The moth unfurls its moistened wings

I woke this morning to an explosion. It turns out that a transformer had blown a few blocks away, which is why the power only came back on about fifteen minutes ago, but it sounded so close and sudden that I would not have been surprised to see a blackened crater in the tomatoes and zucchini across the street, when I pushed apart the blinds: there were sirens wailing and the breeze smelled of smoke. It got me out of bed much more effectively than an alarm clock.

I do not yet have my finalized schedule for Readercon, but I will post it as soon as I do. There will be a reading and at least two panels.

Last night I dreamed a myth-cycle which now I remember only in fragments, but the moment before I woke up I could have recited the entire thing. It was winter, or it was cold and the sky was flat and grey and stretched away on all sides, and I was bound to the earth with switches of dead birch that grew over my wrists and ankles like wickets, a willow branch driven through my belly like a stake and growing. There were spiders in my nose and throat, tiny black beads that swayed like dust motes every time I breathed in. There were pine trees and the rattling, thorny weeds of the dead year all around. I had borne a child, but I had gotten him on himself after stepping out of the world for fifteen years, out of time into a cave like a bear's winter den. I do not think they killed him, too; at thirty, he did not recognize me. There was more to the story, seasons and family and sacrifice, but nothing that I can remember now.

I woke up, briefly. When I fell back asleep, I was inside a country that existed under the peel of an apple, with gates made out of glass, but there were powerful and political liars there as anywhere else. I was retelling the story of the woman whom trees grew through until she died, her fingers fruiting and her eyes full of dragonflies, trying to make them understand it was about me and not to be used as some kind of leverage—as if Prometheus were identified with the Devil, mind what the gods say or you'll end up just the same. There was a young man descended thousands of generations from my son. We ate things like onigiri filled with hot dark syrup. What I cannot accurately describe is the feeling of immense age and distance alongside encyclopedias and wireless cafés, everything that should have looked familiar and instead their very ordinariness made them unheimlich, and the place in the pines (in the pines, where the sun never shines, I shiver the whole night through) where I could feel myself falling back through time, so I stepped away. Sometimes I felt that my mouth was still dry with cobwebs, every time I spoke. We were arguing and the earth was being torn away under our feet, so that we could patch it up again with pine needles and the green-stained bones of a fox. Then there was the explosion and I stayed awake, so I will never find out how it all ended.

I didn't even watch Dogma before bed!