#sinfulfolk

[sinfulfolk]

Halloween: Twelve Terrifying Two Sentence Horror Stories

I found a thread on Reddit that asked this question: “What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?” I posted the best ones I found, as well as one more scary tale I created on my own. See if you can figure out which one is mine! With Halloween right around the corner, these two-sentence terrors fit the month perfectly!

Happy Halloween!

1. 

“My daughter won’t stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn’t help.”

Image Credit: Fivvr

2.

I woke up to hear knocking on glass. At first, I thought it was the window until I heard it come from the mirror again.

Image Credit: Vampyr Fangs

3.

I can’t move, breathe, speak or hear and it’s so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead.

Image Credit: Public Domain

4.

After working a hard day, I came home to see my girlfriend cradling our child. I didn’t know which was more frightening, seeing my dead girlfriend and stillborn child, or knowing that someone broke into my apartment to place them there.

Image Credit: Dead Girl (film)

5.

My sister says that mommy killed her. Mommy says that I don’t have a sister.

Image Credit: Universal

6.

“I can’t sleep,” she whispered, crawling into bed with me. I woke up cold, clutching the dress she was buried in.

Image Credit: Cemetery Guide

7.

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy, there’s somebody on my bed.”

Image Credit: Flickr

8.

A girl heard her mom yell her name from downstairs, so she got up and started to head down. As she got to the stairs, her mom pulled her into her room and said, “Don’t go, honey — I heard that, too.”

Image Credit: Random Geekings

9.

Yesterday, my parents told me I was too old for an imaginary friend and I had to let her go. They found her body this morning.

Image Credit: DeviantArt

10.

In the early morning, I could feel the cat purring against my side, nestled up against me in bed, but the cat smelled of blood. I woke slowly remembering that I had tortured that cat to death last Sunday, and scattered the body parts across the construction site.

Image Credit: DeviantArt

11.

The last thing I saw was my alarm clock flashing 12:07 before she pushed her long rotting nails through my chest, her other hand muffling my screams. I sat bolt upright, relieved it was only a dream, but as I saw my alarm clock read 12:06, I heard my closet door creak open.

Image Credit: DeviantArt

12.

The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand.

Image Credit: MNN 

  (H/T Arts.Mic) (via Reddit)

HORROR WARNING:

Nicholas Hallum created a short and chilling  tale.

You can ORDER for Kindle here >>

Thank you for your reading and support!

Halloween: Twelve Terrifying Two Sentence Horror Stories was originally published on Ned Hayes

[lyrangalia]

sinfulfolk is now following you. adlocked-221b is now following you. auratude is now following you.

Hello, my dears! Sorry for the delayed welcome, but I hope you've been enjoying your stay. I don't think I have to tell you all that I post/reblog a lot of Adlock and cosplay, that the #lyra liveblogs tag will be full of profanity, or that I have a lot of thoughts and/or feels. As always, my ask box is open if you'd like to chat, and feel free to ask if I mistagged or forgot to tag something. 

Enjoy your stay!

[iwannabewithyoueverywhere]

sinfulfolk is now following you :D

[maepostrophe]

Review: Sinful Folk

Sinful Folk by Ned Hayes

Published by Campanile Press. Image from NetGalley.

Possible spoilers - 

Sinful Folk follows Miriam, along with a group of men from the same town who travel on an extensive trip. They are seeking justice for their respective sons who were lit on fire. Miriam has been disguising herself as a mute male, named Mear, and successfully hides under this guise, even while traveling. The novel continuously goes back and forth between Miriam's past and present day. Through the memories, you learn of Miriam's love for her deceased son, Christian, his father, Mear's friend Nell and the reason why she changed from Miriam to Mear. The novel is highly rich in detail, so much that it may seem to lag until Chapter 11. At this point, Miriam's history is forced to come to a head. There are escapes, prisons, and the revelation of the fire starter's identity.

I could easily see this book being turned into a film (or even a series). Hayes' description of this story within the Middle Ages is both heartbreaking and heartwarming. I enjoyed the story of Miriam exploring the depths of multiple relationships and discovering her own identity. 

Score out of 5 stars: ☆☆☆☆

[sinfulfolk]

Poem: Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic?

