#and hell tell you about an old lighthouse keeper that he used to love but the keeper fell in love with the lighthouse

[jonny-b-meowborn]

Not to be a fucked up little freak but recently I started writing a short story in second person in future tense and it's about a lighthouse and her keeper

[notoriousbeb]

Lighthouse Keeper Tweets

Part Three: February 2024 - July 2, 2024

Back to Part One Back to Part Two

Feb. 5, 2024 (barely) 12 a.m.

"'I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love.'"

Now THIS is interesting. First, this is a Jane Austen quote (from Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice [see 11/28 tweet, as well]). In the book, Darcy goes on to say, "Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away." What Darcy is saying here is that he formerly thought pretty words and declarations were enough to sustain a relationship, but he now knows that's not enough. The underlying bond has to be strong first, or it's all for naught. Interesting. Because, my second point about this post is: this is the date of the Grammy's, and the date Taylor announced The Tortured Poets Department.

Feb. 16, 2024 1:30 a.m. BST

"You don't mess with love, you mess with the truth."

These are lyrics from Ellie Goulding's "On My Mind." Someone can't stop thinking about someone!

Feb. 18, 2024 10:45 p.m. BST

"The dirt on my jeans from the mud on the Heath feels like karma to me"

Perhaps someone is starting to realize he fucked up.

Feb. 23, 2024 4:50 p.m. BST "A tangle on the television and the magazine."

These are lyrics from The Arctic Monkey's Teddy Picker. Perhaps, and this is just a guess by me, obviously, but maybe a shot at TK, who was riding around in a rented sportscar, speeding and blowing red lights in Australia while following Taylor on tour?

Feb. 26, 2024 12 a.m. BST

"I've let love be free, and I've let it go. I've let it fade and I've watched it blow."

Sad.

March 20, 2024 5:35 p.m.

"You go back, Jack, do it again, wheel turnin' ' round and 'round"

These are lyrics from Steely Dan's "Do It Again."

March 22, 2024 1:41 a.m.

"One to remember A spill to reflect on High in your bedroom Will you still remember?"

He mentions in his replies that he's "feeling creatively inspired by the people [he's] surrounded with." Perhaps in the studio? A little poem for someone. Reminds me of the "you smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate," line from TTPD song. So, maybe, yeah, she did remember. Gah, these two exhaust me.

March 28, 2024 1:10 a.m. "If you're gonna try and walk on water make sure you wear you comfortable shoes."

These are lyrics from The Arctic Monkey's " Piledriver Waltz. Could be nothing, but it could also be a few things.... Anxiety about the impending TTPD release (thinking about the line "you're gonna shoot me out of a cannon" here). Pics of TK and TS at Nobu that had just popped up where TS looked annoyed as hell. Also there were all those pics of them from their beach vacation. Also, a few minutes before, he'd posted something about the stars, and then deleted it and proceeded to gaslight everyone on his timeline who asked about it. smh.

April 5, 2024 12 a.m. BST

"Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me?"

This is a bit of the Walt Whitman poem "Song of Myself." Has the tell-tale moon and stars, of course. What is he fighting for, I wonder. And who will win?

April 8, 2024 10:35 p.m. BST

"I looked around then for a reason When there wasn't something more to blame it on But, if time makes a difference while we're gone Tell me now, and I won't be hanging on"

These are lyrics from The Eagles' "Train Leaves Here This Morning." Maybe feeling defeated? He's about to leave to go to Japan with TR. When someone mentions in replies that this isn't a happy song (it's not. it's about one of the band members going through a divorce), LK replies: "Or, you could see it as a gateway to happiness. Sometimes the path to joy needs some pruning, and leaving things behind." Then someone else replies, "This is how it has to be though, right?" And LK responds, "I mean... no? Nothing really has to be anything; new things wash up on the shore, seasons pass, gardens flourish and die. Life is ever fluctuating. But also, it's just a great Eagles song." That's some true blue Aquarius shit right there. LOL. Another tidbit from the replies, he likes "Idaho" and "Words" by Gregory Alan Isakov.

April 12, 2024 8:30 p.m. BST / 4:30 a.m. JST

"Take a second, take a minute, take a mile Run the routes, light it up, enjoy the highs"

Probably in Japan?

April 19, 2024 12:31 p.m. BST

"Certified member of The Tortured Poets Department now."

And so it begins, again. Comments in the replies that he's feeling "tortured and poetic." Says he can't pick a favorite track yet.

April 25, 2024 7 p.m. BST

"I won't sit here and wax poetic to try and untangle the way we've crossed each other's firing range"

Sure, Jan. In his replies, he says he's currently inspired by "my life, my fears, my loves, my losses, in no particular order." Also says his current favorite TTPD track, "Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus" "has [his] heart."

April 26, 2024 12:35 a.m. BST

"Love is no more Than the wide blossom which the wind assails, Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore, strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales"

Already wrote about this here. My dude here is IN IT. He sarcastically says he's feeling "dazzling," and when asked who he's dancing with he replies, "Myself, my closet skeletons, and my wandering mind!" Cool night, LK. Sounds like a blast!

April 29, 2024 10:55 p.m. BST

"I used your old toothbrush to clean out my keep cup I suppose that's the way things are right now"

A keep up. So, who's toothbrush we talking about here?

April 30, 2024 1:01 a.m. "What are our vices for today?"

I've already posted about how very, very well he's doing.

May 3, 2024 12:30 a.m. "When the garden leaves blow and you jump out your skin once the shock starts to go that's when solitude sets in"

Already posted about this one, too. Tayrry no more?

May 9, 2024 10:40 p.m. BST

"I should think most of my problems are solvable by feeling the sun's warmth and the sparkle of the stars."

He did pop up in a couple spots in London (a cab, dinner and the ballet) the next day with a nice tan! I'd hoped he'd been to Paris, but it was overcast and not very warm there. Maybe he was just laying out in the Heath taking it easy (and maybe texting someone??). In his replies, he seems in quite a good mood and talks about getting high to write. He also replies to a commenter who asked, "Are you watching TTPD livestream from Paris?" LK said, "I had hoped she would come to Eroda. Granted, it would be a lot more intimate than she's used to..." Cheeky, bugger.

May 17, 2024 3:25 p.m. BST

"Would you be angry? At the cruelty of history Fading away the stories we penned For slamming the dot at the end.

Here's how I interpret this: LK is asking the muse, would you be angry at history if it decided this was it for us? If this was where it decided our story ended? In his replies, LK also mentions he’s been doing some “embroidery.” This reminds me of the line in “loml,” “we embroidered the time of when I was away, stitching ‘we were just kids, babe.’” Perhaps LK is musing about memories today. He also says in response to the question “May I ask you what you would change about your past, what do you like about your present and what would you like get in your future?” “I guess there's not much point in thinking about changing the past, and I love the love I have right now, and in the future l'd like to keep that love.” In Haylor news, rumors are that Tayrry has split. Taylor is about to play night one in Stockholm after spending time with TK in Italy and Harry is unseen (rumor is he's out of London doing a photoshoot--perhaps for HS4, I hope!).

May 19, 2024

May 23, 2024

June 5, 2024

June 8, 2024

June 15, 2024

June 16, 2024

June 16, 2024 (2)

June 20, 2024

June 25, 2024

July 2, 2024

[ikkaku-of-heart]

🙌

Send a “🙌” and I’ll introduce you to an NPC related to my Muse.

Name: “Gramps” Buranku Tomasu Occupation: Former sailor/smuggler, lighthouse keeper Age: “Too fucking old for this” (70 pre-timeskip, 72 post-timeskip)

The lighthouse keeper of Joras, Gramps has a checkered past and ran out of shits to give regarding everything besides his job, his granddaughter, his pets, and the sea. A man with powerful Observation and Armament Haki skills, he’s fought pirates, Marines, Devil Fruit-using polar bears, and crazy cultists alike over his long career. His fondest wish has always been for Ikkaku to keep being a ray of sunshine and get the hell off that island, preferably surrounded by people who love and appreciate her.

“Heh. Ikkaku’s a good kid. Far better than this craphole ever deserved, that’s for sure. I don’t mind her bein’ a pirate; I’ve met a few decent ones in my time. Whitebeard even gave me a lift back home a few decades back. And the Marines? Well, they’ve always cared more about the law than what’s right or wrong, so if she wants to tell them where they can stick it, I’ll be all the more proud of her.”

