thisfinalfathom

[thisfinalfathom]

nameless body / nude sketches / you lying on the bed wearing nothing but the barbed wire fence around your heart / i look away for only a moment / now every page is plastered top to bottom with your face / and some thousand miles away you hold it in your hands / and i’ll keep reaching out because i can always bandage the cuts

[thisfinalfathom]

we were best friends from february 2023 to september 2024. long distance. he visited once. i still remember the way he smelled and the soft roughness of his hands. i don’t forgive him.

(from a draft i never ended up posting.)

[thisfinalfathom]

untitled

wanting is a terrible something. you can taste the want when my blood is coating your teeth like corn syrup. you can hold it in your hand when you feel my flesh around you. need is a wounding weapon. god bore you into a body that only knows desire. he gave you eyes to see and fingertips to trace every inch of my body. you are a vessel of it—of want. take it. open me up like a medicine cabinet and look at all the little red pills inside and take them. i can undress and show you what you want to see and i will never feel more naked than our early morning talks, fully clothed. god is a being of need just like you, honey. eat me limb by limb. consume me like you want to, without any metaphor. let me feel the want inside your body as you take me all the way down. let me taste it, too.

(originally march 10 2025)

[thisfinalfathom]

and since i only see you once a year, since i’m limited to a brief moment of that smile, i will memorize the way it sounds instead.

[thisfinalfathom]

“all you have to do is open your goddamn hand” (untitled)

lover, i can feel you against me, bed-headed and sore from the sleep. the crick in your neck chatters every time you turn to look at me; i memorize the sound like it’s a symphony and i am spilling dementia onto everything i touch. what’s behind the curtain? lover, i will carry you through the fire. i can smell you burning and it makes my stomach growl. please let me consume you, just this once, in one raw piece. the conglomerate masses of skin melding into skin do not faze me. my worst fears are a sticky note pasted to the bathroom mirror. look at yourself all day and all night, and if you can’t, i will take your place. lover, we are on separate pastures in the same field and i can see you sprinting to me. i see the books in your hand, the way your hair flutters like the pages in the oklahoma wind. you lied on your papers to escape the draft then promised me you’d be honest about everything else. oh, you know i can’t cook and you know i can’t clean, but i will write novels in your name. lover, i want to know your wrongs. tell me about the time you tripped charlie trowbridge because she was a girl, and you were, too. show me the blood staining every inch of your hands and let me love you anyway. let me want you like you want me. on the porch, we can see the storm cracking its lightning like a whip and the tip of the tornado beginning to ghost over the ground. “lover, will you hold on tight?”

[thisfinalfathom]

“like the chill of death”

your glaciered eyes, frozen still and bobbing imperceptibly. i’m haunted. i haven’t a moment alone. you’re human (or adjacent to it) and riddled with impurities and bullet holes and wrapped in scarred skin—and my answer is ‘even so.’ there is no with or without; “death is no dream, and in death i’m caressing you.” my cigarette in winter’s morning. my sixteenth shot in a row/the dark. open my ribs so i can see. open my eyes so i can feel. walk another ten thousand miles so i can tell you you’re here. viscera is spilling from both of us, and maybe we’re a mess. nobody will go near us. your hands around my throat feel like a sleeping drugged daydream; that is to say i can hear you. how does it feel to be sober? overcome the smoke in my mouth and kiss me anyway. each crackling sob, every piece of literature is yours. take me when you have me. your blood is beauty. your piercing agony is mine. the water is cold and wide but stand in it anyway. the drip-drip-drip of a saint on a steel bed sounds like you. open the door so i can crash down onto you, onto your arctic bliss, and taste the way god made you.