Andrew Grace After my father died I should have gone to therapy. I tried instead to solve my grief with alcohol and poems. Now I am almost 40 and all I can tell you about grief is that when I found my father on the floor of the machine shed the radio was on and wind pushed against corrugated metal. Of course I still hear it. I should have talked to someone before now and not you. Poetry is not talking. This is just art and therefore could never cover my ears when I, suddenly, am back in the shed and I learn again that my father has died every day since he died.

Poem: Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic? was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

Poem: Journey of the Magi (Read by T.S. Eliot)

A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,

José y Maria by Everett Patterson

Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

                                               T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). This poem has been shared here under fair use guidelines provided by The Poetry Foundation.

Poem: Journey of the Magi (Read by T.S. Eliot) was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

On Writing: Technique & Characterization in John le Carré

John le Carré Obituary in the Guardian October 19, 1931 — December 12, 2020

David John Moore Cornwell began writing novels about espionage and spies when he was working as a full-time intelligence agent for the British foreign service MI6 – a group whose very existence was not acknowledged by the British government until 1994.  He wrote under the pen name John le Carré (“John the Square” in French) only because foreign intelligence service were forbidden to publish under their own names. When his third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, he left MI6 to become a full-time author, but obviously part of him has always stayed in the intelligence services – for all of his books concern themselves with secrets, lies, espionage and spycraft.

I’ve enjoyed reading John le Carré from time to time over the years, but only really became entranced with his craft last year, when I happened upon his masterwork Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and was enthralled with the subtle humor, the detailed characterizations and the incredibly slow pace of a highly suspenseful novel. How, I wondered, did le Carré manage to maintain tension in a novel that focused on a retired old bureaucrat named George Smiley?  Smiley is pudgy, dowdy, old-school English, wears thick glasses, stutters when he talks at all, and when he does speak, expounds in soft syllables. He is a paper-pusher, an analyst, and has probably never held a gun in his life. But somehow, John le Carré makes this novel about Smiley crackle with suspense, and the novel kept me glued to the narrative for 100s of pages. It is a thick book, and a very complicated one, and I even know exactly how it ends, but I never once thought of putting it down. How did he do it?

There are many tools le Carré uses to build his work – like a pointillist master painter, every tidy English scene, every spare sentence and every bit of dialogue builds a gradual picture of enormous tension and incredible momentum. I can’t detail the volumes of education I gained about how to improve my own writing when I analyzed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and more recently The Russia House, but I can illuminate a few bits of craft that le Carré is teaching me now.

First is the fact that le Carré paints a vivid picture when he describes any character. In fact, le Carré exaggerates when he paints a character. For example, he describes a new character entering a scene with metaphor (not simile) – writing “The first to speak was a distraught, floating man with baby-pink cheeks and baby-clear eyes and a flaxen jacket to match his straggling flaxen hair. His voice floated too” (40). The vividness of this character description stays with the reader for much of the rest of the book, and from time to time le Carré reinforces it with a slight nod towards the “floating” quality of this man’s look – what is interesting is that this very quality later becomes a plot point, as the Americans distrust this man for his qualities of not-quite-there. le Carré forces readers to see characters as vivid movement on the page, and uses these slightly exaggerated characterizations as a way of burning the character into the reader’s mind, so that there is no doubt what the character is like when he later references them. Painting brightly at the outset allows your characters to last longer in the reader’s mind.

The other thing I am beginning to learn from reading closely into le Carré’s work is that a character’s interior life will only take you so far. What I write well, without conscious effort, is interior psycho-drama in which you experience a character’s inner world as they see it, without the intervention of outside elements such as dialogue or even physical descriptions of the surrounding terrain. It is the one thing that literature can do very well that is nearly impossible to replicate in film. For in film, there is no true imaginative interior monologue, no way of seeing the world in terms of interior metaphors and interior voice. There is, of course, the filmic device of a voice-over, but even that doesn’t provide the scrim of dream-like narrative that we as human beings overlay on visceral experience to make a sense-story of life.

