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1. This is not a love letter. |
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Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angels? ~ rilke ~ |
Tag: relationships
mihi cura futuri (but my concern is the future)
The preacher called me martyr as he finally found his name, (it’s good to have a name, I cannot write without a name, oh my tarnished scientist, oh my bleeding star), because I give in to the emptiness biting at my heart, because I strive to believe it better to drink the dreadful rain than to be proud and drown in it. I walk out alone, looking at the smoke that passes for a sky in our city and wonder why I’m never good enough company to keep. I have no pure fey and giddy anticipation, it’s threaded through with hard-earned dread. Crumbs from a table. Semantics twisting in. And I’m still terrified to talk to you, still too tired to cry. When everything changed, when the worst happened, it was the supports I never questioned that gave way, that turned from stone to sand beneath my feet. The cement is the same colour as the rain and as the water runs, I feel it must match my eyes. I lost the charm to fly, the meaning. Sometimes I only laugh to let a cold wind out. When I can’t casually say your name without feeling like I’m lying, what can I help but dream you’ll dream of me? My answering machine is silent, except when asking me what I want to do. Press two. Press three or four. I hesitate and hang up.
I dream you will come with me to the station when it comes time for me to leave. That you will reason with me the night before, try to hold me as if I would crack, like the light of a candle dimly holding the darkness back. In the morning, you’ll kiss me goodbye and wave, knowing I’ll come back for you. I dream I’m enough to fight for, an ideal with flesh surrounding, not a shell with soft hurt inside. That’s I’m real instead of filler. That there is music to my madness, that it’s not a lost cause again. Another reason to be myself, another reason to stand my ground against the cynic’s world. I dream and think sadly that I’m too young to feel this bitter, but there is no one to cradle my hands and draw my poisons from me. Not in this city. Not in this place. My time here has already been drawn as dry as glass burned back to sand.
Every single Playboy centerfold ever published, (in order).
The weather the past few days has been beautiful, sun and wind. I have been keeping busy. Friday was beach visiting then Jacques birthday, Saturday was dinner out with Duello-folk, then the TV on the Radio concert, Sunday was Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes, Monday was Korean Movie Night, Tuesday will be the Secret Machines concert, Wednesday is dinner with Nicole and Matt, Thursday is dinner and archiving vintage family-photographique with Silva, and then, as true as the trees let me be, Friday-I-do-not-know. I work this weekend, Raphealla having something else she’s doing, so I will only be available outside of shop hours. If you want to claim some of them, do so now or hold your peace. I have no internet at work, however, so you’ll have to use the telephonic device made so popular by the previous century, TOLL FREE: 1-888-HYPATIA. Handy, no? Yes. Minus the lack of net at work, which leaves my employment stupefyingly dull.
he needs what I have but can’t give away
There is a raccoon stuck bottom-half inside a tree, I see it when I walk from the bus-stop. There is a man on a blue ladder, his arm up to his elbow in the hole, trying to shove the squirming creature free from the other side. I want to walk up to the situation and reach up and grab onto the creature, ignore the claws and teeth that would tear at me and pull. Yank it free in one smooth movement. Instead I run my tongue over the inside of my teeth, ossified pearls, and walk away. I will be late if I do not go now. I am obscurely disappointed my skin will remain intact.
I’ve been sleeping heavily lately, as if everything shuts down, as if my soul goes absent. I’m not used to it. Every morning is a dim entrance, a watery sky debut into a film I never needed to see. It’s like there’s a blanket of dust over me in my dreams. I twitch, I can feel it, just on the edge outside of consciousness. My body is trying to cope and maybe not doing as well as it used to. There’s something in my head getting in the way. It’s like when I lie in bed, when it’s time to dream, my mind seizes the chance to escape me, drive fast and away, disassociate from the crashing tide of conflicting shades of ache that run underneath my point of view, instead of resting, instead of taking the space to relax and fix my scrapes and bruises. It’s tiring me out, not being in my body. I have to find someone who knows how to connect the bits and pieces. I have hopes for Saturday.
Today the radio plays songs I used to listen to last year. It’s like nostalgia without the immediacy of caring about what happened. My in-box tells me letters from people who used to be my lovers. Someone drops the word muse on me and I smile, warmed by a rare spark of feeling worthwhile. If they weren’t so far away, that’s exactly what I want to be. The weather here never changes. Overcast with a chance of sun, sunny with a chance of rain. Always water from the sky. Even when it is blue it looks gray. I haven’t taken part in creating in a long time, too long for me.