[ladyhistorypod]

Episode 8: I’m Holding out for a She-ro

Sources:

Ida Lewis

Thought Co

Atlas Obscura

Smithsonian Learning Lab

Archive.org

Traditional Music

Further Listening: “The Memory Palace”,  “The Eyes of Ida Lewis” by Reg Meuross

Selena Quintanilla-Pérez

Smithsonian Insider

National Portrait Gallery

PBS: Latin Museum USA

CNN

Biography(dot)com

20/20

National Museum of American History

Sábado Gigante

Interview

Further Reading: To Selena, With Love

Rose Valland

Rape of Europa (documentary)

Monuments Men Foundation

The Collector

WideWalls

Statue “of” Rose Valland (image)

Attributions: Airplane Seatbelt Beep, Sailor Song, Spanishy Guitar Thing (that’s the actual name of the file), French Horn Sounds, Trio for Piano Violin and Viola

Click below for a transcript of today’s episode!

Alana: We were talking and I was giving Lexi like things that she could cut from episode six and I was like you can cut just like most of me talking and let someone else… give them, give everyone a break from my voice. And then Lexi was like you're our fearless leader though and I was like no. I'm scared of everything and I just love listening to myself talk, that's what the deal is here, that's what's happening.

Lexi: The fear doesn't come across. So.

Alana: Oh that's good. I wasn’t on TikTok because I don't go on TikTok because I don't have a TikTok because I don't get it. But I follow an account on Twitter that just posts all of Hank Green’s TikToks. Apparently there's like some dance challenge, I bet, or something, I’m making an assumption, where you like put on your shoes or something, and I don’t know. I don’t know. But he was like leaning over doing something with his shoes and then he threw his shoe at the phone and yelled “do your homework” which I thought was very funny.

Haley: Are you gonna talk about Hank Green every episode?

Alana: Yes.

(Haley laughing)

Alana: I wish he was my dad!

[INTRO MUSIC]

Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History: the good, the bad, and the ugly ladies you missed in history class. It's time for my favorite Zoom meeting. Up in the top left corner is Lexi. Lexi, what's your superpower?

Lexi: My superpower is writing essays the night before they're due, not double checking them, submitting them, and then having the professor say wow you're a great writer.

Alana: And down at the bottom is Haley. Haley, what would your superhero name be and why is it Sprinklebear McPuss-n-Boots?

Haley: Ugh. I really, I had my super power all ready to go and you switched it up on me. Sprinklebear McPuss-n-Boots was something off of a whim. That was like a gut visceral reaction to my super power name. I guess I'll stick– I don't know why it's that long. I have a really long last name. I love short and sweet names. I hate that it’s Sprinklebear McPuss-n-Boots.

Alana: I need to– we need to like keep bringing it up so that we can have Sprinklebear McPuss-n-Boots merch someday.

Lexi: Please if you'd like to contact Haley write to our podcast.

Alana: We cannot stress this enough. Even if you don't have anything to say, send us a DM and just be like this is for Sprinklebear McPuss-n-Boots

Haley: This is why I can't speak freely and… I don't know. I can't have nice things because then I say crap like that.

Alana: And I'm Alana and I watch blockbuster superhero movies the way they were meant to be seen; on the tiny airplane screen on the back of the seat in front of me. Or at least I used to.

Haley: Alright. I have a question for you all. What is the definition of a she-ro?

Lexi: A hero who uses she/her pronouns?

Alana: I love that. I think I'm gonna second that. Yeah. I'm also gonna say like people who were overlooked. I know that's like our whole podcast is like people who were overlooked but… That's– that's how I feel.

Lexi: I'm holding out for She-ro.

Alana: Holding out for She-ro. Til… how does the song go I don’t even know.

Lexi: Til the end of the night.

Alana: Can I tell you the first time I heard that song?

Lexi: She’s gotta be strong and she’s gotta be tough.

Alana: The first time I heard that song.

Lexi (high-pitched): She’s gotta be fresh from the fight.

Alana: For reals.

Lexi (somehow even higher-pitched): I’m holding out for a she-ro!

Alana: For reals the first time I heard that song? Shrek 2. Dead serious.

Haley: Yeah. I think that’s… I think that’s the same for me too.

Lexi: No the first time you heard “Holding out for a She-ro” was right now when I wrote it. You may have heard a different song.

Alana: The original song. The original song.

Lexi: This is parody, therefore it's protected under parody law.

Haley: She-ro on the oracle that is Urban Dictionary has like two top definitions in their like first thing that comes up. The first one is a woman or man who supports women's rights and respects women's issues. The second is female hero, basically saying he as in hero and it's like Greek and Old English rooted words going into all that, we're not here for,  it's not fun. The fun part is just how someone put in she-ro as an obnoxious word built off the word hero but in the same breath is like a man or woman who fights women's issues and then truly just like a whole mix of how this word’s obnoxious.

Lexi: Thoughts; I hate the term women's issues.

Alana: Me too.

Lexi: That makes me sick to my stomach.

Haley: Yeah I don't like it either.

Lexi: Second, let’s edit Urban Dictionary. My definition was better because I don't like either of those definitions.

Alana: Me neither.

Haley: There are like a whole host of definitions and that was me dwindling it down.

Lexi: Like the fact that it says female hero like that makes me upset because someone can be female and not use she as the pronouns that frustrates me.

Haley: Exactly.

Lexi: And then also I don't like the term women's issues that just doesn't sit well with me. You know, I don't like that.

Haley: Also I didn't think of like hero as like he I always saw it as H. E. R. so like her.

Alana: So that's why you said her-o in the original spreadsheet.

Haley: I also had a few drinks in me but that's neither here nor there.

Lexi: Also the feminine form of hero is heroine but then that sounds like drugs.

Haley: Yeah that's true, that's also true. Honestly I’d rather be a drug than like a woman. If it– women’s rights or like heroin’s rights

Lexi, laughing: In 2020 America, if you were a drug that was being sold by a pharmaceutical company, you would have more rights than a woman.

(Haley laughing)

Alana: Lexi leave that in.

Lexi: Oh hell yeah I will.

Alana, laughing: Oh god.

(Haley and Alana laughing)

Lexi: So our first she-ro today is Idawalley Zoradia Lewis who was born on February 25, 1842, and in 1854 her family moved to a little island called Lime Rock. It was off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island. The family made the move when her father became keeper of the lighthouse there, and living on a rock meant her and her three younger siblings needed to row a boat back and forth to school on the mainland each day, so Ida became a strong rower. She also learned to swim against really rough waves and so she was just all around really good in the water. In 1858, sixteen year old Ida rescued four young men. The group had been sailing when a strong wave capsized their boat near Lime Rock and Ida, by this time a well-practiced rower, rowed out to where the boys were struggling to tread water. She hauled all four of them aboard and brought them to shore. The event received very little publicity even though this sixteen year old girl saved four people. When Ida was in her teens, her father's health began to decline and he became wheelchair-bound, so Ida had to learn the skills needed to keep the lighthouse running so that her family can continue to run the lighthouse and receive an income. In 1869, a pair of soldiers were on a boat near Lime Rock during a snowstorm and the snowstorm turned their ship over. Ida, who was actually ill at the time, didn't even stop to put on her coat and went out to rescue the soldiers with the assistance of her younger brother. In recognition of her service at this time, President Ulysses S. Grant awarded her the Congressional Medal of Honor. Grant and his vice president visited Ida’s lighthouse to congratulate her and the story about the rescue was published in the New York Tribune. In 1872, Ida’s father unfortunately passed away and her mother briefly became the lighthouse keeper. In 1870, Ida became the lighthouse keeper because her mother was beginning to be sick. At one point, she was the highest paid lighthouse keeper in America. Her mother, who was now at this point very ill, eventually passed away in 1887. There is no written record of the exact number of people Ida saved, but accounts from the time estimate she saved at least eighteen people or possibly as many as thirty-six. Many national magazines acknowledged her for her great heroism and she became a household name in New England. In 1911, Ida is believed to have suffered a stroke. She died shortly after. The city of Newport flew their flags at half mast and thousands of fans came to Lime Rock to bid her farewell. After her death, the lighthouse was renamed Ida Lewis Lighthouse and Lime Rock was renamed Lewis Rock in honor of her 54 years of service. Lewis Rock is now home to the Ida Lewis Yacht Club. Though Ida’s actions and career were considered masculine and caused much debate during her lifetime, she was recognized as a heroine by many young women who admired her. She inspired girls, showing them women could be strong, and save men, something young women at the time likely did not see reflected anywhere else in their lives. And that's what makes her a she-ro.

