#Lila had to railroad her into doing that

[howhow326]

So, serious question here:

Why wasn't she the one to take over Paris?

Like, if Chloe can become "interm Mayor" because she's the daughter of the Mayor, then surely the Mayor's wife can do the same thing? In fact, it makes way more sense if Audrey stages a coup because she's an adult, she's power hungry, she's an adult, she's in Gabriel's inner circle, she's an adult, she's a rich world famous celebrity and staging coups is just something they do now (like Trump), and she's an adult!

It's not even like she's too busy to be a Mayor, because 80% of her screen time is living it up and you know... not working? Also being president certainly didn't stop Trump from running his business

[princess-of-the-corner]

”Telling Lies? No Mama” has to be my favorite post chameleon. Why? The only bitch is Lila!

“A-and now you don’t believe me!” Lila wailed, hands in front of her face as she cried, “You keep saying Marinette didn’t do it, but you weren’t there. It certainly sounds like you’re calling me a liar.”

Something passed over Alya’s face, an expression trapped somewhere between disbelief and sickening realization.

Adrien had the sinking feeling that Alya just realized why Lila covered her face when she cried.

So that no one could see that she wasn’t actually crying.

"If you’re going to keep making false accusation of my best friend,” Alya bit out, her eyes going steely, “Then maybe I am!”

Such a trick ass bitch she can't even fake cry lmao

But also yeah like. While some fics demonize Lila too far(the aforementioned serial killer fics), I very much prefer when it's ONLY Lila who is railroaded in these scenarios.

[richincolor]

Learning About the Present Through Our Past

There are people who would say that students in the U.S. do not get a comprehensive education when it comes to history. So how can we understand our present and work toward our future without a clear view of our past? There may be some schools or teachers who are doing an excellent job, but in many cases we still have a very long way to go. This makes access to thorough and accurate accounts all the more important for young readers. Here are two recent books that could help fill in some gaps.

Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People by Kekla Magoon [available Sept. 28] (Review copy provided by Candlewick)

Publisher summary: In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers’ community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers’ story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members—mostly women—and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens.

Revolution in Our Time puts the Panthers in the proper context of Black American history, from the first arrival of enslaved people to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Kekla Magoon’s eye-opening work invites a new generation of readers grappling with injustices in the United States to learn from the Panthers’ history and courage, inspiring them to take their own place in the ongoing fight for justice.

A few thoughts: Aside from the middle grade book One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia and Kekla Magoon's own teen novels The Rock and the River and Fire in the Streets, not much literature exists for young readers featuring the Black Panthers. That was why I was very excited to see this available for teens, but I think adults will also appreciate it. Revolution in Our Time begins with one of the events that brought the Panthers to national attention, but also goes back hundreds of years explaining many actions and events in history that led to that moment. Readers can see how the organization came together, shaped their collective identity, and got to work.

It's a very comprehensive look at the members and their day-to-day activities, victories, losses, and the many challenges they ran up against. It also includes a look into the many instances of governmental opposition. The Panthers were strong and did want to be seen that way, but their opponents painted them as violent and dangerous and that image is the only picture that many folks still hold in their memories. Here people can see a much more complete and accurate view.

The actual details and the stories are awesome by themselves, but the way that Magoon connects the past to our present makes this an incredibly powerful work. The final sections of the book are a call to action. The Black Panthers' average age was 19. Young people can do amazing things. There's a lot to learn by looking at the past and there's so much potential and opportunity for young people to make change happen today.

From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement by Paula Yoo Norton Young Readers

Publisher summary: America in 1982: Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting U.S. autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti–Asian American sentiment simmers, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin, beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz.

Paula Yoo has crafted a searing examination of the killing and the trial and verdicts that followed. When Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to manslaughter and received only a $3,000 fine and three years’ probation, the lenient sentence sparked outrage. The protests that followed led to a federal civil rights trial—the first involving a crime against an Asian American—and galvanized what came to be known as the Asian American movement.

Extensively researched from court transcripts, contemporary news accounts, and in-person interviews with key participants, From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry is a suspenseful, nuanced, and authoritative portrait of a pivotal moment in civil rights history, and a man who became a symbol against hatred and racism.

A few thoughts: It's clear that Paula Yoo did an incredible amount of research and she carefully unraveled many layers of this complicated story. Vincent Chin was brutally killed and though to some it may seem like an isolated event, it happened during a time when there was increasing anti-Asian sentiment brewing. Yoo takes the time to explain many things that had happened contributing to the creation of this environment. She uses the personal history of Vincent's family and even goes back through U.S. history as a whole to see the threads of hatred and racism that had been there over time.

The narrative includes many people involved in the case and explores their lives and actions--and where possible--their motivations. Seeing Vincent's friends and family up close makes the loss very difficult to witness even just via the page.

A powerful aspect of this book is seeing the way people pulled together and spoke up. They formed Asian American advocacy organizations and some aspects of the justice system were even changed as a result of the work done around Vincent's case. Unfortunately, this book is very timely. It was published during a time of rising violence and racism against people of Asian descent in the U.S. Yoo shows readers that our present has come about because of our past, but our past can also inform and inspire us.

Here are links to a few more YA nonfiction history books that we've featured in the past:

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz adapted by Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza

We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson and Tonya Bolden

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi

A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 by Claire Hartfield

Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles by Tanya Stone

Infinite Hope: A Black Artist's Journey from WWII to Peace by Ashley Bryan

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, & Harmony Becker

Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School by Adam Fortunate Eagle

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White by Lila Quintero Weaver

The March graphic novel series books 1-3 by John Lewis with Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell

In addition to books written specifically for the YA market, there are also some fantastic historical picture books for children, teens, and even adults. Here are a few that are exceptional:

Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre by Carole Boston Weatherford illustrated by Floyd Cooper

Queen of Physics: How Wu Chien Shiung Helped Unlock the Secrets of the Atom by Teresa Robeson illustrated by Rebecca Huang

Freedom in Congo Square by Carole Boston Weatherford and R. Gregory Christie

I Am Not a Number by Jenny Kay Dupuis and Kathy Kacer illustrated by Gillian Newland

Twenty-two Cents: Muhammad Yunus and the Village Bank by Paula Yoo illustrated by Jamel Akib

Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Family's Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh

The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth & Harlem's Greatest Bookstore by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson illustrated by R. Gregory Christie

Fry Bread: A Native American Family Tradition by Kevin Noble Mailland illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal

Paper Son: The Inspiring Story of Tyrus Hong, Immigrant and Artist by Julie Leung illustrated by Chris Sasaki

A Day for Rememberin': Inspired by the True Events of the First Memorial Day by Leah Henderson illustrated by Floyd Cooper

Overground Railroad by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome

Soldier for Equality: José de la Luz Sáenz and the Great War by Duncan Tonatiuh

If you are aware of other books we should watch for, please let us know.

[countesscrellin]

1.

Some of us are the river’s current, floating through life swiftly or slowly, as if in a trance of somnambulism. Some of us are a human shell at its edge, refusing to follow its pattern and be a part of it. Why follow them when you can live on the fringes of society, away from its stigmas and scrutinizing scorn?

2.

When Ellie married Samuel Barnes, the world was a rose-gold utopia. Three years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Ellie no longer felt that the chemistry they had once remained. On a windy September afternoon, when she returned to the red-brick bungalow she shared with Samuel on Hillsam Avenue, Ellie heard moans and sounds of sexual ecstasy emitting from their bedroom. Another woman was there. Ellie’s eyes instantly began to burn like hot coals in a campground grill. She examined her wedding portrait on the wall of the hallway as she moved in slow motion through it. They had been photographed in front of the church’s stained glass windows, a spectrum of color radiating behind the couple adorned in black and white.

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, blinking through the lake of sorrow in her dark eyes, and suppressing a sob, pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Another dark-haired woman Ellie didn’t recognize was riding Samuel, and when she registered the door slamming open, she turned around wide-eyed with a cry of alarm, her brown nipples in full view.

“I knew it,” Ellie told Samuel bitterly. “I knew for at least a year that there was someone else!”

Samuel looked at his wife blankly and didn’t reply, his face smug.

“Who are you?” Ellie shrieked at the strange woman.

“Lila Stern,” the woman replied. “And clearly, Sam doesn’t love you anymore. He loves me. He has for the entire year you suspected something was going on. We would both like you to leave.”

“Don’t dictate what I will do in my own house, you fucking homewrecker!” Ellie shouted. Lila, remembering her nudity, covered herself with the indigo comforter.

“I agree with Lila,” Samuel said. “Just pack your things and go, Ellie. You’ve been a nagging, paranoid pain in my ass for too long. You’re in need of a psychiatrist, but you won’t pay heed to my advice. All you are lately is a cold fish who’s no fun. A fucking schoolmarm. Find an apartment somewhere. Leave.”

“Now,” Lila said.

Ellie slammed the door shut and bolted down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife she could find. Tested its point with the tip of her index finger. A small blood-drop formed in the small pad of flesh. Although Ellie’s tears rained down like heated glass, she felt no physical pain.

I won’t pack my things, she thought. I have a better idea.

She glanced at the neon green digital clock above the oven. It read 1:11 p.m. It was September 24th. As she placed the knife into the pocket of her navy blue peacoat, grabbed her smartphone, scrawled a quick note and left the house, Ellie knew what to do. No more morning to afternoon shifts as a psychiatric nurse at St. Mary’s Medical Center’s psych unit. No more wondering when Samuel would be home from his nightly excursions. As she walked towards the river, passing the other houses, the Texaco, the railroad tracks, the boarded-up, shutdown factories, memories flashed before her. She remembered her lonely childhood, her even more tumultuous adolescence where she slept with a crowbar in her pillowcase and read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird at the edge of the schoolyard grass away from everyone.

“I wish you’d never been born,” Ellie’s mother told her, swilling red wine from a tall, dark bottle.

“I second that,” her father said, puffing on a fat cigar. Once she made it to the river, Ellie collapsed like a house of cards to the white sand, and howled the loss of her love into the godless sky. She glanced from side to side to make sure no one was watching. She couldn’t be sure if someone was for all the foliage and bushes. But she didn’t care. She sat there for the longest time, her breathing a series of hyperventilation. Samuel’s face was all she could see, then Lila’s, the two of them like a rotating holographic image. She wanted her cremated ashes bequeathed to the river. She wanted no tomb in the town cemetery. No funeral. The note she wrote with these directions was in her left pocket of her coat. Such a heavy coat for the nice weather, but Ellie was always cold. Her body, feather-boned and catatonic, slumped over a large rock and she let the tears wet it like a water nymph mourning the loss of a handsome sailor on a receding boat.

Ellie turned on her cell phone and listened to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” one last time. It sounded faint above the river’s churning. Just like the woman in the song, she too had a non-devoted, careless husband. She wept hardest at the chorus:

Where is my John Wayne? Where is my prairie song?

Where is my happy ending?

Where have all the cowboys gone?

“To greener pastures,” Ellie said to herself. “To rose-gold utopias I’ll never see.“

3.

The clock on the wall of Mrs. Sykes’s math class ticked in time to my heartbeat. The hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I crave marijuana was there, screaming like a lacuna asking to be filled. The time for more recalcitrance (in this case, truancy and drug use by the river) was near. While Mrs. Sykes droned on like a monotonous honeybee about the Pythagorean theorem, I got up from my desk and slung my backpack over my shoulders. Her gunmetal grey eyes followed me to the door with the poster of the Power Rangers on it, all teamed up together. Always use the buddy system, the poster said.

“Where are you going, Stacey?” Mrs. Sykes asked.

“Skipping class,” I told her. “And dropping out when I turn eighteen in February. This is non-negotiable. You can’t stop me.”

Before my teacher could retaliate, I flounced out of the room, leaving the scoffing and titters of my peers behind me. I left my textbooks in my locker to lessen the load in my backpack. I unzipped a small pocket and grinned at the verdant green pot in its glass pipe.

Jimmy Stirling is the one who introduced me to pot when I was a junior a year before. He was a senior, and one of Lewis and Clark High School’s few homeless students. His dad was a cantankerous drunk and gambler who threw him out. Jimmy spent time singing songs on the sidewalk for spare change, or sleeping at the homeless shelter for adolescents. For someone who was homeless, Jimmy frequently had a remarkably full tin can of bills and change. His singing voice was a rich alto tearing pleasantly through the downtown breeze. On October of last year, he found me crying under the highway after school let out. I recognized him from my creative writing class.

“What’s wrong, Stacey?” he asked.

“My brother’s locked in the loony bin. He’s possessed. He killed Calvin, my guinea pig. Everything is falling apart, and to top it all off, Liam broke up with me this morning.”

“Man, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You ever try marijuana? It might make you forget all that stuff.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said, knowing that anyone with marijuana downtown expected payment in return for it.

“That’s alright. I have some I’ll share for free. Let’s sit in my favorite place to do it.”

I followed him, listening to him sing as we walked the few blocks to an alleyway with a set of cement stairs against a condemned apartment, leading to a bolted door. He sang Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself To Live.” We sat on the bottom step. He loaded the pot into a glass bowl and taught me how to light it, how to inhale the hit of smoke without exhaling it too soon. I caught the gist of it. Suddenly, within a few minutes, everything was funny. My mind was suddenly devoid of all negativity. I was giggly, light as a tumbleweed blown by a gale of fierce wind. I felt energetic, talkative, and happier that I’d been in a long time. Shortly after my day with Jimmy, I learned he went to jail for getting caught with Ecstasy tablets in his lockers. He was also rumored to be selling cocaine and heroin downtown. He wasn’t allowed back at school. I never saw him again. The flashbacks vanished when I approached the river and saw her. She was a woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a peacoat, jeans and pair of black loafers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what she was doing. The woman older than me by at least a decade, was holding a kitchen knife to the veins in her right wrist. She made no sound when she punctured them, her hand dangling over the water. I watched her bloodletting turn part of the emerald river red. It was spouting out like the slashed throat of a sacrificed farm animal. She turned and saw me when I stepped on a twig by accident and snapped it in two.

“Go away,” the woman told. “Believe me, you should be letting this happen.”

She took in my red ringlets, my sharp green eyes, my pink hoodie, my Converse sneakers. Then she went for her throat with her knife and slit it open with perfect finesse. There was a vibe coming off of this woman that insinuated I should just let her die. I could sense that her life had been miserable and mean. I sat on a rock out of sight of the dying woman and got high, thinking of her spirit rising, transcendental and free, into the sun and clouds. I thought of how the first settlers of the city I live in came here 8,000 to 13,000 years ago. Before there were cemeteries, they buried their dead in unmarked graves. I thought of all the skeletons that must be under the grass of the lawns and parks, the sidewalks, the urban streets. I thought of the days of religious fanaticism, and how had I been born then, I would have been buried in unconsecrated ground for my heathen ways. I didn’t believe in god, but I did believe in Satan.

- Janine Crellin

[ford-ye-fiji]

@honeybeesblr okay so here is the AU, finally! (For anyone who wants to know what the heck is going on in fallout- i made a really quick summary here) 

Nuclear War happens- the Hargreeves have a vault bc Reggie is rich. Reggie is also super shady. When the nukes hit, Reggie isn’t home. Everyone in the house, the kids, Pogo, and Grace get to the vault. Reggie doesn’t.

Pogo, without Reggie, follows his “emergency orders” for what to do if something like this happened

Thus we have the cryogenic freezing situation

Five is kidnapped by, instead of Kellogg- by the Handler (Ben is either shot here in the process or his powers absolutely do not mesh well with freezing and he ends up dying. It could go either way)

Everyone gets put under again

They wake up later when a malfunction happens to find out that Pogo has been dead for years and Grace, a now 200 ish year old robot, isn’t exactly functioning well. She insists the radiation is terrible outside and that everyone is dead. They all want to go after Five but also they’re thirteen. Plus, to them it hasn’t been 200 years. It might as well have been yesterday.

A couple of years pass in the vault? Finally, they just all leave I presume at 18 ish one by one (bc they can’t stick together to save their lives I swear.) Thus, activities happen until we get to the seventeen year mark since Five’s disappearance. Diego is one of the last minutemen because he totally would be. He still checks up on Grace, who putters around the vault. Allison ends up in the Underground Railroad which, instead of there being an Institute- fights the Commission- Diego occasionally helps Allison out. Vanya, I think, would be a sort of traveling bard/occasional help because the apocalypse world would eat up that type of access to new music and knowledge. (There is, of course, a particular farm that she passes by very often). Without access to her pills, she’s discovered her powers and gone through all this growth and character development on her own so when her siblings eventually meet up with her again, she’s grown into herself and is also, “sup I have powers now sweet right”. Klaus ends up becoming a ghoul. He totally becomes the Hancock. He’s in charge of Good Neighbor, Ben is responsible for most of his good decisions. Luther leaves the vault last, but without Reggie he has to find his own path. He joins the Brotherhood of Steel. They provide the structure and responsibility that he felt empty without.

They sort of all keep vague tabs on each other. Until Allison gets word of a woman with a kid in Diamond City. The woman matches the description of the lady she remembers stealing Five. Plus she was seen with a thirteen year old boy who could vanish on command.

Allison loses it, contacts her siblings, they meet up in Diamond City and she’s all “FIVE IS FREAKING ALIVE” and they attribute his still being thirteen thing to him figuring out how to time travel. Maybe he escaped his captors temporarily by time traveling?

Allison and Luther have some tensions because Luther is BoS and Allison is Railroad. Diego literally has no time for either of them. He’s chill with Allison, but won’t really go out of his way for the synth cause. He has no patience for the BoS agenda and constantly spits in the face of authority because he can and he’s Diego and that’s what he does.

When Luther finds out Klaus is a ghoul he has a massive crisis. This is the first crack in the BoS propaganda when he doesn’t shoot his brother for being what he is.

Instead of Nick Valentine (sorry Nick I still love u I swear) we have detective Patch who helps them find their way to Kellogg/The Handler. They find out the Commission told her to kidnap Five. Why? They don’t know.

Plot progresses pretty much evenly in comparison to the game except faster because super powers. When they find out you have to teleport into the Commission, they collectively lose their minds.

They teleport into the Commission-Institute. I think they’d follow the Minuteman route up to this point. Allison still gives the railroad info, but because the minutemen are neutral ground with Diego, they do all the stuff there. Anyway, so they get to the Commisstitute and find little Number Five. This is where I’m changing things. Five knows them. He’s awfully confused stating that they are “dead” and “how can they possibly be here”- which is when he just shuts down, and Father walks in.

The sibs take their turns threatening him obviously, demanding to know what he’s done to Five, and that’s when Father reveals that he is Number Five. That it’s been way longer than 17 years for him.

The Father Five timeline is this. The Handler kidnaps him from his family. She takes him to the Commission, which is basically just the Institute but with Reggie. Reggie convinces Five to stay. They need him because he hasn’t been tainted by the radiation, thus he’s the perfect model for the human synth that they’re creating. Reggie is super freaking old. Because he’s an alien and he can live longer than most people. (Yes aliens exists in Fallout this would totally still work). The Institute in Fallout was initially under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’ll go with that same premise here. He was in a similar type of place when the bombs fell, took shelter there and ended up creating the Commission. He is old and dying and desperate for solutions in returning the earth to normal, he thinks human synths are it, and of course, knew where some perfect untainted subjects were. So we have Five who is raised solely by Reggie until he dies and then is guided by the Handler. This Five loves his family, yes, but he’s lost sight of his original goal. He’s always been capable of terrible things, but now it’s worse, he isn’t concerned only with their happiness. Their survival yes, and also the survival of the world, but in a much crueler and colder manner.

His family is creeped out by this, especially by prototype child Five who Father Five states is their newest model. He has lots of kinks to work out, but he’s the first synth that they’ve successfully integrated his teleportation powers into.

Luther is having the biggest crisis of his life. Not only is one of his brother’s a ghoul, the other one is the leader of the evil organization that his organization is fighting. And then another version of him is also a synth.

Cue them being led around the Commission, meeting everyone etc. Lila is a synth there. Diego obviously gets her to flip and join the Railroad. They spend a lot of time with synth!Five who is, y’all guessed it, more the Five that we know and love and not this warped version that Father Five is.

Everyone is agreed on one thing though. The Commission needs to go. Which is where the railroad and the minutemen start tag teaming it. Luther has to make his decision to join his family or stay with the BoS. Of course, he chooses his family, but there’s a lot of struggle there. Taking down the Commission seems easy until they face Father Five. This a Five not afraid of harming his siblings, this is a Five who is doing this all for “their own good” this is a Fovd with years of experience under his belt, who has prepared himself for this exact scenario. It looks bad. But, of course, there’s one factor he didn’t take into account.

