*Lay back and pretend it’s Saturday, okay? – SAH*

*For the previous chapters, please go here. These are posted first draft, as the brain dictates to the fingers which are remarkably stupid. Eventually it will be cleaned up and fixed just before page is made secret/taken down and the book is published. At that time I will take lists of typos or volunteers to proof read. For now, it’s written in a hurry, usually an hour before it goes up. And, let me remind you, it’s free – SAH*

Installment 9

Happy Families

When it came to having strange relatives, Michael Ainsling felt he couldn’t throw stones.  Or rather he could, but it would be akin to standing atop a tower made entirely of glass and throwing stones at your neighbors’ windows.  Sooner or later, it was your tower that would come crashing down.

After all, his brother was the royal Witchfinder and had continued his avocation for decades, while the kind himself had forbid it by decree.  Seraphim, in fact, had broken royal edict to go to other world where magic was forbidden and punishable with death, and rescue magic users and shifters from the jaws of death.  In this he’d been aided by his valet, whom they all knew to be his father’s byblow.  What they didn’t know was that Gabriel was also half-elf and in the royal land of fairyland.  In fact, he was now the king of fairyland. And Seraphim, despite his transgressions against royal decree, had become the prince consort of the princess Helena, who would eventually inherit the throne.

His father, who wasn’t dead, had gone adventuring among the many worlds, with his mother.  His twin sister, Caroline, had gone to fairyland herself — he’d never understood why, and no one had ever explained — and fallen in love with a centaur named Akakios who had, for reasons also never made clear, been banned from fairyland forever, thereby

During the adventures leading to that outcome, Michael had been kidnapped into fairyland. He wasn’t sure what had happened to him there.  He had memories. They were all unpleasant ones.  But he couldn’t pin them down. The details, the certainty of what happened to him, tended to twist and turn in his mind, when he tried to think of them, leaving him confused, and more scared than the son of such illustrious parentage should be.  He couldn’t dodge the feeling that while in fairyland he had become something less than fully human. He’d been known to wonder if his family suspected the same and f that was why he’d been left alone at their country home while everyone else pursued their destiny.

But at least he thought, none of his siblings had ever turned into a goose.  He thought.  At least he hoped not.

He ran his hand over his face, feeling as though he’d been sandblasted since he’d first read the dead man’s letter over breakfast.  He’d somewhere along the line come to the conclusion the dead man was Al’s father.  But did that make her the byblow he’d talked about? Or was it instead one of his son’s he referred to.

He watched, past wonder, as Geoffrey, a tall lanky youth who would probably be attending a lever and starting his adult life, were this any kind of sane world, hugged Albinia, then gently nudged her aside.  Michael noted that Albinia was crying and wiping her eyes to her sleeve.  Since neither Albinia nor — Michael was sure — himself were noticeably clean after their adventures, this meant she was adding grey streaks to her face, to replace the dirt the tears were washing off.

He felt as if he’d fallen headlong in some kind of dream — at least it wasn’t the screaming nightmares he experienced after his return from fairyland — and waking up was long delayed.

Geoffrey advanced on him, full tilt and extended a hand, “Lord Michael,” he said. “my father talks much of you. He considers you the only genius to equal his to come along… well, ever. Or since Da Vinci’s magical inventions, whichever you prefer.”

“Your father talks…” Michael said.  He remembered heated discussions about the evil of necromancy around the dining room table and one thing he was absolutely sure of: without necromancy dead men didn’t talk.

“Oh. You imagine him dead,” Geoffrey said. He did not look a thing like Albinia, not having even the vaguest shred of red-headed bone structure.  His hair was dark, very straight, unruly, and looked like he’d cut it himself, in irregular swathes, by the method of chopping off whatever protruded onto his field of vision.  His eyes were also dark, and he had the jagged nose that Michael knew best from certain statues of the antiquity.  At the moment he looked amused, his lips twisting right in a smile that made Michael want to scream.  It was the sort of smile his older brothers knew better than to engage in, though they were much older and really royalty, or perhaps in Seraphim’s case, close to it.  It was the smile of an upperclassman laughing at the follies of a new student, or of a young man laughing at a toddler.

Michael refused to answer, because a succession of nannies, tutors and, yes, his older brothers, had beat into his skull that politeness was the requirement life placed on the gentle born, no matter what the temptation.  Instead, he raised an eyebrow, inquiringly.

The trick, which had taken him weeks to acquire, in front of the mirror, having seen their butler reduce an under-footman to incoherence by that expression, worked. Geoffrey seemed discomfited, as likely an outright rude response wouldn’t have managed.

“Oh. Well. Perhaps it is not surprising. But he’s not. He was put under a spell, you see, and whisked…. well…. here.”

Albinia made a sound of shock, as if the air had been punched out of her stomach, and as Geoffrey turned to her, she said, “It was mama, was it not?”

Geoffrey seemed to have forgotten his sister, so he looked surprised, then sighed, “Well, yes, Al. Who else? Who could have thus got under his guard?”

“And you?” Albinia said. She clenched her fists at her side and for the first time looked like she didn’t trust this man, whether he was her brother or not.

“Myself? What do you mean? I did nothing to Father?”

She made a huff of impatience. Michael felt as if he were familiar with it, having experienced it a few times during their adventures. He was also fairly sure that Albinia didn’t know she made that sound.

“Stupid,” she said, with remarkable fortrightness.  “Of course I didn’t mean that. I meant, did mother also spirit you away? Here? Wherever here is?”

Geoffrey pursed his lips. It was an odd expression, as though he were considering what to answer.  Which made Michael think meanly of his mind.  After all, if he knew he was going to meet them, and clearly he did so.  And if he knew Albinia’s curious nature, shouldn’t he have a slew of answers ready, whether they were the full truth or not?
But yet Geoffrey demurred and said, “Well, not precisely, but I think we can safely say it was at her command and instigation.  At any rate….” He sighed.  “The thing is our father was turned into a werewolf and sent back in time…. or perhaps to a world that doesn’t show to anyone’s scans.  And our attempts at freeing him have only locked him tighter.
And our father worries, which is why he decided to recruit you, Lord Michael, into helping us.  We wanted to do it earlier but Father said we had to wait until you’d reached the age of reason and could decide whether to help or not.”

Various things fell in place in Michael’s mind, starting with the fact that the letter, and possibly the golem, as well had been sent by that old wizard who had set the modern age in motion.  And that he’d — or probably she’d — hit Albinia’s father on the nose with light and force.  Well, that was an introduction.

But then his reason intruded, as it had the habit of doing, “What do you mean I could decide? You as good as kidnapped me and brought me here.”

Now it was Geoffrey who looked pained, as though his head hurt.  He rubbed with — Michael noted — exceedingly well manicured fingers at a pot above his nose.  “I’m not sure of that, milord,” he said.  “As nothing is as we planned.  We did not, for instance, plan to have Al come with you, and I’m at a loss for how you even met.”

Albinia and he spoke at once.  She said “He saved my life,” while Michael, his memory on that moment when she’d grabbed onto the smog-fetch and come with him said “She tried to protect me.”

Then Michael cleared his throat, “That is a discussion for another day,” he said.  “Are you saying that if I don’t wish to help you, I can just return to my family’s estate and my normal life.”

The smile was still sardonic, but Geoffrey looked bitter, “Father says without a doubt. Is that what you wish?”

“Geoffrey,” Al interrupted.  “You shouldn’t be the one doing this.  Where are our brothers?”

