I'm totally wrapped up in a great ghost story, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. It's the kind of delightfully unsettling book that makes one start hearing strange sounds in the house as you're reading it. A third of the way through, I was surprised when the narrator made much of the fact she was born--like me--in December. Here's her startling take on the month of her birth:
December gives me headaches and diminishes my already small appetite. It makes me restless in my reading. It keeps me awake at night with its damp, chilly darkness. There is a clock inside me that starts to tick on the first of December, measuring the days, the hours and the minutes, counting down to a certain day, the anniversary of the day my life was made and then unmade: my birthday. I do not like December.
Well, I certainly never felt like that. All I've ever felt was a certain peevishness that the arrival of my birthday was always drowned out by Christmas. Then today, on my December 19th birthday, I reached this point in the book:
"Have you got a birthday?" Aurelius asked.
"Yes. I've got a birthday."
"I'll make a note of it, shall I?" he said brightly. "Them I can send you a card."
I feigned a smile. "It's coming up soon, actually."
Aurelius opened a little blue notebook divided into months.
"The nineteenth," I told him.
Yikes!
