The Blindboy Podcast - The Poitín Maker

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

I read my short story, The Poitín Maker and discuss the connection between the Eifel tower, Paul Cezzane, Dr.Dre and Ernest Hemingway Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Play some bendy tennis you gelded emmets, welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. We've got a lot of new listeners this week. We've got many new listeners because this podcast was featured in The Guardian at the weekend. It was quite a big article which I wasn't expecting. I was on the front page of the Culture Magazine in The Guardian. So welcome to all the brand new listeners this week. And what I always say to new listeners is, go back and listen to an earlier podcast. Some people even start from the beginning to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. It's absolutely freezing in Ireland

right now. It's minus four degrees across all of the country. We're in the middle of a cold snap, but it is quite beautiful because it's a dry cold. There's no ice. There's no moisture in the air. It's what I'd describe as powdery. It's that powdery, frosty coldness. The sky is incredibly clear. It's in HD almost. And the fine layer of frost across all the grass and the plants and the trees keeps everything unnaturally still. Nettles are drooping and crippled with frost. It's the perfect weather for a morning walk. And you don't have to worry about ice

because it's too dry. There's no fucking ice. So I'd like to do something very special for this week's podcast. I'd like to read you out a short story. Probably, I think this is my favourite short story from my new book, Topography Hibernica. It's a story called The Pudgene Maker. I think it's my favourite story in the book because it took me the longest to write. It took about three or four months to write because I poured over every single detail and I did massive amounts of research to create the world that I wanted to create with this story. And it was a pleasure to live in that world while I was writing it. I do get asked frequently why I write books of short stories and why I haven't written a novel.

I enjoy writing short stories, a collection of short stories, because it's a bit like making an album. If you make an album full of songs, each song has a different tone. You can have a reggae song, if you like, or a country song. You can try different perspectives, different sounds, different techniques. So it's the musician in me that likes writing books of short stories. It feels like an album. So with each short story in my book, I get to take different influences and different tones for each story.

I adore art. I adore writing. And I believe in democratising the process. Writers are kind of expected to guard their process, to not speak about how they wrote a story. Almost like if you gatekeep your process, then it adds more value to the work. And I think that's harsh shit. I love to speak about how I write and to expose the fallibility in the process. Because I'd. Because I'd like other people to think, oh, I could have a go at doing that.

I often find it easier to explain one art form by speaking about it metaphorically through a different art form. So let's take music, for example. Back in the days of the rubber bandits, when I used to produce music and make music, it might take me four or five months to mix one song. You've got all these different instruments, drums, bass, guitars, synthesizers, lots of different melodies and textures. And when you're producing that song, you're deciding, you know, how loud should

everything be? Where does everything sit on the mix? Is it on the left speaker, on the right speaker? where does everything sit on the mix? Is it on the left speaker, on the right speaker? That's production. And what I used to always do, and what a lot of producers do, is you have a reference album or a reference track. If I was producing a hip-hop track, we'll say, for a couple of months, every single day mixing, if I'm producing hip-hop, I would always have Dr. Dre, specifically the album Doggy Style by Snoop Doggy Dog, which was produced by Dr. Dre. I would have that album as my reference album. I'd spend a couple of hours mixing my song, trying to decide, is that bass too low? Is that the right drum sound? I'd spend ages doing this. And then when I reach a bit of a brick wall where I'm not sure where to go,

I listen to Dr. Dre on the same speakers that I'm mixing the album. And then I listen to Dr. Dre and I'm like, Ah, so that's how loud his drums are. And that's where his bass is. Ah, fuck it, he's got a synth there on the left hand side. And then I go back to my own mix. And the reference, the reference album is like a guide. Oh fuck it, he's got a synth there on the left hand side. And then I go back to my own mix. And the reference, the reference album is like a guide.

It's like a little guide that keeps you on track. You compare your work consistently to another artist who's done it perfectly. What you would consider to be perfect. And Dr. Dre's mixing is perfect. He's one of the greatest hip hop producers of all time. You can't flaw his mixing. It's very simple. It's one of the greatest hip-hop producers of all time. You can't flaw his mixing. It's very simple, it's very clear and it's very economical. There's not a lot of instruments competing. There's a small amount of instruments and they're all perfectly placed at the right volume. If you're

making a hip-hop track, a good reference song is No Diggity by Blackstreet produced by Dr. Dre because it's perfection. For hip-hop mixing that song is perfection and perfection for me what I think is can this song be very loud and you can also hear every single instrument clearly. Try it yourself. Later on go listen to any hip-hop track you want, any hip-hop track, and then afterwards listen to No Diggity and you'll hear the difference. And I don't mean the lyrics, don't mean the melody, just the presence of the song, the sound, the space that it's able to occupy in your earphones. You're listening to two songs with the same set of earphones and one of them just stands out. Dr. Dre is mixing. It's a bit like a clear frosty morning. Everything is clear,

intense, very detailed. There's no moisture in the air to obscure the sky. The sky is perfectly blue. The sky on a still frosty morning is the best sky you've ever seen. It's the archetypal blue sky. You won't get distracted by a cloud. There's no wind to rustle the leaves. Everything is still and perfect and detailed. A cold, dry, frosty morning with a clear sky contains no visual noise and that's why those mornings are so aesthetically pleasing. That's why they feel incredible to walk around in and to be present in. The landscape is intense and detailed and Dr. Dre's mixing is like that. Everything is incredibly loud. Drums, bass, guitars, synth, but also incredibly clear. And that's unbelievably difficult to do. Another example is the song Let

Me Blow Your Mind by Eve, also produced by Dr. Dre. Mixing and production, perfection. And if you're making a hip hop track and you play either of those Dr. Dre songs on the same set of speakers that you're mixing your song on, if your song doesn't slap the way that song slaps, then you need to go back and work on your mix until your song is sounding approximately as good as your reference track. So your reference track in the art, in the art of production, it's your guide. It's what keeps you on track. Even when you're working on something day in, day out for months, your reference track, it gives you a goal and a purpose. If I was producing rock music that has heavy guitars, I'd use the album Power Age by ACDC. If I was mixing house music, dance music,

I'm going to use the album Discovery by Daft Punk. Like for years and years. Back in the days when people used to buy hi-fis. Before we used to listen to all our music on earphones. When people used to buy hi-fis. Often people would purchase an album called The Nightfly by Donald Fagan because it was considered to be so perfectly mixed that it was a wonderful album to use to test your speakers with.

So if you're making any piece of art, it's always good to have a reference. And writing is no different. So for this short story that I'm going to read you out, The Poutine Maker, which took me about three or four months to write, my reference track was Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is an American writer from the early 20th century and his writing is a bit like Dr. Dre's mixing. Very simple, very clear, very economical. By all accounts as well, they're both bad men, misogynists. Dr. Dre beat up a woman and it's often levelled against Hemingway that he didn't write his female characters with any sufficient level of depth. But the technical aesthetics of both their work,

the craft of it, is pretty high standard. So I want to speak briefly about Ernest Hemingway's writing and how I used his writing as a reference track during the three or four months of writing this short story that I'm about to read, The Poutine Maker. So first off I have a hot take. I see a connection between the Eiffel Tower and the writing of Ernest Hemingway. I know that sounds mad but bear with me. and the writing of Ernest Hemingway. I know that sounds mad but bear with me. You know the Eiffel Tower, one of the most famous monuments in the world in Paris. Everybody knows the Eiffel Tower. We take the Eiffel Tower for granted now. It's become meaningless. It's tourist fodder. But the Eiffel Tower changed art massively. So 1889 and this is the wonder and beauty of art because you have to use

all your empathy and imagination to envision what I'm going to describe here. In 1889 there was a poverty of visual information. You didn't have loads of magazines, loads of newspapers. Photographs existed but they were shit. There was no video, there was no TV screens. This didn't exist in 1889. In 1889 if you lived in the city of Paris, all you knew was everything you literally saw with your eyes on the ground. Now if I said to you now, can you imagine Paris from the sky? What does Paris look like from an airplane? Within two seconds, less, you immediately have a visual image in your head. You know what Paris looks like from the sky. You've seen it. You've seen videos of it. You've seen images of it. You've gone on Google Maps.