Alana: I was literally today talking about when I was– when I was like 11 or something we did…  my family did like a sort of driving tour of Cape Cod, Connecticut, and Rhode Island and I was literally talking about that trip with my mom on the phone today because it's Sunday, it's call your mother day. So I was like actually talking about Rhode Island today which is really interesting. Like what a weird coincidence. I didn't know anything about her. That's cool.

Lexi: She is a little-named person. She's not frequently mentioned, but she does appear in some historical books, sometimes. Like there's a book in the Smithsonian Libraries that is called like “Women Heroes of our Great Nation” and it's from like 1890-something, like during her lifetime, and it mentions her. And it has a cute little drawing of her rowing a boat.

Alana: Do you have a link to that in the show notes?

Lexi: I do not have that specific link, but I can give it to you and I will put– we’ll put it in the show notes. That link will be in the show notes. It's not yet but I will put it in there.

Alana: I have to see this drawing.

Haley: So this shero might come as a surprise because you might be like why did she save the day? But hopefully the story I tell will kind of steer you on that path. Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, or the queen of Tejano music, was one of the most iconic singers of the late 20th century and a trailblazer in Tejano music. I know I know the theme is “saved the day” and you're probably thinking why Selena? What did she save? Well I basically wrote half a page of this long winded story on why she saved the day in my middle school Spanish class, but honestly just Google the testimonies on how Selena changed the lives of so many people and you be the judge of this whole story. So let’s crack open this history book on Selena. Born on April 16, 1971 in Lake Jackson, Texas, her family wasn't originally from fame, but before fame she was a singer of her family's band Selena y Los Dinos, that worked weddings, fairs, and other venues along the US-Mexican border. And her father was also a musician back in the day, so not only did the kids get the musical talent from him but they also were trained and mentored by him. And you see a lot of the family influence come out and her music later. So funnily enough she grew up speaking English, not speaking Spanish but her father taught her how to sing in Spanish so she could connect better with the Latin American community. And in the HBO 1997 Selena movie with J. Lo you kind of see like how and why Abraham, her father, picked that. And she did learn to speak Spanish fluently because actually rose to fame she had to kind of be in interviews and a lot of these were Mexican broadcasting news organizations, which they were going to be asking and expecting her to answer in Spanish. So her rise to fame, she had to break so many barriers because of Tejano music, which is a style of music that fuses Mexican, U. S. and European elements together, was heavily male dominated. In 1990, her Ven Conmigo album was the first to Tejano album by a female artist to go gold, and in the following years songs like gonna Como La Flor, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom, Si Una Vez and others quickly made it to the top of charts and are still iconic songs. Even on the radio, a few days ago I listened to this. I was listening to some channel and Como La Flor came on and I was like “I'm doing her this is like a sign” because I really struggled to pick a shero. Through all this fame, she is noted as humble, caring, and overall a lovely girl who truly put her family, friends, and fans above her own happiness sometimes, and people would just comment on how great she was in interviews, just meeting her on the street, and even the HBO and other documentaries, movies, show that she was just a lovely lovely human. To pivot slightly she was most definitely a renaissance woman while continuing her musical career, she started a whole fashion experience. Her style overall was considered to be breaking bounds of toting the line between “sexy rebel” and “Mexican American good girl” and for those who do not know, she is most known for her bustiers, tight pants, and jackets. All these fashion icons were inspirations from her stagewear, which she made available to the public because she made those herself which I thought was pretty cool like all her stagewear is coming from her. Especially when they were just like a touring small band along the border, they would have to get creative and Selena would take charge in what everyone would wear on stage. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History actually has one of the leather outfits she wore and I couldn't figure out if it was on display or not but they do have that and I believe other Selena artifacts and have done a lot of stuff of Selena which will all be on the show notes. She is also sometimes is referred to as “Mexican Madonna'' which I personally think is garbage for so many reasons because both of those females, women, ladies are their own identities and like her music doesn't sound like Madonna. 

Alana: No. The only way that Selena is the Mexican Madonna, is if Madonna is the White Selena.

Haley: Yeah.

Alana: Like I would accept like either of those because I love flipping that script.

Haley: I saw that quote like “Mexican Madonna” too many times to not put it in and just be like this is a dumpster fire

Lexi: But like I think only similarity is the leather.

Haley: It’s like the leather and the bustiers, and the bustiers she would wear would be like bedazzled bras... so I was thinking like Madonna and the cone boobs. And it’s like, what, we're gonna call Katy Perry like...

Lexi: So many female singers dress like that

Haley: Yeah, so like I wish I was born, I was born right after #1997Baby because I would have totally gotten a leather jacket from Selena. Like when she did her whole public appearance, there are so many interviews of her talking about her clothing, and you see how passionate she is. She broke even more barriers when she became the first Tejano artist to win the Grammy for best Mexican-American album in 1994 and this was at the 36th Grammy Awards. Unfortunately, only a year after her Grammy win at the height of her fame she was murdered. At age 23 she was murdered by the president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldivar in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Yolanda was considered like her close friend, part of the family even though Abraham has been on record saying like he didn't trust her, especially when a lot of like paper trails of money going missing and just fans being like this is not right like I ordered this thing and this came instead or nothing came at all, where he was like “okay, why is Yolanda in our life, how did she come about?” and really Yolanda approached Selena and was like “I’m your number one fan, let me do all this stuff for you.” Once the money laundering and all the other like sketchy stuff was coming to light that's when she killed Selena with a gun. So there's a lot of info about like Yolanda and her head space for this and since she survived and Selena didn't obviously they use Yolanda. Like 20/20 did a whole episode interviewing Yolanda and there's a clip even where she is saying her conscience is clear, she didn't mean to kill Selena, and the murder was a complete accident and like she... I got the sense that she felt worse that she didn't commit suicide versus like murding Selena. Yeah, Alana is giving me that face. It was just such a horrible, horrible scenario. I got the sense that Selena went to confront her or told her dad that she’ll confront Yolanda, starting like “Hey, there’s a lot of sketchy, criminal activity coming out, and you are the president of my fan club, what is going on? I’m talking to you as my friend and I want to work this out with you.” Apparently Yolanda had a gun, was willing, and did use it on Selena. I believe she died either on the way to the hospital or at the hospital. I couldn't get a full confirmation from a reputable source of what happened there. Honestly that whole 20/20 I linked in the show notes it's on YouTube and different parts, someone kindly posted that and it just shows you how sketchy Yolanda was and clearly the interviewers were trying to like kind of be like okay you're kind of a kook we don't have Selena's mark, we want to do a tribute of her overall legacy, we're gonna pick you. And Yolanda is actually up for parole in 2025 which I knew when I saw the movie in middle school, hence she saved my day that day going back to that. Now it just feels so much more real being like in 2020 versus like some random mid 2000s because all our whole like middle school class was obsessed with Yolanda. Honestly most people were for like the wrong reason like they start looking at her Wikipedia's seeing that Yolanda has like a fan club now which is like completely inappropriate. But I kept thinking like yo, why is she on parole and she would be on patrol because she would have served at least thirty years of her sentence so it's like thirty years to life sentence. Honestly, I don't think she's going to get paroled. I never read an indication that she was but you never know.

Alana: The Yolanda fan club kind of goes back to what we were saying in our lady criminals episode. 

Haley: Yes.

Alana: Like these friggin serial killers that have fan clubs and that's so messed up.

Haley: I almost actually paved Yolanda Saldivar as my lady criminal because just whole rap sheet on her and there's just so much on like her publicness, she is still alive, and in the interviews she's like wearing makeup, wearing nice clothing, and I’m like you are painting her as an innocent, sweet lady, she is talking about murder! This is… no. I feel like we wouldn't do that for certain people like people still have sympathy for her, hence she's not wearing like the prison jumpsuit they're not doing in a prison yard. They're like creating this space to paint a picture. So to end on a happy note I've kind of compiled the list on her legacy and Boy Howdy even just in the past few years the list goes on and on. I made like a whole list from when she died and after so like 1995 to 2020 and yes it's a lot of years, but just all the stuff. There's a lot of family drama, court drama, stuff with Yolanda Saldivar and to keep it positive and keep it with stuff that we can use as Lady History and just like us as a community, loving her… Mac cosmetics has created two makeup lines in her honor. The lipstick is chef's kiss gorgeous. It's like her iconic red lipstick. I'm still looking for it. I keep thinking I’ll see it when I go to Mac or Sephora and I should probably just order online. She also has a Hollywood Walk of Fame star which you can go visit. Lastly, we have a ton of documentaries and biopics, notably the movie with J. Lo that is and back on HBO and I believe Netflix is also in the works with creating a series within the near future. The trailer’s out it looks fantastic and in my ever so humble opinion, a lot of these biopics are actually pretty decent. They do show the good, the bad, and the ugly and I could be wrong, you could totally fight me but when I watched the movie when I had HBO, made a list of points I wanted to hit or kind of corroborate because I thought it was interesting when I was watching the movie of like oh the J.Lo movie did like a great job because all that like I could find in like interviews or like the Smithsonian had a bunch of PBS, CNN for a PSA for the sources; lots of visuals this time, so if you're a visual, you like the videos you like the audio for it, rather than the text of all the books definitely check those out.

