"I joke about sex because it's funny when you're frightened."

[greygirlbeast]

Yesterday, I did 1,024 words on "The Melusine (1898)" for Sirenia Digest #31, but did not find The End. Because this is one those pieces. I meant it to be a vignette I could write in two days. It has, become, instead, a full-fledged short story that has, so far, required twice that number of days. If I'm lucky, I'll finish it today. Truth be told,

Comments

[sclerotic_rings]

I understand completely about your aversion to leaving Sophie in Atlanta. I felt the same way about my savannah monitor Afsan: after he died, I made sure to get back his ashes, because I was going to be damned if I'd have left him in Innsmouth West.

I had another savannah, a baby, die on me about three months later of unrelated causes: I had already received a job offer to move back to Texas at that point, so I kept him in the freezer until the move and put him in a cooler for 24 hours. As soon as I crossed the state border into California, I stopped, found a spectacular spot on the side of a mountain on the Siskyou Pass, and buried him there, covering the grave site with quartz chunks that were eroding from further up the mountainside. As much as I detest my ex-wife, I wouldn't have left her in Portland unless I was physically unable to move her corpse, and were I to have been diagnosed with a terminal disease while I was there, I was determined to die anywhere but there just so any obituaries wouldn't associate me with the

[greygirlbeast]

Yeah, I feel about Portland the way you feel about Atlanta. How can you tell?

And, I must admit, if baffles me a little. I've never been to Portland, but Spooky lived there and loves it. Besides its impending destruction by the forces of plate tectonics, what do you find so awful about Portland (and you might well find the impending destruction part not so awful...).

[sclerotic_rings]

In a word, the people. By the time I left, I discovered that the best way in the world to freak out a Portlander was to hold the door open for one, because they're simply not used to random acts of courtesy. The city itself looks like Gary, Indiana with trees, but I described the population as "resembling a horrible cloning experiment involving the main characters from the Britcom The Young Ones, only with far too many Ricks and Mikes and nowhere near enough Vyvians. All of the Neils are working for Powell's Books and the music stores, and Mr. Balowskis fill the city council." I got tired of bicyclists riding on the sidewalk and mowing down pedestrians like Cossacks on a mission, pedestrians who'd jaywalk out in front of traffic and glare at motorists with this "How dare you?" expression, MBAs who'd kick out their apartment windows during big parties and then sweep the broken glass out into the street from the fourth floor when pedestrians walked on by. I got tired of the Portland Coma (where nobody can be bothered to get off

[greygirlbeast]

Fair enough.