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Lost at Green Sea

Summary: A short story about a boy named Henry and a mysterious forest.

Words: 7383

Thorns.

Little, sharp, curved blades on dark emerald stalks hidden in an ocean of blooming rose flowers. Those rose bushes were the pride and joy of Margaret Weston living in Stone Hill, Vermont. Among all the other prize winning arrangements of greenery adorning the colorful, 19th-century architecture in the neighborhood not having luscious, perfectly groomed bushes of flowers would make a front lawn stick out like a sore thumb. But now the plants seem to have parted like the red sea for Margaret's son Henry.

Thorns.

That's all Henry thought about while trying to get up.

Stupid, prickly, little thorns.

When he finally managed to crawl out, getting quite a few cuts on his hands and legs in the process, there was a horrifying carnage of broken off petals, leaves and stalks left in his wake. Margaret felt needles of hurt poke at her heart but instead of focusing on the frustration welling up inside, she quickly ran up to Henry patting him all over and making sure he's alright. It was his birthday after all, and she just wanted him to have a good day. She knew it wasn't easy for him to be around this many people.

- Henry! Are you okay?

- Yeah I-

- Why did you do that? Oh look at your hands!

- I was just-

- Come on, let's get you cleaned up. - Margaret placed her hands on the boy's shoulders and directed him towards the house.

- But I- but I was playing- Mom we’re playing catch. - Henry mumbled out making Margaret turn to follow his gaze and see the group of kids standing behind them waiting to continue their game.

- Oh, right, go play then Hen. - She quickly let go of his arms and watched as the kids dispersed across the yard.

- He’ll live with a few cuts, Marge. - Tom, Margaret’s husband and Henry’s dad, came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist resting his head in the crook of her neck.

- Yeah, he’s always been tougher than you are. - Said Margaret with a smirk on her face alluding to a recent accident involving Tom and peeling potatoes.

- Hey! That was a real injury, almost cut my finger clean off! - Tom hunched over with his legs bent and dramatically raised his left pointer finger up like a newborn baby for a baptism.

They both started laughing, Marge gave Tom a quick peck on the cheek and they went their separate ways to talk to guests like proper accommodating hosts of a birthday party would.

The cake was already eaten and most parents gathered in groups standing by the house with wine and beer talking mostly about plans for the upcoming summer break.

- Henry! Here! - The kids were playing catch, stretched across the yard with the ball flying around between chairs and tables that were set up on the side lawn.

Henry Weston was an average looking fifteen year old, with dark brown hair that got in his baby blue eyes, if he didn’t comb it back. He had soft features and a privilege of having an average body type. Henry liked sports, mostly tennis and swimming, and clay sculpting was his artistic outlet. None of his hobbies were very serious. He didn’t go to any classes nor took part in any competitions. He didn’t handle pressure or people very well. A highly sensitive person is what his mom called him.

A pussy is what some kids at school call me.

It’s not that he didn’t like people but there were just a lot of moments when people got overwhelming. It could be a mean comment, demanding tone of voice, peer pressure on the playground or just a loud crowd and Henry would suddenly feel the whole world crashing down on him. Sweaty palms and a fast heart rate are a fairly normal thing for any teenager or adult alike in a situation they would rather not be in, but for Henry it was always a little bit more than that and it happened a little bit more often than it should. While someone else wouldn’t think twice about an interaction, he would feel a bucket of cold water being dropped on his head, ringing in his ears, tears in his eyes and trembling of his muscles. But he didn’t tell that much to his parents, only that he got upset and they would ride it off as being sensitive. But on this particular day everything was perfect.

- Mary, catch! - The ball sored over the food table, earning a few disquieted looks from parents, to safely land in the girl’s hands.

After something like two hours when the afternoon had turned into evening and all the kids were worn out everyone said their goodbyes and the birthday party ended. Henry helped his parents clean up and after they all snuggled on the couch equipped with snacks and ready to watch a movie. They watched Henry's favorite, which is The Mask and then it was time for bed. Fourteen is said to be the last year of early teens and a threshold to becoming an angsty, know-it-all teenager all parents complain about. That thought was running through Henry’s head as he was now in bed trying to fall asleep on the last hour of his fourteenth birthday, pondering if he really would change perspective on his parents whom he thought the world of thus far.

Summer.

A week after Henry’s birthday he was driving with his parents in their Chevrolet minivan for an out of state vacation in western rural Massachusetts. It was a short, four hour drive which the boy spent looking out the window listening to his parents’ road trip playlists of chillout music. In the cities he watched people out and about in their summer outfits and sunglasses, eating ice cream, talking on the phone, walking home with full shopping bags.

It’s a really nice summer.

Everyone seemed to be walking with a pep in their step, many people smiling, content with the change in the weather from brisk spring air to the soft warmth of the summer sun. When they got into the rural area Henry too appreciated the sun beaming down on him warming his face. The boy dozed off before they arrived and woke up to the car doors opening.

- Wake up, Hen. - Said Tom walking by the back door to the trunk to start unpacking.

He handed Henry his backpack as the boy got out of the car. The cottage they rented was particularly eccentric. It looked straight out of a kitschy postcard, the kind that Henry often got from his grandmas on his birthdays or on Christmas. The walls a glossy, almost black wood, yellow window frames and a tall, red tiled roof encircled on all sides by overgrown greenery. Henry watched his dad grab some bags himself and they followed Margaret to the house. The front porch windows had turned dull. Inside there were two old, worn out, yellow armchairs with a floral print facing the front door and a long, rough wooden bench before them. It was hot and stuffy but it was no match to how it was inside the house. When Margaret unlocked the front door she took a step back and waved at sudden the wave of heat. There was very little space though the cottage seemed big on the outside. Walking in you were greeted by a wall in front of you, a crammed, curving staircase on the left and a little corridor to the kitchen on the right. Henry skipped on the stairs dragging his backpack behind.

Dad will have to walk sideways to fit through these stairs.

He giggled at the thought reaching the second floor of the cabin. There were two rooms on either side and after checking both of them, the left one turned out to be the “kid room”. Henry threw his backpack on the single bed and began scouting the area. The room was full of big, heavy, wooden furniture and boxes of toys left by the owners for the Wi-Fi deprived youth that would come here on family retreats.

I’m gonna dig through that later.

Coming down Henry grabbed the wooden railing on the staircase and hopped down five stairs at a time almost running into the wall on the landings.

- Can I go look around? - He asked, finding his parents unpacking groceries in the kitchen.

- Sure. - Tom answered without even turning to the boy, preoccupied with checking the appliances.

I hope the backyard is cool enough to play in or I’ll have nothing to do around here.

Henry went out the front door, turned the corner close to the cottage and ran his hand on the wood checking if it would actually be as oil slick as it looked.

It’s not.

The wood was dry and old. It was very corrugated and if he dragged his hand over it long enough he would probably get splinters in all of his fingers. The back wall of the house was overgrown with woodbine. The arching vines seemed to be slithering like thin, green snakes in all directions.

The area to which they came for their vacation was a vast plain, sparse with houses that were separated with either large fields of grain or fruit orchards. Their cottage was located on a slight hill and behind the property laid a beautiful dense, green apple orchard.

That looks cool.

Henry made his way between the short trimmed trees and admired the small fruitlets. Walking for a while on one of the paths he could not see how big the orchard was as the path curved far in front and there were trees everywhere as far in as he could look in. Instead of going further Henry walked up to one of the old, rusty smudge pots, it had a large round base with a chimney coming out of the middle, he looked inside and found it disappointingly empty but behind it he saw something laying on the ground. He came up around and crouched next to it.

Dead bird.

Henry was a sensitive boy and death of any creature, big or small, didn’t bring him satisfaction. In fact he oftentimes refused to watch animal documentaries with his parents for the fear of seeing predators capturing their prey and mauling it on screen. But with the crow clearly dead for some time Henry’s curiosity got the better of him and he wanted to investigate. He got up and from a tree next to him broke off a small twig. He bent down again and looked at the bird closely. The feathers black like ink in the full sun looked multichrome, shifting from purple to blue with hints of green. They didn’t seem to lose any of their shine and vibrancy even so long after the bird's death. Henry knew it must have been a while because of the head. The eye sockets were empty and the skin lost all of its small feathers and was now dry and peeling from the base of the beak. The body was visibly flat and when Henry turned it over with the twig he felt it was also very light. He prodded and moved the corpse around, lifting the wings and bending the small feet, until his curiosity was quenched.

Should I bury it?

Henry pondered the idea for a couple minutes but decided against it. The ground was hard and covered in grass. Besides, the bird somehow seemed to be at peace here, hidden behind the pot, slowly disappearing back into nature. Instead the boy plucked a single, long, black feather from the raven and got up with his knees uncomfortably stinging from the squat he’s been in for so long.

Goodbye.

When he got back, he quickly skipped up the stairs to put away the feather. He didn't want to put it in any of the drawers or in his backpack, not wanting it to get mangled and ruined by accident. Instead he opted to put it somewhere on display. The bed was wooden just as the rest of the furniture in the room and its headrest was a thick, tall frame. The feather laid now safely on top of it as Henry ate dinner on the front porch with his parents. They spent the rest of the day on the porch playing cards and board games that were left in the cottage by the owners. When it got dark and Henry started yawning progressively more often Tom and Margaret sent him to get ready for bed. As he was getting in bed Marge came in to check on him.

- What’s that? - She pointed to the long black feather laying above Henry’s head.

- I found it in the orchard. - Henry answered excitedly looking up at his beautiful keepsake.

- Mhmm. - The mom hummed, smiling softly, as she pulled up his cover.

She then kissed Henry’s forehead and walked to the door to leave.

- I’m gonna lock your door, okay Hen? Don’t want you tripping on these stairs.. they’re scary to walk on awake let alone sleeping.

- Okay Mom. - Henry was a sleepwalker and when in a new place, his parents would often lock his room door to prevent him from accidentally wandering and getting lost or hurt in the process.

- Goodnight Hen.

- Goodnight. - Henry heard the door lock and then closed his eyes ready to wake up tomorrow for another great summer day.

Margaret came downstairs and through the kitchen into the dimly lit living room as Tom was making himself something at the bar and she turned her attention to him.

- Can you make me something? - She called out.

Tom turned on his heel to face her with his head tilted and a mischievous smile plastered on his face. She sat down and crossed her arms over the back of the sofa propping her chin on her fist to comfortably watch his mixology skills. Tom turned back for a second doing something on his phone and then Marvin Gaye started blaring from speakers, he reached for a cabinet and pulled out a baking apron, he put it on slowly while swaying his hips and it made Margaret break out in laughter. He started pulling different bottles from the bar flipping and juggling them like a showoff bartender would, only ten times more ineptly. After cleaning up he brought over two drinks and handing one to Margaret he lightly kissed her on the forehead.