The synths are sentient. And, there is one person who knows him the best. Himself. Little synth!Five gives the siblings the edge they need to defeat Father Five. They don’t want to kill him. But they’ve got him under control. He’s sitting there beaten, broken, and tells them it doesn’t matter. He’s dying anyway. Some sort of cancer. (In accordance to the actual game). He tells them they might as well just leave him and move on. He’ll be dead soon anyways. (Cue crisis of faith and, even though he was literally just their enemy, sad boy hours for everyone)

The sibs depart bc they are on a time limit and blow up the Commission. Of course, there’s also them having to fight the Brotherhood of Steel later but I’ll just leave it there for now. Father Five, the original Five, ends up dying. Synth!Five is with them though. He was made with the blueprint of the original Five’s mind, so that paired with the year or so he’s had with the Commission leaves him cynical, bloodthirsty, and with pretty flexible morals, but he still has that deep love for his siblings, that desperate need to protect them. With synth!Five, the siblings find that they have a second chance with their brother.

[shoryubug]

Standing Up. Chapter 2: Andre Glacier

Ahhhh so it's been a while, and my laptop got back to me today...but I'm not feeling that great D: plus with everyone around me assuming it's the big plague going around (when in fact I don't interact with other humans so it's very much indeed just a dang cold), I haven't been in the best of moods to write...but I did promise as soon as I could that I'd get Standing Up continued, so I hope you guys don't hold it against me! Tumblr: Chapter 1, 2 (here), and Ao3 (for registered users).

Alya was always doing this kind of thing, pushing her ideas and thoughts and plans aside...it wasn’t just hers either. Continually she’d been witness to Alya doing the very same thing to Nino, and it was frustrating. It didn’t matter that it had just happened, Marinette wanted to stop thinking about it, so after stomping her way over to Rose and Juleka who were both outside the school gates, she wasn’t exactly angry, that would be too simple, she was more irritated. The fact that Alya continually railroaded her time and time again was frustrating, and the worst part was that it was getting to the point that Nadja Chamack wasn’t willing to trust her as much as a babysitter, so all the spare money that she was earning before was now reduced heavily, due to every instance that Alya was around both her and Manon.

"So Marinette, we got a trailer for Juleka’s bike so that we can all go to Canal Saint-Martin for the photographs, Luka said he’d meet us at your place so that we can all ride down there together because he found a place that we can all change in!" Rose gushed as Marinette had felt a wave of peace wash over her for a moment.

"Yeah, let’s just go to my place for all of it!" she said cheerily as the three of them made their way to the bakery, Rose waited outside guarding the bike while Juleka and Marinette had gone inside to gather a few piles of clothing, three outfits for each Juleka, Rose, and Luka, and Marinette’s mind began to wander to Juleka’s older brother for a moment while the pair of them silently went down the various rows of stairs to dump the folded piles of clothing in the trailer.

Luka was definitely a godsend to her in these moments, and she didn’t know what she would have done without his support. She had given up everything she felt before for Adrien, to give him and Kagami a fair chance at being together, because they were both her friends, and they both were interested in each other, and they both deserved to be happy...even if it had meant that she had to sacrifice the potential of any future she might have wanted with him. That wasn’t as important as the happiness of two of her friends, no matter how much it hurt her in the end.

Marinette found herself to still be lucky to have the support of friends like Juleka, Rose, Luka, Mylene, Alix, Kim, Nino, and of course Tikki in the moments that she could feel the weight of that sadness pulling her down and she was grateful for it. Not a lot of people in the world had that kind of support.

"Wasn’t there also some jewelry you wanted us to model?" Rose asked, breaking Marinette from her reverie.

"Ah-umm, yes, but I wanted it to be a surprise so let me go get the box, and once you’re getting dressed in the outfits you can choose what jewelry you want to model!" Marinette stated, rushing back up the stairs to search her room for the three boxes of jewelry she had packed away, each labeled with her three models names affixed in permanent marker, written in the same fancy script as what was on the T&S bakery door before she made her way back down the stairs.

"So, since you’re getting us ice cream after I kind of wanted to bring something up…" Juleka stated as Marinette turned her gaze to the girl, setting the boxes in the trailer then zipping the casing up and turning her gaze to the girl.

"Oh yeah! I wanted to know too, but I’m going to ride ahead to meet Luka! Please let me know the answer Juleka! I’m really curious!" Rose’s sweet voice broke through as Marinette nodded, trying to follow along confused while Rose grabbed a helmet from the trailer and sped off like a speed-demon, making Alix’s speed craze look tame in comparison.

"So...you had a question?" Marinette offered as she looked up at Juleka, admiring the girl’s beautiful figure and face.

"Well...everyone is assuming that your new flavors are hinted at Luka...but the colors seem more like you yourself, don’t you think?" Juleka’s question lingered between the two of them for a moment as Marinette sighed.

"I don’t really know what to think...I try not to think about the ice cream...I know my dad proposed to my mom with a scoop of it, but...I think I lost my faith in it when Andre was akumatized because I didn’t want to eat it." Marinette admitted, giving Juleka a knowing look.

"Wait he was akumatized because you didn’t want to eat ice cream?" Juleka asked, perplexed "I thought it was because something else happened, that’s what everyone made it sound like!"

"Well...Mylene, Ivan, Alya, and Nino invited me and Adrien to go get ice cream with them...a couples thing I guess...but Adrien couldn’t go, and I was upset, so I felt like a fifth wheel to them, you know, two pairs of couples and one single person...and when they all went to get their ice cream, he kind of...tried to force me to take some myself, claiming that it would 'make my true love materialize'" she used air quotes at that. "And I was fooled for a second, into thinking that this boy was Adrien for a moment...but then I dropped my ice cream and my appetite was gone, so I told him as much...and he insisted on making another one, and...I kind of said that I didn't believe ice cream could bring true love...that ice cream was just ice cream...and I left...everyone kind of followed after but mostly I just wanted to be alone..." she stated with a sigh before shaking her head.

"Wow...it sounds a lot more like he was being a jerk," Juleka whispered, and Marinette sighed.

"I don't know...I shouldn't have overreacted the way that I did...but I didn't know what to do...he was a grown man, and he wound up getting akumatized over it...and I don't know how long it took him to find me, luckily for me Chat Noir was with me that night, or I might have been turned into an ice cream sculpture..." she stated, wrapping her arms around her frame.

"You were with Chat Noir that night? You know how funny it would be if he was your true love? I mean, your old colors kind of match his too." Juleka offered as Marinette burst out into a fit of giggles.

"Yeah, right, me and Chat Noir. That's the best joke I've ever heard!" Marinette managed through her fit of giggles, though aware in the back of her mind that even the possibility of her and Chat Noir together was the making of something catastrophic.

It figures that it would start with the word cat too, effectively making it a pun. Ugh.

she thought, before bouncing in her step trying to match Juleka's pace.

As they had finally gotten to their destination after a few more minutes of chit-chat that was more lighthearted, Juleka and Rose had gone off to one bathroom while Luka stood and waited in one of the new outfits that he was modeling for her, a smile plastered on his face the moment that she'd approached him, and as he was about to speak she held up a finger to silence him, her eyes raking over every detail before she went to the trailer of the bike and came back with a small sewing kit, quickly setting up a ladder stitch on the back of the coat, while it was still on him, then pulling the seam to make it better fitted to his form.

"That looks much better...you were about to say something though? I'm really sorry for interrupting!" she murmured before he shook his head and smiled wider at her.

"Nothing, it's always great to watch you when you're in your own mind, it's like watching a rickshaw in action, something you just can't peel your eyes from because it's intricacies are too alluring." His compliments set her cheeks ablaze for a moment. Leave it to Luka to make her blush. "Anyway Ma-ma-ma-Marinette, how have you been? Rose said you were having some trouble earlier." He patted the space beside him, beckoning her forward. "You can always talk to me if you need...or not talk, you know." His intense aquatic gaze made her feel at ease for a moment.

"It's...It's not that it's bad or anything it's just that...Alya keeps...pushing my buttons. I mean...before when she tried to invite herself to everything I had always thought it was just her trying to be a good friend, but today it just felt too intrusive. She tried to pull Adrien and Lila in too, and just disregarded me telling her no...it was just...too much." she stated, giving a sigh. "I know I probably shouldn't have gotten so angry about it, but I couldn't help it! I mean, she just wouldn't listen! Sometimes she's so stubborn that I just...want to scream at her!" Marinette felt her eyes beginning to water. "I guess I kind of did today though, huh? So much for keeping my cool..." it was then that she had felt Luka's arms around her, embracing her tightly, the warmth of his body spilling into her like an ocean meeting the sand.

"You don't deserve to have your plans stomped on by anybody Marinette...standing up to her was the best thing that you could have done in this situation, maybe now she'll start to understand that she needs to take your requests seriously," Luka stated before he pulled away and his gaze met his sister's who had quickly turned away as if she were caught up in an embarrassing moment...though there was nothing embarrassing about it. Intimate maybe, but not embarrassing.

"Thank you, Luka...I guess I really needed to hear that," she stated before wiping at her eyes.

The photoshoot had gone well, each of the three models posting around the various spaces that Marinette wanted them to while she took multiple high-resolution photos from her phone, which now had a special magnifying lens affixed to it. All in all the four of them had fun, them in making new poses and her in fixing things up, jokes all around between them, and it was one of the happier moments that Marinette had experienced in a while, full of laughter and joy.

"So now that we're all done, do you guys still want to go for ice cream?" Marinette offered, pointing out the Andre Glacier ice cream cart to the trio. Juleka and Luka had simultaneously shrugged while Rose's wide ocean eyes had somehow gotten wider.

"Yes! Ice cream sounds amazing! We should all get our own though if that's okay! I'm just not in a sharing mood!" Rose stated which had made Juleka burst out in laughter. All of them had made their way over to the ice cream cart where Rose and Juleka had gone first.

"We'd like some ice cream please!" Rose stated in earnest as Andre had looked the duo over.

"Strawberry for her darling smile, blackberry for her hair, and blueberry for your ocean blue stare! This shall keep your love together through any affair!" Andre sang out, scooping out the ice cream and putting a cherry and two-scoop spoons on top, to which Rose gave a disappointed look, taking the ice cream to share with Juleka, before Marinette pursed her lips while Luka approached, being gifted some ice cream himself, the same pink and blue colors that he and Marinette had often gotten before Marinette had gotten to Andre.

"I'll take one of each of the previous sets please," Marinette stated as Andre gaped at her then awkwardly laughed.

"Ah, pretty Marinette! You know how the ice cream is here---" he began before Marinette's gaze turned to steel while she looked directly into Andre's eyes.

"As I said, I'll take one of each of the previous two sets of ice cream please." Her voice was cold, anger seeped into her words.

"That isn't how I run this stand Marinette--"

"This isn't a practical way to run a business Andre." She snapped before grabbing two five euro bills and slamming them on his stand before stomping off, notably without ice cream as she made her way over to the trio that had made their way to the bike as Juleka had taken leave on it, to go drop off the clothing and jewelry at Marinette's and the trailer at Rose's. Luka himself had been there with Rose who shrugged about it, though Marinette only sighed.

"So...do you wanna share?" Luka offered as Marinette shook her head 'no'.

"I'm fine...thank you though. I'm not really in the mood for ice cream...I was hoping Andre would be understanding, but apparently, he isn't." She murmured, as the first time that she'd gotten ice cream with her friends replayed in her mind for the second time that day. Irritation laced that memory, just as it had infected her formerly happy mood. "I think I'm gonna head home...actually...thank you guys for today, and let Juleka know that I'll get her some pastries for breakfast tomorrow to make up for what happened with Andre today..." Marinette offered as Luka nodded, Rose softly sighed.

"It's just too bad...I don't like this ice cream much now..." Rose whispered. "I think I might just go get it from stores from now on! You get more for your money in them!" Rose offered, joyously.

"That sounds like a plan to me!" Marinette stated. "I hope you guys have a great rest of the day! I've gotta study for this Friday's test in physics, I'll see you guys later!" She stated as she began to make her way home, no doubt to hear about how rude she'd been that day from Tikki, and get a lecture from her kwami...which she wasn't in the mood for.

@spicybelladonna @vixen-uchiha @doglover82 @captainmac6 @my-name-is-michell @schrodingers25 @mewwitch @princertain @geminikessa @legallyspawned @falling-electricxangel @miraculous-mango @novicevoice

[into-september]

Ending Chloé’s story as a villain will be a vaste of screentime and that’s why they shouldn’t

If I write eight paragraphs of analysis for the sake of contesting naysayers elsewhere then I might as well post it here

The thing with Chloé is that the story makes a huge point out of psychologising her and her awful personality, and to stress the point that it didn't come out of nowhere.

Chloé initially becomes Queen Bee to show her mother that she's "special" (enough to get to come along to New York), then again to save her father, and even when she joins Hawkmoth, she does it on the condition that he let her parents go. Sure, the bee signal throughout S3 is (mostly) your regular Chloé vanity, but it's still a thing that during every turning point in her rise and fall as a hero, she had a consistent and specific motivation that none of the others have had - and that motivation wasn't to be praised and admired.

Going into huge analysis of André and Audrey will probably be giving the writing of this show more scrutiny than it was ever meant to have, but I've said it elsewhere and I'll gladly say it again: Chloé's dad is trash, but he's not any more malicious than your average recurring character here. But her mother is hideously abusive. The show plays it as comedy, but put yourself in André and Chloé's shoes, and the joke isn't funny. We roll our eyes over the girl staging ridiculous videos about herself with her greatest idol and who thinks selfie collages constitute great art, but her own mother doesn't remember her name and tells her -  in front of friends and strangers alike - that she's worthless.

It's no coincidence that the girl who spends so much time inflating her own ego at the expense of others, has a mother who ruthlessly tears said ego apart and has probably been doing so for this girl's entire life. Those are tears in Chloé's eyes when she yells that she, too, can be exceptional.

There is absolutely no doubt that Chloé's bad behavior exists because the most important person in her life is her mother, and her mother is horrible. Chloé clearly emulates her mother ("ridiculous, utterly ridiculous!", "Jean what's-your-name"), and she is also desperate to be acknowledged by her. It's telling that the one time Chloé's mother DOES so, is when Chloé is at her worst behavior. Chloé loves her mother, like all children do, and she's too young, too sheltered, too stupid to realise just how wrong it is for her mother to treat her like she does. (or worse: she somehow reasons that she deserves the treatment, like she presumably reasons that her own victims deserve to be bullied)

The question is whether the lesson they're going for is that Chloé's bad personality traits are inherited, or if they are learned. There have been several episodes leaning towards the latter - Zombizou most blatantly, but I'd like to point out that when Chloé is acknowledged for doing good as Queen Bee, her response isn't to preen and brag. Chloé's bragging always comes out of self-concocted situations. When others are praising her - be it Ladybug or Miss Bustier - her reaction is always far more humble.

Connected to this, a point that I hardly see anyone bring up in this discussion is how Chloé hardly would've fallen if it hadn't been for continuous pushing on Lila's part and Nathalie setting up physical tripping wires in her path. The choice to ally herself with Hawkmoth was all Chloé's own, and I'm not here to defend it - but she was ruthlessly railroaded into making it. If you're going to insist that Chloé never wanted to be better, I'll have to disagree. Chloé might not have consciously wanted to be a different person, but like she was desperate to be acknowledged by her mother, she was desperate to be acknowledged by Ladybug. And from the way she was always better around Ladybug, I have no doubt that she eventually would have learned that good begets good outside the mask, too. It's pretty clear that she wouldn't have chosen the wrong side if she hadn't been convinced that nobody on the right side wanted her, and we've got a fair number of hints that Chloé, like most people, more than anything wants to be wanted. Too bad she thinks that the way to get this is to make people think she's better than them.

I'm not really out to defend Chloé as a person, because she's... yeah, not good. But the show has shown us where the not good comes from, and it has shown us that Chloé has the POTENTIAL to be turn away from those influences. And with how much time and attention has been spent on Chloé compared to every other secondary miraculous wielder on the show, I really hope they'll follow up that thread, and don't just dump it because - in Chloé's own words - once a villain, always a villain. 

[blackkudos]

Allen Allensworth

Allen Allensworth (7 April 1842 – 14 September 1914), born into slavery in Kentucky, escaped during the American Civil War and became a Union soldier; later he became a Baptist minister and educator, and was appointed as a chaplain in the United States Army. He was the first African American to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel. He planted numerous churches, and in 1908 founded Allensworth, California, the only town in the state to be founded, financed and governed by African Americans.

During the American Civil War, he escaped by joining the 44th Illinois Volunteers and later served two years in the navy. After being ordained as a minister, he worked as a teacher, studied theology and led several churches. In 1880 and 1884, he served as the only black delegate from Kentucky in the Republican National Conventions. In 1886, he gained an appointment as a military chaplain to a unit of Buffalo Soldiers in the West and served in the US Army for 20 years, retiring in 1906.

In addition to his work in developing churches, he was notable for founding the township of Allensworth, California in 1908; it was intended as an all-black community. Although environmental conditions inhibited its success as a farming community and the residents abandoned it after a few generations, much of the former town has been preserved as the Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park. It marks the founders' dream and the thriving community that developed for some time.

Biography

Early life and education

Born into slavery in Louisville, Kentucky in 1842, Allensworth was the youngest of thirteen children of Phyllis (c. 1782 - 1878) and Levi Allensworth. Over the years, their family was scattered: his sister Lila escaped with her intended husband to Canada by the Underground Railroad; and the older boys William, George, Frank, Levi and Major were sold downriver to plantations in the Deep South, which continued to buy enslaved workers from the Upper South to develop the cotton industry. Mary Jane was his only sibling who grew up in Kentucky and married there; she purchased her freedom in 1849, gaining stability.

His mother was held by A.P. and Bett Starbird. The mistress assigned Allen as a young slave to her son Thomas. When the Starbird boy started school, Allen began to learn from him, although it was illegal. After his father died when Allen was young, his mother chose to be sold as a cook to a neighbor, the attorney Nat Wolfe. When the Starbirds found Allen was learning to read, they separated him from their son and placed him with another family, the Talbots. Mrs. Talbot, a Quaker, was kind to Allen and continued to teach him to read and write; she also took him to a Sunday school for slave children. When Bett Starbird discovered this, she took Allen back. In 1854 she made arrangements with her husband's partner John Smith to send the boy to his brother Pat's plantation down the Mississippi River in Henderson, Kentucky, to put an end to his learning. On the steamboat, the boy was placed in the care of a slave steward rather than being chained with other slaves below deck. They were being transported for sale to downriver markets.

Hebe Smith, Allen's new mistress, assigned him to be a houseboy; she prohibited him from continuing his studies, and whipped him for trying to do so. Also working in the household was a white orphan boy Eddie; the two boys became friends and helped each other. Suffering on the farm from a cruel overseer, in 1855 at age 13, Allen planned to escape to Canada. He spent two weeks hiding at a neighboring farm before returning to the Smiths for punishment. Later he ran away again. The Smiths and Starbirds agreed to sell him on the auction block in Henderson.

Allensworth was sold again in Memphis, Tennessee and shipped to New Orleans. There he was bought by Fred Scruggs, who taught him to work as an exercise boy and jockey in Jefferson, Louisiana. Unlike others, his new master was pleased to learn that the boy could read; he assigned him to race his best horse.

Civil War and freedom

In early 1861 the Civil War loomed, but horse racing continued. Scruggs took Allen and his horses upriver for the fall meet in Louisville. Allensworth hoped to see his mother Phyllis again, as he had learned that her last master, a Rev. Bayliss, had freed her after she cared for his dying wife. He found that she had recently gone to New Orleans with a Union man to look for her sons. (She found Major in prison.) Waiting for her return, Allensworth was reunited with his sister Mary Jane, who had married and had a son. She had purchased her freedom in 1849. When Phyllis Starbird returned to Louisville, she and Allen were reunited.

While working nearby on a farm where Scruggs' deputy had placed him, Allensworth met soldiers from the 44th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, a Union unit encamped near Louisville. When he told them of wanting freedom, they invited him to join the Hospital Corps. In disguise, he marched with the unit past his old master through Louisville and off to war. After serving as a civilian nursing aide for some time, he was invited to accompany Dr. A. J. Gordon, one of the surgeons, to his home in Georgetown, Ohio. There Allensworth dined with Gordon's family, was given a room of his own, and felt he first walked as a free man. With the war continuing, in 1863 Allensworth enlisted in the US Navy, where he earned his first pay as a free man. He was soon promoted to Captain's steward and clerk, and served on the gunboats Queen City and Tawah for two years.

