sovay | Myth Happens

Good afternoon! May I invite you to the book birthday of Jeannelle M. Ferreira's Ochre, Quartz, or Ivy, now electronically available wherever books are sold? Queer Arthuriana, futures of the Iron Age, co-parenting in a time of dragons. I happen to think it's the best long-form thing its author has yet written. There's so much time in it and fierce love and mountains. My godson did the fossil-coiled cover design.

Music: Blondshell, "Sea Legs"

Paranoiacally I set my alarm early for this morning's telehealth and was thus awake and feeding the cat when the doctor called also early, leaving me feeling prudent but confused. I had not so much slept due to a winning combination of crushing headache and construction starting on the house next door, so I made a bunch of phone calls and left the house to run some errands and came back in time to collect

spatch who had a bus to catch and would walk with me in a roundabout curve to the Mystic River in the clear autumn pour of sun. I returned to eat a tin of anchovies with olives and lemon in which Hestia professed interest until she registered the olive oil which she dislikes on her fish. I feel that I have done a lot of practical things at the start of the week, but not very much with my mind. I am having a lot of trouble feeling that I can get room for my mind in between everything that happens. I may have figured out how to get my pictures reliably off my camera again, however, and I walked underneath a pretty delightful plane tree.

Music: Blondshell, "New Age Trojan Horse"

Because I slept a normal human minimum last night, I was able to drive

spatch to work on the short notice of his alarm sleeping through itself and then to walk down to the park in the later afternoon where I had a secondhand encounter with mortality. I was slightly buried in a yew tree at the time. I did get a bunch of pictures first.

( Are these exposed wires all good? )

I have spent most of the rest of the day engaged in very little except reading on the couch and making myself a pumpernickel bagel with chopped liver courtesy of Mamaleh's. I think it is great that butterflies prove the efficacy of dazzle camouflage. Sunkist Fruit Gems have been saved and it appears we are reinventing the flying boat. I had also not realized that Inspirobot was still around.

Music: Dry Cleaning, "Hot Penny Day"

I had just gotten used to the raw autumnal bluster of the last week when temperatures this afternoon boinged close to 90 °F and everything became summer-sticky again. I recognize this phenomenon and every year I am unimpressed by it. The leaves have not fully flashed over, but I saw a classically orange maple while out on errands, bright as crepe paper.

On something of the same theme,

spatch had warned me that Turlough would be leaving in Planet of Fire (1984), but not that Mark Strickson would be going up against David Farrar in Black Narcissus (1947) for Great Moments in Booty Shorts. At the point where he dropped to his speedos he probably won. That's for those of you who have absolutely no interest in pirates.

Music: Bipolar Angels, "I'm Bad"

Rabbit, rabbit! I am entering October in a state of leftover illness and crushing sleep debt, but in the same way that one year in college it finally clicked with me how much Robert Graves Susan Cooper had woven through The Dark Is Rising Sequence, after close to forty years it occurred to me to check a key piece of verse in Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951) and it turns out to have started life as Euripides.

Much of it is Gilbert Murray's 1910 translation of a choral strophe from Iphigenia in Tauris:

Give me the little hill above the sea.
The palm of Delos fringed delicately,
The young sweet laurel and the olive-tree
Grey-leaved and glimmering . . .

O Isle of Leto, Isle of pain and love;
The Orbèd Water and the spell thereof;
Where still the Swan, minstrel of things to be,
Doth serve the Muse and sing!

