A life that's good on paper, but how does it feel?

[sovay]

I slept in patches and was woken by a roving catlet just too close to my alarm to go back to sleep, but my doctor's appointments both went well and that was so pleasant and frankly kind of a surprise, I am calling this day a win anyway. spatch met me halfway through. At loose ends between doctors, we spent an hour in the branch library on College Ave. where he read Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and I read Dorothy Gilman's A Nun in the Closet (1975); we did not succeed in our quest to drop off the prescription for my new lenses because the optometrist turned out to be closed for the week, but we got chocolate and almond croissants (and later a flat of catfood and a new scratch box for Hestia) out of the expedition. By then my eyes were starting to contract properly against the sunlight and I did not have to wear plasticky wraparound sunglasses like a latter-day laudanum fiend. [edit: Never mind, I just looked in a mirror. One of my pupils is contracting normally. The other eye looks like it belongs to a tarsier.] When the other doctor asked if there had been any unusual stress in my life lately, I'm afraid I laughed.

I dreamed of traveling by myself in a part of the country I didn't know—given the geography of my dreams, I suspect a part of the country that doesn't exist—reading a definitely nonexistent graphic novel on the train. I remember pages in a scratchy pen-and-ink style, spatter-washed red; human figures with heads of animal bone. You don't choose to become a monster, you only choose what kind of monster you'll be. When I got off the train, there was nothing but a collection of storefronts too modest for a strip mall and a gas station where one of the attendants explained that the bus depot had moved a couple of years back to the next town over; he pointed me the way I'd be walking, down a valley of residential blocks and across a four-lane bridge, and then offered to walk as far as the bridge with me, so I wouldn't get lost. I said sure, thanks. This is not a dream where a stranger turns into Psycho or Reynardine all among the mountains high. The streets switchbacked through trees farther into spring or south than the ones on my street, still leafless and mired in crusted heaps of snow from the last nor'easter. The bridge looked like it had been built to take trains, the kind of rusted sky-geometry that I love in the waking city I live in. We walked across it together, still talking. I caught the bus. I assume he went back to the gas station. If either of us was a monster, we were not the kind that was a danger to one other. I wouldn't mind knowing where I was going.

There's a very blue dusk outside my window now, LED-light photographic silver on the wash of ice in the parking lot across the street. I am feeling inordinately pleased with myself for identifying a stranger's half-remembered lost horror story—they weren't even sure if they'd read it or heard it on the radio—as Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey." I remember that one because of the medical details and because of the Catalogue of Ships.

Courtesy of handful_ofdust: Jason Isaacs hugs a potted plant.

Comments

[dhampyresa]

"a scratchy pen-and-ink style, spatter-washed red; human figures with heads of animal bone. You don't choose to become a monster, you only choose what kind of monster you'll be"

I want to read it!

[moon_custafer]

I remember that story for the medical horror, and that Lord Peter uses a passage from Homer as a spell (his version of the Third Doctor’s Venusian lullaby lyrics I guess), but I’d forgotten which bit in particular (if I ever knew).

[gwynnega]

Hooray for unexpectedly good doctor's appointments!

[kore]

You don't choose to become a monster, you only choose what kind of monster you'll be

I have Natasha on the brain after I went off on the BruceNat thing in my DW, so to me that so sounds like something she might say.

[kore]

DAMN YOU COULDA WARNED ME THE FIRST PICTURE WAS OF JASON ISAACS WALKING OUT OF A SWIMMING POOL SOPPING WET

AND HE'S BAREFOOT OMG I DIED

[asakiyume]

I like "rusted sky-geometry." Evocative words.