(originally jan 22 25)

[thisfinalfathom]

sheridan

when i am fifty, maybe i will smoke a pipe. i might become disillusioned with the post-adolescent ideal that my life owes me something. i am not entitled to the oxygen in my body nor the ways i force it out. there is no contract i have signed. has the christ looked upon me and told me every day, i will have the earth below and the sky above, free to roam as i please? i won’t be half-boy, half-man, running footraces in the alley downtown. there will be no time in my schedule to recreate scenes from titanic. no more nude sketches. no more foggy backseat windows. i must say things like ‘signature’ and ‘unfortunately’ and ‘inconvenience’. smoke will be something wrong with my new used car and no longer something passing from my lips to slip between another’s. everything will be baggy-eyed menthol. “what concerts have you been to?” is quickly replaced by “what do you do for a living (but not ‘how much money do you make per year’ because, come on, that’s in poor taste)?” yes, maybe i will smoke a pipe, and after i pack it with loose tobacco and i’m seated on a cheap chair on the back porch, i will look up into the stars and remember. i’ll drift and float above my body all the way back to the fighting, echoing, white-hot youth i came from. what i am saying is that this is it. the cuts littering my body, the contraband under my mattress and in each drawer, the tank of gas drawn out to its last capable mile. i am surrounded by a burgeoning adulthood. i resist the thrust into responsibility. when i am fifty, something will be enough, but here? now? nothing is. “get up. throw on whatever the hell you want. listen and watch but do not pay attention and when you do, make it worth your fucking while.” i ruin my body with sex and nicotine while i can. i waste my money and my time and my endless IQ points on things i won’t have a month from now. “is it worth it?” to feel a familiar hand on my shoulder and see the barely-there scar and fucking remember? anything. anything.

[thisfinalfathom]

i feel like i shouldn't like this terrible man as much as i do

[thisfinalfathom]

lucas ransom you can inject me with your tainted blood

On Luke Ransom's Leather & Queer Masculinity

A little part of Exquisite Corpse (spoilers ahead!) that I love is how much of Luke’s story is about his relationship with his jacket and boots. It really gets at the parts of queer & alternative masculinity that I think are easy for people to overlook. How ragged, boxy, grimy clothes can bring as much joy & comfort to their wearers as pretty things can, how a good jacket or pair of boots lives with you and becomes a closer friend than a person can be, how masc & punk clothing functions as both physical and emotional armor.

“A good pair of boots was a friend forever, till death do us part. Idly he wondered whether this pair would outlast him. One of the soles was beginning to crack and peel, but then so was his.” -p 89

I adore the parallel drawn between the boot’s sole and Luke’s soul, the feeling that to look at his leather is to look at his life, to see him more than you could by looking at his face. My own boots are spattered with paint from years of art practice, scuffed from getting on & off of trains to see my friends, have dirt from all my favorite places caked into their treads. I can picture Luke’s boots so clearly- peeling from years of walking long city streets, water-damaged from time on the WHIV boat, stained with tobacco and maybe blood, faded from resting on a dashboard, a few stubborn flakes of glitter from Tran dragging him along to clubs. They're unequivocally a piece of his soul, an external catalog of his life just invisible enough to still keep his secrets.

"Luke always kept a razor in his boot. After he got sick, he said if anyone fucked with him, he'd slash his wrist and throw blood in their eyes." -p 113

The first mention of Luke's boots being offense as much as defense, used to conceal an emergency weapon. I'm reminded of how many punk women & queers I've heard talk about their leather feeling like armor, or how spiked cuffs & boots can double as self-defense weapons. The archetypal image of the leather-clad greaser calls to mind the switchblade concealed in the jacket or boot. There's a scrappy, improvised kind of power in that. This line also plays into how fucking good this book is at foreshadowing & weaving characters' perspectives together - we ultimately get Luke pulling the razor from his boot to kill Jay by slitting his throat, which subverts the original plan by having Luke be the one who gets an eyeful of blood from somebody else.

“His leather jacket creaked softly, familiar as the sound of a lover’s breathing. The bulk of it reminded him what it felt like to be strong.” - p 137

Suck it, Andrew's whinging about being known or whatever the fuck, I think this is my favorite line in the book. It's just such a gorgeous little bit of writing, and it's one of the moments I remember the most clearly from my first reading. Luke is a wildly complex and very flawed person, but even before we get his self-reflection and redemption in the later chapters, there are bits like this that make him deeply sympathetic. Under all the prickly rage, there's a person who is just deeply sad that his past is gone and can never come back. His jacket is one of the little bits of that past he has left, a home built for his old body and life that he can still live in despite it all, a place to hear a lover's breathing even when he feels unlovable. I'm reminded of times I've closed leather cuffs around fresh cuts to put them out of mind, of stomping as hard as I can in my boots on bad days just to know that I can still make noise. There's no other words for moments like that - they remind you what it feels like to be strong.