The original Greek is less of a paean and more of a plaint on the part of the enslaved women of the Chorus, captured in the sack of Greek cities and sold eastward to serve Iphigeneia in her man-killing role as priestess of Artemis on the shores of the Black Sea. Like the halcyon who laments her husband, they long for home, for the familiar rites of Hellas, for Artemis as she is celebrated on Delos where she assisted at the birth of her own twin Apollo:

ἃ παρὰ Κύνθιον ὄχθον οἰ-
κεῖ φοίνικά θʼ ἁβροκόμαν
δάφναν τʼ εὐερνέα καὶ
γλαυκᾶς θαλλὸν ἱερὸν ἐλαί-
ας, Λατοῦς ὠδῖνα φίλαν,
λίμναν θʼ εἱλίσσουσαν ὕδωρ
κύκλιον, ἔνθα κύκνος μελῳ-
δὸς Μούσας θεραπεύει.

who beside the Cynthian hill makes
her home, and for the date palm's delicate
locks and the beautifully sprung laurel
and the gleam-grey olive's sacred
shoot, the dear travail of Leto,
and the lake spiraling its waters
round where the melody-making
swan serves the Muses.

Murray would be an anachronism in the early nineteenth century of the novel except that Goudge weaves his language so much into the numinous fusion of Fairy and the margins of Paradise that is her Valley of Song that it's like the substrate of Lal Waterson in Greer Gilman's Cloud. The Swan becomes her reinterpretation of the constellation of Libra, the singer of the wild autumn air who fills the gap of birds in the zodiac. The Valley itself appears differently to each person who enters it and one of its aspects resembles the Greek islands with a Delos of its own at its heart, the Swan's domain. It can be found in company of the character who introduces the quotation, the puzzling, disreputable stranger to the shipbuilding town of the Hard whom ten-year-old Tabitha Silver has thought of as "the ogre" ever since his reflection frightened her in a well: he wears the rags of a gentleman's clothes like the wrack of a classical education and shies off bitterly from any mention of the sea or second chances or the lovely East Indiaman that has been abandoned with her keel barely laid now that the captain who commissioned her is reported to have died a bankrupt, having lost all his fortune at cards. No prizes for guessing. His proper name turns out to be Andrew, although Tabitha reserves it for the eleven-year-old child-self he seems at the door to the Valley, unrecognizably beautiful with his slim brown grace and Athene-eyes; he was born in Greece and sees the Valley of Song as Elysium. "And then I was exiled from it."

It's easier to see in the homesick context of Euripides, but it shouldn't have taken reading the actual Greek for me to make the connection between the refuge that Andrew finds in the Valley which lies between this world and the next and the island of Delos whose floating, liminal nature made it accessible to Leto when Hera's wrath had closed all the conventional earth to her and her Zeus-fathered children—Andrew is running even more unforgivingly from himself, his responsibilities and his mistakes, his failures that he feels like ropes of iron, and it is only on the shore of his own island of pain and love, his unexpected homecoming that he was willing to forfeit when it looked for a moment as though he would only be trading off his own exile for Tabitha's, that he can gather the courage to face them out in the world. The orbèd water that idles so stilly about the Swan pours endlessly away down the stair to the great waters, the furthest depth of the sea. There Andrew will have to make his sailor's katabasis under the zodiacal guidance of Capricorn, the goat-fish older than his Greek name, the suḫurmāšu of Enki, craftsman, magician, lord of the life-giving waters of the Abzû:

"If I go down into the depths I shall die there in the rush of the great waters."
"Yes, you will die, and be born again."
"I cannot go down into the depths."
"Then you will make no beauty."
"I am afraid."
"So are all who give themselves to the great waters."

Murray in his notes glosses Λατοῦς ὠδῖνα φίλαν, which he rendered poetically with "pain and love," literally as "Beloved birth-pang of Leto." The Chorus of Iphigenia in Tauris are remembering Artemis not as an alien goddess who demands the blood of strangers, but as Artemis Lochia, Birthing Artemis, midwife to herself. Goudge's Swan does not sing its own dying like the myth of an earthly swan, but "lament and triumph in one . . . a wild desire to be gone and the sorrow of parting . . . weeping and laughter. . . . darkness and light and being born." The reader, like Tabitha, will have to wait several chapters to see whether Andrew succeeded in his rebirth and even if so, what will become of him once he surfaces beyond the Valley. He's not the only thread in the novel, but he pulled on me from childhood and it makes me happy to see finally some more of the resonances in which Goudge framed him. It is the novel of hers in which I have the least trouble with her Christianity, braided as it is with so many other deeply vivid mythologies. The motif of the Swan carries through to the very last page.

