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Apr. 6th, 2025 06:15 pmDark Chapel.
They're talking about expanding the housing pool for the county, the smart new councillors with their mandates from Whitehall, about how the area needs to shoulder its portion of the residential burden.
But Dark Chapel doesn't gentrify. It swaggers, a crack-toothed vagabond in a festering frock coat.
The old planners know. They know, but they never tell and the new blood is its own sacrifice, the fresh faces that will become stiff as cheap leather when Dark Chapel Town is on the agenda.
Here's Plough Mary.
She wears a funeral veil and walks the alley behind the vape shop and the glue factory. Long dress, heavier than sin, dragged behind her like a yoke. She mutters as she walks: curses and confessions dribble between her cudding lips. People say if you hear her before you see her, you're safe. Nobody knows what happens if you don't, although the Missing Persons list at the police station has hints.
It’s the hour when the pubs spill their most broken; rain glistens on cobbles like spilled motor oil and a lurching figure in track pants is trying to sweet-talk the carpark ticket machine into leaving its post for a late night fumble. How lucky he is not to get lucky with a slot machine girl: behind the vape shop, the CherryHaze Lounge, shuttered and dark, though the “H” flickers bravely, there’s a service alley, a hazy maze of crates and bins to a door that leads nowhere, except on Thursdays. And the smell: butcher’s rot that never leaves, mingled with the sugary, fake fruit smell that clings like guilt.
Listen.
She’s there.
Plough Mary.
Six feet of shadow-draped sorrow. Her breath is mist and mulch. Her veil trails in puddles that don’t reflect the sky. She walks like the ground owes her something and the hem of her kirtle is wet with time and regret.
They say Ken Beasley, 19 years and full of beer, stepped into that alley in 1998 to lighten the load. The only things of his to leave were his screams and his England football shirt, the one weaving into the dripping night across the gabled roofs, the other, blood crusted in an evidence bag, a heavy hoofprint over the heart.
A little later, bolstered by the success of The Blair Witch Project, Holly Swift, student film producer, received a white jacket with long, long sleeves and laces and 17 seconds of static on her crushed video camera, for her pain bearing efforts.
They're talking about expanding the housing pool for the county, the smart new councillors with their mandates from Whitehall, about how the area needs to shoulder its portion of the residential burden.
But Dark Chapel doesn't gentrify. It swaggers, a crack-toothed vagabond in a festering frock coat.
The old planners know. They know, but they never tell and the new blood is its own sacrifice, the fresh faces that will become stiff as cheap leather when Dark Chapel Town is on the agenda.
Here's Plough Mary.
She wears a funeral veil and walks the alley behind the vape shop and the glue factory. Long dress, heavier than sin, dragged behind her like a yoke. She mutters as she walks: curses and confessions dribble between her cudding lips. People say if you hear her before you see her, you're safe. Nobody knows what happens if you don't, although the Missing Persons list at the police station has hints.
It’s the hour when the pubs spill their most broken; rain glistens on cobbles like spilled motor oil and a lurching figure in track pants is trying to sweet-talk the carpark ticket machine into leaving its post for a late night fumble. How lucky he is not to get lucky with a slot machine girl: behind the vape shop, the CherryHaze Lounge, shuttered and dark, though the “H” flickers bravely, there’s a service alley, a hazy maze of crates and bins to a door that leads nowhere, except on Thursdays. And the smell: butcher’s rot that never leaves, mingled with the sugary, fake fruit smell that clings like guilt.
Listen.
She’s there.
Plough Mary.
Six feet of shadow-draped sorrow. Her breath is mist and mulch. Her veil trails in puddles that don’t reflect the sky. She walks like the ground owes her something and the hem of her kirtle is wet with time and regret.
They say Ken Beasley, 19 years and full of beer, stepped into that alley in 1998 to lighten the load. The only things of his to leave were his screams and his England football shirt, the one weaving into the dripping night across the gabled roofs, the other, blood crusted in an evidence bag, a heavy hoofprint over the heart.
A little later, bolstered by the success of The Blair Witch Project, Holly Swift, student film producer, received a white jacket with long, long sleeves and laces and 17 seconds of static on her crushed video camera, for her pain bearing efforts.