We constantly are making a story of everything around us, relating it to other things, and this sense of a world-being-made-of-metaphor is what literature does so very well. When I go out in the world, every person and thing I encounter reminds me of other experiences – I am constantly building a chain of connections between my past experience and my past imaginative life and the life I am currently encountering. I am never just “out of my head” (except perhaps in moments of focused physical attention, such as playing sports or sex). Many great novelists such as DeLillo, Faulkner or McCarthy, spend much of their energy creating a tapestry that resembles this inner life, and that is why their best work is nearly un-filmable.

However, the more I read novelists who are telling a compelling story and are writing for plot, the more I am discovering that good literature can do both psycho-drama and external plot. To establish the point that le Carré is not all about plot and character description, let me first show that le Carré also does the interior psycho-drama thing well. He demonstrates this skill in chapter 7:

She pictured him a waif… lying in semi-darkness on the top berth reserved for luggage, listening to the smokers’ coughing and the grumble of drunks, suffocating from the stink of humanity… while he stared at the appalling things he knew and never spoke of. What kind of hell must that be, she wondered, to be tormented by your own creations? To know that the absolute best you can do in your career is the absolute worst for mankind? (172).

This passage serves as a good synecdoche for the book’s treatment of inner life. It moves clearly from one character’s apprehension of another in the world, and a clear description of how she pictured this person in their ‘waifish’ environment, to her conception of the character’s mindset and concerns. The passage touches on particulars of experience, then implies dark secrets, and then moves naturally to the broader questions of their shared humanity and the big questions of human morality. It is a solid bit of interior monologue.

What le Carré is beginning to teach me though is how much more powerful such an complex and emotionally full interior space can be when it is prefaced and impacted by events and physical locations that are clearly described and that have action associated with them that has no “discussion” in the reader’s own head. Motion in the exterior world can be as suspenseful and entrancing as motion in the interior world. In The Russia House, le Carré writes mostly a straightforward narrative full of precise observations, character descriptions that are exacting and precise, and dialogue that sings off the page. Here is one sample passage that demonstrates his skill in this critical exterior narrative:

The woman was trembling. Not only with the hands that held her brown perhaps-bag but also at the neck, for her prim blue dress was finished with a collar of old lace and Landau could see how it shook against her skin and how her skin was actually whiter than the lace. Yet her mouth and jaw were set with determination and her expression commanded him.

“Please sir, you must be very kind and help me,” she said as if there were no choice. …. What happened next happened quickly, a street-corner transaction, willing seller to willing buyer. The first thing Landau did was look behind her, past her shoulder. He did that for his own preservation as well as hers. But his end of the room was empty, the area dark. “Got it with you then, have you dear?” he asked, peering down and smiling like a friend. “Yes.”

What I’m learning from le Carré is that very precise description that does not paint with emotion, but instead paints with detail – every detail in the woman’s description denotes terror, every moment adding fear, and the whole scene creates a moment of enormous suspense for both the reader and the characters. Then, le Carré also adds dialogue that has awkward language, but also implores, finished by a commanding note at the end. Finally, there is the rush to action, coupled with the caution of looking around at the crowd. The dialogue is masterful, because it is so spare, with few adverbs at all. Landau, the character, gives a very English reply – he asks about the manuscript, but the manners he use imply that he is trying to be casual, trying to act as if it is of no great concern. Even though we as readers know that the rest of this 400+ page novel depends upon this scene, and even though both characters act as if their lives depend upon what happens with this manuscript handoff, the exchange is a studied moment of casual conversation. This, for me, demonstrates something I could take to heart: casual “throwaway” moments can be just as dramatic – even more so – than moments that are overwrought with adverbs and emotion.

Overall, what is key to learn here for me is the necessity of moving vividly outside the character’s heads and into the world around them in a forceful way. The action can be constrained – as le Carré demonstrates with finesse in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – but it must be external to the protagonist’s head-talk. If the writer makes the external world come to life in a very real way to the reader, then the internal landscape will matter even more when we return to that inner monologue. The truth is in the intersection between this outer world and this inner world – this is where the writer must make their art.

Since I wrote this post, I was inspired to complete my own spy novel, which is a bit of a twist on the Cold War and War on Terror espionage so well described by le Carré. My novel Wilderness of Mirrors will be released in 2021.