“Well,” Geoffrey said.  “That is part of the trouble. It’s…. complex.” He then turned to Michael, “So, milord, you’ll turn tail and run and leave us mired in our own difficulties? I guess it’s your prerogative.”

Michael tightened his jaw so hard it hurt.  He knew what he must look like, having watched both his brother’s do it. He knew he’d thrust his chin forward, and that his eyes reflected his anger at this Turkish treatment.  He took a deep breath, and when he spoke, his voice was so precise, so cultured, no one could accuse him of incivility, but he knew he was being grossly uncivil all the same.  “You have a curious means of applying to a boon.” He dusted an imaginary speck of dirt from his sleeve, which in fact was so tattered and suit covered that it would be impossible to tell dirt from fabric, and spoke in tones that did their best to ape Seraphim’s.  “Let’s suppose you behave like a normal human being seeking a troublesome favor from another and tell me what this is all about, all of it.”

He looked over at Al, who hesitated. For a moment he wondered if she’d be offended at him, and for some reason the idea bothered him, though he could not say why.

But Al squared her chin, and stepped over to stand next to him.  “Yes, Geoff, suppose you tell us.  Everything, please. Half truths are no way to go about requesting someone leave everything to help you.  It pains me to agree with her but you know what mama always said about your manners and temper!”

Geoff opened his mouth, then snapped it closed.  He flushed a dark red, which proved that Al’s hit had gone home. “Very well,” he said. “if that’s what you wish. But it is a great waste of time.”

 

 

 

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FIRST BOOKS ARE LIKE FIRST BABIES. NO OTHER BOOK WILL EVER BE THAT SPECIAL. SO WELCOME BECKY R JONES’S FIRST BOOK, AND GIVE HER A ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR HAVING THE COURAGE TO DO IT. IT LOOKS INTRIGUING. I’M ADDING IT TO THE VIRTUAL READING PILE:

FROM BECKY R. JONES:  Academic Magic: Academic Magic Book 1.

Zoe has found her dream job at a small liberal arts college teaching the history of Medieval witchcraft and magic. Academic life is exactly what she expected it to be…until the squirrels stop by to talk with her and her department chair and best friend turn out to be mages.

Zoe discovers a world of magic and power she never knew existed. She and other faculty mages race to stop a coven from raising a demon on the winter solstice while simultaneously grading piles of final exams and reading the tortured prose of undergraduate term papers. But first, she must learn to master her new-found powers.

AND OUR VERY OWN MARY CATELLI HAS FINALLY WRITTEN A NOVEL ;) SO ANOTHER ROUND OF APPLAUSE AT HER BRAVERY.

FROM MARY CATELLI:  A Diabolical Bargain.

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry. When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives — but all the evidence points to his having made the deal. Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST, FROM MOE LANE:  Frozen Dreams (The Fermi Resolution Book 1).

It’s a very straightforward detective story! Well, one where the detective lives in a post-apocalypse fantasy setting where there are orcs rampaging in the eastern desert, evil sorcerers lurking in their towers to the north, and Adventurers looting and exploring the post-American ruins. But they all come to Cin City: Cinderella, the capital of the Kingdom of New California. Maybe it’s because of the glitter. Maybe it’s because of the giant iceberg in the middle of the Gulf of California. And maybe it’s because they got nowhere else to go.

*Fear not for the installment of Witch’s Daughter. It will come, probably tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning. I’m still trying to balance the house remodeling and the tasks I should have done this week which I didn’t do because I was remodeling the house. Shoot me. – SAH.*

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Mute.

 

 

The World is Not Ending – by Doctor TANSTAAFL

When word came of a new deadly virus from China, our grown children asked what we thought.  We said, “Wash your hands, and don’t pick your nose”.  They claimed that was our answer to everything medical, along with ”take ibuprofen and walk it off”.  Why were we so convinced the world wasn’t ending?

New viruses come along fairly frequently.  Most of them never get noticed.  Some of them cause human diseases.  Most of them cause something indistinguishable from a cold. Occasionally, there is one that causes more severe problems.  Then comes a familiar pattern.  The worst cases hit the medical system first making all cases of the illness appear severe and with a high mortality rate.   Patients show up really sick and dying and we don’t know what’s wrong.  They don’t fit any of our familiar disease patterns.  We start thinking a bad pandemic is going to hit, and everyone will die.  Then we start recognizing the not-so-sick patients with the disease.  As people hear about it, they come to the doctors earlier.  We then realize that there is a whole host of people that have it, but aren’t sick enough to come see the doctors.  Then, it’s just one of many viruses to worry about.  We’ve seen this pattern before…

Remember West Nile Virus?  Initially very sick people presented to the medical systems. What if a large number of people caught this new threat and became this sick?  Before we knew it people were very upset, we got calls from people saying they had found a dead bird and could we test it for West Nile Virus.  One mother called saying she had seen a dead crow and the kids were near it what should she do.  As it turned out West Nile Virus was widely disseminated with many asymptomatic cases and most symptomatic patients had a mild cold and a headache.  In the end the probability of serious or fatal disease from West Nile Virus turned out to be low and today it has not changed how we live our lives.

Some people did get very sick and some people do die of West Nile Virus as well as other viruses.  Each death is a loss, a tragedy to the families involved.  We understand.   Our jobs are to keep it from happening whenever possible.   We know there are always those who are more at risk, every year, from viruses.  Older people, people with compromised immune systems, anyone with lung disease.  And always, the very unlucky.

Where are we now with this Corona virus? Initially, only severe life-threatening cases presented to the medical system. We did not know how high the mortality rate was and how easily the virus spread. What if a large number of people caught this new threat and became deathly sick? Over the past few months we have learned that the virus is widely disseminated, there are many more asymptomatic cases and people with very mild symptoms then people who get deathly ill and that certain populations are greater at risk than other populations.

Now that we know the novel corona virus is widely disseminated and has a generally lower mortality rate in most populations but a higher mortality rate in some populations, isolation and contract tracing amounts to closing the barn door once the horses have left. Putting a high tech alarm system on the barn and reinforcing it with high carbon steel will not get the horse problem resolved. We should be planning to deal with the now wild and free horses not hoping they return to the barn. It would be nice if we had a medicine to cure the virus or a safe vaccine to prevent the virus from spreading.  We don’t, and achieving a medical cure or a safe and effective vaccine in record time is a Hail Mary, good for the end of college football games but not a useful overall game plan. Protecting our vulnerable population, those in nursing homes and care centers and those with altered immune systems, should be our strategy at this point. If a virus is widely disseminated, having the general population self-isolate from each other will not protect our vulnerable population and may in fact prevent natural herd immunity.  Healthy children playing and learning together are at minimal to no risk as the number of severely ill children with this new corona virus is extremely low.  Passing the virus among normal healthy children and obtaining some degree of immunity offers some immunity for the herd.  Passing the virus to low risk adults would likewise be a low risk proposition and would further add immunity to the herd. Unfortunately low risk adults have a higher risk of severe illness then children but still very low and certainly lower than the risk of increased psychologic stress and illness and deferred medical treatment and care for the general population. Once again the goal should be to try and decrease the vulnerable populations’ exposure to the virus. If we knew in February what we know now we could have placed our entire nursing home and care center populations in private isolation wards with round the clock nursing for a fraction of the price we have paid to keep everyone at home waiting for the virus to go away.

Where do we go from here?