“I will see you again”
video: Royksopp – What Else Is There?
He was a broken angel, a stunningly beautiful boy sitting on a saxophone case on the side of the road. Purple hat, bottle green pants, blue leather shoes. We nodded, one eccentric to the other, and he spoke to me in french. I remembered him, later, from so many years ago that I might have been a different height.
I stood on a table and shouted last week. “This is your only proven chance. The Right Thing is to be, not some societal structured decision on what’s polite.” I hadn’t felt anger like that in so long. I had forgotten. My voice, it snapped off the tips of the words. Hot words. “Do what you need to do now, there is no later.”
I think I’m going to bring him home with me. A bad idea, but a necessary one. When the chemical conversion has finished, I will either be snuffed out or unrequired, but this is the time I have. It’s rare to find people as scraped hollow as I am. He’s going to be a father in a few days to a child he didn’t want. Roe VS Wade for men.
He called me Pandora, the man I shouted at. I love him more than I should be allowed. Traditionally, Pandora was a poisoned gift for man, sent by the gods to punish the theft of fire. Beautiful, deft, clever, and with a talent for healing, still it was her blessing of mischievous curiosity that brought worry to the world, not her grace.
He is one of the people, precious and rare, who bring fire. I would hate to follow history, but I worry that I will. Last night as I walked home the nine o’clock gun sounded like storm heavy thunder. I had sat with the boy for two hours, his heart a black shuttered star, still guttering, else I would not have been there.
When I left, I poured barefoot into the night. When I left, he closed the door. When I left, I said “Good night, sweet prince, dream well. The world is still waiting for you.”
When I had dangerously opened my dowry, my carved box, I had tasted faith.
eternal feminine difficulties
Being with a ghost is hard. It’s tricky, navigating the pathways that carry the least number of rattling chains. I confuse him he says, just like the last few. They think they know themselves, then I come along. “Sometimes I want you to just leave me alone, but whenever I’m with you it all goes away and I’m just comfortable, you know? It’s weird. You’re weird.” He’s telling me this on his cell phone, attempting to be locked in some small room, his foot against the door to keep out his friends. I shouldn’t even be on the phone right now. You make me feel safe, I told him another night. He quotes me, “That’s what you do,” he says. Like you said and I said and he has no memory. No memory at all. It drains away daily. He tells me that he’s worried, that he’s scared, but he doesn’t say he loves me. That’s my line, spoken to the dark when he’s asleep, when he’s awake but not quite paying attention. He says I found him at a strange time. I stole him out into monogamy and being crazy just when his life started again, and he likes it, he digs me a whole lot, but he can’t shake the feeling of bad timing. The same you’re awesome but as everyone else. I can’t help it, this terrifying dream. I’m afraid this will end in another You Can’t See Me.
Streaming audio: Magnetic Fields, an hour of live concert.
Fresh in my mind, his rambling nervous phone-call, scratchy over the line. I don’t think I could take that. I can feel he’s convincing himself of something, but not a decision I can quite access. The story hasn’t enough pieces for me to draw into words, there are gaps, milk-teeth spaces that I need to fill in. I told him I’d call at one. An hour and half, I’d said, to give him time to figure out where he’ll be. “Do you want to come over?” and Yes, in a small voice. A tiny admittal voice, one that’s scared of seeing where it’s been leading. Then, No, wait, I didn’t say that like that, though I did, and you know I did, and you know what that means. I just don’t want you barking up the wrong tree. When I called, he didn’t pick up.
One MP3 a day for one year. Archived bi-weekly. Produced in 2003.
Part of it is that he can’t figure out why I like him, not the way I do. I should be more upset or less patient, less accepting. He goes on about it. Not that liking him is all that strange, I’m sure he has the same sort of line-up as I do, ghost or no. I’d be surprised if he didn’t. No, he thinks his life is unusual, that his insides are crazy and strange. Well they might be, but I’m not in any position to see. I’ve learned over time that I’ve got blinders to socially abnormal behaviour that makes sense. Apparently most girls, they fade away, maybe in a musty cloud of arguements and perfume, when he’s not around as much as they want him to be. Me, it’s more than I have and almost as much as I need.
