📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY

Today is Mother’s Day here, so, a few hours out of the Sisyphus paper-grading: up at 10:30 am, which means six hours of sleep, then a while to get ready, eat a little, go drive into the (already?!) scorching sun, with a stop at the florist’s, then to Mum’s house, patting the dog, chatting with Mum and my brother about my umpteenth denial of a college job I’d applied to, about the next strike day, in a few days, against that damn pension “reform” by the Elysian piece of shit, against the thousand ways in which the latter has twisted parliamentary debate to prevent it from blocking his disgusting bill, about my first chapter that my Mum has finally printed but not yet read, about the small trips she plans for the months to come, with some friends of hers, worrying that she won’t fully enjoy them if they require too much walking, because she’s tired overall, all while starting to get the family lunch in the oven, not waiting for my sister, whose plane from Portugal, where she was in holiday, will be three hours late, and the mini-croissants are nice, so is the grilled lamb chop and a half, the fried potatoes, the green beans, the cake at the end, but soon, when my sister has finally arrived and there’ve been some helloes and how-was-your-trips and don’t-worry-you’ll-get-the-job-next-times exchanged, and some nice little gifts given as she brought them back from there, there comes the time to get back in the car, in the heat, in the (actually sparse, that day) traffic, in the headache of the Sisyphean paper-grading, blinds lowered to prevent the heat from making the apartment hellish (and it’s just spring, imagine what it will be in the heart of the summer), while Haruka Kikuchi plays her trombone with her friends from NOLA and from Japan in the background, gently, and the tea flows to appease and excite at the same time, and the computer hums, and various TYT hosts scoff at the GOP freak show on YouTube in between two essays, or when the correction fluid dries on a red annotation that needed to be amended. And, slowly, the barely cooling night creeps in, but the toil still seems nowhere nearer its end anyway.

^{How to cite: Camus, Cyril. “Just Another Day: Cyril Camus.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.com/2023/06/04/cyril-another-day.}

Cyril Camus teaches English to post-secondary students at Lycée Ozenne in Toulouse and is an associate member of the Centre for Anglophone Studies at Toulouse University. He is the author of Myth and Fabulation in the Fantasy Fiction of Neil Gaiman, originally published in French in 2018, with an English-language edition published by McFarland in August 2026. He also wrote the historical horror novel Grand Guignol, published in October 2026, which had previously appeared with another publisher, in a slightly different version, under the title Sang de bœuf between 2019 and 2025. His academic publications address Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, comics, music, and postmodern fantasy. He also co-edited a 2021 journal issue on societal and environmental collapse in fantasy and science fiction. Further information is available on his website.  [All contributions by Cyril Camus.]