BlueOwlCandle

I. Those of us here in this skeleton time, this time of the year when the nights are thin and dark, and dark with anxiety, peeling as layers of an oyster shell, brittle and effaced and somehow iridescent. When the bell tolls out the time the sound is thin and reaches into fractured air and softly seeks the spaces between the atoms and misses the vital Os and CO2s in a lasting, failed pinball. The bell sound dies in some space between midnight and thereafter, and each tock tock of slipping cogs is a repeat and not a moving on. The air is filled with each dull sound, each tock a repeat and a repeat again. And the slip betwee

Funeral A funeral was no place to have an epiphany. Epiphanies galvanise people into action and the only action you could get away with in a church pew was discreet fidgeting. Even that was considered unseemly when a heart-felt eulogy was being delivered by the deceased's mother, as Mary was finding out to her discomfort. The priest was beginning to shoot her dirty looks. But really, as epiphanies went, it was a brilliant one. She couldn't believe she had taken this long to realise it. She was fat. Plain and simple. Mary was much too fat. It explained everything. Her husband had left her for a skinny bitch because she was fat, the universit