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[earmo-imni]

Vigil

Super quick stream of consciousness drabble for the single word whump prompt: Vigil

Loki is left in a coma after Thanos’ attack, and only Thor has any hope that he’ll ever wake up again

Thor knew what the others said. He heard Bruce and Dr Strange talking in hushed voices outside the room Thor almost never left.

Brain dead, never wake up, lost cause…dark and unwelcome words found their way to Thor’s ears, but he refused to accept them.

They didn’t know Loki.

They didn’t know how strong he was. How resilient. How stubborn.

Loki would wake up, and he would recover.

It had been three years since Thanos snapped his neck. Three years of Loki clinging to life, never moving more than the constant, shallow, rise and fall of his chest with each weak breath.

For over two of those years, ever since arriving at last on Earth after cleaving the damned titan’s head from his shoulders, Thor had sat vigil at Loki’s bedside day and night.

At first his friends came to keep him company. Reassure him or try to get him to leave. But Thor would never leave.

Loki might be afraid if he left him alone. Thor couldn’t let his little brother be afraid.

Most of them stopped coming eventually.

Brunnhilde ruled what was left of Asgard. The Avengers continued to do what they did.

And Thor stayed here, with Loki, waiting for him to wake up.

Only Bruce Banner ever really came to sit with him now, and he tactfully avoided telling Thor what he thought.

That Loki would never open his eyes again.

Thor wouldn’t have cared if he did say it, because he alone knew Loki, and he knew his trickster brother would survive this.

He was a god. A broken neck wasn’t necessarily a death sentence even to a mortal, and Loki wasn’t a mortal.

He would survive.

Loki’s hand was cold in his, unmoving, but Thor could feel a soft pulse beneath his fingers if he shifted them just slightly to rest over Loki’s thin wrist.

A fine needle penetrated Loki’s arm, delivering nutrients and fluids. Bruce seemed willing to humour Thor even now, and replaced the bag of the solution once a day.

And yet outside the door as he spoke with the other human doctor, he agreed with Dr Strange’s assessment that Loki would never wake again.

He was wrong.

Tears slipped from Thor’s eyes as their pessimistic words once more reached his ears from beyond that door.

They were wrong.

They had to be wrong.

An involuntary sob escaped Thor’s lips as he tightened his hold on Loki’s hand.

They had to be wrong.

A soft pressure returned his.

A slight curling of the fingers in his grasp.

Weak.

Almost imperceptible.

But Thor felt it.

He opened his eyes sharply, looked from their joined hands to Loki’s gaunt and ashen face, and choked on a breathless gasp as he met with familiar green eyes.

Tired, confused, but aware. Looking directly at Thor through a half lidded gaze.

“Loki?!” Thor breathed, unsure whether he dared smile or allow himself to feel the rising sense of uncontainable joy, “Bruce! Bruce! He wakes!!!”

He called out louder than he should. But Loki didn’t flinch or seem to mind.

His hand stayed tight in Thor’s and his eyes remained fixed on him as if there was nothing else to see.

The door opened, footsteps hurried in, and the voices were closer now, talking rapidly.

Thor didn’t hear what they said. He focused on Loki, watching as his brow creased and he briefly looked at Bruce when he spoke gently directly to him.

“Loki. I’m going to ask you some questions. I don’t want you to try to speak. Just blink once for yes, twice for no. Can you do that?”

After a nervewracking pause, Loki blinked once.

“Great,” Bruce smiled, looking quickly back at Dr Strange then to Thor, “Okay. Do you know who this is?”

He gestured slowly to Thor.

Loki didn’t just blink, but ever so slightly arched an eyebrow as well. A small motion but so obviously sarcastic and so Loki that it drew an amused and delighted laugh from Thor. 

“Do you know who I am?”

Loki blinked once.

“You need to check the sensations in his extremities,” Strange murmured.

“I know. I’m going slow. He’s been in a coma for three years,” Bruce whispered harshly back.

Loki didn’t seem to hear, or at least not care, his gaze still on Thor.

“He moved his hand earlier,” Thor looked up at them, understanding they were worried about paralysis, “Squeezed mine when he woke.”

Thor looked back to Loki, “Brother, can you try to move your hand again?”

Loki’s brow creased, eyes tightening, and after a long moment, his fingers moved in Thor’s hand again.

“That’s great,” Bruce smiled nervously, but it sounded like he was truly pleased, “Can you move the other one?”

Thor couldn’t see his other hand, but after a few minutes, he nodded, confirming Loki had moved.

But then they asked him to move his feet.

Neither foot moved at all.

