Your mother never took the Christmas lights down

Yesterday was medically grueling and frustrating and when I got out of the appointment before which I had not managed to eat anything because of the hurry-up-and-wait shenanigans of the MBTA, I thought I would go to the Time Out Market. It was right around the corner and the reviews were good. Inside it was cavernous and clangingly noisy and I had to take a couple of phone calls while already battened down against the thumping house music which is probably the reason my ears are hurting so badly today, but its restaurants all looked spectacular, like a sleek, chi-chi version of the Boston Public Market, and I stared at nori tacos and tinned cockles and deli sandwiches and finally made a decision and placed an order and took out a twenty to pay for it and at that point I was informed that the restaurant did not take cash. The entire market did not take cash. Which I had naively thought was, in this state at least, illegal. I was informed that I could buy myself a gift card and use that if I didn't want to use my own credit or debit card. I just stared at the server and then I put my cash back in my wallet and my wallet back in my pocket and I walked out of the Time Out Market and I cannot see myself returning even if one of their vendors sells tinned cockles in brine at a price I was willing to pay.

I walked to Mei Mei with my ears ringing and explained in a staticky voice that I was having a terrible day and would it be a problem if I wanted to order one of their scallion pancake sandwiches and eat it in and their counterman said not at all, so I ordered the pork-stuffed one with cranberry hoisin sauce and the non-alcoholic cider vinegar of a haymaker's punch to drink and asked if it would be too much food if I added a kale salad on the side and their counterman looked at me vibrating with pain and unhappiness and general overload and asked gently if I would like the free brownie or the free coconut-milk rice pudding for dessert. "Coconut!" I said gratefully. I took a table in the corner and read Richard O. Prum's The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017) and right around the unique feathery stridulation of the club-winged manakin my name was called and I received a tray with an entire meal set out on it right down to the spoon for the rice pudding and I ate all of it while continuing to read about avian evolution and aesthetic selection and felt very taken care of. It was delicious and inexpensive and they took cash. I even managed to get home on a combination of buses and trains afterward that came more or less while I was waiting for them. Then I collapsed.

It took me forever to fall asleep, but I slept well into the afternoon which is unusual these days and dreamed in the meantime of a system of superheroes that must have been influenced by L'Engle's nephilim and seraphim, because people were invoking obscure angels for powers of shape-change and other supernatural properties. Mostly young people, some older, all marginalized, even in the dream a visible slap in the face to Evangelical Christianity that felt no one should have a right to the names of powers and principalities but themselves. It led to a standoff with the government at a local farm that I visit quite ordinarily in my waking life. I hope we won. There was also a girl who as far as I could tell was just Leviathan. choco_frosh had left me a copy of Ursula Vernon's The Twisted Ones (2019) and a tin of sardines when I woke.

In terms of recent news, as countercharms to the ever-escalating horror WTF I am enjoying very much both the whale fall swarmed by octopus and the plasmodial slime mold at the Paris Zoological Park. I do not disagree with John Lithgow's assessment of the man in the White House, but I'm not sure I'd known he could draw and he does a mean caricature, entirely deserved.

I want to meet you like trains pass through stations

The mail this evening brought my contributor's copy of Transcendent 4: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press), edited by Bogi Takács. The table of contents is packed with names like Nino Cipri, Nibedita Sen, Catherine Kim, Izzy Wasserstein, H. Pueyo, Margaret Killjoy, L Chan, and Davian Aw; the cover art is stunning. My contribution is "The Face of the Waters," originally published in Forget the Sleepless Shores (2018); it was written to redress a disappointing experience of ashlyme's with a story of canals and rain and almost certainly bears traces of recent exposure to Sapphire & Steel (1979–82). I am delighted and honored to have it included in this anthology, my second appearance in the series. Also I now own a copy of Robert Levy's Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol (2019) and that just looks great.