I said I wanted to write more fiction this year, and I haven’t so far, not a lot in the last seventeen days. Maybe more than James Joyce, but his words were real good. I did a bit of writing towards the beginning of the year and put it down. I picked up yesterday and I think it’s alright. I gave it a bit of a polish, it needs a lot more, but it’s a start:

---

Between a color and anxiety, she could feel the drone before she could hear it.

“Someone’s coming,” she said, speaking too quietly to be heard over the chop of the river below them, but loud enough for bone induction to pick up.

“That’d be the king’s. Put that away,” he suggested, and loud enough to be heard.

Towards the bow of the boat she sat with her feet dangling above brown water, always brown with the ceaseless erosion of hurricane seasons that nearly kissed.

Beside her crouched a twitching purring thing in various shades of black and chrome. From shore it might’ve looked like a black fly the size of a large cat, or a small dog.

Whip antenna and broad nacreous panels large as two hands together, spinning wind cups and barometric pressure sensors of such sensitivity they could feel raindrops in Pittsburgh. It was replete with whirring, shuttering cameras, their lenses distorted to the point of human uselessness pointed in alien directions, every which way and in constant murmuring adjustment. A cord thick as two fingers snaked from its black anodized case and up her sleeve, disappearing into her coverall.

Slipping between streams of data that aren’t quite knowledge to infer in ways that aren’t quite metaphor, her mind was a stone tumbling in a river of information.

The topology of the riverbed below tickled her feet the way looking down from a ladder might. The carp whispered their passing like to do lists. The borders of antique incorporations crisped like old paper while the claims of new dao glowed yonder like a stranger’s porch light.

Distant flight plans spidered the sky above her, bad news of homicide bombs and medical-debt go-fund-me's glared like distant flares over the hillside. The health of the forest, the Ph of the soil measured a decade ago, the number of sparrows according to a man named Jim, the rate of ovarian cancer in women only a little older than her, the change in snowfall, the number of active streamers per square mile and their viewerships, the last reported location of corpsec checkpoints on the river and off it, private road work, detours, and planned brownouts like pop quizzes, it all eroded her mind in a multi-sensory flood vicious with it's irrelevance.

Above it all, and beyond it, that nagging feeling, that whine, it was getting louder.

“Robinia,” he said, his lilting voice whisper-quiet but close. His hand on her shoulder bringing back the boat below her, old wooden planks pinching her ass, the bitter clay smell the river took on in that part of the valley, the Russian chants her brother always listened to, coming distant and tinny from cheap speakers below deck.

With a false ease she yanked out the cable with a short sharp tug. The world went as dark as a bedroom on the way from the light switch to the pillow.