Alana: That was cool. Definitely not someone I think of as fitting this topic, that was awesome.

Haley: We defined sheroes like anyone who makes an impact 

Alana: Yeah. 

Haley: And honestly I had the whole joke of how I really do want to be in my Spanish middle school class and I didn't know of her existence beforehand. I've listened to some of her music growing up I didn't realize like her whole story and that was Seleh-na, Seleena, however you want to say it, I don't know you can you can fight me on how to pronounce the name but like it was the first time I saw Spanish representation in a Spanish class which is saying a lot. 

Alana: Awesome, That's so cool. I guess it helps when you are telling real stories and not being, or at least trying to tell real stories and not making shit up.

Haley: Yeah, also at least for the cast for J. Lo, I'm thinking off the top of my head weren't like white people playing Hispanic, Latino characters. The Spanish was good. Like we'll see West Side Story and Natalie Wood with brown face on that was not the situation will not be the situation for Netflix.

Lexi: sings * MMMAAARRIIIAAAA *

Haley: I will get so mad if that comes around like that again.

Lexi: Ya know I can play Maria on the French Horn.

Alana: So something that Lexi and Haley know about me and now all of our lovely listeners are going to know about me is I have two favorite things: museums and fucking over Nazis. This story has both. Lexi is giving me a round of applause. We love it. So did you two see “Monuments Men?”

Haley: No I have not.

Alana: Lexi is nodding. Well my lady for today is the inspiration for the character Claire Simone played by Cate Blanchett in the movie “Monuments Men.” She's kind of turned into just a love interest but this is not a movie review podcast this is a history podcast. So. Rose Valland. She was born on November 1, 1898 in a small town in France that I'm not even gonna try to pronounce. It occurred to me that this is why we tend to stick with ladies who are American and British is because so many of these sources were in French and I was like I don't speak French. Sometimes I feel bad about that but other times I'm like I can't read these sources.

Lexi: We should get some listeners to send us translations of ladies from their home countries that we can use. So if you have a lady from your home country or speak a language of a country, translate some sources for a rare lady and send them to us.

Alana: We would love to talk about rare ladies who are like– that's the whole point, like overlooked by history.

Haley: Google Translate does not help. I'm ready for someone to be like use Google Translate because I’ve seen that on so many podcasts.

Alana: Yeah. I have a Google Translate story later in this about how bad it was. Rose earned two separate degrees in art history from the École du Louvre and The Sorbonne. I over-pronounce things in French because you can't be corrected if you're wrong on purpose. She also has two previous degrees from École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and in Paris which I think translates just like to school for fine arts or school of fine arts. And yet, she takes an unpaid volunteer job at the Jeu de Paume in 1932. It says volunteer, I've been thinking of her as an unpaid intern because that just resonates with me personally. I watched the documentary “Rape of Europa” which is all about this project. I did that while I was a little bit drunk and I looked at my notes afterwards and I have this line here in all caps, holy shit she was unpaid. I was very excited about her being an unpaid intern because unpaid interns can do anything.

Lexi: The amazing thing about that is that for most of museums’ history, once women were allowed in, they weren't allowed to be paid to work.

Alana: That's a whole other issue.

Lexi: When you look at the Smithsonian archives, the number of women that were just there because their husband was there but then actually contributed way more than their husbands but then got paid like eighty bucks as a present one time? Like… crazy. I digress.

Alana: And the Jeu de Paume is an art museum a little bit further from Paris, a little bit lesser known from Paris. It's like… for my DC friends, my DC audience it's like the Louvre is the National Gallery of Art and the Jeu de Paume is the Hirschhorn. So like it's a little bit lesser known but like still really cool. I can't find a good timeline for like her level of promotion and how far she came which… how? This was like less than a hundred years ago, but okay. Eventually she gets a job being a paid attaché and then becomes assistant curator when the curator falls ill. She was in charge of modern art exhibits which is very interesting because a very prominent art school reject has just become Chancellor of Germany and hates modern art and thinks it's degenerate. Oh. This will come into play later. It was Hitler. I just want to be like Hitler was an art school reject who thought modern art– I guess 1930s art was degenerate. I just wanna explain the joke. 

Lexi: That’s my second favorite fact about Hitler.

Alana: What's your first favorite fact?

Lexi: That he only had one testicle.

Alana: That he only had one testicle. Okay. So. In October of 1940, the Nazis commandeered the Jeu de Paume for storing looted art. This was the Eisen– I don’t speak German. I’m gonna get it clean. Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg Project. It was the name of the operation that Hitler used for all of the basically art looting that he did. That was like the name of the project; name of the operation. And then the director of the French National Museums says to Rose Valland “stay there. Be a spy.” And she's like “okay” and she works the phones which is an amazing way to like listen in to keep track of movements. But guess what? They're like being all loosey-goosey with their info around her because they're like “oh she's French, we're speaking German, it'll be fine.” Plot twist, she knows German! So she managed to keep a diary of which, like, prominent Jewish collectors owned what and what went where and who took it and where it was going and catalogued all this stuff. She was interrogated for being a spy twice and there is a quote from her– like she wrote a memoir about this, this time in her life and she says “he looked at me straight in the eye and told me I could be shot. I calmly replied that no one here is stupid enough to ignore the risk.” And that is movie dialogue level shit. Like, oh my god. Incredible. But like so, she's interviewed a couple times and she was like “no look I'm a woman I can't be a spy, look at my glasses.” (Alana laughing)

Haley, whispering: I’m a spy.

Lexi: Remember, women can't be money, women can't be spy.

Alana: Women don't be money women don't be spies.

Haley: We all have glasses, so we are all spies.

Alana: We are all spies. Can’t be glasses. She has– there are like all these cute little pictures of her and she was wearing Harry Potter glasses but this was way before Harry Potter and also like Harry Potter's kind of cringe now so I think we need to call Harry Potter glasses Rose Valland glasses. That's my new social movement, that's my new fight.

Lexi: Acceptable. We should start a Twitter campaign.

Alana: Yeah. I should. After the war, she kept working with the museum and she kept working with the Monuments Men. That was like their actual name, that's not just the name of the movie. And she was looking for the stolen art and she was part of the French Commission on Art Recovery. At age 54 she was finally made curator. Women… Women don't be museums, women don't be money, women don't be spies, women don't be museums. She's also given so many awards before she's even made curator. She's like the most decorated woman in France and then she's made curator. And like, that's all she ever wanted, was to be a curator but she has like– she's awarded the Legion of Honor, the Medal of the Résistance, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, she's made Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. In 1948 she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but all she wants is to be curator of this museum.

Lexi: I have never felt a story on this show so hard.

Alana: And then , wait, how us is this part? She retired from the museum in 1968, but she went back to being a volunteer for ten years. I've never felt closer to a woman.

Lexi: Incredible. Yeah. I think this is my past life.

Alana: Yeah, right? She published a book called– it's basically like “The Front of Art” like “The Art Front.” It's a pun on a different book called “The Art of the Front.” But so she's just talking about like fighting the war but from the perspective of an art museum, essentially. It became the Hollywood movie “The Train” in the sixties but in her book she's not like a hero or glorifying herself. She's very objective and her fictionalized character in “The Train” has like ten minutes of screentime. She just wants to talk about the deeds, not really herself; she's just like “I was doing my job…” Which is the only way you should be using that phrase in the context of World War II. But James Rorimer, who is fictionalized to James Granger and Matt Damon– Matt Damon's character in “Monuments Men”– in an early draft of his book, he literally says “Rose Valland is the hero of this story.” I just think it's so amazing that she was so prominent in this, and all she's like “okay I just want to go work at my museum now, goodbye” but with a French accent… because she was French.

Lexi: I was gonna attempt it but I'm not going to.