- I love you.

- Love you too. - She replied.

Forest.

It must have been fresh after a light shower which gave the forest a saturated look with leaves and moss shining neon green contrasting the dark brown trunks and ground, on any other day Henry would marvel at the sight and enjoy getting lost in the magical heaviness of the humid air and sounds of hundreds leftover droplets lazily falling from the leaves but right now he was coming to the realization that last he remembered he was lying in bed falling asleep and not anywhere near a forest.

Where am I? How did I get here?

They call it having a pit in your stomach but it feels more like a boulder, it hits you in a split second, all of your organs were holding it up in place this whole time but now they gave out and it dropped almost bringing Henry to his knees. He now knew if anyone ever asks him how well he does in stress situations he would just say he doesn't. Unable to form a single thought about what to do, he couldn’t move a muscle, frozen in his place and just stared straight ahead not focusing his gaze, which made the forest look like a contemporary abstract painting made by swinging a bucket of paint over a canvas.

How did I get here?

It's one thing to get lost in a neighborhood you don't know or even a forest you go on walks in from time to time but Henry had no idea if this was a forest he walked in before. Yes it would be very different if he at least knew how he got here.

- Helloooo! Helloooo?

Along with yelling Henry subconsciously started pacing around but with no path visible he just zigzagged through the trees occasionally stumbling on roots or uneven terrain. Walking on the undergrowth of the forest with every step he felt a cruel contrast between the green blanket of moss and the broken off pine twigs, needles and cones scattered on the ground. He was still wearing the last thing he put on which was a two tone, long sleeved shirt and sweats. His feet were bare and he wondered if from now on he would put on socks and shoes to bed.

That is if I ever get back home.

The thought made him start shivering and hyperventilating. The green sea of trees before him started spinning and Henry sunk to his knees on the damp earth. He had no idea what was going on and how to deal with this situation. He scrambled himself on hands and knees up under the nearest tree and bringing his legs close to his chest he buried his face in them and let out long, muffled sobs. When finally his tears dried and his breathing calmed down he adjusted himself to be more comfortable and just listened to the wind stirring trees around him. The bark his back was resting on was rough with deep ridges that swirled in all directions forming a fingerprint like pattern. It wasn’t much but it provided Henry with a sliver of comfort and security, like leaning against a wall in a crowded place so that people can’t come up behind your back. In this instant it would be an animal coming up behind the boy’s back and undoubtedly it wouldn’t be just to chat about the weather. With that bit of safety acquired any thought of trying to look for help or clues as to where he was dissipated from Henry's mind. It seemed too scary and too unpredictable to leave now as the forest grew darker nearing dusk. Instead he balled up tighter in between the exposed tree roots. He began staining his eyes to see as the color of wet ash veiled what little of the sky he saw over the treetops. In the utter blackness of nighttime in the woods, the wind’s harsh bite made Henry's body shiver much like the countless leaves in the forest. The wind brought with it the type of coldness that reaches into your bones and muscles making even the smallest movement a chilling wave of pain. But every snap of a twig or a howl of the wind still made him snap his head in the direction allowing the wind to quickly slide under his collar and along his shaking body. The understory of the forest consisted mainly of different kinds of tall grass and ferns but there were no shrubs to obscure vision into the distance and the needle leaf trees grew tall and thick but dispersed. Suddenly as if called into existence by Henry’s expectant ears loud, thrashing sounds came from the right. They were not as regular as to be footsteps but clearly there was something moving nearby. A primal self-defense instinct made Henry point his hands in the direction of the noise as if he had a weapon ready to jab any animal or thing coming around for a midnight snack but his hands empty before him, squeezing an imaginary knife, were a sad realization of his hopelessness. The boy shot his head up to see if there were any branches low enough for him to break off but the pine was towering over him with branches from the crown ending high above him. The shuffling sounds consistently moved to the left and were now somewhere in front of Henry. His eyes were dry, unwilling to blink, fixed on locating the moving creature but to no avail. With no weapon to protect him and no fire to scare it off the boy was certain of an upcoming attack.

I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.

The sounds continued in fits and starts but the creature never came closer and was still moving to the left of Henry. Eventually the sounds faded completely. Henry didn’t feel himself peeing and had not realized it until a stronger gust of wind blew across his pants. A wave of shock and embarrassment hit him and for a second he was glad to be alone.

Stupid. That’s not true. I would rather have the whole school here laughing at me than to be alone lost not knowing where. I’m so stupid.

Henry bit his lip trying to stop his sobs scared of making his presence known to the creature nearby. His heart was beating out of his chest for a long time. His hair was stuck on his face drenched in sweat. But there was nothing. The creature left and no other came. Sitting there balled up under the tree Henry’s tiredness inescapably caught up to him intensified by the adrenal crash. His thoughts slowly melted away and his mind drifted to his imaginary happy place. The sloshing sound of water filled his brain. Ears submerged and the corners of his eyes wet from the tiny waves created by his body floating. Legs bent and dangling as if from a ledge. There was nothing on the horizon, deep royal blue stretching into infinity. The water was cool on his body but his face warmed by the sun beaming from the clear sky. Suspended in the strong embrace of his personal ocean Henry started drifting into sleep.

Aliens.

Henry woke up from his uneasy drowse with the sun just coming up above the horizon. The question of how he got to an unknown location, seemingly sometime after he went to sleep, on the first night of vacation with his parents in a rented cottage in the countryside started circling around in his mind like a stubborn fly that manages to sit on your face through a flurry of pats, claps and slaps. He started to come up with different explanations, each one crazier than the last.

It’s all a dream. I’m in a coma. Or in a different dimension. Somehow I opened my door and sleepwalked here. Or I can teleport.

Dismissing the impossible explanations for his predicament, the boy decided to look around once more. He was curled up under the tree for many hours and standing up turned out to be quite a challenge. Henry’s brain, very well accustomed to the motion of standing up, didn't expect the resistance his numb legs and stiff knees gave. A piercing pain bolted up his body and a shocked scream escaped the boy’s mouth. His shoulders straining back to hold him up against the tree, he slowly straightened up feeling his leg tendons stretch and regain their length. Letting go of the tree he tried to keep his balance but a sudden involuntary spasm of his overworked muscles brought him to his knees. Bursts of pain in his calves made Henry squeal and writhe falling from his knees to his side. His pained, growling screams echoed quietly up to the treetops accompanied by occasional birdsong. After a while the pain subsided enough for Henry to touch his legs and gently massage out the tension. In that time the sun had already made its way high onto the sky. He slowly sat up keeping his legs relaxed and looked around in all directions.

Trees. Duh.

The thought of sitting in place waiting for some kind of rescue and the fresh memory of what that could do to his body made Henry decide to get up and start walking. The direction seemed inconsequential so the way Henry was seated on the ground was the way he started his march. His thoughts briefly returned to his circumstance.

Maybe it’s something supernatural. A demon sent me here. Or an angel?

Henry was never much interested in the supernatural or the occult. Except maybe once when he tried to reenact the story of the Jangly man with his dog Darwin, a Kerry blue terrier that Henry loved more than anything. Henry’s grandmother was staying in their house during the vacation and they left Darwin with her for company. Tears started welling up in his eyes at the thought of his big furry friend.

I wish he was with me right now.

Clutching his fists tightly and letting tears flow down his face, he just kept moving forward. One of the tears rolled into the corner of his mouth and spilled over his parched bottom lip. A scar on the right side of his lip now became more apparent than usual with his lips swollen and cracked. Henry got the scar about a year ago and walking now with nothing to look at except trees and nothing to hear except their ruffling noise his mind started drifting and with both horror and nostalgia half consciously he started reminiscing about the day he got it.

He was dreading the appointment the whole week but his teeth moved on from being sensitive and only occasionally aching in the evenings to an unbearable prickling pain for most of the time in a day and all of the night.

The blood.

It was three rotting holes in his teeth that were the culprits of his pain which was more than his parents and his dentist Mr. Wilkinson hoped it would be and far too few than what it had felt like for Henry.

There was so much blood.

They were in the right bottom row of his mouth and the injection to desensitize all of them took a full minute of a needle poking in and out his gums.

I only realized when it tickled on my hand.

Henry came out of the office all stiff from sitting tensed up for so long and told his mom he wanted a soda. Giggling she called him Rambo and handed him a water bottle from her purse. He understood her nickname only after seeing himself trying to take a sip of the water in their car. His face made a grimace he'd never seen before. When opening his mouth his right eye shut almost completely closed and it looked like all the skin from his under eye to his lower lip was being pulled by some invisible, sticky tape. Before he could stop the action he began his arm twisted the bottle and half of what came out landed on his shirt and lap.

I should've known after that not to try to eat so soon.

When they got home it was almost noon and his mom had to go to work which she took some hours off of just to take him to the appointment. She made him a club sandwich and with her signature kiss and wave goodbye she was out the door. He turned on the tv and sat on the couch to eat. Even with his best efforts his mouth wouldn't open very much, being completely sedated in the front and hurting from strain in the back of the jaw but he managed to stuff a corner of the sesame sprinkled bread in and began chewing. He took bite after bite engrossed in the action of an old western movie in which he didn't know any of the actors nor the name of the movie.

It was Comes a Horseman. I watched a re-run later.

But when he looked down to take another bite, the movie faded out and all he heard was high pitched ringing in his ears. The bread was soaked red and there was red liquid dripping rather streaming down on his hands. He raised his shaking hand to his mouth and felt something soft and mushy hanging slightly below his lower lip.

It was my lower lip.

And running to the mirror in the hallway I left a trail of bright red dots behind me. The sandwich desperately wanted to come back up from my stomach when I saw myself so I had to look away to stop it from doing so. I bit through the whole girth of my lip and then munched on some of it along with the bread, tomato and cheese. If my mom saw me then she might have thought for a second that I tried one of her lipsticks on. She would probably have to critique my application though because apart from my lips my whole chin, neck and right hand were crimson as well. The iron taste made the sandwich make another attempt at escaping my digestive system so I had to keep my mouth open and my head bent forward.

Margaret answered the phone with impatience seeping through her tone of voice when he called but it quickly changed to a panicked concern. The call lasted less than 30 seconds and she hung up with instructions to use toilet paper as a cover to stop the bleeding and an assurance that she's on her way. They went to the hospital and the doctor did a great job, with 20 stitches he made Henry's lip look like it had only lost a fight to a sharp, butter knife instead of a mouthful of teeth of a hungry, teenage boy.

