Dispatches from the Void. V.IV

Poe-CLAMATION 9½: THE CHICKENS BELONG TO ME.

🐔 Chicken Infiltration Escalates: Akela Demands Passport Check at Kitchen Door.

Mowgli Declares Literary Nation-State on Window Ledge.

This Week in Underland:

• Turkey or Bust: River and Celia are off to Marmaris for a week of sun, sand, and not thinking about visas. Celia’s Mam joins the adventure. Emotional suitcases packed. Cats unimpressed.
• Zoo Expansion Continues: Martha the Chicken has annexed the kitchen. Flat Face refuses to leave. Rogit (aka Biscuit Bandit) is still freeloading. Underland borders officially porous.
• Retail Portal Opened: The Fourthwall shop is live! Objects of Mild Enchantment now available. Curse-imbued T-shirts and suspiciously sentient prints await.

We are preparing for our trip to Turkey this week, we leave tomorrow for Marmaris to go enjoy some sun and sand. We’re both very excited to get away from our little basement flat for a week with Celia’s mom (mum?). (Ahem “Mam” Cx ) Wales is nice but the weather has been a bit oppressive since I got here. We had a week or so of really nice weather but this week has been back to cold and rain. It’s a nice little slow down before the rest of our life becomes wholly chaotic with the move to Thailand. We’re very much looking forward to not doing very much at all. 

The house is back to normal after our spaniel invader (the cat’s words not mine), I do think they’re still a little wary and they’re definitely not thrilled to see that we’re packing (see Catdiva monologues for more on this debacle). We are running a regular old zoo though, we have Martha the neighbor’s chicken who has decided that it’s cool to come scrounge for biscuits in our kitchen. We’ve got the lovingly named Flat Face, a fighty stray that is growing bolder the longer we don’t actively kick (her? him? dunno Flat face won’t get close enough) out of the house. Then we have Rogit aka Charley who belongs next door but comes and visits for biscuits and sausage. We’re feeding the whole neighborhood, it’s a good thing our cats won’t eat biscuits that are out for more than five minutes. Mogs says they get stale after being out of the bag for more than a few minutes. 

Celia has been working hard on the zine launch, if you’re reading this and you make stuff and you want to send it to be published that would be super cool. There will be a link at the end of this post with the information (or you can just email us at riverandceliainunderland@gmail.com). We’ve also launched a discord server for chatting about writing art and life (https://discord.gg/hZ9KmMFa) join us there if you fancy a chat.  

We also have merch (not merch). Art, cheeky clothing, and a tiered membership! Check out our Fourthwall site.

That is all for now, we will be posting from Turkey next week.

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Well its been a week…a month…a year. Between shop launch, working, writing and all the other shenanigans of life I am quite done in. But on a positive, the holiday finally seems real. Boarding passes in hand and such. I am tried on all the levels of tired. Happy but pooped I think some wise woman once said. Or not. Either way. Tired and ready for a vaccay with my wifey whose presence seems weirdly like they have always been here and yet, simultaneously there is just never enough time together. Anyway, sun, sea, sand and a whole lot of whiling away the evenings on a balcony. And time.

Watch this space for countless inane photos of blue seas, skies and Margheritas (Not the pizza, believe me!)

Dispatches from the Void: Volume I →

If this resonated, share it on Bluesky (or anywhere folks still have an attention span longer than a moth after a sleepless night), leave us a comment, or check out our latest anthologies

Poetry Collection, ‘Is this all we get?’

Prose Collection, ‘ Fifth Avenue Pizza’