- the silhouette of a Great Dane bending reality around it in the halflight as it leaps and growls, unearthly shadow, throat-catching shade

- the conversation sprung on me while I sat alone in a restaurant, full of bewildering generosity and staggering racism in equal measure

- the way tears taper my lashes to fine points, making me look as if I’m wearing mascara

- my dreams from last night, in which I bought original art from Tomas Pajdlhauser in a style he doesn’t actually do, something painted directly on wood and heavily varnished, small and compact, as well as a print that looked like an abstracted conversation between pieces of honeycomb; the realization, in the dream, that I will buy anything that makes me think of honey and bees; the shock that I’d inadvertently spent $700 I didn’t have on art; the further shock that a book called The Buried Heart had been released under my name, but I hadn’t written it, and when I tried to text my agent about this my phone kept crashing, having been infected by ransomware that took the shape of three obnoxious men dressed as cartoon-Jesuses.

- the fact that when I woke from that dream and looked at my phone I saw an email from my husband that was greyscaled out as if my phone were crashing the way it had in the dream, but it turned out it was because he’d copied it from Notes

- the intensity of my desire to receive this month’s Locus magazine, to which I am subscribed, and in which I am reliably informed This Is How You Lose the Time War is reviewed

- a photo of a slender lock of my hair curling out of the top knot in which I’ve bound it with such enthusiastic verticality that it looks like nothing so much as a question mark

- the amusing appropriateness of me wandering around today beneath the auspices of such punctuation

- the annoyance at neighbours who don’t deal with their laundry in a timely fashion, forcing my own washing to languish damply while the dryers sit, mouths open, disgorging clean laundry for all to see

- the anxiety of finally setting my hands on my neighbours’ laundry in order to make room for my own because dammit I want to sleep by midnight

- the fear that some kind of dubious retaliation awaits my laundry

- how freakin’ good Paul Krueger’s Steel Crow Saga is, how complete and satisfying, and the places in which I cried

- wondering if that Great Dane was shade-pacted with its companion

- TRIUMPH! AT THE LAUNDRY RETRIEVED UNMOLESTED! VINDICATION! AT THE SIGHT OF NEIGHBOUR’S LAUNDRY STILL UNRETRIEVED!

- A perfect photo of Millie

- Good night, good night, good night

Amal Content

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