Postwar years

Allensworth first returned to Kentucky to work and study. In 1868 he joined his brother William in St. Louis, where they operated two restaurants. Within a short time, they received a favorable offer and sold them out; Allensworth returned to Louisville. He worked while putting himself through the Ely Normal School, one of several new schools in the South established by the American Missionary Association. During Reconstruction, Allensworth taught at schools for freedmen and their children operated by the Freedmen's Bureau. Inspired by his own teaching, he began attending courses at the Nashville Institute, later known as the Roger Williams University, but did not graduate. The school later gave him an honorary Master of Arts.

Allensworth became involved with the Baptist Church in Louisville and attended the Fifth Street Baptist Church led by Henry Adams. He was ordained in 1871 by the Baptists as a preacher. In the 1870s, Allensworth went to Tennessee to study theology. During this time he also served as a preacher in Franklin, Tennessee, south of Nashville.

In 1875, Allensworth started working as a teacher in Georgetown, Kentucky. He also served as the financial agent of the General Association of the Colored Baptists in Kentucky. They had joined together to support the founding of a religious school for black teachers and preachers. Allensworth was among the founders of The State University, helped guarantee the salary of the president in the early years, and served on the Board of Trustees.

He returned to Louisville when called to be pastor of the Harney Street Baptist Church, which he reorganized, attracting many new members. They renamed it Centennial Baptist Church; it was selected as a model by the American Baptist Home Mission Society of America. Within a few years, Allensworth had increased the congregation nearly fivefold, and it built a new church.

Marriage and family

In 1877 he married Josephine Leavell (1855–1938), also born in Kentucky; they had met while studying at Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee. She was an accomplished pianist, organist and music teacher. They had two daughters together, Eva and Nella.

The year of his marriage, Allensworth invited his mother to live with him and Josephine. They had several months together before she died in 1878 at the age of 96.

Post-Reconstruction era

Allensworth was called to the State Street Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He also gave public lectures. That fall, he went to Boston to give a series of lectures, after studying public speaking in Philadelphia.

On his return, he met people from the American Baptist Publication Society in Philadelphia, who appointed him as Sunday School Missionary for the state of Kentucky. He had always worked to build up the Sunday Schools at his churches, and this gave him the chance to continue to work on education around the state. The Colored Baptist State Sunday School Convention of Kentucky appointed him to the position of State Sunday School Superintendent.

With his leadership positions and public speaking, Allensworth became increasingly interested in politics. In 1880 and 1884, he was selected as Kentucky's only black delegate to the Republican National Conventions.

Military career as chaplain

In 1886, when he was 44, Allensworth gained support by both southern and northern politicians for appointment as a chaplain in the US Army; his appointment was confirmed by the Senate, as necessary at the time, and approved by the president. He was one of the few black chaplains in the US Army and was assigned to the 24th Infantry Regiment, known as the Buffalo Soldiers. His family accompanied him on assignments in the West, ranging from Fort Bayard, New Mexico Territory to Fort Supply, Indian Territory, and Fort Harrison, near Helena, Montana. His wife played organ in the fort chapels.

At Fort Bayard, Allensworth wrote Outline of Course of Study, and the Rules Governing Post Schools of Ft. Bayard, N.M.. The Army adapted these for use as the standard manual on the education of enlisted personnel.

By the time of his retirement in 1906, Allensworth had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, the first African American to gain that rank.

Allensworth, California

After the army, Allensworth and his family settled in Los Angeles. He was inspired by the idea of establishing a self-sufficient, all-black California community where African Americans could live free of the racial discrimination that pervaded post-Reconstruction America. His dream was to build a community where black people might live and create "sentiment favorable to intellectual and industrial liberty."

In 1908, he founded Allensworth in Tulare county, about thirty miles north of Bakersfield, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. The black settlers of Allensworth built homes, laid out streets, and put up public buildings. They established a church, and organized an orchestra, a glee club, and a brass band.

The Allensworth colony became a member of the county school district and the regional library system and a voting precinct. Residents elected the first African-American Justice of the Peace in post-Mexican California. In 1914, the California Eagle reported that the Allensworth community consisted of 900 acres (360 ha) of deeded land worth more than US$112,500.

Allensworth soon developed as a town, not just a colony. Among the social and educational organizations that flourished during its golden age were the Campfire Girls, the Owl Club, the Girls' Glee Club, and the Children's Savings Association, for the town's younger residents, while adults participated in the Sewing Circle, the Whist Club, the Debating Society, and the Theater Club. Col. Allensworth was an admirer of the African-American educator Booker T. Washington, who was the founding president and longtime leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Allensworth dreamed that his new community could be self-sufficient and become known as the "Tuskegee of the West".

The Girls' Glee Club was modeled after the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, who had toured internationally. They were the community's pride and joy. All the streets in the town were named after notable African Americans and/or white abolitionists, such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The dry and dusty soil made farming difficult. The drinking water became contaminated by arsenic as the water level fell.

The year 1914 also brought a number of setbacks to the town. First, much of the town's economic base was lost when the Santa Fe Railroad moved its rail stop from Allensworth to Alpaugh. In September, during a trip to Monrovia, California, Colonel Allensworth was crossing the street when he was struck and killed by a motorcycle. The town refuses to die. The downtown area is now preserved as Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park where thousands of visitors come from all over California to take part in the special events held at the park during the year. The area outside the state park is also still inhabited.

Allensworth is the only California community to be founded, financed and governed by African Americans. The founders were dedicated to improving the economic and social status of African Americans. Uncontrollable circumstances, including a drop in the area's water table, resulted in the town's decline.

Legacy and honors

The state has preserved the site and is gradually restoring its buildings. The most important building is the school house, which the community prized as representing the future of its children. In use until 1972, it is furnished as it would have been on a school day in 1915. The park arranges special events to celebrate the former community's history, and the park's visitor center features a film about the site. An annual re-dedication ceremony reaffirms the vision of the original pioneers.

Col. Allensworth's residence is preserved and furnished in the 1912-period style. It contains items from his life in the military service and the ministry. A small display of farm equipment is a reminder of the Allensworth economic base.

A public monument, designed by Ron Husband, has been funded by the City of Monrovia, California.

Death

Allen Allensworth died at the age of 72, on September 14, 1914. He was killed by a motorcyclist in Monrovia, California.

[gomustanggirl16]

What's your favorite scene that you've written for With Love From The Hastings

I have no idea when you sent this or why I haven’t answered before, but so far my favorite is a scene is a tie between two I actually never used. And have been waiting and trying to integrate for over a year now, but unfortunately tbey just never fit. The first was supposed to take place a little bit after the first hospital visit and I ultimately decided not to use it because I took the chapter in a different route and the second takes place in Chapter 13 right before Sharon shows up. I didn’t end up using it because it was an early draft that took place in a happier setting and was before I decided to have Nat find out Steve was reporting back to Fury on her. I also thought I lost them due to the Great Deletion of 2018, but I didn’t! So that being said here they are:

“HeyNat?” Steve said getting Natasha’s attention.

“Yeah?”Natasha looked up giving him her attention.

“CanI ask you something?” Natasha smirked.

“Technicallyyou already have. Twice.” Steve rolled his eyes and she kicked his leg with herfoot playfully. “What is it?”

Stevehesitated a moment trying to find the right words, like he wasn’t sure heshould be asking what he was about to ask.

“Yousaid before the start of all this, before we agreed to take it on that younever really planned on having kids. Why? I mean I think I know why anyone inthis business wouldn’t want to, but still.”

Thatcaught her off guard. Why wasn’t she interested in having kids of her own? Wellbesides having that option taken from her? Her entire life is reason enough.

“I’msorry, I shouldn’t have asked, it’s just-and no I’m not being stereotypical,but the girls really take to you and I don’t know maybe I’m just trying tofigure it out for myself to.”

Natashasighed setting aside her tablet.

“Well,besides the job? I’ve got a ledger full of red and a long line of people who’dlove nothing more than to watch me suffer. It just seems selfish and cruel toput a child in their line of sight like that all because they came from me.Besides, I wouldn’t even know what to do with myself.” Simple, neat, andstraight to the point. Steve nodded.

“Yeah,you got a point there, but you seem to be finding plenty to do.” Natasha smiledshaking her head.

“Becauseit’s a mission directive. It’s an order. To actually want this on my own? Noone giving orders, creating this life myself?” She shook her head. “It’s awhole lot different.”

“Youknow for someone who calls themselves a spy, you talk a lot like a soldier.”

“GuessI’m a bit of both.” Natasha returned, “My turn, why don’t you ever go out onthose dates? I mean I know you had someone back then, but not even one just totry? So, what if it doesn’t turn out to be more at least you put yourself outthere and maybe gained a friend.”

Stevesighed taking a sip of his beer.

“Yes,that’s all true, but the thing you gotta understand Nat, is that for me? Iremember hitting the ice, I remember losing consciousness and it was just likeI blinked and suddenly I’m waking up at SHIELD. Two, maybe three minutes tops,was what it felt like for me. Not seventy years. It felt like I closed my eyes,I’m not fully asleep, but almost and what was meant to be a short half hour napturns into twelve hours. Some days I still have trouble comprehending it all.Afraid that I’ll wake up back there and learn this was the dream. Trust me,I’ve thought about it, but I feel like I should have it more together before tryingto start something like that.”

“That’sfair, I guess,” Natasha never realized how jarring waking up really must havebeen for him. How haunting it must be. It’s an honest to god miracle he’s asstable as he is.

“Howabout you?” Natasha raised an eyebrow.

“Whatabout me?” Natasha countered.

“Idon’t think I’ve ever heard about you going out on a date once. For someonewho’s constantly trying to set me up, you seem to be lacking in that areayourself. Ow!” Steve laughed as she punched him the shoulder.

“Youknow it’s rude to ask a lady about her love life.”

“Iknow, but I was referring to you-hey!” Steve blocked her next punch that was alittle off thanks to her laughter.

“You’resuch an ass!”

“Stilldoesn’t answer my question.” Natasha groaned sitting back again.

“Wellif you must know, I don’t really do the whole dating thing. When your codenames the Black Widow it tends to scare people off. I’ve had a few one nightstands here and there in the past, but it was usually a quickie in a clubbathroom. Goes along with my earlier statement.”

Shecould tell she’d caught him off guard with her honesty, but it was true. Whenyou’ve spent your entire life seducing people into bed only to off them afterthey’ve given you what you want, having a real relationship just doesn’t feelright.

“Holdup! Are you telling me you’ve never in your life been out on a real date?”Natasha frowned.

“Really?Out of everything I just told you that’s what you get stuck on?” He shrugged,and she rolled her eyes. “Of course, I’ve been out on a date! More times thanI’d like to admit.”

“Thosewere all for a mission. You just said you don’t date.” Natasha’s mask falteredas she realized her slip up. Steve seemed to realize it too.

“Natasha…whenwas the last time you actually kissed someone? As you not the Widow, or for SHIELD.” Steve was challenging her, shecould see it.

Natashashifted in her seat trying to come up with something, anything. Well the last guy she kissed as herself was also the lastguy she fucked, which if she recalls was Clint’s farmhand Paul at Lila’schristening three-oh god.

“Okayso it’s been a little while.” Natasha said into her drink and Steve put hishand up to his ear.

“I’msorry I didn’t catch that.” Natasha mumbled into her drink again before Stevepulled it away and she huffed.

“Fine!Three years happy.” Steve’s eyes went wide, and she nearly smacked him again.

“Andyou’re the one questioning me about the last time I kissed someone?” She glareddaggers at him.

“Isuggest you sleep with one eye open tonight Rogers. You might wake up with someundesired damage done.”

“Oh,come on Nat…seriously though, when’s the last date? You don’t really strike meas an on the first date every time person.”

Natashatried to recall if she’d ever actually dated, but she couldn’t. She was raisedto be a weapon to make a life for herself.

“Ihaven’t.” Natasha answered timidly making Steve’s brow furrow in confusion.

“Youhaven’t what?”

“Haven’tbeen on a date.” Natasha huffed.

“Ever?”

“Never.”Natasha said, lips in a taught line and Steve’s expression fell. Natasha sighedrunning a hand through her hair.

“Alright,come on let’s have it. I’m sure you’ve got plenty to say.” Steve shook hishead.

“So,your first date was with a mark?”

Natashanodded.

“Firstkiss?”

Anothernod.

“First…”He couldn’t finish that one, but she nodded knowing what he was asking, unableto hold his gaze any longer.

Momentspassed as he watched her, and she felt like she was in front of a firing squad.No one, not even Clint had asked her about that, well besides the SHIELD shrinkshe’d been forced to see, but everyone else just didn’t think about it ordidn’t ask. She doesn’t remember pulling her legs up to hug herself, but shealmost felt like she couldn’t breathe.

“How…”

“Twelve,maybe thirteen.” Natasha responded in a whisper.

“Iwas gonna ask how long you worked for them, but…” Steve let out a harsh breathand she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He was mad, no he waspissed.

“Pleasesay something.” He opened and closed his mouth a few times and she began toworry what he would think of her now. Would he look down on her? Sure, hedidn’t before, but clearly, he never anticipated for her to have gotten such anearly start. Would he be disgusted by her?

“Whatthe hell did they do just kidnap you up off the street?” Natasha looked back upat him, nodded and watched as his face fell completely. She watched theemotions flash in his eyes, horror, disgust, anguish, fury…

“God…Nat-”

“Don’t.”Natasha said cutting him off before he had the chance to give her the usualsentiments. He nodded leaning his elbows on his knees. Neither spoke for quitesome time not knowing what to say. She was still shocked at how easy it was forher to tell him those things. Then again, it’s easiest to keep a secret when noone wants to know.

“Thankyou.” Natasha frowned looking over to Steve.

“Forwhat?”

“Fortrusting me.” That shouldn’t have been as much of a relief as it was, but stillit made her feel a little lighter and she gave him a hint of a smile.

“Youhave no idea…”

#2

Lancaster was a little over an hour’s drive west of them, but the roads were open andtraffic minimal for a Saturday. All around them were tall oak and sycamoretrees with pine and maple mixed in painting a beautifully calm scenery. The airwas different, not stale like the city or stuffy, fresh and clean (besides theoccasional waft of manure). Everywhere you looked you could see for miles,large stretches of farm land and mountain ranges. Lexi would stretch pointingout the window at the many horse farms they passed excited by every single one.

She’d done some research last night looking at whatthey could do deciding to just spend the day. Steve was fine with it and whileyes, she could be mission focused, she loved just walking around the cities andstreets of the places she went when she could. You could tell a lot aboutpeople by the way they live. Either way she’d bought tickets for the StrasburgRail Road thinking maybe Lexi would like it and Steve though, she more or less wantedsomething to tease him about.

They arrived at the railroad and saw a few dozen otherfamilies walking around. She could feel Lexi bouncing in her car seat andlooked back to find her tugging at her seatbelt. They got out of the car andLexi looked around, jumping a bit at the sound of the trains whistle. Natashagrabbed Ellie from her seat and put her hat on before allowing Lexi to pull herforward because she absolutely knewwhere she was going or why.

“Open car?” Steve asked as they boarded the train andLexi hopped into the seat closest to the window. “You know that hats gonna flyright off, right?”

Natasha scowled.

“The hat stays on. It’s a steam train from themid-eighteen hundred, it’s barely moving faster than you drive.” Steve chuckledshaking his head as he sat down across from them.

At Natasha’s insistence, Lexi sat down as the trainstarted moving as she mimicked the sounds of the whistle laughing. Sure enough,Lexi stood up again and Natasha quickly grabbed her by the waist to keep herfrom falling out the window. Steve just raised an eyebrow and she knew he waswaiting for the damned hat to go flying.

“It’s not coming off.” Natasha repeated, and thebastard just smiled and returned to pointing at things for Ellie as she stoodup on his legs.

It was halfway through the trip that Lexi just sohappened to lean a little bit forward and the hat caught wind. Natasha snatchedit though quickly stuffing it next to her.

“Told you.” Steve smirked.

“It doesn’t count if you catch it.”

“It still came off her head.” Natasha glared sittingLexi on her lap to keep the girl from leaning more over the side.

“This was a good idea.”

Steve said later that day as they left the localfarmers market. It was hard to find good fruits and vegetables especiallyaround this time of year. Not to mention she found out that bargaining gets youeverywhere. A lot of the market consisting of Amish farmers who were more thanwilling to barter with you for a fair price.

So far, she’d found peaches, grapes, raspberries, mostgreens, eggplants she had plans to use tonight, gorgeous air loom tomatoes,along with ripe fresh ones she planned on canning with the peaches and pears,and a small basket of apples they’d gone and picked right off the treethemselves. Lexi had a lot of fun doing that as she sat on Steve’s shoulders toreach the best ones to put in the little basket the lady at the entrance handedher.

“Thank you.”

Steve chuckled.

“Your welcome, but I have to ask what on earth are youplanning on doing with all that?”

She considered her baskets and bags she’d brought tocarry everything.

“Canning, the late season finds and baby food for Ellie,maybe applesauce and were having Eggplant Parmesan for dinner.” Steve nodded inresponse and as they were about to leave, an older man stopped them.

“Might you guys like a photo before you go?”

“Yes.” Lexi answered for them and Steve looked up ather from where she still sat on his shoulders.

“Sure.” Natasha said pulling out her phone.

They stood against the backdrop of the farmers marketas she held Ellie and Steve slipped his arm around her waist. They all smiled,Lexi and Ellie’s cheeky.

“Such a beautiful family! One more, how ‘bout a kissfor your wife?” The man asked, and Natasha instinctively tilted her head up tomeet Steve’s lips.

He reacted almost instantly this time and her breath caught as he pulled her a littlecloser by the waist. It was slower this time and she was a little surprised tofind his lips moving with hers. It didn’t last long though as Natasha heardLexi giggle and parted from Steve’s lips as Lexi laughed for whatever reasontwo-year old’s laugh. She accepted her phone back from the man before theyheaded back to the car.

I have so many more, but these are the ones I remember the most XD I have fill in and all that, that I simply didn’t have time for or just didn’t fit in, and I hope to use some of it eventually, but most likely won’t. Anyways thanks for asking!

[halloweenvalentine1997]

A short story I made out of short stories I’ve written under other names.

When she died, I felt a series of perforations, hollows and bruises

about my skull. I saw her die behind static.

By the stone wall adjacent to the office supplies store, I

bewailed her, screaming,

burning myself later with the tip of a lit cigarette.

I put ash and poison on my wrist for the ones who died.

I wanted to pick a strawberry off the plant in my parents’ backyard

and once more taste its succulence. I wanted to impale my head with the

iron tip of a weathervane. Slice open my vibrant red aorta.

Seeing them all in a hole

through the light emitting

through the asylum blinds.

I myself am a corpse in a bed

in the forensics ward,

green moths on my blanket,

rotting silently in a pastel grave,

killed by medicine,

wasted by time.

If you come close enough to hear my thoughts

(like a chemically-enhanced ghost)

distort and clamor

amongst the traffic, the television,

the noise a death in a family brings,

I will let loose my hatred

like a ribbon from hair,

unraveling red Medusa strands.

I will draw more ribbons on your flesh

if you touch me,

bleed you into the wood,

hammer a nail into your heartline,

devour your fear like a shot of amphetamine

to my malevolent blood.

2013

Stacey

1.

Some of us are the river’s current, floating through life swiftly or slowly, as if in a trance of somnambulism. Some of us are a human shell at its edge, refusing to follow its pattern and be a part of it. Why follow them when you can live on the fringes of society, away from its stigmas and scrutinizing scorn?

2.

When Ellie married Samuel Barnes, the world was a rose-gold utopia. Three years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Ellie no longer felt that the chemistry they had once remained. On a windy September afternoon, when she returned to the red-brick bungalow she shared with Samuel on Hillsam Avenue, Ellie heard moans and sounds of sexual ecstasy emitting from their bedroom. Another woman was there. Ellie’s eyes instantly began to burn like hot coals in a campground grill. She examined her wedding portrait on the wall of the hallway as she moved in slow motion through it. They had been photographed in front of the church’s stained glass windows, a spectrum of color radiating behind the couple adorned in black and white.

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, blinking through the lake of sorrow in her dark eyes, and suppressing a sob, pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Another dark-haired woman Ellie didn’t recognize was riding Samuel, and when she registered the door slamming open, she turned around wide-eyed with a cry of alarm, her brown nipples in full view.

“I knew it,” Ellie told Samuel bitterly. “I knew for at least a year that there was someone else!”

Samuel looked at his wife blankly and didn’t reply, his face almost smug.

“Who are you?” Ellie shrieked at the strange woman.

“Lila Stern,” the woman replied. “And clearly, Sam doesn’t love you anymore. He loves me. He has for the entire year you suspected something was going on. We would both like you to leave.”

“Don’t dictate what I will do in my own house, you fucking homewrecker!” Ellie shouted. Lila, remembering her nudity, covered herself with the indigo comforter.

