She makes a banner with her hair

My short story "A Cherry Without a Stone" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was supposed to be a poem: yhlee had given me a handful of prompts, including "a siege of cherry blossoms." The phrase took off immediately into prose instead. The title comes from a riddle song that my mother used to sing as a lullaby, although technically her version was a cherry that had no stone. It has trees, and war, and stories; it is honest-to-God secondary-world fantasy, which is rare for me. I am back to feeling that my body has completely forgotten how to sleep.

Stay the night, I swear we'll sleep

I am heat-stunned and exhausted to the point where I feel I cannot talk intelligently about anything, which is especially bad when I have outstanding Patreon obligations to complete. Our new next-door neighbors have been holding a party all afternoon, complete with blasting, bass-heavy music—they brought speakers out onto the back porch—and beer pong. They appear to scream "WOO!" a lot. I tried to nap this afternoon and was prevented by the noise and the heat, which the window unit upstairs is having trouble even ameliorating. I am averaging about three hours of sleep a night.

I got up early this morning for British Car Day at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum. We were taking my father as a very belated birthday present; the event had been rescheduled once already from June. I took lots of pictures of Jaguar E-Types and two lovely examples of the XK120, including a 1954 roadster in British racing green. All sorts of classic MGs, though not a 1962 MGB like the one a college friend of my mother's once drove her from Oklahoma to upstate New York in. A flaming magenta 1974 TR6 Triumph. A Tardis-blue Morris Mini Traveller its owner had decked out with Doctor Who stickers. And after we came in out of the sun, an amazing array of motorcycles from the museum's current exhibit, Beauty of the Beast. My favorites were the 1912 Flying Merkel Board Track Racer and the 1928 Indian 101 Scout used in the Wall of Death at a California amusement park called The Fountains. The former is a low-slung caramel-colored curlicue with its name written in dynamic capitals on the gas tank; it looks like a candy wrapper and an elegant piece of jewelry and it influenced all later motorcycle design. The latter was the one bike in the exhibit that didn't look like a museum piece, lovingly restored and polished, chrome-shining under the spotlights. It is beat to hell and back, peeling at least three different colors of paint; it has patina like a Greek bronze helmet and the front fork is held on with baling wire. The whitewall of its front tire is scuffed a chalky green. I took pictures, but I don't know if they'll convey the astonishing sense of survival the bike gives off. You can see time in it. I don't know who rode it. It probably still remembers them.

(The 1928 Indian Scout was the preferred bike of Bessie Stringfield, Motorcycle Queen of Miami, who I need to learn more about. I'd heard of Anke-Eve Goldmann, but none of the other women mentioned in the exhibit.)

So that was all worth the early rising and the walking around a car-crowded lawn half-melting in midday heat and the one awkward interaction with a young man who I thought was asking to take my picture, but turned out was just sarcastically asking me to move out of the way of the car he was trying to photograph. I just resent deeply the fact that I couldn't come home and pass out for even a couple of hours. It is my hope that when the thunderstorm finally breaks, it will at least short out the party's sound system. They're still at it. It's like living in New Haven all over again without even the payoff of being in grad school.