While on the classically-adjacent subject, I meant to mention it weeks ago when I learned that from 1924 until his death in 1979, the dancer-choreographer Léonide Massine lived on Il Gallo Lungo, the largest of the caldera-scratch of islands off the coast of Amalfi known as the Sirenuse after the Homeric Sirens who were said to inhabit them, or perhaps to have turned into them after Odysseus sailed on past their singing of tales. I love this fact for its own sake and because Massine is most famous outside the ballet world for his appearance in Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948), where he originated the onscreen role of the irresistible, diabolical shoemaker in The Ballet of the Red Shoes, who ends the dance by offering the bright fatal shoes to the audience. It made perfect sense to me that he knew from siren song.

Music: Blondshell, "Stone Fruit"

Five days out from a late train home from D.C., I seem not to have contracted COVID-19 and since my immune system is still a pile of wet tissue paper and my government still invested in the die-off of just about every demographic I belong to, I will continue with my masking and keep visiting the mother of my godchild until we sort this continental divide problem out.

I find it very demoralizing that for various reasons I have barely slept since coming home. Part of the efficacy of the windowless pit is simply that in a house with normal insulation I cannot hear every footfall on the floor above as if it's in the room with me starting at the dark-thirty hours necessary to scramble for work or assemble a teenager for school. Part of the rest is this apartment possessing genuinely the worst-converted bedroom I have slept in, at least in terms of its orientation to light and the accommodation of the windows to blocking it. Dawn didn't go off like twenty tons of alarm clock everywhere I've lived.

Having watched almost no movies since the start of this month, I was dismayed to discover last night that the Criterion Channel has overhauled its formerly minimalist, straightforward interface into something much more pushily autoplayish and also geoblocked itself outside of North America. The former annoys me, but the latter seems counterproductive to the point of cancellation considering its catalogue and subscriber base, not to mention the existence of international travel; I can't even see it as a logical extension of Criterion discs being traditionally locked to Region 1/A. I have to wish a whole lot of film fans a very happy VPN.

I may have been even more shocked to walk into my local branch of When Pigs Fly this afternoon and be informed that they no longer sell pumpernickel. I have been buying it for two decades at least. It is mostly what I patronize the bakery for, although I like their cinnamon raisin and some of their fancier fruit breads in season, like apple cinnamon and the mango pineapple ginger that is basically candy. "No one bought it," said the person behind the counter, cheerfully. "I bought a lot of it!" I protested. I could use it for sandwiches from grilled cheese to peanut butter to lox and cream cheese. It had figured centrally in my plans for dinner. Since their contact information includes a phone number, I figure I can call tomorrow and register my disappointment. Without pumpernickel, the chances that I will purchase anything from them have considerably dropped. I think of it as an absolutely staple bread.

Just because I discovered Kate Bush's "Coffee Homeground" (1978) twenty-one years ago in October, it has been in my head walking around the cold leaf-scattered rain of my neighborhood over the last few days. Yesterday I was stopped and asked for directions on the Tufts campus which I could not provide.

spatch reassured me that I might have been mistaken for faculty or staff. This afternoon the sun came out through the overcast in the waterily monochrome fashion that suggests an overexposed silver gelatin print. I do not understand how leafblowers were allowed to become legal in residential areas.

selkie sent me another packet of Violet Crumble in the mail.

Music: Dear Nora, "From My Bedroom Window"

The nor'easter not only smells like autumn, it seems to have kicked the season over, all the leaves plastered in the street in slick green and early gold, barn-red and vein-brown. I remembered to take my camera and afterward to wrestle the pictures off it, a process which has begun to make a darkroom and a shelf of developers and fixers feel like the easy way out. The storm had reduced to more or less misting in which a quantity of students were out and about with hoodies, umbrellas, and rain in their hair.

