Macbeth ... from 'Lady Macbeth's Tale'

There’s something you should know about her, they
tell him. But always it’s left unsaid, the final truth behind
the gossip surrounding her marriage. Some tragedy is
hinted at. Something that lingers in her southern voice.
Though she’s a Scotswoman, to her fingertips, make
no mistake about it. And the bonniest. The advancing
years merely serving to add to her renown as the most
exquisite of noblewomen. Only the gossip, that persists
like a treacherous undercurrent, hints at something ...
Yet, when he enters his cousin’s house, what takes
his breath away is how rumour and suspicion have no
place in its fastidious arrangements. His eyes, scanning
dark corners as if for sudden ambush, find only the soft
glow of wax tapers.

His cousin welcomes him to the feast. His tall,
languidly elegant kinsman, sporting the smoothly-
capped hairstyle of his Norman companions.
‘It’s been too long coz!’ The Mormaer of Moray
smiles easily, with the manner of one well-versed in
dealing with inferiors.
‘Aye,' he answers shortly. Always tongue-tied by
these sort of occasions. Still, his eyes go on taking in
everything: registering there are no women present ...
noting the effete manners of these Normans.
‘We played together as youths, remember?’ Moray
drawls.
‘At our grandfather’s court!’
‘How is King Malcolm?’

Semele - excerpt from Lady Macbeth's Tale

Semele, this woman’s name was. A woman swollen up with desire for a god who threatened his manhood was only a fiction.
‘If I ever lose control and let you have the full measure of me, it’ll tear you apart!’ Jove boasted.
Or
‘I’m sorry,’ Jove groaned, turning his back to her on the cold ashes of their illicit bed. ‘But it’s your fault I can’t get it up.’
‘Mine?’ Semele was both anxious and incredulous.
‘You’re cold. A chill that deflates my tumescence.’
‘But I’m hot, hot only for you,’ she protested.
‘Yes, but you’re a woman.’
‘I thought that was part of the attraction,’ Semele smiled trying to relieve the tension.
‘Yes, but I told you, my sweet, you’re really not made to take in god-sized proportions. I don’t want to hurt you,’ Jove offered.
‘Don’t give me that crap!’ Semele was spunky enough to challenge his male excuses. Staring at her lover’s divine face with its eyes cut straight from the endless blue of Athenian skies, she snickered, ‘Or is it that you’re more of a centaur man, needing the thick hide of a hairy rump and ticklish little hooves to get you going?’
The god was stung. ‘I’m all man and more!’ he promised. ‘None of this having to transform myself into swans or bulls. I like it straight. Man to woman. Alpha to Omega. Prick in cunt. And strictly missionary position.’
‘But you’re a god. You can do anything. So take me anyhow and which everyway. Blow up my belly with your godseed. Take me to the top of Mount Parnassus and back again. But for Hades’ sake, do something!’
The lovers sprang apart, panting.
A thunderbolt growled above in the far off heavens. But neither heeded the warning, lying side by side in accusing silence; until at last battle was joined.
Big mistake!
Semele had spoken.
‘What’s that you just said?’ The god thundered. ‘What did you call me, bitch?’ he demanded, dashing down the flask of nectar from which he’d been quaffing.
Semele reached a plump white arm to her lover’s neck, turning his face to hers. The same wayward streak that had first led her to reject the puny advances of men to go god hunting brought her to the brink. Of the abyss.
‘Limp-dick!’ Semele jeered.

Before you could say - stap my vitals! - her lover had shown himself in his true colours. A mushroom cloud of white-hot destruction. Because where men have only guts gods have volcanic eruptions.
In the next moment Semele was molten: a puddle of hot lava blood. Bones like twisted metal. Her lovely golden hair a spume of blown glass that cooled rapidly. In a trice all that was left of the disappointed woman was the bulbous roundel of a pissing vessel.
Now and then, when the mood takes him, the god squeezes his more than manly proportions into her glass neck. But he’s an ageing god and it takes him an epoch to pass water.
Centuries roll on. By the time it gets round to the first millenium Semele is just about filled up to the brim with her hotshit god.

Lily - an extract

The rain fell skittishly like nuptial rice on the morning Jonathan Hopgate brought home a limp bride who would begin dying in the east wing at High Withens.
Beads of bright rain-water clinging to the bridegroom’s hair. Scuds of wet earth, swampy as desire, spattering his wedding clothes. And his bride of a few hours calling out from the trailing carriage ‘Jonathan have a care for yourself!’ For his damned horse had stumbled; its hooves continuing to slither on the slippery track that led up from the valley to the moors around High Withens.
A hot rain, flung from a too blue sky on to the land that was unstable and sodden, must have drowned-out her voice for he didn’t answer; riding on ahead into the the thicket of lilac trees that grew low, awry, bent by the stern winds that whipped the moorland.
Bridegroom and bride pressing on under the canopy of stunted trees that dripped sap and rain over them. Then, as the path narrowed, the progression of the carriage was impeded by the ever thickening branches of lilac that scratched the fading Hopgate crest from the lumbering vehicle. Three times Jonathan dismounted to cut away the importunate tangle of branches and already withering white lilac that smelled all the sweeter as it neared decay. Three times the bridal carriage lurched forwards, trailing Jonathan on horseback, until at last the summit was gained and a stout wind shooed the rain back down the valley to where the land churned and sickened.
At last ... destiny ...
The bridegroom’s arm sweeping a flourish as he pointed to where the house lay ahead of them.
Thirty years in exile from his inheritance.
His bride calling again from the carriage, ‘Jonathan you must help me out, if I’m to see anything.’
So he dismounted and fetched the poor, crippled thing to whom he’d pledged himself; his invalid bride cocooned in her shawls and mantles. Snatching her up into his arms, her crooked spine nestling against his chest as he showed off the estate that had been heavily mortaged by his errant grandfather before being irrevocably ruined by the Hopgate who’d spawned him; his own father having gone to damnation in the belief the Hopgate line faced a greater curse: descent into penury and oblivion.
Two upright coffins, beyond a tarn stagnant with waterlilies.
Lily looked again and saw it was only High Withens, the east and west wings louring at her.

But his wife’s shudder of awe thrilled Jonathan. The lustre of her new wealth tarnished by this visible symbol of old blood. Hopgate blood. For a brief moment he almost desired her; the coarse brown hair straggling from her bonnet, chafing his neck, its wiry strands stirring him like wickedly probing fingers. Now she saw what he was worth! The history ... the land ... and inheritance that after centuries had come to such a sorry pass of dissolution.