“Precious Day” in Allegory

Don’t know what’s going on in my town but I’m hearing a lot of sirens this morning.

I wrote another story which began as a poem not that long ago, and rather quickly, it has been picked up and is now available for all to see with Allegory ezine. It is another attempt by me to write a horror story. I’m still not very certain about the genre. Also I think I was using a couple of prompts on this story and one of them said something about using languages you’re unfamiliar with, and I at one point had three or four within the story, but it looks like only two made it into the final. Thousand-year-old English is trippy.

This story took me down several enjoyable research rabbit holes, and had me keeping time by canonical hours for a week as an experiment. Because that kind of experiment is how you amuse yourself in the winter in a small Canadian town when you are a nerd, okay? This morning I was awake in time for lauds aka daybreak. And yes, I know the canonical hours are not news to a lot of people, a lot of people are already familiar with them, some people continue to live by them following tradition that is traditionally said to go back something approaching two thousand years, and I think that’s pretty cool, but I am basically a lapsed Protestant pagan – I believe my ancestors are better represented by the men from the north in “Precious Day” then by it’s hero – and I don’t remember learning much about canonical hours before.

“Precious Day” involves monks and vikings and fancy books. Does it end well? Hmmm.

Amusingly, I got a rejection letter for Precious Day just two days ago. I swear I sent the rejection-senders a withdrawal notice when I heard Allegory was accepting it, but I guess the rejection-senders didn’t see it. Anyway I was entertained to get the standard “thanks but no thanks” on this story two days ago knowing it would be published today.

Rereading “Precious Day” just now, my fingers are itchy to edit it a bit (it seems rather long, suddenly) but that “oh, I can make this shinier!” after publication is a familiar regret.

Wanna see a freaky picture some monks made a long time ago? It’s from the so called Durham Gospels, and seems to date from the 7th century. Whenever I see it, I think there’s gotta be a story involving extraterrestrial visitors in this. I mean… yeah. Right? That’s not what Precious Day is about, but it might be what a future story of mine is about…

Read “Precious Day” in Allegory here!