We had an electric water heater installed yesterday, and now this old house has a shower like some kind of luxury hotel. Which is nice.

What is not so nice: last night, sitting on the couch, the power went out the moment Sheryl turned on the hot water in the kitchen. In this cold, going outside to get into the basement to flip the breaker is nobody’s idea of fun. There is a trap door next to the kitchen, but it’s buried under a lifetime supply of canned tomatoes.

I suspect old houses like this were never built for modern amenities - or maybe the electrician we hired to wire the water heater phoned it in. I lean toward the house. The heat pumps, the dishwasher, the clothes dryer, and the myriad of other small things push the limits of an old electrical panel. When we had the front door light installed last fall, the electrician discovered that the existing wiring was some kind of ancient extension cord, badly frayed. The previous owner was a do-it-yourselfer - from before the age of YouTube tutorials.

An imperfect house comes with increased costs. Our very imperfect house, more so. But I like its faults. The rolling floors. The ceiling at the top of the stairs that catches your head. The complete absence of right angles. It feels more human than the sea of gray, white, and black that passes for quality these days.

We received emails from families in Iran a while back. Story requests, shoutouts, science topic requests. The same kinds of messages we get from families everywhere — which should surprise no one. Kids are the same the world over.

I think about those families today. Their children especially.

There has never been a year in my lifetime without conflict somewhere. And in every conflict, regardless of the stated reasons, it is the children who absorb the cost — the disruption, the fear, the loss. From that comes resentment, and from resentment the cycle finds its next generation.

We tell stories to children because we believe in their capacity for empathy and wonder. I have to hope that somewhere, that matters. That the kids listening from Tehran or Gaza or Kyiv feel something other than what the adults around them are feeling.

I'm not sure what else I have to offer them. But I think about them.

It’s white page time, but the flow is broken - broken by pain I didn't want or need.

I take after my aunt. Not the part where she loved loud colours and had a loud laugh — I missed out on both. But her body, which always seemed to be staging some small rebellion. So many complaints that people stopped taking them seriously — the way a word loses meaning if you repeat it too many times. By the time her problems became acute, no one was paying attention. In the end, she went quietly — so quietly that if I hadn’t been in the room, no one would have known.

I’m not there yet. But I’m sitting here negotiating with my spine, which seized up because a chest cold forced me to cough and sleep upright for one week straight. The mechanism was explained to me. It sounded like nonsense.

In Toronto recently, crossing an intersection, a young woman coming the opposite direction sneezed at the exact moment we passed each other. I turned to Sheryl and said, I guess I’ll have whatever she’s having. I like to think I have her to blame — that stranger — for the smell of A535 that now permeates the walls of the house, and the scent of Voltaren that clings to my hands no matter how many times I wash them.

There are always roadblocks. The white page waits. My back does not care.

I’m not good at business. Specifically, the parts that matter. Usually money.

Since returning to Canada I’ve negotiated four significant contracts — significant mostly because they define how I’ll work, and what I’ll work on, for the coming year. I have no boss, but I have a contract, which feels close to the same thing.

These have been different from what I knew before. As the “creator” — a term I despise — you have little leverage, especially early on. The agreements are almost always lopsided, favouring the larger company with more lawyers. There is no win-win.

You can say no, of course. Hope your efforts pay off elsewhere. Go back to having a hobby. But then sunk cost sets in. So much time, effort, and fun. It’s hard to walk away. Also, I like good coffee too much.

So you accept the last-minute change in terms — the one with no significant reason behind it other than we can — and you sign. And you hope that somewhere outside the edges of that agreement, you can build enough that next time you can pause and say: we don’t agree.

Journals are a wonderful reminder.

Looking at a photo of my mother in palliative care, nine years gone now, trying to navigate the food they brought her. The tray table too high for comfort, but an ideal height to catch whatever might slip from her plastic fork. Easier to wipe a table than to wash the baggy oversized t-shirts she always wore.