In 1889, to say to somebody, think of a bird's eye view, they would have to imagine it. No one had seen the world from that high up. Maybe a couple of people had if they were lucky enough to get on a hot air balloon but the average person had no idea what a city looked like. The city that they live in had no idea what the city they lived in looked like from very high up. You couldn't get on an airplane, there was no skyscrapers. When the Eiffel Tower was built in Paris in 1889, for the first time, regular people, everybody, could go to the top of the Eiffel Tower, hundreds of feet in the sky, and they could see what their city looked like from high up from a bird's eye view. Can you imagine how mind-blowing that was? To have no photographs, no videos, nothing. For the first

time ever you were seeing your city from hundreds of feet in the sky looking down as if you're a bird. It changed the way people saw things. It changed the way people thought about seeing. All of a sudden, Paris, where you've lived your whole life, it's not roads and alleyways that you're intimate with. Now everything is tiny and underneath you and you can see beyond Paris and you can see that all the streets are these little cross hatches and squares and it's Paris and there's fuck loads of artists and painters really important painters living in Paris and when artists went to the top of the Eiffel Tower it changed how they thought about seeing you have to

remember too by 1890 photography was a thing and photography was threatening art. What's the point in a portrait? What's the point in a landscape when you have a machine that can take a photograph? By the 1890s you had painters, the impressionists. I've done podcasts on the impressionists. Painters like Claude Monet and when the impressionists were in painting a landscape, painting trees and forests or whatever the fuck, when Impressionists were painting, they weren't just painting what they saw, they were painting what they felt also. They were doing an impression of the environment in front of them because a camera couldn't do that. So there was a painter at the time in Paris called Paul Cézanne, one of the most important painters of all time.

And Paul Cézanne's paintings changed radically the year after the Eiffel Tower was built. Paul Cézanne, it could be said, invented abstract art. Most likely because seeing Paris from up above the Eiffel Tower completely radically changed how he thought about seeing. He completely abandoned conventions in painting, such as perspective. Perspective is very important. That was like a golden rule within academic art. If you're painting a forest, then the trees in the background that are far away, they have to be smaller. And that's perspective. From 1890 onwards, Paul Cézanne said, fuck that.

He started painting trees, but everything was fractured. The sky, which was supposed to be in the background, appeared to be closer than the trees. I'll include an image of the painting on your phone screens there for this podcast episode so you can see the painting I'm speaking about. But he painted a tree overlooking a mountain and there's no sense of depth. The tree, the sky, the mountain, the fields, they're broken into simple fractured squares. And there's no sense of distance or perspective. And this was quite radical. More than quite radical. This was insanity.

People thought he'd gone mad. They thought he was painting things wrong. They thought he was making bad art. But what he was doing was, I'm not painting what I see anymore. My paintings ask questions about how we see. Because I was up in the Eiffel Tower. And I tell you what lads.

I saw the city from the bird's eye view. And it's fucking mad. So I have to change how I think about seeing. Now my art is about seeing. It's not about depicting what I see. The birth of abstract art. No longer painting a realistic depiction of what's in front of you, but instead using shapes, colours, forms, gestural marks to fuck with your head,

to fuck with your head. How do we include emotions in this painting? How do we incorporate the feeling of movement in this painting? How do we incorporate the passage of time on a 2D surface? And this then led to Cubism, which is Picasso and George Braque. I explored this in great detail in a podcast called The Linear Understanding of Time in European Art from June 2022, if you want to go back and listen to that. So basically, Paul Cézanne, 1890, went to the top of the Eiffel Tower, said, fucking hell, this is mad, and then started to paint paintings that were about how we see things and invented abstract art. He died in 1906. In the 1920s, the American writer, Ernest Hemingway, was living in Paris. He hadn't quite found his voice as a writer

yet. He'd been a journalist for a while. But one day, Ernest Hemingway went to a gallery in Paris and saw the paintings of Paul Cézanne for the first time. He saw Paul Cézanne's paintings of trees and a mountain. He noticed how the painting didn't have perspective. He noticed how his eye wasn't drawn to one central point. He noticed how the trees, the sky, the mountains, the grass were presented in parts of equal importance. He noticed how background details such as the sky which is supposed to be in the distance, was actually closer than the foreground, such as the trees. And this changed how Ernest Hemingway thought about writing. He started to think, what if I could write stories that don't necessarily have a plot? What if when

I write, I focus in on lots and lots of tiny, tiny details, slow observations, really simple details. And if I do this, the plot or the meaning of the story doesn't necessarily happen on the page, but it happens within the mind and feelings of the reader. Hemingway called this the iceberg theory, because with an iceberg, what we see is just the tip. We see the tip of the iceberg. But the huge body, the mass of the iceberg, that's way below the surface and we don't see it, but we know it's there. So Hemingway reckoned, like a Cezanne painting, fuck plot, fuck perspective, fuck narrative. Slow, med meditative meticulous details show don't tell plot emotions themes these things will bubble up in the subtext the story will occur in the mind and emotions of

the reader and what you get from that and this is what I adore about Hemingway's writing, and this is what I strive for in a short story when I write one, you want to walk away from a short story the way you would a weird dream that you just had. You might have a mad dream and wake up, and then two days later you're thinking of the dream, trying to figure out what it was about, rather than being able to close the book and say, oh, what a lovely story, what a happy ending. You're left with internal questions weeks or months later. And Hemingway's writing, after he saw Cezanne, does that. So Ernest Hemingway was, he was my reference track for this short story that I'm going to read out. He was my reference track for this short story

that I'm going to read out he was my reference track he was my Dr. Dre my guide to keep me focused and that's how it that also that's how I connect

the Eiffel Tower with the writing of Ernest Hemingway before I get into the story I'm going to do a little ocarina pause I don't have an ocarina but I have a cabasa which is a lovely little a little ocarina pause. I don't have an ocarina, but I have a cabasa, which is a lovely little, a little Latin shaker.

And I'm going to shake this, and you're going to hear an advert for something. Beautiful sound off this. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com on april 5th you must be very careful margaret

it's a girl witness the birth bad things will start to happen evil things of evil it's all you know don't the first omen i I believe girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year.

It's not real, it's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The first omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Oh, I just hit the microphone. My apologies. That was the shake or pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment,

entertainment, enjoyment, curiosity, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I put in. Because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I feed myself. It's how I rent out this office. It's how I have the means to fail so that I can be a full-time artist. If you met me in real life, would you buy me a pint or a cup of coffee? Well, you can on Patreon. Because that's all I'm looking for. The price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it. That keeps me going. If you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. Listen to the podcast for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living.

It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. Also, it means I'm not beholden to advertisers. Each week, I make a podcast about what I genuinely want to make a podcast about. I get to genuinely explore curiosity. Couple of gigs, couple of live podcasts coming up. Next Monday and Tuesday, the 22nd and 23rd, I am

in Vicar Street in Dublin and I cannot wait. I usually don't announce guests in advance but on Tuesday the 23rd in Vicar Street I'm going to be speaking with Rory O'Neill, Panty Bliss, the Queen of Ireland.