( Think awhile, walk away. )

spatch and I made noodles and cheese with tarragon-and-shallot-fried ham for dinner, making sure not to leave Hestia out of the quality control. There was a horrifying moment when we thought the oven had died, but it was just the circuit breaker. I never had any rituals in my life where anyone threw them at me, but I am still sorry to hear about the demise of Sunkist Fruit Gems. My night was very much improved by discovering Kym Deyn's "Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight" (2023).

Music: Ride, "Sennen"

I calmed down from the afternoon by making a bowl of pumpkin ravioli in a tomato-and-shallot sauce and even managed to eat most of it not standing over the stove. I have three pieces left of the Violet Crumble from D.C. and the mother of the family upstairs brought me a tupperware of homemade brigadeiros, not all of which are even the traditional chocolate. The nor'easter smells like autumn, cold rain and wet leaves and earlier night. I had slept minimally and dreamed about needing to organize a circus act on no notice, which I can legitimately say is not the usual anxiety.

Most of yesterday was spent flat on the couch recovering from spending the previous day folded on the train. It turns out that if I am doing functionally nothing else with my time, I can listen to five radio plays in a row before shorting out mildly in the middle of the sixth and needing to sit up reading for hours to restabilize. I was charmed by the lampshading in Joan Coggin's Why Did She Die? (1947) which doubles to catch up on previous adventures:

Mrs. Dashwood looked at Lupin out of her bright blue eyes. "I could think of a lot of reasons," she said, "but one does not often murder people in real life."

"They do if I am anywhere about," replied Lupin. "I don't know why it is, exactly, but there must be something queer about me, like those people in Greek tragedies, you know. The minute I appear upon the scene everyone cries 'let's have a murder!' First there was the curate at Glanville; it wasn't really anything to do with me, but I feel it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been there—I mean, no curates had been killed until I married Andrew. Then I went to stay with a friend for a rest-cure and a nut was loosened in her car and she was very nearly killed—as a matter of fact it turned out to be an accident in the end; but the principle is the same, and now Penelope has gone and shot herself or else someone else has shot her."

It took me a few scenes to adjust to the farcical register of Heroes of Sontar (2011), but I was so won over by the pre-flight announcement for Certain Death Airways that

spatch handed me five dollars out of his tip money to buy my own copy in non-potato quality while it was on weekly sale from Big Finish. I still feel so weird about owning any audio that I cannot re-rip from its physical format in the event of disaster that I may burn myself a couple of CDs.

I understand that I may not have worn my boots since the spring, but since they were stored in our front hall and not, say, a tent, it seems entirely unreasonable that one of them should have had a spider in it.

Music: Sidewalks and Skeletons, "Goth"

While I was away, the mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #88, containing my poem "The Walls." It's the one I wrote earlier this month, suggested by a marsh fort and a bog mummy, and it closes the new world order issue which opens with a call to resist authoritarianism. It's the fortieth anniversary issue, featuring the fiction and poetry of Patricia Russo, Jennifer Crow, Larina Warnock, Christiaan Sabatelli, Devan Barlow, and more. Check it out! I am honored to be in its pages. I slept almost eight hours with Hestia curled against me in the warmth of the bed, as I have not slept with a cat since her brother died. Outside has been a chill, grey, rattling day. The wind is rising for the forecast nor'easter.

Music: Rabbitology, "Sleeping God"

The train ran behind its time because Baltimore exerts a field of stiff molasses and

spatch couldn't meet me on arrival because of the construction on Route 128, but he did meet me with a roast beef sandwich and after more than eight hours on a sold-out train I fell raveningly upon it. Hestia sniffed my belongings all over before approaching to equalize the colony scent. She reposes on the bed on the green blanket, fed by me as part of the homecoming rites. Tomorrow I plan to do bupkes.

