A sun symbol made of light and blood

Some massive jellyfish had washed up at St Cyrus when we took Floof for a scamper on Sunday. The sight sparked a fragment, which isn’t much, but it’s nice to have produced something new. I suspect this belongs in the same world as the unpublished (but prone to receiving good personal rejections), genderqueer Swimming Lessons for Girls.

Jelly

It always started with the jellies. There were occasional rafts of them in all seasons, globular forms flattening like griddle cakes on the white sand without the supporting embrace of the ocean. The children would come running, screaming, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” and the old men puffed their pipes and squinted over the heather at the tideline, then settled back against the daubed walls of their houses, eyes glittering like winter sun on chop. Those were the small ones, no bigger than a forearm’s length across, innards forming patterns passed on as jumping games for eons. They baked in the sun until they were the same colour as the sand, and then the tide took them back.

But when the big ones came, crystalline orbs driven up onto the sand by waves big enough to crack rocks, the men got off their benches and put out their pipes. They went to the burn and filled their waxed pails, ensured the wet peat was banked high above the strandline and all the rooves were sodden.

Because when the big ones came, the ocean-goers, the deep swimmers, crashing ashore in storms that brought mass strandings of silver, flung birds bent, broken and bloody against the dunes, and turned unwary seals to carrion, those Others were not far behind.

Kelpie spotting

It’s a common misconception that kelpies of Scottish myth were horses. They are always horses in popular media. Those shapeshifters emerging black-maned from rivers and lochs to lure unwary humans to a nightmarish end being devoured amongst the weeds in the dark depths.

The Bard himself said:

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord
An’ float the jinglin icy boord
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord
By your direction
An’ nighted trav’llers are allur’d
To their destruction.

But kelpies weren’t always horses. They could be any animal that might founder in a way that would bring the unwary human to the water. If you can’t catch a man by inducing him to ride you, then why not be more antlion about it and get him to come to you?

Calves, sheep, goats.

Deer.

Kelpie

At about 20s you can see where the fins used for swimming turn back into legs. I filmed this standing next to my significant other and our very excitable derpwolf, but this “deer” seems quite nonchalant about it. When I looked down, I found a line of hoofprints leading into the water.

I wonder if they were noticeably deeper than the ones the animal made on the way out.

Help the Apex magazine fund!

Haar is what we call the sea fog here in the north east of Scotland. There are other places that have similar banks of dense, white cloud rolling in from the sea, of course; the phenomenon is not limited to this part of the world. I’ve seen something similar in San Francisco.

It plays a big part in She Gave Her Heart, He Took Her Marrow, which will be published in Apex Magazine next month, and is as much a part of the land here as the ever-shifting dunes, the tank traps and pillboxes, and the extinct volcanoes.

It was particularly splendid this week, sitting a mile or so offshore and dull grey in shadow but bright, brilliant white in the sun. I tried to take a picture, but I have yet to manage to capture an image of the haar in its full glory.

Haar
There’s something in the haar and it has a taste for cattle

The thick grey band across the horizon is the haar. It’s remarkably stable, and just sits there until conditions are right for it to come into shore.

Apex has announced a subscription drive, with a target of $5,000. As I write this, the funding rocket is showing less than $1,000.

You can find direct links to the subscription links here. It doesn’t cost much to subscribe. Most of the material is online for free anyway, but by subscribing you help make sure that there will be more great new stories from emerging and established authors. If you can’t subscribe, or can but want to do a bit more, you can always add some funds to the tip jar at the bottom of the subscription drive page.

Autumn’s here

It’s that time of year again. I was moving wood from a delivery into the shed earlier, trug by painful trug (the weekend’s sea kayaking has broken me), and a long V of geese flew in overhead. I sometimes wonder why they talk to each other incessantly as they fly. It looks like so much effort to keep those big bodies up, wings incessantly flapping.

There was a second, smaller V, and a couple of geese broke free from this as I watched, trying to join the larger one. I imagined them worrying about directions — they’re all following Jemima, maybe they know something we don’t; maybe Steve doesn’t have a clue where he’s going and he’s going to turn left over there when he should turn right — as they beat the air furiously with those long wings, slightly akimbo in their sprint across the gap, all against a background chorus of slightly squeaky, syncopated honks I could hear before I spotted the birds and long after they had passed.

I felt the season turn a couple of weeks ago, and while I’m sad to see the back of summer, with its sunny beaches, garden barbecues, fledgling birds, wonderful flowers and hazy warm days of having every window open in this granite fridge we call a house, Autumn has always been my favourite time of year. Here in Scotland we often get the best of the year’s weather in a blissful window on the cusp where summer gives way to autumn; it’s as if the sun realises we are given short change on that front (excuse the pun) and throws an extra week or so of blue skies our way just when we think the cold rains have arrived. It’s warm, but not too warm, with cool, crisp mornings and spectacular sunsets.

It’s fungus season, too. I took this picture in Aviemore at the very end of August:

Fly agaric

Fly Agaric is so beautiful when it breaks through its hood, the red still glossy, the cap unblemished.

This one I took in Keil’s Den, Fife, a couple of weeks later.

Cluster of sulphur

These are Sulphur Tufts, named both for their colour and habit of clumping together. I love taking pictures of fungus. They can be so whimsical.

Speaking of whimsy, yet another story that was supposed to be a flash has grown arms and legs. I’m wrestling my way through thick undergrowth to the end, trusting I can cut it back to something manageable once I’m there. While I thoroughly recommend Rand’s The 10% Solution — especially if you often get comments from crit buddies along the lines of overly wordy, padded prose or over-written — sometimes the machete has to come out before the secateurs.

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