I am obliged to say that if you'd like to read a serialised book about trailer parks and magic that is absolutely not a romance, then step right this way, please, there's dwarven rock climbing walls.

It's truly awful, I've had like three good start ideas for this month's newsletter and then promptly forgot them. You think I'd write them down or text them to myself. Wait.

Image description: A screencap of texts to oneself, three individual texts over two days. "Angry pigs." "Ghosts: false teeth, watch." "Smell corner in apartment and fan on floor."

Hmm. What was my intention here. Though, I do know "angry pigs" is what my partner called Angry Birds, with supreme confidence, while mentioning something about the game.

Another text to myself,

Truly heartbroken that we didn’t get a picture of the protective screen on my phone before Chase changed it, it’d been on there for years and years and the matte finish had worn off fully in a fat V where I often swiped, a desire path of movement worn a thoroughly as a track in the grass. The screen protector had been put on badly in the first place and was half-lifted on one side with air bubbles scattered around. It was a masterful mess, one I was proud of in a way.

Ah, right then.

So two things to know about me are firstly: in 1997 when The Lost World: Jurassic Park came out I was freshly 14. The second is that had read the Jurassic Park books a couple of times and was quite taken with them. So, of course I got one of the promotional watches from McDonalds¹. I don't believe I had a watch before then, but I may well have. This though, was when I became A Person Who Wears A Watch.

I cannot remember if this was my all-the-time (lol) watch or not (though my partner remembers seeing me wear the Jurassic Park watch in college), but I do know that in the course of my teens and college years I killed multiple watches, the "alarm off" buttons giving up the ghost under daily use ². I wasn't buying nice watches, is the thing. I stuck with wearing the kind of watch you'd give your tween nephew well into adulthood.

Eventually though, one's heart turns to Casio. Or mine did, anyway. In my late twenties or early thirties I got some very aesthetic models from the watch counter of the supermarket-slash-department store³, and when I left my job of a decade I bought myself a gold-look calculator watch as my own going-away gift for years served.

All that to say, other than a chunk of time where I did a lot of work on ladders and did not wear jewellery, I wore a watch daily. Then lockdown happened and jewellery felt like germ-catchers and got in the way of regular and thorough hand washing, but also I just didn't really wear watches at home. That'd be like wearing jeans and shoes inside for me rather than house pants and slippers. Jewellery comes off at the end of the workday.

But I've accumulated some two decades of watch wearing at least. So I will! Still look at my wrist! And, since I do wear a watch when going out and tan easily, what happens is I find myself looking at a paler patch of wrist for the time.

So, a watch is a kind of ghost.

Similarly, and with less background because it's about teeth, for a while there I had a flipper⁴. It was a type of retainer with a fake tooth stuck on that filled a gap where I no longer had a tooth. It made me lisp-whistle a bit when I was tired, and was a part of my life for a period of time until one day I did what everyone with a retainer does: leave it on a tray while eating and bus several hundred dollars not covered by insurance into the restaurant trash and not realise until an hour later.

I never replaced it because it was expensive and honestly who cares if I'm missing a tooth⁵. Nonetheless, I still get the feeling sometimes I'm missing something, that I can feel the roof of my mouth too much, the double ghosts of my tooth and my false tooth reaching out over the years.

There's the idea of ghosts as memories recorded into a place, which is maybe what I was trying to remind myself of with the longer text to myself--though I wouldn't call desire paths (which is what the worn screen protector more accurately represented) ghosts, really. The ghosts of objects feel more like a glitch in the then and the now, reminding you of a missing weight or presence that you once counted part of your own body or life.

The hauntings of things can be welcome, in a way (depending on the object), even as they make you feel for a moment that you've forgot something important. You did, it was just ages ago and you're feeling an echo of it now across the distance of time, like light from a star. The realisation sometimes that the weight is gone forever is a relief.

Oh, right, I also texted myself "Smell corner in apartment and fan on floor." That I think was just because the apartment we live in is very strangely laid out and has unexpected spots of dead air where cooking smells can linger well beyond their expected lifespan. Take a corner too hard and there's the onions from the other day or a whiff of heavily spiced porridge. In the recent heat we've been placing a fan in one of those spots in an attempt to circulate the air and it's exorcised the ghosts of meals past.

How about two books with different kinds of ghosts (ghost-ghosts and memories). Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.

• Diavola by Jennifer Thorne is yet one more addition to Thorne's pile of books with main characters designed to first piss me off, who then make me admire them. Thorne writes the most deliciously genre-unaware, young women protagonists. These are people who have no innate cultural sense of superstition or magic or anything. They're fodder for ghosts and curses, and yet!! They are people willing to change with their environment and meet the world where it is, not where they thought it was. Diavola takes the gothic, European haunted vacation with your horrible family and does something fabulous with it. Have fun with this one, folks.
• Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon has one of the best things in the world: an older protagonist. There's so much world described just the by the shadow it casts on Ofelia's life in this book. But what the greater galaxy holds doesn't matter as much as the life she discovers after the rest of the colony leaves. Very solid and satisfying spin on a first contact story.

I don't have as good a system for making sure I don't re-use an image as I do for links and books, but I do feel I have not yet shared the second one here, although I love it.

Image description: A photograph taken from the bottom of a steep set of wooden stairs, looking up to the landing where a squirrel is mid-air leaping from one railing to another. End ID.

Image description: A photograph of an irrigation canal cutting through patchy green-and-brown winter fields, reflecting the wooded hill in the background and the thin layers of cloud and fog cutting across their dark bulk. End ID.

Image description: A photograph that is mostly clear clean blue sky, the bottom third is partially the tops of sun-bright evergreens. Just above their tops, a crow is harassing a hawk, their distance simplifying their shapes. End ID.

I've got archives, games, and poems for you this month.

• Do you like looking at medieval manuscripts? Over at Medievalists-dot-net they've pulled out some very delicious examples from the Czech National Library. You can browse the full collection of what is available online over at Manuscriptorium.
• Here, have another post that is the taster for something more, a short look at Harvard's glass flowers over at Talking Pictures. Now, pop over to Harvard's Glass Flowers page to gander more. Currently, there's a video enthusiastically titled "Rotten Apples Return." They've lots of videos, actually, which is nice for those of us nowhere near Harvard.
• A couple of short delights over on Itchio: Puzzle Box Ruin is a free browser puzzle game that is madly nostalgic for a certain set. Poems Aren't Stories is a sort of endless poem, but be sure to read the "why I made this" section, it's really a mood (also I learned about the N+7 formula, which is a delight). If you'd like a poem game that is both more and less structured, Centoquest, also by Bibliomancer, is a delight.
• I'm always a sucker for anything with a whisper of epistolary nature and the audio log format of Informed Consent Logs from the Soul Swap Clinic by Sarah Pauling over at Clarkesword does a lovely job with it.

The Sameer Project continues to do amazing mutual aid work in Palestine and they particularly have been in need lately.

If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.