Asakiyume mita

Prick my skin and peel it back
Inside you'll find
November skies
That filled me to the brim
When I looked up today

Speaking of winter (....more or less) a story of mine, "The Stars' Chill Song," which was originally published in Zahir (a speculative fiction zine that has since closed) in 2011, is reprinted in Still Water: A Noblebright Fantasy Anthology.

The only other stories in it that I've read are the ones by Sherwood Smith, but I sense a theme of coldness, at least in the titles ("Ice and Fire," "Iron and Frost," "The Ice of Heaven"), and there's one author who I want to read just because of his cool name: Ville Meriläinen.

Here is an Amazon link if you want to check it out.

At the Cold Spring Orchard today, so many starlings, thick on the telephone wires across from the main building, and in a bare tree by it, and more and more kept coming and finding room on those wires ("slide over; can I squeeze in here?"), and they were chatting to one another in their squeaky voices, metallic parts in need of oil, but they were cheerful and comfortable squeaks--not strained or agonized. So many, against a sky that was a broad watercolor sweep of gray. They filled up that sky with their chatter and their black silhouettes. They were crowd sourcing themselves. Then I opened the trunk of my car to take out a bag, and then I let the trunk slam shut, and they all lifted up,

all of them,

And they all stopped speaking,

and they gathered into one cloud and flew away without saying a word, the only sound the whirring of all those wings,

and I wanted to call, Come back

don't leave the sky so empty.

But they wouldn't have heard me.

....

In other news, there is a UMass cranberry bog, and they were selling cranberries from it. However, I bought only apples: Baldwins and Roxbury Russets. But I took the card by the cash register, with the photo of cranberries ripening on the bush (they look like coffee berries), and the links to pages with recipes.