Music: Pretty Jane, "Too Few Tattoos"

Once again my rear-facing seat makes me wonder if I will ever take a train in the traditional direction again, but the overhead lines are the same copper-green as the gutters of the two-tiered brown-brick building we just slid past that made me think of the long-disused Signal Tower 'A' of the Boston & Maine at North Station. I am less used to the slope of afternoon sun on the crumbled umber and rust-pink of the ties. The shirr of white cloud drifting in two directions at once makes an optical illusion of even greater speed above the treeline. I hadn't been aboveground at Union Station in so long, I had forgotten it had quite so much Vittorio Emanuele wedding cake going on.

We discuss over and over again how much easier it would be without five hundred miles between our households, but in this immensely imperfect world I take these trains. Jorts leapt onto my black travel bag to shed pale fur all over it in a parting gift. My godson came down twice before bed to talk. N. showed me Project Hail Mary (2026).

selkie wore the

elisem necklace I gave her through the High Holidays. Everything feels so precarious, which makes the time matter more. It does not feel like nearly a week.

Music: Sam Phillips, "Taking Pictures"

Just in time for the last hours of the equinox, my poem "The Principle of the Thing" is now available in Weird Fiction Quarterly: Liminal Spaces and Beings 2026. It is the ghost poem I wrote last spring for Werner Heisenberg and nothing about this year has rendered it a period piece. The issue itself is a genre-ranging stack of the in-between, featuring fiction and poetry from Adam Boliver, Gevera Bert Piedmont, Can Wiggins, Maxwell I. Gold, Pixie Bruner and Sara Castaneda, Brandon Barrows, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Kurt Fawver, Sarah Walker, Rhys Hughes, Christopher Ropes, Sumiko Saulson, Rebecca Buchanan, and dozens more. It's the right season to check its slippage out.

It being my last night in the house, my godson has come down the stairs and thumped himself onto me like a long-legged cat and then returned to share an encore of horror stories about the inexplicable toilets of his summer camp. The afternoon's oatcakes were a hit, especially when eaten with pistachio butter, and

selkie who turned out not to be able to eat the experimental decadence of langoustine paté graciously bequeathed the entire small glass jar to me. I did very little else with the afternoon beyond propping myself against Selkie as she contended with the ways of Microsoft, reading a mix of radio scripts and novels and eventually falling asleep. Laundry was forgone. We had haruspicy bolognese for dinner; there were hearts and liver in the turkey and we forgot to read the tomato smears at the bottoms of our bowls.

Tomorrow I have to get up and haul back on a train to Boston, but I am very glad I stayed the extra day.

Music: Sam Phillips, "Things I Shouldn't Have Told You"

Happy autumn! Behold

selkie's forthcoming short novel, Ochre, Quartz, or Ivy, long known in these parts as the queer Iron Age Arthuriana.

Apparently it is also the day for bisexuals to be visible. We're going to make oatcakes.

Music: Sam Phillips, "Edge of the World"

Yesterday I was so melted on conclusion of services that after consuming an—entirely symbolic, no one in this house is medically constituted to fast—break-fast of kebabs with the family and failing to go to bed on account of conversational nearness of

selkie, I sat up reading Kenneth Morris' Book of the Three Dragons (1930) and some of the more official of a cache of Big Finish scripts which I found on the Internet Archive until I passed out for six to eight hours in the uninterrupted darkness. This afternoon I am curled on a couch while the rain bounces steadily off the tangle of pokeweed outside the window behind me, having eaten a tin of smoked mackerel on the thin square rice cakes that always feel ritzy to me, kibitzing a not so secret project with the mother of my godchild. The honeycake from my mother arrived in the mail. I have made a cup of pour-over coffee for the first time in my life and the fumes haven't given me a detectable migraine yet, on top of which it's been rated drinkable by the person I made it for. We are agreed that this sweater looks in the most complimentary sense as though it just came out of a bog. I am deeply entertained by the recent findings that if Venus ever had a moon, it almost certainly ate it.

P.S. I have moved my return ticket out another night.