                                               On Writing: Technique & Characterization in John le Carré was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

Whale Songs: Eagle Tree as Featured Audiobook

Orca Books in Olympia just listed The Eagle Tree audiobook as one of their picks for a new Pacific Northwest audiobook “play list” called Orca Books Whale Songs

An Orca-themed mix for your Pacific Northwest dreams.

Enjoy the Orca BooksAudiobook Play List here.

The Eagle Tree

A Novel

By Ned Hayes

Narrated by: Will Ropp

Length: 7 hours 11 minutes Fourteen-year-old March Wong knows everything there is to know about trees. They are his passion and his obsession, even after his recent falls—and despite the state’s threat to take him away from his mother if she can’t keep him from getting hurt. But the young autistic boy cannot resist the captivating pull of the Pacific Northwest’s lush… Read more »

Audiobook details

Playlist Tags: Orca Books Booksellerreccomended

Whale Songs: Eagle Tree as Featured Audiobook was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

MLK Day: A Langston Hughes Poem

The poet Langston Hughes was a great inspiration to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Examples of their connection are expansive. In 1956, King recited Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” from the pulpit to honor his wife Coretta, who was celebrating her first Mother’s Day. That same year, Hughes wrote a poem about Dr. King and the bus boycott titled “Brotherly Love.” At the time, Hughes was much more famous than King, who was honored to have become a subject for the poet. To honor MLK’s legacy today, here’s Langston Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too.”

I, Too

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes, “I, Too” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted with the permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

Source: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Books, 2004)

[Read more Poetry Posts]

MLK Day: A Langston Hughes Poem was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

The October Country

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”

― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

The October Country was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

Song: Build A House -- Juneteenth Song from Rhiannon Giddens featuring Yo-Yo Ma

“This song came knocking about a week ago and I had to open the door and let it in. What can I say about what’s been happening, what has happened, and what is continuing to happen, in this country, in the world? There’s too many words and none, all at once. So I let the music speak, as usual. What a thing to mark this 155th anniversary of Juneteenth with that beautiful soul Yo-Yo Ma. Honored to have it out in the world.” — Rhiannon Giddens

Build a House

You brought me here to build your house, build your house, build your house You brought me here to build your house and grow your garden fine

I laid the brick and built your house, built your house, built your house I laid the brick and built your house, raised the plants so high

And when you had the house and land, the house and land, the house and land And when you had the house and land, then you told me “go.”

I found a place to build my house, build my house, build my house I found a place to build my house since I couldn’t go back home

You said I couldn’t build a house, build a house, build a house You said I couldn’t build a house, so you burned it down

So then I traveled far and wide, far and wide, far and wide And then I traveled far and wide until I found a home

I learned your words and wrote a song, wrote a song, wrote a song I learned your words and wrote a song to put my story down

But then you came and took my song, took my song, took my song But then you came and took my song, playing it for your own

I took my bucket, lowered it down, lowered it down, lowered it down I took my bucket, lowered it down, the well will never run dry.

You brought me here to build a house, build a house, build a house You brought me here to build a house. I will not be moved.

No, I will not be moved. No, I will not be, I will not be, I will not be moved. –Rhiannon Giddens

Song: Build A House — Juneteenth Song from Rhiannon Giddens featuring Yo-Yo Ma was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

KING DONALD: a comedy?

“This low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.”

— George F. Will, The Washington Post

The perfectly satirical story of our age, King Donald is the shockingly prescient story of our time, a ripped-from-the-headlines lampoon of both William Shakespeare and our national politics.

THE EXPERIENCE

A rollicking production that lifts all the best lines from Shakespeare’s classic dramas and weaves them into the most bizarre political tale of our age, King Donald is an entertaining romp through the true-to-life surreal story. This staged play is sure to be enjoyed by political aficionados, fans of William Shakespeare and devotees of “The Capitol Steps,” alongside the crazed fans of such personages as Hillary Clinton, Kellyanne Conway, Michael Cohen, Robert Mueller and James Comey (all of whom appear on stage).

THE STORY

The faithful story of a young scion, raised to wealth and nurtured by dissolute amoral mentors, among them the Falstaffian Roger Cohn. A playboy who rises in prominence even as he fails at business. A man enchanted by lewd youth, yet brought to the political forefront, who strives always to hail his larger purpose as Prince Hal and confront his corporate masters, in Hamlet’s own voice. A man who is at last exalted to prominence in the empire’s politics, where he is led astray by advisors both heraldic (Conway) and traitorous (Cohen) and ends his life wandering in a twitter storm, entertained by a pitiful fool, Roger Stone.