Henry kept on walking and throughout the day recalled things that had happened in his life. Unexpectedly quickly it became night again. The second night in a dark, mysterious forest. As the colors around him dimmed Henry searched for shelter around the nearest trees. He had hoped for a fallen tree to hide beneath or an unoccupied den to curl up in but he had to settle for another night sitting between roots of a tall pine. This time though he made sure to stretch his legs out and let them properly rest. It was not a calm sleep but the next morning he woke up feeling well enough to start walking as soon as he stood.

Fire iron.

After some hours of marching Henry started walking unusually slowly, almost robotically, as if his brain was struggling to tell each foot to take the next step. It was because his stomach went from growling loudly to a silence filled with gnawing pain, it felt like a wormhole sucking itself and everything around in. Stumbling over his own feet Henry had to bend every couple of seconds from the pain. As if that wasn’t enough the ground started cascading in long slopes. Many times he lost his footing and almost fell.

It feels like my stomach is on fire and someone is moving the coal around with a fire poker. Just jabbing me in the side. Over. And. Over. Again. There’s nothing to eat. No berries. No mushrooms. Nothing.

Henry tried to appease his wrathful stomach by chewing on some leaves of a small, green plant but his mouth quickly filled with an insufferable bitter taste. He quickly spat out the leaves but the damage was done and the swallowed spit left him with a foul aftertaste along with nausea and some dry-heaves. What was nice for a change was actually producing spit. It was now his third day without water and he almost forgot what it was like to feel moisture in his mouth. There was a burn in his throat that didn't go away, but instead grew steadily stronger and harder to ignore as the day went on, he felt it yesterday too but nowhere near as intense. Every swallow began to feel like broken glass down his throat.

It’s worse now. I made it worse.

He felt the sadness, the quiver of his lip, the irregularity of his breath; all accompanying signs of crying except his eyes were dry.

And burning.

Henry kept on forward, now perpetually bent, hugging his nagging stomach. About his feet were only the browned remnants of branches and needles that must have fallen in high winds. He tried to look out for anything that would ease his thirst or hunger but with no luck.

At least the ground leveled out again.

The day grew old with him still pressing on as if in a trance, somewhere in his subconscious knowing that if he stopped he might never start up again. The sun was sinking down beneath the tops of the pines casting long shadows beneath his feet. Unanticipatedly the boy was halted to a stop by a loud cry. Panic quickly set in until he recognized the sound as an ordinary raven’s caw. Henry straightened up and saw the bird on the tree just before him. It sat on one of the few branches in the lower part of the pine. The raven on the branch moved its head from side to side, every turn rapid, almost too fast to see. But in the moments it was still Henry could see the glossy, black eyes set in the plumage so dark it looked more like a shadow. Only when the swaying canopy allowed the setting sun to cast its rays upon the raven and illuminate the feathers could the true, shining beauty of it be seen. After a few, restful moments it spread its wings and ascended to the tree tops and out of view. The boy looked after the bird for a while, trying to glimpse it in the multitude of branches covered with dark green needles. Staring up at the vibrant canopy Henry noticed black spots in his vision. He quickly turned his head in different directions but the spots followed. The sudden movement made him dizzy and he felt a dull ache and pressure in his head. He tried to gather himself and move on but instead of his legs moving in an orderly fashion he fell flat on his face. Henry realized his body would not move and it refused to go any further that day. The boy was exhausted. The fall didn’t hurt as much as Henry would expect and in fact he felt relief in not having to keep his body upright. With that newfound comfort his body relaxed and his eyes closed. As soon as they did he was fast asleep. He dreamt of flowing water. It came as a river that floated across the air like wind. It swirled around raising him from the ground and cooling his aching body.

Henry woke up gradually from a growing discomfort in his right leg. As he got more aware he looked down to realize he was scratching his shin in his sleep. It took great effort to sit up. He was very weak; his breaths were deep and slow. The skin on his whole body felt dry and itchy and he rolled up his right pant leg to reveal a palm sized bruise with bloody scratch marks. His dehydration was severe and after an insect bit his leg the irritation on his ailing skin must have caused him to pick at the area for the whole night. As he got up the leg started throbbing and Henry had to skip to the nearest tree to slowly acclimate. He knew he was weak and the leg would only get worse as time went on.

I have to keep going.

Moving forward somehow seemed like the only salvation. If he had stayed his body would surely give up then and there. So bent and limping he started walking again. The black spots from before didn’t leave and were now obscuring his vision making him stumble over roots and saplings in his way. There were so many things that Henry’s body was going through that he slowly became numbed to them. He walked for a long time with a blank mind looking down on his feet. The crunch of dried bracken underfoot gradually changed to almost silent steps on fresh grass and stems of herbs. In front a field of ferns enveloped the ground beneath them, their fronds a myriad of hands reaching up to grab any sunlight that peeked through the thick canopy. Looking up from the green sea Henry saw a glimpse of something in the distance, it was hard to make out in the shaded forest but it definitely didn’t belong.

Grey. Some kind of rock. Or concrete. Is it a building? Too small for a building. A bunker?

Henry slowly approached the structure. His slow pace partly dictated by caution but mostly by the depleted strength of his legs.

A staircase. Just a staircase.

His thoughts became loud and incoherent. Distorted, they reverberated in his mind.

Staircase In the woods Concrete Staircase In the woods Staircase

He felt short of breath, staggered and his head lunged forward without his consent. His extremely exhausted body short circuited from the sudden agitation.

When Henry came to and opened his eyes it was already night. He flipped onto his back and looked at the clear, starry sky.

The Big Dipper. Cassiopeia. Hercules.

His eyes automatically searched for familiar constellations and for a moment he felt good admiring the faraway stars and feeling the chilly air on his face. But after that moment the exhaustion with all of its symptoms came back as strong as before. The dizziness made Henry reach for his head finding a cut clotted with blood. He felt nauseous but with a completely empty stomach all his body could do was dry-heave. The muscle spasms made him sit up and after they stopped he mustered up all of his strength to stand up. When he got up and felt steady enough he lifted his gaze up and once again saw the mysterious staircase. He made his way over to the construction. The moonlight bleached the concrete before him transforming the steps into an icy, frozen waterfall. He touched the side of the staircase and the comparison seemed even more fitting for the cement was truly as cold as ice. The steps were wide and tall, each its own block of stone. With weak legs and a slow, heavy step Henry sluggishly climbed the first stair. He kept his hands tight on his thighs to help lift his body weight up. After the first step the boy saw the staircase up to its end.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

Ten steps. Henry didn’t question the feeling of necessity to get to the top of the staircase even though it seemed impossible to climb all of the steps with the little energy he had. But as he got up the first stair, he managed to get up another and then another. The feeling of rough concrete was terrible and quickly turned painful as Henry's feet got cold standing on the treads.

Five. Six.

His breathing turned into loud wheezing, his arms having a bit more strength in them than his legs helped to push him up after each step.

Seven. Eight.

Walking up and looking down at the gray stone beneath, the black spots in Henry’s vision slowly turned into bigger smudges, his lungs started to burn and his whole body trembled.

Nine.

As his foot touched the last step the boy closed his eyes and with a lunge forward he made it to the top.

Ten.

I’m back.

Henry’s eyes were wide open and he was now standing on the staircase of the rented countryside cottage he arrived at four days ago. He didn’t hear or feel any change but from the top of a staircase in the forest he suddenly appeared inside the house he desperately wanted to get back to for the past few days. Grabbing the rail to steady himself, he frantically looked around unable to believe his nightmare was over. His head was throbbing and he slowly lost his eyesight completely as if someone was turning the light off with a remote dimmer until it was pitch black. In a daze, looking straight ahead, he took a step up the stairs. The wooden rail was gripped so tightly in his palm it let out loud creaks.

The first evening in the cottage passed in uneventful enjoyment, Margaret and Tom flipped through the channels on the old TV sipping on their drinks and planning activities for the week. Around midnight Margaret got up and went to bed for the night with Tom still watching something on the TV. She was already fast asleep, lying at an angle on her back with one arm loosely draped over her waist and the other spread next to her head with her hand to forehead, when Tom came upstairs twenty minutes later. He laid down next to her so gently she only woke up when he took her arm from her waist and placed it on his own. He rested his head over her other arm and was now enveloped in an embrace by his own making. Margaret hid her palm in his hair and took a deep breath. She always loved his scent, he smelled like clean fresh laundry with light notes of jasmine and bergamot. His body next to her created pleasant warmth and she let herself quickly drift back into sleep. But as the night went on Margaret stirred in her sleep. She tossed and turned and a restful dreamless sleep soon turned into one filled with nightmares. She dreamt of walking in the dark. The air around her was cold and heavy. Fear and loneliness slowly grew in her mind as she wandered aimlessly. Suddenly the darkness beneath her gave way and swallowed her. Exhale. Inhale. The subconscious action suddenly became impossible. Where her lungs should be filled with air Margaret felt nothing. She was suffocating. Her chest started burning like a chunk of wood thrown in a lit fireplace and with that feeling she woke up jolting into a seat. Outside, the sky was slowly filling with heavy slate clouds. Sitting quietly she could hear the growling sounds of faraway thunder. After the startling awakening she wasn’t ready to try and get back to sleep so instead she got up and peered out the window sitting on her feet in a big, white, linen armchair that was beside the bed. The rain hasn’t reached the cabin yet but she could see it in the distance along with a vast blanket of clouds and occasional lightning. The first creak of the staircase Margarets ears dismissed as part of the storm coming but then she heard it again and recognized it as a noise inside the house. She got up from the chair and listening in she inched closer to the door. Standing there for a moment she clearly heard creaks and footsteps so she opened the door and came out into the corridor. Without windows the corridor was veiled in darkness and Margaret had to feel around for the switch. When light illuminated the room she stepped closer towards the staircase.

A pale and measly vision of her son stood on the middle landing. With eyes bright red and puffy, small lips a lump of white dried skin and bloody cracks. A dirty cut on the forehead with dried clots of blood trailing down. Dust and dirt covering his sweats and bare feet. Ghostlike moving slowly up the stairs, unaware of Margaret's presence at first. The woman stood horrified by the state of the boy and his unexplained appearance. He reached the top of the stairs and the boy looked right at her but his expression remained vacant, he opened his mouth several times like a gulping fish but no sound came out. Instead Henry’s eyes rolled back into his head as his hands left their support of the railing and the wall.

- Henry! - Margaret screamed, rushing forward with her hands desperately stretched out as her son collapsed before her like a lifeless marionette cut from its strings.