Initially, our kids asked how long we thought the lockdown would last.  We were surprised the lockdown for two weeks occurred at all, but given the uncertainty and the dire projections, two weeks at least made some medical sense until the smoke cleared.  After two weeks the lockdown became less and less about good medicine and more and more about something else. At this point, after not weeks but months of lockdown, I cannot even venture a guess when it will end as this lockdown has less to do with medicine and more to do with politics. I know what should be done from a medical point of view.  Open up!  Not in phases and color codes, but return to normal and put our assets into protecting our vulnerable population.  No masks, no forced testing, no forced tracking of our population. And in the following months to years, figure out what went wrong. Why did we stick to our initial battle plan after the fog of war lifted and our real world information did not agree with initial models, projections and strategies?  Refusing to adapt and ignoring data that contradicts models is counterproductive.

I know what I fear will happen. There will be fundamental change in our freedoms, liberties and way of life in the name of keeping people safe from the multitude of viruses that will come down the pike.  We will ultimately risk life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the illusion of safety.  I really hope I’m wrong!

 

*Sincere apologies to Dr. TANSTAAFL for not only misplacing this post but also posting so late today.  All I can offer as an apology is that I slept way too late after spending the day yesterday ripping up carpet. Which like everything else done by the previous owners was done …. in a difficult way, which means I need to go scrape the floor now before we put down wood tomorrow. Also I need to buy putty because — seriously — who cuts the hole for the light plates way too small and then CAULKS the plate to the wall. I broke one before I realized what they had done. (And they VOTE. Let’s remember that.)
What I can promise in the future is that as soon as this round is done, I’ll go on an AGGRESSIVE writing schedule, because whatever other construction projects this or future houses need, I want to pay someone else to do it. Now I’m nearer 60 than 50, I’m way too old for this sh*t. – SAH*

 

 

*A message from your friendly management: If you sent me blog posts that haven’t appeared yet, I’m not ignoring you. My hotmail seems to have lost its marbles, or no longer know how to do searches or something. PLEASE send again.
On the post, another note:  Apparently my old friend, Bill Reader, felt we need a new battle flag. We could do worse – SAH*

Hivemind – by Bill Reader

It’s been a very interesting couple of weeks, and I daresay the interestingness is not over. With the Communist History Analogue Zone managing to recapitulate decades of disintegration in a matter of days, I wake up every morning wondering what new depth of irony they’ll manage to descend to. Balkanizing Lies Matter, meanwhile, has forged an alliance with Pro-fa, and together they are merrily wrecking black owned businesses, making life difficult for the people who make the country work, and of late, destroying monuments.

History is where all communist failures live, so the only good history is dead history, I suppose.

Amidst all this I happened to see this image on Ace.

Now, Ace found it somewhat more disturbing than I did. It’ll take more than 30 minutes in Photoshop and a silkscreen job—done in all probability on someone else’s budget— to actually disturb me.

As far as I’m concerned, the fist in particular is such a ubiquitously recognizable Communist symbol around the world that the bigger Pro-fa prints it on bright red banners, the better. The remaining six people in the United States who haven’t yet been appraised of the current state of the world need to see that this symbol – which is associated with way, way more deaths than even other major-leaguers like the swastika— is now front and center of an American political party, and act accordingly. We’re on notice: the soviet troops didn’t land on the lawn, they came up from the basement. Our primary good fortune is the recruiting effort wasn’t able to bring in almost anyone even half-competent, and the exceptions are mostly busy dominating the rules in their own camp—See Raz de CHAZ.

Even so, it is always wise to be thoughtful about symbols. Symbols have a great deal of power, and can serve as guideposts that bring us back to common principles when things get messy. A good symbol is a shorthand for a set of ideas, and the set of ideas is a shorthand for a worldview, and the worldview is a lodestar for approaching life.

Just for example, let’s look back at that fist. That communist fist is seen in communist revolutions in multiple countries where the revolution itself nominally has some other symbol. And it rises to the top, time and time again, because all the stars and sickles are transparently meaningless. They want to be aspirational symbols, but nobody can articulate what they aspire to, except, vaguely, a working version of communism. On that front, you may as well aspire to make dehydrated water. Now the fist, that’s a good symbol for communism—it explains both its predilections and its fate.

One look at the communist-fist tells you you’ve got a movement that’s interested in being a danger to everyone around it right now, yet has no real future.  When your motivating principle is the eternal, unbounded, pointless fight— when the “struggle” is so front-and-center in your mind that it supersedes whatever ideal it was in the service of — then the only possible destination is “Revolution from above”, endless purges and purity tests and infighting. And lo, does it not deliver? You asked for the fight, comrade, and the fight you shall get—first from the people trying to save you from your own stupid wishes, then from the people who used you as a means to grant them.

The rattlesnake, on the other hand, elegantly encapsulates the American temperament. Americans are slow to anger. We give plenty of warning. But heaven help you when you push us one step too far, because just about nothing else can. I’m sure Pro-fa thinks its variant is rather clever—they’re the sort to be easily self-impressed— but I think they’ve accidentally said a bit more than they meant.

On my first sight of the banner, in fact, I thought for a moment that it was from a counter-protest. Why? Well, the snake is wrapped around the fist. Sure, on closer inspection, the fist has the snake by the head, but isn’t that itself rather ironically reflective of American society today? Here is this cabal of far Left lunatics, holding onto the top of all American institutions, and all the while, the rest of America is wrapping around them from all sides, encircling and surrounding them. Trump didn’t have almost a million people clamoring to go to a rally in Tulsa because of an abiding desire in the populace for fresh country air. We may be in your grip, Pro-fa, but we’re a long, long way from dead. And we’ve got you surrounded, on every side, however much you try to strangle us out of existence. It’s true, rattlers aren’t constrictor snakes— but then again, you never know what new tricks we might learn in a corner, tovarish.

Even so, I think it’s worth considering a little update, an adjunct symbol, if you will, a supplemental representation of the American psyche. Conservatives are used to being reviled, mocked, demonized and stigmatized by the same “inclusive” individuals who insist that no such thing ought to happen to anyone. Ironically, though, we’re also what keeps things running. Years of being underdogs in the culture war, a war the left has waged against the culture, mind you, that the country itself is founded on, can change you. We’re no less embodied by the rattlesnake than we were—but maybe we’re something else, too.

Consider an animal that is omnipresent. It is virtually everywhere that people are. Its work is vital, it has helped make society what it is since society was a concept, and it works constantly. It saves for the future. It is fundamental in producing things used by everybody, soy-boy and steak-eater alike. Yet despite its absolutely indispensable work it is widely disliked. People may feel menaced, indeed, by even the sight of one. Thus, for safety, these animals cluster together in large numbers, make common cause against an unfeeling world. And you can easily interrupt its work or kill it if you decide to, but you’ll regret it. It won’t go down without a fight, and it may even kill you. It is small, it is humble, but you mess with it at your peril.

It is, in short, well-organized, conscientious, hard-working, unfairly stigmatized, non-aggressive but fully committed to effective self-defense without reference to the status or power of the aggressor, and its work is crucial to the survival of even those that attack it. Oh, and despite predictions that it would die off entirely in recent years, it seems to have found a way to survive.

It is, of course, a bee. Or a conservative, of course.