Music: Sam Phillips, "Love Is Everywhere I Go"

Getting out of the car this afternoon at the temple I was inexplicably stabbed in the thigh by one of the enamel pins off my computer bag, requiring me to declare that I was not doing the Fisher King for the High Holidays, but my godson had a candlelighting honor for Kol Nidre, so I spent about the first five minutes of Yom Kippur on the bimah and watched him matter-of-factly and ceremonially draw one fire into three. I had previously spent the day hanging around

selkie at work and occasionally eating another chunk of Violet Crumble to supplement my breakfast of sardines with preserved lemon. The windowless pit continues to work its magic even when I am awake too late listening to radiophonic weirdness. I have been forgetting to carry my rather damaged camera anywhere, but one of the silver linings of this future is the photographic capacity of the mobile phone.

( —און דײַנע פֿינגערלעך, װי טינט און װי פֿעדער )

I mean if healing me would heal the land I could get better any second now.

Music: forshpil, "oy dortn dortn"

What in the actual hell produced Daphne Oram and Frederick Bradnum's Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (1957)? It is introduced by Donald McWhinnie as an experiment in sound, but how did the idea of a radiophonic poem translate into a fifteen-minute horror show for three voices and manipulated tape that must have scared the pants off or at least bewildered most of the listeners who switched on the Third Programme one early evening in October? Its metallic, cosmic skitters and sludges are instantly recognizable as the uncanny objects of the not yet Radiophonic Workshop. Every time the interplay of its trancelike, fretful, or inexorable narrators threatens to sound over-psychologized, the script pulls out another stop of genuine surrealist creep:

Do you know what crown is waiting for you? Look. Open the inner eye. Look! Do you see that head there, just above the level of the sand? Do you see that head crowned with a band of thorns and black stones, that bodiless head sunk into the landscape of rock and desert sand, almost like a bomb dropped by an aeroplane at the moment before explosion? That is your fear. Your crown is waiting.

Beat with your fists on the double-sided, double-faced mirror at the end of all corridors.

The image smashes. Here, it smashes because you fear and spreads like water flooding a land of faces. I pick my way over this sea, walking on water between floating briefcases, umbrellas and drowned faces. O my friends, my friends, you have learnt to be my enemies! Who will pray for those who drown in lonely places?

Deep and deeper, the knife turns in the sleeper. Your fear has stabbed like little knives which kill so many that you might sleep.

Even the semi-exorcistic ending in which the voices performed by Joan Sanderson, Andrew Sachs, and Frederick Treves are supposed to merge in the dreamer's recognition of his own sleep of reason sounds less therapeutic than continuingly weird, breathing dry rhythms of silence, bubbling with the looped and pitch-shifted polyphony of dream. I was late to bed because I was listening to it and then listening a second time. McWhinnie's The Art of Radio (1959) explained nothing at all.

Music: Daphne Oram and Frederick Bradnum, "Private Dreams and Public Nightmares"

Report from the windowless pit: I slept at least ten hours and was presented with an extremely fancy salmon bagel with cucumber slices and za'atar on coming aboveground. The deck has been repaired since the last time I visited and features a hammock. Vacation underway.

I have just been made aware of the casting of Daniel Craig as Andrew Ketterley in the Greta Gerwig film of The Magician's Nephew I had no idea was happening. I must shift my mental view from Peter Cushing.

September blew past in such a skein of stressors that it was not until I was lying in bed last night that I remembered about International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Have a photoshoot which describes itself magnificently as hot girl summer of the Caribbean and the electrified Cyril Tawney of Blackbeard's Tea Party's "Chicken on a Raft" (2011).

My godson is embroidering sharks.

Music: Morcheeba, "The Sea"

I have been safely installed in the boglike seclusion of the windowless pit at chez

selkie. Being sixteen and Subaru-capable, my godson met me at the Metro; his hair this trip is layered like the red and violet of shifting electromagnetic waves. I have never really spent enough time in D.C. proper to map it like New York, but I have gained enough knowledge of its transit system to help a stranger purchase their fare card when the machine was confusing. I got in with time to eat the smoked salmon sandwich I hadn't managed on the train and was additionally treated to tinned mussels with sweet pepper and seaweed chips and some kind of electrolyte solution I was in apparent dire need of, since it tasted sickeningly sweet to me instead of like the Dead Sea. Thank you again to everyone who helped with the rollercoaster expense of my antibiotics. As far as I can tell, the sole fixed plans for this weekend beyond sleeping and not needing a screen to hang out with the mother of my godchild are Project Hail Mary (2026) and Kol Nidre.