“I agree with Lila,” Samuel said. “Just pack your things and go, Ellie. You’ve been a nagging, paranoid pain in my ass for too long. You’re in need of a psychiatrist, but you won’t pay heed to my advice. All you are lately is a cold fish who’s no fun. A fucking schoolmarm. Find an apartment somewhere. Leave.”

“Now,” Lila said.

Ellie slammed the door shut and bolted down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife she could find. Tested its point with the tip of her index finger. A small blood-drop formed in the small pad of flesh. Although Ellie’s tears rained down like heated glass, she felt no physical pain.

I won’t pack my things, she thought. I have a better idea.

She glanced at the neon green digital clock above the oven. It read 1:11 p.m. It was September 24th. As she placed the knife into the pocket of her navy blue peacoat, grabbed her smartphone, scrawled a quick note and left the house, Ellie knew what to do. No more morning to afternoon shifts as a psychiatric nurse at St. Mary Medical Center’s psych unit. No more wondering when Samuel would be home from his nightly excursions. As she walked towards the river, passing the other houses, the Texaco, the railroad tracks, the boarded-up, shutdown factories, memories flashed before her. She remembered her lonely childhood, her even more tumultuous adolescence where she slept with a crowbar in her pillowcase and read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird at the edge of the schoolyard grass away from everyone.

“I wish you’d never been born,” Ellie’s mother told her, swilling red wine from a tall, dark bottle.

“I second that,” her father said, puffing on a fat cigar. Once she made it to the river, Ellie collapsed like a house of cards to the white sand, and howled the loss of her love into the godless sky. She glanced from side to side to make sure no one was watching. She couldn’t be sure if someone was for all the foliage and bushes. But she didn’t care. She sat there for the longest time, her breathing a series of hyperventilation. Samuel’s face was all she could see, then Lila’s, the two of them like a rotating holographic image. She wanted her cremated ashes bequeathed to the river. She wanted no tomb in the town cemetery. No funeral. The note she wrote with these directions was in her left pocket of her coat. Such a heavy coat for the nice weather, but Ellie was always cold. Her body, feather-boned and catatonic, slumped over a large rock and she let the tears wet it like a water nymph mourning the loss of a handsome sailor on a receding boat.

Ellie turned on her cell phone and listened to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” one last time. It sounded faint above the river’s churning. Just like the woman in the song, she too had an non-devoted, careless husband. She wept hardest at the chorus:

Where is my John Wayne?


Where is my prairie song?


Where is my happy ending?


Where have all the cowboys gone?

“To greener pastures,” Ellie said to herself. “To rose-gold utopias I’ll never see.“

3.

The clock on the wall of Mrs. Sykes’s math class ticked in time to my heartbeat. The hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I crave marijuana was there, screaming like a lacuna asking to be filled. The time for more recalcitrance (in this case, truancy and drug use by the river) was near. While Mrs. Sykes droned on like a monotonous honeybee about the Pythagorean theorem, I got up from my desk and slung my backpack over my shoulders. Her gunmetal grey eyes followed me to the door with the poster of the Power Rangers on it, all teamed up together. Always use the buddy system, the poster said.

“Where are you going, Stacey?” Mrs. Sykes asked.

“Skipping class,” I told her. “And dropping out when I turn eighteen in February. This is non-negotiable. You can’t stop me.”

Before my teacher could retaliate, I flounced out of the room, leaving the scoffing and titters of my peers behind me. I left my textbooks in my locker to lessen the load in my backpack. I unzipped a small pocket and grinned at the verdant green pot in its glass pipe.

Jimmy Stirling is the one who introduced me to pot when I was a junior a year before. He was a senior, and one of Lewis and Clark High School’s few homeless students. His dad was a cantankerous drunk and gambler who threw him out. Jimmy spent time singing songs on the sidewalk for spare change, or sleeping at the homeless shelter for adolescents. For someone who was homeless, Jimmy frequently had a remarkably full tin can of bills and change. His singing voice was a rich alto tearing pleasantly through the downtown breeze. On October of last year, he found me crying under the highway after school let out. I recognized him from my creative writing class.

"What’s wrong, Stacey?” he asked.

“My brother’s locked in the loony bin. He’s possessed. He killed Alvin, my guinea pig. Everything is falling apart, and to top it all off, Liam broke up with me this morning.”

"Man, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You every try marijuana? It might make you forget all that stuff.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said, knowing that anyone with marijuana downtown expected payment in return for it.

“That’s alright. I have some I’ll share for free. Let’s sit in my favorite place to do it.”

I followed him, listening to him sing as we walked the few blocks to an alleyway with a set of cement stairs against a condemned apartment, leading to a bolted door. He sang Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself To Live.” We sat on the bottom step . He loaded the pot into a glass bowl and taught me how to light it, how to inhale the hit of smoke without exhaling it too soon. I caught the gist of it. Suddenly, within a few minutes, everything was funny. My mind was suddenly devoid of all negativity. I was giggly, light as a tumbleweed blown by a gale of fierce wind. I felt energetic, talkative, and happier that I’d been a long time. Shortly after my day with Jimmy, I learned he went to jail for getting caught with Ecstasy tablets in his lockers. He was also rumored to be selling cocaine and heroin downtown. He wasn’t allowed back at school. I never saw him again. The flashbacks vanished when I approached the river and saw her. She was a woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a peacoat, jeans and pair of black loafers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what she was doing. The woman older than me by at least a decade, was holding a kitchen knife to the veins in her right wrist. She made no sound when she punctured them, her hand dangling over the water. I watched her bloodletting turn part of the emerald river red. It was spouting out like the slashed throat of a sacrificed farm animal. She turned and saw me when i stepped on a twig by accident and snapped it in two.

“Go away,” the woman told. “Believe me, you should be letting this happen.”

She took in my red ringlets, my sharp green eyes, my pink hoodie, my Converse sneakers. Then she went for her throat with her knife and slit it open with perfect finesse. There was a vibe coming off of this woman that insinuated I should just let her die. I could sense that her life had been miserable and mean. I sat on a rock out of sight of the dying woman and got high, thinking of her spirit rising, transcendental and free, into the sun and clouds. I thought of how the first settlers of the city I live in came here 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Before there were cemeteries, they buried their dead in unmarked graves. I thought of all the skeletons that must be under the grass of the lawns and parks, the sidewalks, the urban streets. I thought of the days of religious fanaticism, and how had I been born then, I would have been buried in unconsecrated ground for my heathen ways. I didn’t believe in god, but I did believe in Satan.

2019

Stacey

I am not sure exactly when my family died. Before they died, I was a genuinely innocent soul whose conscience burned to a crisp. I couldn’t blame myself for it, but I didn’t know who to blame because the ones responsible for my family’s death never came out of their disguises, synthetic human skin and features made to look exactly like my family members would look if they were really there amongst you. I still hear them call to me over highway noise and wind, while I’m taking hits off a meth pipe or smoking a cigarette on an overpass with dead eyes and no ache. I’ve already ached so much. Without them I am a branch breaking off of a tree. It’s hard to explain what I mean by disguises; they look so much like my family but aren’t. They could look like anyone and they’re wearing synthetic skin designed to look like my mom and dad.

I am Stacey Galloway. I was born to a family that never loved me but that I tried to love fiercely. I may have turned into a drug-addled street kid but I still wanted them to love me, anyway. I remember when I first suspected them to be dead. I was sitting in my old apartment in the living room with a scream in my ears that sounded like my mother’s emanating from my laptop and whirling through the dusty air like a trap I would remained enveloped in. I heard a chainsaw start up and then the sound stopped. It was like an audio recording that just stayed there screaming and sawing in my computer speakers. The voices told me my parents were dead and replaced by “skin masks.”

I asked, “What is a skin mask?” “Synthetic skin made to look like your parents. Exactly like your parents. And your younger brother,” a man replied out of thin air. “Someone else is wearing skin that looks like them now. Every feature of your family has been replicated, special contact lenses have been made, someone with the same height as them is wearing skin masks.”

I couldn’t see him but maybe he could see me. I hoped not. What he was saying was too horrible to want to comprehend. It’s humanly possible to do this, with the aid of a lot of fake skin and ways of knowing how the victim worked, how they spoke, where they lived, whom they spoke to. I will never know that world and don’t want to. It’s insidious enough just to live in the city I live in, gone and waking up with ice in my chest in a house that is now unfamiliar and rearranged. All I want to do is get high to forget about it, and it’s worked after awhile.

I know the police will do nothing because I don’t know how to explain it without dying or not making sense. I never wanted this.

I never wanted to lose the only lifeline I had.

So after the voices came from my laptop and told me these things, I left my apartment, locked it and went to the stone wall by the office supplies store about a mile away. I sat there in the gravel and lit a cigarette, the parking lot blurring through my wet eyes. I didn’t know why I believed what I was hearing, but I was anorexic and schizophrenic, and didn’t know how to not believe something that seemed so real. Before all this, I heard voices talk to me in my room that really were there. No one was physically present around me, but their voices reverberated throughout my walls, my silent television, my closed laptop.

“We’re going to kill your family,” said the voices.

I didn’t believe them. I didn’t reply. I thought they were full of shit.

Now I know they’re not, because although the identity thieves of my family are never in prison, the handwriting of my parents has changed, and so have the cadence of their voices. They speak in European accents now when they think they’re alone and that I’m out of earshot. But I can hear them. It’s hard to understand what they’re saying. It’s plain English, but indecipherable at the same time.  My brother’s identity was never actually stolen. He is eighteen and currently going to college. I am twenty-three and never doing anything with my life again. I’m in the loony bin.

I stare through the green and blue in the slit in the blinds and think about the house I grew up in, a green bungalow in the middle of a golden field of grass, a porch swing, wind chimes and an attic window that never lit up. My father always told me our attic was full of asbestos and that it could cause mesothelioma to inhale it after years of exposure to it.

“But,” he said, “there is no asbestos in the rest of the house. You’re safe.”

In the backyard, my mother grew strawberries and tomatoes. There was a one-car garage and a deck, a wooden fence and a glass picnic table with chairs surrounding it. I remember days, years of smoking marijuana in my room and listening to music. Grey smoke filling the room with the scent of weed, filling my lungs with blackness and my heart with euphoria. I will do that later on, in another place, when this institution is tired of me and forces me out the door like I want.

When I went home after my tantrum by the stone wall, I noticed that my parents were still there, or they just appeared to be. I saw no blemishes, no redness, nothing but them with a synthetic look to their skin, it appeared to be fake. But there was my mother’s hair, my father’s hair, my father’s eyes, their faces. Over the next several years that I lived in the house with them, I noticed that while they copied the handwriting of my parents well, it was slightly altered. They could do their signatures perfectly, but their notes to me and their grocery lists were different looking than a note would be were it from my parents. I was distressed by the way my father’s eyes were either a dark blue or a light blue. They looked like two different sets of eyes. He tried to hit me three times, but never went any further than that. I could tell he was an angry man all of a sudden, and though he looked like my father, I knew he wasn’t. He was wearing a synthetic skin mask. It looked like my father, but it wasn’t. Its skin is fake. It wasn’t real. Same with my mother. Whoever these people were, I know I need to chop them up and leave their remains to dissolve in a landfill somewhere. I want to leave my brother, Steffan, out of it. I know there’s a way to make them expose themselves. Purchase a gun, aim through the summer air at the targets, themselves and tell them, “Take off your skin masks! You’re not my parents! You killed them.”

They wouldn’t be able to reply, and if they were somehow compelled to reply and tell me what they did with my parents, I would happily kill whoever is underneath that fake human surface and tell the cops that they were serial killers who spied on my parents for years and stole their identities. Something I never wanted to happen to them or to myself. I hardly ever talk to “my parents” anymore and Steffan stays the hell away as well. I know I have to have them buried but for now, I think I’ll drown myself in writing. I haven’t explained what is going on to the psych ward, which is going to let me out anyway soon. I know how to handle it myself after hearing one of the directors of the facility tell me, “Your family is skin masks.” The sick fuck laughed to himself and I knew I had to flee and get those people who thought they could ever replace my parents, who were unkind to me but were all I had. I hated everyone else or lost the ones who mattered. I’m going back into their house and I’m going to dig up my gun and aim it, loaded with silver bullets, at their brains. I know they’ll unmask. I’m not born yesterday. I know I should do this. I would never duplicate a mask made to look like real skin and identity of someone else, and wear it over myself as though I could become that person. I’d rather swallow a bottle of pills and go to sleep forever. Fall asleep in a meadow of bluebells and Vicodin.

Before here, I hung out under a train bridge where I always wanted to follow the mysterious Mathilde, a girl whose surname I didn’t know to this day, anywhere and everywhere. She came there to buy meth and was always hanging out with older men, smoking a meth pipe and blowing the smoke up into the lights under the train bridge on the cement walls, watching it float, a white demon mask, in the illumination. I joined her once. She asked me, “Why are you doing meth, Stacey?”

“Because I’m miserable without it. It makes me feel like I could walk for miles and it feels like it’s only seconds until you’re at your destination. I feel like I can die alone on the autumn breeze and die happy.”

“Don’t die, Stacey. You’re the last one of them that should be killed.”

“Some of these bitches really should die. Last night, someone threatened me with a lead pipe after I threatened his friend with a lit cigarette after that cunt tried to beat me up. The both of them should burn up in a chamber underground.”

Mathilde smiled. “How did you know I love that sort of thing?”

“Because I can see through you. I’ve seen you in fights under here, too. Try to keep a low radar. I know you haven’t initiated any of those fights, but try to see there are real dangers here in town and don’t let anyone know where you live. I heard you lost your ID recently and had to get it replaced. It was stolen. I’m only saying this because I care about you, Mathilde. I don’t think they’ve done anything with your ID except disposed of it, by now. I think we should stick together.”

“I don’t have any friends except you,” said Mathilde.

And a few days later, I was shoved away into the psych ward, the loony bin, the human menagerie. I felt like a psychiatric science experiment, doped up with meds and lost in the dull, utilitarian rec room, playing ping pong, watching an episode of Intervention in drug  therapy, browsing the bookshelves, learning different coping skills, watching the bus park and then leave through the glass cage of windows, learning about different behavioral therapies, making collages with magazine pictures, standing in line for more meds, staring at the ceiling light reflecting from their TV, craving drugs and wanting to cast off all purity. I couldn’t stand it here any longer. I still can’t. I’m crazier and know I won’t pay for what I’m about to do, considering how horrible what these people did to my parents is. I can’t let them live any longer and everyone is buying into their disguises except and another lady whose name I don’t know. Their old friends won’t speak to them. A lady who lives me nearby told me my mom isn’t herself anymore.

“She’s not Autumn,” the lady told me. Autumn is my mother’s name.

She said nothing about my dad, but all the voices ever reiterated to me was that my dad, Roger, was killed and that I would never know where or what had been done with him. I’ll forever remember that scream and chainsaw sound on my laptop, playing through the speakers out of dead silence. What was I supposed to do with that information. Say I heard it out of thin air? I’d sound psychotic to law enforcement, mental health services and anyone listening. I can’t just ramble about this to random drug addicts, either. I can’t tell them why I’m purchasing the gun, what its purpose is, or where I’m going to kill those thieves. I am haunted by days of sleeping and screaming and all I can do is bleed Ativan and never want to wake up. But still want to avenge my parents’ murder as well. I’m getting out soon. I will sleep under the stars for a night out on the deck, and wait until the daylight breaks to kill them when they emerge from behind their locked door and into the interior of the basement.

You’ll see. They have masks that are so fake-looking they betray themselves, they give themselves away. I can find a way to move on and I know I shouldn’t blame myself, because this destruction of the family foundation was never my doing. It was theirs, whomever is living in those disguises. I’ve told no one. I can’t allow myself to be labelled as psychotic or severely mentally ill, but I have been. I can hear the voices to this day, and four psychiatrists told me that schizophrenia is incurable. The voices can only be tapered down with medications. There is no cure alive for hearing voices, for visual and auditory hallucinations. I’ve seen things too. I’ve seen people that look ghostly and transparent appear by the river, or sitting on curbs, and they vanish into thin air just as quickly as they appeared. A cop by the river, a man in a grey hoodie on the street curb. I see black shadows above me, or white or golden flashbulbs emanating in the ceiling like there’s a camera taking my picture. The voices still talk through speakers, walls and televisions. Car radios. Computers. A speaker will transmit a voice faster than anything. All they’re telling me is that my family was bad and that they deserved it. I know most people wouldn’t agree with this or think this is okay. Nothing is okay. I will never feel like I’m wholly human again.

2016

Mathilde

1.

In the woods there whispered a secret I felt compelled to follow, just to discern its meaning. It could’ve been a blessing or a curse, and still I was brave enough to leave my repressive household for those screams that normally would frighten someone, but I’ve been reduced to a frozen-hearted Banshee on the floor of a seclusion room more than once. I remember the fog of those moments and feeling more broken than even the most dismantled women could get. Screaming because it was expected of me.  

I left home when I was eighteen, dropped straight out of high school, a nightmare I never hope to relive. Age eighteen was the last time I saw a psychiatric facility. My family and me lived in a Tudor mansion in the city’s most affluent neighborhood. It was my parents and my sister Sinead, who was always the opposite of me, the black sheep.

“Mathilde, no one is screaming in the woods,” she’d tell me when I first heard the shrill, ear-scorching girl’s shriek echo from the trees bordering the park.

I ignored her and ran knocking a stone statue over, and sought out the source of feminine distress.

“Hello? Are you alright?”

“No matter where you go, I’ll find you,” was the whisper that fervently replied from somewhere in the foliage. As though the angel or apparition (whatever she was) could read my mind. I was thirteen.

Pale and whey-skinned compared to my sister, who perpetually blushed and took better care with her pretty countenance. She snagged Dale Tierney before I could get to know him; naturally someone like him would gravitate towards an extroverted floozy like my sister Sinead. He greeted me politely but tersely upon visiting our house, as I was not the subject of his interest. My sister was seventeen, and a senior in high school, while I was in ninth grade, a razor-freak and antisocial, maladjusted misfit. Sinead pretended not to notice. My cuts bled on tiles to industrial rock music. No one could stop me.

*

“Mathilde-”

“Don’t speak, or I’ll excavate your heart from your chest and incinerate it while I smoke a coffin nail,” I replied. He was chasing Dale with a bat, and I remembered a brief feeling just like getting fucked with a knife. Some bat-wielding perverts had jumped me several years ago and shoved the handle in.

“Mathilde!”

“I’ll eat your heart before I burn it over the pyre,” I snapped.

In the abandoned grain elevator building made of cement, a place I pretended was a mental institution, I executed him. Lobotomized, Never anesthetized, because I wanted him to feel like hell. I always knew there was no inferno underground where bad people like myself and this man who is dying beneath a series of rope knots. I have bound him in a length of chain as well. Years ago, long after the screaming in the foliage to the cacophonous magpies had ceased, I heard a woman or young girl wail in agony above the ceiling. The attic I never went up in because it was asbestos-ridden, and I wondered how schizophrenic I had become.

I told my father (a man who once told me “try harder” while I pretended to asphyxiate myself with a shoelace adorning the knob of my bedroom door) that I heard a scream erupt from the attic.

“Well, your intake with mental health is tomorrow,” my dad replied. “We’ll get you on the right meds.”

I hoped and prayed there was no reality behind the scream.

The house was over 100 years old; it could’ve been a benevolent or malevolent apparition.

He’s dead.

I’ll splash him with acid and dissolve him into the floor.

I see Dale watching me from the doorway all of a sudden.

“I am Hell itself,” I tell him. He seems to know the guy I offed was scum.

We laugh.

*

I wake up from my zoning out on the couch at 3 a.m., content, knowing I had no part in it. None of it was my fault. Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back album has played on repeat all night. I could’ve retained my innocence if the city’s pathetic excuse for a population cut me a little slack, but now all I have time for is complete, indisputable indifference. And euphoria over everything, hedonistic amusement showing at all times. So happy I could die in outer space. I wouldn’t even care. I used to put methamphetamine mixed with angel dust, or PCP into my bloodstream and it was then that I discovered a drug that could take away the fear of death itself. A man said, “Get the fuck out of here or face my gun.” I saw no gun to speak of and felt numb with nothing but mania in my head under the freight train bridge. I moved myself as far away from him as I could go. I was full of amphetamines under the bridge. A place downtown full of drama and drugs. I saw a man hold a knife to the throat of a man in his late teens or early twenties. I told the older man with the knife, “Don’t cut him. Just don’t. I don’t want police under here. I’m not calling them. Just…don’t,” I told him lifelessly. This was before the gun threat with the possibly non-existent gun in one of his pockets. The man withdrew his silver blade and backed off the guy, who was the only one allowing me to use a meth pipe. I felt no affection for him considering I don’t know him to this day, but I wonder how I’m not afraid to waltz out into the insidious Spokane night. A hellhole in the central eastern part of Washington state. I never liked this city, famous for its underground whoredom and criminal activity since the early nineteenth century. I intend to haunt it just like the screaming ghosts.