Rory Panty Bliss, the Queen of Ireland. Rory Panty is a legendary Irish drag queen, gay rights activist, deeply interesting, intelligent, compassionate person, and an artist who has lived through a lot of history and has a lot to say. And we've been meaning to chat on the podcast for years, but I've never gotten around to it. So I can't fucking wait for next Tuesday the 23rd in Vicar Street. I'm going to be chatting with Panty Bliss. I cannot wait. There's only a few tickets left for that,

but you don't want to miss that one. And my guest on Monday the 22nd, I'm going to keep that a secret. I think Monday might actually be sold out. I'm not sure. There could be a few tickets left. And then February the 6th, I'm over in Oslo in Norway. Come along to that live podcast in Norway. That's going to be amazing. Then I'm in Berlin on the 8th and the 9th. There's only tickets left for the 9th. Tuesday the 20th of February, tickets left for the 9th. Tuesday the 20th of February, I'm up in Derry. Friday the 23rd of February, I'm in Killarney in the Einach. March the 7th and the 8th, I'm doing two tiny little gigs, little intimate live podcasts down in Ballycotton in Cork in Sea Church because I love

the fucking venue. And then a big giant tour of England, Scotland and Wales in April. I'm in Newcastle, Glasgow, Nottingham, Cardiff, Brighton, Cambridge, Bristol and my biggest gig yet on the 1st of May. Biggest ever gig. Hammersmith Apollo in London. Come along to those. I haven't gigged in about two months so I'm really looking forward to being back on the road, meeting people, chatting. So now I'm going to read you this short story, The Pudgine Maker, from my book Topographia Ibernica. And like I said, I love writing short stories because it's like making an album. You know, this story that I'm about to read, very much influenced by Hemingway. But then I have other stories in the book. And it's Virginia Woolf is the influence.

And something about that process feels very musical to me. This story, it's set in Ireland in 1890. The year that the Eiffel Tower was built. That's just in there for my own kicks and enjoyment. It's a story, it's a slow meditative story about a man and his daughter and this man makes poutine. Poutine is moonshine if you're not from Ireland. I did huge amounts of research while writing this story. Very, very enjoyable part of the process was the amount of research I did. Research into

the folklore of poutine making and the superstitious pagan beliefs that poutine makers had. I went into ducas.ie, which is the National Folklore Collection, and got old recipes of poutine from the 1800s. I loved writing this story. If you're not into short fiction, that's grand. You can go listen to another episode. This story is an hour long, but I would suggest listen to it in its entirety. Go for a nice walk or go for a cup of coffee. Set aside the time to listen to the entire story in one go. I don't have any major content warnings. to the entire story in one go. I don't have any major content warnings.

What I will say, and this doesn't spoil anything, there's no spoilers, plot spoilers in this, but parts of the story deal with themes of infant mortality. So just to give you a heads up if that's quite heavy for you. And just a little disclaimer,

I'm not comparing myself to Ernest Hemingway or Suzanne or Dr. Dre or Virginia Woolf or anyone like that I adore art I fucking love art and I worship at the altar of great art and great art for me is anything

that makes me want to try and create all I can be is the best version of me I can only make the best art that I can make having influences that's the joy and fun of the process I can only make the best art that I can make. Having influences, that's the joy and fun of the process. I love that. Having an idea and saying, what would happen if I tried this idea like Hemingway? How would that turn out? What would that be like to do? I'm not comparing myself

to these artists. Also, I composed a soundtrack. I composed a soundtrack, a synth soundtrack like Blade Runner for this story. Because why the fuck not? Have a story set in 1890 in Ireland with a Blade Runner soundtrack. Why the fuck not? Let's play tennis with a Harley. Let's put a banjo in the reggae song. Alright,

this is the Puccine Maker. The Puccine Maker. The ochre kernels of barley sifted through his callous fingers, scarred from seasonal blisters. The grains had been soaking in the bloated bags for two days and two nights, woken by the silver water of the river. The sturdy odour of cereal hung in the earth of the hut. Tiny translucent hairs were sprouting from the base of each river. The sturdy order of cereal hung in the earth of the hut. Tiny translucent hairs were sprouting from the base of each kernel. They looked like worms, the way they pushed off the slimy husk of the seed. There must have been ten thousand of them in his four sacks. He picked one kernel and held it between his index finger and thumb in a pincer.

and held it between his index finger and thumb in a pincer. As he squeezed it, he fixed a squint on the white paste that emerged from the bran. It stuck to his skin. He rubbed it between the tips of his fingers and pinched at the gummy resistance of it. There was a chalkiness that he felt in his back teeth. It was the malt, pure starch. He thought about semen. His head flew off to an endless yellow field of barley with tall fronds tickling a low sun. The sadness and the fear entered him again because each one of these little sprouting barleys was a young life that he was cutting short. He wiped his palms clean on the front of his trousers and stepped back from the sack of malting grains. The tightness was in his chest and travelled up to his forehead and furrowed a frown that was painful. It had the bones of a headache in it.

Cat was bent over on the back floor of the hut. Her little chubby hands were playing in the dirt. She was farming balls of mud and squeezing them through her fingers. She smiled when she squeezed and then the smile faded into the soft blankness of a daydream as her eyes focused on the strings of mud that pushed through the gaps in her fist. It was a wonder and a curiosity

as if she was only now realising that she had that gaps in her fist. It was a wonder and a curiosity, as if she was only now realizing that she had that power in her hands. He stooped down in a squat and put both his hands under Kat's oxters, then stood up and brought her chest close to his chest. She produced a gentle whisper of a gasp, and whenever he'd hear it, he'd think about how small her lungs must be. He repositioned her so that her bum rested on the crook of his left forearm. His right palm supported her spine and her head was nestled perfectly under his nose. As he bent low to walk out of the hut he took deep breaths in through his nostrils, revelling in the smell of her hair and her scalp.

It was like garse flower or fresh milk or strawberry, and it trickled down into the pit of his belly and flowed around his lungs. It tingled to the edges of his toes. It shone on any bit of anxiety in his body and cleansed the feeling with terrifying love. The sad pain in his forehead subsided and moved behind his eyes in a soothing balm. Tears formed, the healing tears that he'd searched for whenever he smelled his daughter's hair. Cat's left hand reached up towards the curls of his beard, just under his chin. She fondled and pulled like she'd find something in there. She was wiping off the mud from her palm. It hurt him a little. He pressed his neck closer to her fingers. She could clean her hands on his beard all day if she liked. The air cooled the tear on

his cheek and they both gazed at the rolling bubbles of the stream. It was more of a river, but still a stream, somewhere in between. The ripples slushed over pebbles in the deeper pools of dark water. The surface reflected the sky. He watched slender brown trout reposition themselves in unison, blending into clouds of sand. They darted with the current so that he could only see them when he focused intently. He blinked and he lost them. He found them again. Blue mountains rose in the distance, watching him through the hazel trees on the other side of the stream. The mud hut was to his back,

like the den of an animal. He had built it in this spot three autumns ago by piling dense grey sods of riverbed clay between layers of willow branches, eventually forming a wall. The exact spot was chosen with incredible care. A small leafy ravine that looked like the earth had been split open with a hatchet long ago, hidden away from eyes. The water too shallow for any person to pass by on an oar boat. The hut leaned into the crevice of a limestone rock face that was just taut enough to dissipate the white smoke from his still. The roof had a chimney hole and was thatched with fresh lumps of grass and ferns as green as the natural thickets that grew around them. If any passing person was ever to look down into that

ravine, they'd have to focus intently to see the hut, but no person would ever find him. He knew that. A dusk breeze came down the water and Cat did her gasp again. The creeping chill of late autumn. He hoisted her up closer to his elbow so that her chest was nearer the warmth of his body, steadying her again with his palm. Her middle was sturdy and she could support her neck. She was almost as heavy as a bag of dry barley, but nowhere near as heavy as a bag of wet barley. The sun hid over the limestone ravine

and cast a shadow. Everything became dull as the air cooled. A cormorant landed on a rock a slight distance upstream. It was a silhouette in the fading light. It spread its two black velvety wings wide, shaking them in a slow dance, its serpent neck tapering up into a sharp beak. Cat jolted in his arms with excitement and pointed at the bird. Gak! Gak! she said. Her eyebrows raised as if they were ready to jump off her forehead. A look of new surprise and amazement took over her face. Gak! Gak! pointing more at the cormorant, like she could reach over and touch it. The terror and tightness returned to his chest. He felt that they were being monitored. He quickly turned his shoulders to the water,

