Drank up all that hemlock, here I am just reading the leaves

I had to get up very early for a doctor's appointment; the rest of the day has been work, exhaustion, and steadily pouring rain. Last time I looked at the news it was all burning swastikas and incel terrorist attacks, so here is the one horrific thing that haunted rather than upset me to read: the excavation of the 5th-century massacre at Sandby Borg.

Such an aura of horror clung to the site that when archaeologists went in to uncover the gruesome facts, local people warned them they should keep well away from the green mound within the low stone wall.

It's the namelessness and the persistence that haunts me. No folk history of the killings themselves, no known and remembered dead, but fifteen hundred years later still the echo, strong enough to warn strangers, of the place as wrong. I keep thinking of the phrase quoted in the article, "like a shipwreck but on land." And now you dig into that mound and you take out the dead of that violence whose reputation outlived even the people who committed it. I will be amazed if they don't get draugar.

Tough times are a way to prove that life ain't nothing but the rent that's due

And tonight, the third total street-and block-wide blackout in less than a week. What the hell, Eversource. What the hell. We keep tea lights on the mantel and a flashlight in the bottom cupboard of the glass-fronted cabinet, but that's not an invitation, you know? I am getting tired of being told that I am one of the first callers in my area to report an outage. (spatch: "It's lost whatever prestige it had!") In a kind of grimly salvaging way, I am enjoying the photographic effect of the flat white streetlight on the rain-filled parking lot across the street, producing the kind of roughened, splintered wet asphalt glitter that adorned many a back alley of noir. I would cheerfully trade it for the headlights of an oncoming repair truck, however. The robo-call said helpfully, "April 26th."

There now appears to be a repair truck at the end of the street. I saw its flashers reflecting in the glass bricks of the windows of the Pentecostal church, adding an amber-colored hazard touch to the scene. Autolycus is prowling the darkened floor with his characteristic clicking of claws, but Hestia is crouched on the arm of the couch, which puts her at just the right height to groom, simultaneously and at the same time, her own back fur and Rob's eyelids. The breeze drifting in from the street smells disorientingly like salt and exhaust, like a harbor full of tugs and commercial tankers. "Maybe they've put a new coat of creosote on the pilings," says Rob.

The repair truck has shown itself! It is a cherry-picker. We salute it as it goes by.

It does not immediately restore the electricity.

The electricity is restored! Train whistles holler through the night as if in solidarity. It is not even yet April 26th.

Nonetheless, Eversource, what the hell.