Alana: I’m not gonna do it, I can't do it. There is a statue of– it's sort of, there is a statue that's sort of of her in Lille, France L. I. L. L. E. France. Which is like a little town about 225 kilometers or 140 miles north of Paris. It's pretty close to the Belgian border. The way in which I had to go to the Hebrew language Wikipedia page and translate it to English to find out that's where the statue was… So here's my Google Translate story. In Hebrew, I speak very little Hebrew, shout out to my at-home synagogue who gave me a job teaching Hebrew even though I don't speak it. I love that. But there's a prefix V- which means and. And so when I translated the page into English, the computer translated Rose V-alland to Rose and Allan. So that's why we don't trust the Google Translate. That's why we don't trust the computer translate. We only trust the people. The humans. Because there's like no capitals in Hebrew, so you can't tell what's a name and what's not. This statute does not look like her at all. It's more like a monument to her. It's like a woman, wrapped in a sheet, surrounded by empty frames, and it's kind of weird but it's like a memorial to her. There is ongoing work with the recovery project. There are still paintings that the Nazis looted that haven't been found; it is called the E. R. R. project for. Eizen– Eizenstab or whatever. And they're trying to find the stolen works and it is sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum– please give me a job United States Holocaust Memorial Museum– and the Jewish Claims Conference. So it's like her life is not– like her life's work is not complete and we have to finish it. I had a really good time researching this story. Shout out to my dad for the four bucks he gave me so that I could rent “Monuments Men” on Amazon. Yeah. I also have documentaries this week. It's fun that we've like done different kinds of sources.

Lexi: We covered such different she-roes like–

Haley: I love it. 

Lexi: Mine’s like the classical like she literally like pulled someone out of water.

Haley: Yeah.

Lexi: And then Haley's is more like look how many people's lives that she touched and therefore like saved people through music and then Alana’s is about saving art. Which is so cool that we all have different types of heroes. There's no wrong way to be a she-ro.

Haley: That's why I wanted to ask the question.

Alana: What is a she-ro.

Haley: Yeah. I love that.

Lexi: Anyone can be a she-ro.

Alana: Anyone who uses she/her pronouns can be a she-ro. Lexi's doing a fist pump and it's very funny that she has a screenshot from one of our previous Zoom meetings as her Zoom background.

Haley: What would be the non-binary version of hero/she-ro? 

Alana: They-ro.

Haley: Okay. 

Lexi: Yeah, I love that.

Haley: Well, I wanted to say that but then I didn't want to be like– that was in my head, but…  

Alana: They-ro.

Haley: Trying to like pronounce it sounded weird.

Alana: Like my favorite joke that nobody likes, like happy Rosh– or like, Shana Tova to all my Hebrews, shebrews, and theybrews. 

Haley: Yes.

Alana: My favorite joke in the whole world and I made it on Twitter nobody liked it. If you see me on Twitter no you don't.

Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at LadyHistoryPod. Our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on lady history pod dot tumblr dot com. If you like the show, leave us a review or tell your friends, and if you don’t like the show, keep it to yourself.

Alana: Our logo is by Alexia Ibarra you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me, Garageband, and Amelia Earhart. Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us, next time on Lady History.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Haley: Next week on Lady History; we're heading to the zoo to monkey around. Get ready for some zoologists, zookeepers, primatologists, you name it. It’s going to be such an animal party.

Alana: I have a confession to make. Every time you say the birthdate of one of your ladies I’m like “Oh, so her star sign is…” 

(Lexi laughing)

Alana: Like, Haley was like “she was born on April 16th” and in my head I'm like “so she's an Aries…”

Haley: I think of the same thing. I like–

Alana: It's just like where I am. I always think that like… every time I write down a birthday I'm like “oh maybe this time I'll be like oh that makes her a Scorpio. Like, Rose Valland, Scorpio.

[dvlphine]

me watching pouring rain outside : delphine angy !

n e ways HEWWO 🥺 it is i , ellie , ur local cryptid , n here is my newest luvie delphine , or delphi , etc. ....... whatever u fancy !

OVERVIEW ♡

°✧｡× :  (  roh jisun  +  cis female  +  she/her  )  ───  oh, look, i’m pretty sure that’s DELPHINE SUH !  you know, the TWENTY-ONE year old harvest sprite ? they’re a WATER SPRITE, by the look of them. a bunch of them were helping to welcome new residents, and i’m pretty sure i heard that one say they might also work part - time as a LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER, but i could have heard wrong. well, regardless of that, i’m almost certain that they ARE NOT loyal to the harvest goddess, which explains why they’re so UNINHIBITED and RESILIENT, but can also be a bit MISCHIEVOUS and EGOCENTRIC. whether they want to revive the goddess or not, if you need them i’m pretty sure you can find them at ROSE PEAK most often ! murky water concealing what’s underneath, a pretty grin capable of striking fear into one’s soul, unrepeatable whispers floating through the quiet ! ✧  ( ellie , 20 , she/her , est )

STATS ♡

full name: delphine suh age: 21 birthday: may 20 star sign: taurus gender: cis female sexual orientation: bisexual hair color: brown to teal ombre height: 5′2″

HISTORY ♡

so ofc , delphine is born out of pure love and devotion , as all sprites are , but that love & devotion doesn’t last ..........

her mom’s a sun sprite & her dad a water sprite ....... despite taking after her dad element-wise, delphine takes after her mom in some other ways which i’ll expand on ! mfkdmsk

so during her younger years, delphine’s parents were always quarreling , whether it was about small things like the weather or big things like the harvest goddess ! when delphi was born , her mom was loyal to the goddess , but after a few years of being settled down in roselake and raising a family , she realized she wanted more .. she wanted to travel & live like a normal human did

ofc her dad was like ‘no!! our duty is 2 stay here’ but her dad was quite a timid character compared to her mom’s outspoken-ness n so when delphi’s 15 her mom leaves the island for the first time .......

she’s gone for just a little bit & she comes back & is visibly happier & delphine naively thinks that maybe things can work out this way , with her mom coming & going occasionally but everything remaining the same other than that

... it doesn’t . her mom comes back one day & says she’s leaving for good .. she’s gonna become a human & everything

once it’s all done delphine goes back to their cottage w/ her dad still processing ...... but the minute she’s done she explodes at her dad , asking him why he didn’t get her to stay .. she leaves , & 6 months later she hasn’t been back since

PERSONALITY + TIDBITS ♡

p new at being a lighthouse keeper ...... keeper-in-training if u will ....... she didn’t start spending all her time at rose peak until after her mom left so after a couple months of spending all her time sulking there she was like might as well do SOMETHING productive .. but i’m still gnna sulk . MFKSDM

luvs the aura the lighthouse gives off esp. when it rains/storms ( she’s like bleh the sun ....... MFKDSM ) .. loves jus traipsing around there n the shore like the mysterious emo she is

lil bit nocturnal bc of her job .. she’ll like invite people over during the night but try 2 scare them when they arrive 😔 doesn’t get much sleep n so i’d say u can find her during the day half the time .. the other half u’ll have 2 drag her out of bed n she’ll spend the rest of the day looking like a sleepy bby !

loves using ( abusing ? ) her powers but isn’t loyal to the harvest goddess ..... jus doesn’t think she’s All That u kno she Also blames her for her mom & is like ‘if everywhere else is doing just fine w/out the goddess ....... why do we need her .........’

so yea i wanted 2 make her .. fallen angel-esque but she hasn’t y’know received consequences for her actions just yet .. although her powers are def not where they used to be ( partly jus due to the goddess dying ) but don’t bring it up to her or she’ll drench u with water :/

it’s uhh kinda good that her powers r weak atm bc she’s a lil power-hungry :/ n control ? what’s that she asks ? she loves 2 lose it but at the same time she doesn’t want anyone else 2 hav control over her .. if she gives it 2 u for even a short bit consider urself v special ......

her empathy ..... deeply hidden but its There

still has a Lot of unresolved feelings revolving around her parents so sometimes she can jus be a lil ball of angst n anger bc of that .... she doesn’t wanna be like her mom bc she hates her ....... but maybe she does wanna be like her ? she’s jus confused , doesn’t know how to cope

thrives on chaos ........... she loves the distraction so will do whatever to create more , whether it’s manipulating the weather or jus creating rumors to tell about people ! MFKDSM

that bi who’s soft around any + all girls but likes 2 mess with/boss around men .. plot ideas ! MFKDSM

