She said I'd need a blaster and I'd need a freezer gun

Everything since Readercon has been exhausting to no good end. Something needs to give. The cat dying was the wrong thing.

The howling of the stray souls of heaven

I dreamed of a dead man with gold crusted in his mouth, like too many filled teeth. He had been made to drink it, like a realization of Crassus defeated by the Parthians (although my favorite story about his death is the one where his severed head is used as a prop in the final scene of the Bacchae, which if it were to be the true history would make me wonder what god he had met and failed to recognize at Carrhae), but the setting was modern, the walls industrial green, the pathologist's table reflecting thinly in the fluorescent lights. I was meeting with his family to discuss burial arrangements, in which no one said revenge and everyone thought it. I don't think I was expected to handle it. Just the style of coffin, the wood, the colors of the winding sheet. He was Chinese, his family wasn't. They wanted knots of red silk to hold down the lid of the casket. I didn't make the connection in the dream, but I started to wonder as I woke if they were trying to bring him back as a vengeful ghost. I'd have done what they asked if I'd stayed asleep much longer. I don't imagine that would have ended well. That's the sort of thing that's in my brain these days.