I’ve been putting this one off. Not because I don’t know what to write. Because I know too much, and case files are supposed to maintain a certain distance, and distance is a thing that becomes increasingly difficult when the subject has your number and uses it. We’ll get to that. Conn O’Cuinn. Celtic Soldier
Conn O’Cuinn: Three hundred years and counting Read More »
I sat in St. Cuthbert’s this morning. Don’t read anything into it. The heating works and it’s quiet before ten. Tazia and I have churches in common that way. There’s a painting on the north wall. Small thing. Oil on board, probably Victorian, probably donated by someone who thought they were being generous. An angel
Tuesday. The farm shop on the edge of the village. I need eggs. That’s the whole of the errand. Late April and the lane is aggressive with green—hawthorn budding hard, cow parsley shouldering up through the verge, the whole hedgerow committed. The air above the fields is layered with it. A soft, breathing green that
What the Colours Know Read More »
There’s a little boy on the Tube in the 90s. One, maybe two years old. Jam on his face. Waving a crumpled ticket in his fist. His mother’s head is lolling against the window, her hijab slipping. He reaches up with both hands—small hands, still soft—and pats it down. Only one sees him do it
Billy Nadig: Just Billy Read More »
The chalk is close to the surface here. You notice it when the ground dries out—white showing through like bone. England is like that. Old things near the surface. Mostly ignored. The chalk figures help make the point. Horses. Giants. Men with arms outstretched, cut into hillsides across the country. Some of them thousands of
Before London got complicated, a man came through here on his way back from the city. Salesman. The rolling-suitcase kind. Grumpy bastard. He’d been working in the capital—deals, meetings, the usual churn—and felt he’d been made a fool of. Demons, he said. All through his human network. Hiding in plain sight. Pulling the wool over
The statistics coming out of rural England don’t alarm people the way they should. I’ve been watching the pattern. Not the cities. The cities are loud about their violence, wear it on the outside, make it visible and therefore manageable. No. The villages. The ones that have been here since before anyone can remember—where everyone
Murder in an English Village Read More »
The first thing you should know is that he makes excellent coffee. The kind that comes from caring about the result more than you’re supposed to, given everything else on your plate. He thinks about the blend. He thinks about the grind. He thinks about what the person on the other side of the cup
Soren Huxford: A man who doesn’t miss Read More »
Every culture that looked into the dark long enough came back with the same story. A place beside this one. Not above it, not below. Beside. The Celts called it the Otherworld. The Portuguese and Galicians knew it as the Mourama. At Disney they call it Fairyland. The map underneath the names is identical. Not a
Someone left a file on the bar last winter. I wasn’t there when it arrived. That happens sometimes. The door has a way of letting things in when I’m not watching. The file smelled like a damp basement. I’ve been sitting on it since. There’s a moment in 1914 that history skips over too quickly.
