categories: elsewhere
Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin Ava and Aliya meet at a small university near London and fall into a kind of friendship that is its own closed world. They are the strange girls; they write stories that bleed into each other; they are each other’s entire point of reference for a few years. The novel moves between two timelines, Aliya’s perspective during their university years and Ava’s a decade later, when they’re thrown back together at a mutual friend’s wedding, and everything that was left unsaid between them starts surfacing. Ava’s life has stalled; Aliya got the book deal they both wanted. The power has shifted, and neither of them quite knows how to stand in it. Hasin writes their friendship — claustrophobic, electric, all-consuming — with exacting precision, and the campus atmosphere has that immersive and tragic quality of a world that felt infinite while you were in it and shrank the moment you left. [The ending lands in the past, at what feels like a tentative, fragile attempt to give the friendship another go … and then it just stops. You already know, from everything you’ve read in the present timeline, that it didn’t take. But you don’t know why, or whether the attempt was halfhearted, or whether the rift was simply too deep. It’s a devastatingly perfect place to end a book.
The Anniversary by Alex Finlay Quinn and Jules are seventeen when their lives collide on May 1st, 1992 — he gets arrested breaking up a fight, she survives an attack by a serial killer who has been striking every May Day for years. The novel then follows them both across the next decade, checking in on each May 1st as they separately try to piece together what happened and why. The structure is interesting in theory, and there’s a lovely warmth in watching these two find their way toward each other over the years. It’s a serviceable thriller with an earnest heart, just not one that surprised me very much. (courtesy Netgalley)
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm There is a moment in There Is No Antimemetics Division where a character arrives at her job, settles in, and gradually realizes she has been doing this job for decades. She is in charge of things. She has an entire history here. She just can’t remember any of it. That character is Marion Wheeler, Director of the Antimemetics Division, and she is the closest thing the book has to a beating heart. She is driven and capable and fighting a war she can’t remember fighting, against enemies she can’t remember encountering, with colleagues who may or may not still exist. The book lives in that register throughout. A secret organization exists to study and contain entities that protect themselves not through teeth or claws but by making themselves impossible to perceive or remember. Look away and they’re gone. Leave the room and you never knew they were there. The horror isn’t really the monsters. It’s the vertiginous, howling gap where the monsters were. On paper, the premise sounds unwieldy, and the book itself is a bit episodic; it began as installments for an online collaborative horror project called the SCP Foundation, and it reads that way, interconnected short stories rather than a traditional novel, each self-contained, each pulling you a little deeper. Characters are thinly drawn. Plot threads drop away without resolution, which is either a flaw or entirely intentional, given what the book is about. The ending goes big and then bigger, but then, the concept itself is pretty wild, so who am I to nitpick? What I can tell you is that it’s strangely, almost suspiciously easy to lose yourself in. The horror sneaks up on you after you’ve gotten comfortable. You think you have a grasp on how things work. But you really, really do not. What I retained after finishing it was next to nothing, just a simmering smattering of symptoms. Paranoid. Devastated. Destabilized. Whether I’ve forgotten the details because that’s simply how my brain works, or because the book worked exactly as intended, I genuinely cannot tell you. (I’ve been ruminating on this one so much I wrote an entire Rue Morgue column about it in the current issue!)
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey Celia has tried MLMs. She has wanted a baby, lost pregnancies, and kept moving forward in the vague way people drift along when they don’t have anywhere in particular to be moving toward. Desperate and tired, she arrives at Kindred Cove, an isolated island community that holds an annual festival for carefully selected outsiders. The island promises healing and transformation and belonging, and Celia is someone who has been trying to build those things for herself for a long time without much luck. You understand immediately why she’s into this place, even as the weirdness and wrongness of her stay becomes weirder and wronger. The book takes its time getting where it’s going, maybe too much time. Multiple POVs and timeline jumps are fine in theory, but layered on top of an already slow burn, they start to feel like obstacles rather than exciting or intriguing texture. Every time I got traction in one thread it would shift, and the momentum would have to rebuild from scratch. The cult mechanics seemed extremely well-researched; the manipulation here is warm and attentive rather than overtly sinister, which is more unsettling, but the repetition of the community’s language and rituals started to work against the book rather than for it. By the end, I wasn’t surprised by where things landed. Celia felt fated for this place from the first page. Whether that reads as tragedy or arrival probably depends on you. (courtesy Netgalley)
Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell Daye is a girl woven from flowers by Rory’s older sister, who needed the eight-year-old off her back and decided a botanical companion was the solution. It’s a loose reimagining of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, which is a premise I love, and the early sections, where Daye is new and strange and Rory is just a lonely kid, have a pleasantly eerie fairy tale quality. Then Rory grows up and develops feelings for the creature his sister made him, and the book follows that dynamic for a very long time, through many repeated seasonal cycles, and it is slow and it is uncomfortable in ways that did not feel productive or illuminating to me. I understand what it’s doing thematically. I just did not want to be there for it.