She looked older than she should have — or at least older than I hope I’ll look at that age. The skin hung from her arms, no longer held up by muscle. Inactivity and age will do that to a frame. She had been active once — golf, mostly, and long walks — but problems with her mobility went undiagnosed for years. So she sat. The local medical system is a shambles until you have an emergency, and then all manner of care and diagnosis becomes suddenly available. Her palliative care was wonderful. But I suspect she would have preferred some of that wonder earlier, so she could have kept golfing.

Her face told a different story than her body. You could see someone who had loved the sun, loved being outside — and the sun had left its mark. But the closer she came to the end, the smoother and more angelic her face became. As though the effort of living was quietly releasing its grip.

Until finally she was at peace, and no longer had to wrestle tough meat in gravy from a cheap plastic fork.

Of all the minor afflictions one can suffer, the common cold deserves a special place in hell. Nothing is quite so immobilizing as a virus that settles into your chest and saves its worst for bedtime — a cough that surfaces precisely when you need to sleep, dragging the misery out for days while making you largely useless in the meantime. Last night was night three of no sleep. No amount of cold medicine, in any dosage, actually eases the symptoms. All it does is threaten my liver.

When you first look at a toaster its usage might be somewhat confusing, butt if you have had toast before you could guess its purpose, and by looking at it guess its function. Watch someone use it once and you will know how it works. There are some settings, but you can learn about them later, and generallly they are not essential to making toast. I'm looking at ours right now, and while there can be plenty of refinements made to the interface, smoother or motorized push of the lever as an example, it's pretty much the same as toasters costing 5 times as much. The interface works.

I can't believe it's an age thing. If something is working I see little reason to change unless that change brings a leap in ease. More delight sure - I could see the value of adding some joy to my toaster. Maybe some sound indicating it's started. A little jingle when toasted. A display with a happy face. But would you want the lever too hard to find, or harder to press, or perhaps replace the up down interaction with side to side? Would you want the settings transparent and without enough contrast to read?

Last night, somewhere between a bad chest cold and a weak moment, I finally gave in and updated. My iPhone had been nudging me for months, and I'd been holding it off the way you hold a door against wind — reading the reports, knowing what was coming. But I caved. And this morning I picked up a device I've used daily for years and had to think about it. The interactions I'd worn smooth through habit were gone, replaced by something that looked considered but felt arbitrary — a toaster whose lever now moves sideways, whose slots have been repositioned for reasons that must make sense to someone, somewhere, who does not make toast.

My father wouldn’t be impressed. There are certain skills I was brought up to be expected to have, of which I have very few. This week was a good example.

One of our Toyotas wouldn’t start. There was power, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. I had no idea what was going on, so the car just sat there while I cancelled a couple of trips into town. After consulting ChatGPT, we called a local garage who said they’d come have a look — but they never showed up, losing a sale, a customer, and a referral all at once. It wasn’t a huge deal in the end; the battery needed a charge and likely needs replacing. The embarrassing part is that I didn’t even know how to use jumper cables. Luckily, Sheryl knows how to use YouTube.

We’ve also had water pressure issues in this old house for as long as I can remember. I told myself it was just an old house, which was a convenient excuse for not knowing how to diagnose the problem. The worst offender was the kitchen sink — despite having new plumbing, it flowed far too weakly. When the hot water pressure suddenly got worse, we called a plumber. To avoid embarrassment before he arrived, I went down to the basement and checked all the water valves to make sure nothing had been accidentally turned down. Turns out the kitchen issue was caused by a small plastic insert in the faucet head, designed to reduce pressure and catch sediment. A terrible design. Once removed, the cold water pressure was fantastic. The bathroom shower head has the same problem, but the insert can’t be removed, so a new head will be bought.