Top 65 Songs of 2005: 65-26, as picked by the clever Good Weather For An Airstrike.
(((awakening in a tiki ballroom))
Kyle and I crept down the familiar black wood stairs behind the bar, “Want to see where I go when I pull my ghost act?”, and came out into the vast industrial vintage kitchen that dominates a third of the basement. I’m familiar with this place, but in the dark, everything looks different, as if the room is religiously slumbering, waiting for a second coming of a sacred pastry chef.
Exiting the kitchen into the hall, where the bar is, to the left is the entrance to a low thatched ceiling Tiki Banquet room, all low slung chairs piled haphazardly and woven bamboo walls, and to the right is the entrance to the Polynesian Ballroom which, when the lights are on, is dominated by a long colourful mural put up somewhere in the late forties, the sort of thing you tend to only see in movies unless you live in L.A. or San Francisco. However, it being somewhere close to two:thirty in the morning, the place was abandoned. In the dark, the mural is ignored in favour of the elegant farthest wall, made almost entirely of black and white glass.
This is what we walked into, the stained glass our only source of light, transforming the ballroom into a warm cavern of a room, dark as unwashed velvet. It was a movie moment, a cinematic young girl’s dream of where she’d lose her virginity.
We were talking about fathers and how they’re different from dads. How I’d had one of each as time progressed and how both of them were eventually terrible. I settled our things, strawberries, alcohol, his back-pack, three layers of our jackets, on one of the black tables scattered around the room as Kyle went up onto the balcony and fiddled with switches until he’d found us an unassuming light. The green carpet glowed.
My head in his lap, his hand in mine, my eyes slowly closing with exhaustion, we talked about the shattered crystal balls that were our childhoods. How our hell-raising had taken entirely different forms. Mine almost entirely after dark and secretive, away from my mother, his open to the point where his mother had to fight to keep him out of special schools. We swung ridiculously between being serious, out-pouring our personal history of hurts, and laughing at the futility of the human race. We both want to leave this place better than we found it. When the ice-age comes, if we’re not colonizing the stars yet, we’ll be standing on the side, waving flags and rooting for the Earth.
If you call it love, we’ll cut you.
She sang to herself, as she waited, about the death of dreaming trees. She was almost asleep, but she still smiled when she heard him singing in reply from the next room. When he returned, he’d found she’d shifted from lying on the couch to lying on one of the shining black tables scattered around the room. His reaction was delightful to her, an outburst of sweet awe-struck vehemence so gratifying that it occured to her that she might take up lying on chilly tables in dimly lit rooms as a hobby for the rest of her life.
he says I’m trouble exactly like you did. I’m trouble and too good. It’s eerie.
In my dreams I’m climbing. My hands grip wooden railings and the edges of bricks. I pull myself over balconies and stand on the knobs of doors. I brush flakes of paint from my hands onto my pants and look over a small inlet to apartments across the water. There is a light there, blocked by a friend I only know when I’m asleep. I think routes, maps that mean escape and freedom and eluding pursuit. Up, I dream, up and over and that way. I am rescuing myself from the ground.
The graffiti in the washroom reads DO IT BECAUSE IT’S FASHIONABLE? VOMIT! WHY NOT? in thin black permanent marker on the door. Later, for a split second, I think I recognize the hand-writing as I walk by a man sitting fetal on the street, rocking back and forth, holding a sign in the air with an empty paper coffee cup. HIV POSITIVE & HUNGRY, PLEASE GIVE CHANGE. I am wrong, of course, it is merely that they are both messy block letters, both made in staining black marker. I am walking too fast, not fast enough. We miss the light and have to wait. My wallet is thick with coins, but there are none spare. I am poor. The quarters are for laundry, the dimes are for carefully counting out at the check-out counter one by one by one as I try to pay for a bag of oranges. I don’t feel guilty, but I turn my head from him as we stop and talk. I want to block my brother from his line of sight. He is eighteen, but he is still too young.
It’s official now that I’m tangled with a hotel ghost, brass numbers drifting through my blood. There was A Talk last night that mostly involved Kyle apologizing. “Where will you be tonight?” “Vanishing.” It was a portrait of everything dysfunctional between us. Ourselves as hungry children who deny that we’re stealing. He said, “like” and “you know what I mean?” a lot. I nodded into his shoulder and repeatedly asked him “why?”
