It’s the strangest phenomenon: wings, thousands of them, disembodied, fluttering around my neighborhood. From cicadas or fairies, anyone’s guess; they manifest a potent and malicious magic.

Last night, wrestling bags from the grocery and wine stores out of my trunk, I beheld a terrible and purple explosion. My beloved (but, thankfully, not very expensive) shiraz had fallen to the sidewalk and was seeping into the cracks. The bloody horror! Nothing left for me but the jagged glass shards.

Much later, wrestling boxes of recycling over my back gate (stuck shut for the moment because we were never given a key), I felt a blinding and purple pain in my forearm, which, I discovered, had become punctured on a spike. It was a hideously deep wound that strangely enough did not seep a drop of blood.

I am much accursed.