Thistle is a lovely word to pronounce—it feels like drawing a bow and releasing it. An arrow at the ready; a word on the tongue.

A character who dies in his son’s armor at the hand of his brother...

Vanilla vodka in pasta sauce

Critics forget that Caleb Landry Jones in Dracula will allow me to indulge in what cinema once knew but has since forgotten: an intriguing face.

My grandma only liked what she called self-respecting flowers of which the carnation was one. I have come into a sample of Hiram Green's Philtre and it is rapturously bygone. It is a kind of thrumming desire: limpid boldness. I think of a moment in the more recent film adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover in which the title of lady is a thing of/to desire. "You would want coarser treatment with me," Oliver realizes obediently. Philtre smells like the steaming ground where the two have lain—kneeling, broken green stems against a backdrop of pressed floral silhouettes. The single carnation of the perfume is, of course, red.