Here in my parlour we can sit down together. Uncomfortably close at times, during the strongest parts of the story. By red light we will weave through some of the Virtue of a time period where a lot of modern witchcraft ladders get started. Through stealing the fat from the crops and the cattle sheds of the previous era as witches were believed to do, (one that still exists inside us in the presence of our own great-grandparents) we can nourish ourselves here in this age. As selfish as that act may sound, you will find that all of us feasted on the bodies of our great, great grandparents, just by being born. Mostly they don’t begrudge it. They do like to be remembered though. Because, as they say, what is remembered lives. Even their own ladders came from other ladders. Ones that all wear the torn rags and and gnaw on the bones of earlier times, in the great ongoing sacrifice we call parenthood, as we tread down the generations.
Find me.
‘These salons are stamped into me as a series of perpetual fallings backward into Arthur’s arms, a long collection curated out of my surrender. On a walk home after such a seance, where I had gone limp against him, we saw the rag and bone man coming towards us in the distance. The night was faintly misty. I’m not sure if that was because of a true mist or fire-place fog, yet it concealed the man’s identity, and a threw an extra, larger shadow of his against the damp orange glow of the road. “You are like him,” Arthur remarked. “You’re the spirit-world version of the rag and bone man. You make your living by taking away the rags and bones of people’s feelings for the dead. What do you do with them to transform them when you get home, I wonder? Do you have to turn them into something else, Henry? Just like his shop does?”’