The hot water situation is not so easily solved. The copper tubing in our old furnace needs replacing, which costs nearly as much as a new water heater — so we’re getting a new electric water heater instead. Except that also requires an electrician, who has to piece something together because our 100-amp panel is full. Upgrading the panel is cost-prohibitive just to solve a hot water problem.

There are plenty of other basic maintenance tasks around the house and cars that I haven’t the faintest idea how to do. It’s not that it would be difficult to learn. It’s just that learning requires time, and time is the one thing I never seem to have enough of either.

Sheryl and I spent a few days in Toronto and came back Monday evening. On a whim back in January, we decided to catch Gregory Porter at Massey Hall, and it was a great concert. Tucked away on Prince Edward Island, we don't often get the chance to hear music of this caliber, so it was a wonderful treat.

It was, coincidentally, Valentine's Day weekend — something I had no idea about at the time, because I don't seem to have a romantic bone in my body. Our Valentine's Day "dinner" was at Shake Shack, though we did manage a fancy brunch near St. Lawrence Market. The kind of fancy where you're expected to hang your coat (I didn't) and staff come by to introduce themselves. Someone was playing jazz on a white piano. Most people wore pants and jackets. I wore ripped jeans and a hoodie. The food was well prepared, but the prices would make you laugh.

We have a few more trips planned this year, most of them for business. I'm looking forward to visiting Calgary again in August, and if things go well, the Vancouver area in September and Shanghai in the fall. There may be more. The odd thing about traveling in Canada is that it can cost more than going abroad — what we paid for a weekend in Toronto might have covered a package deal to Mexico or the Caribbean. I'm not really a resort-and-free-beer-on-the-beach person, and Europe might have run almost the same price, but my passport has expired, and Gregory Porter was singing in Toronto, not Sintra.

If you get the chance, % Arabica in Union Station — of all places — makes the best espresso drink I've had in a long time. Given the volume of customers they move through, you wouldn't expect them to pull it off, but they do. They even have a dedicated latte artist. It had a lovely mouthfeel and tasting notes that should appeal to just about anyone. Nothing funky, just really solid.

We stayed at TOOR, which had a nice gym, friendly staff, and was quiet.

I attended a workshop yesterday on writing from a children's point of view. I've made some progress in thinking as a child would, but writing to their vocab. level remains difficult. Better editing skills - or more time - might help.

The best part of these workshops is often the prompts. This time I had ten minutes for each exercise. A couple of the results are below.

Playing with Fire on Prince Street

Mommy wanted me out of the house. At least that's what she said, but I think it might have been because Daddy wasn't really well again or something.

I wasn't allowed to go far, so I just went outside our apartment. Bobby was already there at the patch of grass on the corner. He lived nearby, I think. We didn't really talk much most days. I don't think he had many friends either.

We sat watching the cars whiz by. They moved so fast.

"Someday I'm gonna drive race cars," I said. "And be famous and on TV."

"Yeah?"

"So famous I might even have two TVs. Like Sarah said she has."

Bobby pulled at the grass. There was only so much we could do, just sitting there.

"I got something," Bobby said. He looked around, then pulled a lighter from his pocket. "Kind of a secret."

My eyes got big. "Can I try it?"

"Maybe."

"We could light the grass on fire. Just some of it. Then we could send smoke signals to the kids across the street."

Bobby handed it over.

I flicked it a few times. Nothing. Then—whoosh—a little flame jumped up. I tried to touch it to the grass but something bad happened. The flame got my thumb instead.

"Ow!" I dropped the lighter and stuck my thumb in my mouth.

Bobby grabbed the lighter quick and shoved it back in his pocket.

My thumb hurt. A lot. But I didn't cry or anything.

The next day, Bobby came back. And we tried again.

Boredom

"Hi Bobby."

"Hi Bernice."

"Wanna play?"

"Can't. Mom says we have to stay inside."

"How come?"

Bobby got quiet. "She said something about ICE. Not the cold kind. The people kind."

