Look into that smoldering building's bombed-out fog until it finally lifts

I spent so much of Boxing Day curled on the couch with my books, I failed to notice it was snowing until well after dark when it glittered down through the streetlight in one of those soundstage tinsel veils. One of my goals for this afternoon was to get out into its Arctic wonderland, whose streets were spidered with ice and drift-blue with chemical salt instead of glacial age. I walked further than I had intended and had to come back across the snow of the imaginatively designated Veterans Memorial Park between the iron freeze of the Mystic River and the less elemental red lights of Route 16.

( Look quick, is that something you missed? )

I have been sick for so long, I feel that I have once again come unplugged from any of the places where I live. I don't know that I will be any less sick in the immediately foreseeable future, but I have to try to socket myself back into these streets, this light, the inside of my own head. I remain so tired the latter feels emptier than I would like, but at least I am trying not to punt every idea that crosses it as pointlessly exhausting. In the meantime I am enjoying Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen (ed. Edward Parnell, 2024) and Russell Hoban's The Bat Tattoo (2002).