And the Left would do well to take note—you seem to think if you drown out the buzzing, you aren’t going to get stung. But the buzzing is a warning. It’s the rattle in the tail of the snake. It’s the alarm you stubbornly insist that, if silenced, will make the danger it is alerting you to vanish. It is asking nicely, and if you don’t believe that, just you wait. If you really want not to get stung, you’re free to back away. That’s the play you ought to make. You’ve got a lot of pride on the line, but we’ve seen what you did to Minneapolis, and your pride doesn’t mean much to us, given that we can see where it leads you. We don’t give a damn who you are, and nor do our stingers.  But if you’re going to insist on sticking your hand into our home, taking the spoils of our work, breaking what we’ve worked so hard to build, well–

You might not be too sharp—but you’ll find that we are.

(H/T to a friend who asks to remain anonymous for the artwork above)

Look, we’ve talked here before about how the lockdown affected people. I think it was part of the reason the left was so insistent on the lockdown, and why they still don’t want it to end.

People are not going out and seeing other people, catching snatches of conversation, seeing the expression in people’s faces. Instead, they’re relying for all their news on an increasingly more deranged MSM and an increasingly stranger social media. (Some of the banned words on FB don’t even make any sense.)

Even I who am mostly anti-social but rely on my one day out a week, and who haven’t been getting it in far too long (do you know how hard it is to schedule things like the zoo ahead of time when we’re also in the middle of various things like the Great Office Move of 20, and don’t know what crisis will happen next?) am feeling cranky and impatient and, frankly, horrified over the bilge being thrown at us by all these megaphones.

Look, it’s nothing new. I had a preview of this in writing circles last decade. These people really, really really treat Marxism as a religion and view their inevitable ascendancy as set in stone. The future will approve of them! Young people are all revolutionaries!

This is all crap. Fables. It’s a Christian heresy, but frankly the Cathars and all the other early Christian heretics are looking on in awe, at how little it takes to get a heresy going these days.

Part of the problem is that the cult has started being disproven. If you read about how cults fall apart, members become more strident and insane and often homicidal or suicidal.  This is what we’re seeing. 2016 was the discomfirmation of prophecy for them. And they can’t handle it. It’s like the day for the end of the world was set, and then no UFOs showed up to blast away the heretics.

All we’ve seen since then is a meltdown because they can’t abandon the stuff they’ve believed all this time. They’ll be left without an identity if they do. On the other hand, they keep raising the ante, and nothing goes the way they planned.

And that last is what you should remember.

You see, there are generations in revolutions. It is probably the reason the USSR disintegrated when it did.

When the philosophy animating the revolution or the revolutionaries, at least, is completely at odds with the way reality actually works, corrosion sets in.

The revolutionaries that seize power have to be sane enough and in enough contact with reality to seize it. It doesn’t matter if those revolutionaries seize power with an AK or by pretending to be completely average people until they have some power over institutions.

But once they are in power, they see preserving the revolution — the ideological bend of their change — as more important than anything else. Because if they lose power, everything they did was for naught, and they’ll not only fail but be exposed as failures.

So they hire mostly for ideological compliance. These people won’t be as competent as they are, but then they also don’t need to seize power and/or slide in under cover. They have power now, and keeping power is easier than acquiring it.

But those second wave people hire third wave people. At this point no disguise is needed, and rewards come mostly for being vocal in support of the revolution — whatever the revolution and whatever it dictates.  This is how we get the arts and literature and news today, where you stare at the supposed journalists on TV, or throw the book against the wall, and wonder how in heck anyone can be that stupid and have that position in the public eye. You wonder how it’s possible for people to actually produce movies that make no sense whatsoever and aren’t even fun to watch. You wonder about someone who was a candidate for vice-president and who is not — unlike Biden — obviously senile, but who says America invented slavery.

The point is, by generation 3 these people are — to be charitable — ass clowns, for whom mouthing the cult chants is the source of all that’s good.  They don’t really get what they’re supposed to do — note editors thinking their job is to “educate” the public — or what they’re there for. They just know the slogans.

They manage to have careers, and pass for normal and even stellar human beings, so long as they have a captive (or in the case of the US, complicit) press that covers up all their issues and makes their every little achievement sound wonderful.

And yes, the people who are in charge of most things right now are third generation, since the left took over most positions of power in education, entertainment, news reporting and even government bureaucracy.  Which is why we have people like Biden who were never that competent, and who were, to put it mildly corrupt, but who manage to have a life of power and influence.

It’s also why the corruption now starting to come out, the bloody stupid stuff that happened under the Obama administration isn’t surprising. Infuriating, yes, but not surprising…. except perhaps for the utter and absolute pants-on-head craziness of the things they did and tried to do.

It’s like the Russia! Russia! Russia!  which had nothing at its back. The only reason the left could hope to win that coup was their belief that the media could convince us all they were right.  And they tried…. oh, boy they tried.

But the internet, and people being able to communicate and realizing they weren’t alone, and that, yeah, the mainstream narrative really was crazy, had long since eroded their Media-created shield of invincibility.

Take a deep breath. I know it’s been insane.  I know we went from fake scandal to fake crisis, ad nauseum, and it’s stupid and you just want it to stop. I mean, it started right after the 16 elections with attempts to “contest” them that made no sense.

But what you have to remember is that none of those attempts worked.

And they couldn’t work, no matter what the media told you. Their play was on the hope Trump would get embarrassed and quit. Which tells you how out of touch with reality they are.

This latest insanity? It’s not even the third generation. The would be revolutionaries are the kiddies that the people in power have been encouraging.  They are very pampered; most of them have no clue where money comes from; and they’ve been indoctrinated with nonsense since the cradle.

They are, in one word, pathetic.

While this is an attempt at the cultural revolution, remember that the people in the cultural revolution were first or at most second generation revolutionaries. They still knew what they were playing for. They’d seen violence against them.

This is not who we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with the unleashed tantrum of the last ten years of college insanity.

These people are cowards and mewling bullies. Yeah, they’ll attack as long as they’re convinced they have the upper hand.  But they really can’t take any resistance at all.

Am I saying the left is inoffensive?

Oh, hell no. They retain enough levers of power, and they have enough — more these last few months — audience in the media to cause a lot of havoc. And yes, like the rest of you I’m worried about vote fraud. 18 was crazy and blatant enough, with polls open for weeks afterwards, under an “emergency” order, until they got the result they wanted, for instance. The fraud in this upcoming election will be epic. It will also be visible. Very visible. And when you’re running a reject from the cast of the Walking Dead, I don’t think people are going to buy that he won, much less in a landslide.

Yeah, they can do a lot of damage, and not just by setting fire to things and beating people. They can seize the country, however briefly.

BUT–

But they can’t really seize it. Not all of it. And if they seize it they can’t run it. Not even for days.

They can’t win.

Yes, we can lose. But that’s if we give up and we inflict that wound on ourselves. I’d say that’s what the Wuflu panic and the lockdown were all about. Making people lost enough, confused enough to put up with that.

But we don’t have to. Just because they broke the fire alarm, it doesn’t mean the fire isn’t raging. Just because they force people to mouth agreement, doesn’t mean people agree.

There is immense rage building in this country, my friends.  Not the rage of kiddies on the streets, breaking things and hurting people; no. This is the rage of quiet, solid people, who work hard — if the shenanigans of the left haven’t destroyed their jobs — and just want to live a normal live, and who’ve been subjected to instability and insanity by a bunch of cultists.

They might not say anything — who really needs to have their spouse and kids attacked? — but they are angry.

And their anger, right now? Fights on the side of the freedom lovers.

Be not afraid. This is not the end. This is not even the end of the beginning.

This is not the time to despair.

Lift that torch high. You can always get the pitchforks later….

*I thought this was a good one for right now.  You might also – SAH*

There is a funny thing that happens, when you find out that everything you have ever known is a lie.