"Oh." I didn't really get it. "Is that like... police?"

"I don't know. Maybe? Mom got all weird when I asked. She just said it's not safe to play outside right now."

"That's dumb. It's sunny out."

"I know! And I'm so bored. All I can do is read the same books over and over."

"You could come to my house," I said. "We could do a science experiment or make stuff or something."

"Can't. Mom says I have to stay home. She keeps looking out the window a lot."

"My Papa said something might get better after... midterms? I don't know what that means."

"My mom said we might move to Canada."

"Canada? That's far away! Can I come?"

Bobby laughed. "I don't think my mom meant you too."

"But we're best friends."

"I know. It's stupid. I don't even know why we'd move. Mom just keeps watching the news and getting all worried."

"Grownups are weird."

"Yeah."

At Grandma's House

Daddy's always in a bad mood, especially at night.

I try to show him stuff I made at school or ask if we can play a game, but he says he has important things to do. Then he gets upset if I ask again.

I guess I can just read by myself at night.

Mommy says we have to be quiet. But sometimes I forget and I start dancing or singing, and then she cries. Which isn't fair because I'm not even being that loud.

I don't know why she cries. Maybe I'm too loud and I don't realize it? Or maybe I'm supposed to know when to be quiet without anyone telling me?

It's different at Grandma's house. She reads to me for hours. She puts on the record player and we dance together in the living room. She says I'm super smart and know lots of big words.

When I'm at Grandma's, everything feels wonderful. She bakes good cookies too.

Sometimes I wonder if Mommy and Daddy would be happier if I lived at Grandma's all the time. Then they wouldn't have to tell me to be quiet. Then Mommy wouldn't cry.

Maybe I'm just too much.

Every day I start with a blank slate. Just me and my iPad at the dining room table, the white screen staring back.

Sometimes I walk circles through the house hoping something will percolate. Often a prompt arrives—last week a listener requested a story about a boy and a squirrel, and that one flowed easily. I love writing about kids with racing minds, thoughts tumbling out faster than they can catch them. Earlier this week my writing group sent a prompt that became more dystopian microfiction. That flowed easily too, rooted in something I'd heard: someone in Brudenell suggesting we deport Chinese landowners, confiscate their property, auction it so locals can afford it.

Today there's only the white screen. And the snow.

The flakes fall past my dining room window—each one distinct if I watch closely enough, catching light as it spirals down. Some drift lazily, taking their time. Others seem urgent, racing toward the ground like they have somewhere to be.

It's beautiful enough that I forget winter is my least favourite season. Forget that by February I'm usually researching flights to Thailand, pricing out escapes.

I watch one flake land on the window ledge. It sits there, perfect and temporary, already beginning its small surrender to warmth.

I'll likely fail today to write something new, like I have numerous times this month and last. But facing this white page is important.

The snowflakes keep falling. I keep watching. The screen stays white a little longer.

My mornings are built carefully. Like a small, delicate structure made of good intentions and caffeine. Coffee by the water if it’s summer. Journal. Reading. Writing. Fuelling for a run. No news. No idiots. No world.

This works as long as nothing goes missing.

The moment something is lost, my vocabulary collapses to two words: f*ck and f*ck.

This morning it was oatmeal.

I own an unreasonable amount of breakfast food. Super seeds. Chia experiments. Ground nuts. Things that look like gravel but promise longevity.

But what I want - what I need - is my maple and brown sugar oatmeal. Low sugar. Responsible. My favourite these days.

It is gone.

A whole box. Vanished.

I check the places I would have put it. The pantry. The counter. The shelf where things wait to be used. Then I check the places I wouldn’t have put it, because experience has taught me not to trust myself.

My temperature rises. The morning peace collapses like a folding chair.

F*ck.

This is usually how it starts with keys. I put AirTags on them for exactly this reason. Sometimes they’re exactly where I left them but something has been placed on top, turning them invisible. Other times I search the entire house, growing increasingly furious, only to reach into my pocket and pull them out like some stupid magic trick.