Bruce bit his lip, and pressed one of his toes between a pen and his finger, “Can you feel this, Loki?”

Loki’s brow furrowed but he blinked once.

“Does it feel at all numb?” Strange asked.

Another single blink.

Bruce glanced back at Dr Strange, something silent understood by both.

“What is wrong?” Thor asked nervously.

“It’s too early to say,” Bruce replied, “We’ll just have to keep an eye on things.”

He turned back to Loki, whose gaze had once again turned exhausted and fallen on Thor.

“Loki, are you in any pain?”

Loki didn’t respond, but he tightened his hand in Thor’s.

He was, but he didn’t want to admit it. He didn’t admit to pain or fear or any feeling Odin would have deemed weak.

Thor caught Bruce’s gaze and adopted the communication method himself, blinking once to tell the doctor what Loki didn’t dare voice. He was in pain.

“I’m going to make up a new IV fluid. Something that might be more helpful now you’re awake,” Bruce smiled kindly at Loki, “For now, don’t try to speak or move too much. Take your time.”

With that, he left the room, ushering Strange out and they resumed their conversation outside as they walked away down the corridor.

Thor heard nothing of hopelessness now. Discussions of future and how to proceed and treatment and assessments, not of death anymore.

He turned back to Loki with a grin he couldn’t contain, tears slipping from his eyes.

He clasped the pale hand in both of his and kissed his knuckles lightly, his whole body trembling with emotion he could barely contain.

Too much emotion to contain. He was certain he must be altering the weather right now and he didn’t give a damn.

He shut his eyes as more tears fell from them and kissed Loki’s hand once more.

A tiny, rasping, almost inaudible voice drifted through the silence, uttering the single word, “Eye.”

Questioning. Thor had only one eye when Loki last saw him. That would take some explaining and Thor had no heart to even think of the past right now. He cared only for the present and the reality of Loki finally waking, proving everyone who doubted his strength wrong.

Thor swallowed back a sob, smiling down at Loki and brushing a hand through his long hair, untucked from the rigid neck brace that contained him.

“Bruce told you not to speak yet,” he chastised gently.

Every word in Loki’s reply was hoarse and breathless, barely there at all, but Thor heard each one as he listened with adoring attention to every minute sound that passed Loki’s lips.

“I do what I want Thor.”

[earmo-imni]

trump makes a blatantly lying comment about how haitian immigrants are eating “pets” and the white left is frothing at the mouth to turn it into a “hahaha funny meme”, without thinking of the horrific implications that a statement stating black people are coming to eat [inferred: white] people’s pets went unchallenged and is now actively being spread as a “joke”.

[earmo-imni]

i can convince myself anyone deserves to be mistreated. i am also unshakable in my belief that i'm pure of heart and objectively a good person <- how you guys sound to me

[earmo-imni]

some of yall don't understand what human rights mean and it is legitimately worrying how some of you think that if a person is 'bad' enough they should have their human rights taken away

[earmo-imni]

Goldie Finkelstein was just 13 when she was sent to Wiener Graben, a work camp that later became a concentration camp. The youngster lost her entire family in the war, and among the things she never learned from them was how to cook. She had no family recipes and, according to her son, when she married Sol Finkelstein, also a Holocaust survivor, she didn’t know how to boil water or cook an egg.

Eventually, other survivors taught Goldie the necessary skills, and she was a quick learner. She soon became known for the copious amounts of baked goods she would provide for any occasion. Her recipes, some of which are included in the “Honey Cake and Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors” cookbook, include cake mixes and other ingredients that wouldn’t have been used in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Her whiskey cake, for example, calls for both yellow cake mix and vanilla pudding mix.

Goldie’s experience illustrates the ways in which recipes, including those we think of as quintessentially Ashkenazi Jewish, have changed over the years. Survivors lost the ancestors who passed along oral recipes. Families’ personal artifacts, such as handwritten recipes, were abandoned when Jews were forced to flee. 

Most significantly, perhaps, after the war, survivors had access to different ingredients in their new homes. Sometimes that was due to seasonality, such as was the case for those who moved from Eastern Europe to Israel and had access to more fruits and vegetables year-round, including dates and pomegranates. Other times, it reflected changing tastes or newfound wealth  — liver soup, pates with liver and offal were classic Eastern European dishes in the early 1900s, when there was an intention to use every part of the animal, but became increasingly uncommon. In other cases, like Goldie’s, packaged goods replaced homemade. Another survivor whose recipes appear in “Honey Cake and Latkes,”Lea Roth, detailed making noodles for Passover from the starch leftover at the bottom of a bowl after grating potatoes before the war. After the war, most people added “noodles” to the grocery list.