I’ve watched friends go through this when they found out they were adopted, or that their parents really weren’t their parents (well, okay, usually the father) or that their parents weren’t the people they thought they were (by which I mean, say, discovering that one of their parents had a criminal record, or even that their parents had never actually got married.)

I’ve never had a revelation of that magnitude, or that personal.  I’ve had a lot of small ones over the times, as I discovered that things like teachers’ interpretation of history were not “true.”  They were usually just someone’s interpretation, filtered through what was fashionable at the time: and given the time I was in school, that was usually Marxism.

Of when I started correlating things in my head and realized that things like Chariot of the Gods couldn’t be true.

All my revelations came in slowly, on a drip, and not on matters closely related to me.  This means that, though you could look at me and see where most of my opinions and interests (not all.  I’ve always been a bookish person) have changed since my early twenties, there was never a break, a moment where I wasn’t myself.  There was a continuum.  It just so happens that I started out as an indoctrinated socialist twerp, (even though I was always anti-communist, and suspicious of socialists, I didn’t realize how much of their philosophy permeated everything I was taught in school.  Heck, I’m still having these realizations and I’m past fifty), and ended up wherever I am now, I guess the party of “leave people alone, don’t hurt them and don’t take their stuff.”

Therefore there was never a period of acting out, rebelling against everything, and generally being a crazy woman.  My friends who had their reality “ripped” from under them and rebuilt, sometimes in minutes, usually had one of those periods: a “I’m going to go to India and learn Yoga” or “I’m now a Vegan and my assumed name is  zityhgmn, pronounced John.” And sometimes, btw, they would hysterically deny what they’d just found.

In the end, they returned to being more or less the people they were before.  But sometimes there were very odd years, there in the middle.

Why this is is important: mostly because it can help us understand what society is going through and what lies ahead.  It’s an imperfect analogy of course — all analogies are imperfect — mostly because people aren’t cultures.  And yet, if you kind of squint and abstract to the highest points, people and cultures are remarkably similar, though most cultures blame like crazy teen people, and some — I’m looking at you Europe — are remarkably emo, sitting in their rooms with the lights off, having bad relationships, and engaging in self-harm.

The point is that all cultures change all the time.  The idiots on both the left and the right who think culture is genetic have issues with this concept, but if cultures didn’t change, all the time, very gradually (just like people change all the time, very gradually) we’d all be hunting gathering and living in small family groups/tribes.  (Actually most of us wouldn’t exist.  The lifestyle wouldn’t support it.)

But some cultures change suddenly and traumatically.  What we did to Japan, ripping out everything they ever believed in, and substituting an arguably far less toxic (or at least dangerous) culture is one example.

This seems to have very weird effects, as it does in people.  On Japan, it seems to have had the effect of such civilizational loss of confidence that they might go extinct from lack of procreation.  If they don’t, at some point they’ll return to something like what they were before, though the details will be wildly different and integrate the change.

The same thing goes for WWI, which sort of ripped the ideas that Europe had of itself in itty bitty bits, and remade them as something else wholly different.  Europe is in that emo funk because of it, and exaggerates its crimes and embraces anything different, because everything different must be better.  It seems to be wearing off though — not very clear, yet, but there are rumbles — and if it does, it will be suddenly, as it is in people, and Europe will become more or less what it was before.  Maybe more so, in fact.  It might embrace previous versions of itself with a fervor it never had before, because the emo phase has been so bad for it.  If this does happen (and again, it already seems to be) there’s going to be a shock (and awe) heard around the world.

But the same thing applies to groups within a culture.  All of us, (except maybe the very young, here) started out living in a world where there was a single integrated media, and the media companies were more or less controlled (by choice, I want to emphasize) by a group who all thought the same, and who had become decidedly Marxist early on.

Since the entertainment companies were the same, the… lie, for lack of a better word (it wasn’t so much a lie because most of the people propagating it weren’t conscious of lying.  They were simply watching the world through a distorting political theory) came at everyone as a seamless whole.  For instance, the ideas that capitalism was inherently bad for people, or created mental illness, probably first dreamed up in USSR think-tanks, was propagated through slants on news, through story lines in movies and books and even through songs.  One of the times I remember seeing the story line was a soap opera where a worthy character who has done everything right kills himself for lack of money, and his son becomes a “righteous communist.”

This “unified voice” has started to break down.  In fact, the propagators of the “universal truth” that isn’t, are getting fairly drowned out, and, in their despair, sounding more and more obviously biased and crazy.

To most of us this is funny to watch, because we came of age under the unified lie, saw something that we couldn’t ignore and popped us out of it, and this led to little by little emerging from and rejecting the vision behind the lie.

It was so gradual that we changed without fracturing.

This isn’t true for people who are right now exposed to dissonant “truths” and consciously or not starting to realize there is no one thing “all right thinking people believe.”

A lot of the behavior we’re seeing right now is the result of that dissonance.  They’re starting to suspect everything they know is a lie, and most of them are embracing it with twice the fervor and also acting more than a little crazy.

Some of them are already in the advanced stages of this, and landing on the other side with their opinions flipped, but their behavior exactly the same, and just as tiring and annoying to sane people.

And some think their world is coming apart, don’t want to admit it and propagate myths of prison camps and genocide, just to justify their horrible feelings of anxiety that they can’t admit is based on the shattering of former beliefs.

This explains why it feels like everyone (including people most of us thought were sensible) seems to have lost their minds.

It doesn’t help to either get to the other side, or stop the crazy.  This thing is a process, and takes its time.  Also, the news is never going to be unified again (though many seem to want it) and the trickle will continue.  Only believe it or not, that trickle was too rapid for most of them.

We’re just going to have to let them scream and slam their room door till they come out of it.

But perhaps having a comparison and a handle to the situation will make it easier.

Be not afraid.  And carry on.

There is a Ray Bradbury story in which a woman lies dying in an upstairs room of her family home, while around her her family life goes on.

In the story he describes dying as resuming a dream which — presumably — was there before the birth.  The woman is trying to recall that dream and bring it to mind again.

I’m not dying — at least not that I know of — but this morning, while I did the absolutely essential stuff left undone because of painting and flooring this weekend, I found myself thinking of that story and of “resuming the dream.”

When I was first married, and lived with a book on my right hand while doing every day things, I tried to talk to my mother in law about books.  She said “Just wait till you have children. I too used to read all the time, then I had children.”  Years later, with toddlers around my ankles, she said “Wait till they go to school and you have all the stuff the school sends home to cope with.  Then you’ll know you no longer have time to read.”

Needless to say this never happened. When I was profoundly concussed, I read very slowly, but still read.  I also have been known to read either fanfic or comics through the times when I can’t cope with much mental strain. But I still read.

I claim no great virtue  for this. It’s entirely possible — almost sure, in fact, that reading is an addiction, akin to taking drugs. I do it because I can’t help doing it, not because of intellectual curiosity.  Perhaps it is how I cope with ADD. Because without something to anchor me, I get nothing done.

On the other hand something did slow down while I was raising the boys.  No. Not writing. Since I was first published and put under contract when Robert had just turned 6, I actually did more writing in the last 21 years than before.

No, what I let go was “the dreaming time.”