But oatmeal cannot hide in a pocket.

Which means it is truly gone.

So I eat Super Seeds and Grains. The cereal of compromise. The breakfast of people who have lost control of their lives.

F*ck.

—-

Another exercise, but based in reality, as this is what happened this morning. The prompt was: “He reached into his pocket, and pulled out an object”.

I’ve been avoiding winter all week, except for Monday when I spent an hour shovelling the driveway. Last weekend we were in Saint John watching Camren swim, stayed at the Delta that connects to the pool. No need to go outside and start a cold car, or walk anywhere. This also meant eating greasy onion rings and a burger in the pub attached to the pool. It was bad. Our friends went to a nice restaurant because they weren’t afraid of a three-minute walk in the cold.

If there’s a heaven and hell and I find myself visiting the latter, my version will be full of snow and I’ll be poorly dressed.

Except I do have proper winter clothes—technical layers even, from back when I thought running in winter could be a thing. My boots are a problem. Wearing them is a surefire way to fall on ice. I thought they looked nice at the time. Now, just like in my youth, I wear sneakers in snow unless I’m shoveling, and then I wear rubber boots that aren’t fashionable and, combined with my slovenly appearance, make me look like I just came in from the backwoods. Since I live in Montague, there’s some truth to that. My sneakers have those cleat things on them. Sometimes they work.

I watch all these videos of people doing cold plunges, or even more extreme, jumping in ice-filled lakes, and shake my head in disbelief. They’re made of something I’m not. I have a weight lifting session tonight, which means I have to clean off the car. I’m sure I’ll survive. Maybe I should just force myself to embrace the cold. Go sit in the backyard on a lawn chair drinking my morning coffee, visualizing myself on a sandy beach in some exotic locale. Like Brackley. Or Phuket.

Or not.

I've been grieving my impending demise. No indication of when -- just the math of it. So much time behind me now, so little ahead.

I think of my uncle Wendell, how he once said he was content to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. I don't know if that was true. He did something. But there's so much I want to do, and the gap between want and time left -- that's the source of my greatest frustration. My own blocks, creative or otherwise, stopping me from maximizing what remains.

How can anyone be idle? I have hundreds of unread books in this house. I haven't biked or walked across Canada yet. There was a plan to drive across the US before it turned to fascism -- best to wait now. I see apartment rentals in Thailand, cheap ones. Six months working there, maybe. DAK coffee in Germany, run by a couple from Montreal -- might be worth visiting. And all the work here: perennial garden to plant, marathons to train for, muscles to build, meals to create, stories to write. The list breeds faster than I can cross things off.

We're not so different from flowers, I think -- just cursed with a big fancy brain. The cycle is the same: seed, growth, bloom, wilt. But does a flower have any sense of time? Does it feel the ache when companions disappear with the seasons? Does it fear its own wilting?

There's a cruelty in understanding our limits. Why evolve this way? Why not give us a choice -- go when you're ready, not by surprise or slow withering. Of course there are cruel people we'd wish gone quickly, but for most of us, choice would make sense.

I know what I'd choose. I'd wait until every book was read, every place visited, every story told. Then I might rest.

But that's not the deal we're given. The hourglass drains regardless.

Wendell is gone now. I never asked him if he'd truly made peace with his small world, or if he was just too tired to keep reaching. I think about him in that chair, watching his TV, and wonder if he found something I'm still missing. Or if he simply ran out of time before finishing his own list.

I started training again. This isn't a resolution or some such - just more consistency and purpose. I figured if I was going to keep identifying as a runner, I should actually embody that with proper habits.

The stumbling block since returning to Canada has always been winter. Getting out in subzero weather to run on ice and snow is a challenge I don't enjoy, even after it's over. When we lived in Stratford, I used to run to Victoria Row. Not a long run, but it was never really about the run - more about battling the elements.