retreating inside the hut with Cat firmly in his arms. She squirmed to look back at the bird. The Puchene hut was smaller than their stone cottage over the hill, but there was enough space for him to stand upright in the centre. The mud walls made the whole place smell like being buried alive. It was very dark. A turf fire pit in the centre gave off a faint orange glow about as bright as two candles. He sat Cat on a bed of straw and fed her a gluey meal of barley porridge and smoked dried trout in a wooden bowl. The bowl rested in between her thighs. She ate with her hands and her little face took on a studious look when she savoured the food. He tipped water against her lips from his tin cup and her fingers stained the sides with gruel. He basked in her delight. A pride filled his belly when he

recognized that something he had prepared could bring her such pleasure and vitality. She paused between bites and looked at him with an urgency. Gak, Gak, she'd say in an excited pitch. He smiled back at her, saying yes, yes, not understanding what she was trying to say, but truly believing that it was very important to her, whatever it was. He didn't eat. Pitch darkness came outside, and he knew she'd be getting tired and cranky soon. He set to work on the soaked barley. He had crocheted a robust drying rack, woven in a teepee shape, from bendy branches of blackened willow that had been smoke-hardened over the years. It could hold significant weight, despite its spindly appearance. It was taller than him and was situated over the glowing embers of peat turf.

It reached up so that the top was just under the chimney hole in the roof. up so that the top was just under the chimney hole in the roof. He settled the barley sack on the bottom tier of the rack which was interlaced in a hatched pattern. Using his knife he cut a careful slit down the centre of the coarse bag. He pulled the hessian apart. All the barley swooshed in a triangle pile on the splayed sack. The white spouts of each grain caught the glowing light in the dark and stared up at him like red eyes in a triangle pile on the splayed sack. The white spouts of each grain caught the glowing light in the dark and stared up at him like red eyes in a forest. This made him pause for a bit. Cat was playing with her empty wooden bowl behind him and making little groans of frustration. A few kernels rolled towards her and she crawled forward with a curious hand unfurled.

her and she crawled forward with a curious hand unfurled. He swept them away with his palm before she could put them in her mouth. He quickly got back to work, spreading the barley out evenly on the fabric with his palms. He repeated this four times on each shelf of the drying rack so the gentle heat of the peat fire could rise up through the striating layers of grain and draw the moisture out. This would stop the seeds from germinating and complete the malting process. It would take all night to do this. He arranged straw on the bare mud floor beside the rack. On a strip of hessian, he placed a smoked trout and a small tin cup of water. Next to this were several sods

of fresh turf and a set of iron tongs. The turf was well dried. He dug it himself from the bog of skulls at the feet of the Blue Mountains. It would produce hardly any smoke, nor would it impart too strong a peat taste on the barley malt. He sat down with his shoulders against the natural limestone wall at the back of the hut. It was cold, but his feet reached the rim of the fire. He rehearsed picking up a piece of turf with the tongs and dropping it in the fire, making sure his arm had enough of a span to do this without needing to get up from where he lay. When he was satisfied that everything was in its place, he called to Cat. She was rubbing her eye with her fist. He said, night-night, and she

understood this and crawled towards him as best she could. He reached out and laid her whole body on his chest. He relished the warmth of her back. She slumped into him, her head under his chin and her feet reaching down to the top of his thighs. He wrapped Kat in a red blanket made from wool, tight and cozy, up to the top of her belly so that she could still move her arms. She looked up towards the chimney hole, but the smoke escaped. His lips pressed against the back of her head and he noticed the warming fog of his own breath. He admired the perfect softness of the left side of her face. His two hands secured her in place. She began to wail. She reached behind her head and tugged at the curls that finished on

the back of her neck. She pulled at the hairs of his beard. He knew this meant that she was very tired and needed help falling asleep. When Cat would cry in the hut, a great panic would consume him. He worried that she might feel his heart pounding against her back and then bawl through the night. He told himself that the thick mud sods in the walls would dampen the sound of her cries. He told himself that the rushing of the stream outside would overpower the noise she made. He could deal with a human hearing her, but dusk was when the fairies listened out for babies. He inhaled the perfume of her scalp through his nostrils. His heart lulled in his chest. He rocked his torso and sang a whispered lullaby until her wailing became a

quieter, rhythmic groan that matched the tempo of his movement. When she drifted off, he placed the warm iron tongs between his hand and her chest to protect from the fairy's magic and to help transport Cat into a deep sleep. He listened to the pace of her breath, scrunching the muscles around his eyes to hone in on the sound. There was always a ringing in his ears, like distant bells. He couldn't remember how long he'd lived with the bells in his head. He'd only noticed them when Cat was a few weeks old, and a tiny breath was something he needed to hear. As the air from her nose flowed heavy and slow he cautiously took the iron tongs from her chest and placed a fresh sod of turf on the embers. He watched the orange glow creep and singe

the fibres. Clean heat wobbled the air like worn glass and distorted the yellow barley. He wondered if she was old enough to have dreams yet. The sound of water rippled outside. When Cat slept, he had the misfortune of being alone with his thoughts. How the fairies had taken her brother in the night and replaced him with a changeling. They come for the baby boys. Intrusive images nailed themselves to his head. The month-old baby stiffened the straw cot on that morning. A frozen face like a little apple made out of candle wax. No priest would bless the dead child. You can't bury a changeling in a graveyard. His two hands thatching his son's body into the roof of the cottage with an iron horseshoe for protection. Was it his son in the ceiling or the

fairy child they left in his place? The fairies had taken Cat's mother too. In a fever the week after Cat was born, in the daytime he kept his hands busy to stop himself from thinking about his wife and son. He couldn't even say their names, and he knew with utter certainty that it was all his fault. He had been targeted by the fairies because of what he did with the barley and the still. Every drop of spirit stolen from a grain belongs to the other world. They'll take their reparations. He was haunted by the sound of them coming for Cat in the tiny bells they put in his head. Cat was born a boy, but he's raising her as a girl. He'll grow her hair out long and put her in dresses when she's older, all to trick the fairies.

And that stayed locked in his mind with the visions of her dead mother and brother. She was cat. She was nothing other than cat. But he knew that cormorant had its eye on her when it did the dance on the stream. That was no cormorant. His heart got loud again and the chilled sweat bloomed out of the pores on his forehead. He felt the powerful urge to get up and walk it off. Cat blubbered and irritated, groaned and exhaled, as if her body sensed his intentions. She was a ball of heat on his chest. He moved his left hand up slightly so that it rested under hers. Her hot palm gripped his finger from the depths of her sleep, and he was frightened by how much he loved her.