We’re a gordian knot on the bed. “I’ve got too much to figure out right now.” A train-wreck year. “Let me explain mine.” Every five sentences, we’re laughing a little, he’s unconsciously kissing the top of my head. We tell the right kind of stories. “See, this I can live with. This is really nice.” I say yes. “More is too much. You scare me.” “See me twice a week,” I say. He says he’s not sure.
I believe him implicitly when he says I’m scary. Everyone worth knowing says I’m scary.
The summary is a red flag warning that he’s unreliable company, that he’s not ready for four letter words. I can live with that. “Come back to bed with your dumped non-girlfriend.” He says, “See, you’re scaring me again.” and stops his mouth with mine. My gold lipstick dusts his cheeks and the tip of his nose.
After, he spreads his hands with an expression on his face that I can’t identify. “Where did you come from?” I can’t see him, is he kidding? My glasses are off, I’m too blind. I lean down, spreading wool across his shoulders, my weight on my hands. “What do you mean?” “It’s a good thing, believe me.” I’m grinning. This is the same man I had a water fight with in the bed an hour earlier. The sheets are still damp with beer. He found out where I’m ticklish. “Well, where did you come from?” “Here,” his hands point out, “planet Earth.” I tell him I fell from the moon. It feels true.
trying to remember the worth of birth control when all I can think of are his unfair hands
I am the very model of a Singularitarian
I’m combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian,
Aggressively I’m changing all my body’s biochemistry
Because my body’s heritage is obsolete genetically,
Replacing all the cells each month it’s here just temporarily
The pattern of my brain and body’s where there’s continuity,
I’ll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology,
(“But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes…”)
I’ll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology.
There’s an MP3 link too.
Today was spent re-arranging the shop I work in, hauling large heavy awkward pieces of pale laminated wood around into hopefully better positions. We need a curtain now. A curtain, a ladder, some screws, and some paint. It’s nice to have carte blanche. I’ve been told that I’m to treat the store as my own, all my decisions will be supported. It’s interesting, like an experiment in culpability. How responsible am I? How capable?
“I’ve listened to your music, seen the way you dress. I trust you.”
I’ve had relationships based on less.
Remember the water? It sprayed like insane rain, kamikaze airborne water trying to reclaim the shore from the sky and bring it back into the ocean. I was so glad you ran through it after me, it felt like a victory. Breakfast, then sitting on damp moss, so British Columbia, so everything about this place that’s sometimes nice. Secrets, so many secrets. I miss you. You’re around and then not, all at once. I remember kissing you, lying with my body pressed against yours on a volcanic outcropping of rock, all soft cliffs and too much ocean view. All those trees. I saw you watching me trip down the path like a child, I watched you smile. How much that meant to me, I’m not sure I can say. It had been so long since I’d felt like anyone wanted me, like I could make someone happy. Therapy for both of us, I suppose. A furtive thing we could call our own. An epoch passed as we climbed the earth.
Evenings like this I wish you were here, free to sleep in my bed, be warm for me in the chill.
My lovers last year, all of them left silver hair on my clothes. Spiderwebs that tied joy down, transmuting me into an alchemist of golden moments, but my last year was longer ago than that. I think of new years in terms of fall. Leaves and seasons changing, halting, freezing. Anything after Hallowe’en is this year, anything before is last. It might be in November this year, my annual transfer from them into now. We met in August, we began in August. The year before last, something new, a man, a burning furnace hanging in the ether, changing my perception of time. Everything counted from the day I took a worried picture that my friend has hung on his wall in Montreal.
This year it might be somewhere in November where it shifts. Before there was my first love returned to me, too poetically pleasing to last or be real. My theater painter, my silly Gavool fool. “Have you met my underage girlfriend?” A genius clown that handed me so gracefully to California (Uber Alles). Flash: tied with ribbons, merry christmas, the light from the window before we moved the bed, a thin string glittering from one thing to another, my decision. LAX = empty regret. Last winter spent in Orange County, adrift in rain and lost without direction. My lovers, before they didn’t trust me, they didn’t tell me until it’s too late.