What changed this year is that we invested in a treadmill, which ups the difficulty in a couple of ways. First, my balance sucks, and when I'm running on roads it's easy to accommodate that. Not so much on a speeding belt. Second, it's mind-numbingly boring. Where I've had to position it means I'm staring at an electrical panel for 45 minutes or more. I have an app that takes control of the treadmill and lets me run in, say, Lisbon - which is incredibly hilly, I found out - but my eyes can't see the iPad screen at that distance. New glasses required. My bike erg is in front of our old 50" TV, so I get to ride in Singapore with crazy fit people while being in my office in Montague.

Training also means proper prep: strengthening my weaknesses and readying my parts for the run. I've been injured enough to know where many of my problems are. (Try doing any single-leg exercise and see if you have similar problems.) So I spend about 30 minutes every day addressing those. I thought of getting a personal trainer for an experienced external eye and reached out to Cayla Jardine-Hunter, who seems to have the right mix of personality and experience to help motivate. But before I could commit, I joined a group glute-strengthening session that meets every week for six weeks. Since I have no ass, maybe after a year of doing these I'll not only improve my running - I'll fill out a pair of pants better.

One of my goals is to run the Fredericton Marathon in May, and either an ultra in Kamloops or Saskatchewan in September (who knew that Saskatchewan had hills?). Sixteen weeks of training for each is a tidy way to bookend the effort. Mostly I just enjoy the process and its general effects on my mind and body.

I'm thankful I can devote the hours required to train again. Something I'd lost these past few years.

One of my cats looked at me funny this morning. So I was inspired to quickly try writing "atmospheric horror", something I have never written before. A fun exercise, with help from Catriona.

The cat had been off lately. Not unusual—she’d always been temperamental since I brought her home. Playful one day, aloof the next, vocal and demanding on others. I figured we mirrored each other. Isn’t that how it goes?

This was different.

She started hiding in places she'd never chosen before—pressed tight behind the water heater where the dust was thick, beneath the crawlspace access I'd painted shut years ago. When I approached, something low and sustained would rumble from the darkness. Not a growl exactly. More like a warning hum, the kind you feel in your sternum before you hear it.

Two days without eating. Unprecedented. Usually if I was five minutes past feeding time she’d weave between my ankles, all performance and need.

Her appearance changed too. Patchy fur, ribs showing in some places while her haunches seemed swollen, distended. I wondered about pregnancy, but she'd been fixed—I had the paperwork. Though maybe that didn't matter. The shelter knew nothing about her history. She'd simply appeared on their doorstep one morning—no collar, no microchip, no explanation. Just there, as if she'd materialized from nowhere.

I tried three times to get her into the carrier for the vet.

Three deep punctures across my left hand. Four lacerations on my right forearm. The last time, I could’ve sworn her pupils dilated in something close to pleasure as I yanked my hand back, blood already welling.

She’d never scratched me before. Not really. Just play swipes when I’d rile her up, tickling her belly until she kicked.

I used to sleep with my door open. She’d visit most nights—gentle head butts, that rattling purr, her weight settling onto my chest around dawn. Perfect alarm clock.

Now the wood around my doorframe is gouged. Deep scores, some nearly a quarter-inch into the oak. I wedge a chair under the knob each night and pretend the scraping I hear at 3 AM is branches on the window.

This morning I woke before dawn—on call at the hospital, my phone already buzzing with pre-shift messages. The house smelled like coffee and something else beneath it. Something organic going wrong. Spoiled meat left in summer heat. Had I forgotten to take the compost out?

I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth by the glow of my phone screen to save time. Grabbed my badge from the dresser.

The stairwell was dark.

I hesitated at the top, one hand on the bannister. The smell was stronger here—thick enough to taste. Below, the living room sat in pre-dawn grey, furniture reduced to suggestions of shape.