The barley made crackling noises. He dipped his other hand in the tin cup and flicked water on the burning turf. It hissed, and white smoke swirled up and out the roof. He hoped that it wasn't seen in the sky. The song of a thrush brightened the ravine. Perfect beams of blue light penetrated every fault in the mud and shunned through the smoke of the hut. Cat awoke with a groggy cry. She had relieved herself in her sleep. He cleaned her off and quickly washed his soiled shirt in the stream. Beside him, she swept at grass with her hands and tried to place some in her mouth. Wisps of dawn fog curled over the surface of the water. He focused on them from

his knees, and in that small moment, he was not consumed by worry or guilt. He moved her to his lap. They ate porridge and buttermilk warmed in the ash of the sods. The barley kernels were bone dry from the night. The malt was complete. He sniffed them in his palm. The sweetness of cereal climbed up the hairs of his nostrils and finished with the smoggy violence of peat his thoughts could taste their spirits in the arse of his throat

they would make a fine pochine Cat's blanket was stretched over the grass by the edge of the stream she had only learned to crawl a month ago but stayed within the warmth of the woolen surface. He settled two oak barrels in front of the hut, aged and coopered with rusted iron bands. They'd been buried nearby when he did this last year. All his equipment was hidden and buried

near the ravine, with the exception of the copper worm. He arranged the barrels so that he could see Cat while he was working. Their rims reached his thighs. He emptied the malted barley into both of the barrels. White powder kicked up from the starch of the grain and chalked his beard. Squatting with a stable back, he lugged a tin milk churn onto a three-legged grate and set it there. He lowered the tan ceramic jug into the stream with both hands and sluiced it into the churn until it was full of water. A fire of tarp and sticks was lit under the base. Flames blackened the bottom. The stream carried a breeze that flumed the smoke into the hazel trees. The leaves ate the plumes. They didn't slither above the ravine. Cat played with her bowl

and paused when damp wood popped in the fire. It's okay, he said to her. As he waited for the water to boil, a white butterfly jittered over the grass. It landed on the red fabric of Cat's woolen blanket, confusing it for a flower. Slow movements, fanning its wings with a delicate grace that caught the sunlight and glinted. Cat reached for the butterfly. Gak, she said. She planted her palm down on its body and pressed it against the wool. Her face with a daydream gaze. He looked up from the bubbles of the heating churn and screamed at

her. No. She recoiled and began to cry. He had never shouted at her like that before. It was the same guttural cry she made the time she accidentally burned her hand on a kettle. He rushed to her side and picked her up, rocking her and kissing her forehead. Her face was pink and swollen with tears as she wailed through the ravine. Bards flew from a hazel, spit dripped from her mouth and her few small teeth were visible. I'm sorry. Shh, shh, he said. I'm so sorry. Her crying faded into staggered anxious gasps, which were somehow more painful to him than balls. He rubbed his cheek against her tears and wished that he could put them back into her eyes. They were diamonds to him. The morning had been peaceful and now he had ruined it. He hated this

world where she experienced heart and terror. He despised himself for being the source of it. The butterfly was still alive. He peered down and watched it unfold its snowy wings against the scarlet blanket. Cat's hand on the soft wool had not been powerful enough to injure it. After a few seconds it fluttered off again over the stream. He had Cat close in his two arms. He told himself that it was just a white butterfly, even though he knew what they say about white butterflies, but it was definitely just a harmless butterfly. He tried desperately not to entertain the fear that the butterfly was the soul of her dead brother who had come back from the fairy world to warn them. Steam puffed from the boiling water of the churn. He wanted to hold her to his body

all day but the job wouldn't wait. He took a baton to the malted grains that rested in the wooden barrels and crushed them under the cudgel, beating the wood like a drum. He sung the song his mother sang when he'd watched her do the same. The chaff separated under the battering until a coarse raggedy yellow meal remained. He poured boiling water from the churn and scalded it. He did this until the barrels were almost full and the oak was warm to the touch. The kernels floated up and frotted at the surface, releasing the stodge from their endosperms. With two fists around the long wooden batten, he stirred the mixture anticlockclockwise in a gentle vortex. The swirling grains were hypnotic, and they released him from his ever-present sensation of panic. Plumes of steam

sweated up the hairs of his forearms and condensed in dripping beads on his face. The mixture resembled the grey porridge that they ate. The barley bloomed in the scald, and the dead grains diffused their full bouquet. His seasoned nose took in hazelnuts rolled in burning sugar, goat's cream about to sour, a new-turned sod of earth on bruised grass, stained with the dungy viscera of a lamb's birth, the stolen nectar of a foxglove, toasted bread, the screams of a widow after a battle, a thousand yards of peat bog under thunder and the sharp zest of vomit. Every seed was a unique life with a story and an ancestry, and he had no business translating these ghosts into a bottle for a human to comprehend with their lips. He released heavy black treacle from

a ceramic pot, and it folded on the meniscus and sunk below the liquid to the bottom of the barrels. He agitated the grey wash and the sweetener stained its sienna. From his waistcoat pocket he produced the yeast wrapped in butter paper, a live culture that might be three hundred years old and passed down from distiller to distiller, yellow and doughy with a sickly essence. It would devour the barley starch and treacle to excrete them as heady alcohol. He scraped the yeast into the barrels and covered them with their lids, leaving enough space at the top for the bubbles of the wash to burp. He draped the wood in an olive drab wax tarp that could stand a bit of rain if it came.

He would leave it now for a week until it awoke for the still. He wrapped Cat to his chest with their few important belongings in a sack on his back, performing the necessary precautions of subterfuge around the hut before they left. necessary precautions of subterfuge around the hut before they left. The olive tarp of the barrels was staggered with some ferns to break up their shape. The milk churn and any other instruments were placed back in the hut with the opening shut. From her bundle on his midriff, Cat reached out helpful hands at every object he grabbed and said gack and squealed. Any trace of a fire pit near the stream was dug up with the heel of his boot and covered in grass. They exited the ravine by the end of the stream where it tapered off into a wider river. Up the slant of a mossy hill

and through the heather of the moor until they found the grey-shaled boarine. The blue mountain stood watch like impartial deities. He began the trek back to their cottage. It was midday and Cat was stirring in the bundle under his chin. There was nothing strange about a man and his daughter travelling home on the moor. He stood taller on the path than he had done in the ravine. One arm swung and the other supported Cat's back. The odd bit of sun warmed the top of his head. They passed a raggedy tent on wooden poles, with the look of the fabric of the barley sack about it. He couldn't tell if the people inside had no belongings or if they were transient. A man lay at the entrance in a stupor, with his face pointing up at the sky. Drunk as drunk could be, his body had sunk into the mud like the earth had no teeth and was slowly sucking him down with sloppy brown gums.

A bare-chested child of about five wore a lion cloth and was playing with a grey dog who bounced and barked. The child barked back at the dog and was indifferent to its father in the mud. He slowed his step until he wasn't moving. His shoulder pointed towards the tent with a tension of intent in his tilted neck, like he would stop to check on the man and the child. The ground off the path was marshy. He kept walking on and wondered if he had distilled the bottle that caused all of this. Cat always slept easy when his silent body produced heat and rocked her with the predictable rhythm of his pace. It was clear heather moors for acres on either side of the crumbling path. The shadow of a cloud dragged across the side of a mountain in the distance and disappeared. The rock face lit it up bright purple with the flowers of the heather. A fox emerged

from a trail ahead of him, bushy-tailed. It stopped in the centre of the road, looked at him and Cat, then moved to the other side and was gone. It was definitely just a fox. The animals didn't frighten him out here in the open. Cat was waking in the bundle when he came up the hill to his cottage. She did cranky little groans that shook off her sleep. He moved closer to the cottage and noticed a single white sheet hanging on his washing line. A worry came over him. He had not put it there. It was a message from the Gadger Mull Queen.

One white sheet on the line meant the Gadger would need the stock of poutine in one week. There must have been a wedding suddenly announced down in the village, or maybe some person was at the door of death, and there would be need of spirits at their wake, whatever it was. The Gadger had a sudden demand for drink, and it was none of his business who bought it and why. Sure, he didn't sell it. He just made it for the gadger to sell.

But a week was too soon. The malt was only put to ferment that morning. He'd have to rush the distillation and risk producing a spirit that could blind a person, or worse, kill them stone dead. If he refused, he'd be in debt to the gadger and his men, a rotten shower of thugs. There was nothing special about their cottage, but it wasn't a tent on the side of the road either. Walls of stone with a lime wash and a strong roof of thatch. It always stayed dry inside. The wood of the door was heavy and it could tell you stories about battles it had won

with February winds. There was a pine table by the fire, two chairs and a cotton mattress full of straw, a dresser that was taller than him. Cat had her own cot with high sides that enveloped her and he could afford the rent of it, no fear of a bailiff around here. They had been away for a week and the stones in the wall had sucked in the cold. There were piles of wood adjacent the hearth of the fire. He lit them and the room filled up with warmth. Cat was wide-eyed and sat up on her blanket. She reached out her hand and pointed at the objects around the room like they were all friends. The wooden butter churn in the corner, the oil lamp on the table, and Cat's doll that sat on the top shelf of the wooden dresser.