Next year. New Year, December. My hanged moon, strung up on charming wire, so full before it waned so suddenly. He fell from the sky and destroyed all the tides. I fell down and drowned and my morning star, my most precious thing, my evening dream who surrounded me with words, abandoned me after burning me with a small handful of flame. Hours counted like suicidal moths. Hating how easy I must be. Fifteen people dying in six months. All the ways to count a year. Two jobs gone, three, a night of fire where I finally died. There was no vessel to carry me. When the apple fell, there was no one to capture it, no hand to interrupt its crash to the ground. Everything all at once, so dreadful.
I’m older now, I can feel it for the first time in my life. I see lines inside my face, miniature scars, a map of where I used to live. Pictures from last year, they look too happy to be me, too young and yet, here I am, feeling alright with life again. It took me eight months. It took me a year, a failed one night stand, and a married conductor. It took music and getting away from here, a refreshing life out of the small town. It took the sky and blood and tears and feeling too alone. It was Ryan, it was walking into the water on the night of fireworks and resisting the urge to let my head go under. It was so many things, saving a life on New years, never seeing that girl again. Slapping Matthew, dancing alone, dancing with Kyle. It was myself, finally, and the memories of starry skies that brought me back to me.
Though mostly it was the conductor.
        the good ones are just like that
“No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.
But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.”
understand me, I’m not going to wire you shut
My invisible relationship continues. His son spent the weekend in the hospital. Last night I expected him to be home at seven and he wasn’t there by eight. I suspect there may have been a relapse. Either way, I’m worried. I feel now that I should have accepted the proffered key to his bedroom. Then I could at least sleep in his bed, play goldilocks and the sweet-hearted amateur DJ. It’s only a block away and our work schedules strangely match. He starts at five in the morning, I have to leave for work at ten to start at eleven. There’s enough time for sleep in there. In the evening he wakes up at five:thirty, I lock up at six. I could have set the alarm, rescued it from where he threw it if he hasn’t already. Red glowing lights made up by little bars in rows. It’s enough to make me smile. My clock is for the blind almost specifically. The dial is huge, blue, and exceedingly bright if I want it to be. I can read it from the head of my bed if I squint a little. A miracle clock, granting me time without eyes.
A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence statements on global warming, the administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a statement yesterday calling for “scientific openness” throughout.
      “Remember there is no such thing as global warming. Use only space words. Don’t mention the big bang. NASA needs to teach more religion.”
We met again at the bus-stop yesterday. He bashfully idled out of the hotel as I was on my way to work and explained what his day was going to be. Last night I padded over at midnight in my barefeet and almost wasn’t let in by the nervous front desk clerk. (This morning, of course, he was incredibly friendly. I suspect my “position” logically asserted itself). It is refreshing to finally have a relationship not be that delightful and frustrating thing, a secret, (those were too many), but standing the confidence of being coupled on the strength of only a few encounters feels odd, as if I shouldn’t assume so much, though I know I am a fool to think so. Established is established, with no reason to justify calling or arriving at the door. In my long absence from these things, my natural inclinations have been eroded. I’ve forgotten that my partners also tend to think in marriages.
old news: MIAMI – An agitated passenger who claimed to have a bomb in his backpack was shot and killed by a federal air marshal after he bolted from a jetliner that was boarding for take off.
      No bomb was found. “Go back to bed, America, your government is in control. You are free to do what we tell you.”
Aiden and I made headway on one of the mink last night. We sliced off about a pound of flesh from the female. Once beheaded, it looked less sad and depressed and more anatomically interesting. We filleted her until she was almost skeletal, then we packed what remained in salt and put her in the fridge. Aiden wants to name her Anne Rand so that he’s had the satisfaction of tearing out her intestines and slitting her throat. I am refusing, however, on the grounds that my mink will be pretty when they’re finished and not fascist.
He also made the incredibly unfortunate comment that claimed that he was feeling better about it as the corpse cooled. When pressed as to why, he very haltingly admitted that he was finding too much similarities between the feeling of the dead mink and plunging fingers into female genitalia. I think that disqualifies any of his more poetic suggestions. There was also a comment about killing me if I posted that, so I suppose I’m lucky he never reads this thing. *teases*
dear holy mother death, my music is wierd
I have wrapped myself in pixels and lost myself in who I used to be a little more. This means my feet are returning to stone. I haven’t been writing as much, which felt awkward, but perhaps it only reminded me what was gone. In the abandonment I’ve made a new friend, an else person, someone sweet to talk to me out of sleep. The free long distance option has been illuminating. The light’s been blinding me until I fall down smiling, cradling my joy within my body through incredible acts of will. Sparse news, but breaking important to me.
