- The Infanta Triptych - in Red Skies Press' Their Dark Masters: Tales of Extreme Vampire Horror.
Out now:
Amazon.com. | New* Pre-order from Amazon.co.uk now!. - Spangles and Pustula Peculiar - both published in Pill Hill Press' Daily Bites of Flesh:
Out now:
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Femme * New
Helen grabbed my balls with forceps.
"Wanna know what it’s really like?"
I screamed. Cold steel wrapped around me, wrinkling the flesh between my legs. I could taste it as it pinched.
She yanked, hard. I squealed like a girl.
Helen’s eyes flared; exhilaration pulsed – not prettily – across her wiry face. I looked around, anywhere but at her.
Hidden Beast
The Weeping Beech hung its boughs to the ground. Mifkin loved its tresses, watching them dance in storms as he lay hiding, waiting in the hollow of its trunk. It was the best of places, warm inside like mother’s womb.
Wind howled across the darkening grass as the day drew to a close. Mifkin clung to his prey...
Dressing Up Box
Swivel.
Awkward, I turn to pick at the flesh adorning my wardrobes, and sigh. The dance has left me ragged; exhausted from the relentless flamenco. Elegant feet I had chosen especially, bleed in stinging shreds. I have worn them to calluses. Yeast stinks between the slender toes.
A fine week’s work.
Walls of Flesh
They are dark but I can clearly make out the striated slashes in the deepest of red. How you ever came to decorate this palace with the freshest of corpses I can never know. But it matters not.
Your obsession with my skins seems the baddest of fanhood. Your adoration of the dances that my girls perform before and after death – it is indeed perfectly justified.
Read more, and buy soon...
Pat-A-Cake
He’s a Roger, by name. He’s staring out the window where the rain is spattering, disguising his display of cupcakes and fat bread rolls. A curly calendar on the wall reveals the date he’s been working towards, the days leading up to Friday 13th obliterated with huge Xs and random scribbles.
He’s a victim of his own profession, is Roger. Standing large and pink behind the evil till he surveys the thing, blinking in green at him. He had to use it himself these days, the assistants only lasted a few weeks, tired of the machine snapping at their fingers. ‘Tired of your leering, and your fiddling hands,’ his wife had said. She was gone now too.
Etheric Fields
“Thief.”
Gerald blinked. It was the first word out of the woman’s mouth since she’d entered his cubicle. He eyed her carefully. He’d take the photograph, but if she couldn’t pay she’d be out on her ear.
The Devil In Me
The last time I saw The Devil he was dancing on stage.
What I was doing there, I can’t be sure. Sleep had evaded me – I swear I was awake. It was one of those vivid ‘between the veils’ moments where the extraordinary seems real; when you can fly without wings and fall off cliffs without landing. It was a moment when being invited to watch The Devil trip the light fantastic seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Mind Games
I thought them ferns; tall penile stems, their tops weighty with verdant coils just waiting to unfurl and release their fertile spores into the density of the hot forest.
Tickling their tendrils with soft affection my fingers instantly freeze in pain...
Dog Day Delivery
Mike Walters ripped at the grey plastic bag. I couldn’t even remember what it was. I ordered stuff all the time. Walters dug at my ribs with puke-splattered toecaps. I gagged at the bitter reek so close to my face as a lacquered photo frame, some silky pyjamas and a six-pack of panties fell to the ground.
‘Look at it. It’s crap.’
Cold Stare
I wake up completely blind. Dumb. Paralysed. Yet my ears rage and my skin burns with the heat of you beside me; your rancid breath, a sickening stink.
Torn in Two
It’s a Monday when the needle nips. It slips across my spine. I relish the agony.
Marco’s fingers scroll and massage as he works my skin.
Paper Lace
Needles tottered from tubes, feeding into flesh that decayed by the second. Corey Beal sensed the panic rising in frantic conversations around him.
‘Can he hear us?’
Carpaccio
I prepared a new entry for tonight. A eulogy.
I didn’t usually record the times and dates of their deaths because that made it kind of final. I liked the idea that the agony would go on forever.
Fissure
Bernard Baker had an ‘orifice’. It wasn’t an orifice he was meant to have; what’s more, it wasn’t a discreet, insignificant little opening, it was a “bloody-great, super orifice” according to Mrs Baker, which was how Bernard learned the word. He would have called it a boil.
Pure
‘Put the coins in the slot, lad.’
‘I don’t want to.’
The old man snatched the money out of Luke’s hand. He shoved it into the machine.