But I won’t scream. I’ll just make them their own worst enemies. I don’t feel I will ever really die, even when my body does.

“I hate you and I love myself, you pathetic fucking city,” I whispered to the mirror. I would place them in an underground chamber. Baths of acid dissolving useless DNA. When people like me are crossed, the night can scream and sleep will reveal what Hell can be. I’ve dreamt of being in a kennel on a plane. Jail cells on a bus with cages lining the aisle that remind me of a jail on wheels. It deserts me by the side of a road aligning a river. Sometimes I dream of treading deep water and drifting along in its waves like a damned soul. I dream of people glaring at me in dark alleys, houses where there’s nothing to watch but a woman in a peach-colored dress entertaining some businessman, drinking something out of a wineglass while she does it. An abandoned asylum being haunted by myself and others. It’s like I’m haunting somewhere that is judging me as I judge it.

I made a carbon copy of him. A clone. I drifted away on dissociative hallucinogens to the sound of his voice in my ear. I don’t care that he’s not really here.

Whenever anyone badmouths him, I feel like they should meet the Windex I pretend to pour in their coffee.

I’ll do what I please for the rest of my life.

2.

Colored balloons and iridescent papier-mâché dotted the walls on the summer evening of my sister, Sinead’s, suicide. I staggered home to Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” blaring from her room above the stairwell on repeat, a bottle of Robitussin lingering in my bloodstream. I felt high as a kite. I stared into the rainbow vortex, the littered warps of tinsel on the floor, and remembered hours earlier an argument ricocheting off the walls between Dale Tierney and Sinead. I couldn’t understand them through their slurred drunkenness. I remember a wineglass breaking against his car as it was tossed aside by Sinead.

I had never known her to fall apart.

I would have never done this to him, but I chose to keep out of his way and never tell him how I felt. I was like winter without him, cold as silver and bracing as the winds of the east. I could sustain the fantasy of him more than the reality.

He was somewhere in the house, probably, drunk in the kitchen and avoiding the drama of prior hours.

When the song played one more time, I ascended the stairs and traipsed down the corridor to Sinead’s room.

Do not turn away, my friend

Like a willow I can bend

No man calls my name

No man came

So I walked on down away from you

Maybe your attention was more

Than you could do

One man did not call

He asked me for my love

And that was all

The lines from the song tore through the air and were like bells of 80s euphoria in my ears. I saw Sinead dead with a jagged red line across her throat, torn open from a self-inflicted wound. Blood spattered the mirror of her vanity table. I never thought she had the guts to even prick her finger. I watched her white face for a moment, its waxen marble idiocy, its vacant, grey-eyed death. In extremis, she looked more at peace than I’d ever been in life.

Dale was nowhere to be found on the property. A white sheet covered my sister’s face and they wheeled her to the morgue. I would soon adorn her grave with clematises and dahlias. I would miss her soliloquies on the balcony before he entered our lives. She was so melancholic sometimes, but nowhere near as much as I.

The day after her funeral procession, a blur of black hearses and silver cemeteries, mounds of dirt cascading over her coffin, I smoked angel dust and watched the rain fall outside as I blared heavy metal from the stereo. Tears only burned once and I allowed them to fall for two minutes. Nothing could bring her back, and when Dale rang the doorbell I only told him, “She’s gone,” and closed the door in his face. His double stood behind the closed door ready to embrace me and disappear with me into the bed.

“No one should be allowed to even reach me, touch me or talk to me,” I said. I told the silent thin air. I didn’t want a reply, and I awoke the following day to a touch on my shoulder. When I turned, I saw nothing. Not a person. Not even a trail of vapor. I’d deny anyone from knowing the monster that is me.

Something in me still laughs, despite the grief.

I can see her in dreams. I can see Dale in dreams.

I’d rather daydream on drugs and live in the ruins of my old house than deal with the heinous society around me.

Broken doorknobs and glass I can’t shatter. I swallow pills and wrap myself in blankets, dreaming of a boundless, lazy sea that carries me in its midst. When I reach land, it is steep and treacherous.

I awaken in my mirage’s arms. I am an endless realm of sadism when someone poses as a threat. I once pointed a silver crescent of a knife to the skin of one of his would-be attackers. I won’t ever let go of the image Dale embellished in my mind.

I am as dead as the man in the cement left in a puddle. I am as dead as Sinead, wallowing away in a hallucinogenic reality.

I find nothing damaging although my health is rotting like the grass in the heat waves. Rotting like the relics in every yard, made of metal and plastic. I hate everyone in the world and all I wanted was to end the city.

All I wanted was to end time.

To corrupt and corrode.

To slide right out of life older than anyone had ever been.

3.

I’m only twenty-five years old, and it took me that long to finally kill someone. It was in defense of Dale while we wandered for a couple minutes when I ran into him, discovering he also had an affinity for the abandoned grain elevator where I killed whatever his obtuse name was. I knew somehow he would grace my presence that day. The would-be attacker was quite the opposite of a graceful presence; he was a storm. A storm boiled in my blood, too, and instantaneously, I made the baseball bat fly out of his brandishing arm and struck him several times. Dale Tierney grinned as he watched me debase the humanity right out of the man’s veins. I left him there to rot by some old filing cabinets.

Months after all of that happened, I no longer cry tears or cling to a crucifix on my pillow in the shade. There is nothing more to make of myself; no one will expect anything of me for a long time. Maybe never. Isolative by both night and day, I crave no presence to sustain me through the day. My parents flit about the house and are mostly not in it.

Yesterday I met a girl in a white dress with glittery, crimson-bleeding eyes in the foyer. She bid me follow her to the mirror beneath a chandelier and told me my beauty would wane.  Then she vanished into the air like an exploding star. I didn’t care and I told her to hush and leave me be. I gazed into the mirror, not as dissatisfied as I used to be. Sinead was always prettier, but I no longer envied her for it. If anything, I missed her. I never knew, in my cough syrup-induced state, what Dale had told Sinead that pushed her over the edge enough to slit her throat. She took her own life right off the planet. I will forever imagine her ricocheting into the stars, an astral angel leaving her own body and becoming a new being in the form of a spirit. The girl with blood rivers in her eyes was nowhere near as beautiful as my sister.

Whenever I think of the glow of emergency vehicles outside the limits of the mansion, I pacify myself and push away the thought as fast as it came. I know there were no witnesses besides Dale and me. There was no one to see us all meet there, not knowing one another would gather there to explore the grain elevator. Barbed wire, rusted beer cans and rejected heroin needles littered the ground at the base of the cement building. It had been shut down since the 1970s, and not a soul usually stirred in or around it premises by the railroad tracks. There was nothing to do at the place besides fuck or get stoned. In this case, I killed someone and left him for dead in the place’s basement. The bat was disposed of. Everything wiped clean. No information regarding me can be salvaged because I am a lightning bolt full of speed running as fast as I can away from everyone.

4.

I am sitting by the 7-Eleven high on acid. Halos and wings bleed out of the sky and litter the parking lot in a debris of feathers and gilded circles. I cannot scream in my house, so I went downtown to swallow an LSD-laced sugar cube and careen in the opposite direction from rational thinking. There was nothing to do but melt away along with everything else around me. I wanted the patterns of the strip mall across the street to keep melting, the neon of the bar on Dante Avenue to keep illuminating the girl beneath its sign with the darkest eyeliner I’d ever seen. She kept moving from side to side erratically, as if she were high on speed. I just can’t sustain my lifeform without drugs. I become other selves. I talk to ghosts of humans, both living and dead. She is talking to the empty air that always has answers. Her cigarette smoke forms a crown. I get bored and walk down the street, the church on its corner alit with hallucinatory flames. I think I see Sinead staring at me beneath the wainscoting in someone’s house through their window. I hate everyone except her and Dale, but whatever he said to her caused her to slice her own throat open. I can’t trust him to not make me capsize. I can’t let my iron guard down when it comes to my walls.

Do not touch me, I command every living human.

There is a star I stare at to the south that shines its light upon my shoulder blades ripping open, my veins bluer than before in my wrists. I caress them. The most important love is self-love, I tell myself. That is how I will flourish.

2019

Mathilde

1.

They found the remains of the body that I left behind in a fit of post-traumatic rage. It was a puddle of lye and hydrochloric acid, and gone was the baseball bat-wielding storm of a man after he tried to assault my sister Sinead’s lover, Dale Tierney. A few years ago, my sister committed suicide over an incident with him in which the circumstances are still unknown to me. Since then, I’ve been laying on my bed with voices compressing my head, telling me they’ll sell me and kill me. I am too strong, too fortified with indifference to care. My parents are rarely at home and I’ll never tell them. My dad would just advocate for changing the medication combination I’m currently not taking.

My twenty-eighth birthday is just around the corner. A brand new gun I purchased from one of my meth dealers shines in my hand in the starlight, full of a fresh supply of bullets. My red-lipsticked smile could enchant the devil. On top of the hill where I stand are two high school enemies, Jamie Frances and Stormy Hale. The last place I saw them was under the freight train bridge. They were sharing a pot pipe. They called me an ugly dog. That time, I let it slide off like snow from a gabled roof. Now, I’ve got the two of them right where I want them and I’m still not bothered by their comment. Underneath of them the grass blades look like ebony knife blades and my hand is on my cheap but efficient gun. It’s a silencer so there won’t be much sound when I snuff their lives out. I know how reckless this is considering anyone could have seen me out their window at 2 a.m., but I’m willing to risk it anyway. Jamie and Stormy don’t see me watching from the top of the metal stairs.

2.

I approach with quiet steps across the hilltop. Their backs are turned. My hand grips the gun more firmly than a snake’s coiling hold on a victim. Closer. They turn around. Closer still. Jamie yelps like a mouse before the gun’s bullet catches her in the head, embedded in the wisps of her brown hair. She collapses like a darted, tranquilized animal to the grass. Next, I point the gun at blond, self-righteous Stormy. I see nothing. The fear in her face screams a novel’s length of words. I fire at her forehead and she, too, is done for. It’s my lucky night that they chose this hilltop to smoke weed. I was coming here to smoke meth. I embellish each bitch with another bullet hole and calmly leave them there, the swishing sound of the gunfire replaying in my mind.

The hill. The black grass blades. An abbatoir for two girls who crossed a thin line.

3.

I go home, hide the gun and decide I’m already too high to take another hit. I open an antiquated copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel and nearly read the whole thing, satisfied that the voices in the wall have been silenced. I’ll read the end tomorrow. Before I close my red-tinted eyes at 8 a.m., I think I see Sinead standing at the edge of my bed.

“Good job, Mathilde,” she tells me. “You snuffed those cunts out just like a hurricane takes out a wooden house in southern floods.”

I love her.

I miss her.

I almost cry, but my emotions are in a graveyard somewhere. My eyes are only ice instead of liquid tears. My heart isn’t broken. I know she’ll always be with me. I know that the mirage I made of Dale will always love and caress me, even when I’m no longer young and dangerous. He’s not really here but it’s like I can see him anyway.

4.

I imagine the bones of Stormy and Jamie decomposing under the cold earth. And if they are cremated, their ash is undisturbed in urns for centuries. I think of crimson bullet holes on the hilltop of a feminine warzone. It’s the last thing I see before I fall into a pleasant slumber.

2019

Stacey

They released me from the psych ward. I have a gun in my hand. I’m veering towards the bungalow with meth reeling in my veins, my hands on a fifteen dollar loaded gun. I purchased it from a man in a trench coat in an alleyway. I open the door.

“Where were you?” asks my non-mother. She looks and sounds like my mother, but she isn’t my mother.

“It’s late.”

“Take off your skin mask,” I tell her, withdrawing the gun and pointing it at her head. “Stand up and unmask! You’re not my mother! Take that damn thing off!”

She starts to hyperventilate, and stands up. She fumbles with the layers of skin parts that originated in some clandestine building. They come off and underneath is another pale woman. I don’t study her face but I don’t recognize it. The moment I realize I’m right and that this is a malevolent identity thief, I blow her brains to pieces. I shoot her full of three holes. I only wish this were a smoking gun. I steal away into dad’s TV room and he does the same thing. He’s just an ordinary guy underneath. These two strangers are people that have lived the lives of someone stepping into a stranger’s skin. Stealing their house, their job, their lives. I’ll never sleep again. Once they’re both dead, I call 9-1-1.

“I just killed my parents’ identity thieves. Come and pick up their remains,” I tell the operator once asked what my emergency is. I tell them my address and they wheel them away. They’re covered in white sheets.  A bunch of cops tell me, “You’re not going to pay for this. They were dangerous. They were unpredictable. They could have killed you, too. You haven’t assaulted us, and we thank you for that and understand how hard this is to talk about for you. So we’re going to just let you stay in the house for awhile. Keep the gun with you.”

They leave.

I’m considered a murderer in self-defense. I’m not even going back to the psych ward because I haven’t told them my history of hospitalization.

I scribble a murderous vignette in a composition notebook that night called “Cornfield Rot.”

It reads:

1.

“Some of us are wraiths gliding through your world, blissfully unaware of your cryptic eyes staring past us, of your mouths that eject inanities. All we’ve heard is noise for years.

We’re used to it.”

2.

This is the paragraph I hear spoken aloud to me in a phantom whisper at 3 a.m., my alarm clock bathing my stoned self in a neon green glow. It’s a feminine voice, half-familiar and as faint as the illumination from the clock. My pillow is like a wreath of thorns. I eat pills, caffeine, switchblades and shards of broken teacups. There is a prevalence of apathy that spreads me in me, but what I lack is fear. What they say I lack is self-respect. I suck down another joint, draining the grass until it glows like the motel fire I will see in a few days. Lighting up the firmament with incandescent flames, fiery orange mingled with slate grey. I always wanted to rip open the sky like paper and end the world. When the Days Inn burned down from one of my lit cigarettes, I fled the scene as the firetrucks skyrocketed past me. Black flames filled the town with poison. The colors blurred through the water in my eyes. I hated everything around me since I could think, since I could speak.

Something explodes behinds me as I propel myself further away from the scene of my infantile crime. No more late-night TV, no more waking up to the same sailboat prints on the walls. No more panhandling at the hamburger restaurant next door to the Days Inn.   I’m as thin and intangible as a wisp of smoke floating through the adrenaline-suffused air. I’ll disappear into the fields and search for rotting bodies under the pines.

I imagine swallowing a handful of pills next to the concrete platform by the abandoned bowling alley, the one with the crimson anarchy sign spray-painted on it. I see a haze of red Victorian wallpaper and a knife aimed at many skulls. A flash of fire will light up in other places someday. I won’t kill myself while they recline in the brambled ruin and laugh.

3.

Sometimes I can hear the dead in the dirt beneath me say,  “I am under here.” I’ve heard them come from underneath the bus stops I wait at, the sidewalks, the swimming pool, the abandoned drive-in theater at the edge of town.

I can’t see them, but I can hear them with ears that hear nothing but bells, voices, or chaos. I can feel my pain get carried off with the breeze at such times. They give me the hope that death is an opening to a portal of the soul’s immortality.

4.

My makeup is burning off. I’m a limp, ragged doll in the corn maze getting eaten by ants. I got lost looking for the exit. I am rot given back to the earth.

2015

Janine

Amanda Warwick, age twenty-two, lay submerged in a halfway-house, painted yellow walls, dirt yard, a place to be jettisoned to. She had overdosed on methamphetamine in the heated, sunlit parking lot of multiple storage garages, her head in a hole in the cement next to an empty Halloween candy basket shaped like a Jack O Lantern. After the sharp inhalation of crystallized smoke found her brain, she was set off balance with the cathedral’s clamoring bells, the beauty of the wind’s white noise. She drenched herself in the calm black water of the lake, washing asunder the sins of Janine Crellin. Janine, with her green eyes and reddish-blond hair, a contrast to Amanda’s coarse black curls and hazel orbs, was in an infamous fixture in Amanda’s past. She had bled Amanda in the alleyway, bedazzled by the trails of blood flow, scarlet stars, mesmerizing to Janine. They were both sixteen and lived next door to each other. A red brick house with a picket fence (Janine’s) set beside a white house with green shutters (Amanda’s).

Janine was belligerent. Amanda was polite. They weren’t friends and Janine’s problem with her originated from a source unknown to her. In wild, vociferous rage, Janine left cigarette burns, several of them, that felt like surface tumors after they swelled with ash and pain.

What could I have done to you? Amanda thought.

Amanda was never wholly perceptive of what she was doing to Janine. If the evidence of Amanda’s taunts and provocations had been recorded, her remarks would have been proven to have been said aloud. On that day in the alleyway, Janine couldn’t refrain from assaulting Amanda because of Amanda stealing a plastic bag of marijuana. All they both wanted to do was get high. Janine withdrew a knife, the steel blade glinting, sawing gashes formed like lightning bolts. Gashes made while Janine sat on Amanda’s neck to choke and carve across her stomach, the spaces between her ribs where Janine slightly poked Amanda’s ligament, tearing it. When Amanda passed out from lack of oxygen, Janine began to carve some more. The thighs. The calves. A turning over of the deprecated body. More blood pools against the jutting bones of the shoulderblades.

What a passage to destitution, what a decline of descent into the laconic state of shades pulled down, the swallowing of Vicodin. Amanda was in for it. After the cutting and the burning done unto her flesh was concluded, Janine took off into the night where she was always most comfortable.

Amanda never would have been revived if not for a lone transient who discovered her with a faint pulse and numerous raw wounds, blood cold, veins a transparent blue beneath the skin on her crooked arm. He called an ambulance at a pay phone and Amanda was swept to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion, loss of blood, five broken ribs and amnesia. It took Amanda one week to recall Janine’s attack and even longer to recover her memory; her head had been hit so hard on concrete. She chose to press charges and Janine was confined to jail for eight months and later on to psychiatric care on and off for three more years. She was very troubled. Her anger seemed baseless. Amanda wondered, withdrawing from meth in her bed, if she had died that evening in rigor mortis in the snowfall, if some silver angel of death, one of grace and storms, would have absolved her of fear and taken her to another side. One separate from life where we all may go, anointed. Amanda wasn’t sacred anymore. She had survived but now she wanted to expire.  Amanda thought of Janine in a devious city, weapons hidden away, only to come out again for the dismemberment of corpses, dragged in burlap thorough a secluded forest, placed in a ditch by the railroad tracks under a pine tree, branches hanging low with needles. Amanda’s thoughts were decay, wasp stings, rotten fruit, sour wines, aspiring homicide. The residents of the group home generally ignored Amanda, but as of recently, they wanted her dismissed as a resident because of her conflict with them over trivial matters of ones full of more depth than would have been suspected.

Meanwhile, Janine was exactly where Amanda supposed, in the position of a merciless killer. She let the bodies sink into remote lakes with heavy stones tied to them, not a trace of her DNA left on their remains because she wore hair nets and was careful. She often got high and was free of institutionalization. No more secluded cages or millstones of grim prophecy. Amanda was only an attempted murder. When Janine left town at eighteen, she acquired a car to transport the bodies. In her new town, a population of nearly 30,000, she knew the civilians to target. She knew who they were.

Fanatics.

Chaos itself.

Dysfunctional child-abusers.

Every house with a shrine dedicated to only the pristine. Their gilded monuments.

So far, Janine had killed seven people.

Her victims:

1. Jay Motley, 36, convicted child rapist and wino

2. Alyssa Sparrow, 14, student, frequent bully

3. Martha Wilde, 45, child killer and teacher

4. Karen Wilder, 21, employee of Burger King

5. Kevin Fielding, 7, was terminally ill

6. Tess Moriarty, 22, bartender

7. Matthew White, 29, pawnshop owner

*

When Janine Crellin was four, she saw in her parents’ living room, a black halogen lamp with white flames flickering at the top. Either it had been left on too long, or her mother had set the fire herself, Janine decided.

“Look what you did,” said Mrs. Crellin, blaming the fire on her. She would grow up to relish those flames, pyromania impending. First, Janine burned her journals, then people.

In remote plains tied to wooden stakes with twine, gazed at by onlookers, the only ones who could hear the screams.

Amanda Warwick, in her reverie of Janine, planned to kill her. A new resident told her where she was living. Not far away.

“Here’s her address. I’ve smoked weed at Janine’s house. After what she did to you, Amanda, I would undo her.”

Seven people were dead so far and Janine still slept, tranquil at night. Never would she allow grief or guilt to disturb her. She had made to list of victims, having met them all, knowing their crimes. They had moved to the town for its quaintness and scenery as well as to carry on their traditions of immorality. Only one victim was innocent. Kevin Fielding, who was only seven years old with severe cancer. Just a needle in his vein put him to sleep and sent him, Janine supposed, to celestial firmaments.

