Damp Ignite. (from The Loser by Marcella Belly. Damp Ignite is located on the Kadmudia Gouache Mudflats, on the western side of the River Fly.) If I were a woman who liked to interpret things to suit myself I would say that Damp Ignite had been created all those years ago specifically to suit my mood at the time I approached it across a sodden plank of wood, muddy and wretched right down to the splinters. My heart was as downtrodden as that well-worn plank, as muddled as the houses I saw in that wet place, those collections of sticks and rocks and plants and mud and wood and clay, those dirty, grassy heaps of organic matter huddled on their wooden floors like a gathering of men under their shawls, these houses that floated, rather than stood, upon the semi-solid ground which rotted slowly beneath them. The air was filled with a rich smell and the faint, persistant sound of someone playing a zither, which I later learned was the noise the mudflats' insects made at this time of the year. If I wanted, I could drag the metaphor out further. I could have said that my heart collected sorrow as readily the people here collected the herbs that grew abundantly in the fertile mudflats (and then said something about the fertility of sorrow), and then extended the image to say something about the quality and flavour of the herbs versus the quality of my sorrow, and added that in time my heart would transform this sorrow, as the villagers transformed the herbs into medicinal stews. If I had gone there later in my life I would have compared the aristocrats' mosaics in Ex, which were made from clay and mud collected from certain areas of the flats, by people who lived in this village, to a picture of my ... oh, never mind. Let me say that I settled here for a while, that I became a collector of clay for the mosaics, that I lived in one of those huddled houses, that the grit of Kadmudia Gouche settled on me like an extra skin, and let me leave it at that.