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(NOTE: I've been reading too much classical work).

The siren had many times betaken herself to the woods, and there, beside herself with delight, she beheld the lakes and ponds fair to look upon, over which every sturdy tree let fall its leaves of green and of orange. Now and again she would sing to herself, as she walked the woods, whatever she had heard of the street singers; and her husband, no mean listener himself, whom she had loved beyond measure through all their years together, would walk beside her and hearken to it too. She had heard it whispered in the town markets, and again at the ports where she and her husband were wont to fish, that a witch’s rite had lately been held in the woods, “in the south,” as they said, though what that might mean she could not tell. Nor did the uncertainty deter her, for she would be walking there at her ease, and scarce a month remained before she and her husband should set out for the old Golden Krone Hotel.

She walked out in the early morning, and while she delighted in the green grass beneath her pale bare feet, there came to her the smell of smoke from a torch lately burnt out; nor could she turn her mind from it, and before long she followed where it led. So she came upon a clearing in the woods, and in it stood a table spread with a white cloth, and upon the cloth lay the stripped bones of some small creature, slight enough to be a fowl’s. Beside them sat a head like a mummy’s, its eyes hollowed out and its mouth gaping, as though it had been struck dumb with terror in the very moment of its ending.

Another step she took, and there rose to her ears the singing of those streets which he had loved, swelling by degrees until it wrung from her a cry of fright; and turning, she beheld her own face within one of the hollow circles of the tree behind her, not so plainly as in a mirror, yet plainly enough to show the stars within her eyes, which cleared before her sight even as she moved her head to seek where the sound was wandering off in another quarter.

When she turned, her eye fell upon something, and then upon many things, moving to and fro among the trees, now here, now there, appearing and vanishing in the gloom. Yet what was that yonder, stirring where nothing ought to stir? And lo, it is upon her!

My husband was a wily old rapist, but he had other qualities, too. Not among them was throwing out the bath water.

He could pick the horses, though. On race day he’d wake up early, boil up some water and soak a while. Then he’d dress himself up neat, I’d give him a big smacking kiss good luck at the door and he’d stroll off and win big. I was ever so proud. But then of course I would see the mess he left behind in the bath.

The winnings always went straight to the pub, you know. Never any left over. But anyway it was the bath water that drove me most mad.

I do remember locking him out of the house one day. Because of his infidelity on one of those trips of his. I never told him how I knew. And once again he hadn’t thrown out the bath water. So we got into a yelling match and I swung my tits out the first floor window and teased him with my big nipples and said I could have any man I wanted. I watched him chase the local kids up and down the lane with February biting at his flesh until he screamed at the front door and pleasured himself as some kind of public act of revenge. He wasn’t mentally stable.

I let him back in before the frostbite. He was shivering too much to hit me. Our reputation among the neighbours never really recovered after that. And soon enough, I was once again pouring out his bath water into the grass.

Well that all changed today. Now someone else can deal with your bloody bath water, am I right? Tee-hee-hee!

The curtains open to my forest, my forest of dreams. In the centre, the heart, is a clearing. There is a table and a spotlight of sunlight slips through the canopy and shines on it. On this table lies a white lace tablecloth and on this tablecloth sits her head. My grandmother.

The audience of trees surrounds the silent, bodiless performer. I pass their thick trunks and enter the light, placing my arms on her stage and my hands cupping her cheeks. I look into her empty sockets, then down to her smiling lips.

Oh how I’ve missed you, you wonderful woman. I pity these trees for they will never hear you sing, rivaling the songs of all the birds to which they are accustomed. You had the most beautiful voice but I cannot remember it, only the feelings it brought me. Your eyes, your clothes, your smell, it all escapes me. But I could never forget your kind face.

The way you treated me, I wish I could treat myself. The care I felt I could never show another and you harboured talents I could never muster. I was present in all this greatness, but I never felt like a lesser woman.

The one I trust and who held me dear, you didn’t inquire about my future or scold me for my past; you were happy that I was there. As this sun shines on you now, you shone on me then. I take solace in that when I grow old and look into a mirror, I’ll see you again.