PLAYWRIGHT

Playwright Kate Ayers was the co-founder of the Indianapolis Children’s Theatre and has created educational theater programs nationwide. She is the writer of over 200 plays, and her plays have appeared on over 300 stages across the globe. La Casa Azul, her musical based on the life of Frida Kahlo, was featured in a world premiere in 2019 and will go on national pre-Broadway tour in spring 2021. The PBS documentary of the La Casa Azul production won an Emmy in 2017. Ayers ran the Theater Program at the Indiana Women’s Prison for 10 years, studied at the Goodman Theatre School and graduated from Columbia (Directing).

PLAYWRIGHT (AND PRODUCER)

Playwright and Producer Ned Hayes wrote and produced the 8-hour-long production of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in Seattle in collaboration with the Washington Center for the Book, which featured actors from Seattle Rep, Intiman, Seattle Opera and University of Washington. He has written and produced plays for a variety of stages for ten years. He holds an MFA and an MA, with a focus on medieval drama and Shakespearean studies. Four of his novels have been published, and his novel The Eagle Tree was a national bestseller, nominated for the National Book Award and the ALA Book Award. The Eagle Tree was adapted by Kate Ayers for the stage and screen in 2018.

PLAYWRIGHT 3: AN APOLOGY TO SHAKESPEARE

William Shakespeare is the prominent English playwright of the 1500s, who would shrink from claiming any responsibility for this riotous travesty of his work, as his plays were absolutely rifled and routed and spectacularly disassembled for the purposes of a narrative that has absolutely nothing to do with his original intent. Except, surprisingly, Shakespeare’s original scenes work nearly unedited in King Donald! If you love Shakespeare, you’ll find much to enjoy in this ribald and uproarious production.

THE SOURCES

The playwrights are both expert in Shakespearean drama, and have both performed Shakespeare’s plays on numerous stages nationwide. King Donald contains much original material, but also adapts and reconstructs moments and famous storylines from all of the following Shakespeare plays to create one seamless and hilarious staged narrative: Hamlet, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, Henry IIIV, Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, MacBeth, King Lear, Taming of the Shrew, Cymbeline, Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing

SEEKING PRODUCTION PARTNERS

The team who created King Donald is seeking production partners at this time for a national premiere and a national tour, both to take place prior to the U.S. presidential election of 2020.

KING DONALD: a comedy? was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

Poem: what they did yesterday afternoon, by Warsan Shire

Poem: what they did yesterday afternoon, by Warsan Shire

  these are what my prayers look like; dear god i come from two countries one is thirsty the other is on fire both need water.

later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt?

it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.

— Warsan Shire

Poem: what they did yesterday afternoon, by Warsan Shire was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE: A LETTER FROM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, QUARANTINED IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE

f. scott fitzgerald in the late 1920s.

  by NICK FARRIELLA

  Dearest Rosemary,

It was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. I thank you for your letter. Outside, I perceive what may be a collection of fallen leaves tussling against a trash can. It rings like jazz to my ears. The streets are that empty. It seems as though the bulk of the city has retreated to their quarters, rightfully so. At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier, that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. I’m curious of his sources.

The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.

You should see the square, oh, it is terrible. I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. The long afternoons rolling forward slowly on the ever-slick bottomless highball. Z. says it’s no excuse to drink, but I just can’t seem to steady my hand. In the distance, from my brooding perch, the shoreline is cloaked in a dull haze where I can discern an unremitting penance that has been heading this way for a long, long while. And yet, amongst the cracked cloudline of an evening’s cast, I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better morrow.

Faithfully yours, F. Scott Fitzgerald

(the best quarantine-themed literary parody from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE: A LETTER FROM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, QUARANTINED IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

Shakespeare's Witches for Halloween

Song of the Witches: “Double, double toil and trouble”

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

(from Macbeth)

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,

Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon’s blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

Shakespeare’s Witches for Halloween was originally published on Ned Hayes

[sinfulfolk]

The October Country

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”

― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

The October Country was originally published on Ned Hayes