Lady Midday

The over-indulgence, it's tangible. Drink a lot of wine, and you'll find yourself with one hell of a headache. And I'll be right there. Smiling. With my fingers wiggling delightfully in your brain and giving a new sense of what migraines actually are. Dehydration is totally hot, even when it's so fucking cold I can't feel my toes and I'm pretty sure I woke up today not only as a pile of dust in Leiah's living room, but a frozen pile of dust. Fuck. And when I finally did manage to get myself together and off of the floor, and I looked in the mirror, half of my face was missing. Yeah. Fucking great. 'Tis the season to be fucking merry. Shit-for-brains holidays and winter. The harvest is over, and they're reaping their fucking bounty.

After sleeping for more than a fucking week after that night of exploring the nefariously beautiful world of caffeine and other stimulating goodies, and the dancing, I wake up today at 11:30.

Wow! People are so fucking miserable today, it's FANTASTIC! Is there someone I can talk to about, y'know, maybe helping a girl out with a universal inability to quench one's thirst? Because oh sweet Czernobog, that would be BRILLIANT.

[Locked]

( Baba Yaga & Viktor Zmey )

( Andjelija )

( Nergal )

Around sunset of Friday, Pscipolnitsa, on the verge of collapsing into a heap on the couch until the sun would rise once more and reach its zenith in the sky, found some cash somewhere in the apartment she shared with Andjelija. She dragged herself down the street, and found herself hovering questionably before a glass case, full of sugary drinks she loathed, but, she felt, needed to to try. After this, she persuaded a charming man into giving him his very tall cup of coffee. She would, ultimately, find a candy shop as well. She would also take something that looked like candy from some chick in the park, and, well, we're pretty certain it wasn't candy, in the pure sense of the word. There were reasons lessons were told about not to take candy from strangers. 'Nitsa never listened. Because she was one of those reasons. But she was never one for giving candy, and more giving sunstroke wrapped in an adorable package, all with a blonde, curly-haired bow.

In retrospect, she would regret it. Because there was something horribly unnatural about Lady Midday running around Manhattan in the middle of the night, when, clearly, she was a demon of daylight hours. It upset the balance of things, and thus, upset what little inner balance 'Nitsa had left in her body and mind. Seriously. Upset.



HOLY CRAP. LEIAH. NERGAL. LET'S GO DANCING. And MAKE PEOPLE REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE. I'LL GET MY GARDENING SHEARS.


WE WILL NOT DISCUSS THAT THERE IS SOMETHING INSIDE OF ME MAKING ME ACT DECIDEDLY LIKE A NEWLYWED MAIL-ORDER BRIDE WHO JUST DISCOVERED THE WONDERS OF PROCESSED FOOD. AND THAT I'M PRETTY SURE RIGHT NOW I AM NO LONGER ZEH AMAZINGLY DREADED PSCIPOLNITSA AND HAVE INSTEAD BEEN REDUCED TO INSIPID SHIT-FOR-BRAINS MORTAL TEENAGER.

I wasn't at some party on All Hallow's Eve, oh no. You think an ancient crone of death and magic and gods know what else could help a girl out, maybe cast a little magic, make it possible for me to be at a night-time party. But no. But no, that would make too much fucking sense. But no, she had to go and get all prissed up for something without me.



Elderly good-for-nothing. We've spent hundreds of years, as friends. Pfft. I'll be over here, with the resident Wila. Holler when we're more than a sideshow to your infamy.

Old lady took my bird. What. The. Hell.

Midnght what

cold fingers can't mv . .

warm drinks nergal?

'Nitsa woke at 12:01 AM, dragged herself to the computer - literally, dragged, for her legs would not function, her muscles in revolt, and her whole body felt like it had just been thrown against a brick wall as if she were nothing but a rag doll - and indeed, she was akin to one, at this hour. In other words, Lady Midday woke to the migraine of all migraines, equal only to a mortal suffering the hang over from hell. That, paired with the slip of her form in between being solid and dust. For her to be up at midnight meant something was horribly wrong. Lady Midday could feel the ache of obscurity in her bones, feel her thin tether to this world growing ever thinner.

To the perpetually yawning mortal stranger on the subway this afternoon:

Yawning in public? It's unattractive. Don't do it. For the love of Marzanna, don't do it. It only adds to the uncomfortable air of the subway, adds your late-breakfast breath (you had onions, eggs and something that was probably supposed to be meat but wasn't) to the onslaught of the smells that are assaulting my senses while riding. Your gaping maw and subsequent gathering of the loose skin beneath her your neck makes enduring the bitter cold of the underground train worse. Do it again, Oh Stranger, and I'll rip your esophagus from your throat. Figuratively speaking, of course, because I'd hate to ruin my nails, or get my new white cardigan messy.

Written in 'Nitsa's tiny, nearly illegible handwriting on the back of a magazine discovered drifting amicably down a sidewalk in Carson City, Nevada. Illegible because every other word was in Russian or German or Polish, or none of the above and all of the above, suggesting that Pscipolnitsa had lingual attention deficit disorder, a rare but common side effect of being a forgotten spirit of noon who wavered on the cusp of rationality and fluttered delightedly along the precipice of madness, born of too many imaginations at once, and then, poof, none at all.