I might have talked about before — I’m sure I have, but I’m not going to look for the posts now — about how I coped with a highly sickly childhood (mostly because I was born premature I think, but who knows?  Like me, older son seems to have been born with Neanderthal ear canals, which means we catch ear infections at the drop of a hat.  He was a sturdy, busy little boy, but got horribly sick with ear infections often and without warning (Yes, we might have/should have put tubes in, but the ear canals are so peculiar it took a recent visit of his to a specialist to show that WOULD have been beneficial.  Probably would still be for me (I catch ear infections as a toddler does.) but each of the surgeries would run around 15k and both of us have more immediate priorities for our spending. Anyway, who knows how susceptible that rendered me to other stuff.)

Because, even though of course there were antibiotics when I was a kid, in the sixties, Portuguese society hadn’t adapted to them, I used to be isolated from every other kid (and adults not in the family) whenever I was ill.  That was how societies, pre-antibiotics, avoided contagion.

Before I could read, I spent a lot of time in the only bedroom in the house (which was my parents’ but dad traveled during the week, so I slept with mom. I don’t remember — if I ever knew — what arrangements they made when he was home over the weekend, and I was ill.

Sometimes I wonder how different I would be if my parents weren’t the sort of people who pay cash upfront.  I.e. I was born in their 10th year of marriage, but they still lived in the shotgun apartment made out of storage rooms on the bottom floor of grandma’s house to accommodate them on their hasty marriage.  The reason was simple: they were saving to build a house without mortgage.

This meant a myriad of little savings and pinchings, like buying meat scraps normally sold for dogs, and then making it into “11 things stew” (Stew with whatever she could find on sale. Mom’s joke being that it always took eleven things.  But you know, wilted veggies the grocer would just give away, or day old cornbread fried and added on top, or–) Weirdly none of this affected me, probably because mom really was adept at this sort of contriving.  That she insisted on cutting down my brother’s clothing for me DID affect me, because in Portugal at that time it wasn’t normal for girls to dress like scruffy boys.  But admittedly the scruffy was MY fault, and at any rare like the boy named Sue, I have a certain appreciation for what it did to my character.

But what affected my future self most was the fact that the bedroom in which I spent easily 8/10th of the year had no window.

I was — barring illness — a very active little girl. (Clumsy as heck, which means my activity mostly consisted of walking all over and finding things to make or do.) And have I mentioned ADHD? (Which at the time they had no name for.)

When well I would engage in RPGs of my own design (LARPing, really) which was difficult with only one person, but I played all the roles. And I rode my tricycle a LOT.  (That tricycle was a tour bus to exotic — any place not the village — locations, or a shuttle among the stars or a time travel machine.)  I also followed grandma around, because she did entertaining things.  I was rarely still and at rest.  In fact, when I calmed down, people worried I was getting sick.

Which brings us to….

When I was in bed, in a windowless room, with not much to do.

Sure, sometimes I had visitors, like my brother, who was very patient and read me stories.  (Even now in English, I still hear Uncle Remo’s tales  in his voice.)

And I had legos.  I remember building fantastic constructions all over the bed, though mom hated it, because sometimes pieces were forgotten under the covers.

Because I had inherited a lot of pieces, in disjointed sets, from brother and cousins, I actually didn’t know what any of them were supposed to be, so I used pieces that were designed for cars to build houses.  I built very odd looking cities, and trains, and then imagined the lives of the people who lived there.

Actually, imaginary people were most of my entertainment, without or without the help of legos.

On the bedside table of that long ago room, there was a little wooden mushroom house (I find it weird NO ONE in the family knows what happened to it, and I seem to be the only one who really remembers it.  Mom seems to, but she says she has no idea where it went.  And my brother doesn’t remember it at all. OTOH I don’t remember some things he’s been trying to trace from our childhood. Perhaps it’s a Mandela effect thing and we grew up in different parallel worlds?) with a black top, and a yellowish stem, on which someone had painted a little door and a window.

In fact, it was a box, of course, and I have no clue who thought to make it into a “house” or in fact, what crazy friend gave it to my parents.  I know it was a weeding gift, because I asked them where it had come from.  I also have no idea why mom kept it, except perhaps that because they were so poor they kept EVERYTHING.  I know it was in the bedroom because that was where mom put things she had no clue what to do with.

I remember imagining at length the people who lived in that little house and what their family life was like.  I imagined they only came out at night or when the room was empty.

In fact “tiny little people” who lived in various parts of my room became a constant thread in my imaginings until I realized you couldn’t have people that size and retain intelligence.  I’m glad I didn’t realize it earlier. It would have defeated my imaginings of tribes of little humans in the garden, battling the lizards and the snails. (Is this a universal human dream? It appeared so often in early SF/F)

Then there was “other worlds”.  These were both in space and “in other places.”  I never really had a concept of fantasy till my teens, when I read the first fantasy stories, but I had a concept of different times and parallel worlds, though I didn’t call the later that, and had no immediate explanation for them, again, till I read science fiction.

Because I had no window, I imagined one, and looked through it at other worlds, the imaginings sometimes so vivid it was hard to tell from reality.  And I imagined their ways of life, and their language.

Later, even though I had a window, I retained the dreaming habits.  We moved to the new house when I was six, and I was only really sickly for another two years.  Pre-puberty and puberty were good to me and I was fairly healthy (for me) until my mid- thirties. (I wonder if it means that the issues were always, at their root, auto-immune, as that seems to follow this pattern.)

And I started writing some of the worlds and the stories.

Yes, one of them — though a late one, in my late teens — was the DST world.  An earlier one was the multitude of worlds and the peculiar form of transport in what will hopefully become (if I live that long) a vast interweaving universe called Schrodinger Worlds.

Anyway, all this is in the name of: Recently I became aware that some of my friends who are very successful in indie publishing despite doing “everything wrong” as it were, are in fact writing worlds they dreamed of when they were very young.

Perhaps there is some special force to those worlds, some feeling of universal “must exist.”

I have recently finished The Pursuit of the Pankera (thank you for recommends) which deals, to an extent, with that very idea, the idea of tapping or linking with some great universal dream/existence.

Also, recently, my friend John Ringo made a joke about “Was that guy who dictated a book to me exaggerating the truth to make a good tale?”

The book he was talking about was The Last Centurion and I had in fact that morning, at breakfast (the poor man endures a lot) made a not quite in jest comment to my husband about whether the overreaction to Winnie the Flu was driven by a feeling that in a world “next door to ours” the “plague” was far stronger and more horrible?

I know John is not the only one to have this sense that a book was dictated to him. (Ask me about A Few Good Men, where I was metaphorically socmob — standing on the corner minding own business — when suddenly two bad dudes were in my head and telling me their story (If you don’t know what I’m referencing, it’s the studentdoc side and it’s very funny, at least when you’re not crying.))

It’s all very confusing, in that way things are confusing before they’re explained or fully understood.  But there seems to be some reality to these things “dreams are made on.”

And there seems to be a special force to much-dreamed (or occasionally dictated) fiction.  Not just in terms of “it seems to sell” — though I’m not an idiot, and I value accolades in the only form that matters — but in terms of “it must come through.”

Then there is the concept that some stories/dreams can only be told/brought to life by the right person.  I know, for instance, when I’m visited by someone else’s muse, but I’m often helpless to write it. (Though if 2020 hadn’t been so far a stone cold bitch, I’d already have started the book that John’s muse attacked me with, and sent it to him for his touch, so we can collaborate.  Yes, I’ve talked to him about it.) Most of the time it’s a matter of “I’d love to read that story, and I wish I were the right person to write it.”

So…. All this to say, I find myself standing now on the edge of maybe, perhaps, having interior silence (and exterior. The house being quieter helps) enough to restart the dreaming.

