklesof my brain like crisp ironingContinue reading “Next Of Kin”

The tired man sat with his back against the hard ridges of his daughter’s cradle, struggling to keep his eyes open. Within the crib the child moaned in her sleep, but did not wake. Mortem was glad. He didn’t like Ilsa to rise until the sun did, for fear of what she might see orContinue reading “Crib”

It was Friday night when Lois found the hole. It had opened up in the flowerbed, where the cats had been buried, one after the other, where the summer blooms had been brown and wilted and dying. They were all gone now, having fallen into the black pit without a trace. It was as wideContinue reading “Gone Were The Flowers”