Fool Moon In a Scorpions wake, hound dogs and hedge hogs

Some long winded titles get your attention dont they? But read on it may just be a hook that has meaning and relevance.
First lines and images are like ghosts that haunt you, and fish that dont want catching, they just wont leave till you have them in your net,
but then they slip and slide all over the place, whipping their spines and tales, dissolving into labyrinthine castles and caves, till you have them safely corralled on the white sheet of paper.
Only then they dont quite conjur up what you hoped they would, something with an essence, a taste, an ache you cant quite explain is not there, or maybe the sentence doesnt take you anywhere you thought it would. But the best part is yet to come, you cock an ear to the echo, look out the maps and polish the compass, lean into the urge and stay with the process.

Trying to capture a salt water woman.
She is tall,strong, hair the colour of treacle..that whips around her face.
Her skin is lined by the wind
she holds the sea in her mind at all times.
It is an ever changing map to her. A blue  print of tides and waxing moons dissolving time, shaping and changing.
She wears second hand clothes usually mens, large bulky coats and faded jeans.
 and so it goes, she is there, clear as daylight begging me to tell her part of the story and I have no idea where she fits in all, or if she needs a story all of her own.
… SO..Well if the moon looks as good as she did last night, I might just go down to the rocks and holler, like a hound dog. She is in Scorpio for Beltane as well, so very potent for the pagan calender people oh and the faeries.
Been doing stuff and writing till late, tired enough to starting seeing things that arent there, but that is normal for me anyway. 
I could of sworn I saw a hedgehog last night scittering across the road at full pelt. I was mentally willing whatever it was to get there before the squash machine got her. But I think it was just a blob of seaweed being blown across the road like watery tumbleweed in the wind.

Happy moon.

FURNACE ROOM LULLABY
Neko Case (2000)

ALL NIGHT
ALL I HEAR
ALL I HEAR IS YOUR HEART
HOW COME? HOW COME?

I TWISTED YOU OVER AND UNDER TO TAKE YOU
THE COALS WENT SO WILD AS THEY SWALLOWED THE REST
I TWISTED YOU UNDER AND UNDER TO BREAK YOU
I JUST COULDN’T BREATHE WITH YOUR THRONE ON MY CHEST

ALL NIGHT
ALL I HEAR
ALL I HEAR IS YOUR HEART
HOW COME? HOW COME?
SO FAR UNDER THE BED INTO THE BEAMS YOU’VE GONE
I’VE GONE YOU’VE GONE

I’M WRAPPED IN THE DEPTHS OF THESE DEEDS THAT HAVE MADE ME
I CAN’T BRING THIS SOUND FROM MY HEAD THOUGH I TRY
I CAN’T SEEM TO FIND MY WAY UP FROM THE BASEMENT
A DEMON HOLDS MY PLACE ON EARTH ‘TILL I DIE

All the world is Green

 

And glorious..listening to Tom in between working..progress steady, mule like..climbing a winding path..

before editing 2000 words…not much , better than last week.

Collected tales of fey isle.

Prologue.
 Collected tales of fey isle. ( A work in progress) Grand Mother’s stories.
It is a well known fact that rats will leave a sinking ship. Their tails wormlike, slithering wet across the deck. They know by instinct to get out when the going is good.

I was told of a  storm that struck this Isle with such force that it is said  that it lashed the shores and changed its shape forever.  Waves that built their muscle and weight far out in the ocean, hit the shore with such a pounding that the Island seemed to creak and groan. The wind pushed and moaned at the wooden doors of the houses.

Branches scratched and clawed black fingers at windows.
Candles guttered, their flames sputtering in the wind sending out black puffs of smoke like distress signals as their small bright flames fought against the darkness.

Small children sharing a bed ,clung to each other beneath their quilts at the sound of the pounding wrath of the wind and rain; their faces lit up like small moons by the flashes of lightning.The waves worked hard, beaching great piles of seaweed and shingle, sculpting it into mountains of green sludge and stone. In the valleys lay giant bones of bleached driftwood, like dinosaur skeletons, scattered along the shoreline.

Then, the next morning , in the pale watery light when all was calm again, the shadows of the Islanders were seen, picking their way down to the sea. They searched the treasures of the deep, turning stones and scraping seaweed back from wood, examining the changes wrought by the storm. It was with this foraging along the shoreline in amongst the sludge and shingle that they found her.

She was curled around a stone, hugging it tightly to her chest. There was seaweed tangled through her hair and scattered everywhere around her were small delicate shells, looking for all the world like confetti strewn across her body.

Now it has been said that she was on board a ship that the Islanders themselves had tempted, brought to the rocks with great fires and wreckers greed. There were others who said the selchies  must have brought her, that the seal people took pity and pushed and nuzzled her to the shoreline.

Others said that she was of the blood of the seal folk but they had lost her in the great waves.

Of course there were dark mutterings that she was a witch and that she survived the sea, it left her, spewed her forth like some unfinished meal, unable to swallow her devilish skin. There were those folk who did not comment nor mutter; they just stared at her in a daze of wonder. They thought she was a gift from the sea, a miracle of salt and wind.

After the shock of finding the girl lying amongst the stones and the seaweed, the Islanders carried her body to the only person on the Island who knew any healing. The general opinion was that she was dead anyway, her body was cold to touch and her skin had no glow of blood pumping beneath it. She was lifted and  carried gently, by Calumn a local fisherman, who had claimed last year to have seen the selchie folk gathering on the rocks as he returned homewards at dusk.

He strode ahead of the little band of storm weary folk, the girls head lolling against his shoulder, her arms swinging loosely by his sides.
He watched her face closely as he carefully placed her on the wooden table and with great tenderness he asked if there was anything that could be done.

Strong hands took her from him, a voice told him to leave, but to come later with wood for the fire. He searched the gloom of the croft for the source of his instructions but could only see the dim outline of a small woman. As he left there looked once again at the girl where she lay, the miracle of the storm.