She was excited and he was glad that she was home in comfort and not in the cold of the mud hut. The sky outside grew mauve. Cat fell asleep in his arms and he lay her down in her cot. He had prepared a quick dough for bread earlier. It rested in a blackened pot that was smothered in ashy coals. A smell of baking stuck to the air. The embers of the hearth glowed just enough that he could save the bit of oil in the lamp for another time. Cat's slumber was all-consuming.

She was surrounded by the familiar smell of her home. He placed an iron poker that had warmed near the fire across her chest to protect her from fairy magic in the night. Quietly, he removed a bottle of whiskey from the dresser and sat down at the wooden table. He wiped away flour and dough with the edge of his palm. The crown stamp was torn under the cork. The stamp let him know that the necessary taxes had been paid and that this was a regulated and legal bottle of alcohol. He'd spent a fair bit on this bottle last year. He poured a small measure into a cup and topped it up a quarter way with water. The bottle went back into the dresser. The whiskey was the colour of strong tea. He lifted it under his nose and marvelled at the aroma of butter and bubbling sugar.

The alcohol odour was pure, with no fruity trace of the dreaded methanol. The sip he took was miserly, just enough to dance around his mouth and burn his throat. He could make a spirit as good as this if he had the equipment and the time to age it in the barrels, without fear of them being dug out of the bog by the revenue men. And it wasn't his fault either, that the safe stuff was beyond the means of the ordinary people of the countryside. He was only meeting a demand. If he didn't do it, someone else would. He inserted his index finger in a remnant of itinerant bread dough

that rested on the wooden table. It was puffy and raw from the yeast. The dough sucked the tip of his finger down and smothered it in its beige sludge. The harsh lick of winter was almost in the air. He watched Cat sleep and gulped the last of the cup of whiskey. He clenched his jaw in anger, grinding so hard that he felt the sugar in the drink between his back teeth. He thought about the money he'd earned from the gadger for a full delivery of poutine,

and he inventoried the next eight months in his head. The rent paid to the landlord, six bags of flour, charns of milk, plenty of oats, coal, the few spuds in the ground outside the door. He could buy a young pig and fatten it come November, and himself and Cat would have salted bacon hung from the rafters until May. His eyes moved up to the rafter where he envisioned the hanging pig. To the right was the spot where he'd patched his baby son's body into the straw of the roof. Tiny porcelain bones now, he supposed, encircled by the iron protection of the horseshoe.

Or maybe he was still there the way he found him that morning, because changelings don't rot. Little fleshy dolls, made as a joke in the other world, from materials he can't even fathom. And what was the point of even thinking about it anyway? Because he'd never dare check to find out. He saw the sour head on the priest who refused to bless the stiff little body in the cot. Did the priest refuse to bless the dead boy because it was a fairy child? Or was it a cruel human punishment for how the boy's father paid the rent? At least the fairies would never look down at you. If you took from them, they took something back and that was that.

He moved his left foot to his heel and slid off the boat on the other foot. The leather made a squeaking sound against his skin. He reached down and took off the right boot with his hand. He got up from the wooden chair with his two hands on the table so that it didn't scrape against the stone floor. He crept over to Kat as she lay in the cot, negotiating with the smack of his bare soles on the stone. Cartilage of bone cracked in his knees and betrayed his attempt at silence. He bent and kissed her forehead, reassured by the heat of her skin on his lips. She had the look of her mother from this angle. He listened for the

breath from her nose, but the bells in his head were too loud from thinking about the priest. nose but the bells in his head were too loud from thinking about the priest. When she gets old enough, maybe five or six, she'll start asking questions about whether she's a boy or a girl. He will deal with it then. It'll be up to her then. The fairies will have moved on if they can just keep it going till then. He let five days pass in the warmth and dryness of their cottage. His head was away in the rising bubbles of the barrels in the ravine. On the sixth day the fizz of the ferment sang to him across the moors and called out for his intervention. From the rafter he took down the worm of the still and held it aloft in his fists like a curly sword. The worm was a winding brushed copper tube, a rose-orange

tangle of metal that glimmered like the inside of an oyster shell around the bends of its coils. The open ends crusted turquoise in a verdigris rust. It had been hammered out by a rare craftsman of the ditch and then blessed by a fairy doctor in a holy well. The worm was the tunnel through which he saw life in the other world and stole it. It was a pink-eyed all-white badger and the collarbone of a saint. Not a hope would he risk stowing it in the mud-put gene hut with the rest of his instruments. He circled the worm at his feet and stood back admiring it. Cat entertained herself on the floor with a strand of yellow straw, chewing it and relieving the soreness of her teething gums.

chewing it and relieving the soreness of her teething gums. On the stone slabs, he rested the worm on a yard of cloth and wrapped the coils tenderly. In that brief moment, there was something in front of his eyes that he worshipped as much as his daughter. Cat watched him coddle the copper worm with about as much patience as an infant could muster. He packed it with the straw and twine so that it looked like a square bale on his back. He then took Cat in his arms and secured her in the bundle under his chin. There was no space on his back, so he hung a compact lamb's leather pouch from Cat's waist, placing in this some bread, stewed apples and cheese, but not so much that it would burden her. From the threshold, his eyes scanned back over the room. He tapped an iron

key off the wood of the door and said to himself in a whisper, You've put out the fire. You've packed everything. You've put out the fire. You've packed everything. You've put out the fire. You've packed everything. He repeated this four times and turned back in the threshold twice to make sure that he had put out the fire and packed everything. Cat began to whimper and struggle in the bundle. She reached up towards her doll on the dresser. The doll was wooden and had a polished ceramic face. Its timber ribs were covered in a bright blue dress with a head of hair that had curled like hanging sausages. He was reluctant to bring it with them to the Pudgene hut

in case it got damaged or dirty. He wasn't made of new dolls. But now the cat had pointed at it, he couldn't risk her crying all the way back to the ravine and drawing attention to them. He handed her the doll and she said, ah, and hissed out smiles, tugging at the doll's hair and soothing herself. He locked the door of their home. They exited the cottage at dusk and cut across the field to the route that led to the ravine. He fed cat marsels from his fingers as they moved. She ate lumps of cheese and stewed apple and fell asleep in the bundle with her legs dangling and

wrapping off his thighs. He retrieved the doll from the clutch of her sleeping hands and tucked it inside the leather pouch around her waist. An accusatory moon saucered up in the stars and it lit the wild path with a paleness that turned shapes into faces. It wasn't great for his imagination. it wasn't great for his imagination. The terror returned in the sweat under his arms. Slumbering Cat dragged down his chest. Crossing the moor he stooped from the weight of the warm and the moonlight

cut him a beastly side profile. The mountains and their heather were only a rumour in the blackness. He thought he saw a fairy light flicker up over the bogs and disappear again. He heard the crunch of the shale-bow ream under his feet. He listened to bats swoop over the midges that bit at the grease of his scalp. The tent with the drunk man and the barking child was gone or swallowed by mud. Catching sight of Cat's white breath in a lunar beam, he tasted the damp and the chill in the air. The chatter of the stream was close. He held her two feet in his

palms as they negotiated the hill down the ravine and entered the mud hut for the night. He didn't sleep and she did. He set to work at the first glimmer of dawn. Cat ate porridge from the wooden bowl. It stuck to her fingers and got in her hair. He gently plucked the goop from the strands before it dried and nestled her on her red blanket with the doll. Peeling off the drab tarp, he scored the knife tip under the lid of the first barrel

and sensed the new pressure that was not there when he sealed it a week ago. With the weight of his wrist on the knife handle, he pried the wooden lid open and felt the pop. He watched vapour emerge against the trees in the foreground, and the barrel fizzed with enthusiasm. Bubbles rose up in the caramel liquid and frothed a yellow scum at the top that reminded him of an elderly malicious river. The piquant hammer of alcohol met his nose. He dipped a glass in the barrel and held it to the sky. The morning sun shot through the bubbles and cast an all-born stained window shadow over his eye. He put it to his lips. The excited ghosts of barley kernels scarpered around the purgatory of his tongue and he spat them out on a dock leaf.