The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson I’ve never read a book of fiction, horror or otherwise, that uses this particular piece of Irish folklore as its central conceit, and The Burial Tide is a hell of an introduction to it. Mara Fitch wakes up inside a coffin, six feet underground, with no memory of who she is or how she got there. She claws her way out and emerges on Inishbannock, a small fog-wrapped Irish island where everyone seems to know her, and nobody seems to want her back. The opening scene yanks you by the collar and you tumble headfirst into the story whether you’re ready or not. From there, it unspools as both a mystery and a folk horror, Mara piecing together her identity while the island’s secrets close in around her, and the creatures that eventually emerge are grotesque and strange, and like many other things in this story, I’ve never encountered their like. Sharpson keeps you uncertain about who to trust right up until the end, and I had a good time with every second of it.
Crossroads by Laurel Hightower The crossroads as a place of supernatural transaction has a long history: Robert Johnson, folk tradition, the idea that where roads meet, something waits for yearning, for blood. Hightower takes that mythology and builds a story of profound grief around it, about a mother two years out from losing her son who returns nightly to his roadside memorial and one evening inadvertently bleeds into the ground there. Short, sharp, effective.
The Estate by Sarah Jost Camille Leray is an art historian who can slip inside a piece of artwork and inhabit the emotional world of the artist at the moment of creation, taking others with her if she chooses, which makes her either the most valuable person in any auction house or the most dangerous, depending on what she finds. After her weird powers lead her to make a call about a piece that costs her her job, Maxime Foucault, an aristocratic heir with a sprawling Brittany estate and a history with Camille, offers her a chance at redemption by authenticating a collection of sculptures by a mysterious vanished artist. The chateau is atmospheric, and the art world details are intriguing, but Camille’s dumb obsession with Maxime, who is fairly transparently a tool from the beginning, drags down everything around it. You spend the book waiting for her to see what everyone else already has, and the patience that requires is not really rewarded. The friendship between Camille and Lila is the more interesting relationship and the one I wished the book had focused on.
The Belles by Lacey N. Dunham Bellerton College in 1951, is all velvet ribbons and strict rules and prestige, and Deena Williams is a working-class girl doing everything she can (kinda on the unethical downlow) to pass as someone who belongs there. She falls in with five other freshmen, and they become the Belles, singled out by the college president’s wife as the most promising—and also kind of the shittiest— girls on campus. There are also disappearances and possibly hauntings! The setup is exactly what dark academia promises and for a while it delivers… the atmosphere is good, the sense of something sinister underneath the propriety is well sustained. But after a while it loses steam or loses its way, or loses something. But Deena herself never quite worked for me, and the mystery, when it finally resolves, doesn’t pay off what the buildup promised. I was rooting for this one. We were all rooting for you!
The House of Whispers by Laura Purcell I keep waiting for another Laura Purcell novel to jazz me up the way The Silent Companions did, and, sadly, this one is not it. Hester arrives at Morvoren House in Cornwall to care for the now mute and partially paralyzed Miss Pinecroft, finding a household of superstitious staff performing rituals and muttering about fairies and whatever lurks in the caves beneath the house. The second timeline takes us back forty years to Louise Pinecroft’s childhood, watching her family succumb to consumption while her father fills those same caves with sick prisoners for his experiments in sea air as a cure. The bones of a good Gothic novel are all here: Cornwall, caves, fairy folklore, a woman with a terrible secret locked inside her, but it never quite happened for me. The atmosphere is present without being immersive, the characters present without being compelling.
Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou “The decision to try for beauty meant I could also fall short of it, which would be more painful than not trying at all.” That line is from somewhere in this collection, and I can’t recall exactly where, or who said it, or why, but it doesn’t matter because as soon as I read it, I just knew this book was going to be practically perfect. Seven stories, each one its own strange world. A mail-order bride arrives from Taiwan, packed in a cardboard box. Two teenage girls plot to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. A father reconnects with his estranged daughter by sneaking onto the set of her film as a background extra. And then there is “You Put a Rabbit on Me,” in which an American woman moves to Paris to find herself and instead finds her French doppelgänger — someone closer to who she always wanted to be — and I laughed out loud and felt a little sick and then wanted to immediately read it again. Elaine Hsieh Chou writes with ruthless precision, funny and dark and strange and occasionally disturbing, and every story goes somewhere different than you thought, delightfully unpredictable. If you like fiction that is funny and dark and unsettling, uneasefully human, this is your book.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue Rachel is a broke university student in Cork working at a bookstore when she meets James, and they fall into one of those friendships that immediately swallows everything else. They move in together, they scheme together, they enable each other’s worst impulses with tremendous enthusiasm. When Rachel develops a crush on her married English professor and James helps her devise a plan to seduce him at a bookstore reading, it backfires in a sadlarious kind of way that changes everything and sets the rest of the novel in motion. O’Donoghue is very good at writing people who are making genuinely bad decisions for reasons you completely understand, and the friendship between Rachel and James is the kind where you lose the ability to talk each other out of anything, which is both the best and worst thing about it. My one complaint — and it is a small (?) one in a book I loved —is that James spends a fair amount of the book as the gay best friend, the comic relief, and sometimes it’s written so broadly that when you laugh you start to feel a little bit like part of the problem.
Little Wild by Laura Evans opens with an hourly countdown to Joanie’s arrival at Snare House, and that structural conceit captures the obsessive, breathless quality of Margaret’s inner life perfectly. She has been living as a ward of Joanie’s family, in love with her in the way that has nowhere to go in 1937 Suffolk. When they’re discovered together, Margaret is banished to her father’s cabin in the woods, and the book shifts a fair bit of strangeness — magpies, inherited magic, the shadow of her mother’s fate, dreams she wakes from with dirt on her feet. The forest atmosphere is poetic and beautiful, and Evans writes the creeping unease of Margaret’s isolation wonderfully. But the book never quite commits. The magic stays ambiguous in ways that feel less like deliberate restraint and more like uncertainty about what the story actually is, and by the end, it has neither gone far enough into the dark nor resolved enough of what it set up. Margaret’s obsession with Joanie is vivid and consuming, but Joanie herself barely registers, which makes it hard to know how seriously to take the love story at the center of everything. A gorgeous idea, imperfectly executed. (courtesy Netgalley)
Marla by Jonathan Janz Marla Gorman is the local legend of King’s Branch, Indiana — the strange girl who never leaves the creepy Gothic house she shares with her mother, spotted staring from her bedroom window at the exact moment murders begin to occur around town. The setup is all small-town atmosphere and creeping dread, and the elusive figure at the window…very much 1980s pulp horror energy, which I mean descriptively rather than as a complaint (except that the 1980s also had a particular way of writing women and about women that I found myself bumping up against here. The male gaze is present and accounted for.) Marla herself remains frustratingly opaque, her motivations, her history, the why of what she is, and I kept wanting the book to give me more of her rather than more of the men trying to figure her out. A fun romp of a horror novel that I wished had trusted its central character a little more. (courtesy Netgalley)