#shortstory #short story #mystery #writers on tumblr #novelette #thriller #forest #horror #countryside #cottage #teen #story #fiction #fic

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justanalto · 8 years

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It's Quiet Uptown

It's 55 out on February 24, 2017. It's not supposed to be this warm this time of year in Amherst. It's not supposed to be this warm this time of year in Massachusetts at all. But it's still 55 degrees and it's 11 oclock at night, and there's a breeze blowing through; not enough to make me freeze but enough to weigh my body into settling down. It's enough to weigh my body into nostalgic wanting, the kind that makes you want to cry until you can't breathe through your nose anymore. The best part is I don't even know why this is. It's enough of a breeze to make me smell spring, always ten feet ahead of me no matter how hard I try to catch up. Where in this type of weather last year, I was a ball of anxiety, but i was surrounded by everything. You can gently feel the wind whipping in your ears, but just a little; a small whisper in your ear to remind you you're not alone. In this, I remember that I'm not really worthy of anyone at all. Not even to myself. That I'll spend the rest of my life alone because I'm not nice enough or willing to put on a social front all the time. That's what college is: a social front; all the time. You're never allowed to take those boundaries down and just live. I should be spending this weather up surrounded by a haze of skyscrapers, mushes of sound, car horns, even the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke. Pot, if the place is bad enough. I should be lost in a crowd and content with that, headphones in and music blasting from my ears. I shouldn't know where I'm going, and I should feel sidewalk cracks constantly underneath my feet until they hit paved concrete, and even then it's just briefly a crosswalk. I should be surrounded by neon lights and store fronts that never close. I should look up at the sky and feel like something is there for me; that I do exist but at the same time I don't. I should be in Manhattan; but I'm not. I should be in Boston, but I'm not. I'm in Amherst. I know where my feet will go next - up the steps of this attempted ampitheatre and into my dorm; I'll swipe my card and take the elevator to the fifth floor, where I'll unlock my door and wait for the party to die down in the hallway. The cars here are quiet, the only sounds are groups of drunken people shouting nonsense as they go out for the night. That's sporadic enough. The tallest building here is the DuBois. I see all of the buildings, and you can see empty stretches of walkway for an entire field of vision. When I look up, I know what I see. I see my calendar, laid out ahead of me. I see predictability and bleakness. I see my 1 in 25,000. I am just a number in the system - but I also know who I am little too much. I am that girl that doesn't drink on Fridays and can't make friends because she's too standoffish and doesn't do parties. I am that girl that would rather stay in and write with someone rather than go out and party. I am the unrelatable girl because I can talk about nothing except Marvel and how pretty everyone in the universe is. I am the girl who falls for things they can't have and tells herself that she's over them, but finds herself peeling back that flap of curiosity every now and then to find that that's not true. I am the girl that hates that she goes to college in such a rural place, but was too insolent about applying elsewhere. My heart beats for someone; who that someone is I'm not sure of yet. I'm the girl who's most connected to someone they don't even know. I'm the girl who some days, is just trying to graduate, but others, is ready to write a novel and change the world. God, I wish I were anywhere but here right now. I wish I were in New York. I wish it with a burning passion and the deepest inhale of my life. The deep inhale of fresh air - just a little too fresh - and contains a little too much dirt, a little too much nature, a little too much contentment and surety about what tomorrow will bring. I do not smile when I breathe in this air. I am only weighted and hurt by what isn't to be. Chicago was good for this weather. When we were by the river in Chicago, and I sat on the steps and pondered my life. What I was doing with my life. What I was about to do. I was isolated enough, but the city still towered around me. It was enough. I was enough then. I was enough for my family, for my friends. For me. And I'm not anymore, no matter how hard I breathe. I want to live. I want to be able to scream and shout with joy without being drunk and forgetting everything that happened. I want to do something out of my comfort zone that makes me laugh like I'm insane once I've accomplished it. I want to get that feeling that accompanies a good piece of indie music. I want to stick my head out a car window and yell. I want to have a road trip where everyone sings along to the songs on the radio. I want noisy moments. But I want quiet moments too, where everyone can just lay side by side somewhere and not have to say a word. Where I can just stare and have everyone understand what I want to say without a single word being said. Where everyone is satisfied. Maybe not for life, maybe not even in the next moment, but for now, in that specific moment, everyone is okay. I want to be okay.

#sorry #I be shitposting #here in these deep city lights #I just want to breathe

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bethsteury · 5 years

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“So, when are you going back?”

I lost count of how many people asked when we planned a return visit to Maine, where our immediate family had marveled in the beauty of an east coast autumn while spending time with the paternal side of my biological family in October of 2018. I found it intriguing that folks didn’t ask if we planned to visit again, but rather when we’d venture that direction again. Could be the phrases that populated our accounts of the vacation—gorgeous views, awesome adventures, a great time with the “new” family—may have encouraged the “when” assumption.

Since my husband and I had taken all of five seconds to sign-on for the big gathering of Grammy Brown’s branch of the family tree planned for July of 2019, the answer was a quick, easy, “Next July for an extended family reunion.”

I loved that a plan for a “next time” had been set in motion. And the potential to meet many more paternal relatives excited me. Another opportunity to explore Maine, to see the beautiful landscape in its summer colors coupled with more “first family” time and connections. July couldn’t arrive soon enough.

Our “Maine in October” adventure had left me immersed in yet another phase of processing. Honestly, it feels like I’ve spent the better part of the last three years in a state of wading through stuff. From the doorstep secret revealed and continuing through every new discovery, each in-person connection, the incredible trips to significant locales, my mind has remained in a near-constant state of sorting through a myriad of mental questions, see-sawing emotions, and potential future scenarios. Factor in the loss of both of my parents in the middle of all these breakthroughs and connections, and it’s a wonder my brain hasn’t turned into a puddle of mush.

With most of my faculties intact, the planning for Maine Adventure #2 commenced. I envisioned the lot of us together—bio dad, Aunt Donna, cousin Honey, brother Alan, and possibly, hopefully two other half-brothers we’d yet to meet. Not to mention the boat load of cousins attending the big family gathering. I was positively giddy.

But my excitement took a hit with the news that Aunt Donna and Honey would be unable to attend. I admit to a fair amount of what I’m sure bordered on badgering, but it was not to be. And then, bio dad confirmed he would not be able to attend either. The realization of how much I’d been looking forward to another in-person encounter with him explained the huge wave of disappointment that surged through me. The youngest of my biological brothers hailing from California admitted his participation would be a last-minute decision, one that looked less likely every day. Sigh . . . But the oldest of my birth father’s children confirmed he and his wife would make the cross-country trek from Washington state. Yes . . . I allowed myself a bit of time to pout and stew and fret. Then I tucked away most of my disappointment and moved on with the arrangements for adventures in Maine round two.

Maine Adventure #2

A super early July 19th flight dropped us in Portland by noon. We skipped from the airport in full vacation sightseeing mode, to take in the sights at Two Lights State Park. Drinking in ocean views never, ever gets old. Especially if you’ve lived your entire life in Indiana.

We sped north to the now sort-of-familiar Augusta and Waterville area for a nap, hoping to banish the sleepiness leftover from a very short night, and to prepare for an important family dinner.

While older brother Gerald knew the story of how I’d come to be his new little sis, we’d not yet connected in person, by phone or email. I’d already experienced the gamut of newly-discovered sibling responses, resulting in a variety of relationship statuses. From welcome to the family/let’s get to know each other to cordial but with little interest in connecting to an initial welcome that soon disintegrated into distant silence. I loved the close-and-growing-relationships. I understood the little interest one. I mourned the no-longer-a-connection-at-all relationship. I knew what I wanted from this newest sibling introduction. I also knew that I didn’t have the deciding vote.

A dinner date that first night gave us a chance to meet before the next day thrust us into the crowd of reunion attendees. Lots of conversation of the surface level and deeper variety flowed freely over a delicious meal in a cozy, back booth. We swapped stories about our individual families, a total of four sons, three daughters, and five grandchildren between the three half-siblings seated around the table. I sensed a cautious approach from this new older brother—one that I totally understood. He and his wife Furong didn’t know us from the man on the moon despite our shared DNA. But when we parted company, I inwardly declared the evening a success and set my sights on tomorrow’s main event, the Tobey Family Reunion that bio dad’s first cousins had been planning for nine months.

The Tobey Family Reunion

The next day we traversed roads not completely unknown to us to the rural area where Grammy Brown’s family had lived for decades. A long winding lane led us to a stone-quarry-turned-beautiful-pond property. The property owner/event co-organizer who knew immediately who we were—the new relatives from Indiana—shuttled us from the parking area to the circus-sized white tent shading folks from the blistering 91-degree heat. We donned name tags and set about meeting and greeting our kin.

Thelma Tobey Brown

The next four hours were a whirlwind of conversations, of hearing how much I looked like looked like my Grammy Brown, of being greeted by folks who’d heard my story and were thrilled to welcome us to the family. I leafed through photo albums where I spied pics of my birth father as a teenager. I tracked down Jill, the cousin whose amount of shared DNA nearly ruined the “poster family” status I’d been touting to demonstrate the accuracy of Ancestry’s testing process. Jill’s dad and my Grammy Brown were siblings, making Jill my bio dad’s first cousin and my first cousin once removed (1c1r). But our shared DNA comes in at the very highest level for 1c1r, so high that we could have been first cousins. Of course, I insisted on a picture and Jill graciously agreed. I met other DNA matches–Priscilla and Margaret–chatted with the reunion organizers–Robin and Noreen–swapped tips and techniques with fellow genetic genealogy enthusiasts, all the while scoping out the crowd for family resemblances and scanning name tags for folks from the family tree.

At one point, my head whipped around for a second look at a tall gentleman who looked remarkably like my birth father. Had he popped in at the last minute? Like we’d contemplated might happen? Nope. Just his first cousin who bore a striking resemblance to him. And threaded throughout the afternoon, another round of just-introduced siblings engaging in the odd combination of catching up and getting to know one another all at the same time.

Throughout the afternoon I murmured time and again, “These people really know how to do events . . . ” My brain had kicked into event-organizing mode the moment we arrived, calculating the time and effort that had obviously been invested in today’s festivities. When the first signs of tear down and clean-up began, I felt prodded to hop up and help. But instead I continued to mingle and visit, pushing aside the guilt for not pitching in. The afternoon came to an end before I got a chance to meet everyone. But I’m counting on a next time.

More sibling time . . .

Sunday found us sharing another sibling/spouses meal with lunch at a favorite local seafood joint. Recollections and stories flowed between Alan and Gerald, prompted by the same box of photos we’d pored over last October. And I again imagined myself as part of their lives as well as them alongside me in my growing up years. Furong had forever captured a moment when, side by side at the reunion, Gerald and I had not only shared the very same expression, but also displayed a remarkable resemblance. I promptly texted the picture to my son and daughter back in Indiana who marveled at the similarity.

