Púca Love

I am Púca, shapeshifter—goblin, hare, fox, crow. Desiring the remote. Dewy-eyed meadows can’t beguile me with the soft rustle of their leaves or their lilac shadows. No, my lover devours the giant elk and then cradles its bones. She is crowned with the jewellery of cadavers. Her embrace is mesmeric, embalming, sensual. Her kiss—fathomless, dark, liquid, slow. Her flesh is studded with arrow heads; she carries cauldrons in her stomach; swords pierce her legs. She plays wooden trumpets and turns the millstone. Her blood is the purplish black of iron gall ink and the golden leaf of manuscripts sticks to her teeth. Her joy is a radiance of illuminated pages. She is generous. Under a greying sky she sacrifices herself to the dull glint of their knives. Her body burns. It kindles on the embers of their homely little altars. Her heady, vegetal scent flavours the griddle cakes cooking over hearths. Her pyre is one of pale asphodel, sphagnum moss and tufted black rushes. She laps at the whorl snail’s soft entrails with her many red sundew tongues. She licks the spots off ladybirds, smiles, and then gently, gently sucks the wings off dragonflies. Her laughter is shining puddles of reflected light; her joy sounds in the skylark’s song and the whistle of the plover. The spider’s spiralled webs shimmer on her contours like the finest gossamer lace. I smell the wine spice of red myrtle in her embrace. Her voice is low, carrying the weight of bog oak, smooth as butter, as melodious as the harp and yet there is an edge, a sharp horseshoe clatter. Horseshoes made of iron that makes the faeries quiver.

Alex Glebe is a lover of all things gothic and the fantastical. Her fiction is featured in The Lit Nerds, 101 Words, Crow & Cross Keys, Eternal Haunted Summer, Spellbinder and is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine. Find her and books she loves on Instagram @alex_book_treasure.

A Song for Alex