garran | Getting longer for a while

It's been the winter solstice again. I live on a planet with an axial tilt; it is much larger than I but my days are intimately bound up with it.

Rachel and her gentlehusband came to visit and it was lovely and lower-key than usual. She is pregnant, which makes me feel strangely protective. We played board games and watched several movies all of which I enjoyed more than I expected to and ate dinner with old friends of mine who have naturally over time become hers. Once I guessed her Balderdash entry verbatim before it had been read out (the word was 'millimole'; Rachel scribbled for five seconds and slapped it down with a "done", and I said, "I'm just going to assume that Rachel wrote, 'A mole with a thousand legs'." It was basically amazing).

Now she's gone home, though, and others of my people have likewise fled the city; Joanne's gone to Ontario and the new women's studies buddies I know best are off to various American ports of call, some indefinitely. So I am left more of a hermit than I might be, my beard growing relatively long and itchy, checking every day to see if my grades have come in yet (nope). It's nice not to be furiously treading water, though. Also my narrative about this is slightly disrupted by the people still around who invite me to solstice parties I don't quite make it out to.

I have a lot of windows open with short stories I've seen recommended or otherwise becomes interested in, but haven't got around to reading yet. Some of them have been there for months. I still intend to read them all (that's why the windows are still open) but in the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to link to them in the order they appear. Do you feel like reading an arbitrary but not indiscriminate short story? Try one of these: 1 2 3 4 5.