How far could she get by being a killer? In the distance, Amanda tried to peer into the room of Janine and sacrifice her dead.

 

                               Amanda

I was born in the middle of nowhere in a Gothic castle with saints and gargoyles guarding the doorway. My father had painted blood coming from their eyes as they knelt in prayer, keeping watch over our mercenary riches. He was blond with brilliant green eyes. When I lived on the grounds of his castle, I had to be his farm slave doing yard work and keeping the flowers by the moat neat and alluring. He made me kill the animals I admired more than the humans. I will forever remember what he did to my eyes. A complicated surgery that lifted up my skin and transformed my eyes from squinty and listless to bulbous and beautiful. I was staring into an antiquated mirror surrounded by four girls prettier than  myself preparing me for eye surgery. My father grabbed me aggressively by the wrists, placed me on a cot and put me to sleep momentarily to perform plastic surgery. An eyelift, he called it. The girls giggled in their pinafores, playing dress up at girls from the nineteenth century. I will kill Janine. They looked just like her. I will kill her. We are sisters. We have the same father and I killed him when he came to my adopted parents’ house to kill me. Shot him point blank in the head. His ghost will never be able to speak to me from the dead. 

I am ready to kill this girl Janine who fucked me up when we were teenagers. People tell me to stop being so high school and grow up, but I’m not in high school or hanging out with high school kids. Just people that keep the mentality around too much and I’m bored of them. Where will I find her and how will I get past her gang of people that I know is protecting her, driving her around in cars to burn people and sink them into rivers. Nobody can find her but I know she’s the type to kill and I heard a woman discuss her and use the term “murder” and “rope.” I don’t know how to take a person down and a part of me tells me to stay away from her. But a part of her wants Janine to kill me again and send me on my way to a better place. The government wants to control my health and not allow me to smoke meth. It houses me in group homes that are unkind to me and compare my surgery to drivel compared to what their daughters with a lot of money paid to get. They got way better facelifts. I have weird eyes. Currently, I’m on the road looking for a way to find out what Janine’s doing, spy on her a little. She lives in a plain wooden house and I can see her in the window, staring out at me knowing it’s me; I am easily recognized by my eyes, even at a far distance. I’ve changed my mind. I want Janine to kill me. I can take a lot of pain. I know I won’t survive her and I can’t help but throw myself at the mercilessness of this sadistic girl.


 

*

Nobody saw Janine drag Amanda’s lifeless corpse up the three cement stairs and into her house to dispose of her with acid. She shot Amanda with a silencer the moment she saw her face loom large and moon-like at the window, open and paneless. The neighborhood Janine lived in was full of gang bangers and drug addicts that shot up and shot people driving by them at night in the street. I must be in the right place, Janine reassured herself. She planned to dispose of Amanda in a nearby landfill, to never be figured out.

2019

Mathilde

My old friend, Janine from summer camp, was just arrested. She told the news she assisted in the suicide of Amanda Warwick, a girl who Janine claimed wanted to kill her. A girl I once met under the train bridge, Stacey Galloway, is not being prosecuted for the murders of Brian Harlow and Jane Seymour, her parents’ identity thieves. It’s really sick shit. Brian and Jane wore skin masks that were completely like real human skin and the features of Stacey’s parents had been duplicated. She didn’t really know what to do about it for many years until she just went crazy. She told me about the recording from her laptop, and I didn’t know how to explain it. I had heard the voices, too. If you don’t want to hear voices, I recommend that you don’t do drugs. You will become a schizophrenic satellite. You’ll hear the world speak to you, and the people in public will say what you’ve heard your voices say when you think you’re alone at home. They can hear you breathe, they can hear you sing, talk, even think. I don’t know how to put Stacey at ease. I’m never really on edge anymore, but I can tell she is. I always wanted to make her my partner in crime. Even Janine would have done well, but I’m against her opinion that Kevin Fielding needed to die. He was just a kid, and I’m against killing kids. Apparently something leaked out and someone turned her in. She is now in prison forever.

I know the same thing won’t happen to me because I plan to stop after three killings. I wish I could free her and I wish I could ease Stacey’s pain. What’ s happened to her is horrible.

Like my old friends, June and Marcelle. Their group home has been shut down and I don’t know where they are, now. Both girls were beautiful and crazy. They had been raped by strange men who met them at the house of their legal guardians and they killed their guardians in self-defense. Marcelle didn’t pay for her crimes, but June had killed the neighbors as well as her guardian and got locked up in the criminal forensics ward for seven years. Just as I’m thinking of them, I decide to write. It’s about a girl who’s always being watched.

It runs on like this:

It was my sophomore year of college. I had just completed the first day and everything depressed me, especially the shadows of the maple leaves dancing on the wall in my dorm room.

“I’m going out for awhile,” said my roommate, Naomi Carver. I assumed she would be gone for a long while. My homely reflection stared back at me from the rectangular razorblade I held in my hand. I took in the zit on my chin, my black curls, my lackadaisical brown eyes. I turned the blade away from me and reflected the white, utilitarian walls covered in posters of new wave bands, the fake plastic red flowers in a vase on the nightstand, the Russian dolls next to it. The bottom of the blade was still covered in cocaine powder from a night Naomi spent partying at a friend’s apartment. My eyes stung. I moved in slow motion to the bathroom and ran water on my wrist in the sink. The key is not to think, I silently told myself. The key is to gash the vein and not fear what’s beyond. With the past, present and future forgotten, I made a vertical red line on my wrists, tearing into the blue creek of vein beneath my porcelain flesh. It brought forth a mild sting, like a bee’s. Blood spurted like a fountain into the sink, onto the mirror.

When I began to feel weak, I allowed myself to fall to the linoleum and wait for a bright light, a celestial set of golden gates. Before I faded out entirely, I felt a pair of arms pull me up and heard Naomi’s distorted shouting.

“Mildred!”

I blacked out, thinking it was only a hallucination when I saw a girl who looked like me staring at the scene from the entrance to the dorm room. I would see her later, in new circumstances. It turned out that Naomi forgot her phone, which is how she found me attempting to end my dismal life.

They sent me to a local hospital, where they staunched the bloodfloow and where I eventually came to. The first thing I remembered was how I used to be such a sweet little girl. I think the most soulless day I had was when I was in junior high and I burned Elena Miller with a lit cigarette, all the world curdling behind my eyes with anger.

“Where do you want it?” I asked Elena, wielding the cigarette like a knife against her arm. “Your skin, or your clothes?” I pointed the tip at the polyester of her blue blouse. At the finality of my outburst, I chose her pale wrist as the target. Elena gasped instead of screaming. I spent two weeks in juvenile detention, was expelled and transferred to another school. As I was recalling this savory memory, a psychiatrist came to evaluate me and she concluded I needed inpatient treatment in the psych ward on the upper level of the hospital. Once I was up there, I frequently threw thermonuclear fits in the blinding flourscence of the ceiling lights. The leather restraints they placed on my bed burned like fire. They were too tight. A whole week later, they sent me to a place of higher security, a building as old as the 1950s called Astria State Hospital. Located in Astria, Washington, a small country town full of orchards and horses.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I covered my bedroom window with collages and childish colored pencil drawings, once of which was a depiction of me rising above three pastel-colored buildings and into the sky. I wore a black dress and had no legs. Often, I stared up at the sky during cigarette breaks and felt like falling to one of the hollow black holes in outer space, but I was bound by the limitations of earth. My heart felt like hellfire.

“Mildred Swain should burn with fire,” said a patient with wild hair, pointing at me and taking a puff of his cigarette. I could only wonder how he knew my last name, let alone was he was saying this. I had been as friendly as possible since I was admitted into the hospital. As I lay in bed one night, a litany of insults came from both patients and staff passing by the door. They called me ugly, weak and deserving of death. I pulled the blanket over my head and refused to fight back. When I felt they were gone, I emerged from under the blanket, and saw her come in. The girl who looked exactly like me loomed, pale and spectral over my bed. She moved as though she were walking on water.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“An extension of you,” she said. “You are doomed to be hated until you die. Humans are forever to be your plight. When you go home, they’ll talk about you on the sidewalk, in the park, in the classroom. All you can do is be strong and persevere.”

She went on talking until I fell asleep. When morning came, I felt groggy. The sunshine evaporated me. I felt like a puddle of snow melting beneath my blanket. Slowly, in the midst of the empty room, I willed myself to rise to the ceiling and become united with the camera I felt to be hidden in the light above. I watched myself from the top and there was my strange twin in the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, snapping my picture with a polaroid, the black eye of the lens like the eye of an observant spider.

2019

Stacey

In the dream, I am small enough to fit into a crawlspace. I cannot hide from my mother’s red wine in our barren living room that is as black as a power outage, as black as my rotten innocence. My mother picks me up and takes me to the car, says it’s time to go, I need help. She parks outside a stone clinic and leaves me inside. I cry out and am told to be silent by a stern receptionist. Two white coats hold me down and drag me to a white room with a thirty-something redhead in it. She has painted the word “borderline” on the wall next to an immaculate, gold-framed mirror. When we face it to see our reflections (mine child-like, hers much older), we are propelled from its shattering glass by a defiance of gravity. We coil up and writhe, possessed by demons. Satan lets us die together, which is a blessing compared to living in the hospital. I close my eyes one last time without seeing my mother. I only see the broken glass, the blood on the wall (bright as an ambulance light), the linoleum beneath my cheekbone. I am a dead husk of a human determined to haunt the city I was born in. Life grows black again. I don’t scream.

Marcelle

2012

Marcelle Trahern was raised by two cunts with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term derived from the original Munchausen syndrome itself. If one has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, it means a caregiver (in this case, the godmother of Marcelle), chooses to refrain from giving their charges the right health, supplements and nutrients to keep them alive. In fact, they make them worsen with sickness and degradation. Subtly, so the good doctor won’t notice they’re causing the illness for their charges. The first bitch had decided to poison her subtly instead. Marcelle’s godmother favored ipecac. In their small village, church was a mandatory service where all girls had to see the Lord Jesus Christ be praised or crucified on film. A montage of filmy sunlight and a golden cross shone from an array of manipulative Christian imagery, perceived on an overhead projector.

Marcelle went every Wednesday and Sunday in a grey stone building with elaborate brick arcs painted black outlining the stained glass windows. The broadcast room was like an insidious revelation opening up a nightmare to the eyes of sensitive Marcelle, without the abrasive steel to pry a pair of eyes open. Especially when the topic was eternal damnation or the crucifixion of Jesus. It was like a metaphorical film lobotomy. They just stayed peeled open, unable to shut or fall asleep for any reason. Nanny Cravat insisted she stay awake. She favored those antiquated neckbands.

The girls sat around her in stiff, ungraceful lines, backs upright or slouching depending on the girls’ preference to posture. Ms. Winifred Scarlet, who had been killing off children in her home for three years, took Marcelle in at eleven years old the year her mother died and Marcelle was never able to know the woman by heart in a way her memory could rely upon. Winifred was a registered foster mother and she was ailing. Marcelle killed her foster mother (and made the police and medical examiner rule the death as a suicide). She sang “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in her choir voice while spoon-feeding Winifred “sugar in a spoon bowl, so the medicine goes down.” She gagged on the Drano and no longer said the words Marcelle needed to hear: “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “You should be grateful,” “Why didn’t you try harder?” Winifred was involved in a canned television broadcast again for that last comment, a boring, banal comedy Winifred needed to have Marcelle watch with her before bed in 2011.

On March 24, a clear, shiny spring morning, Marcelle knew that she had no one to rely upon any better by the time the next foster mother came around to raise her. She was a distant harridan of a woman with a thin, pert mouth shut tight at church and open like a wrathful shrew to chastise Marcelle at home.

“See that window?” said Nanny Cravat, her second godmother: a malevolent, Puritan woman with brown hair in a frizz and vacant eyes.

“You’ll be lucky if God saves you when you fall out of it. It’s all shit. God’s for nothing. But I fear hell just as much as you do. All we can do is try to believe and see if God listens.“

In her dress made for church, the stiff lace a cascade of black and white. A knee-length skirt and pilgrim collar. Church uniform. The telepathy Marcelle heard: “devout truths”, “deep breaths,” “if you need to console yourself, use these coping skills.”

All the things Marcelle picked up on by reading minds that she could never express piled up in her head and she was crazy.

“Marcelle may be crazy,” said a soft-voiced man about to make an assumption based on what he saw in elaborate artwork in a journal: a drawing in Bic pen, of a realistic-looking Nanny Cravat swallowing a spoonful of something, reminding him of milk poisoning and a scary story his mom sometimes read to him at night in his portentous childhood. Marcelle’s self-portrait was accurate. She overheard the bell ringing in the distance beyond her thoughts of his voice by the cathedral  bells that rang with worship, clanging vehemently. When Marcelle got home after spring choir ended, she planned the Drano death. It was under the kitchen sink, meant to mingle with Nanny Cravat’s cup of milk.

“Nanny, I  hope you enjoy your milk,”

“Come, have a sit-down,” said Nanny to Marcelle. She set the glass of milk  in front of Nanny Cravat, who was wearing her red velvet blouse and white cravat.

“Put that milk on the table carefully. Don’t spill it.”

Time to die, Marcelle wished. Down the throat went that blue liquid permeating Nanny Cravat’s esophagus as she choked. The only number Marcelle knew to call wasn’t an option, and she had to make her own way in the world feeling like humans weren’t worth anything and we’re all just partially alien. Meretricious, cheap people.

Marcelle wanted to die in outer space. She left the raw death and agony of Nanny Cravat  slumped over on the table after she choked. Marcelle became the third eye, the third shrew, the ultimate survivor of destiny and doom.

June

2014

My lucidity died in the house I grew up in. I was raised in an arcane Hitchcock mansion with a cupola. There were no servants due to my guardian, Scarlett Freeland’s, illicit exploitation, and her fear of it being discovered. Therefore, she let everything collect dust. Her mansion was tall and monumental. It reminded me of a Halloween sticker decoration one puts on a windowpane. On our street, Cupola Avenue, named for the cupolas on each house, I suffered many seasons of violent turmoil at the hands of Scarlett. She owned a video camera that she balanced on top of a tripod and told me it was my “surveillance.”

On several occasions, at the age of thirteen, I was raped by a multitude of strange men that Scarlett invited inside. She would put 80’s hair metal on the stereo while they raped me and she sat in a red armchair, smoking numerous cigarettes. Sometimes, I wouldn’t get raped and instead it would be my deed, according to every person in the room, to kill a person in front of me. I’ve killed 37 people in Scarlett’s house, each one dissolved with acid in the cupola on film, and killed on film as well, before being doused with acid. Each time this event happened, it was recorded and burned onto a disc to be viewed on Scarlett’s TV.

There were only two other houses on Cupola Avenue: the Tarringtons’ house and the Miltons’ house. Clyde Tarrington lived in a two-story house painted white with black shutters. He lived there with his daughter, Blithe. On their front door was a poster of a symbol that held a cryptic enchantment for me: a cross with an hourglass in the center of it. It always reminded me of their time running out. I had wanted to kill Blithe for so many years. I felt her to be prettier than me with her lustrous black hair and piercing green eyes. She always loved to remind me of how I would have been killed by my twin sister, Adele, had she lived. In the womb, she was the alpha and I was the omega. On a rainy day when lightning split the sky into slices, Adele and me were playing dress-up with red velvet gowns and silver high heels. We were twelve. I convinced her into a “baptism,” holding her head underwater. Despite my carrying the title of the omega twin, my newfound strength prevailed and she soon ceased to breathe.

When Scarlett found out, she didn’t seem to care. Neither did the rest of the neighborhood; they were always killing people. We melted her body into the floor of the cupola with acid.

My name used to be Lillian Freeland, but once my twin was dead, I uncontrollably became someone named June. She came to me, like a doppelganger, looking exactly like me, but bearing no evil intentions.

“I am here, and I am not leaving you,” June told me. I regret killing Adele despite her greater knowledge of schoolwork. We were both homeschooled and Scarlett never told us what she did for a living. I learned later on that she worked for the federal government.

My liberation from Scarlett’s persistent and unyielding abuse came on the day of my eighteenth birthday, April 17. After she made me read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot” to two men, who raped me when I was done, and when they had left, I waited for Scarlett to go upstairs and watch one of her movies. I sauntered to the garage and snatched an axe, the same one Scarlett used in satanic rituals when she was young. I made the predatory ascent up the stairs and into her bedroom. Then, as though she were a chopping block and as though her sanguine bloodflow was sacred, I swung the axe down upon her skull. Hard. She was watching The Caretakers, a black and white movie about women in group therapy. She fell to the side, writhing in pain. I went to the front of the chair and brought the axe down upon her back until her spinal cord was severed and her tenebrous heart gave out. I left her there and ran back downstairs, screaming the whole way.

Next, I opened Scarlett’s freezer and grabbed a carton of Marlboro 100’s, lit one, and burned the subtle swastikas hidden in the patterns of an Oriental rug. I gazed around me, took in the contents of the living room: the Kit-Kat clock shaped like a black cat with bulging eyes, the white topaz chandelier, the gutted hearth, the period furniture. I decided it was time to leave my home behind forever. I grabbed a pink backpack and shoved the carton of cigarettes inside, along with a drawer full of working Bic lighters. I threw in three shirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, a journal, a pen, and a gun. I topped off the luggage with some rubber vampire teeth I endeavored to save for a malevolent purpose: murdering Blithe Tarrington.

I put my hand on the gun as I walked outside, holding it securely within the large pocket of my forest green trench coat. To my knowledge, the Miltons across the street were always killing people (Scarlett always said so.), but I didn’t know how they felt about Blithe. I didn’t care. I rang the doorbell, staring down the cross and hourglass on the door’s poster. Luckily, Blithe answered the door. I pulled out the gun, and her face became as stricken as one being lashed with a switch.

“Get inside,” I gnashed, pushing her onto the floor  and slamming the door behind me. “And don’t get up. Don’t even talk.”

She talked anyway. “Lillian, please don’t kill me. You don’t have to - “

“But I want to, and I can, and I will kill you and nothing will ever be able to resurrect you!”

“What’s going on with that Freeland bitch? Why is she in my house?” screamed Clyde, who had just descended the stairs. I shot him in the head, and he slumped over, instantaneously dead.

“You’ve been killing people in this house for years, and it’s time to go!” I vociferated over her harrowed wailing. “Now, put these in.” I unzipped my backpack and handed her the rubber vampire teeth.

She stared at me, wide-eyed with feral fear. She did nothing. She said nothing.

“Your mouth, dummy. Put them in your mouth.”

I handed her the teeth, and she took them from me and placed them over her own toothpaste commercial-white teeth.

“You look the very caricature of Halloween,” I said, laughing as I blew out her brains. The remains flew against the wall and painted an inkblot test of blood smears everywhere. I walked into Blithe’s bedroom after I was sure she was dead, and saw a purple canopied bed, a bookshelf filled with many classic and contemporary novels, among them: the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Dreiser, Jane Austen, Anais Nin, D.H. Lawrence. I grabbed Nin’s House of Incest, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and left the house.

I didn’t make it very far. I was down the road not very far when I was arrested.  I always feared them coming for me. I fell onto the asphalt, scabbing my knees and not feeling it. I denied what was happening. I muttered to myself incoherently.

“We know you killed some people, Lillian.”

“My name is June,” was all that I said before my mind shut off and I suddenly woke up vegetative in a jail cell.

*

Eventually, I was labelled not guilty by reason of insanity. The police found Scarlett’s recordings and the recordings that the Miltons and the Tarringtons made of their own killings when I told them about the neighborhood, and what Scarlett had done to me. One day, I will get out of the forensics services ward, where the criminally insane are housed. I have spent many nights here, remembering the death and ravagings, my hair coiling like Medusa’s on the pillow of the restraint bed, the leather straps leaving black bruises on my wrists. Every night, I pray to God and Jesus and all the saints that ever were that I’ll be forgiven for my killings, and be accepted into a realm I can call heaven.

My lucidity will live again, resurged.

