If you close your eyes and think of your idyll. Where do you find yourself?


Do you remember the wind or is your memory of the soil clearer?


Are you in a field or a forest or a glen?
How often do you find yourself there and why did you have to leave?

To keep the waste treatment tank healthy, you have to feed it like a starter. Bleach used in toilets kills the bacteria in its belly and it takes even longer to restart the cycle of fermentation once the damage has been inflicted.

A friend’s mother uses dead crows.
My uncle is never very specific on the species but needs the body to be good and rotten.
My father always brings home a still born banbh.

To feed it, go out the back door and open the cement lid. Taking care to not let it drop on your fingers. Then slowly lower the banbh into the darkness. Back into a warm, chamber for it to nourish, in place of being nourished.

Swimming in grey water under the thick crust, the bandh’s skin and open insides are the first to be eaten. The mushy bits go down a treat. Tiny creatures rush to the fresh meat. Unlike a slurry pit, this container is full of movement. It cannot preserve the bandh, it is much too hungry for that.

Like with normal submerged decay, the body will putrefy and swell and ooze and weep fluids for the wild microbes to gobble up.

I have reached the correct temperature and am now digesting the carpet, exposed stone walls and delicious glow

I wonder what it looks like when the skin has been punctured in sections and the grey water suddenly turns red in the darkness. And do some microbes eat faster than others? Breaking down certain parts before other bits, not working together.

The flashes I have of this memory are scattered - at best.
One half sees a white yard light that pierces through a rainy night, and I am standing still.
The other is a soft night filled with torches leading the way to the hole.

Both end in front of the fire.
At the distance where it can enter your body and spread through you like syrup. Not too close and not too far.
I am melting into sleep. Gooey under the flickering incubation bulb.

It smells like a village / Swimming in Grey Water

Photo credits to:


Anne Ardnt
Renata Mirón
Maureen Marck
Alexandra Komsta