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On Sunday, Charybdis is inside , but it is not me, and when it opens my mouth to s Arcturus, I am not responsible It’s not o dark, one by one, I can sas

On Monday, it all begins again, the (maybe) cats and (stained or unstained) Jane Eyre and (possibly) St Ovidius and ) deadlines and the (probable) ice and the (yes or no) stars burning insideslowly to boil

It’s just so hard to keep everything straight whenconstantly edited by a madman with a bottle of cosht, at 1:47 AM, he gives et fifteen et fifteen minutes in the dark with the authentic, canonical universe curled up inits tail around my wrist

What do you know? Look at the time

• • •

1:47 AM

I am Julia Ash I want to be Julia Ash It’s a relief to be her Julia Ash is good and kind and beautiful Julia Ash is special

Julia Ash is a bird

You can call us freaks You can call us monsters and mutants and abominations and threats to national security But we call ourselves os all those years ago, it wasn’t the finches or the turtles that first tipped hienetic record It was the birds evolved quickly enough for anyone to see with two regular old nineteenth-century huan to consider the transmutation of species And now, in the post-Darorld, on this s, and full of ice and fire, and invisible, and psychic, and in flight, and invincible We are birds We look like you, we is and your nests and your colors, but we are not you We are the transmutation of species

Professor Yes caht and you lock yourself in the closet, keening back and forth and sobbing for everyone to stop thinking so fucking loud, someone always colasses and a Deeply Concerned Expression Alrey hair If you’re very lucky, that person will be Dr Clara Y Xenophile and not anybody orks for Child Protective Services or the local mental hospital

Dr Clara told my parents to call her Professor Yes Everyone did, because she never said no to a child in need She said that she understood irl She’d devoted her life to helping the young and the lost She was the headmistress of a place called St Ovidius’s School for Wayward Children, which wasn’t any awful Catholic laundry or Dickensian orphanage, but simply a place full of people who also understood poor little Julia She said it all in such a nice voice that I’d already packed ht to ask about tuition

I sat down in Dr Clara’s long, beautiful red car It was so quiet in there Perfectly, absolutely quiet No one else’s thoughts banging down the doors of reen apple slices waited in the cupholders Professor Yes slid in next to me Our eyes met and held on for dear life I liked her face It was brown and broad and had the good kind of wrinkles that make you look like you know top-shelf stories about just everything She wore her long silver hair in a big, twisty, old-fashioned bun Suddenly, I knew she didn’t need those glasses at all She only wore the but a harmless old lady who’d done too many crosswords in her day

Words unfurled inor holler or kick the can down hts Dr Clara’s thoughts wrote theolden letters across reen apples

Don’t tell anyone It’s our secret

And that’s how you begin to win over a child People who share a secret share a heart