Kirsty Logan
Kirsty reads “Seal-Blood Soup”
Seal-blood soup is made with fresh blood in the summer and small chunks of frozen blood in the winter; even that far north it is not always winter, and the sun hangs low and bright to mark your progress when tracking with divine direction the swish of the seals under the ice.
Seal-blood soup has the consistency of half-melted ice-cream on the ceiling of your mouth, and a metallic harsh that makes the corner of your eye twitch; think of it as a fresh orange without the stringy pith, without the rot-syrup scent, without the ache of scurvy feathering towards your gums.
Seal-blood soup is sweeter than your bunched fists and the crunch of your molars around the soft ends of fishbones; sweeter even than the deposits of fat behind the caribou’s eyes, or the smile of its skull.
Seal-blood soup is heated in a black pot over a fire struck by blocks of iron pyrite, stirred with a spooned bone from the leg of a caribou, held by your knee-high daughter who is also wrapped in the skin of a caribou that was younger than she is now when you tore its throat out with your flicked thumb because it was just soft enough.
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Kirsty Logan won her first literary contest at the age of 8, and has been going mostly downhill ever since. Her short fiction appears in Flatmancrooked, Pear Noir!, and Best Lesbian Erotica; she is the co-editor of Fractured West and the reviews editor for PANK. She is currently working on her first novel, Little Dead Boys. She lives in Glasgow with her girlfriend. Get in touch at kirstylogan.com.
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