My coffee maker’s red light glowed from the kitchen counter. Still brewing. I could hear the drip and hiss.

But I could hear something else too.

Breathing.

Not mine.

Too deep. Too measured. The rhythm of something large at rest.

I took the first step down. The wood didn’t creak—I knew which boards to avoid—but the breathing changed. Became aware.

Second step. Third. My eyes adjusting now to the half-light.

The shape on my couch was too big. Too high. Shoulders where a cat’s head should be. Spine curved in a way that suggested it was sitting up. Watching.

I froze halfway down.

The breathing stopped.

In the silence that followed, I heard it then—that same low hum from the crawlspace, but closer now. Vibrating through the floorboards, up through the soles of my feet, settling somewhere in my gut where prey animals know they've been seen.

When it stood, it unfolded in sections.

First the shoulders. Then the spine straightening, vertebrae popping like knuckles. Limbs extending—too long, joints bending at angles that made my eyes water trying to track them.

The coffee maker beeped. Brew complete.

I never saw its face.

I didn't need to.

The morning light began to leak through the kitchen window, and in that thin gray dawn, I could finally see it fully—the shape that had been my cat. Still her coloring. Still her markings. But the proportions all wrong, stretched and reformed into something that wore her pattern like a costume that no longer fit.

It took a step toward me.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. The hospital. My shift. The ordinary world where cats stayed cats and morning meant coffee and complaints about traffic.

I didn't answer.

Behind me, up the stairs—my bedroom door standing open. Below me, the front door with its deadbolt I'd locked last night like I always did. And between us, close enough now that I could smell the wrongness coming off it—fur and rot and something chemical underneath—the thing that had been my cat.

It tilted its head—that same curious gesture she used to make—and purred. The sound resonated through the stairwell, too low, too sustained, like a motor idling in the dark.

The nightmares had come every night this week—floating faces with ember eyes, silent mouths stretched in fury. But this one felt wrong. The cold was too real. Her fingers searched for blankets that weren't there.

She remembered her grandmother's bedtime stories about the flat man who slipped through windows to eat the eyes of children still awake. Sometimes nightmares don't stay dreams, she had warned.

One eye opened.

Green. Not the soft pink of her bedroom walls, but vegetation—thick, angular, alive. The kind with teeth. The kind that moved after you looked away.

She sat up fast.

The hush around her wasn’t silence. It carried a low, layered sound, like breath passing through too many throats.

She checked herself quickly. Pajamas intact. No cuts, no pain. But the ring—the one that tethered her to the city collective, that placed her on ten million screens at once—was gone. Without it, she was unindexed. Unlocated.

Standing slowly, she turned in place. There were no maps of this. No one studied the expanse.

The green desert that separated the cities had been hostile for millennia, kept outside the walls where it belonged. And yet here she was, standing in it.

She wanted to cry.

Her father’s voice rose instead, sharp and practiced: Suspend emotion. Think. Survive.

He’d disappeared six months ago. Into this, maybe.

Above her, something mechanical droned past—a cargo carrier, its belly lights blinking green, green, red. Occupied airspace. It didn’t slow. Didn’t see her.

The vegetation rustled nearby, though the air remained still.

She needed to move. But there was no sun to read, no shadow to follow. The walls lay somewhere beyond the green, too distant to matter.

Her bare foot touched something smooth. She looked down.

A path. Narrow, deliberate—pressed into the earth by something that returned often enough to leave a memory behind.

The hush deepened.

She stepped onto the path before she could talk herself out of it. The ground held, firmer than the surrounding soil, as if it recognized the weight of a human body. Somewhere ahead, something shifted in answer. Not pursuit. Not welcome. A recalculation. She set her jaw and followed the line forward, carrying the quiet certainty that the cities had not lost her by accident—and that whatever had taken her ring had been waiting far longer than she had been alive.

