Then every sailor lad he would be happy with his friend

My short story "Twice Every Day Returning" is now online at Uncanny Magazine.

It was written last September, another ice-story from a heat wave; it was my first original fiction since the onset of the pandemic and arrived somewhat unexpectedly as a pendant to the title novelette of As the Tide Came Flowing In (2022), itself already a prequel to the central novella of Forget the Sleepless Shores (2018), thus making a cycle for the first time in my fiction. The title comes from the ballad "Just as the Tide Was Flowing," but the song itself was written to albums of Gordon Bok and Cesária Évora plus an assortment of sea-songs, chanteys, and morna. It is queer, and maritime, and about diaspora, and important to me.

The past is the anchorage of the future. I want one to live toward, not merely into.

Oh, little splinters, someday trees will grow

For Guy Fawkes Day, spatch and I voted in our ward and precinct; we have the stickers to prove it. So goes the work of the world.

I saw the crescent moon and the Venus-star in the aftermath of a mackerel sunset sky, a corded haze of washed denim and faded rouge.

As long as we're waiting, I'm waiting for T Coronae Borealis.