2017

June and Marcelle

Cathleen Carter

She led me to the house with the cupola

Where she stabbed me in the backyard

Blood flowed glowing red from my pale skin

Staining my white blouse

And my throat ached

I haunt the halls

And my voice resides within the walls

I’m a phantom floating through the inmates

Living in my killer’s group home

Eyes stare from the cupola

I don’t know who saw me die

I’m buried under a thorny bush

Bones hidden by woods and tiny baby teeth

She scattered

Covering my grave with evidence from her recent infanticides

She stabbed my baby

And cut me for giving birth

In her bed

My lover carved our initials in a tree

And we’ll always be in touch

I eat strawberries off a plate in his room

We hung a dreamcatcher to capture his nightmares

Of me being tortured by her ringed hands

Bag placed over my head

Cathleen Carter, the snuff film queen

(I have killed many)

Choking on film reel

Always having to be polite

In the morning light drinking tea

Deirdre, the killer, laced it with GHB

Putting me to sleep

Separated from my lover

Pillow soaked in warm tears

His tears and mine

We drink them in vials and kiss under stars

Soon he too will be a ghost

Swallowing pills on a blanket in the cemetery

Deirdre will find us and take our picture

Maybe she’ll capture my phantom on camera

*

With curiosity, Marcelle Trahern saw from the window Deirdre Carter and her niece, Cathleen, arguing. The infant was dead, that much Marcelle knew. Cathleen Carter had given birth to a baby girl now with stab wounds, lying in red and white rigor mortis in her crib with blood on the teddy bear, in the dolls’ hair and on the lampshade on the side table. Most of the inmates, as they were known due to the group home’s strict rules, were gone for the day at an event and June Freeland was downstairs Deirdre Carter quickly took over June’s life after leaving her post as nurse at the asylum where June was housed. June was incompetent to stand trial, declared insane and sent away for seven years. She had returned to Scarlett Freeland, her former guardian’s, mansion to live. It had been converted into a group home for women with trauma issues.

All thoughts of June vanished from Deirdre’s mind when the knife blade shone in the sun, an ominous metal glint that suddenly penetrated the naked pearl throat of Cathleen. She collapsed to the grass in the fenced-in backyard and as the earth was fresh from the rain, Deirdre found a shovel leaning against the toolshed and dug a fresh grave. Marcelle had never liked Cathleen much because she was always harping on the girls to follow the rules: don’t smoke dope, don’t invite boys over without permission, etc. She had gotten herself knocked up by Miles Sutherland, and Deirdre highly disapproved of him with his leather jacket and cigarettes. Marcelle only saw him once when he drove to pick up Cathleen for a date, his handsome face a silhouette in the dark window. Marcelle decided to keep quiet about the death. She watched Cathleen be tossed into the grave liked a broken doll. Deirdre had tied a plastic bag over her face and stabbed her in the chest. For ten minutes, Marcelle watched Deirdre extract Cathleen’s heart from her chest cavity, holding the dead, lifeless muscle in her palm, her calm blue eyes narrowed and focused on it like a witch in a black magic ritual. June suddenly appeared beside Marcelle.

“The bitch is finally dead,” Marcelle said, breaking her vow not to tell anyone. “What is she going to do with the heart?”

“I don’t know,” said June.

The girls, both in their twenties and too old for Cathleen’s trashy immaturity, watched with morbid fascination as Deirdre snapped a polaroid   (after turning off the video camera)

of Cathleen’s corpse before throwing dirt back over her and packing it in. She laid stones over it and from her pocket, she took something white and scattered it over the grave. When she went back inside the house, Marcelle and June left the cupola to inspect what Deirdre had spilled. Six tiny teeth in the front yard, taken from a toddler’s mouth. A previous killing. When the cops led Deirdre away after June called them, June put on a nun habit and took over the house.

They heard Cathleen’s whispers of love for Miles and reassurances that Deirdre was gone. They buried her baby in an infant cemetery labeled merely “Infant Cemetery” in iron above a fancy gate bearing an entrance to the graveyard. June called the cops by her own policy, knowing hiding a murder is wrong.

“Marcelle, she’s a psycho, bats-in-the-head bitch and she could have come after us, too. It’s better that she’s gone.”

“I guess so,” said Marcelle. her  mind on Nanny Cravat choking on her milk laced with Drano. Marcelle had fled the world of Christian broadcast rooms and the sex trade. Nanny Cravat had invited several men over to force themselves on her, and she was glad she couldn’t remember it in great detail. Dissociating was so divine. Girls wore meretricious makeup to school and church and their naked limbs stuck out from cheap, mall-bought

miniskirts. Marcelle would have given them all Drano in a cup, too, if she knew how not to get caught.

But she was far from their bratty voices now, with June Freeland, Anika White and Marilyn Sanders to keep her company. In the meantime, the house became less of a group home and June began paying the monthly bills with Deirdre’s leftover income found stashed in a safe in her room. Marijuana smoke soon filled the rooms and the girls giggled at the enhanced cartoons on the television, making funny faces at the ceiling. Then, Cathleen appeared in the mirror behind them in her prom finery, staring sternly with her stab wound, The blood withdrawing and disappearing into the gash. Anika screamed. When the others asked what was wrong, Anika revealed what she saw.

“You’re too high,” Marilyn said, running a hand through her rainbow hair. But Cathleen stood behind them, strawberry juice the color of blood on her mouth, back from Miles who contacted her spirit and she came when summoned and manifested herself in the flesh.

Cathleen

My baby is gone

In an infant coffin underground

I wear black to mourn her

And place flowers on her grave

Miles embraces me in the cemetery

Where we have sandwiches and milk

He marvels as the food disappears from the plate

And the milk drains from the thermos

He can see me fresh as daylight

A rose haloed in gold

I am fragile dust and fairy winds and gilded blond hair

They find him dead the next day

By the gravesite of his daughter

His lips blue from the pills

His hair plastered to his head

In the spring rain

His indolent heart gave out and from her prison, Dierdre laughed at the television giving news of Mile’s suicide and the note he’d left:

I’ve gone to be with Cathleen, who drew me into hear heart forever, and our daughter Melanie’s, too. Dierdre couldn’t kill my love, though she tried very hard.

I saw Deirdre from the corner where I stood, staring at ladies dressed in orange watch the television and play cards. Now that I’m dead, I can go anywhere I want to in the world. I’ve explored the moors of England and I’ve been to Alaska, the northern lights illuminating the night sky and I didn’t feel the cold nor the heat of Death Valley, California. I flew and touched the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Anything can be done in death, it’s like magic is yours after you die,” I told Miles.

Down he went with me and they buried us side by side. We go into earth, then Summerland, then back again. When I haunt the group home, I conjour nightmares for the girls who tormented me, especially June Freeland who told me I looked dressed as gaudily as she had for one of the snuff films her guardian she murdered made her do. I know many murderers: the worst of them being June and Marcelle. I read the evidence of Marcelle’s Drano murders in her journal and her revelations of sex with strange men who came when called by Nanny Cravat, Marcelle’s godmother. But something told me not to be a hypocrite and tell on her. I never had a mother like these girls. She abandoned me on the doorstop of St. Xavier’s Orphanage and Dierdre, the nun (she was a devout Catholic before she moved on to work for the hospital) who knew her sister’s face and knowing I was her niece, took me in and after years of her impossible violence and nagging, I am finally set free and better off, even if by her hand.

The Ouija Board

“Miles committed suicide,” said Marilyn to Marcelle. “It’s on the news.”

“Oh,” said Marcelle. “I bet Cathleen’s ghost dragged him down with her. Anika keeps seeing her everywhere and is freaking out.”

Anika was fast asleep in her room, having taken a dose of Haldol to help the hallucinations.

“But you aren’t hallucinating,” Cathleen had insisted when she came to Anika late at night. Sometimes she wore a nun habit like June, who had taken to smearing on red lipstick and blaring Courtney Love from the stereo. Sometimes, she sang opera with a crucifix dangling around her neck, and quite good. The girls loved listening to her sing her songs of lovers who lost their loved ones like Miles and Greek tragedies where Persephone became trapped for six months in Hades with the Lord of the Underworld and six months on earth. Gods and monsters fighting their battles to the death. The Ouija board they used to summon Cathleen worked. Anika revealed the messages to them of their conversation she heard in her head. Anika directed the board marker’s movement in their hands.

“Cathleen, where are you?” Anika asked, finally facing her fear of the unknown.

“In Summerland, with Miles,” was the reply.

Anika spelled it on the board and all were shocked.

“I knew it was real, like heaven but better than clouds and angels playing harps, waiting at the gates to judge you,” Anika said. “In Summerland there is no judgment, or pain or violence. Just love, laughter and magic. I learned all about the theory of the afterlife in Summerland from a Wiccan book I found in the used bookstore downtown.”

“Are you sure it isn’t fake, Anika?” Asked June, who doubted the paranormal.

“I heard her voice, just the way it was when she was alive!” Anika stormed out of the room, offended by June’s remark. The Ouija board remained still. Out of all of the girls, Cathleen found Anika most vulnerable to her presence. Cathleen enjoyed scaring them a little. But she never spoke to June, who ascended the staircase with a boy from the nearby prep school, holding a candlelabra and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. Marilyn played 20 Questions with Anika in their room and listened to her account of what she read in Marcelle’s journal.

“I saw too,” said Cathleen. “She sent people to their death same as insane June. I wonder what sort of terrorism Dierdre endured at a young age.”

“Probably witnessed something violent, or had no parents like you. I didn’t,” said Marcelle, who stood behind them listening and hearing Cathleen’s voice just like Anika.

Deirdre

High on a precious hill stands my home for abandoned, unstable girls

I can’t return to it

I’m in prison garb in the women’s prison surrounded by barbed wire and a river runs past, saturated in pollutants spilled by the nearby plants and factories.

I used to be a nun, then a nurse, mercy-killing the elderly, smothering infants and pretending they died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), immune to the wails of inconsolable parents informed by the doctor in the corridor.

I spent my early childhood in a ramshackle farmhouse in Louisiana, smothered by my mother and her hot back coffee thrown in my face. How her knives danced before my eyes. When my baby brother died when I was fourteen, they thought it was SIDS. I hated babies. My mother told me to kill it, it was a sickly, weak little boy and wouldn’t last the year. I fed him to a hungry feral cat and watched the skin ribbon over her bones from the cat’s carnivorous snacking. My mother, a widow always in grey with shadows under her eyes the color of her sweater, watched the baby’s decomposition.

I felt an affinity for June the most out of all the girls in my home. We had killed and had bad mothers who abused our bodies and sucked our souls out through crazy straws, leaving us bereft and insane. I couldn’t plead insanity the way June could, though.

I wish I were out of this stale air and away from these women, with their murderous stairs and rancid shouting, their fights that lead them to solitary. I won’t put a hand on these women. I won’t go to solitary.

June

I murdered this whole neighborhood besides Clinton and Mary Milton and their twin son and daughter. The parents went to prison for murder, and the kids live somewhere else now. The house is vacant.  I never enjoyed what Scarlett made me do. They housed me in an asylum, where I spent the majority of my time in restraints staring at the ceiling with vacant eyes and Medusa coils in my hair that snarled on the pillow.

I dreamt of black widows biting me and in my dreams, Deirdre, who worked there at the time as a psychiatric nurse, didn’t tend to my bites that reddened on my hand. When I wasn’t dreaming, Deirdre liked me. Now she’s in prison where she belongs. I no longer handle nitric acid or kill people or endure stiff baseball bats tearing open my cunt.

Scarlett watched my defiling from behind the camera, recording the rapes in the dark room. I was smothered in her cellar and remembered it, screaming, spitting out the pills, refusing to take them. Deirdre heard my whole story, decided to move into the old Freeland estate and take over as group home director. I moved out of my trailer to stay there. Weird I should live here after killing someone here. I used to hallucinate Blithe, who I shot and killed, but I don’t see her lately. I dismiss Anika despite my own experience. Sometimes, the ghost of Cathleen gets old as a topic and I think all should  remember the living and forget the dead that can’t reach us, gone to nether realms.

But what if she was there? What if she can reach us?

I’ll never know. One day I’ll be a ghost myself. I have faith that there is something prettier to see than this insidious earth after our bodies run out of time and our souls transcend.

There must be something better than what I had, what Marcelle had, what Cathleen had, what all of us had.

I think I just heard a voice. Is it the still, small voice of God, or is it a spirit coming from some divine region, holy or unholy?

I am a combined angel and demon. I want to drink absinthe and sleep with that voice.

Mathilde

2019

I stood in the calm, obsidian woods and gained my frail balance against a ramshackle cabin. Wolves dashed out of the shadows, ignoring me and veering towards a carcass in a wildflower-bordered clearing. I was pretty certain it was human. Then I saw a ski-masked perpetrator, blood channeling from his disguise. He offered me a bouquet of purple irises in his scathed left hand. In the shunning woods, feeling like the ghost of someone gone, I tore my lavender dress on a nail in the cabin’s wood. I declined the masked monster’s offer. Suddenly, I was pulled inside by someone behind the front door. I cried out, closed my eyes and could hear the door shut and bolt. Once the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered on, I saw my rescuer’s face like a sanctified revelation. The kindest pair of dark eyes I had ever seen. My speech failed me but his did not.

He told me, “Nothing will kill your equilibrium while I’m here. You no longer have to claw at wooden walls are cry into a pillowcase. Notice that soon the sun will come up and figuratively, I’ll give you a pair of rose-colored glasses to view the world through. A better world than this.”

“I-“ I began.

“I love you,” he said.

Of course, he was handsome and I coveted him highly.  He pressed his perfect mouth on mine and carried me to bed. After the sex and the sun-glow, he told me he’d be my dreamcatcher, and if not the destroyer of my enemies, the bane of them. The unidentified mask never showed up again. We soon left the cabin to live in a castle. He taught me to love instead of maim, to be tender instead of destructive. I learned to give myself away to a man created by the sparks of imagination itself.

*

I ease myself out of bed after this dream and take another hit of glass. Something to make the world glitter with white ice and a way to make the hell inside freeze over. I see him blur on every bridge, every riverbed, every highway. There is no hallucination more powerful than him. Nothing will perforate me and make me stop haunting this city. Nothing will make me bleed out onto the sidewalk because I am too fast for the blade, the bullet. The smoke flows through the open room and hits the sun. I wake to sirens piercing the quiet. I’m the cause of them but I know their glow won’t alight on me and swallow me up.

[the-light-of-stars]

So I just watched “Once upon a time in the West” (well, I watched it partially, it’s a damned long movie) and you know what I had to think of?

Endless Summer Wild West AU !

I mean, think about it wouldn’t it be interesting?

Sean and Craig are the sons of local farmers and knew eachother since childhood , Sean taught Craig how to ride a horse, Craig taught Sean how to fix a barn. Sean wants more than a farmers life, though, and wants to become the next Sheriff. His mother owns their farm alone since everything that happened with his dad (what happened with him is all still the same), and has been asked to sell lately (more about that later), which she refuses to do even though they’re not exactly rich.

Quinn is the daughter of the town’s baker, an Irish immigrant, and since Rotterdam’s probably wasn’t well known back then she’d probably have tuberculosis instead :(

Raj works at the local pub, which is owned by his family and was funded by his grandma, he’s been dreaming of opening his own restaurant in the city, though.

Estela is a mysterious stranger who just came to town, but people say she’s a bounty hunter. And well, they’re correct.

Yvonne and Malatesta are in a western gang, but one of those that only rob postal coaches and trains and still have some sort of moral standards

Zahra is the daughter of the local clockmaker and set up a telegraph line as a teen with which she’d “listen in” to the telegraphs that are sent to the postal station

Michelle’s parents moved to that town from the city and want her to become a seamstress, like her mother, but she secretly studies to become a doctor

Diego’s parents own the towns retail shop but he’s always been dreaming of moving away, and living like the lonesome cowboys that are written about in the newspaper

Kele is also rather new there and just became the Sheriffs right hand man

Grace is the daughter of the mayor who also owns aforementioned newspaper (this would be Blaire). Her mother wants her to go into politics and business as well, but Grace rather studies the regions ecosystem

The Vaanti are a Native American tribe in this scenario

Rourke is the owner of a very big and just as dubious company (nobody really knows what the company is doing. Is it a railway company? A finance one? Real estate maybe?) Which buys up a lot of farms and land for unknown purposes, leaving abandoned ghost towns in its wake. Nobody knows why but it sure ain’t good when suddenly some random British industrial shows up and buys so much property. There are also rumors about him being involved in his wives mysterious death.

Lila is his assistant/secretary, who’s the one usually sent out to make a deal with the landowners at first. If she’s not successful the “special unit” (Lundgren and co) are called. She still killed Estelas mom, who in this AU was one of the companies accountants that noticed there’s something off with the firms finances.

Aleister is basically still the same, just now in the 19th century. He’s been sent to the town by his father to make a deal with Mayor Hall ( there might or might not be corruption involved ), but alas he has doubts about his fathers business

Lundgren is the leader of Rourkes gang of goons, who do the dirty work for him (like “convincing” farm owners that don’t want to sell). Tetra and Fiddler are part of those, of course.

Jake and Mike both came to the West from Louisiana in the search for a way to sustain their families back home . They’ve been working at the railroad, but one day got recruited by Lundgren. But at one point he ordered them to kill an innocent family that didn’t want to give up their land, which they refused to do. So they tried to flee, but Mike got shot. And since Lundgren bribed the Sheriff to declare Jake as the sole murderer of that family, he was on the run, and just so happened to come across this certain town, right as Lundgren and co are around. And he sees Mike again, who lost his memory (and eye - losing his legs too like he did in canon would be too problematic in that time) after he got hit by shrapnel from an explosion.

And MC? Well MC is truly a wildcard. A mysterious stranger, who came into the city after receiving a mysterious letter in the mail, who almost seems to have lost most of their memories as well.

I hope you enjoy this AU, because I sure do :D

I can already hear the background score for the duel at high noon ;)

[ishouldreadthat]

The sun is shining, everyone is sneezing, and June is coming to a close.  It has been a very gross and sweaty month here in the UK, but has at least resulted in a lot of indoor reading time for me.  Let’s take a look, shall we?

I surprisingly only read four physical books this month, two of which were ARCs!

Books I read

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandya Menon (Review)

Flame in the Mist by Renee Ahdeih (Review)

The Never King by James Abbott (Review)

Spellbook of the Lost and Found by Moira Fowley-Doyle (Review)

Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee (DNF, review)

Lost Boy by Christine Henry

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

The Underground Railroad by Colston Whitehead

I’ve read eight books this month, which isn’t too bad considering the number of hours I’ve invested in video games and The Bachelorette.  I had hoped to read ten or more, but I think that eight is a very respectable number!

Overall, it has been a really great reading month.  I only set aside one book, Raven Stratagem.  I decided to put this in the dreaded DNF pile at about 32%.  I felt it lacked the brilliant characterisation that made its predecessor, Ninefox Gambit so readable.

The best books of the month were When Dimple Met Rishi and Spellbook of the Lost and Found.  You can see my reviews for each linked above.  I thought Flame in the Mist was good, but a bit of a disappointment and The Never King was a fun and entertaining read, but nothing too deep.  I’ve got reviews of Lost Boy,  The Underground Railroad, and Everything, Everything coming up next week, keep and eye out!

Books I am currently reading

Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab

Fellowship isn’t going anywhere, I’m reading through it at a very leisurely pace.  You’ll get really bored of seeing it listed in these round-ups. I’m starting on the second of V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series.  I thought the first book set the stage for a great series, although I had some issues with it in general.  I really hated Lila Bard, but am slowly starting to warm to her in A Gathering of Shadows.  She’s lost a lot of the grating, stereotypical features and is coming into her own as a character.

Books I bought

There’s a lot here.  It’s probably easiest to just post book haul photos.  Don’t judge me.

Needless to say, I’m really excited for all of these.

Book mail!

Lost Boy by Christina Henry

The Particle Zoo by Gavin Hesketh

The Cardinal’s Man by M G Sinclair

I’m really excited for these!  The Cardinal’s Man will be my first blog tour and I hope it goes well.  The Particle Zoo is really intriguing.  I love all things science, but usually cannot wrap my head around some of the more technical concepts.  The sign of a great science author is that they put concepts into works that someone like me can understand.  Fingers crossed!

  That’s it for this month.  Do you see anything on your TBR here?  Have you read any of these books?  I’d love to hear, let me know!

ARCs abound! Monthly reading round-up: June The sun is shining, everyone is sneezing, and June is coming to a close.  It has been a very gross and sweaty month here in the UK, but has at least resulted in a lot of indoor reading time for me.  

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks — July 1, 2019

July 1, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

The National remains my favorite band and probably 50% of my listening time is a National album or playlist. Their new album I Am Easy To Find feels like a turning point record for the band, going from the moody, outsider introspection and doubt of lead singer Matt Berninger to something that feels more adult, sophisticated, and wiser. I might have titled it Women Help The Band Grow Up. Matt is no longer the center of The National’s universe and he frequently cedes the mic to the many women who accompany and often lead on the long, their longest, album. They include Gail Ann Dorsey (who sang with Bowie for a long time), who is amazing, and a number of the songs were written by Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife. I especially love the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the arrangements, and the sheer complexity and coherence of the work. It still amazes me when I meet someone who does not know The National. My heart breaks for them just a little.