[nsfw] typically tops but open 2 switching if u ask ...... she’s a brat as a bottom though :/ MFKDSM

probs more but i’ll end it there for now 🥺

CONNECTIONS ♡

friends ! some people who have gotten past her mysterious creepy exterior ....... she’s actually v motherly/caring over the ppl she likes ..... maybe has a bff that knows everything abt her .. maybe a friend she’s like siblings w/ .. maybe a childhood friend that it’s awkward w/ now .. not Super cuddly but will play with hair or hold a hand .. 🥺 MFKDSM

fwbs ! i imagine she’d have at least a couple since she’s not rlly for the idea of settling down w/ sumone .......... like at all actually ......... MSDJKLJLS but the variety we cld have ... mayb there r feelings n jealousy ...... mayb they’re chill n actually wholesome friends ..... up 2 our muses !

exes ! a couple she had back in the day .... ended on good terms or bad terms !

enemies ! i could see this possibly going towards a loyal sprite who jus can’t believe what she’s doing .. or maybe she told a lie about someone to cause a ruckus & now they dislike her for valid reasons ! MKMSDKM also enemies w/ benefits ? hell o

+ more ! that will be thought up during plotting FMDKSM

feel free to message me on discord if u like or i’ll put up a plotting call ! but if neither of those are your fancy u can simply like this n ill im u ♡

[starswallowingsea]

Surgeon of Death

Fandom: One Piece 

Word Count: 2060

Content warnings for the hanahaki disease, although the purpose of this work is to counteract the popular trope by taking the side of the person without it and focusing on how the trope can seriously harm the character(s) it’s aimed at. This takes place during the period in Trafalgar Law’s life that we don’t know much, if anything on, after Corazon’s death but before the events of the manga and anime. Law is also aromantic in this fic, although the word is never explicitly stated.

“I see land, Captain!” 

Cheering erupted from the other two men on deck. In truth, there were only four people on the small ship, sailing the open seas, looking for somewhere to set up for a few days and gather supplies. Or maybe stay longer, take a break from running if they were lucky. Law had realized how lucky they’d been to make it this far without drawing attention from Doflamingo. It had been almost eight years now and the pink feathers still haunted his nightmares. 

He stood up, a slight smirk on his face, looking at the beacon that called their ship to land. A tall, brick lighthouse shown out in the night sky, brighter than the stars around them. Only a small stretch of ocean separated the ship from it, waves breaking gently against the rocks. 

The ship pulled up against the beach next to the rocks, hoping the cover of night would disguise their movements. They could hide the ship better in the morning when they didn’t have to risk sinking it against the rocks or a sandbar hidden by the darkness. 

Law heard it first, the creaking sound of a door opening behind them, from the lighthouse. He motioned for the others to get down and stay quiet hoping to distract the lighthouse keeper and get them to look the other way. 

He jumped to the ground and walked over, holding Kikoku over his shoulder hoping to intimidate the lighthouse keeper despite his scrawny frame. Law had a decent control over his powers after training on his own, but hadn’t had much practice in using them with Kikoku. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. 

The lighthouse keeper stopped a few feet in front of Law. 

“Who are you?” he asked. 

“Trafalgar Law,” he answered honestly. He had no reason not to trust the man before him. Yet. 

“One of those pirates huh? After the One Piece?” 

“I suppose you could call me that.” 

“And what brings you to our island?” 

“I needed somewhere to restock and hide for a few weeks.” 

Shachi and Penguin’s heads poked above the deck railing behind Law, watching the discussion and hoping to God they wouldn’t be seen. 

The lightkeeper continued talking. 

“The lighthouse is a little ways from town. Is there a reason you didn’t dock in the harbor?” 

“I’m a pirate, is that not reason enough?” 

“I suppose but don’t you need to be closer to town to get your supplies?” 

Law realized he wouldn’t be getting out of this as easily as he had hoped and tried to find a way to end the conversation soon. 

“I’d rather take an extra few hours to move it out here than get arrested.” 

“That’s fair enough, but if you didn’t want to get arrested, why are you talking to a lighthouse keeper who reports to the government?” 

Shit. 

Law paused for a moment. A moment dragged on into more, and as he put a thought together, the other three members of his crew jumped over the side of the ship and got on their knees to beg. 

“Please don’t report us to the government! We just need some help and we’ll leave!” 

The lighthouse keeper took a step back in shock and Law stared wide-eyed at the three men before him. Or to be more precise, the two men and the talking polar bear. 

“What the hell, who the hell are you!?” The man shouted, more in shock over the fact that there was a walking, talking bear in front of him than anything else. In all his 19 short years of life, he had never seen a walking, talking bear. 

“We’re so sorry we promise we won’t get in the way just don’t tell the government!” 

Law sighed and internally chastised himself for thinking anything could go smoothly with them around. 

“Well I think I see why you don’t want to dock in town now,” the lighthouse keeper said, starting to come to terms with seeing a bear talk.  

“I can put you up at my cabin for a few days I suppose, if you need somewhere to stay.” 

Law thought about it but before he could make a decision, the others had made it for him. 

“Thank you so much!” They said. 

The four of them followed the man down the shore to his cabin, Law on alert for anything that might be a trap, but finding nothing. 

When the door opened, a soft lamp light spilled onto the sand, illuminating the lighthouse keeper. He was a man of medium build with warm, brown skin and dark hair, not unlike Law himself. It was obvious the man took better care of himself, however, evidenced by the lack of dark circles under his eyes and minimal scars across the exposed skin. 

“What’s your name?” Law asked. 

“Derya.” 

--- 

Days passed as Derya had let the small group of pirates into his home. They were surprisingly polite, the bear most of all. He had learned the names of the rest of the crew, interesting as they were. Shachi and Penguin were the human men, maybe a little younger than himself, and Bepo was the polar bear. Law, their captain as Derya had learned, was about his own age. 

And he was hot. 

Derya told himself to not get too attached and develop feelings, they would be gone in a few weeks anyway. But he wouldn’t object to letting them stay longer. 

Law was grateful for a place to stay and the discretion Derya had promised them in return for help maintaining the lighthouse on shore. It was physically exhausting for his crew, who had never dealt with so many stairs at once, but Law used his powers to do it with minimal effort. 

Derya stared at Law the first time he used his devil fruit powers to turn on the lighthouse. He had only heard of devil fruit powers before, and never saw one in action. It only made his feelings for the brooding captain worse. 

--- 

Weeks turned into months and the crew continued to help Derya keep the lighthouse running, which gave him an excuse to relax with Law more and more often. His feelings had grown since their first encounter and he knew that he shouldn’t have these types of feelings for a pirate who could kill him in an instant, but he couldn’t help it. 

And he knew that they were getting worse, because only a month after meeting them, he had begun coughing up flower petals. 

Derya had only heard of this condition in the tales his mother told him as a child, someone fell in love with another and flowers grew in their lungs until they confessed their feelings. If they were accepted, then the flowers shriveled and died, but if they were rejected, the flowers would kill them almost instantly. 

The flowers could be removed, but at the cost of the romantic feelings of the affected. To many, that was a fate worse than death, and Derya had believed it was just an old wives’ tale, until now, anyway.

Law knew that Derya had been making excuses to be around him, but he didn’t mind. Derya wasn’t bad company and Law enjoyed talking with him, but it was nothing more. And he thought that it was a mutual feeling between him and Derya. 

Then one day he saw some damp flower petals in the garbage. At first he brushed it off as petals blowing in from nearby bushes and getting caught in someone’s drink. But they continued to grow in number, hidden in more places, as if in desperation. 

Law thought about one of the diseases he had read about with Corazon. One that stood out was hanahaki, a disease that made one vomit flower petals in the event that they fell in love that was unrequited. A fairy tale, Corazon had told him. That’s all it was. Now he wasn’t so sure. 

He tried to think of who could be suffering from the flowering disease; He knew Bepo didn’t feel romantic love towards humans, and Shachi and Penguin wouldn’t develop something like this over whatever innkeeper they were drooling over in town that morning, and it certainly wasn’t Law who was vomiting flower petals. 

Shit. 

He had come to a conclusion and he didn’t feel great about it. Law realized why Derya had wanted to spend more and more time with him, and thought back to how he had been coughing more and more lately, turning away, and seeing pieces of a flower sink to the ground, saying it was just allergies. That the flower petals were gifted by someone in town. 

Law’s stomach knotted itself over, tightening at the thought of someone dying over him because he couldn’t reciprocate their feelings. He had never believed he needed to feel romantic love to anyone, nor did he want to. It was an extra tie he didn’t need and after watching Corazon die for him, and he was determined not to let that happen again. 