We gathered one last time for dinner, a boisterous bunch including Alan’s immediate family, all folks we’d met last October. The family vibe around the long table intensified my extreme dislike for the 1022 miles between us and the Maine bunch and the 1989 miles between our Hoosier home and Spokane, Washington, where Gerald and Furong lived. But we’d made a genuine connection with them leaving no doubt the promised “let’s stay in touch” sentiments would indeed come to fruition. Hugs all around times two left me sad that our time together had come to an end.

More scenic views

While they headed north to take in more of Maine’s beauty, we plotted our three remaining days. Alan joined us on Monday for a full day of Camden State Park and wild blueberries, lighthouses and ocean views, and of course, more seafood.

On Tuesday we launched from Boothbay Harbor for a four-and-a-half-hour whale and puffin watching excursion. Miles and miles of ocean and blue skies, and yes, we saw a whale. But the highlight of the trip was the stop at Eastern Egg Rock, a seven-acre island located six miles from New Harbor, the world’s first re-established seabird colony, managed by The Puffin Project.

On Wednesday we enjoyed lunch with some relatives on Grampy Brown’s side of the family. Some DNA detective work on Aunt Donna’s part had solved a long-time mystery that led to us lunching with our first cousin twice removed (1c2r)—a first cousin to our Grampy Brown—and her daughter our second cousin once removed (2c1r)—a second cousin to our bio dad. Is that cool or what? Too, too fun. We’d hoped to meet up with a couple of other DNA-matched-cousins from Massachusetts and Georgia but arrangements did not fall into place. “Another time . . . ” we all promised. “Another time.”

A quick stop in Belfast left us once again in awe of the beauty Mainers enjoy all year round. Literally at the water’s edge, we spotted a three-sided structure that housed of all things, a library. I immediately envisioned myself enjoying a good read under sun drenched blue skies surrounded by the ocean.

The day ended with a farewell seafood feast at Alan’s. When we couldn’t eat another bite, we leaned back to give our stuffed stomachs a bit more room. Conversation lulled for a moment before Alan’s tone turned serious with a pointed question. “When are you coming back?”

I reminded him we had journeyed to Maine twice since his visit to Indiana. He reminded us we’d barely scratched the surface of all that Maine had to offer–a fact we knew well. “We’ll come back someday, I’m sure . . . ”

“But probably not next year.”

“No, probably not.”

With no specific plans in place for a “next time,” this last-in-a-series of goodbyes was tough. But we would be back. We will visit again.

And the processing continues. I’m beginning to realize it will probably never end. This week marks the 3rd anniversary of Aunt Donna popping up on our DNA results. Within hours, the mystery was solved, opening the door to so many people and experiences and relationships that, now, I honestly can’t imagine not being part of our lives. I’m so looking forward to what year four has in store.

If this is your first introduction to my story, check out the beginning here.

Meeting the Bio Family: Chapter 10 – Another Big Bro and Cousins Galore “So, when are you going back?” I lost count of how many people asked when we planned a return visit to Maine, where our immediate family had marveled in the beauty of an east coast autumn while spending time with the paternal side of my biological family in October of 2018.

#adoption #adoption reunion #biological family #birth parents #brothers #doorstep baby #family reunion #siblings

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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‘He’s Like, Okay, Well, Screw It’

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/hes-like-okay-well-screw-it/

‘He’s Like, Okay, Well, Screw It’

BOSTON—Beto O’Rourke last week stopped here for beers. He wasn’t hunting big-dollar donors or votes in a state with a meaningful primary. He instead wanted to stand on a box in the middle of a pub and just let it rip. So that’s what he did. The crowd was young, diverse and notably not reaching to write checks, but they were plenty ready to hear his profane riff on his proposed gun buybacks. He downed a Ricochet IPA while answering their questions and then took his place in the picture line and ordered another. Two women joined him in raising their pints. “Salud,” he said.

For a one-time Democratic darling who hasn’t sniffed double digits in the polls for months, this brewery called Backlash didn’t seem like a materially strategic, smart spot to be in the run-up to a debate night that might for him be do-or-die. But O’Rourke’s clearly not doing the obvious anymore.

Story Continued Below

In the wake of August 3, when a bigot with an AK-47 murdered 22 people in a Walmart in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso, the former congressman has changed the way he’s waging his presidential campaign. He’s running with arguably reckless abandon, breaking norms to try to rekindle some lost spark. Beyond his much-discussed uptick in swearing, he has traveled to places that make limited political sense, taken a provocative proposal on assault-style rifles that could permanently jeopardize his electoral viability in his native state, and trashed President Trump with increasingly explicit rhetoric. What’s interesting about O’Rourke at this moment is not just that he’s sayingfucka whole bunch—he’salwaysdropped curse words on the stump—but that he’s entered more broadly a new phase of his 2020 bid, which supporters find inspiring and critics consider desperate to the point of pathetic. Up close, though, it feels actually pretty compelling.

Let’s go ahead and call it Beto’s “fuck-it phase.”

“That’s where I think he’s at now,” Moses Mercado, a Democratic lobbyist from Texas, told me. “He’s like, okay, well,screw it.”

“Eff it,” Austin-based Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser said.

“He has no fucks to give,” added Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and activist who is one of O’Rourke’s most devoted backers in New Hampshire.

“This feels right to me,” O’Rourke said when I asked him about how he’s currently campaigning when he met with reporters by the stainless-steel beer tanks at Backlash. He said this was “the way politics should be.”

The question lurking behind this caution-free style is whether O’Rourke is doing this because he cares less about his stagnant candidacy or because he in fact cares so much more.

Six months ago, O’Rourke was drawn into this race, it seemed, because of some combination of a sense of entitlement (“… born to be in it …”) along with an irresistible inertia (he did, after all, bring in a record-breaking $80 million in his bid to unseat the unlovable Ted Cruz). After the lengthy will-he-or-won’t-he, the middle-of-America meandering and his overwrought postings on Medium, his entrance prompted a frenzy of live-coverage attention on cable news. Reality bit, alas, and right out of the gate was as good as it got. His fundraising dipped precipitously in the wake of his considerable initial intake. The mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana swiped his new-guy, next-gen fizz. He turned in oddly leaden showings in the first couple debates and languished in a polling position unbudgingly far behind the clear top three and trailing even out-of-nowhere entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

Then, though, came the shooting.

O’Rourke hurried home. He stayed in El Paso for almost two weeks. He listened and gave hugs and attended vigils and silently marched. He called Trump a white supremacist. He called him “the greatest threat to this country.” He couldn’t fathom, he would say, leaving to go to the comparative inconsequence of the “corn dogs and Ferris wheels” of the Iowa State Fair. Anxious, angry and rattled, he was asked by a reporter if there was anything Trump could do to “make this any better.” He answered with a kind of righteous despair that sounded new. But it boiled down to this: “What the fuck?”

By the time he was ready to return to the trail, he did so by saying he could “see more clearly,” and that there was “a way to do this better,” and that one of those ways was to not simply retrace well-trodden, politically prudent early-state paths.

He went to Mississippi to try to shine a spotlight on the recent ICE raids. He went to a gun show in Arkansas. He went to Oklahoma to go to the 1995 bombing memorial and the site of a 1921 race riot and talked about “white nationalism” and “domestic terrorism.” Even at pitstops in more expected locales, O’Rourke acted in ways that were suddenly, strikingly, even dangerously un-standard. At historically black Benedict College in South Carolina, for instance, his campaign booted a reporter from conservative Breitbart News.

It was on the whole in some ways reminiscent of his run against Cruz, in which he hit every one of the 254 counties in Texas, even the reddest of the red, all part of an effort that was not just DIY but (to a fatal fault, some said) DITWHW (do it the way he wanted). And in a rural, Trump-loving portion of Virginia, after yet another mass shooting in west Texas, he said it was “fucked up,” and said it again live on CNN, and made his stance on these kinds of guns even more blunt.

How, he was asked by a reporter, would he reassure owners of assault rifles that the government wasn’t coming to take their guns?

“I want to be really clear,” O’Rourke answered. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Just in case that wasn’t enough, his campaign manager added in a tweet, “GET EVERY ONE OF THOSE GODDAMN GUNS OFF OUR STREETS.” Shortly thereafter, the campaign leaned in harder, hawking shirts that said, “THIS IS F*CKED UP,” not once, not twice, but six times stacked.

With this, O’Rourke “broke some glass,” as BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith wrote in his newsletter. In the minds, though, of some Texas political strategists, Republicans and Democrats alike, he did more than that. He might have killed his career, they told me.

“Those words will come back to destroy him should he run for statewide office again,” said longtime Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who’s worked on campaigns all over the country.

“To say, ‘We will take away your guns,’ you know, in this state, in this culture, that’s a no-no,” Steinhauser said.

“His presidential bid,” said Matt Mackowiak, another GOP strategist in Austin, “has been very bad for his future in politics in Texas.”

Last week, though, he was in New York, for CNN’s climate change town hall, and from there he took the budget Bolt Bus to Boston. In the raw aftermath of the shooting in El Paso, the “performance, the ritual … all the editing that goes into speaking when you’re running for office,” he said during the drive, “just really evaporated, or didn’t seem important, or I didn’t even really know that I cared at that point.” He described the question that elicited his most memorable response “the stupidest fucking question I’ve ever been asked.” He described himself as “pissed at the world.”

O’Rourke’s long been a slinger of four-letter salt when making his political pitch. But this new level has been hard to the point of impossible to ignore. And now at Backlash, which endeavors to “brew in defiance,” he harangued Trump and “the crazy shit he says.” He decried the suggestion that four black and brown women who are members of Congress should “go back” to anywhere that isn’t the United States of America. “Tell me what the fuck that means!” he said. And he lamented the prevalence of weapons that were built for war and meant “to shred your insides to shit.”

“This is fucked up!” called out Chris Wright, 39, a square-jawed, flat-topped food distributor from nearby Scituate wearing a blue “Beto Por Texas” T-shirt.

O’Rourke heard him and looked at him. “Thisisfucked up,” he confirmed.

Some see this as “glorified performance art,” “a caricature of authenticity,” but it’s working for Wright. “Beto’s not afraid to say things,” he said. “He’s not afraid to say it like it is. For those people that say, ‘Oh, Trump says it like it is,’ well, guess what, let’s go head to head.”

Will it work for not only Wright but many more persuadable voters? The swearing? The going anywhere and everywhere? The talk of making people give up their prized but deadly guns? That, of course, is TBD. No sign so far in the polls. Politicos from both parties are not optimistic.

“He’s seeking ways to bring the fire back,” Sheinkopf said. “Too late.”