"He took off his leather jacket and swung it over his head, trying to snag its lining on the iron spikes[...]He pulled himself up as quickly as he could, grabbing onto the ironwork, easing himself over the top of the gate, using the heavy leather to protect his hands and his crotch from the spikes." - p 231 "Luke wrapped his jacket around his head and shoulders and hurled himself at one of the black-painted windows. He felt glass and ancient wood splintering; then he was kicking the frame away, clawing his way in, throwing the jacket aside and staring at the impossible scene that confronted him." -p 232 "Luke saw all this in the split-second it took him to regain his footing and slide his fingers into the top of his right boot. His momentum carried him toward Jay. He was already flicking open the silver V of the straight razor." -p 233

In the climax, Luke's jacket and boots are as much a hero as he is. I guess it's ultimately futile as far as Tran is concerned (sobbing and throwing things across the room), but in a book that's partly about manifestations of love and violence in the name of love, what matters is the sheer courage and determination of Luke's trying; the fact that he risks his life just to get to Tran for that tiny sliver of a chance that things could be okay. And without his leather he wouldn't have gotten as heartbreakingly close as he did. If he didn't have his jacket he wouldn't have climbed that fence without getting stabbed in the gut or gotten through the window of the shed without shredding his face. If he didn't have his boots with a razor tucked inside, he wouldn't have killed Jay, avenging Tran's death and saving the lives of probably dozens of runaways and Quarter brats. Looking back at the first time they're mentioned, Luke's boots and jacket get the same character arc he does - from a cynical, crumbling soul to an unstoppable force of determination to save someone.

To conclude, I love that Luke doesn't get visually softer as he emotionally softens throughout the book. It's easy to imagine that if this story were written by someone else or visually adapted, they might be tempted to have him shuck his rough edges as a symbol for his internal growth, clean him up like the much-reviled makeover Ally Sheedy gets in The Breakfast Club. Any punk, goth, or other such creature knows the frustration of their self-expression being looked at in fiction as a character flaw to be improved upon, a symbol of some internal ugliness. I'm so glad that doesn't happen with Luke. Luke's jacket and boots were with him before the bitter, vindictive, abusive part of him was born, and they are there with him as he lets it die. Even in his most tender, sensitive, sympathetic, loving, and lovable moments, he's one ugly son-of-a-bitch in a baggy motorcycle jacket and peeling cowboy boots. And my butchfag ass wouldn't want it any other way.

[thisfinalfathom]

PLEASE PLEASE

should i start posting my ec analyses and short story fics????

[thisfinalfathom]

i am hunrgy i go to Mcdonald Only to find out they be throwin my shit in there sideways style

[thisfinalfathom]

untitled (jan 7)

i am a machine. eclipsed and sundowned. tear out my wires and coding. i am allowed to take a punch. i can fall face-first onto the concrete and exhale smoke from my crackling ribs. moonlight, sunlight, artificial light—and i am incapable of deep thought. androids can figure it out anyway. watch the lunar masses swarm our apollo. build us an altar. build another skyscraper. agitation is difficult to manage; remember your fists lying tucked away in your pockets. however you might feel, do not keep yourself safe. you will not let them win. i am a mechanical overheating mess. i am a jumble of programming. touch me. hold me with your seething sadness and your interstellar rage and i will not shock you. i have made a mess but i cannot help myself. restrain me. tie me down and fuck me up. suspend me from your ceiling and ask me who hurt me. (you did. you did.)

[thisfinalfathom]

i finally made a community for martyrs. you all should join.

