You say it's elemental, I say it's alchemy

In traditional fashion, I believe I mistook this morning's earthquake for trucks out on the street. I feel a little as though I should visit the Bloody Bluff Fault and a little as though I should just leave the crumple zone of our bedrock alone.

I have been in a kind of free-fall of sleepless pain, but Uncanny Magazine is running its 2024 Favorite Fiction Reader Poll in which each reader can vote for their top three favorites of the magazine's year of fiction and since I had a story in Uncanny last year, I am self-interestedly boosting. It's a magnificent roster of fiction to choose from all round.

I hate finding out about local art through the news that it was mysteriously and aggressively stolen. I still dream of discovering the one sculpture of my grandmother's that is unaccounted for in a private collection or a museum with no idea of its provenance. It went missing when the temple that had commissioned it was vandalized: I have only ever seen my grandfather's photographs of it, the stark-lined armature of a hand in her characteristically half-fleshed style, the lava-black beading of its solder ominous in light of its title, Auschwitz. I do not like to imagine it was destroyed when it was made to hold memory in its empty, upwrenched palm.

History is a yahrzeit candle.
One terrible wind could blow it out.
—Jane Yolen, "Tombs" (1996)