“He’s almost become a target for mockery,” Steinhauser added. “I don’t know what he does after this. I don’t think he’s going to run for Congress again. I think if he were to run for Senate”—the editorial board of theHouston Chroniclerecently pleaded for him to drop out of the presidential race and come home and challenge John Cornyn—“I don’t think he would just walk into the Democratic nomination. I think he’s been that damaged.”

After his stop in Massachusetts, he continued on up to New Hampshire, where he rejoined the rest of the still massive field of 2020 Dems and did a town hall in Keene. He took off his shoes to go into a mosque to tell the people gathered that Trump is “the most dangerous president the United States has ever had.” He ate and complimented vendors on their Indonesian rice pudding at a festival in Somersworth. And at the state party convention at the downtown arena in Manchester, wearing a white shirt with no tie and a navy suit with no belt, he delivered a speech in which he said Trump had “no honor, no morals and no ethics.” Talking to reporters in a cramped, stuffy room off the floor, he discussed climate change more. “If we can’t make progress on climate change,” he said, “then people are going to give up on their government. They’re going to say, ‘You know what? This shit does not work.’” He was asked on his way out if he was going to swear Thursday night on the debate stage in Houston.

He responded with a verbal shrug of the shoulders.

“Maybe.”

“Lot of talk of late of your use of the wordfuck,” I said to O’Rourke a few hours hence when I caught up to him in the early evening at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, where he spoke to perhaps a hundred students. “I’m not interested so much in that, but I am interested in the idea that you’ve sort of entered this, like, ‘fuck it phase’ of your campaign.” I wondered if that was an accurate read.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I am trying my best to be as honest and direct as possible, and when asked a question, or thinking through a given issue, to make sure that it is as candid a response as I can possibly produce, in part because I think I realize that our rhetoric, our politics, the scripts we as politicians, the talking points we as politicians, have been using have been completely insufficient to the challenges that we face,” he explained. “The demands that we have in this country, I think, necessitate, you know, a different kind of politics, and a much more honest, transparent way of discussing these issues.”

He exited through a side door. He needed to get some rest. He was slated the following morning to make another unusual campaign stop—a trip with commercial fishermen that took him to Maine.

#Foreign #Politics #screw

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

More women are running for president than ever. But there’s no one way to do it. This is the second article in a series exploring the way that the female candidates in the 2020 race are navigating questions of identity, sexism and public critique.

As a child, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recalls being mesmerized by the jiggly arms of middle-aged women stuffing envelopes with political mailers. This is part of her stump speech — a thing you start to notice about Gillibrand is that she seems quite alive to the physicality of being a woman in the world. She talks about the haircuts she got that law firm bosses praised instead of her work, and the indignity of being underestimated by her first political opponent as “just another pretty face” (perhaps not coincidentally, also a humblebrag). In her 2014 book, she mentions her weight — and other people mentioning her weight — well over a dozen times.

Gillibrand might have thought that 2018’s “year of the woman” fervor would sweep along her presidential campaign. Her most high-profile political battles have been about the injustices — large and small — facing women. If voters know her, it’s likely for her fight with the Pentagon on military sexual assault (her reform bill was defeated in 2014) or for when she became “the senator from the state of #MeToo” when she was the first — though not the last — Democratic senator to call for Al Franken to resign.

Behind the crusading work for women is a pragmatic political career. Since her start in politics as an upstate New York congresswoman, Gillibrand evolved her position on guns and immigration. On the trail, Gillibrand talks a lot about how electable she is given the fact that she won 18 Trump-voting counties in her 2018 Senate campaign. But being electable in your home state in 2018 doesn’t necessarily mean you’re electable in a 2020 presidential primary. Gillibrand is currently polling at a dismal 0.5 percent average in polls. Something hasn’t clicked. It might be that Gillibrand’s attempt to mix her activist instincts with a moderate’s pragmatism is too odd a pairing for today’s Democratic Party.

***

New Hampshire’s highway medians were carpeted with purple lupine and clots of daisies when I caught Gillibrand on a swing through the state in mid-June. Six months into her campaign, she was still playing small venues like The Franklin Studio coffee shop in Franklin, New Hampshire. (Down the street was Granite State Hedgehogs, a purveyor of actual, factual hedgehogs.)

Mike and Pat Kane, retirees from northern Massachusetts, sat in the back of a small room filled with tchotchkes, waiting for Gillibrand to arrive. They hadn’t picked a candidate yet but were intrigued enough by Gillibrand to have made the drive from out of state. Pat described the couple as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative. “We’re not interested in the warriors,” Mike said, meaning Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

While she’s tried hard to make a splash in the overly crowded field, Gillibrand is still introducing herself to voters (her name recognition is in the middle of the pack among 2020 contenders). Gillibrand’s stump speech is heavy on biography, with quick homages to her politicking grandmother and her turkey-shooting mother before a mention of how foolish her 2008 congressional opponent was to launch attack ads on the pregnant mother of a toddler. (Later, Gillibrand told me that her strategy is to overcome media storylines by burrowing into the hearts and minds of as many early state voters as possible: “I have a chance to win them over regardless of what’s going on in the national narrative, so I can break through.”)

There isn’t really a mention of the #MeToo movement in Gillibrand’s stump speech, though she does cite Hillary Clinton’s “women’s rights are human rights” speech as the inspiration for the start of her political career. It’s a fraught reference masquerading as a banal one. In 2017, Gillibrand said Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency because of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. That, along with some of Gillibrand’s other outspoken statements during the height of the #MeToo movement, has in many ways backfired for her politically. Her Clinton comments raised the ire of both Clinton allies and party donors. One prominent Clinton adviser called Gillibrand a “hypocrite” for taking the “Clintons’ money, endorsements and seat,” a reference to the fact that Gillibrand was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in 2009 when she became secretary of state for President Obama.

Many traditional large-dollar donors in the party reacted adversely to Gillibrand’s Franken comments, and in an April campaign memo, her team acknowledged that her fundraising “was adversely impacted by certain establishment donors — and many online — who continue to punish Kirsten for standing up for her values and for women.” Gillibrand has continued to struggle with donations and only recently met the 65,000 individual donor threshold for the first debate. Inexperienced candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson both met the metric before Gillibrand.

Gillibrand’s “Brave Wins” slogan seems to reference her trailblazing on issues and her ability to weather harsh criticism (and to take on Trump). But in a primary that has increasingly become about “big idea” reimaginings of American institutions — the health care system, the Electoral College, consumer finance protections, college tuition and debt — she has gotten somewhat lost in the 24-person shuffle. While Gillibrand introduced a paid family leave act this year, it’s not one of the marquee issues of the primary campaign. Her most high-profile work is centered on concerns perceived as affecting women most — sexual harassment, sexual assault — but it’s fellow Democratic contender Sen. Kamala Harris who has most recently grabbed headlines for a plan that would place the burden of equal pay on companies rather than on under-compensated individuals (typically women). In some ways, the progressive drift of the party on issues of identity and gender leaves Gillibrand as part of a progressive pack rather than a leader on gender equality issues. Where Democratic candidates make the most splash seems to be on issues of the economy, often on capitalism itself. Gillibrand has adopted many of the new progressive ideas, but she hasn’t trailblazed on them.

Perhaps that’s why she’s tacking back to a posture of moderation. The bills that Gillibrand mentioned in New Hampshire aren’t necessarily flashy ones, but they have a specific audience in mind. “In the last Congress, I passed 18 bills with a Republican House, Senate and President signing them into law. Those are common-sense bills, like rural broadband, money for made-in-America manufacturing, money for small businesses — things that can actually make a difference in places like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania,” she said.

Gillibrand had just finished her second event of the day at a bar in Plymouth and we sat across from each other at a high-top table. Earlier she had called herself “the most electable candidate” in the field and I asked Gillibrand whether she worried if the political environment had changed such that a liberal woman from New York is seen as too culturally far afield from swing voters in the Midwest. “Not at all. I think I’m perfect for those voters, in fact, because I’ve been representing those rural places in this climate for the past 10 years.”

When she represented her upstate congressional district 10 years ago, Gillibrand had an “A” rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. She quickly changed those positions to jibe with her downstate constituents, a move that got her plenty of critique as disingenuous. That rapid evolution is part of what makes her 2020 campaign trail mix of progressivism and professed moderate appeal so interesting — it’s high-risk moderation, given that Gillibrand has already been labeled pliable to the whims of the electorate at any given moment.

“I honestly think that Sen. Gillibrand is closer to Kirsten Gillibrand the human being than the congresswoman was,” David Paterson, the former governor of New York who appointed Gillibrand to her Senate seat told me. Her mistake, Paterson said, had been that she didn’t manage the ideological transition well in public. “You supervise your own evolution,” he said of politicians.

I was in New Hampshire on one of the last days of motorcycle week. Fairly or not, Trump has become associated with the biker community, at times hinting that they might serve as enforcers of a kind (for what and because of what is never clear). Heading to Gillibrand’s Plymouth bar event, I passed a “Live Free and Dine” sign and a gaggle of bikers. The roads were lousy with Harleys, too, which made the appearance of a white Audi with a Pod Save America “Friend of the Pod” bumper sticker on the road from Franklin to Plymouth all the more striking. Gillibrand’s proposed coalition is, if you are to believe her, Trump sympathizers and Democratic establishment liberals. Given the cultural and political divisions of America in 2019, it’s hard to imagine the two groups crossing into Gillibrand’s lane, whatever that lane is. As the senator might say with a pepped-up grin, “It’s so early.” She’s still hoping for her moment.