—-

This was something I wrote during a Sci-fi Microfiction workshop that I attended recently with Marion Lougheed. I like how she gives everyone space to write and listen to what others have created - even if created within a short period of time. It's often said that you should polish your work and submit it to various pub's but perhaps I don't want to feel the sting of rejection. Or maybe I just like the control oof self-publishing. Some writers also only share their very best work - I don't want that kind of performance anxiety. I experienced enough of that as a musician.

I have my first-ever Mac sitting behind me in my office: a Mac Color Classic I bought with help from my then-employer, who gave loans to employees so they could get computers. Having a computer at home was still a bit novel then. I used that Mac for all the same things I use a computer for today—manage my day, communicate, and create. It worked so amazingly well it locked me into the Mac ecosystem ever since. Hand me a PC and I wouldn't know what to do with it. I've never used one at any job.

Last year my final business expenditure was a base model iPad, on sale at the time. I had an older one, covered in stickers, that worked well as a distraction-free writing device—something to take on a plane or to the Gallery in Charlottetown, where I like to go for their cookies. Cookies help you write. I thought a new one might improve in important ways over the old. Battery life being one of the biggest hoped-for improvements. Also, developers often never really optimize their apps to use fewer resources, so an improved processor might address some of the sluggishness.

There's this general expectation I have that everything can improve over time. When I was finally at the tail end of my career creating interfaces, I thought there were only edge cases left to solve. Only new problems when new interaction paradigms were introduced—like VR. Why make things worse?

Lately I have this general malaise toward all the software Apple produces. Their standards have regressed. Their UI design has gotten so bad that I turn on accessibility features just to get acceptable contrast. And I haven't even updated to the mess that Alan Dye's team created in the latest release. Sheryl's MacBook looks like System 7 in black and white because of all the accessibility features she has enabled.

So to write this I took out my iPad, and immediately it took a minute to find which was the top of the device because the power button is at the top, and it's not immediately obvious which way is up (good hardware makes this obvious). The fingerprint sensor on this button—though a bit like magic—never seems to work as well as when it was a big button on the bottom of the screen. I'm presented with the Home Screen and I try to swipe to find an app. No response. Try again. Same. I have no idea what process is causing this, because everything is hidden and is supposed to just work. I sit there, tapping glass like a bird attacking its own reflection, waiting for the device to decide I'm allowed to use it.

I meet with a group of writers every week to workshop each other's work. Normally we'd use Zoom, but no one wants to pay for longer meetings, so we use FaceTime. Not a week goes by when someone doesn't have some problem. Inevitably someone will say, "I just don't know computers"—which is what I often heard thirty-plus years ago.

No. It's not that you don't know computers. It's just that after thirty-plus years, no one has bothered to know you.

WES: Well, I've had an apartment in Paris for I don't know how many years. I've reverse emigrated. And in Paris, any time I walk down a street I don't know well, it's like going to the movies. It's just entertaining. - The Pilot Light

I miss this. There is only so much to discover in Montague and Charlottetown, at least in terms of their limited urban landscape. This is made worse by winter's discomfort, and the risk of slipping on ice—something I'm not quite terrified of, but wary enough to feel constrained. Sundays used to be for exploration. New paths to the coffee shop. There was always some new alley or street, it seemed. Or a new shop to discover. Things to see. It keeps your mind alive—so much visual stimulus—and if you put your phone away you might get lost, which is a wonderful thing to be.

In our remote corner, I have much more time, but it's often frittered away with concern about things I have little control over. Or tracking the movements of our neighbour whom the RCMP have visited a couple of times, so that one of them could vacate safely. The other hasn't been out of their house in many days. Dead? In search of interesting things I become one of those people who track the goings-on of everyone in the neighbourhood, or I retreat into my mind. That's what my daughter does—reads all day.

We have some trips to Toronto next month. Weather permitting, perhaps we can get lost amongst that urban landscape, with coffee shops providing a beacon of respite.