Dear Back of an Abandoned and Forgotten Issue of National Geographic that happens to have a special article on Drought and Pretty Pictures of Scarred Desert Landscapes and Wheat Fields that Border on Abstraction,

Well. It's decided. I wasn't sure she'd make up her mind in a timely manner, or if she'd forget about what we were trying to decide while sailing down the gravel roads in states and places that time forgot, but Leiah has made up her mind: We Are Definitely Not Near New York. We thought we were.

In fact, we were sure we were.

But that's when we drove by the 'WELCOME TO KANSAS' sign. I'm pretty sure we passed this already. Pretty certain, actually, that we went through Kansas already, and passed along this road already, and saw this sign already - four times, even - in one day. Around and around we go. Funny thing is the Wila is so distracted by pretty things and the music on the radio and when she drives, regardless of the strange car we happen to be in, we always end up going a hundred miles in the wrong direction.

Not that there are any wrong directions at this point in time.

I don't know where you are or what you're doing, Baba Yaga, but this car you so conveniently hide with a domanoy is doing weird things. I'm not sure if we'll ever make it back.

Not that it matters. It's sort of fun, getting lost in the vortex that is the Midwest. The car swerves in and out of This Place and into Another One, where it happens always to be noon and the color of the sky too blue, the color of the wheat too golden, and the parched feeling at the back of your throat perpetually my delight.

Lots of fields. Open spaces. Could be worse. Could be snowing. Shh. Maybe if I deny winter is coming it won't. Ah, well, there's always snow blindness.

[/End Note on Back of National Geographic]

Leiah and I are on our way back. We just stopped in El Paso. Miserable. Delightful! If Texas were any more delightful, I might throw up with glee.

You know what's fabulous?

Water bottles.

Full of nothing.

And the look of kids' faces when they try to refill them with lemonade, but even lemonade gives them no relief.

Oh, it just makes me flutter with excitement.

I'm on the road. With 'Leiah. I'm not really sure where we are, but I'm certain it's a hell of a lot more enjoyable than skulking around the city bemoaning the weather, for better or for worse. We got a car from a kind and gullible man in Jersey, and it's one of those marvelously modern convertibles! It's fabulous! Leiah and I are quite persuasive when put together, and this vacation will be wonderful. I am slightly concerned, though... I have not heard from Baba Yaga. I gave her a cell phone that we kindly persuaded a woman in Times Square to give to us (really, we were very... kind), and told her how to use it, but Beatrice is ever-so-clueless about these things. Dimitri? Have you heard or seen anything of her?

We might be in Utah now.

Red rocks. Endless spaces. The high desert. I woke early and met a couple from Kansas on the trail. They'd never been hiking before! And never will be again.

Next stop? Vegas. Less interested in gambling, more interested in watching the Vila busk in the so-called city of sin.

Disneyland eventually. Oh, the possibilities!!

I've been waking at midnight for the past week. What. The. Hell. I swear to Morana, if it's Lady Midnight taunting me, laughing like the fucking freak of nature she is, at me...

This has made me sleepless and irritable, and unamused. Hell, a kid was running around in circles the other day at the park until running itself into a proverbial brick wall of heatstroke head-on. It's still in the hospital. But the little idiot didn't learn his lesson, and the shit-for-brains that spawned it didn't, either.

Existence is futile.

107 in the Pacific Northwest.

Um, excuse me?

Disneyland says Play carefully in the heat and stay out of the sun.

And I say, Don't tempt me.

[Private musings/notes.]


Dear Back of Gum Wrapper [inverytinywriting, in Russian],

Gum is disgusting. And yet, I chew it anyway. It's something to do. Mmm, chewy rubbery sugary goodness.

The Vila and I may go on a hunt for doormen. Doormen. Men who open doors for us. We could adopt one! Spectacular. And, well, they ought to be Russian, because that would make everything right. Andjelijah says she could make them Russian. I don't doubt it. Baba Yaga could make them Russian, too, and make them sing and dance like they're on marionette strings, make them open doors until their hands bleed, and then eat their hands when they do. I adore Baba. We'd all be less shiny without her.

It's been a good couple weeks. Zhara and I went on an adventure. I won't say where. But there was lots of wheat. So much wheat. Fields of wheat. Wheat.

I may sweetly ask the Vila if I could crash on her pretty couch. Permanently.

The motel kicked me out. No money. And, while my voice is lovely and sweet and was, once upon a time, enough to make a man collapse in delirium, it cannot buy me another month here.

I'd like a couch. It's so much more cozy than Baba Yaga's cardboard hut in the park.

[/end note]

Message to Leiah sent via some poor soul's stolen device that somehow relays messages through the air. Apparently it has something to do with blackberries. Modern technology still mystifies Lady Midday, but her sneaky, bloody little fingers get a hold of said devices, regardless.


Andjelijah! You have a computer! How shiny!

Remind me again the significance of a day that celebrates a being that you should be celebrating every single day of your petty, good-for-nothing life. I'm sort of delighted that I don't have one of said beings. Kind'a excited, actually.

I'm spending this afternoon cleaning my dresses in a pond I found in the park.


I hope the ponds don't mind.