The Unknown by Riley Sager In 1926, five women vanished from New Avalon, a remote Vermont island that had been home to a commune of spiritual mediums. Their dresses were found hanging from an oak tree, no bodies, and to this day, no explanation. A century later, struggling actress Marin Keane (whose only screen credit is an eczema cream commercial) unexpectedly lands a lead role in a film about the disappearances, opposite legendary actress Violet Wright and under the direction of Ronan Peters, who insists his actresses actually live amongst each other on the island for a week — period clothing, no electricity, no phones — to prepare for their roles. Things are awkward and uncomfortable before the freaky stuff even starts happening. Daisy Rue was one of the women who vanished in 1926, and her diary entries run alongside Marin’s increasingly panicked present, the two timelines mirroring each other in increasingly unsettling ways. I’ve been let down by Sager’s last few books, so it was a relief to find this one working. The eerie island atmosphere is thick and sustained, the twists piled up in ways I didn’t see coming, and Marin, ambitious but naive, vulnerable, and surrounded by people she can’t quite trust or read, is easy to root for. A return to form! (courtesy Netgalley; pub date August 4, 2026)
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker Lee Turner has just killed his college roommate (or thinks he has, the details are blurred and bloody ) and flees to his father’s remote house in Japan, a place hidden by sword ferns where the bedroom window is not always a window and a woman with a sword keeps appearing in the yard. In 1877, Sen is a young samurai’s daughter hiding in the same house, doing terrible things to earn her father’s approval. The two timelines circle each other and eventually collide, and the Japanese mythology woven through it gives the whole thing a haunting, otherworldly texture. A few chapters from the end, something shifts, becomes more mythological, stranger, and I feel like I should have seen it coming, but I absolutely did not. Still a little confused about Hina, but I don’t think that’s entirely the book’s fault?
The Season of Sinking by Daphne Woolsoncroft Imogen Bly returns to her lakeside Washington hometown after her mother’s sudden death, joining her twin sister Amelia to pack up the family house, and almost immediately starts sensing that something is wrong — that someone is watching her, that her mother’s death wasn’t accidental, that the town is keeping secrets. There’s a third narrator running through the book, anonymous, watching Imogen from the shadows, and I guess that part kinda works. But the weird writing kept pulling me out of it. Coffee does not dance down a hallway. (Drift, waft, sure.) A small voice does not shine like the sun. (WTF?) There is too much smirking, particularly from men, and at one point a character says, “I just want to get out of this place and never come back,” like a cranky child who has been told she cannot have dessert. Ugh. Reading this book was mostly painful.
Please Enjoy Your Stay by Tara Goedjen Mia was thirteen when her cousin was murdered at an Austrian castle, and her testimony put the killer away. A decade later a true crime podcast starts poking holes in the case, and Mia returns to the castle — now being converted into a luxury hotel — working undercover as a nanny while she reinvestigates. The story moves between timelines and incorporates podcast excerpts alongside the main narrative, which gives it a neat, layered quality. The castle atmosphere felt pleasantly moody, and the mystery unspools at a decent pace. I don’t remember much of it now, but I was clearly entertained while I was in it, because I noted it as 4 stars.
…and that’s it! I don’t think I’ve been reading as much these past few months as I usually do. But that’s fine! I’ve been working on other things, and sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
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A friend posted a book cover on Threads the other day: the trippy, verdant jacket of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest. I’ve still never read the novel, but every time I see this cover, my mind is boggled by how gorgeous it is. These old vintage paperbacks rarely make it easy to learn who painted them, but a little digging on ISFDB turned up a name: Richard Powers. Which rang a faint bell, because I had a post about him sitting half-drafted in my files, abandoned at some point and promptly forgotten.
So I asked my friend Adam Rowe, of the 70s Sci-Fi Art Tumblr, author of Worlds Beyond Time, whether he knew of the artist, fully aware the answer would arrive as an immediate and faintly insulted yes, obviously. (I am projecting here. Adam is too nice to act insulted. But if it were me, I would have been!) So yes, he’d written a whole section on Powers in his book, and somewhere in the middle of telling me about it a few days ago, I experienced a mortified flare of recognition. Huh. This sounded …really familiar.
Reader, I am a moron. I had already singled Powers out. In my own interview with Adam about his book, which I read cover to cover, Powers was one of the artists I’d fixated on and asked him about directly. He is not, as it turns out, a new-to-me artist so much as something my brain once glommed onto and then immediately cached away into storage to make room to keep more important stuff like the lyrics to Weird Al’s “Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung.”
Anyway. That cover! Drowned in a world of green, a wet watercolor green that bleeds past its own edges. A woman’s face surfaces out of a tangle of pale fronds, except her hair keeps unraveling back into them, so you can’t say where the woman ends and the forest starts. Pink and magenta flecks drift down over all of it, blossoms or spores or some secret mycological third thing. Off to one side, low, sits a small dark seed-head fringed like a sea urchin, faintly lit, a little private sun. And along the very bottom, so faint you could miss them, two or three figures stand sketched in bare outline, peering up at her.
No two are quite alike; the work is restless and wildly varied, but a handful of recurring elements surface often enough to feel like a signature. Bodies that blur past their own outlines: a face blooming open in the palm of a cupped hand; a woman condensing out of a dark husk with only her face and red hair finished; a whole head built from scabbed, scraped-on texture, the face under it carved and totemic and very nearly tiki, with hard little triangles and dots and dashes sifting down like television static. Coral and anemone growths pocked all over with neat ringed holes that resolve into eyes the longer you stare into them.
Half the time, you can’t tell whether you’re looking at biology or machinery: a reef on one cover is strung with glowing filaments, like someone ran a current through it; a hand on another is freckled with little starbursts that could be sores or suns. Whole cover flooded in a single color, a sodden green or a hot arterial red or a low-sodium orange, and shapes surfacing strangely out of it. Most science fiction art of the era at least did you the courtesy of somewhere familiar to stand: a rocket, a ridge, some square-jawed soul in a spacesuit. Powers does… not.
The scale slides around while you watch, planetary one moment and microscopic the next, and a lot of it has a certain Joan Miró looseness, all biomorphic shapes and little calligraphic marks adrift on a flat field, an alphabet no one was ever meant to read. The covers were forever getting saddled with clumsy packaging, type clomping across the image or a painting cropped down past all sense, and the weirdness underneath came through all the same.
Then, every so often, he’d do something like this. The Midwich Cuckoos is the odd one out: almost no color at all, just black brush-ink on cream, a band of khaki, a single pool of gold. He’s pared the whole thing down to a few gestural strokes — a great dark shape in profile, a head or a brooding hill or some sleeping animal, with one enormous ringed golden eye held open in the middle of it. Two small children stand up on the black mass, drawn in the barest scribble, and a little steeple leans in at the lower edge. Elegant and hushed and graphic where the others are bold and buzzy and chaotic, and yet there’s that eye again, the same one surfacing in all the coral and the anemones.
Ah, the horror anthologies, these are the ones I love best! The same hand behind all that hushed green tenderness moonlighted in the charnel house, and bless his little macabre heart for it! The Zacherley collections give us a leering ghoul risen from the flames to stir a vulture’s skull into his own bubbling muck, and a gangrenous green face sloughing apart at the jaw. The Graveyard Reader is a sodden cluster of glistening pods, swollen and eyed, one of them cradling a tiny human face with its mouth wrenched wide. And then — because there is always some wretched little detail waiting to undo you — there in the corner of Midnight Snacks, a prim miss lady in her pink finery, smiling out sweet as you please amid the carnage, as though she’d wandered in from some other, far more wholesome book and gotten herself pasted into this one for reasons known only to God and Richard Powers.
Richard M. Powers (1921–1996) spent decades smuggling Surrealist and abstract painting where nobody thought to look for it, on the fronts of cheap science fiction paperbacks, and did it hundreds of times over for Ballantine, Doubleday, and what seems like very nearly everyone else along the way. What a fabulous weirdo! After writing all of this out, you’d think now I will remember who he is, but eh. You know me. I’m not making any promises.
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categories: foodish
I kinda lost my kitchen mojo there for a while. Maybe not “lost,” exactly, but I guess it got buried under new interests and enthusiasms and deadlines and research, and before you know it, we’re eating random cans of beans for dinner because I just can’t be fussed to cook. (Exaggerated for effect, of course; I am a Taurus, I would never eat an unseasoned can of beans.)
