Dream of the Cactus Garden - Kirsten Norrie

Dream of the Cactus Garden - Kirsten Norrie

‘Late that afternoon, drowsing in the old Cactus Garden with its virulent flesh-eating flowers, I had again my strange dream…’

About Nigthjar Press: Nightjar Press publishes limited edition single short-story chapbooks. Publisher/editor is Nicholas Royle, design by John Oakey. Royle and Oakey collaborated on Joel Lane’s The Earth Wire (1994), from British Fantasy Award-winning Egerton Press, which also published Darklands (1991) and Darklands 2 (1992). Nightjar was founded in 2009. The nightjar – corpse fowl, goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies at dusk or dawn as it hunts. It is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. Sylvia Plath, in ‘Goatsucker’, wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’; David Morley, in ‘Beethoven’s Yellowhammer’, calls it simply ‘Satanic’.