“Some of these recipes changed because of New World versus Old World,” explains Jeffrey Yoskowitz, author of “The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods.” Yoskowitz and his co-author Liz Alpern work not to replicate pre-war Ashkenazi Jewish recipes, but to reclaim and modernize them. To do that, they’ve had to examine the ways in which recipes have changed.

In the Old World, for instance, almost every recipe called for breadcrumbs. At Passover, the leftover crumbs from the matzah were used to make matzah balls, leaving nothing to waste. But when immigrants in the U.S. could use Manischewitz pre-made matzah meal, then recipes started calling for it to make matzah balls.Today’s recipes for kugels with cream cheese, cottage cheese and sour cream would not have been made in the Old World, where dairy products were expensive. Again, ubiquitous cows in the New World made that “celebration of dairy” possible, Yoskowitz says.

At first, recipes may not seem like the most essential thing to recover from Holocaust survivors, but they paint a picture of what life was like before the war. It is essential to see the Jewish experience as one that is not solely as victims, and learning what people ate and cooked is part of that.

“Bringing back recipes can help bring people back to life,” says Edna Friedberg, a historian and senior curator with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “In particular, it was women who were in the kitchen in this period, and so this is a way to make the lives of women very vivid and real for people.”

The idea is not to romanticize Eastern Europe, says Maria Zalewska, executive director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, which published “Honey Cake and Latkes,” but to see the memories connected to togetherness, like picking fruit toward the end of the summer and using that fruit in a recipe, such as cold cherry soup with egg-white dumplings. 

In addition, examining recipes gives us a sense of what role cooking and food played in trauma processing, Zalewska says. “Remembering the foods and the food traditions of their lives before imprisonment were some of the ways that survivors coped with starvation,” Zalewska adds. These are things that survivors say they are not often asked about, but when asked they report remembering dreaming about food during incarceration. 

“We have quite a number of testimonies, where survivors talk about being in situations of starvation, and food deprivation and ghettos and camps and in hiding, and that dreaming about and remembering food from before gave them emotional sustenance,” explains Friedberg.

Exploring such memories have been meaningful for those survivors who were young when they lost their families.

New Orleans’ Chef Alon Shaya has been working for several years to recreate recipes from a book belonging to the family of Steven Fenves, a survivor and a volunteer for the museum. The book was rescued by the family cook, Maris, when the family was forced to flee their home on the Yugoslavia-Hungary border in 1944. The recipes are largely written without measurements, times or temperatures, and many of the ingredients are different from those used today. (Like the Fenves family, Goldie’s son, Joseph Finkelstein, says his mother wasn’t big on using measurements as we think of them in recipes today. She knew the quantity of an ingredient, for example, if it would fit in her palm.) Unlike Yoskowitz, who is looking to update recipes, Shaya has been working to replicate them as closely as possible  — and has come across a few surprises.

Many of the desserts use a lot of walnuts, for example, which, of course, are also used in contemporary baking. But Shaya is using what he says are “copious amounts of walnuts” in various ways, such as grilled walnuts and toasted walnuts. The Fenves family walnut cream cake, which includes both walnuts ground in the batter and in a cream in-between the cake layers, has featured on the menu at one of Shaya’s restaurants, Safta, in Denver.

For all the recreation, and Shaya’s goal to bring the tastes of his youth back to Fenves, he says “it is impossible that a recipe in New Orleans would be the same as one in Bulgaria. The seasons are different, what animals are butchered are different, and the spices taste different.”

Indeed, place matters, Yoskowitz says. Ashkenazi food has a reputation of being terrible, he says. Take mushroom soup, for example. “There is no good mushroom soup in a deli. It is made with mushrooms that don’t have much flavor. But if you have it somewhere made with mushrooms grown in the forest, then that is going to be good soup.”

Many Holocaust survivors settled in new lands with new ingredients, and little memory of how things were made before the war. They knew they used to eat mushroom soup but didn’t specifically remember the forest-grown and harvested fungi. So, dishes morphed depending on what survivors had in their new home. In Eastern Europe, veal was plentiful, but in the U.S. and Israel, schnitzel began being made with chicken instead (a process Yoskowitz calls the “chickentization” of cuisine). And the beloved Jewish pastrami on rye? The pastrami would have traditionally been made with kosher goose or lamb. It wasn’t until Jews came to the U.S. that beef was easily accessible. 