What I’m reading: 

Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad through the lens of a captive Trojan queen, Briseis. As a reviewer in The Atlantic writes, it answers the question “What does war mean to women?” We know the answer and it has always been true, whether it is the casual and assumed rape of captive women in this ancient war story or the use of rape in modern day Congo, Syria, or any other conflict zone. Yet literature almost never gives voice to the women – almost always minor characters at best — and their unspeakable suffering. Barker does it here for Briseis, for Hector’s wife Andromache, and for the other women who understand that the death of their men is tragedy, but what they then endure is worse. Think of it ancient literature having its own #MeToo moment. The NY Times’ Geraldine Brooks did not much like the novel. I did. Very much.

What I’m watching: 

The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirror and Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.

Archive 

May 19, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life.  While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.

What I’m reading: 

Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library.  It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more.  It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.

What I’m watching: 

What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

What I’m reading: 

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous. 

What I’m watching: 

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s  AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star.  The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018 

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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[laughbreak6-blog]

The Ralph Pulitzer House - 17 East 73rd Street

Someone thought it would be a good idea to paint the limestone at the entrance level gray.  It wasn't.

Although only steps from Fifth Avenue and Central Park, the ten brownstone residences erected by developer James E. Coburn on the north side of East 73rd Street in 1871 were not mansions.  For the time being Manhattan's wealthiest citizens were content to live below 57th Street.  But they hinted at things to come. At least one of them, No. 17, replaced an earlier, simpler home.  On April 24, 1869 an advertisement in the New York Herald had offered "To Let--A three story high stoop house."  Now, on September 6, 1875, an ad in the same newspaper touted: For Sale--That New and Well Built House, No. 17 East Seventy-third street; hard wood finish; 22x60; four stories and basement. Designed by J. W. Marshall, it and the rest of the row were aimed at more affluent owners--such as Ernst August Roesler, who would live here.  Born in Germany in 1844, he and his wife, the former Clara Mueller, had a daughter Ottilie. Following Clara's death in 1883 Roesler married Augusta Koehler.  The couple had another daughter, Therese Auguste Louise.  But her half-sister would not see her grow up in the house.  On the afternoon of April 17, 1888 the 18-year-old Ottilie was married in the parlor.  It was a wedding that was covered by all the newspapers. The bridegroom was George A. Steinway, eldest son of piano maker William Steinway.  The Evening World reported "Many telegrams of congratulations have been received not only from all parts of this country, but from friends of both families in Hamburg, London, [St.] Petersburg, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Paris and other cities of Europe."  The article concluded "The presents received by the bride were very beautiful and very numerous, coming from Germany and England as well as the United States."  Dinner and the reception were held at Delmonico's. Roesler died on February 10, 1900.  By then merely well-to-do residents like the Roesler family were being nudged out by the fantastically wealthy.  The following year millionaire publisher Joseph Pulitzer demolished Nos. 7 through 15 Eat 73rd Street as the site of his magnificent mansion designed by Stanford White. In June 1904, the year after the Pulitzer palazzo was completed, son Ralph bought the former Roesler house next door.  The timing of the purchase, a year before his marriage to one of society's most eligible debutantes, Frederica Vanderbilt Webb, was most likely not coincidental. Frederica was the daughter of Dr. W. Seward Webb and Lila Osgood Vanderbilt.  Her grandfather was William H. Vanderbilt.   The wedding took place in Shelburne, Vermont, where her parents maintained their 3,000-acre country estate, Shelburne Farm.  Its Queen Anne-style mansion contained 60 rooms and Frederick Law Olmsted had designed the park-like grounds. Webb, who had given up his medical practice to become involved with the railroads with his father-in-law, arranged a ten-car special train to transport guests from Manhattan.  On October 14, 1905, the day before the ceremony, The New York Times reported "At Shelburne House, the decorators were kept at work to-night.  They completed the decorations there yesterday, but the heat to-day withered them so it was necessary to do them all over again."  The newspaper later reported that the wedding "was attended by 600 guests." A month later, on November 12, 1905 the New-York Tribune reported that the architectural firm of Foster, Gade & Graham had filed plans for remodeling No. 17 East 73rd Street.  "The facade is to be removed and a new front of decorated limestone erected.  New staircases are to be installed and the interior rearranged."  The firm estimated the cost at $20,000, or about $575,000 today.  The Real Estate Record & Builders' Guide reported on what might have been an embarrassing afterthought.  A separate set of plans were filed, this one specifically to "install toilets." Foster, Gade & Graham worked around the old English basement plan by placing the new entrance a few steps below sidewalk level.  Clad in limestone, the neo-Renaissance residence was splashed with Beaux Arts embellishments.  The three story rounded bay was marked by three arched French windows, and a trio of rectangular openings separated by Corinthian pilasters, their sills dripping swags of carved roses.  Similar garlands draped over blank rosettes below the elaborately carved stone cornice which supported the mansard level. The house was barely completed when Ralph and Frederica began construction of their summer home in July 1906.  The Colonial-style mansion would sit on their 200-acre estate near those of William K. Vanderbilt and Payne Whitney. Back in Manhattan the newlyweds most likely never lived in the 73rd Street house.   Despite the efforts and cost his son had expended to renovate the house next door, Joseph Pulitzer's wedding present to Frederica was a house on Fifth Avenue. In 1910 Ralph Pulitzer leased No. 17 to Josephine Livermore.   The widow of attorney John R. Livermore, who died on May 3, 1906, she was the former Josephine Whitney Brooks.  The couple had married in December 1898, The New York Times noting "The wedding was a social event.  H. O. Havemeyer was the bridegroom's best man." Livermore's death was, somewhat bizarrely, brought on by the trauma of the destruction of their country home in Westchester County about a month earlier.  The target of arsonists, the magnificence of the mansion and its furnishings was reflected in the silver alone--valued at around $990,000 in today's money.  "The fire was a great shock to Mr. Livermore," said a newspaper following his death, "who has been ailing ever since" As the Pulitzers continued to lease the house (to Sidney C. Berg in 1913 and Mrs. Gardiner Sherman in 1915, for instance) their names continued to appear in newspapers.   In 1913 Ralph surprised most of the city when he sued the powerful Tammany-backed Mayor William Jay Gaynor for defaming his father.  A few months later, in January 1914, the building in which Pulitzer's $40,000 yacht, the Bullet, was store in dry dock burned, destroying it. In August 1916 architect Louise J. Farmer did significant upgrades to the 73rd Street house for Pulitzer.  His plans called for "new stairs, partitions, plumbing, brick walls."  The renovations cost the publisher the equivalent $105,000 today. Ralph and Frederica had two children, Ralph, Jr. and Seward.  In the autumn of 1921 a tutor was hired for Seward.  Cyril Jones had served as secretary to Colonel Edward M. House during the Paris Peace Conference and was in charge of communications between him and President Woodrow Wilson.  Following his discharge from the Navy, he took the job of tutoring Seward. Before long, unknown to Ralph Pulitzer, a romance was developing between his wife and the tutor.  In the spring of 1922 Jones resigned to join the faculty of the Milton School near Boston.  Frederica promptly sailed to Paris to begin divorce proceedings.   On February 15, 1924 The New York Times reported on the pending divorce, the grounds of which were "constructive desertion."  Four months later the newspaper reported that Frederica Pulitzer would marry Cyril Jones at Shelburne House in August or September. Interestingly enough, Pulitzer retained possession of No. 17.  In 1927 he leased it William D. Flanders who married author Margaret Leech the following year.  Upon returning from their honeymoon in England and France, they took up residence at No. 450 East 52nd Street.  A daughter was born in there March 1929. Finally, after decades of leasing the home, Ralph sold it to Benjamin Joseph Buttenweiser in 1934.  Five years earlier the banker and philanthropist had married Helen Lehman, daughter of Arthur Lehman, senior partner in Lehman Brothers.  Son Lawrence Benjamin was born on January 11, 1932.  His parents were a fascinating pair. Buttenweiser, the son of wealthy real estate operator Joseph L. Buttenwieser, was admitted to Columbia College at the age of 15, focusing on 19th century English poetry.  He graduated two years later.  Because Columbia University refused to accept him for its doctorate program (he was too young) he entered the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb. And Helen was no insipid socialite.  A civic leader, she was one of the first women admitted to the City Bar Association. Before moving in, the Buttenweisers got rid of the Edwardian interiors of Foster, Gade & Graham.  They hired the Modernist architect William Lescaze to completely redesign the interiors.  On December 12, 1936 The New Yorker wrote that Lescaze "in the last five or six years has taken the lead in Modernist architecture in this country" and said that the Benjamin Buttenwieser house was one of "the only three completely Modernist town houses in N.Y.C." The result was a striking dichotomy of styles.  The inside was sleekly cutting edge, while the facade remained nearly unchanged.  Writing in Arts & Decoration in 1937, architecture critic Mary Fanton Roberts noted "The exterior Mr. Lescaze left pretty much as it used to be. He took a few ornaments off, substituted casement windows. All of which was probably a sound idea...although the result in no way reflects the Modern expected from Mr. Lescaze." The Buttenwiesers would have two more sons.  Peter L. Buttenwieser was born in 1936 and Paul Arthur on April 15, 1938.  All three boys would go on to successful careers.  Lawrence established a thriving legal career; Peter would eventually become best known as a philanthropist (Mother Jones Magazine placed him at No. 2 on its 1998 list of Top Ten "power elite" with "bald ambition"); and Paul became a physician, child psychiatrist and author. The family's country home was in Bedford Village, New York.  Benjamin and Helen were still living on 73rd Street when Lawrence married Ann Harriet Lubin on July 14, 1956 in Purchase, New York.  But within to years it was owned by the Republic of Guinea as its Permanent Mission to the United States. The Mission remained in the house until 1969 when it was converted to a three-family residence with a doctor's office on the ground floor.  It was most likely at this time that the mansard was converted to a glass-walled penthouse. From 1977 to the early 1980's the office was home to Maho Bay Camps, Inc., operators of the "camping resort" on St. John in the Virgin Islands.  The resort offered 70 three-room "canvas cottages" each 16 x 16 feet.  The rates in 1977 were $150 per week for couples and an additional $15 for each child.

The Pulitzer house has suffered some humiliation--the coat of graphite-colored paint over the limestone first floor, window air conditioners in the transoms of the fourth floor windows and, much worse, gouged into the fifth floor stonework.  (And, then, there's the matter of the mansard roof.)  But overall the elegance of the 1906 remodeling of the Victorian brownstone survives. photographs by the author

Source: http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-ralph-pulitzer-house-17-east-73rd.html

[educateddiesel]

Hillwood High: A Tale of 1 1/2 Cities “11 Seconds Left: Part Two, One Play Away”

“Gerald, I need you and Paco to cross at 5 yards and Stinky, you and Rashad do the same. Gerald, Stinky, since you guys are both the tallest, I need you both to run up the hashes to the endzone and I’ll look inside to see who’s open first and roll out to whichever side looks better. We survived three quarters against these racist bastards and I’m not sure about any of the other ten of you, but I plan on going to State. Is that clear?,” said the leader of the Hillwood huddle.

“Wow, Miss Helga! I got a tear in my eye. I never thought a girl quarterback would be such a good leader to us boys! I reckon love will make you do crazy things!,” Stinky laughed and joked while his teammates chuckled at Helga fulfilling what was still a farfetched idea of her playing quarterback in the state semifinals. 

“Stinky....you’ll have more than one tear in your eye if we lose this game,” Helga bellowed back.

“Mm, mm, MM!” Stinky, boy when I say you right, you are RIGHT! I knew Helga was athletic and could play ball, but not at QB!,” Gerald added. “Ever since Arnold got hurt, though, she playin’ like she Michelle Vick!” All the boys laughed after Gerald proclaimed that Helga’s love for her boyfriend who had suffered a concussion caused her to turn superhuman in her athleticism; however, after throwing for 195 yards in just 8 passes, with 7 of her throws being caught between her receivers with touchdowns to both of her jokester receivers Gerald and Stinky, and even rushing for 125 yards on just 8 runs, including being sacked twice and still scoring her first touchdown on a 55-yd run, their wisecracks could not prove to be much further from the truth.....especially to bring the team to just a deficit of one point after being down 31-14 when Arnold was taken to the hospital with 3 minutes left to play in the 3rd Quarter.

“SHUT UP!!!! I’m going to State for the Football-Head even IF I have to start next week, but we’re scoring and have Wolfgang, Edmund, and the rest of these Centennial bitches crying until next year.....and those other bitches Rhonda and Lila too!” Helga fired back.  “Let’s go.....Football-Head on 3! 1, 2, 3.....”

“FOOTBALL-HEAD!,” the team chanted in unison.

On the other side, Wolfgang was an All-State middle linebacker on defense when he wasn’t playing quarterback. He was also a senior who had 10 Division I college offers to major universities to play college football. Wolfgang not only wanted to finish his high school playing career as the state champion he became in 2003, but also continue his dominance over some of the very same kids he had bullied since they were at P.S. 118; especially Gerald who he used to start fights with the previous year when they were teammates at Centennial together and also Helga, a girl but still was Arnold’s true love and also a girl bold enough to lead his rival school almost to their first victory against the Rebels after being behind 38-21 at the beginning of this 4th and final quarter.

Wolfgang barked at his teammates:

“Okay. We have these Hillwood faggots right where we want them! We just have to stop them here and as much as that bimbo bitch Helga has done, she’s still a girl and she still can’t throw 55 yards to the endzone! Johann.....you, Peter, Franz, and Anton play prevent to the end zone and don’t let anyone behind you, especially that hoparound monkey Gerald! I’M NOT LOSING TO HIM! He cost us the basketball playoffs last year when he couldn’t make those free throws and let his friend Arrrrrrnold win, and he almost lost State for us last year with that fumble! WE DON’T LOSE TO GERALD JOHANNSEN or any other niggers from Hillwood!”

“Yeah, but what about Helga? What if she runs?,” his fellow linebacker teammate Edmund asked.

“Oh, I’m drilling her ass into the ground like a railroad spike!,” Wolfgang answered. “Now, you all know football is a man’s sport, right? I’m not losing a state championship to a girl either....ESPECIALLY not fucking Helga G. Pataki! I’m glad her dad could cheat for us and helped us get Arnold outta the game until she got in. We would have had 50 points by now and won if Big Bob could have stayed as the ref!”

“Let’s go, Rebel Pride on 3! 1, 2, 3......REBEL PRIDE, REBEL POWER!,” said the Centennial defense.

[beebrainedstudios]

ADSOM AU Asks are open!

Since I’m still working on some ADSOM art (I’m like 75% done with several things), I thought I’d list out all my ADSOM AUs (including the new ones) and see if anyone has any questions about them, their plots, or even any questions for the characters. Maybe I’ll even do a few drawn responses. So ask away people! I’m in the mood to answer. AUs below the cut, and each has their own tag.

Precious To Me: During AGOS, Kell pushes Maxim too far in the cells (and vise versa), and Maxim tries to have Kell executed by sending him to White London. Lucky for him, Osaron is a nice oshoc who is delighted to have another Antari around, and despite Holland’s protests Osaron insists Kell stick around as another prince. Hijinks ensue as Osaron tries to bribe the pair to get along with magic lessons, Rhy tries to figure out where his brother went, and the Essen Tasch Masquerade Ball approaches, during which everyone will have to make a decision that will change their lives forever. There’s shapeshifting, magic training, mystery-solving, and a whole host of other things; it’s a lot of fun. 

Ferase Stras Kell: Maris never gave Kell to Maxim, instead telling him she never received an Antari. Lila and Rhy end up acting as the focal pair of the series with Alucard joining in along the way, but when Osaron is closing in and all seems lost, Maxim reveals his deal with Maris and his suspicions that she was never entirely honest with him. The group along with Holland heads out to sea to find this mythical Antari, but the man they find may not be entirely willing to help them.

Smuggler: Kell’s family never gave him up (they decided on the boat), so rather than growing up royal, he grows up as the heir to a massive crime family, which he contributes to by using his natural Antari gifts to help him smuggle. Rhy eventually gets sent by Maxim to go break up the smuggling ring as a chance for him to prove himself; he and Kell become rivals in a cat-and-mouse game, as neither really wants to fight the other like their families want.

Black Magic Buddies: A weakened Osaron wakes up post-ACOL and ends up stuck with Ned, who can’t decide if he’s terrified, in awe, or amused by his new roommate. I’m trying to do a comic with this one and several installments are already out! Go check it out if you want; the tag’s below.

Studs and Spikes: A modern AU where almost every character is a celebrity of some sort; Kell and Rhy are pop stars, but Kell hates it. Maxim and Emira aren’t just his adoptive parents- they’re his managers, and Kell can’t stand the pastel pop aesthetic the pair force on him, but he has no idea what to do. Now that his old buddy Lila has left to pursue her own career, Kell’s left fuming with no way out. One night at a bar, Kell ends up meeting the Dane Twins and their drummer Holland, a punk-rock band that Kell wants nothing more than to be a part of. Astrid extends the invitation, recognizing him from his albums; he gets along nicely with Athos and Holland after all. What follows next is a roller coaster roadtrip as Kell tries out the rockstar lifestyle and the group tries to avoid Maxim, who first starts a manhunt to find his “son” and then considers other, more dangerous methods of making sure Kell gets back to making music the way he wants him to...

Aesthetic: Basically just an excuse for me to draw ridiculous versions of the cast. Every London has a look and aesthetic, all evolved from the original color of pure magic; rainbow glitter. Grey London is steampunk, Red London is hyper-trendy fashion where the royals dress like various pop stars, White London ranges from punk to goth to emo, and Black London is based on the 90s. I’ve drawn for this AU before.

Tangled: Pretty self-explanatory if you’ve watched the Disney movie. Kell is a magical dude imprisoned in a tower with only the occasional visit from Holland or his companion gecko Hastra for company (also the White Twins, but Kell doesn’t see them much and definitely doesn’t find them to be good company). He bumps into the traveling thief Lila Bard and demands she take him to see the beautiful red city he can sometimes see at sunset. She agrees with some conditions, they go and cross paths with the royal prince Rhy and his trusty dragon Alucard. Both groups agree to work together if Lila will show Rhy where the Shadow Thief (AKA her, but he doesn’t have to know that) went. But something strange is going on; Rhy can’t figure out why seeing Kell triggers strange visions for him, and Lila swears that she keeps seeing a shadow following them, occasionally joined by two others that give her a bad, bad feeling.

Aftermath: Holland survives because I say so, and he, Rhy, and Alucard try to navigate kinghood together- up until Rhy decides to up and go leave to find his brother.

Reverse: The seal between the Londons decayed long ago, leaving four separate kingdoms split by two massive rivers. The bloodthirsty Red London is eager to conquer its peaceful and prosperous White London neighbor, who has built its own resistance movement in an effort to beat back the threat. Prince Rhy is trying to resist in his own way, as he hates the actions of his wicked parents and the ruin they’ve brought to the kingdom. Rhy is worried too for the court Antari, Kell, a man who made a decision in secret, one that saved the prince’s life but left them both tied together, and if Maxim and Emira find out Kell is doomed to a fate worse than death. But death itself seems around every corner, and its Rhy’s turn to save Kell and himself, if he can only figure out how. He finds the locket of his past lover; Rhy’s parents said he died at sea, but the locket proves otherwise, and Rhy has a good idea where he went. He and Kell flee for White London, but the resistance will not be happy to see them- Rhy can only hope that he can find Alucard before the resistance and its leader find them.

Western: Arnes is a small desert oasis that hosts one of the most successful business families around, the Maresh family. Their railroad wealth flows out to the rest of the town, but such prosperity attracts dangerous outlaws and gangs looking to make off of other’s good fortune. It’s up to Sheriff Kell to keep things civil, but he ends up off the beaten path and must work to recover a special stone artifact worth millions of dollars that Maxim Maresh needs; Kell also may or may not have had a hand in its disappearance and he needs to clear his name. Teaming up with the known thief Delilah Bard ends up being his only option, and the two work to reclaim the stone while also avoiding natural dangers and the deadly White Vipers gang.

Swapped: Several characters get their arcs swapped around; Athos becomes Red London’s Antari after mysteriously appearing in Arnes, Astrid meets Lila Bard and the two become tyrant queens, Kell is their very angry thrall, Holland is a magical thief trying to avoid detection in Grey London, and many others. Not the same thing as Reverse AU.

Pokemon: Also fairly self explanatory. Everyone has their own pokemon teams and it affects the plot a bit. Osaron’s part-pokemon, part-Ultra Beast, and the Inheritor is a master ball. You can imagine how things go down. 

Pets: Everyone gets cute pets because I say so, regardless of whether each pet species actually exists in England or whether the character died in canon. They all deserve a cute animal companion.

Congrats if you read this far down! This turned out a bit longer than expected, but I hope you enjoyed! Ask away!