And like Bradbury’s character I pause and thing “Now, where was I?”

 

 

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM MARY CATELLI:  The Dragon’s Cottage

 

When the dragon does not come for the annual maiden to devour, the knight Theodore sets out for adventures, hoping to find what the dragon is doing.

He finds more than he thought he would.

FROM KEN LIZZI:  Warlord: Falchion’s Company Book Three

DEATH FROM ABOVE

Captain Falchion, of Falchion’s Company, has reached the pinnacle of the mercenary profession. But that only means the jobs become more challenging. When the Wagon Circle threatens invasion, Falchion finds himself leading the defense. Fighting a nomadic army of armored wagons is hard enough, but the Wagon Circle possesses a secret weapon: Griffons. Facing the Wagon Circle, the combined efforts of its sorceresses, and the missiles and fire bombs of griffon riders might be too much for Falchion. Does he truly want to be a Warlord?

Warlord concludes the Falchion’s Company series.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Tooth

*For the previous chapters, please go here. These are posted first draft, as the brain dictates to the fingers which are remarkably stupid. Eventually it will be cleaned up and fixed just before page is made secret/taken down and the book is published. At that time I will take lists of typos or volunteers to proof read. For now, it’s written in a hurry, usually an hour before it goes up. And, let me remind you, it’s free – SAH*

*And this week, I’m sorry it’s so late (besides skipping the last week) but we’re engaged in the Great Office Move of 20.  Today we emptied my office and painted and killzeed the floor.  Tomorrow we install wood flooring. Wednesday, Dan moves his office in and next weekend we killzee and put flooring down in his current office.  After which, we move the household management office there AND we can then paint and killzee that office (Our cats never actually got in there, but the previous owner’s cat did) and put in wood floor.  After which I get to have an office again.  Yes, other than installing the flooring all of this is in the name of us working in the same floor during work hours. Meh. Deal. Okay, now for the chapter.-  SAH*

Comfort

It was dark and Albinia was tired.

They’d run madly through the forest, leaves and twigs poking up through her indoor slippers and catching at her gown.

And then she stumbled, and Lord Michael put out a hand to stop her falling.  for a moment they stayed like that in the dark.  She realized she couldn’t hear the sound of pursuit.  There was no way that wolf could be chasing them without making any sound.

“I don’t hear it,” Lord Michael said, with a kind of gulp, as if he were trying to get air in , as though he too were breathless after their run.

Albinia shook her head, then realized he couldn’t see her, and said, “I don’t either. I don’t think it…. it is following us.”

For a while they stood.  She could hear him breathe, but all she could think of was how much her legs hurt.

“We…. should find a place to…. spend the night, until the light comes up.”

She had a moment of fear, wondering whether the light would come up.  Her heart thumping, she wondered if they were in some unnatural land, where the light would never come, day never break.

“I believe it’s just night time,” Lord Michael said, his voice hesitant. “I can’t …. be absolutely sure, but it doesn’t feel like a place of night.” He sounded very tired too, and not just physically.  “Perhaps…. He said, we can make a bed of leaves or–”

He stopped because there was a sound like a child screaming.  his hand which had let go of her arm came back again, and held her wrist. Albinia wondered if it was meant to reassure her, or if he was seeking reassurance.

The cry sounded again.

Memories of early childhood when they’d visited Albinia’s grandmother who had a lake filled with swans came to Albinia, and she said in relief, “It’s a swan.”

The cry echoed again, and then Albinia felt a beak against her leg.  It wasn’t done hard or viciously, but more as though calling her attention.  And then she heard the sound again and Lord Michael said, “Ow.”

She felt him move power, and the light came on again, a witchlight, soft in glow.  Albinia knew how to do it, of course, but she also had been taught not to use it unless in absolute necessity because it used a high level of power and would make you very tired. By rights Lord Michael should not be able to bring the light up, as tired as he sounded before he did.

But the light was enough to see a very large swan.  It seemed completely unsurprised by the sudden light, and in fact — though it was impossible for a swan to do such a thing — Albinia had the impression it was smiling.

It flew near the ground, ahead of them, a short flight, then stopped and waited.

“I think it wants us to follow it?” Lord Michael said.
Albinia forebore to say “Obviously.”

“I sense no evil from it.”

Albinia also didn’t, but all she did was nod, and the two of them followed the swan.  After a while, through the trees ahead they saw a sort of glow.

“If it’s a spun sugar cottage remember how the story ends,” she said, mock-sternly, mostly to distract herself from her own fear.

“This is not fairyland,” Lord Michael said. His voice sounded very odd.

The swan led them nearer the light.  As they got close they realized it was the tower they’d seen from a distance,a ndn the light shone through a window on the bottom floor.

The swan opened the door. Albinia was sure of it, though she couldn’t see how.

It went in, and they followed it.  But when got in, it was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, they were in a tidy room, with a fire burning.  On the table there was a warm pot of soup, and a loaf of bread.  There were two beds made up, one on either side of the room.  Candles burned on candlesticks on the table.

Albinia hesitated.  “You are sure this is not fairyland?” she asked Lord Michael.

“Absolutely,” he said.  “I was kidnapped into it, you see.”  He said it very simply, like he might say that he’d spent some time at a country estate. “And had to be rescued.  I know fairyland.”

“This is good, because I am very hungry,” Albinia said, having just realized it when she smelled the soup.  It smelled like the beef vegetable soup her brothers used to make.

She realized, at the last moment, that there were three bowls set out on the table.  And then she heard light steps down stairs, a door opened next to the fireplace and a familiar voice say, “Al, I’m so sorry. I had to got put clothes on, or it would be quite shocking to receive you.”

Standing in the doorway, impeccably dressed in a brown suit, with white shirt and neatly tied cravat was a young man four years older than her.  She knew this precisely because they shared a birthday.

“Geoffrey!” she said, and ran into her youngest brother’s arms.

 

 

 

 

This has been a year of goodbyes, most expected and welcomed — I mean, I’m going to miss older son and his wife, but it was time for them to fly on their own — some expected but not welcomed — Euclid was at least a year old when we got him in November 2000, so we knew the time was coming — and some of them sock your gut out of the blue, like losing our car one fine Saturday afternoon, with no warning because a gasket seems to have disappeared.

Notice I include the car, not because I think it’s animated — though one wonders sometimes, if some object that’s been really close to us for most of our life partakes some bit of the things it participated in — but because their loss or change over disrupts our basic pattern of life.

The first for us was the loss of the car — Old Blue — my birthday gift for my 35th birthday, back then an almost-new (almost for sure corporate fleet) blue expedition, which saw us from the-kids-in-car-seats to the kids rarely riding it, because they have their own cars and lives.  Which transported construction materials we should never have put in it, carried the fragiles through three moves, served us on weekend trips, and generally was as much a part of the Hoyt family as our pets.

Yes, we knew a 20 something year old car would go soon. We were hoping for another year.  Or some warning. Or something. Instead, it stopped on the highway on the way to downtown Denver, and was suddenly empty of oil.  Starting it to move it to the side finished killing the engine.

We got some trade-in value when buying the new one, and as it was being taken away, the lines from the Cohen song “And now you’re gone, and now you’re gone, as if there never was a you” ran through my head.  Which surprised me, as did experiencing grief at the loss of a car.

But of course, it wasn’t the car. It was the loss of a bit of the kids’ growing up, and my memories.  You see, we move so much, that that car had most of the continuous memories of our raising the kids.

