nellie relic

Before long, she is tearing the curious room apart at its very seams, her creative ambitions for sound driving her to pull ancient lampshades from the ceiling, peel plasterboard from the walls. Above all, a mathematician, a scientist - her cassette recorder is her implement, and she drags out both the ethereal and cerebral from the shuffle of furniture against the carpeted floor, or from the plastic snap of the lightswitch. She breathes into the microphone, plays the recording backwards, splices it with the hollow taps of the radiator tepidly issuing warmth into the little basement room. The artist will be remembered as a comet: she has learned to recreate the scorching heat of the Sahara desert just as well as the subaquatic depths of some fantastical watery abyss.

The half-buried skulls of long-dead giants, partially unearthed from the barren earth, form the basis of their shelters. As fragile as porcelain teacups are the great domes which house the local families, the curve of the orbital bones serving as convenient doorframes. While the travelling priest claims that such acts of necessity desecrate the sacred bodies of the Nephilim, the locals simply scoff and say their homes are no different from a deer skull fishing hook, or a whalebone piano key. Where were his complaints about the haddock stew he so happily lapped up? Or, indeed, the hymns reverberating through the ribs which encase the village church?