Anyhow, in the last few weeks, I’ve felt a shift and suddenly Kitchen Sarah (who is a fun-loving, free-wheeling fuckup, unlike Everything Else-Sarah, who is a rigid, neurotic rule-follower) is back! Last Friday, I made falafel from scratch and some Roman chicken dish and gluten-free peanut butter cookies (which were close to the best cookies I have ever had!!), and this week I have been doing what I love most: using up bits and bobs and scraggles and scraps, no recipes, just vibes, and conjuring delicious meals out of next-to-nothing.
Pictured here is a sort of breakfast okonomiyaki made with sourdough discard (why did I never think to do this before?) It was really good.
[EDIT] I know I said there was no recipe for this, but I posted the same photo with the same caption on social media, and, of course, someone asked: “…Could you post the recipe, please, or link to it?” (Sigh…insert something something about the literacy crisis.)
But I’m a good sport, so here’s what I roughly did…
Mix together: one shredded carrot, one cup shredded cabbage, a dozen small green onions, chopped green part only, 3/4 cup sourdough discard, dashi powder, baking powder, and one egg. Fry in a pan 2-3-4 minutes per side. Serve with okonomiyaki accouterments and a fried egg on top, if you like. That’s a very loosey goosey approximation of what I did! If you want to make traditional okonomiyaki, there are tons of recipes, and they are all pretty much the same. There are even kits that you can buy, like this one.
The world we navigate daily is only the palest precipice at the edge of, well…everything.
Beneath, beyond, between it all lie chasms upon corridors upon catacombs of spatial marginalia we have failed to notice or chosen not to see: the vast, unmeasured wilderness beneath our feet, the vaporous spirit world peering from beyond, the humming, thrumming space between dreams, the distance between newborn and dying stars.
I assembled a companion playlist to my new book, The Art of the Unknown, and it sounds like this: a shimmering sidereal lullaby, jazz noir bleeding into a pulsating wound of ominous dread, the Stendhal syndrome scored for strings, the ritualistic choir of the body in extremis, the echoing reverb of palindromic mirror worlds, the incantatory clocklessness of Afrofuturist jazz. It contains a ballroom that survives the dissolving shipwreck of memory, electronic music built from pure sine waves for a universe in its first three minutes, before matter and light separated, the moment before anything became anything, and twenty-one minutes of slow electronic drift that pools like November fog in an abandoned stairwell. A trombone played in an underground cistern by seeping stone seraphim. A coastal field recording that captures moonlight shadows creeping slow.
A sonic curation for entire worlds — worlds beneath the skin on our bones and the lightless bottom of the ocean, beyond the final named star and the glittering edge of heaven, between the infinite and the unbearably intimate shadow and the soul.
Listen here:
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I have spent a lot of summers being miserable about being miserable. Florida in June, July, August (and May and September and October and sometimes way into November, too) is brutal, and I have never made my peace with that. I’ve written about it as dread, as folk horror, as a survival problem to be wrangled with the right eerie playlist and robust air conditioning.
Looking back at those posts, I think I was doing what I’ve always done: sending my mind somewhere else. Into books, horror films, art, other people’s landscapes. Anywhere but here, in this body, in this place. Escapism has been my primary coping mechanism for as long as I can remember. It has served me well in many ways. I have read extraordinary books and watched extraordinary films and found my way to extraordinary art because of it. But there is a difference between enriching your inner life and just…not being present in your actual one. I am not sure I have always known where that line was.
I turned fifty last month. My knees are stiff. My lower back has frequent complaints. I keep seeing people shuffling on Instagram (that sort of hypnotic footwork dancing? I don’t know how to describe it?), and I am intrigued, but the jumping involved in the more energetic, athletic versions makes my teeth rattle just thinking about it. I need to find a low-impact place to start because I want to do it, it looks fun and cool, and I still have time left to do things that are fun and cool! But. My body is making itself known in ways it didn’t used to. But. It’s also more than that.
