Be there in the nude—I tore into your sweater

And when I got home tonight, the mail had brought me my contributor's copy of Mythic Journeys: Retold Myths and Legends, edited by Paula Guran. The cover looks even better in person.

"A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie" was published originally in Not One of Us #45 in 2011, reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine in 2015, and I am honored to find it the closing story of this anthology, all the more so since it is exactly the kind of anthology with which I stocked my shelves when mythic fiction was booming. The ToC is full of people I am equally delighted to appear alongside, including a marvelous fox by Yoon Ha Lee and one of my favorite short stories by Tanith Lee. And the story itself matters to me: it is no longer the only piece of fiction I have drawn from Norse myth, but it was the first and remains to date my only writing of Loki, the god I imprinted on so formatively in second grade—thanks, D'Aulaires—that in some ways that one illustration of him smiling in the fire of his own changing shapes remains the yardstick against which I judge even the Marvel movies. I wrote it while Eyjafjallajökull was erupting. I couldn't not think of Loki twisting under the earth, poison-burnt, making it shake. I wrote the story about some of his children instead. Some of the narrator's details are shared with my family and some are not. I just realized it's probably the closest thing I have written so far to a werewolf story, too.

It is enough to be myself, to have myself as an audience

Today's medical adventure brought to you by the letter seriously? I am fine, but when I say I didn't need an office visit this afternoon, I don't mean I could have done without the reason for it, I mean I got scheduled an office visit I genuinely didn't need because the person who answered the phone at the doctor's office did not believe that I knew what I was talking about with my own body and made me come in to prove it. I got there and the doctor agreed with me. It was pouring rain the whole time and I was exhausted. I could have just gone home after my first appointment of the day that took forever to get to because the buses no longer run on even the ghost of a schedule and the taxi got, apparently, lost. Can we get Charlie Baker to take the T? Either it will shock him into responsibility or it will just shock him and at this stage I'll sit back with popcorn for the latter.

1. I'd never heard of the High Tider dialect of Ocracoke Island until this rather dramatically titled article: "The US island that speaks Elizabethan English." I immediately went looking for audio clips and found several in North Carolina Sea Grant's Coastwatch. I see why people are fascinated by it. Some of its phonology sounds Southern to me; some of it sounds unmarked (and because I can't hear my own accent I can't tell what that means); and a lot of it sounds like Australian, Irish, and West Country English. I'm wondering if the latter is where the original article's description of "pirate slang" comes from. Robert Newton casts a long shadow.

2. Speaking of dialects, on the train I ended up standing next to a teenager rapidly texting in what looked like one of the Italian languages to me. (I couldn't study it due to not wanting to be rude even on the semi-sardine-crowded Red Line, but I thought it might be Venetian. There were a lot of x's in her spelling. What it did not look like was SMS Italian, in any case.) Especially having just read an article which mentioned almost in passing how rapidly the various regional languages are dying out in Italy itself, I would be happy to see someone a full generation younger than myself communicating in something that was definitely not Standard Italian.

3. Too late to add it unobtrusively to last night's post, I realized there's another substrate in "A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie." There were two books by Rita Ritchie in the house when I was growing up, The Golden Hawks of Genghis Khan (1958) and Ice Falcon (1963). Both are about falconry; the first is set in the early thirteenth-century Mongol Empire and the second in tenth-century Norway. I'm sure some of the history has since been surpassed, but since Ritchie presents both Mongol and Viking cultures as complex and sympathetic rather than savage raiders (or noble savages), I don't feel they hurt me any. Anyway, what's relevant here about the plot of Ice Falcon is the part where the young protagonist, the Saxon falconer Kurt, finds himself in Iceland searching for the king's ransom of an all-white gyrfalcon on its native ground of "haunted, twisted" Mount Loki:

Around the thunder-dark towers flew white gyrfalcons, ringing and wheeling as if they were ashes whirling around a fire-blackened hearth.

With a sudden chill, Kurt remembered all he had heard about the region, from Rolf, Egil and others. "Some say it is here that the gods chained evil Loki in a cave," went the tale. "They fixed a poisonous serpent above his head. When the poison drips into Loki's face, he shudders, and the earth shudders also."

Shaking off the memory of this tale, Kurt urged his horse through the barren, broken land that lay between him and Mount Loki . . . Riding on, Kurt noticed that the black, twisted lava shapes were more and more frequent. As he gazed at them in passing, the peculiar ropy surface seemed to shift until he was looking at the face of a demon. "There are rock-dwellers and shape-changers," he had been told.

And then, just in front of his horse, a great gout of steam burst from the earth. Boiling water showered him as his mount shied, and there was the smell as of spoiled eggs. "The geysers pour out a poisonous vapor." He covered his face and dared not breathe until he was clear of the dancing fountain. It was indeed easy to die in this wretched wasteland.

Black walls rose on either side as his horse picked its way over stones. Here and there moss furred the ledges and lichen crawled over the face of the cliffs. Open country, desert though it was, had vanished. Kurt was in the crack of a vast field of lava.

Now he could not avoid the changing, leering faces in the stone, nor the play of shadows which made it seem that twisted arms moved to clutch him. "Outlaws sometimes hide there, slaying men who come to hunt them." And spirits wandered here, too, killing humans that they might have company in their torment.

Suddenly the earth shuddered, and lava shaken loose from the cliff crashed into the ravine. Earth and sky danced before Kurt's eyes as the ground heaved and settled itself. It was only Loki, he joked to himself, writhing under the poison dripping into his face. But the jest was a poor one.

I fell down an amazing hole of vulcanology in 2010 trying to figure out which volcano in Iceland Ritchie actually identified with "Mount Loki" and never did figure it out, unless she meant Laki. But the idea of Loki beneath tangible, mortal ground, not just the earth and ice of myth, stayed with me.

And I wrote all of the above before leaving the house to run a quick errand with my mother, which became slightly less quick when her car decided to make exciting intermittent grinding sounds with its front wheels. Everyone is safe and home and out of the torrential rain and the car is going to the vet tomorrow. Which it just came back from a day or two ago. Today's automotive adventure brought to you by the letter seriously?