From ABC News:

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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pusicdanny · 5 years

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So you’re a tall and handsome alien with the super human strength and power of a God. And you just so happen to live on a planet filled with people that inexplicably look, speak, and act exactly like your own alien race. Except of course they're not as handsome as you, or as strong as you, or have any of your God like powers. And they can’t help but die if you hit them. You’re faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. And You’re able to catapult a punk straight to Russia with a nonchalant flick of the wrist. So you’ve got the looks, the God like arsenal of powers and the confidence that comes with that, and for some reason you’ve decided against becoming King of everything. You’ve said no to wearing a golden crown -- which only you could wear because it’s so heavy it would snap anybody else’s neck like a twig if they put it on -- and rejected the idea of having hot alien sex with their most beautiful and sort after women. No, you've decided against that. Of course being Earth’s sole ruler doesn't mean you would’ve been a tyrant. You could’ve been a benevolent master and ruled like a loving father, bringing about world peace and the end of crime with your fair and just policies. Perhaps your new crimes legislation, the ‘stop killing and stealing from each other or I’ll put my fist through your face act!’ wasn’t immediately popular with civil liberties groups, but who’d be able to argue with the results? No one would be able to deny the strength of your international policy, your ‘stop being a bunch of jerks or I’ll kick your nuts in so hard you’ll be sucking on them for the rest of your lives’ fair trade act. No, instead you’ve decided to create a secret identity, join the workforce and try to blend in with the crowd. In essence deciding to take shit from people much weaker than you who, you could easily melt with a single ray of laser from your dreamy blue eyes. Not only that, but you’ve also decided to retire from a hard day at the office to a hard night of saving jerks that keep calling you gay for wearing your symbolic, form-fitting, superhero outfit and then stretching the limits of your moral strength by not stuffing their own fist up their own ass. “What’s the S stand for - Supergay? “Stop fisting yourself. Stop fisting yourself. Stop fisting yourself” “ARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” Not only are you taking shit from a bunch of weak pissants, you’re taking shit from a pack of idiots too. You’ve cleverly managed to disguise your true identity from them by simply wearing a pair of false prescription glasses. (Look, I know I look and sound exactly like that Superman character flying around town, and you’ve seen me rip a parking meter out of the ground and then kick a parking meter attendant straight to Massachusetts -- No, you’ve just been booked, by me! -- but I’m not Superman; see, I wear glasses. I’m just as pathetic as you.) So naturally you’ve come to the conclusion that either the entire human race are relatively blind or are, in fact, a pack of retards: Traffic jams, fist fights or entrapped anorectal foreign body surgery (Why is that even a term?) this is not a species you should be taking orders from. You’re cut from a stronger moral cloth and you want to help people, you say. Well then, why not start at home?. What about your adoptive parents? The dirt poor, mid - western farmers that took care of you and raised you as their own. Sheltering you and showering you with unconditional love. Remember them? Most other farmers would have tried to pitchfork you in the throat if they thought you were an alien. Or Mexican. Being a couple of rural farmers is hard enough as it is without having to raise an alien’s child who could literally kick the shit out of them if he wanted to. Literally “Eat your peas son” “I’ll fucking kill you” “Maybe I’ll eat them” So why not help them out? I’m not talking about plowing the old man’s wheat fields, or harvesting his corn, which by itself would’ve saved dear old pop’s back, and let him look up at the heavens once in awhile. No, I’m talking about returning some of that goodwill and generosity by easing their financial troubles. Like maybe finding some gold. Maybe fifty tonnes worth.In a cargo ship you just happened to find lying by the side of the road. “Hey, these gold bars are stamped: Property of Ecuador. Maybe we should return it to them?” “Oh, no I already tried. In fact, they insisted I kept it just so long as I blew out the huge fire that started when I arrived.” You can’t do that you say. You're Superman. It wouldn't be right. You stand for truth, justice and the American way. So no stealing I guess. Hey, that’s not to say you couldn't still make a fortune using your powers and help out your surrogate family in other ways. Surely you could make a few million by being a UFC world champion fighter? You could call yourself: Clarke ‘’The Superman’’ Kent. And when you fought guys like, ‘Chuck ‘The Iceman’’ Liddell’ and ‘Wanderlei “The Axe Murderer” Silva’, you could beat them with some flare. Like freezing ‘’The Iceman’’ into a horrified block of ice. Or axing “The Axe Murderer’’ with your karate chops, making their defeats both ironic and entertaining to the crowds. And what’s with this punk, Lex Luther? He’s been nothing but a thorn in your side ever since you decided to don the cape and costume. This guy’s almost killed you countless times.And there he is still walking around. Maybe he couldn’t keep breaking out of prison to kill you if he didn’t have any legs? It sure would make him easier to find. But legs or no legs that won’t stop Lex from trying to kill you. It’s like he’s obsessed with it. And he knows of the one thing that can kill you: Kryptonite. Do you really want a guy that knows your single but fatal weakness “walking” (read: crawling) around, single mindedly and pathologically obsessed with killing you? So You might want to take him out the next time he tries brandishing a stick of Kryptonite in your face. “In my hand I have the one thing that can kill you, Superma--” Zap! “...but I see you’ve burnt my face off. From a hundred yards away.With those laser-eyes. Probably won’t forget about that trick next time.” So how does it end for you Superman? Do you continue fighting crime and injustice one act at a time? Or do you hang up your tights and retire as Clark Kent. Stuck in a rut. Only to use your laser eyes to warm your instant coffee and using your X-ray vision to check out what Lois Lane keeps refusing to show you. Surrounded by morons and wondering what could have been if only you applied yourself to loftier goals. Like being king of everything

#superman dc comics cinematicuniverse

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viralhottopics · 8 years

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The Movement Resisting Donald Trump Has A Name: The (Local) Democratic Party

Local Democratic parties are confronting a problem in the Trump era that is as confounding as it is unexpected: space.

All across the country, party meetings that had once been sleepy affairs, dominated by Roberts Rules of Order and a handful of graying activists, have become standing room only. The overflowing crowds have sent stunned party regulars scrambling to find new venues, while the surge in interest, and the coinciding fundraising boost, is enabling local chapters to hire staff and build infrastructure in previously unthinkable ways.On the national level, Democratic politicians have been rushing to respond to the sudden outpouring.

Im as busy this year as I was at any time last year in the heat of a huge election, said Mark Fraley, chairman of the Monroe County Democratic Party in Indiana.

Fraley said he received 65 emails in a single weekend from people requesting to become precinct chairs, a thankless job that normally requires begging and pleading to get someone to fill. The county party has restructured and added five deputy chairs to channel all the energy, and created six new committees.

Whats very different is that its made the party younger. Young people never really wanted to have as much of a meaningful part in the Democratic Party infrastructure. Now that doesnt seem true anymore, he said.

The resistance to President Donald Trump has taken a variety of forms, all of them well chronicled by the media. The Womens March, which saw some 5 million people take to the streets in a single day, helped fuel the growth of Indivisible chapters around the country, and has itself continued organizing meetings and protests since. The groups Swing Left, Flippable and Sister Sister are routing people to swing districts in an effort to flip the House, and groups are forming to challenge Democrats in primaries. Amid it all, observers and participants alike have wondered what the name is for this nascent movement. The Resistance? The Opposition?

But if the swelling ranks of county-level meetings are an indication of things to come, the grassroots movement underway already has a name. Its called the Democratic Party.

Interviews with activists in 24 states red, blue and purple reveal a strikingly similar pattern: Shocked by the outcome of the election and fearful for the future of the country, people of all ages, some of them Democrats, some independents, some Greens, found the time and location of a local party meeting and showed up. Here are a few of their stories:

COLORADO

Andy Cross/Getty Images

Protesters showed up at Denver International Airport on Jan. 28, to protest President Donald Trump’s ban on refugees and travelers from a number of predominantly Muslim countries.

Carol Cure had been an active member of the Democratic Party more than two decades ago in Arizona even running unsuccessfully for Congress but she thought those days were behind her. Shes now back in the game.

Just recently, Cure found her way to the local La Plata County Democratic Party organizational meeting and was named a bonus member of the Colorado House District 59 committee.

I really thought, until now, that I had done my part and was content to enjoy my retirement and all of the great activities available to us here in Southwest Colorado, she said. Many new people are getting in the game, many of them young, recent college graduates. We just had our two-year reorganizational meeting last Saturday, and two recent graduates were elected to the County Executive Committee. Now that the Dems are fired up and involved, it has become apparent that many of us are Progressives and may have been when no one noticed.

GEORGIA

Ilene Johnson, a veteran party member, said a recent meeting in Greensboro was standing room only. And at a breakfast meeting there, 70 people showed up. Fulton County, Cobb County and Dekalb County Democratic meetings are packed. But Dekalb and Fulton are majority Dem. [Greensboro is] not, neither is Cobb. My mailbox is full. I have more volunteers. Im swamped, she said.

ILLINOIS

Oak Park Democrats usually get maybe 80 people at a meeting. But at their most recent gathering, they had more than 120.

Our meetings are bursting at the seams these days, Oak Park Democratic Party Executive Director Karen Fischer said. We literally couldnt get them in the door. There were people out on the street who actually couldnt get in.

Fischer emphasized that so far, the party hasnt yet increased its advertising in the new year; all these new folks are finding their way on their own. People are walking in off the street every day and asking how to get involved.

Were planning to [step up outreach], in part because organizations are popping up all over the place, she said. Were kind of looking at it and going, Wait a minute! Were here! You dont need to invent the wheel!

INDIANA

At the last meeting of the womens caucus of the Monroe County Democratic Party normally a sparsely attended affair people spilled out the door onto the street. For the partys upcoming reorganization meeting, county chairman Mark Fraley said theyre looking for a new venue, because the courthouse room that had always been more than sufficient is now too small. If they cant find a new room, he said, theyll put speakers outside the door so the spillover crowd can still hear. Democrats here have seen such an outpouring of new members, theyre on track to raise enough money to hire an executive director for the first time.

Right after the election, we were just inundated with emails [asking], What can I do? said Fraley, 37, who works at Indiana Bloomington University.

Fraley said the county party has restructured and added five deputy chairs and created six new committees. The influx of new people is making the party younger, he said:About two-thirds of them came through Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) campaign, many of them encouraged by his organization Our Revolution to do so.

If we can maintain 30 percent of this energy, thats a huge increase in our local Democratic capacity, he added, arguing that Republican House seats that were 9-point wins in the past could soon become competitive.

IOWA

The Winneshiek County Democratic Party had its largest central committee meeting ever in January, with a third of the 40 attendees being people who had never attended a meeting, according to the county correspondence secretary.

Polk County, which includes Des Moines, is bursting too. Tamyra Harrison, the county partys executive director, said that over the last decade, around 50-60 people have shown up for central committee meetings. On Nov. 14, however, they had 177. The committee has 359 elected positions and at this time two years ago had 120 open seats. That number will soon be 80, now a record low, and is falling fast.

Every post-election meeting I have attended has been crowded and humid, Thomas Henderson, the partys county chair, said.

Down in Page County, in rural Southwest Iowa, party member Christine Adcock said that four times the normal crowd showed up to the first county meeting after the election a whopping 20 people!! Adcock followed up a week later with an update: The February meeting drew 30.

MARYLAND

In Montgomery County, a standing-room-only crowd showed up to hear freshman Rep. Jamie Raskin talk about threats to democracy in the Trump era.

Just since this past election, a number of friends have quite suddenly expressed interest in becoming more involved in the party many of them have been activists with local environmental groups and in some cases the Green Party, said Sylvia Tognetti.

Raskin told HuffPost there were some 900 people at the Trump event. It was one of eight events he did that day and all of them, he said, were bursting.

MASSACHUSETTS

A group affiliated with Sanders Our Revolution ran a slate of eight people to be delegates to the June state party convention, and all eight won, said Jordan Weinstein, one of the eight. Several are also moving to become members of the town Democratic Party committee in Arlington. Weinstein said hes running for a seat on the town council, known as the Arlington Town Meeting. The ages range from 30s to 60s, he said.