Even now, four months later, I look for it in the parking lot, before I go “Oh, right. Not that car anymore.”

Someone asked why we’re so fond of Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax which is, granted, just a greasy spoon. Well. Mostly because it’s another place where the memories of our life with the boys are unbroken. (Another place used to be the Embassy Suites in the tech center (because cheap on weekends) which younger son thought was “our house in Denver” when we lived in the Springs.  We still do the occasional writing weekend there, or did, up to 2 years ago, but they’ve remodeled and changed where stuff is in the common areas, so not the same at all.)

Then son moved away, and I can’t begin to say how happy I am for them. But it’s disruptive to a certain way of life.  Partly because the kids lingered so much, and because we LIKE them as adults, that they’re part of the pattern or our daily lives. So, you know, when I hit a plotting/story snag, I’d tell older son we needed to go for a midnight coffee at Pete’s.  The drive (used to be an hour and a half from the springs. From where we are now more like 20 minutes, which meant we lingered longer at the restaurant.)  Same as for reasons hard to describe, we got in the habit of going to the zoo when it was cold and rainy.

DIL was ridiculously indulgent of this, but of course, that’s gone. And new habits will have to come in in its place.  The fact that we couldn’t do “one last” as a goodbye and for old times’ sake, due to the ridiculous lockdown doesn’t help.

And yesterday we faced the fact something had to be done about poor Euclid.

To explain: about a year and a half ago, he became incontinent, or at least too impatient to get to the box.  When I got to the point I couldn’t live with it, we put him in a multi-level cage (like a boarding cage, with levels.) For a while that worked well, and we took him out and petted him a lot, usually while watching a british mystery or reading in the evening.

Then he seemed not to like being held as much, and we went to diapering him, and letting him roam.  VERY slowly.

He had bad arthritis, but the pain meds didn’t seem to dent it, so I mostly didn’t give them to him. He also had hyperthyroidism, which we controlled with meds, which had increased to double recently.  And yet, he was eating every hour, and still rail-thin.

I kept hoping he’d go in his sleep, but we weren’t that lucky.  And yet I hesitated to take him in for that last, sad trip, because he was still somewhat self aware, at least in flashes.  And he enjoyed toddling around in his diaper, coming up to rest his paws on my arm.

And I hate deciding this for them, without knowing if it’s what they’d choose. I can well imagine being that age, and just relishing each day, and people thinking I want to go.

What made it worse is that Euclid was the most…. submissive? Compliant? Cat we’ve ever had. We used to call him “The totally surrendered cat” so I was afraid of taking advantage of his good will, one way of another.

But he’d been crying in the night, for a long time. And there was PAIN in his eyes, if you know what I mean.

Last week, he just started peeing on EVERY shelf in his little cage.  Even though the box was RIGHT THERE.  I was cleaning those shelves twice a day.  Worse, he’d pee on his little sleeping blanket, and then sleep on it.

I had a long talk with the vet, and without pushing, she did her best to imply it was time. She said it was time six months ago.

Yesterday, I still tried to balk it. And then I WATCHED him pee on his food.  And then eat it.  And I realized he was demented, for whatever that means for cats.  And so we kept that awful appointment.

And those lines went through my head again “And now you’re gone….”

So, because I’m afraid of forgetting, I thought I’d write some things about Euclid. Because there was a Euclid, and it’s important to remember. Because he was part of us, and us of him. Also he’s the only cat we ever acquired through psychic control on his part….

So November 2000, for younger son’s 6th birthday, we took him out to a movie.  We left our cat, Pete, on the front porch, sunning himself on a blanket. We knew he wasn’t going anywhere, because he was extremely hyperthyroidal. We were letting him get the meds out of his system and were scheduled to take him in for radio iodine therapy.

We came home and he was gone.  After three days of searching, we found a neighbor (which the vet refused to identify) had taken him to a vet and had him euthanized. He was 13, and the first cat we lost.

During the search we’d gone to the humane society and saw a cat who looked just like him from the back. From the front, he was more apple headed and had the most amazing green-blue eyes.

Dan had seen him and — because we were not wise to the ways of the humane society — though he had an owner and would be picked up (the cage said “Not available for adoption. Just waiting for my owner.” which is what they always said the first 2 weeks, but we didn’t know that.) Which means when my depression over Pete’s death wouldn’t lift, he took me to see this cat, in the hopes it would cheer me up.

He was now available for adoption but more interestingly, he acted like he knew us, and was very vocal at us.  So…. we went to the get acquainted room, and he walked all over us.  We also noticed he was sneezing.

Dan told me we COULDN’T get him, because that would make six cats, and surely someone would adopt such a friendly boy, even if he was black.  And we were past Halloween, so probably not at risk.

But on the way out we stopped by the front, told them he had kennel cough, and we’d pay for the treatment. They said not a problem, they’d take care of it.

Only ALL night I dreamed of him. Not in any bad way, just I dreamed of him asleep on our sofas, walking around our house, etc.

And I woke up with a sense of urgency.  I had his case # and was on the phone to the humane society as soon as they opened.  They told me he was scheduled for euthanasia in 20 minutes….  You see, they don’t treat colds in shelter cats. They just put them down.

Which is why Dan came into the kitchen and I was yelling into the phone that was our cat who just got lose, and if they put him down we’d sue them for their backteeth, and–  I remember his expression and sigh, and the “oh, hell” before he went to put clothes on.

On the way out we bought a large dog kennel, to keep him confined and away from the geriatric cats, while he recovered, and we picked him up. (And endured a lecture about letting him roam, etc.)

We named him on the way home.  And he became the NICEST cat we’ve ever had.

It’s like he knew we had saved him.  I got him to hiss at me ONCE, shortly after 9/11 when we were mindlessly watching whatever came on TV.  More out of distraction than on purpose, I’d been tickling his paw pads for an hour.  He let out a hiss, then licked my hands to show he didn’t mean it.

He used to sit on the arm of my armchair in the family room, and then slowly migrate till he ws completely on my boobs. He did the same to DIL. Very slowly and carefully.  Led DIL to nickname him “The world’s most polite molester.”

Up till the end, he let us position him, and do with him as we wanted.  We never dressed our cats up as anything, but Euclid would have let us, and endured it purring, just happy to be with his people.

I’d say he answered to his name, but that’s not quite true.  Greebo answers to his name. Euclid answered to the name of any of our cats, on the premise that three of them were (two are) black and we weren’t very bright, since I often called him the other cats names, so if he came he might get petted before we realized our mistake.

I didn’t realize how bad things had got until I looked for a photo of him (we don’t have many. Black cat, you know?) and realized how beautiful and glossy he used to look.

Yesterday he was a wreck of a cat, thin and scruffy.  And yet, I hope I did the right thing, and that he forgives me.  And he left a Euclid-shaped hole in our hearts.

I read somewhere years ago, the year we got our first baby and moved three times, that a move puts a great strain on you, as great as a divorce. Any disruption of routine apparently upsets the monkey brain, and you’re at risk for heart attack and stroke.

Well…. 2020 isn’t done with us, and I hope we survive it.

Some changes are good, some are bad, and some are breaking our hearts.  But we’ll remember, and we’ll go on.  Because life IS change.  And it’s better than the alternative.

*The picture is of Euclid and D’Artagnan who were inseparable for most of their lives.  D’Artagnan is older son’s cat and moved with him, despite being in (slow) renal failure.  In the last three years, he and Euclid didn’t recognize each other, which is perhaps the saddest thing of all.*