I dreamt of a forest.

No usual sort, I may add. The trees were bare and crooked, filled with dead hollows and recesses carved deep into their demented timber. I walked among them and did imagine among some the soft sound of agony. A woodsman had been at one, and where his axe had chewed there streamed thick black sap trickling like blood into unsated Earth; its exposed bark groaning in agony.

Onwards I crept, dreamlike, and discovered within this fantasy an enclosure. Beyond the circling thicket I trod and there, saw it.

An altar carved deep in stone, atop which in the centre sat a head dessicated beyond all years. Eyes wide, peering into the soft embrace of its mortal lover, and speakig a dead tongue.

Closer, I could hear them sharing sorrowful words. She, not yet an adult, wore a silken gown through which I could see her pale body in its entirety, and a garland wreath around her head from which flowed thick blonde hair down unto her waist.

At last, she stroked the head on the altar and rose, walking towards me. I did not see it at first, but she clutched in her hand a butcher's knife, its sharp metal blade kissed with an ochre pigment which stained its edge. In the dream I stared, baffled and unaware of what was to occur.

Raising the knife to my throat she spoke to me from beneath red lips: "shall we follow Michaelangelo" the sibyl seemed to say. I was dumbstruck, and words which oft spoken wake the dreamer left me unconscious to the world.

She slid the knife across my neck.

Falling, I heard before awaking screaming the sibyl repeat herself, this time in old Aramaic:

"In the room where women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo".

In dreaming of death I slept, and in dreaming died

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>>25625779
Who are you?

Adulthood.


The girl studied the face in the graveyard for the rest of the night by the flickering lamplight, her fingers still black with freshly dug dirt as they manipulated the sunken eyelids, lifted the lips to expose the teeth in the receding gums, pushed and pinched the soft cheeks, the wrinkled skin already spotted with rot.

Her father would've been horrified, furious, hurt, confused. He would've pleaded and accused. He didn't understand. She had to do it. She couldn't let this only chance pass. She had to look at the only face that could've shown her her future, that fleshy window into the void, that putrefying crystal ball shaped like her mother's face. If there's one truth in this world, the old ladies say, it's that every girl becomes her mother. So she studied, she examined, she prepared.

By dawn, she knew. The head had become just a head.

The woman laid it back to rest and walked home.

A Bad Prompt

No two ways about it, the faint chiaroscuro and Ellen Terry lookalike don’t stir much inside him. Somehow the contours of her shirt caught his eye more than her un-Greek profile. Reminded him of the Bargue plates he spent hours copying in school (apparently Picasso did the same), he still saw shadows as shapes that should be drawn before the subject of a piece. An image is made not from you but an absence in the shape of you. Like those handprints at Lascaux with pigment blown around them. Just what is that expression on her face anyway? Not endearment. If the artist had included the reflection of the High Lights at exactly the right place in her eye, he supposed, it could’ve manipulated him to some affection. But his mind had already wandered. You know it was nearly twenty-thousand years ago, he thought, that those Lascauxians daubed their cave walls with inspirational paint? Not scribbles but real art, beautifully observed. And those handprints with paint all around them remain stamped seven hundred generations later. Like someone reaching through the stone, and right to us.

I was here.

He suddenly wondered what he’d say back. We built a magnificent cathedral that has stood for eight hundred years in the centre of Paris. Though actually that caught fire about five years ago, Notre Dame, though money was quickly raised from the international community to restore it; now cosmetic rather than historic. Still, the fire was something. The old green and grey stone suddenly livened by red and orange. Do you remember? That was a grand display of all the arts: God’s, man’s, the devil’s. Marked by a pillar of skyward smoke, do you remember? It sang louder than any cathedral choir. We all wanted it saved of course, but nobody stopped looking. Everyone secretly backs a fire.

He’d probably tell them that.

He glanced at the prompt image again and ended his piece by bathetically typing out

alas poor yorick.