This past weekend, Yvan’s mother came to stay with us. She has ALS and is nonverbal at this point, her right side paralyzed, and she communicates through a talking board that her hands struggle to use (and English is her second language, Icelandic is her first, so even when we can make out what she’s spelled, we’re not always sure we’ve understood correctly.) Most of the time we’re guessing. Her husband, who is elderly himself and exhausted in the way that intense caregiving can exhaust a person, needed the weekend to repaint/redecorate their bedroom for the hospital bed that was being delivered. He needed her not to worry about her, just for a few days. He needed to not be burnt out for forty-eight hours.
So she came to us, and Yvan and I were both dreading it, for various reasons. We had to learn to feed her through a stomach port with a gravity feeding tube. We had to learn to mix her medications and administer them the same way. We had to learn all of this without killing her, which felt like a reasonable bar to clear but also an extremely high-stakes one. I was anxious about the physical intimacy of it – helping her dress, changing her pad, getting her situated. She couldn’t tell us if we were doing it wrong. We just had to try.
The weekend came and went. After the first night, we were both more comfortable. She slept a lot. We had people over; one of Yvan’s brothers came for lunch and a movie, and an Icelandic family friend stopped by for coffee. I stumbled through some feedings and screwed up, but I did not kill anyone. She seemed more relaxed than usual, looser, without the rigid routines her husband runs on. Yvan said it was good to spend time with his mom without his dad hovering, and I think that was true.
At one point, I was sitting with her, and I did the thing I always do when I’m nervous, which is babble, and I started telling her how much she and her family mean to me. She started crying. Which made me start crying, because I am a baby! I apologized and gave her a hug; she gave me a thumbs-up and something that was almost a smile, and I chose to interpret that as a good cry. I think it was.
She is thirty years older than me. Watching her, helping her, fumbling through it, learning the weight and reality of her body and what it needs now … I kept thinking about thirty years from now. What I want those years to look like. How I want to have spent the ones between then and where I am here and now.
I don’t want to spend them escaping into my own head. I have been doing that for so long, and I think maybe it has cost me something I am only just starting to add up. Not the books or the films or the art; I will never give those up, and I don’t think I should. But that Sarah-specific habit of using them to not be here. To not be in this body, in this place, in this heat, in this life that is actually mine.
So this summer, I am trying something different, which is not really a big deal, mostly just small, unspectacular acts of paying attention to the body I actually live in. I have spent the winter eating my morning gruel of oats and hemp and flax and chia, and now I am switching back to breakfast soup. This morning, it was cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, onions, a dashi-soy-mirin broth, and one lone leftover barbecue rib from the weekend that fell apart in the pot and seasoned everything with smoky, sticky fat. Hot soup in the morning feels like tending to something!
Some other things I am doing or acquiring or finally committing to:
And then there is everything else: the parts of summer that feed the mind rather than just the body, which I refuse to give up, I am just trying to be more present while I do them.
I am also taking this opportunity to resurface some older posts. A blog entry goes up, gets its moment, and then sinks into the archive where most people never find it again. That has always felt like a waste to me, because the thinking and the feeling that went into it doesn’t expire just because the publish date is two years ago. Writing isn’t milk. It doesn’t sour and go rotten! (Unless it turns out you’re a predator or a TERF or some other lousy thing, I guess, because that deffo sours the writing.) And there are always people who weren’t here yet when something first went up, who might find it useful or funny or resonant now. An archive isn’t a graveyard. It’s a shelf, and things on shelves deserve to be pulled down and looked at again, especially when you’re standing somewhere new and the light is a little different and you can see them more clearly than you could before.
These posts were written by a version of me that was coping, or raging, or reaching for something beautiful in a season that felt hostile and gross. Looking at them now, from here, I think I can see what I was reaching for. Maybe you can too.
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categories: scents & sensibility
I was traveling for most of the month, so I didn’t have much time or energy to try things, but here are my musings on five fragrances I sampled this past May…!
Witch NY Basil-ica A not-nearly-long-enough playlist on a Sunday morning, Haley Heynderickx and Cosmo Sheldrake trading sweet, playful verse in a sunlit patch of floor. The tardigrade in its shrubbery, with its little dappled patch of moss, the bug collector scooping the centipede out the window, carefully easing the praying mantis priest into a jam jar. A small disturbance of anise, sharp and green and dark, and then the green rushes in through the window, tangy lemon balm and the acrid green resin of unripe fruit leaves and clean, crisp cedar, a breeze of honeyed effervescence gone flat, warm and golden and slightly sleepy. The sound a fern makes when it uncurls, a soft incantation for rainy windowsills, a potion brewed in a thimble, a love letter from the slug to the fruiting vine.
