And the coins they find in the mouths of beasts
The construction came back before seven in the morning; my day has been all awry. I can't remember the last time I got two nights of real sleep in a row. One every weekend is not a viable ratio. Falling asleep on the couch in the evening instead of watching a movie with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch does not count as makeup.
Since no one asked, my slowly accumulating collection of good bog/marsh/fen stories non-comprehensively includes Jenn Grunigen's "The Seaweed and the Wormhole" (2014), KJ Charles' Spectred Isle (2017), B. Pladek's "What the Marsh Remembers" (2021), Steve Toase's "The Ercildoun Accord" (2022), and now Katie McIvor's "We Bleed Water" (2022). I don't know if I would include Andersen's "The Marsh King's Daughter" (1858) except that a passage from it frightened me as a child as much as Seamus Heaney's "The Grauballe Man" (1975):
I fell asleep, and I dreamt—I seemed to be again in the vast Egyptian Pyramid; but still before me stood the moving alder stump which had frightened me on the surface of the bog. I gazed at the fissures of the bark and they shone out in bright colours and turned to hieroglyphs; it was the mummy's wrappings I was looking at. The coverings burst asunder, and out of them walked the mummy king of a thousand years ago, black as pitch, black as the shining wood-snail or the slimy mud of the swamp. Whether it were the Mummy King or the Marsh King I knew not. He threw his arms around me, and I felt that I must die.
I note that it didn't occur to me immediately to include Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) in this list, even though I read it just as young and wasn't frightened and the swamp is right there in the title. I never thought to look for film adaptations; there are at least three. Of course the silent version produced by the author's own production company is lost.
I don't think I remembered to share Chrystabell and David Lynch's "The Answers to the Questions" (2024) with anyone but my husbands last month when it was released, but I liked it.
spatch does not count as makeup.Since no one asked, my slowly accumulating collection of good bog/marsh/fen stories non-comprehensively includes Jenn Grunigen's "The Seaweed and the Wormhole" (2014), KJ Charles' Spectred Isle (2017), B. Pladek's "What the Marsh Remembers" (2021), Steve Toase's "The Ercildoun Accord" (2022), and now Katie McIvor's "We Bleed Water" (2022). I don't know if I would include Andersen's "The Marsh King's Daughter" (1858) except that a passage from it frightened me as a child as much as Seamus Heaney's "The Grauballe Man" (1975):
I fell asleep, and I dreamt—I seemed to be again in the vast Egyptian Pyramid; but still before me stood the moving alder stump which had frightened me on the surface of the bog. I gazed at the fissures of the bark and they shone out in bright colours and turned to hieroglyphs; it was the mummy's wrappings I was looking at. The coverings burst asunder, and out of them walked the mummy king of a thousand years ago, black as pitch, black as the shining wood-snail or the slimy mud of the swamp. Whether it were the Mummy King or the Marsh King I knew not. He threw his arms around me, and I felt that I must die.
I note that it didn't occur to me immediately to include Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) in this list, even though I read it just as young and wasn't frightened and the swamp is right there in the title. I never thought to look for film adaptations; there are at least three. Of course the silent version produced by the author's own production company is lost.
I don't think I remembered to share Chrystabell and David Lynch's "The Answers to the Questions" (2024) with anyone but my husbands last month when it was released, but I liked it.
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That's just appalling! I am beginning to wonder if perhaps you have checked whether or not your local authorities are in fact run by seven megalomaniac wizards and if one of them possibly may or may not need 2000 words from you, because what else justifies this brand of torture?
(It's unreasonable! In the exact same time period my local authorities have spent six weeks doing something mysterious to the gas that involved digging lots of small holes up and down the street mine adjoins to, then filling them in, which evidently kept them amused for a while and presumably had some purpose. They then resurfaced the parallel street in two weeks, last week opposite had electricians in for a week, and this week someone out of sight was doing something that might as well have been digging holes in concrete, but they all came and went, and none ever earlier thann 8.30am! So, you know, I have to wonder: have you checked your laptop for possible magical causes?)
*hugs* (sorry! But they might as well construct you a moat and send a marching band at this point, what even.)
I am glad there are bogs to, er, bury yourself in, but I very much hope they at least move further down the street again and get on with it. ♥ ETA: <-- the construction workers, not the bogs.
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I actually heard from one of the project managers this morning, because I had left a message with his office the previous day trying to find out if our property manager had ever passed on the information about coordinating the transfer of service to our landlords as required by the gas company. (It doesn't look like it.) He sounded like a normal slightly harassed human and explained in helpful detail what our next week would likely entail, but unfortunately he also claimed that the company is hoping to finish construction on our street by the end of August and I still can't understand how or why it is taking this long. It can only be easier to talk to someone who lives literally in the past.
In the exact same time period my local authorities have spent six weeks doing something mysterious to the gas that involved digging lots of small holes up and down the street mine adjoins to, then filling them in, which evidently kept them amused for a while and presumably had some purpose. They then resurfaced the parallel street in two weeks, last week opposite had electricians in for a week, and this week someone out of sight was doing something that might as well have been digging holes in concrete
I must say that also sounds like a lot.
I am glad there are bogs to, er, bury yourself in, but I very much hope they at least move further down the street again and get on with it. ♥ ETA: <-- the construction workers, not the bogs.
Honestly having a mysteriously mobile bog around here would be so much more fun than construction. And also the sort of thing that would happen in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones.
*hugs*
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A normal human is something of a comfort, although I am sorry that you've still got a few more weeks to go; that is pretty rotten, to put it mildly. - :-(
It can only be easier to talk to someone who lives literally in the past.
I mean, you can't be sure that he wasn't. XD
I must say that also sounds like a lot.
Thankfully, aside from the first week or two of the gasworks, there were only odd days when it was particularly bad. It does seem to be the summer for it round here, though!
Honestly having a mysteriously mobile bog around here would be so much more fun than construction. And also the sort of thing that would happen in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones.
LOL, it really would, wouldn't it?