Most of us have been registered Democrats forever but just so we could vote in the primaries. Since Trump, we all see the need to get involved with the goal of trying to move the Dems toward more progressive positions, he said.

Alice Trexler, a veteran member of the Arlington Town Democratic Committee, witnessed the same bursting attendance at the convention meeting, but did so with the perspective of somebody whos been to many of them.

It was roughly triple the size of the past three to four I have attended. There were many new folks who were, on balance, younger than many of us on the Town Committee, she said, adding that a later Indivisible meeting downstairs was overfilled with people backed up in the hallway and into the lobby.

Our town is hopping with resistance. I know, its Massachusetts, but its still extraordinary to see the number of young parents and those new to protest and to politics, she added. Believe me, I havent seen this before.

MICHIGAN

Rachel Woolf/Getty Images

In January, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined with members of the Michigan congressional delegation and local elected officials for a rally at Macomb Community College in Warren to save Obamacare.

The spring conventions of the Michigan Democratic Party dont usually attract too much notice, described by the Detroit Free Press as sleepy affairs filled with party regulars giving speeches and calls to action.

This year, however, was different.

Nearly 5,000 people came to the convention, with longtime attendees saying they had never seen anything like it.

That blew the doors off previous conventions, especially considering its an off-year, said Herb Helzer, a member of the Northville Democratic Club. Sure, plenty of people showed up for the midterms in 2014 or 2012. … But this is winter 2017 after the biggest trouncing weve gotten.

Helzer said the meeting of the progressive caucus was especially popular at the convention, with about 600 people showing up.

Chris Savage, chair of the Washtenaw County Democrats, said he usually gets about 50-60 people at a meeting, if hes lucky. But at their last meeting, on Super Bowl Sunday, 225 people showed up.

I could not believe it, he said. Our email list since Election Day has grown by about 20 percent, and Im getting new people signing up every day.

People are particularly interested in pushing their legislators on policy. He used to have a legislative programs team, which mostly consisted of one staffer from a congressional office who would help be a liaison between the party and government officials. Now, that team has 120 people who signed up to do twice-weekly phone banks and engage people in other counties.

OHIO

Martha Viehmann, of Anderson Township near Cincinnati, said the state, after falling badly to Trump, has come alive. Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of the stronger progressives in the Senate, faces a critical re-election bid in 2018.

The January meeting had a phenomenal turnout, said Viehmann, a precinct executive in Anderson. The resurgence of the Democratic Party is very clear here in my eastern suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. Lots of new people are not only turning out to protests. They are also learning about our local and state elections and swamping our elected officials in D.C. with postcards and phone calls.

One of those is Aileen Peters, 72, who joined a Dayton Democratic club in the wake of the election.

I have always voted, but not been active politically with the party, she said. I was a fellow in Hillarys campaign. Volunteered in the local office, phone banks, etc. Now Im a member of the South of Dayton Democratic Club, Im organizing a No Hate group, I have a group I email to keep them informed of opportunities to be involved. The first thing I do every morning is send emails to Congressmen and make phone calls to [Sen. Rob] Portman and [Rep. Mike] Turner.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Greenville is the reddest part of a very red state, according to Kate Howard Franch, the chair of the local Democratic Party. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who led the Benghazi committee, is their congressman, if that gives any indication of the areas leanings.

Franch usually gets about 20 people at her monthly meetings 40 on a good day. But at the end of January, she had 120.

Franch said that in her nine years there, shes never seen this sort of engagement. They had a gathering at Furman University after the Womens March to build upon the momentum and figure out next steps. Even though the meeting took place on Super Bowl Sunday, there were about 1,000 people in the audience.

Over in Charleston, the local party had 130 people show up at its January meeting, a big jump from the 20 or so they usually see. Chair Brady Quirk-Garvan said theyve also tripled the number of monthly donors to the party.

TENNESSEE

The Davidson County Democratic Party in Tennessee maybe gets 10 people at its executive committee meetings. But in January, it had nearly 200 people show up, and 180 people filled out forms to start volunteering.

We had so many people we had to leave the conference room that we were supposed to be in and move out to the lobby of the building because there was no room to fit everybody, said Whitney Pastorek, a member of the executive committee.

Theyre self-identifying and self-gathering, Pastorek added, stressing that all this energy is organic. Theyre not waiting for the Democratic Party to tell them what to do. Theyre doing it themselves, and its great.

TEXAS

Typically after an election, Carisa Lopez notices that people just want to take a deep breath and relax before mobilizing again. But not this time.

We put together an event that was kind of an open mic type of event, less than two weeks after the election, Lopez, executive director of the Travis County Democratic Party, said. We had about 400 people in attendance, and that was right before Thanksgiving. So even around the holidays, when … people usually arent paying attention, they definitely were.

Her organization also had a training in early February that they expected about 100 people to attend. But they ended up having nearly 500 people and had to change venues three times just to keep up with the demand. They also streamed it on Facebook Live because there was so much extra interest.

UTAH

The state party is hosting a candidate training in March. When officials opened up registration, they sold out 50 tickets in the first day. A week later, the party expanded it to 200 spots and again immediately sold out.

VIRGINIA

Democrats have already won two special elections in Virginia since November, and the state House and governors mansion will be up for grabs this fall. (More on that below.) Mike Freeland, co-chair of the local Democratic party in Manassas and Manassas Park, said the party is being flooded with new members.

We had our largest attendance ever at our regular monthly meeting last week, he said. We are averaging 4-5 signups per week on our website and are having events like new member breakfasts in an attempt to capture the momentum and find a place for these new folks to help out.

The same, he added, is true for other local officials hes talked to recently.

WASHINGTON

Alison Dennis, 30, just started going to her local Democratic Party meetings in Wenatchee. At her first meeting last month, the hosts were overwhelmed, with about 85 people overflowing the room that was supposed to hold only 53 people.

Folks consider the area Im in to be a deeply red area, but I think its more purple than folks give it credit. I think theres a lot of potential here, but we need to ramp up the leadership quickly, she said.

David Turnoy has been involved with the San Juan County Democratic Party for the last five years and was recently elected chair. He said turnout was huge for their meeting in December, and their email list has grown significantly.

People are energized in ways that they have never been before, he said. And our Democrats group normally only meets once a quarter, but we have been meeting monthly since December and look to continue that for the foreseeable future.

SHIFTING TO THE BALLOT BOX

Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters

None of it means anything if the energy doesnt become power, if it doesnt translate into electoral success. One major test of how potent the new movement is will come on Saturday, when Delaware holds a special election for a vacated state Senate seat. Whichever party wins will control the state Senate. The district leans slightly Democratic, but special elections with low turnouts are often the partys Achilles heel, just as midterms are. But if the grassroots energy is real, turnout wont be a problem.

Sonia Sloan, 88, has been a First State Democratic activist all her life and said she hasnt seen this much excitement in a race since Eugene McCarthy, whose presidential bid she chaired in Delaware in 1968. This year, shes co-hosting a fundraiser for the Democrat in the race, environmental attorney Stephanie Hansen.

Our field operation is off the charts, as is volunteer activity. Organizers and volunteers have already knocked on over 30,000 doors, and theyve made over 28,000 phone calls as of Wednesday, said Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, adding that theyd knock on another 30,000 doors before the campaign is over.

With only about 31,000 registered voters in the district, that means theyll be hitting voters repeatedly.

The Republican in the race, a retired cop, John Marino, is running as a Trump-esque candidate. We deserve to be First again, he says.

If special elections are a sign of things to come and they may or may not be signs are good for Democrats so far. In two specials in Iowa, in December and January, on the eastern border in Davenport, Democrats won by larger-than-expected margins. Iowa allows absentee balloting, which allows organizers to go door to door to make sure those ballots are being filled out and mailed in. In the state Senate race in December, Democrats collected 2,163 ballots. On Election Day, the Democrat won only 1,640 votes, meaning more people voted absentee than in person, suggesting an extraordinarily high level of organization and energy on the ground. The same pattern held for the House race.

Iowa

More Democrats voted absentee than on Election Day.

In mid February, Republicans won their only special election since November in a district outside Minneapolis. But Trump had carried it by a 61-32 margin, DailyKos reported, and the Republican winning by just 6 points was a huge collapse.

The question, then, is whether the momentum can carry into 2018. Along the way will be the November 2017 elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The Garden State should be easy to pick off for Democrats, given their statewide advantage and the cellar-level popularity of Gov. Chris Christie (R).

But Virginia will be interesting to watch. If populist-progressive Tom Perriello can channel the new grassroots energy into his candidacy, theres every reason to believe he can knock off the establishment candidate, Ralph Northam, who is lieutenant governor and was Gov. Terry McAuliffes (D) hand-picked successor. If Perriello can get past Northam in the June primary, hell likely face GOP lobbyist and operative Ed Gillespie, who is perfectly ill-suited for the moment particularly with Trump regularly attacking federal workers, who make up a significant chunk of the Virginia electorate. Democratic committee meetings in Virginia, Perriello told HuffPost, are absolutely bursting out of the room in the hallways with crowds.

Governor and state House races like the one in Virginia are more critical than ever because the redistricting process follows the 2020 Census. If Democrats can ride a new wave into power, the gerrymandering of 2010 can be rolled back.

Local officials nationwide say theyre focused on creating a positive vision and a constant stream of activities to keep these new activists engaged.

If we stop giving them things to do, Im worried that people will get apathetic, said Lopez, the executive director of the Travis County Democratic Party in Texas. Its only February, but typically after an election, this is the time when people are apathetic.

Savage, who runs the Washtenaw County Democratic Party in Michigan, said hes been making a point of reaching out not only to his new members, but to many of the people in the outside activist groups, to let them know that the party has resources that can help them organize.

Were going to be here whether theyre here or not, he said. But if we can activate them, help them have some successes youve got to have a success now and then, otherwise it becomes too demoralizing.

Next year is key for Michigan as well; every state legislator and every single statewide office holder is up for re-election.

Even without a to-do list from local party leaders, Trump is managing to be liberals greatest organizer, with one extraordinary move after another drawing public outrage. With his Muslim ban on hold, his popularity plummeting, national security adviser Mike Flynn fired, Obamacare repeal looking less and less likely and Labor Department nominee Andy Puzder defeated, Democrats can start to point to wins that keep newly engaged activists fighting.

And theyre hoping to pick up one more in Delaware this week. Even if they dont, Republican John Marino, making a bid for the seat, appears to have his finger on the new public pulse. Theresa Kudlick, a district voter, said Marino came by her neighbors house and she was left with the impression he was the Democrat in the race. None of his material mentioned what is becoming an inconvenient fact: Hes a Republican.

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