#No More Kings

[melancholia-ennui]

Fun fact!

The coronation celebrations today were in part paid for by money that would otherwise have been spent on foodbanks.

Fuck the royals, fuck the lords, and fuck the capitalist state that preserves their power. How long, how long, until the people can be free?

[lenbryant]

My friend who posted this coronation merch is so naughty.

[gummyartstradingcards]

[billyjoelmutt]

Soaring Eagle- "Rockin and rollin Splishin and Splashin over the horizon what can it be?!! Looks like its going to be a FREE COUNTRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D

[gert53]

"I got my talking socks

Behind this painted box

I'm putting on a show"

"Someday" - no more kings / @daspetey

[nedison]

Have a transparent orange 45 of Pavement's cover of Schoolhouse Rock's No More Kings in honor of... uhh... no particular reason I guess.

[xxdovelin]

Origin story for my character VOID, from No More Kings.

---

She stood across the fence, trying to be fierce.

“You can’t make me afraid.”

Everyone already was. That wasn’t hard.

A rock crushed the fence post. She pretended not to flinch.

“I’m only asking for your help.”

The fence flew into the sky and twisted. Wide eyes didn’t dare look up.

“Please, just once. I know you can."

The apple tree beside us shook and the roots gave way.

“It would be easy to you, just a second.”

The orchard was next. Part of the hayfield went with it.

She was on the other side of the fence. When had she moved? Time was hazy sometimes.

“I know it was an accident.”

Then she touched my cheek.

Miles away I felt the drill suddenly stop, the hillside shuddering. Families who cared only for their own sobbed. It had been three days already. I could hear them whispering: miners were sure to be out of oxygen soon. Four counties had combined efforts; forty men and two drills down, and now the third had finally seemed to give in as well.

“It would be easy to you. Just one second. Please.”

Then a miner walked out from a perfect hole.

The rock I took had to go somewhere so I put it where the apple tree had been. It appeared with a dusting of earth.

For a moment, she was crying. Not cutely, like I thought girls did. She snotted and sobbed and I think she tried to say “Thank you” but it just came out in a scream of relief-

Then the days flashed on. Fast and feverish, the moon making a halo in the sky with the sun blinding behind it, the universe rotating around me. Everything was brighter now, with the apple tree gone.

I wondered who the girl was.

“What happened. In the accident.”

I didn’t know how to say it. Or where to start. Her clothes were different, hair a bit longer now, cascading. There were less freckles now and the hay fields were all stacked behind her. Time.

“Have you asked that before?”

No one had asked that before.

My throat felt dry. She seemed pleased.

“Yes. Everyday.”

I didn’t remember.

She was gone again.  I thought about how to tell her as the sun blinked by. It was slowing down, a good sign. What had happened back then, in the accident? What was before the accident?

I remembered my hands were smaller. And the trees, they seemed taller. I would hide under them, pressed down in the dirt while the angry voice called through the woods. The world was so steady then. Time pulsed along with my heart and I could watch the slow march of stars through the branches. The voice would fade with dawn, my father back in his chair when I came home.

Townspeople called the angry voice the woodland ghost: the ghost everyone knew, who worked two blocks down in the lone mechanic shop.

“How much longer?”

She seemed older again. I wondered by how much. The clothes changed as I considered, light fading and growing behind her. Tall grains sprouted in the fields.

“Not much more.”

I think she smiled and I watched the rolling waves of her hair grow in front of me.

“What happened in the accident?”

I tried to tell her, but the days were so fragmented. How far apart were my words? Did she have to catch each word, day by day? What if she wasn’t there, when it fell? I worried and tried to pace myself with the light. I wanted to make sense.

No one had ever asked me before.

“My father drank- Mother didn’t know- she was working in the city-”

He was so ashamed; he tried to drown the feeling, but the feeling overflowed like it always does  and the door would burst open, remaints of tables and chairs flying.

“I think we were alike.”

I couldn’t brave his storm, so I watched stars instead. Each night the woods grew smaller as the voice torn them down. I wondered why he searched for me, but the thought kept me in dirt, feet firmly on the ground, gravity.

Eventually only the apple tree had been left, lone on the hill.

“I was waiting for mom to come back.”

So many days.

“Then one day father said--”

He lied.

“-- and I got angry.”

I’m sure he was lying.

Probably.

She did come back, afterall. Mom came back just once. Her image had flashed by the house in the woods. But I was on the hill, beneath the apple tree.

Then mother was gone for good.

Perhaps he’d been right.

“He was driving. We were in the truck. I did something. The trees broke along with the road, all the metal caved in around us, and--”

And --

“-- and I was angry.”

I had never been angry before. Angry had only been the voice in the woods.

“I was so angry.”

Then father was gone for good.

“They called it an accident.”

