Pagan Blog Project: A is for Ancestor

Each Friday a post on some aspect of the post-modernist neo-global Weird, scratching for fetiche and  chewed pencil ends amongst  these fragments shored against my ruin. See the Pagan Blog Project here.

After visits from my father’s mother, the long-dead Edinburgh widow, all rooms would shrink to doorways. A parting gift of threshhold.  Her sepia  portrait in a gilt frame, scowling and beetle-browed,  became just a beckoning  frame and her  empty  image the mirror in which I hovered like a weary bat or  moth.

She left behind her in the stairwell a membrane like some descending iridescent shower curtain. We called it Jean Hamilton’s Winding Sheet and ran through iridescent into a grimy corner of  boneyard. Shine on, said my brother.

On the Far Side a wasteland of  Salvation Army pamphlets, wet ashes in the fireplace and dusty lintel, the cat  scrounging for garbage. The Uncanny clawing silt, flickering on and off with thin-film interference, static crackling in the keyhole, the mollusc pearl in retreat.

Not a promising start. Rainbow? one of us asked.

‘Look again,’ said the Ancestor, shaking coal dust from her hair, bending low to cough out more Comiston Street smog.

Image  Clarence John Laughlin.

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