Heretic Queen Of The Night Honeyed night blooms open pale against absolute black, a luminous vanilla moment, sweet and strange and fleeting the way a face emerges from darkness before the darkness rushes in. Vetiver, dry and dusky and gritty, the black sand of dreams. The mortuary scent of jasmine, a bitter shiver of arsenical wallpapers. The scent of the thing that presides over the voice that whispered your name, and there was no one there, which is worse than if there had been someone. The road that looks different on the way back because something has shifted that you cannot name or locate or defend against. The cat that peers into the shadows and sees what you cannot. The hour between 3 and 4am. The goddess of objectless dread.
Pearfat Parfum Sister Hildegard Thin cold air and clover and wildflower sweetness, morning dew on stone, the sort of bright bright, expansive, anything-is-possible morning that makes you want to set out with everything you own in a small bundle on a stick. A small figure against a large landscape, stepping off into something with no idea what that something is. Then: a door in the meadow, and beyond it woodsmoke and char and animal warmth, pine resin and ash, the dark beyond the firelight pressing in close. The flames a waystation, the meadow a small window just behind you in the distance… but you are not the same person who left it, you’ll never be that young or that bright or that foolish again. But you’ve learned you can light this fire of glow and illumination for every version of yourself you encounter along the journey.
Flâner Yakisugi Wood Incense in a cypress enclosure, herbal smokiness that is not now-smoke but then-smoke, absorbed into the walls over many generations. Resinous and pencil-dark and cool, a bitter astringency, dusty-dried to a husk of itself, the aromatics of a space long tended. The knowing of which wood to burn and when and why, a knowing internal and undemanding, unhurried, uncommodified. Then the world got very loud and very fast, and people forgot how silence felt, and the how in the feeling was a healing, and someone noticed the forgetting and put a price on it, because people were so harried and hollowed out they would pay anything to remember what standing still felt like. Two hundred and sixty-nine dollars, and it doesn’t even include a sound bath or a breathwork session or an adaptogen bar, just a metaphorical cedar door wrapped in a mountain fog of the then-smoke, which became a now-amenity.
Syd Botanica Butterfly Tamer A History of British Butterflies, Morris, The Reverend Francis Orpen, 1864; forest green cloth binding, gilt-stamped butterflies on the spine, hand-colored plates behind tissue guards, the smell of a volume that has been handled with reverence and also with muddy field boots, airy and ozone-tinged, the mineral shiver of pre-rain shrouding delicate papery grasses and flowering herbs, pale gold at the tips, cool green at the root, something floral but not quite flower, the honeyed dust of dried chamomile, the ghost of a garden in late summer. The slightly breathless Victorian naturalist earnestness of a parson who looked closely at small winged things, who catalogued every county and date and friend who once glimpsed one in some hedgerow, who recorded with equal gravity the testimony of Mr. H. Sims, certain he saw one Silver-washed Fritillary near Norwich on the 24th of August 1810, who struck at it with a forceps and missed, and the testimony of J. C. Dale, Esq., certain he saw one Purple Emperor settled on some rushes in Cambridgeshire in July 1818, wings half-expanded toward the sun, and the diary entry of a Miss Eulalia Cramm of Shropshire, who recorded with great excitement the appearance of a Velvet Obscura on her windowsill, though she could not be entirely certain it was not a very large moth.
Bonus! I do a sort of review for a body lotion over on Instagram…!
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categories: art
I have been traveling and am behind on everything, and so I don’t have much lined up for the ol’ blog this week. SO I thought I’d pull a lazy move and share an update to a blog post I wrote a few years ago, Bargain Bin Romance, where I captioned some gothic romance covers with silly, made-up nonsense. It occurred to me that these would work better with some cheesy graphics, and I even added a few more to the mix!
Anyway, back to normal (?) updates once I get my shit together!
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?