He let the air of the bog enter his mouth and noted the uncorrupted fermentation of the brew. On the grass by the stream, he blended coarse flour and water in a bowl and kneaded it into a fist-sized ball of dough. It was speckled and rough. He left it to breathe. He kept one eye on Cat and ran to pick her up when she crawled from her blanket. Flat rocks were lifted from the bed of the stream. He arranged them in two piles near the edge of the water, one taller than the other. The taller pile had a chamber in the middle. It was a fire pit. Sods of turf and sticks were placed in the chamber. He walked towards the hut to quickly retrieve the components of the poutine still. In the brightness of the sun, he detected footprints in the mud around the entrance

of the hut. They were impressions of a cloven hoof, like those of a goat. He sensed terrible burning fright in the pit of his stomach and it went up into his head where his thoughts were and began to control them in a very cruel way. What if they were the footsteps of a devil or a puka who had come to find Kat while they had slept inside during the night? What if it was watching them now? What if it had made its mind up and there was nothing he could do to stop what was going to happen to her? He turned to look at Cat. She stared up at his eyes and stopped playing with the doll. He scanned the trees and the water for danger. They all blurred into one threatening

visage. His breath was up in his throat and he felt like he was dying. He hoisted Cat up and tried to protect as much of her body with his arms as he could. A panicked right hand grasped at her shoulder and then clasped her two feet. It was cold. Cat's bottom lip quivered and her face became pink. His heart hammered at the bones of her chest. He considered abandoning the entire distillation process there and then. She cried, he kissed her forehead and the smell of her hair helped him to slow his breathing down. He listened to the air swoosh through the hazel trees.

Down the ravine in the distance at the end of the stream he could now see a red deer fawn among the trunks of the trees. he could now see a red deer fawn among the trunks of the trees, beautiful and peaceful, with a coat like flower flicked on a toasted loaf, its head grazing the earth. Calmer now, he traced the cloven footprints from the hut entrance with his eyeline and they led in the direction of the deer. With Cat hunkered against his ribs, he entered the hut and saw the leftover piles of malted barley had been disturbed by an animal's muzzle. He felt relief and he felt foolish. He saw himself telling the gadger about confusing a little deer for the puka fairy and how he nearly didn't distill the poutine and the coins in the gadger's hand and his dirty fingernails and his sneaky laugh. He situated Cat back down near the fire pit

outside the hut. She was still upset but he didn't have the time to console her. He rapidly retrieved the milk churn, a copper kettle, a pipe and a few dozen glass bottles that were stored in the hut. He hauled the tin milk churn onto the flat rocks of the fire pit. Using the big jug he filled it with the fermented barley brew from the wooden barrels. It fizzed and small bubbles danced up over the brim of the churn. A copper kettle with a spout was secured on top of the churn. The burnished metal was cool against his skin. He had cut out the bottom of the kettle so that it had no base. It would be the head of the still where the vapours collect. He took pinches of the coarse

dough from the bowl. At the seam where the kettle rested on the churn, he moulded the dough to create a seal. He smudged the putty with his thumb, pressing and kneading until no vapours would escape. Cat was crawling by his feet. She took twigs from the fire pit and broke them in her hands and put them back. He was afraid she might knock a churn on top of her. He moved her. On the shorter of the rock piles, he rested a wooden barrel that had a hole at its base. The coiled copper worm was lowered into the barrel. It was a perfect fit. The worm spiraled orange and metallic from the top of the barrel to the bottom and the end poked

out of the hole in a spout. watertight around the hole. A pipe connected the spout of the kettle to the top of the worm, both ends sealed with the dough. He filled the barrel with very cold water from the stream. He peered down into the clear water and watched how the submerged coil was distorted in size under the surface. He placed Cat on her blanket, which was a safe distance away from the still. A ball of dry straw nestled among the hazel twigs and turf of the fire pit. He napped lively sparks from his flint rock. They kindled the hay.

Wisps of white smoke licked out like tongues, and he blew on them. Flames came into being as if given permission from his breath. Everything crackled and popped. The turf began to burn with the tiny green flames he'd seen over the bogs in darkness. The flickers reflected in his pupils and he felt the heat on his face. Angry orange fire rose up the base of the blackened churn and the doughy seals at the seams of the metal shrank and hardened like white plaster. It was still blue early morning. He set a glass bottle directly under the warm spout at the base of the barrel. It would take at least 20 minutes before the fire started to heat the fermented wash in the still he waited. The blanket was comfortable under him. Next to

Kat, he stroked her arm. The calluses of his skin scraped off her skin and she recoiled instinctively. He experienced shame and guilt and told her that it was just a deer earlier and that there was no need for her to be as upset as she was. He sat with his legs crossed and lifted Kat so that she rested on his thighs facing him. He held her hands and doted on her, telling her in high-pitched whispers how much he loved her. She looked back at him, telling her in high-pitched whispers how much he loved her. She looked back at him, her eyes wide and affectionate, a feathery smile with soft teeth.

She stared directly into his face with an awesome glare of pure innocence and unconditional love, and when she did this he broke eye contact and felt deeply undeserving. A confusing flicker of resentment towards Cat glimmered in an untrodden part of his brain, and then he knew that he was a despicable person. The churn began to rumble with the bile inside. He stalked around the side of the gargling still. A pinhole of vapour hissed through a seam on the kettle. He thumbed dough over the orifice. The churn growled and staggered.

He poured quenching water on the fire underneath to modulate the aggression of the distillation. Squeezing his palm around the pipe that connected the kettle and the copper worm, it felt blood-warm and pulsed with the chug of the kettle and the copper worm. It felt blood warm and pulsed with the chug of the spitting brew. Alcohol vapour coursed down the submerged coil and condensed into liquid when it hit cold copper. Puccine trickled out of the turquoise lip of the spout into the glass bottle. He splashed more water on the fire. Opaque smoke wafted through the ravine and stung his eyes. The spirit spurted out until it stopped about three-quarter ways up the glass bottle.

He held it up to his eye. It was like water, clouded with a thimble of milk. Under his nose the odor attacked with an acridity that split a squirm through the middle of him and echoed back up his mouth in a gawk. He salivated. It retreated with the fruitiness of a withered brown apple. He shook a drop on the fire and it exploded in a green flame the way Puchene doesn't. The ghost of the spirit was demonised by vitriol. He would not even taste this, it was methanol, the poisonous singlings of the grain that he expected from the first run of distillation. The singlings were the property of the fairies and could only be drunk by the fairies. He held the bottle in front of his chest with inertia, as if he was considering the tradition

of throwing it over his left shoulder as an offering to them. There was no point. The fire picked up pace and he let the cloudy methanol fill the bottles. The sun was higher in the sky now. He wrapped the tin churn to hear its hollow clank. Eight bottles of milky fluid rested on the grass by the river, ready to be corked. The fire was only ashy coals. Cat was seated in his left arm and was groaning in the cranky way that implied hunger. Tears and commotion if he didn't feed her soon. After they ate a lunch, he would fill the churn up again with the wash from the barrels and begin another distillation.