‘You want to see your mother again, don’t you?’
Made To Order
‘What’s your name?’
The woman shivered at the question, barely able to contain her excitement.
Pretty Pinholes
The factory floor was cold beneath her naked back. Hard on the shoulder blades, crusty against her splayed buttocks.
Naomi Allen, her arms and legs strung out to her sides, strapped down to stubby poles she could not see, lay shuddering. The only light - a breath of radiance shooting through a distant keyhole - spangled across the thousand pin heads that pierced her trembling flesh. A bed of nails, she was. Only more so.
Take Me Down, Sir (a little taster from Magenta Shaman)
The searchlight from Tom Shaman’s soul bled pale amongst the treetops.
‘C’mon old man’ he whispered. ‘Help me out. Just one more time.’
The crow found him first. Its blue-black feathers flurried in the twilit sky like the tattered jacket of a jaded Morris dancer.
Softly (excerpt) Soon to be published in Static Movement's Caught by Darkness Anthology
‘He just, sort of crawled off me. I tried to talk to him but the words wouldn’t come. He didn’t even look at me, he just ran down the hall to the bathroom where I could hear him chucking his guts up over and over again.’
‘So after this time, when did you have sex again?’
‘Do you know, Doctor, I’m struggling to remember. It kept happening; he kept coming back for more.
Face Off
I keep it in a bag, my face. It hides there of a night when I slumber and dream.
The bag isn’t new. It is black and it is padded and it reminds me of cheap, knock-off Chanel. For five years it has been home to the composite pieces that come together every morning to rebuild my mask. It is the latest in a long-line of face keepers; storing cosmetics for me since the first time I walked out of Woolworths without paying for the pearly pink lip gloss tucked into my size 6 jeans pocket. I was thirteen.
Somebody, somewhere; tell me this ain’t fair but it seems to me that what you write in a song has a nasty way of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Take it from me, Kurt Cobain did have a gun – denying it even as he sang Come As You Are. Amy? Well… Rehab was just waiting with open doors.
Scuttle (possibly my favourite piece - she badddd)
Rabid fingers scrape in fear, tearing at the earth. She cannot see. She cannot hear.
It is moist in here. Wetness seeps into her shroud. She shifts, releasing muscles from their pain, and begins again. Rolling soil between bloody thumbs and flaking oak, she works at her container. There are holes. The space fills slowly with crumbling rot. It tickles her face in the airless cavity.
Ghost Story
I am the Narrator.
I speak to you on our behalf, elected by the masses.
Don’t bend our words with pseudo-channellings. Don’t lay claim to speak with us, through us.
We hear you. We do not want to be you.
Leave your séances to the Victorian parlour. Why reach out for us? Why drag us back when we do not want to return?
Welfare and School Gates
They follow me home.
Trajectory reflections on wet, winter windows give them away. Sly expressions on sneering cold faces bear down on me; judging, accusing me.
‘Unfit mother.’
Slideshow (Just a little bit of fun) (Excerpt)
‘Now where are we? Oh yes, back in the lounge. I remember I had to turn the camera off to drag him down the stairs. He wasn’t quite dead then. Just suffering.
‘So. This is me phoning the whore. This is him hanging onto my legs after he crawled across the carpet to try to stop me. This… Now this is the whore arriving at the front door, screaming at me, demanding to see him. What a sight she is.'
The Apprentice
Carlotta jabbed the ragged wound with an insensitive finger.
"You’ve screwed it up."
"Forgive me. It’s…"
"I know, I know." Carlotta studied her young disciple, taking in his distress. "It happens. But you need to be more careful."
Read More... | Find out more about Carlotta in Scuttle...
Watched (Excerpts)
They’re always there now, watching. I don’t know what they want. I don’t know what they’re waiting for.
***
A bliss of mermaids.
They followed me round the edge, as was our little tradition, their bodies undulating as they swam, their long, long hair never getting caught in their sinewy limbs.
When we reached the little bridge that crosses the lake, they didn’t come out the other side.
Grub Up
Vanessa was skeletal. I could barely get any meat off her bones so I just gnawed away at the stringy flesh. I sighed. I’d starve at this rate.
I sat back and surveyed the remains of my late cousin. Apparently she didn’t know I have certain tastes. And that I’ve been particularly hungry lately.
Fashion Victim (Excerpt)
I was right. Fashion did tear me apart in the end. In a carefully staged show I arranged for my guts to spill as I took my final step on the catwalk, models towering above my slight frame, praising and applauding me, all glittering in the darkness of my exquisite designs.
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