Podcast S01E11 ~ Chapter 10 Up Now!

Chapter 10: Brain Fever

…in which Carrie is unwell and Ricky starts a fire…

The neighbour was due to die in fifteen days and he still hadn’t got what he wanted. Fairwood’s aura repelled him again – he had tried his luck at the back fence, to no avail. His farsight was almost totally gone, and, for the first time in a long time, he was anxious. What if the wyrd were not as immutable as it ought to be? What if it was fixed for everyone else, but not for him?

He’d seen a single magpie on a branch that morning, black and white feathers ruffled in moody silence.

(One for sorrow, that’s how the rhyme goes.)

The crows had mobbed it, chasing it off in a flurry of feathers, dropping a scrap of thin, paper-lined foil on the ground, the kind used in sweets packaging. Without his farsight, that omen was hard to interpret.

Should he have gone into town at all? He could feel the threads of his wyrd constricting around him, warp and weft trapping him like a fly. The town made him feel like that, too, claustrophobic amid the concrete.

C. M. Rosens, The Crows, p. 197

In this extract, you see the crows engaged in more bird-bullying (through Ricky’s memory of earlier that day), which prompted Ricky’s visit to town and Carrie’s encounter with him there at the start of this chapter.

Ricky is banned from SupaPrice due to … an incident. Here’s a list of all the pubs in Pagham-on-Sea that he’s banned from, most of which were before he was even legal (18, in UK) so its just as well his drinking days are behind him anyway.

If you’re enjoying the podcast (or just these posts with the extracts and titbits) you can buy the book to read along.

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