He'd repeat this until he had 24 bottles of poutine ready for the gadger that night. On Cat's blanket they sat together. The water was at their feet with the mud hut behind them and the still to the left. Brown as the pebbles beneath, the trout were hidden in their forever dance with the current of the water. He watched spidery-looking flies skirting across the deeper pools of the stream. Satisfying circles rippled out when a fish surfaced the bite. The ravine had a peace in the ether and the leaves of the hazel didn't sway at all. The bread he had baked was round like a mushroom,

tanned and blackened from the hearth. The crust made a tapping noise in his hands. His fingers pulled apart the loaf in two halves and revealed the spongy innards with big creamy holes of air. It smelled like the comfort of their cottage over the moor. He pinched at the soft bread and rolled it in a ball. He inserted some cheese and handed it to Cat. She gummed at the morsel and clasped her hands, studying the food in her mouth with her serious expression. He smirked at her face in adoration. He ate too and relished the tang and resistance of the toasted crust against his teeth. He'd made a pot of black

tea on the fire-pit embers and drank it warm and tannic from the vessel it brewed in. The tea coaxed out the unctuousness of suet in the bread. He was distracted by the eight bottles of poutine that stood on the grass in the corner of his eye. The pale greyness of their fluid brought up the shame in him. If he could only have a week to let them sit and then run it through the still a second or a third time, he could purify it and make it safer to drink, ideally a month to breed in a barrel after, but even one more time through the still would nearly be enough to sort it. Maybe if he'd have thrown a few lumps of charcoal in a funnel under the spout that might have extracted some of the badness before it went in the bottle. Why didn't he think of that? His feet stretched beyond the

red blanket towards the mud of the stream bed. The heels of his boots indented in the sludge of the earth and sank a bit. He watched the mud envelope the leather. He knew the Gadger Mulk Queen wouldn't give two fucks about the colour of the drink. The Gadger would have no bother on him watering it down and cutting it with horse's piss to hide the fruity tones of the methanol. It was none of his business what the gadger did or who bought the bottles, and it was the gadger on his bed sheet who told him to rush the whole thing anyway. He gritted his teeth again and evicted bread from a mauler with his tongue. Cat had eaten well and was stroking her doll's dress and making cooing noises in a languid state of satiation. She sat up between

his legs with her back to him. His left hand was on her left shoulder and his other hand was across her chest. He raised a finger and felt the softness of her ear and the wisps of her hair. He tried to bend his chest forward to kiss the crown of her scalp, but her head was just beyond the reach of his lips. He watched the surface of the stream with intent and tried to locate the trout underneath. A quick shadow blackened a ripple and his eyes flew up. It was the cormorant flapping up above. The bird landed in a pool of the stream where the water was slower and deep, about two yards from him and Cat. It bobbed on the water with the look of a malnourished swan,

much smaller than when its wings were outstretched. The slick iridescence of its plumage scintillated like black pearls you wouldn't see on a devil's necklace. Feathers shifted shapes in front of him. The panic came up into his forehead, but he was determined not to react to this feeling after the incident with the deer. He focused on its snaky head and the tiny scythe at the end of its beak. He couldn't decide if the bird was monitoring Cat, or if that was just the way it held its head. Slowly, the cormorant arched its slender neck back, raising its beak skyward, and then sprang forward and disappeared its entire body under the water. It barely created a ripple. The eyebrows

raised on his face, and he waited for the diving cormorant to return to the surface. He was unable to tell if time was slowing down in the moment or if the cormorant was really under the water for that long. How could it stay down that long? It must have been two minutes. He became aware of his tongue in his mouth and the metallic taste of his saliva. He wondered if he controlled his tongue or if his tongue controlled itself and what was preventing him from swallowing his own tongue and choking on it. This brought on the heartbeat again. He scanned the stream,

fixing and darting his field of vision on all the possible spots where the cormorant might emerge. What type of cormorant is this at all, that it can stay down that long? Doesn't it have lungs the same as me? He heard an unmerciful splash that slapped through the quietness of the ravine in an unexpected spot of the water. The cormorant emerged, as if a hand was pushing it up underneath the surface and stabilizing it. Two black wings stretched wide with sharp feathers that dripped silver beads of river. The full span must have been the length of his leg. There was a plump,

tumescent throat thrashing in the cormorant's beak. The cormorant's eye was bright green and round like a wound. Cat was now pointing at the bird and shouting gack, gack in her high pitch. Delight and excitement on her face. The cormorant hopped onto a rock. Through the splashing and cat's shouts, he saw and heard the trout's tail thud off the rock, its mouth gaping in a steady rhythm like it was trying to drink the air. The fish was drowning in the same air that he was tasting in his mouth. The cormorant pinned the trout with the talons on its left foot and pierced its beak into the slimy skin of the creature until it stopped being alive. It celebrated the killing with a clacking noise from its throat. When Cat

shouted, the bird paused and then resumed. This terrified him to his core. Blood that was bloodier than blood oozed on the stone and diffused into the water. The cormorant pincered its beak around the fish's robust torso, muscular and firm, and then bit through it until the trout was severed in two. Cat pointed more and screamed, Gak, drawing attention to herself. In that moment, he jolted to his feet and grabbed Kat under her armpits from behind. Her doll was clasped in her hands, its hair dangled, her mouth gaped into a silent maw. She searched for a noise and then let out a mighty cry that changed in pitch as he dragged her away. He pulled her towards his chest

and ran with her into the mud hut. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, he said. Kat squirmed under his arm. In a panic, he used his free hand and raised the doll to his mouth. He gripped his front teeth around the fabric of its blue dress and pulled, revealing a sparse wooden skeleton. He situated the doll on the bed of straw where he and Cat had slept and furrowed the indentation of a miniature crib. He exited the hut backwards. Tears were tracking down her skin as he glared at the stiff dummy boy in the straw that would bide them some time with the fairies. Outside, Cat wailed through the ravine. Her muscles had tensed with fear and she stretched out her limbs in a star shape against his chest. The cormorant was still eating the trout on the rock. He shouted at the bird,

Hey, hey, look at me! Cat faced outwards, his hands under her arms. He kicked at the churn. The tin buckled down the centre and stuck on his boot. He shook it off and the contraption crumpled into a heap. He fell back on the grass but held Cat so that she didn't make contact. His toe was sore. He got up. He turned to the eight bottles of poutine with the peg of his boot and knocked them all towards the stream with frantic swipes of his legs. Some spilled out on the grass. Others plopped under the ripples of the stream. Their milky essence blended with the water and the ghosts of the barley dispersed back into the land. He was certain that the cormorant saw this.

back into the land. He was certain that the cormorant saw this. Cat was now bawling loudly. He ran into the stream and generated big splashes with his knees. Trout dispersed in all directions away from him. He held Cat high above his head and screamed an animal scream at the cormorant, a scream from the bottom of his guts where the pain lived, as if to make himself sound bigger than he was. The cormorant flew off over the hazel trees and left the bloodied trout on the rock. He turned Cat around into a hug and held her firmly and lovingly with both arms around her, hoisting her higher up to his chest than usual so that her head lay over his shoulder. Her pink, swollen face sobbed and gasped intermittently as she watched the poutine still in bits behind them. He would explain this day to her when she could understand it. No smell to follow or tracks to trace.

He waded deeper into the river until it reached his stomach and never touched her feet. They both moved with the current and blended with the flow upstream until they exited the ravine. His heart was dancing inside his ribs. Steam rose from his clothes like a horse and he stared out at the moor. He told the Blue Mountains that he would figure something else out and begged for their protection. Cat's bum nestled in his arm. His hand secured her back, with her head resting over his shoulder. She slept with the movement

and a little brown curl from her neck blurred into his vision. He told himself that he would kill or die just for one of those curls. All right, you glorious bastards, I'll catch you next week I didn't want to interrupt that synth ambiance I quite enjoy it it's very relaxing I hope you like that story I'll be back with a hot take rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation

night on saturday april 13th when the tor the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.