The people I love, I paint them as half a myth, partially a ghost, and as clear as faulty memory can make. I think of one in particular, so vulnerable without their glasses. I wondered at the time if that’s how different my face looked as they smiled into me through an expression clear as the sky. Here, take my hand, take me upstairs again. My acceptance an open letter, addressed to nothing. Made of laughter, the ink of my hand wiping my mouth. Shining laughter, the word rill. Teeth like the trigger to procreate. Such a gentleman, all euphemisms and too much poetry, enough and more to fill me. Hit with words, I entertained what I could keep, the bare minimum of what I could stand. Such a denial of the closest thing I have to a fetish. The cream of my curiosity, oh. It was thick, it was all I could do. The idea at the time was to not miss him the way I wanted to, the way my blood was telling me to, so that like now, I could wonder. I could question and write these invisible love letters, trying to pour my problematic methods into explaining why I was impossibly putting everything off so I didn’t have to carry him with me, so that I could have his weight to look forward to instead of around my neck.
Time, of course, bends wills better than wind does trees, and curiosity will find pleasurable answers in the unlikeliest of places. In the same day, I was given him to freely write to, but never to anything else, as well as a repository for my starving affection. It’s like free insurance, that wedding ring, a name for the noose to hang my weakness from until it quits kicking. That word could is no longer directionless. I don’t think, how long since last year, since the year before that. How long until I see them again. Instead, I think how every perfect vision blinds itself with time, how unsteady all my life has been, how my rocks threw me into the water to drown, so how damned nice to have new ones. And only a block away.
On my off days, I feel like my emotions displayed here are a compilation tape with a relationship theme. The first song says that every time I see you, I understand the meaning of “swept off my feet”. The second song considers the effort of movement as I forget to breathe. The third tries to breathe as it tries to remember the last thing you said to me as I tried to resist the urge to kiss you until you know what I mean, sugar sweetness segue into all the days I spend alone that don’t armor me, but pretend, but really break me down. Middle of the tape and I’m skinned. Minute by minute, the music watches where your eyes trace, as if by some resident understanding of your gaze, I’ll be able to train it to stick on mine, to watch it shake and take me in for the finale, the poignant fuck moment of eyes meeting until they can’t and close instead.
It’s like I should take up a hobby, but I’m already beginning to fill up my days as my schedule calcifies. Korean Movies take up Mondays, Gamelan will be every Tuesday, and the drop in ballroom dancing is on Wednesdays. Kendo is looking to end up on Thursdays for lack of anywhere else. I have a suspicion that Kyle has weekends more free than other days, though at this point, I could be entirely wrong. All my tricks of gleaning information don’t work well without a modicum of input.
Speaking of hobbies, I’m finally picking up my mink corpses tomorrow! Waiting for me in Terri‘s freezer are two skinless mink, a male and a female, Dahmer style, she says. Bloodily packed, so fresh off the floor that the corpses steamed as they were placed in the clear plastic bags, they should be an adventure in kitchen misappropriation. I’m glad there’s two, as I’m certain that I’ll botch the first skeleton somehow. I’m considering attempting to boil the fledgling crow corpse tomorrow too, if I have time before ice-skating, or at least dip it quickly into boiling water and plucking the straggling feathers out to start. Eventually the finished product will be a flying mink skeleton to put in my window next to my angel mouse. I need to get some silver jewelers wire with my next paycheque and maybe a pair of tiny pliers, if no one has a pair I might borrow, and try to find out how to bore very tiny holes. Glass eyes are always tempting as well, though I don’t want to spoil the pure effect of wax polished bones.
Once I find how mink are to work with, I’m likely to make more. Bliss suggested dropping by various pet stores for dead birds, which is a far more reliable than my method simply finding them on the street. Slightly more sanitary as well, probably, as so far I’ve been carrying them home bare-handed and relying on my ridiculous immune system to take care of whatever germs I might have touched. They might have other dead pets as well, she said. Things like hamsters and guinea pigs tend to expire at the stores, creatures much more size-suited to budgie wings or cockatoos. Aside from being beautiful, I want my flying creatures to be improbable, not impossible.