The same is true of what is likely the most iconic Jewish American dish. “Bagel and lox are what we think of as the most Jewish food. But the only thing that came over was the cured and smoked fish,” Yoskowitz says. “Cream cheese was a New York state invention. Capers were Italians. It was a completely new creation, and it became a taste associated with Jewish people.”

One of the most poignant recipes in the “Honey Cake and Latkes” book is a chocolate sandwich, a basic concoction of black bread, butter and shaved dark chocolate. Survivor Eugene Ginter remembers his mother making it for him in Germany after the war, to fatten him up after years of starvation.

Adds Shaya: “We have to continue to adapt, and I think that that is part of the beauty of it.”

[earmo-imni]

Joining a new fandom and giving the shipping scene a quick check:

Oh, The Silmarillion fandom would kill these people XD

[earmo-imni]

🌟 Fëanor ♥ Nerdanel 🌟

[earmo-imni]

Do you sometimes read a fic writer’s work, and just… thank all the gods this person managed to get obsessed with the same fictional people you did?

[earmo-imni]

Pretty Erik 😌💀

A step by step process of this will be available at my Patreon on december 1st! 

[earmo-imni]

Exactly my whole point about how we need to get the fuck out there and VOTE. That was Hillary being many points ahead of Trump and everyone was like, "Ahh we got this, no biggie!" These numbers for Harris right now aren't even that high and even if they WERE it doesn't mean crap unless people VOTE.

[earmo-imni]

Wally Dion, born 1976, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Fabric Star Quilts.

Wally (Walter) Dion is a Canadian artist of Saulteaux ancestry living and working in Upstate New York. Working in a number of media including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Wally explains:

"The first fabric star quilt was made as part of a 2022 residency at Wanuskewin Park. It was my way of reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plaines. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another... a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.

I was considering how all of these things worked together for thousands of years to create what is known as the 'prairie tall grass ecosystem'. A vast and fertile expanse of land stretching from the foothills of Alberta to the banks of the Mississippi. I wanted to highlight the invisibility of systems when everything is working well, as it should be.

I started with the green quilt because it is the colour of the sweet grass braid that is exchanged in ceremony and relationship building. I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric. I considered the act of offering fabric and adherence to tradition. I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence to protocols spanning decades. My thoughts travelled across the land, imagining the trees and rocks collecting these prayers like a bush of cloth, or an etched boulders."

[earmo-imni]

I've been rereading my journals recently and made a quiz about it. Here, if you want to experience the quiz equivalent of reading bits of my diary over my shoulder

[earmo-imni]

[earmo-imni]

109 years ago today, leo frank, an innocent american jewish man, was lynched.

in 1913, leo frank was arrested for the murder of mary phagan. despite evidence that he was at home at the time of the murder, the jury decided in just four hours that he was guilty and the judge sentenced him to death. all of frank's appeals were rejected. protests erupted outside the governor's mansion when the governor decided to commute frank's sentence from death to life imprisonment, and on august 17th, 1915, a group of 25 men kidnapped frank from the prison hospital where he was recovering from an attempt on his life, drove him 100 miles to mary phagan's hometown, and lynched him. there are several photos of the lynching.

though frank is the only known jewish victim of lynching in america, antisemitism was baked into the nation's history in numerous other ways. during the trial, the prosecuting attorney framed him as a sexual pervert who was both a homosexual and preyed on young girls. this is not the first time a jewish man has been framed as a sexual predatory because of his jewishness. it was simply the culmination of centuries of antisemitism that still persists to this day. (content warning for antisemitic caricatures and one graphic photo of the lynching of leo frank)

leo frank was proven innocent after his death, though many people still insist he was guilty, particularly white supremacists.

a musical called parade about the trial and tragic death of leo frank was written by jewish composer jason robert brown and jewish playwright alfred uhry. it premiered in 1988 and was revived in 2023 on broadway, starring jewish actors ben platt and micaela diamond, where neo nazis protested outside the theatre, claiming the show was "glorifying a pedophile."

as of writing this, tomorrow is the first day of elul, the last month in the jewish calendar culminating in the high holy days, the holiest days of the jewish year. every year, synagogues see an increase in negative attention and antisemitism from their wider communities. we start to receive more hostile phone calls and emails, threats of violence, and this year there was a swatting campaign targeting at least 26 jewish institutions. we are supposed to be using this time to reflect and make amends with the people we've hurt, and instead so much of our time and energy had to go toward ensuring we can even safely walk into our communal spaces.

i don't have the answer for how to fix this or what you as a gentile should do. antisemitism is thousands of years old, and it's not going to stop because some well meaning people on tumblr read all the articles linked in this post. all i know is that jews all over the world are terrified and so, so tired.