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if i made a group chat for it on discord would anybody join ?

does anybody like martyrs 2008 … is there a fandom for that …

[thisfinalfathom]

for those of you interested, i posted some martyrs stuff i’d written months ago

does anybody like martyrs 2008 … is there a fandom for that …

[thisfinalfathom]

(author’s note, i guess ???? i am well aware of the strange and very full-of-errors grammar i used in this. it’s written by ‘anna’ and i felt like she wouldn’t have the best grasp on english, so the grammar is veerrryyy not the greatest. lots of weird wording and run-on sentences. i reiterate: this is on purpose.)

this is a letter written by anna assaoui to lucie jurin, taking place in an au where anna never gets martyred after lucie’s death.

21 août 1987

yesterday i walked all the way to where you and i met. it took me four hours, and by the time i got there my feet were numb. i would do it again and again for you, don’t you know? i still sleep on my side of our bed. i only use half the blankets because i don’t want you cold, my angel, my star.

do you remember when you couldn’t sleep so you shook me awake and brought me to the window? we must’ve been about twelve then, i think, because you had gained a bit of weight and had a hope behind your eyes. you held tight to my hand and clung to my side (a regular little mother i was to you) while we watched the trees shiver in the wind. when you looked up at me with your ghost blue eyes and asked where we were going, i didn’t understand. we were sitting so still then. i felt like it would be still forever that way but here i am and you are gone. you are gone. i always think of you and that night in the windowsill together. you asked where we were going, i told you i didn’t know and that i wasn’t going anywhere. i didn’t lie to you. i am incapable of lying to you. the glow in your eyes faded then like you were disappointed that i didn’t understand, and shook your head slightly and turned away. i was meant to know everything for you and i couldn’t answer that question. if i had answered it right, would you still be here? would we have gotten to stay twelve years old forever? i think about that question every day and every time the answer is different. i wonder what you would ask me now if you were sitting next to me. i know what i would ask you. i think so often about what it would be like to speak to you now, when i would have so many things to say. i regret every silent moment, every quiet night filled with tv static and the humming air conditioner instead of conversation held together. i regret more often than i expected to. this isn’t to say i expected any of this. i did not anticipate being forced into missing you.

i have a recurring dream about you. in it, we are sitting alone in a yellow room together. we talk, this is the part that changes every time, and no matter the topic you get up and start walking to the door. then i cry and beg you to stay with me if only a moment longer. the worst part, when you look back over your shoulder at me and walk away like that. you leave me while you look at me. i can’t close my eyes in the shower because the water starts to feel like blood on my hands. i wonder if my palms were always so pink or if your blood has forever stained them. disgustingly i pray it to be the latter. i have thought about turning to god some nights, the lonely nights, but if he was out there you'd be in hell. my heart, you have burned enough for one lifetime. you lay behind my closed eyes. when do the good dreams start? i lie in wait to fall asleep and believe just for a minute that i am holding you. i wait to be a girl again with you, i wait for nights spent in each other’s arms.

that starry night after you calmed and we went back to bed (separate beds then) i waited for you to sleep and then stood over you, ghosting my hand over you. some nights you looked pained when you rested like you were trapped in your head but others you were at peace. this night you were peaceful. i hope you rest like that now, warm and content and left without hunger or thirst or need. in my mind you come behind me and kiss along my shoulder and ask me where are we going with your voice encased in a whisper. somewhere good. somewhere together. wait for me.

[thisfinalfathom]

intro to a martyrs fic i started but never finished last year

that night. the night we collided was dark but the moon lit up a mackerel sky, only apparent if you looked up. there wasn’t much else to look at. just the pained expression of a girl-turned-woman who i knew and somehow didn’t. it was the third summer we’d been sharing a cheap apartment. the ac was broken and only provided a screeching whir that did nothing to barricade us from the ninety degree afternoons. it could’ve been the sticky summer heat plastering our hair to our foreheads that ruined everything. maybe it was the way we slept in the same bed when night terrors were too much to handle alone; the feel of her shirtless back, slick with sweat, pressed flush against my chest. that night of the third summer i shared an apartment with lucie jurin, i left.