And he failed. 

He failed by allowing someone to get close enough to him to develop romantic attraction to him when that was everything he didn’t want. He failed in causing someone to contract a now fatal disease because he was putting off running away. He failed because he allowed himself to feel safe. 

Law called for a crew meeting, wanting to deal with Derya’s disease and leave immediately to prevent it from happening again from someone else. 

They all agreed it was time for them to take off again soon and began to load cargo over the next few days. 

Derya knew he had to confess soon, or Law’s leaving would kill him, literally. The flowers would bloom in his lungs and kill him. 

It was one of the days that Law was training on his power with Kikoku when it happened. 

Derya: “I think I love you.” 

Law: “I’m sorry.” 

Derya: “What do you mean? I know you’re leaving soon but I just wanted you to know--” 

Law: “I mean I can’t return those feelings.” 

Derya stopped, eyes widening in horror as he realized what would happen. 

“Room.” 

In the blink of an eye, Law had created a small blue sphere around the two of them before slicing at Derya with Kikoku. The flowers in his lungs that were about to sprout were pushed out of his body harmlessly. His feelings disappeared, too. 

Law’s body was shaking from the effort it took him to create the room and replace the flowers in such a quick time. He had done maneuvers like that before, removing a heart or switching two people’s souls when he needed cooperation, but he always had at least a minute to do it. If he hadn’t done it in a matter of seconds, Derya would be dead, and he knew it. 

Derya looked up at Law, eyes wide and shaking with the realization about what had just happened. Law had removed the flowers, and Derya would never be able to love again. 

Law turned around and placed his sword on his shoulder like they day they met. 

“It was nice meeting you.” 

“Wait don’t go, bastard! Why the hell did you do that? I won’t be able to love anyone ever again!” 

“Is that really so bad? To be unable to love?” 

“Some call it a fate worse than death.” 

Law didn’t know how to respond. Of course he knew that many people considered feeling romantic love to be the epitome of human emotion, but how could he explain otherwise in a sentence while walking away for good? He couldn’t. 

“I guess I’ve been dead for a long time, then.” 

“You’re a surgeon of death, that’s what you are. You don’t care about others’ feelings! Why couldn’t you just let me die?” 

But he did. He cared too much to watch Derya die with flowers in his chest and he cared too much about Corazon to listen to him and he cared too much about his family to run away with them and he cared too much for everyone. 

And maybe he shouldn’t. 

Maybe that’s how he ended up so alone in the world. 

“You said it yourself. I’m a surgeon of death, and sometimes, living can be worse than death.” 

And he walked away. 

[thefilmsnob]

Glen Coco’s Top 10 films of 2019

2019 was one of the better movie years I’ve experienced. It was no 2007 or 2013--we all know that--but it was pretty damn good. People who say ‘they just make crap nowadays’ probably aren’t really into movies and are definitely out to lunch. Dammit, now I want lunch. Anyway, here are my picks for the ten best films of 2019 which, as always, follow my runners-up and the traditional bonus track...There’s always a bonus track. 

Runners-Up

-Bombshell

-Booksmart Full Review: https://thefilmsnob.tumblr.com/post/185427895290/booksmart-out-of-5

-Ford v Ferrari

-The Irishman

-Joker Full Review: https://thefilmsnob.tumblr.com/post/188571262775/joker-out-of-5

-Parasite

-The Peanut Butter Falcon

-The Two Popes

And here are my top 10!

#10b. (Bonus Track) Avengers: Endgame

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, the rest of Hollywood

Maybe, like some people in the industry, you don’t consider Marvel films to be ‘cinema’. Well, that’s a legitimate and long debate for another time. But, you can’t say that weaving a narrative through 22 related films isn’t an impressive feat. That’s what Marvel Studios did and with the help of the Russo Brothers, and despite the countless moving pieces, they ended this chapter of the franchise almost perfectly with just the right balance of action, human drama, twists, turns and some surprisingly poignant moments. If you didn’t get goosebumps--and maybe even pee your pants a bit--when those portals opened up at the end, bringing to mind Gandolf’s triumphant entrance into the Battle of Helm’s Deep, then maybe movies just aren’t for you, my friend. 

Full Review: https://thefilmsnob.tumblr.com/post/184694412545/avengers-endgame-out-of-5

#10. Marriage Story

Director: Noah Baumbach

Starring: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson

Ironically, Marriage Story is actually about a divorce. But, writer/director Noah Baumbach imbues this civil-turned-nasty separation with all the complexity and aggravation that come with being married with child. He treats the divorce like the grueling process you’d expect it to be, one which involves real, flawed people whose needs and desires don’t align, making the situation increasingly distressing for all parties involved. In turn, Driver and Johansson make this distress increasingly palpable for the audience until it feels like we’re in the room with them during one of their several heated arguments. Both actors give some of the best work of their careers, yet it still may be overshadowed by Laura Dern and Ray Liotta who shine as the two ruthless lawyers representing them. Baumbach has been churning out these gems for years, but his latest, which may be his most accessible, may also be his best so far. 

#9. Jojo Rabbit

Director: Taika Waititi

Starring: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson

What do you get when you mix Nazi Germany, the ghost of Hitler and a poor Jewish girl trying to survive the second World War? You get one of the funniest and most touching movies of the year, of course. The surging writer/actor/director Taika Waititi, who specializes in quirky films filled with quirkier characters, hasn’t made the typically grim melodrama about Nazi Germany nor is he doing anything close to promoting Nazi culture. Instead, he uses the tale of a young boy who attends a Hitler Youth training camp to highlight the absurdity of this horrible movement while promoting tolerance. He delivers this powerful message by introducing a young Jewish girl who seeks refuge in the home of Jojo and his mother, played by Scarlett Johansson (who clearly had a good year). This leads to Jojo’s crisis of conscience which is complicated by his imaginary friend...who happens to be Adolf Hitler! Yes, the movie is different.

#8. Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie

It’s no surprise that Quentin Tarantino would make a film about 1960s Hollywood starring one of the most prestigious celebrity trios in the business; the guy’s passion--obsession even--for film is unmatched. Here, he uses the medium to take a horrific moment in history like the murder of Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson Family and gives it the stereotypical Hollywood happy ending. In doing so, he showcases the wish fulfillment of the movies and their power to comfort us with optimism while simultaneously warning of their ability to shelter us from our cruel reality. DiCaprio and Pitt give brilliant performances as characters who add to the perception-vs-reality theme, DiCaprio playing the huge movie star full of anxiety and doubt in real life who relies heavily on his stunt double, Pitt, who’s the actual confident hero. All this and much more takes place in a meticulously recreated Hollywood of the ‘60s that sweeps you up in nostalgia and immerses you in a world of make-believe.

#7. Knives Out

Director: Rian Johnson

Starring: Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Plummer 

Yes, there have been many murder mysteries. No, Knives Out isn’t just like the rest of them. Writer/director Rian Johnson does a masterful job at crafting a labyrinthine story that’s just complex enough without overwhelming and strikes a perfect balance of suspense and comedy. Featuring one of the greatest casts assembled in 2019 playing a dysfunctional family of despicable yet intriguing individuals of means, the story is full of truly surprising twists and turns and, more crucially, some well-integrated and astute social commentary. This isn’t a two-hour lecture, though; the film is undeniably entertaining. The stand-out here is detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig with a delightful southern drawl and an attention to detail that rivals Sherlock Holmes. Craig transcends his James Bond persona while the film itself transcends a genre. 

#6. 1917

Director: Sam Mendes

Starring: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman

If this were a few years ago 1917 would be, without question, my #1 pick. However, as the long, uncut tracking shot has become more common over the years, it’s also lost a bit of its luster; 2014′s Birdman, one of the best films of the decade, also had the appearance of a single take. Nonetheless, to make a war film, with all its tricky choreography and pyrotechnics, look like one long take is still a phenomenal achievement and an absolute marvel to behold. And, although it obviously couldn’t be filmed in one shot, Sam Mendes and master cinematographer Roger Deakins still had to shoot long takes and stitch them together digitally while stealthily hiding the seams. It all helps tell the story of two young soldiers tasked with traversing treacherous territory to warn a Battalion of British soldiers about an impending German ambush. We follow the pair in real time amidst a story of remarkable bravery, enhanced by the fact that we’re with them every step of the way, at once experiencing everything they do up close while being reminded of how removed we really are from the danger they face.