Music: Sam Phillips, "Say What You Mean"

I am still on a regional train with temperamental wi-fi, but

spatch informs me that donations to his ko-fi have covered the cost of my antibiotics. That is astonishing. Thank you so much to everyone who donated or signal-boosted or just expressed an appropriate horror at the state of American healthcare. It is awful that you had to and it's a mitzvah in spades.

(

dialecticdreamer has posted her latest story in thanks for everyone who helped.)

It's absurd that after twenty years I wake like clockwork at New Haven regardless of my actual destination. Three and slightly less than a half years I lived there and all I got was hypervigilance and Akkadian. Shortly after Providence I deliquesced in the direction of the window with a flannel overshirt rolled up under my head and my hat pulled down over my eyes and watched a tilt-shift tile of summer-bronzed verge and the stage-angled surfaces of warehouses and yards run through the remaining square of my vision like a kinetoscope. I dozed more than I dreamed, but I saw bridge-trusses in the hard clear sun and marsh-brushed Rayleigh-blue water and telephone lines streaming and looping like a shadow on the blurred collage of trees. I woke properly before New York City and negotiated a can of seltzer. I have been reading my trip book and watching the sliding world ever since.

Music: Sam Phillips, "Open the World"

Backwards in the rust and concrete photofit of railway mornings, I am on the Amtrak Regional, pulling out of South Station in pursuit of the D.C. metro area. The clouds are ocean-tufted through the catenaries. The rowhouse channel of brick has the desert-rose warmth of ashcan paintings. I am hoping to sleep in the afternoon, since I have not in so many nights.

Contrary to the assurance I was given two days ago after an exhaustive number of calls, my insurance refused to cover the last two-sevenths of my course of antibiotics without which I cannot kick a major infection out of my system and for which it acknowledges there is no alternate treatment. It cost a penny short of seven hundred dollars to pay for the necessary four days out of pocket. It took me until three in the morning to establish this fact with the all-night pharmacy and until seven-thirty to be sure there was no recourse. In the understanding that everyone right now is strictly from hunger,

spatch has a ko-fi and anything that can be donated would be appreciated beyond belief.

At least two days ago I was also at SRV with

rushthatspeaks for our sixteenth anniversary observed. We sat under the incandescent strings of their brick-framed patio and according to our tradition ordered the Arsenale, their Venetian-style shared menu that has never failed to wow us and this time was no different, from the brine-black crostini tufted with salt-white baccalà and the corn-chowder arancini over a hilarious deli-smear of mortadella mousse through the basil-drizzled salad of thick summer-sweet red and yellow tomatoes and the liquidly tender mussels in a Calabrian chili stew into the showstopper of their in-house pasta, agnolotti packed tight with earthy mushrooms under a consommé pour of spruce and finally a chunkily tossed sugo finto with black kale which made me remember how much I like other kinds of bean than black. For my one cocktail, I ordered the vodka-based Blue Seas because of the wakame and was entertained that its blueberry infusion turned the vermouth madder-red. Rush-That-Speaks had the Erbaria Spritz for its rhubarb and the Ryan's Saltata for the novelty of its IPA. The tartly lime and pooled blackberry semifreddo came as the dessert, but the strawberry stracciatella gelato was a gift for our anniversary. We talked about driving to the sea, but instead repaired to the apartment so that my husband could show me the next four episodes of Call of the Night (2022–). It took a fair amount of waving, but I remain proud of having parallel-parked on the street in South Boston.

A year ago I was still in hospital. I have so much trouble with the idea that I should have survived. I will see my godson this evening. Stripey the Fifteenth, last of the summer's dynasty, flew yesterday from my hand.