The girl stood there. I could see the moon now, drifting as a comet.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Angela.”

“Do you know mine?” I’d forgotten.

“It’s Aiden. Is time back?”

I considered. The wind blew her hair. The moon was a shape I half knew.

“I think so.”

“Ok. No more magic, ok? It takes you away.”

Then she took me away.

She took me to her apartment, a too-small box where she lived. She made me try on too-big, hand-me-down clothes. I didn’t have any. She made dinner but I found I couldn’t eat. We went to bed but I found I couldn’t sleep. I could remember sleep; I could remember the dance of branches that use to lure me there. The stars crawled past the window. I missed the woods. Or at least the land on which they’d stood. But Angela explained the land had been bought. There was a new house there now, had been for awhile... I looked at her but couldn’t see the years.

“Five,” she said.

Seemed a long time, especially sitting through the days. How did I stand it before. Angela took me outside because the room, the bed, the clothes were too tight. Usually at night, for the space, for the bare town blocks. But even the grid of streets were too tight, breathing on me, lined with box buildings, louder and heavier than the apple tree or the fence. How did I stand it before. Cars inched slower than ants and the few people moved like moonlight along the streets. The moon itself failed to sway. Too much time for thinking. I could only think of what I could remember. I could only remember so much before the hill. Just the woods, vaguely, and the accident, a bit more.

I thought about the fireman who found us, in the truck.

I told Angela about the fireman. Angela told me no one ever found him.

I said the truck had turned over. I could see the chaos of land behind the cracked glass.  Angela told me they called it a landslide. The fireman dipped down into the truck, a shadow on the destroyed landscape. He reached for me, painfully, like a blossom unfolding, too slow to bear. I had looked around in my wait. Something was twisted next to me. It seemed days before my head was turned enough to see what had caught in the metal. I recognized my father’s watch. Then I was on the hill by the apple tree, forever.

I said, “I think I killed him.”

Angela said, “I know. It was an accident.”

Angela said, “Both of them.”

Her uncle was a fireman. He quit after his brother vanished before his eyes, along with a truck and half of a roadside. Doctors said trauma, but everyone said mad. He had a wife and two sons that left. But he still had a will and a niece, and the mine was always hiring.

“You saved him; him and a lot of others,” she whispered. “The stuff before was an accident. I know that now.”

END

-- original ending below tw character death --

Her eyes drifted over, catching a light. What was that look. I’d seen it before. But I didn’t get a chance to find out. A car was there, navy steel against her like a rock crushing a petal. It plucked her into the air, a pearl-stealing raven.

I was slow. The long days had slowed me.

She fell in my arms, the last piece of me fitting in place.

I could feel the strands of her hair slipping through my fingers, falling in the same way of snow, silky and frail. There were no screams when the car collapsed in on itself. No bodies left. Only Angela. But her eyes never opened, no matter how long I waited.

And I waited, waited til the skin blued and the ground beneath me crumbled to ashes, tiny bits of carbon, tiny bits of stars I knew made up everything.

How dare they exist when Angela did not.

Walls of the building streets bowled out, then vanished in a wave that swept away even sound. I watched it roll over the valley. Watched as it carried away trees then hills, then the hill, and the mine, the dust cloud travelling along the low horizon in every direction, kissed light by the moon. The sky looked brighter than day with the stars shining through the veil. They grew stronger with each city the wave consumed, the ring of earth expanding as far as the reach of my lungs. Land on land, clashing, marring the foot of mountains. Then, there was nothing; nothing but the stars, and the last look of her eyes as they closed.

The wave rolled back in an instant. I swallowed it whole, with all my grief, and her.

 ​

[roleplayretcon]

Coming up Next on Roleplay Retcon:

* The Spirit made with Noirlandia by Evan Rowland!

* Empire Records starring Pete Mitchell of No More Kings and made with Damn the Man Save the Music by Hannah Schaffer!

* Pluto Nash starring Kendo of Tales Yet Told and made with Moonpunk by Wannabe Games!

[bone3chan]

sigh so harry du bois core

[honeyimissjoo]

wait wait what do you mean july 24? as in less than 2 weeks from now???? are you sure you dont meant july 24 2024?? you know july 24' 24' ??????????@!?!?!?!?!

nononononononononono no

brb I need to blast out of the stratosphere and into the sun

[thecreativemillennial]

Happy 61st birthday to Ralph Macchio

[lenbryant]

Happy Bastille Day!

(photo - Wikipedia)

[gwydionmisha]

Execution of Charles I

[louisegluckpdf]

i was talking to this guy yesterday and he said "i'm pretty sure i'm straight but i might be a little bicurious. there are definitely some guys i might hook up with. like samson." and i said "samson?" and he said "yeah. like from the bible"

[astrolavas]

a bit late for mermay but. obligatory mermaid au