"...for a lead role in a cage."
I'd like my walk-on part back now, please.
I have spent years now in a fancy prison with very liberal privileges (though I rarely avail myself of them).
I am fairly certain that this is the coldest March morning I have ever known, out of forty-nine years and nine months worth of March mornings (unless that was actually yesterday morning). My office windows are frosted over. The lying sun is out and bright in a wide carnivorous sky. Currently, it's 24˚F out there, but feels like 17˚F. Last night's low was 18˚F, and tonight's low will be 14˚F. Supposedly, some sort of miserly warming is about to begin. We shall see. I sit here in stale Hell:
Yesterday, I began the cyborg story. Just barely. Currently, it wears the Daxian title "The Living and Their Stillborn." I only wrote 357 words, probably because of the very, very potent weed I was smoking to take the edge off my anxiety. Anyway, here's yesterday's work, in full:
I usually bring Jessamine down to Little Beirut, to the Backwash Anticline stringers of dyke subsequents and neonical bioluddite lounges. The resident cops’ cady is an ex-friend of mine, and therefore not as prone to tagging a slŭf all night, so Jessamine and I can mainly be out with-out suffering the attention of the froggers. Like most left behinds, she’s a right hypochondriac, but wouldn’t I be, too? Fuck yeah, I would. If I’d been born locked up with an inviolable biochemistry, I’d be five-fold paranoid as Jessamine. I seriously doubt I’d be trusting my continued persistence to a Made-in-Tianjin rebreather, gloves, and a handful of skittles. I’d be one of the bubble babies, for sure. So, it makes me proud of her, whenever Jessamine agrees to leave her tiny sharefare apartment in Red Hook and accompany me anywhere at all.
We sit together in the cat-leather booth all the way at the back of Canaan, so we don’t have to watch the daily-events giallo they flash over the bar. Jessamine is talking about her new painting when a certain lady we both know spots us and waves and makes her way through the press to our booth, her own reject in tow.
Now, that term - reject - it might not be deemed any longer corrección política in some more refined circles. But those are circles to which neither myself nor Jessamine belong. Also, I’d hasten to add: circles whose constituents are as gun shy of the Little B saloons and brothels as the bubble babies are of opening a window on a smoggy August afternoon. Jessamine, she names herself reject. And the sole time I objected, and even went so far as to raise the hoary specter of self-hatred, autoloathe, she told me to wear my heart on the inside, where it belongs. She even said please.
Anyway, the certain lady in question is known usually as the Natrolite Viper, and she’s a stone fan of Jessamine’s work. She seems to buy every other canvas, at least.
Otherwise, yesterday we finished Season Three of Games of Thrones. Superb. Also, Naked Lunch, downloading for this weekend's Wildstar beta, Vicodin, leftover chicken and a very nice avocado, "A Review of 'Morphology and Evolution of Turtles: Proceedings of the Gaffney Turtle Symposium (2009) in Honor of Eugene S. Gaffney,'" "New specimens of Protocetidae (Mammalia, Cetacea) from New Jersey and South Carolina," "A new record of ringed seal (Pusa hispida) from the late Pleistocene Champlain Sea and comments on its age and paleoenvironment," Yacht Club soda, and electronic mousetraps. Oh, and my comp copy of S.T. Joshi's Black Wings III: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror came, and I read a little from it. Beautiful cover. The book includes my story "One Tree Hill (The World As Cataclysm)."
Now, it's that time, so it is.
TTFN,
Aunt Beast
Except from "The Living and Their Stillborn" Copyright © 2014 by Caitlín R. Kiernan, All Rights Reserved.
I have spent years now in a fancy prison with very liberal privileges (though I rarely avail myself of them).
I am fairly certain that this is the coldest March morning I have ever known, out of forty-nine years and nine months worth of March mornings (unless that was actually yesterday morning). My office windows are frosted over. The lying sun is out and bright in a wide carnivorous sky. Currently, it's 24˚F out there, but feels like 17˚F. Last night's low was 18˚F, and tonight's low will be 14˚F. Supposedly, some sort of miserly warming is about to begin. We shall see. I sit here in stale Hell:
Yesterday, I began the cyborg story. Just barely. Currently, it wears the Daxian title "The Living and Their Stillborn." I only wrote 357 words, probably because of the very, very potent weed I was smoking to take the edge off my anxiety. Anyway, here's yesterday's work, in full:
I usually bring Jessamine down to Little Beirut, to the Backwash Anticline stringers of dyke subsequents and neonical bioluddite lounges. The resident cops’ cady is an ex-friend of mine, and therefore not as prone to tagging a slŭf all night, so Jessamine and I can mainly be out with-out suffering the attention of the froggers. Like most left behinds, she’s a right hypochondriac, but wouldn’t I be, too? Fuck yeah, I would. If I’d been born locked up with an inviolable biochemistry, I’d be five-fold paranoid as Jessamine. I seriously doubt I’d be trusting my continued persistence to a Made-in-Tianjin rebreather, gloves, and a handful of skittles. I’d be one of the bubble babies, for sure. So, it makes me proud of her, whenever Jessamine agrees to leave her tiny sharefare apartment in Red Hook and accompany me anywhere at all.
We sit together in the cat-leather booth all the way at the back of Canaan, so we don’t have to watch the daily-events giallo they flash over the bar. Jessamine is talking about her new painting when a certain lady we both know spots us and waves and makes her way through the press to our booth, her own reject in tow.
Now, that term - reject - it might not be deemed any longer corrección política in some more refined circles. But those are circles to which neither myself nor Jessamine belong. Also, I’d hasten to add: circles whose constituents are as gun shy of the Little B saloons and brothels as the bubble babies are of opening a window on a smoggy August afternoon. Jessamine, she names herself reject. And the sole time I objected, and even went so far as to raise the hoary specter of self-hatred, autoloathe, she told me to wear my heart on the inside, where it belongs. She even said please.
Anyway, the certain lady in question is known usually as the Natrolite Viper, and she’s a stone fan of Jessamine’s work. She seems to buy every other canvas, at least.
Otherwise, yesterday we finished Season Three of Games of Thrones. Superb. Also, Naked Lunch, downloading for this weekend's Wildstar beta, Vicodin, leftover chicken and a very nice avocado, "A Review of 'Morphology and Evolution of Turtles: Proceedings of the Gaffney Turtle Symposium (2009) in Honor of Eugene S. Gaffney,'" "New specimens of Protocetidae (Mammalia, Cetacea) from New Jersey and South Carolina," "A new record of ringed seal (Pusa hispida) from the late Pleistocene Champlain Sea and comments on its age and paleoenvironment," Yacht Club soda, and electronic mousetraps. Oh, and my comp copy of S.T. Joshi's Black Wings III: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror came, and I read a little from it. Beautiful cover. The book includes my story "One Tree Hill (The World As Cataclysm)."
Now, it's that time, so it is.
TTFN,
Aunt Beast
Except from "The Living and Their Stillborn" Copyright © 2014 by Caitlín R. Kiernan, All Rights Reserved.