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    From the park on Puget Sound I watched the sun go down on the shortest day of the year. The air lost its lemon glitter, the dancing water dulled to a greasy heave, and the moon, not yet at its height, grew more substantial. Clouds gathered along the horizon, dirty yellow-white and gory at one end, like a broken arctic fox. Snow wasn’t in the forecast, but I could smell it.
    More than snow. If all the clues I’d put together over the years were right, it would happen tonight.
    I let the weather herd me from the waterfront park into the city, south then east, through the restaurant district and downtown. The streets should have been thronged with last-minute holiday shoppers but the weather had driven them toward the safety of home.
    By the time I reached the urban neighborhood of Capitol Hill, the moon was behind an iron lid of cloud, and sleet streaked the dark with pearl.
    Inside the women’s bar, customers were dressed a little better than usual: wool rather than fleece, cashmere blend instead of merino, and all in richer, more celebratory colors. The air was spiced with cinnamon and anticipation. Women looked up when the door opened, they leaned toward one another, faces alight like children waiting for teacher to announce a story, a present, a visit from Santa.
    The holidays, time out of time. Mørketiden or Mōdraniht, Solstice or Soyal, Yaldā or Yule or the Cold Moon Dance, it doesn’t matter what people call the turn of the year; it fills them with the drumbeat of expectancy. Even in cities a mammalian body can’t escape the deep rhythms imposed by the solar cycle and reinforced by myth. Night would end. Light would come.
    Daylight. Daybreak. Crack of dawn. You can tell a lot about a culture from its metaphors: the world is fragile, breakable, spillable as an egg. People felt it. Beyond the warmth and light cast by the holiday they sensed predators roaming the dark. It made people long to be with their own kind. Even those who were not usually lonely hungered to belong.
    I sat by the window, facing the door, and sipped Guinness black as licorice and topped with a head like beige meringue. I savored the thrust of rusty-fist body through the velvet glove of foam, glad of the low alcohol. Daybreak was a long way off.
    Three women in front of me were complaining about babysitters; someone’s youngest had chicken pox and another urged her to throw a holiday pox party so they could get all their children infected at once. After all, wasn’t it better for the body to get its immunity naturally, the old-fashioned way?
    It was one of the most pernicious fallacies, common the world over: old ways are best. But old ways can outlast their usefulness. Old ways can live on pointlessly in worlds that have no room for them.
    I drained my beer and almost, from force of habit, recorded my interaction with the server when she took my order for a refill. But I wasn’t here to work and, besides, it would have given me nothing useful, no information on the meeting of equals: the customer is always a little higher on the food chain, at least on the surface.
    A woman in the far corner was smiling at me. A woman with the weathered look of a practiced alcoholic. I smiled back; it was the holidays. She brightened. If I brightened in turn she would wave me over. “Let’s not be alone at Christmas,” she’d say. And I could say … anything. It wouldn’t matter because drunks forget it all before they reach the bottom of the glass. I could say: I’m so very, very tired of being alone. I ache, I yearn, I hunger for more.
    But women like her would never be my more. So I shook my head and raised my glass with the inclination of the head that, the world over, meant: Thank you. We are done.
    I sipped my Guinness again, looked at the sky—the sleet was getting whiter—and checked the time. Not yet. So I tuned them all out and listened to the music, a heartfelt rendition