After all the drama around Bright Eyes, I honestly wanted something banal if not boring. So, turning back about twenty years, we have Henge Hartmann going to the market. She’s already had her two children and is a housewife who wants nothing more than to be a good wife and mother. Given what she is, her immediate family, and married into the imperial family, it is a bit more complicated that it first seems. I am looking forward to seeing where she takes me with this story.

The idea behind this is very, very loosely based upon Yokohama Shopping Trip. The lead there is also not human and their world is also changed. It is a brilliant but sometimes confusing manga and a warm, soothing anime. Five stars.

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The Farmers’ Market was held twice a week on what had been the grounds of the Knoxville World’s Fair, from generations before the Change.  Only a few blocks north of their townhome, Henge stood on the north-south rail line and listened.  Nope, nothing coming.  Unused for years following the Breakup, with the economy of their city-state now retied to places such as Chattanooga to the southwest and a slowly recovering Kentucky to the north, there was enough demand that Faustina, her sister-in-law, had an engineering detachment of her legions repair the line.

Balancing on one of the metal rails, Henge walked north in her trademark blue denim overalls covering her white tee shirt.  For betting footing, she wore sandals rather than her usual barefoot, even in the hot sun.  If there were any burns to feet, she simply repaired them.  A small backpack held some canvas bags for whatever she might want to bring home to her family, today.  A warmer day, her purple hair was up in twin-tails on either side of her head.

My family, she thought.  She thought very fast.  Called a demi-human like her husband Gary and his sister, Henge was unique.  A Thinking Machine of tribe Tohsaka who, for love of Gary, wrecked a multi-billion-dollar fusion reactor to manifest a physical body.  A more gross imposition of ego I cannot imagine, and they let me get away with it!  After some initial problems with her new body – the massive seizure she had at her First Communion – they were married at thirteen and, once cleared by her Machine relatives, allowed to have their first child, Aurelia, three years later. 

She paused to look down at the few cars on Cumberland Avenue.  Most powered by CNG or electricity from the many small fission reactors they had built.  The trucks were generally biodiesel.  Gasoline and real diesel were reserved for the legions and their heavy equipment. 

“And a year after Aurie,” she spoke to the light breeze, “Roland.  Then, no matter how hard we tried, no more.  My Beloved, recognized as a brilliant doctor, surgeon, and now pharmacist, discovered that in my incomplete formation, each ovary carried only one egg.”

She resumed her walk, hearing the sounds of the market, just ahead.  “I am blessed, God, with my two children.  But You know I did want a dozen.  Your will be done.”