Serendipity has been circumventing my attempts to celebrate the winter solstice in any true style for several years in a row. This year I get to spend the 21st on a plane. I hope I have a window seat.

The other day I was walking on River Road in Sunderland at around one in the afternoon, getting towards the end of our first big snow storm. The precipitation had turned to a fine sleet, and underfoot were four inches of snow topped by an inch and a half of hard slush. I followed other people’s footprints when I could, but mostly they’d been left hours ago and had healed over with ice.

I was walking by a gap between farmhouses when I heard something from the big, empty field behind them. Music. A couple of chords played on a big ole synth pipe organ, strung together into part of a melody. The sequence repeated itself once, then ceased. I wasn’t sure if I’d really heard it, so I stood there in the iced-over driveway for a minute, looking around at the clapboards and the maple trees for a light in a window, an open garage door. Something that might hint at the source of the sound. Nobody was out.

After a minute I heard whoever it was play through the same half-melody once more. I recognized it, but couldn’t place it. Maybe it was part of a Christmas song. I wanted to figure out how I knew it, and who was playing it.

Fairies? Angels? The Dead?

I turned away from the road, between the farmhouses and into the field, into the wind, the wet ice coming down on my face, turning it numb. Straight ahead over the pines and hemlocks at the far side of the field were the profile of Mt. Toby and the Bull Hill bluffs. Left, a church spire—no, it was the tower of the Blue Heron. The building had been town hall once, but never a church. No synth organ music issued from any of the above. I didn’t hear it again.

The wool coat I had on was getting close to soaked-through. I gave up, turned south over the crunching, sopping-wet fields towards home.

I have a story out in the new issue of The Future Fire, a politically-oriented online SF magazine featuring a super-awesome ironical Nietzsche quote (perhaps the best kind of Nietzsche quote) about the value of escapism.

To invent stories about a world other than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, belittling, and suspicion against life is strong in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of another, a better life.

—F. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung

“Maryann Saves the World” is a piece of full-on, unapologetic, angry environmentalist escapism I sat down and wrote in a huff after watching some of my favorite woods in the whole world (in Westwood, a little town where I grew up, named for its awesome, under-appreciated, steadily vanishing woods) get knocked down and dynamited and replaced with landscaping and mcmansions. Writing it was a wonderful catharsis, which will completely justify that Nietzsche quote—and in by-no-means ironic fashion—unless, by some miraculous stroke of wish-fulfillment, a few complacent armchair environmentalists find their way to it, read it, and are re-energized to change their evil ways.

If you fit that description, please go read!

Here’s a little piece of the super-cool angry mansion-eating thicket illustration the story got from crafty artist Carmen: