Tag: prose
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Entrained Rhythms
I: Aretha I’ve just moved to Uppsala, Sweden, where at first I knew no-one, apart from my old friend Kalle, who with characteristic kindness invited me to go see Amazing Grace with him as soon as I arrived. We packed into the smallest room of the Fyrisbiografen, a tiny cinema constructed in 1911 and now…
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![The Book of Feral Flora [extract]](https://thelearnedpig.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/0033-1.jpg)
The Book of Feral Flora [extract]
I planted a garden and removed the weeds because they were getting too tall and too abundant. Some were choking my other plants and some smelled of decaying spinach or mint. Then when summer came I noticed lichens (plants that eat light and nothing more) growing on the trunks of my fruit trees like tiny…
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The Look Away
Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away A sense of ominous foreboding pervades The Look Away, the debut novel from Richard Skelton, musician, poet, and co-founder, along with Autumn Richardson, of Corbel Stone…
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The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static
I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…
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Ishmael House
Ishmael House stands along a small stretch of gravel road leading up a hill away from our town. A two-storey granite brick sentry that appears, alongside an old and dying ash tree as no more than an accent stretching out onto desolate sky. The boundary, not that it is needed, is a fence that seems…
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The Old Weird Albion
Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…
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Green Boots
The water falls on her head, on her face, around her ears. She sits on the floor and it falls encasing her in the only shelter she has found in this house. She feels safe, she must be, no one can demand anything from her while she´s in the shower. Her back hurts. Her feet,…
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Coyote
All aboard, climb inside! Back of the van! Get back, Loretta! Only 1500 miles to the promised land! Farm jobs, construction, cleaning, meatpacking, don’t bleed when you’re cut or you go right back! Need papers? Housing? A lawyer? A clue? My cousin, he’ll hook you up. Fenrir. We grew up together. Wolf, coyote, closer than…
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Interview with a Wolf
Once upon a time, there was a magical fairy-tale world where marvellous and unbelievable events occurred and, as a general rule, everyone lived happily ever after, unless of course, you’re a wolf. In which case, these marvellous and unbelievable events were only marvellous in the sense of something to be wondered at, and unbelievable in…
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Were
We have been taught to believe that werewolves only change into their cursed form on full-moon nights, but perhaps – and this is speculation – on nights without full moons, the animal shape, which is the cursed form, still awakens within the werewolf, yet it cannot be seen, only sensed. Maybe werewolves spend any night…
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Kaiku
Kaiku peeked through the kitchen window. The scene was empty – the Shaman was out. Kaiku went to the kitchen cupboard. Behind the pots and pans her fingers found a key. With great care she opened the door. The action made her shiver with excitement. The heavy door opened slowly. The room bathed in sunlight….