>"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions prod...
My grandfather owns a pair of dead man’s eyes. I’ve seen them sitting on his mantelpiece, staring blankly forward, above my head. He got them in the war, he says. A French soldier in a foxhole gave them to him as a gift, said they were lucky, could tell him what to see. He said the French soldier bled out and died ten minutes later. One time, one of the nights that my mom was sleeping off a binge…
TW: Horror, gore, Animal distress/death, that kinda stuff. I pace the little house restlessly again in the middle of the night, roused for the third time since arriving by a nightmare that shouldn't have been a nightmare. Again I count the pine tree motifs scrawled out on various markers and hangings-about on the walls – 17 of them. I sit and stew with a cup of tea, bothered more by the fact that…
The Underground Forest is blight and bounty, causing the world above to bleed as it bears out riches and terrors of flora and fauna. The wild bleeds, thick sticky it runs down roots and into streams and pools. The wild bleeds and people sicken, eating at its heart and tasting iron and rot on their gums and tongues. The wild bleeds and birds sing harsh through sallow days. The wild bleeds and…