'in Lafcadio Hearn's travel narrative Two Years in the French West Indies in 1889. Hearn keeps asking what the Creole word means: he is told, variously, that it is a three-legged horse, a hanged man, a five-foot tall dog, or a fourteen-foot tall woman.'

Roger Luckhurst (2015).

Nasreen gathered the food quickly, but she, too, noticed a series of odd smells carried into the house by the wind. 'At first, it smelled bad, like garbage,' she said. 'And then it was a good smell, like sweet apples. Then like eggs.' Before she went downstairs, she happened to check on a caged partridge that her father kept in the house. 'The bird was dying,' she said. 'It was on its side.' She looked out the window. 'It was very quiet, but the animals were dying. The sheep and goats were dying.' Nasreen ran to the cellar. 'I told everybody there was something wrong. There was something wrong with the air.'

from here

Social grants are, in many senses, the glue holding families and communities together

Chris Webb on the social grants crisis in South Africa

oceans atop bus shelters

great plains on lamp posts