A dark, fantastical tale that is intended to unfold a paragraph, or thereabouts, at a time.
18 Jan 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
He pauses a blink and passes fog-quiet without hindrance into the Hall of Stews. Perpetually brass-lit and fantastical, this outrageous lane of leaning pleasure houses. The pungency of opulence and redolence of sex, its spillage and carriage, its s...
17 Jan 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
His pace is that of a meanderer. A casual, comfortable stroller across the secret folds and creases of Night’s fiefdom. Footfalls silky but ironshod, hurling deliberate echoes high into the mazy dark. Careening off masonry like black, blind moths....
15 Jan 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
Autumn inevitably comes to the narrow ways Above. Rain turns night-work oily and treacherous for even the most sure footed of beast, and man. The presence that drifts like a wisp of evening fog through the tight and cantankerous alleys and ways is ne...
14 Jan 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
“There is no other way Ineb.” The broad-backed one, voice like the oil in the belly of a cold bottle, roiling. Her brother’s answering silence is fragile. His face drawn, eyes full of cracked twigs and broken leaves. She sees therein a premonition....
5 Jan 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
Ahead not twenty steps her brother and two others. The family cottage, rough with Autumn, looms over them. Their backs turned towards her, all bound in brass buckled coats and dirty leather. Her nose wrinkles. Downwind the pair reeks of unclean an...
1 Jan 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
Crossing the hill-crest, she winds down a gentle slope, through naked, crackling poplar and cedar with a swift footfall, abetted by slippery leaf-litter. Voices muted by the veil of hill and tree unfold into shapes of anger and despond. She can taste...
29 Dec 2020 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
She is unhurried and unharried, dreaming idly of the unseen over the next rise. Her thin slippers provide otherwise little succor to her feet, but she is unconcerned. The cow-path is soft with sweet straw and the day is pleasantly warming. Her le...
28 Dec 2020 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
The cool eyed sun of Autumn after the mid-noon meal. Crackling field-husks and the plumping gold of lazy gourds. The press of air is gentle against her bare limbs. Tangling playfully with her rough-hemmed skirts and wheaty hair. She wends home acro...
15 Dec 2020 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
An expectant intake of breath and a soft pause to drink in the whispers from below. Pyna drifts down a narrow, silty, path. Umin gingerly at her naked heels. Her eerily graceful gait carrying her meandering down, down. As they descend, she converses...
11 Dec 2020 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist
Quickened by her words, he moves to follow. A few further steps beyond, and quite suddenly the enshrouding black rolls back, like the tumescent skin of a dark plum peeling. From the height of an intimate alcove, gazing out over amber and brass-black...