#5. Uncut Gems

Director: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin Garnett (hey, why not?), Julia Fox

There are several talented actors in Hollywood who’ve gained a bad reputation for poor career choices. Ben Affleck and Will Smith come to mind. Perhaps the king of this group is Adam Sandler. He’s excelled sporadically in movies like Punch-Drunk Love and The Meyerowitz Stories, but he gives a truly Oscar-worthy performance in this--ahem--gem. As Howard Ratner, he’s a gambling addict who runs a jewelry store in New York’s Diamond district when he gets his hands on a rare Ethiopian black opal which he hopes will help pay off his many debts. In fact, he owes so much to so many people that he struggles to keep track of it all and we cringe every time he does. The tension builds to an almost unbearable level as a host of dangerous men seek payment. If that’s not enough, he’s on the verge of a divorce as he continues seeing a mistress who’s also his employee while owing $100 000 to his own criminal brother-in-law. If you were stressed just reading that, try watching the movie...or being Howard himself. The Safdie brothers don’t let up either, filming it like a documentary to add to its realism and immediacy...as if it needed that extra boost.     

#4. The Lighthouse

Director: Robert Eggers

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe

The first thing you notice watching The Lighthouse is that half the screen is missing; Robert Eggers, who also wrote and directed The Witch, shot the film with a 1.19: 1 aspect ratio, making the picture square, like an old-timey photograph. It feels limiting at first until you fully appreciate the feelings of confinement and anxiety it evokes. That’s important in a film about two lighthouse keepers, or wickies, who are forced to live together in insanely grungy and cramped quarters of a lighthouse on a remote island off the coast of New England. Considering the harsh conditions and the fact it’s a horror film, they soon clash and seemingly lose their grip on reality which manifests in macabre images and supernatural occurrences. Or does it? Ha! This is one of the most unique and beautifully filmed movies of the year with the grainy black and white 35mm making it seem like it was made closer to the late 19th century, when the film takes place. Like many recent horror films, this one relies more on mood and imagery than jump scares and is buttressed by only two actors who give award-worthy performances. Alright? So, go to hell; Pattinson can act.

#3. Little Women

Director: Greta Gerwig

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Timothee Chalamet, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern

You might assume that Little Women is a stuffy period piece and even unnecessary considering it’s the seventh adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s iconic 1868 novel, but the prodigious actor-turned-writer-turned-director Greta Gerwig is too adept in her craft to settle for conventional story-telling. She gives this classic story a fresh, modern take with a non-linear approach and a feminist angle that enhances without overwhelming. Like her work on Lady Bird, she keeps scenes brisk and to the point with decisive cuts. She also adds her unique wit and snappy dialogue. Every conversation, no matter how superficial, leaves you enraptured. So, too, do the characters; it’s a pleasure following these complex girls through the ups and downs of their lives as women of little means and even fewer rights. They’re portrayed by a stellar cast, particularly Jo March who’s played by Saoirse Ronan, perhaps our greatest sub-30 actress. This may be a little movie about little women, but the payoffs and sheer enjoyment are truly grand.   

Full Review: https://thefilmsnob.tumblr.com/post/190231754125/little-women-12-out-of-5

#2. Us

Director: Jordan Peele

Starring: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke 

I know it’s blasphemous, but I might be the only person on Earth who not only thought Get Out was a tad overrated, but that Jordan Peele’s second feature, Us, is the superior picture. It’s easy to look at this film as merely a unique take on the slasher genre, but it’s so much more than that. Like any good horror, it’s creepy as hell, but it’s also brimming with foreshadowing, symbolism and metaphor. There are three or four ideas that Peele sets up at the beginning that seem disconnected to the story, yet they each have a specific purpose and when that becomes evident, it’s incredibly satisfying. Even more impressive is how Peele turns a movie about a vacationing family encountering their doppelgangers into a brilliant commentary on the current state of America, specifically in regards to class division and its relation to the Nature vs Nurture debate. And the movie’s neat twist at the end isn’t just added for shock value; it’s actually the final puzzle piece and essential in conveying the film’s message. I struggled with ranking Us at #1 or #2, but its over-reliance on slasher film action around the mid-point (a minor flaw) was the deciding factor. It’s near-perfect, nonetheless.

Full Film Interpretation: https://thefilmsnob.tumblr.com/post/184073868405/interpreting-jordan-peeles-film-us

#1. Midsommar

Director: Ari Aster

Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Will Poulter

If there’s one thing for which the 2010s should be known, it’s great horror films, a refreshing development after decades of mediocrity. But, just like movies in general from the ‘New Hollywood’ ‘70s, horror films are more creative and ambitious than they’ve been in ages thanks to a handful of visionary filmmakers. Three out of the top five entries are horror movies and that’s saying something.

Midsommar is a mesmerizing horror film that hearkens back to the 1970s when the genre relied more heavily on atmosphere and pacing and sheer creepiness than on jump scares and gimmicks. It takes one hell of a talented writer/director to make a movie shot almost entirely in daylight feel so utterly sinister, but Ari Aster, who also made the acclaimed Hereditary, does just that with ease. What’s more, the film contains no monsters, nothing supernatural and an astonishingly minimal amount of violence, yet when we do see bits of blood and gore, it’s a complete shock to the system. What Aster does rely on is his mastery of lighting and framing to produce images that are unexpectedly eerie.

This is a movie that starts with a group of anthropology students looking to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime festival at a commune in the Swedish countryside and ends in an unspeakable nightmare. It’s a long and sometimes grueling experience that steadily snowballs into horror, but that slow burn is crucial for this delightfully nerve-wracking series of events. Oh, and it’s also a breakup story...possibly the scariest breakup story of all time. It’s certainly the best film of 2019.     

[definitelynotscott]

WIP game: life, blue, and/or help !

:D

Secrets

The banked rage in his heart flickered to life, and he set his tumbler on the table because he didn’t want to test its strength.

“Can I come in?” she asked, voice subdued, serious blue-green eyes looking up at him from under her golden lashes.

He chose the two-tiered dangly kind with a hook clasp and golden glass chips to match her hair, since he had never determined if her eyes were blue or green.

She was wearing a strapless dress in a blue so pale that at this distance it looked white except in the folds and valleys of the fabric.

He couldn’t help but smile back.

Understanding lit her eyes and he couldn’t help but grin.

Inheritance

Draven inquires about her love-life. (from the summary/outline)

To-Write List

(Please remember that while some of the stories in here haven’t been written because I’m slow, some of the stories in here haven’t been written because the initial idea just wasn’t that strong.) Cut for length. Like. There’s just over 39 pages. There were going to be a lot of hits. Some of these I’ve posted about before so I’ll come back in the morning and edit in links, but I’m tired now.

I guess I’m here to light up your life, but maybe not like you expect. (Soulmate AU II)

Okay, so he was a dick, saddling her with, essentially, a mark that called her a whore her whole life, but was she really planning to avoid speaking to him forever? (Soulmate AU V)

“How’s married life?” (Soulmate AU XIII)

And even when you’re a good liar “Ha ha, you’re my friend, and he’s a big part of your life, so of course I’m interested…” will only take you so far. (Soulmate AU XIV)

Ezreal hasn’t really thought about the sudden appearance of Darius in Lux’s life, he’s busy concentrating on his studies (and Taric, but…). (Some college AU)

Lux walks in on Garen and Darius trying to kill each other but mistakes it for another activity entirely. Garen doesn’t deny it, in fact goading her into making Darius’ life hell by acting emotionally vulnerable (“I wanted something more than physical”) (Wow you get the entire prompt for this one. Also a College AU)

All he wants is to show Lux how grateful he is to have her in his life. (Established Relationship AU/Starting Their Own Business AU/Unplanned Pregnancy AU)

Domestic Life in Noxus sort of thing where an assassin and an “information broker” get married because the landlord is only renting to married couples. (I actually posted about this one before!)

But she feeds him and keeps him safe like she would have for Jane, and makes snarky comments about his dad and all the unhealthy people in his life, and she starts to grow on him. … And they’re having one of their sniping little conversations like they do, and she pulls up the “upgrade to PAID” line, and there’s a pause and he says “…I could pay you…” kind of reaching out to the one non-toxic person in his life. … While she’s sending out applications and going for interviews she’s texting Justin to make sure he’s eating and sleeping, and giving him little pep talks about not abandoning his dreams and not letting the toxic SOBs around him direct his life. … Then Justin is kidnapped by unsavory types and Darcy A) can’t tell anyone because then she’d have to fess up about talking to Justin all the time and she’s sure they’d assume she’s a traitor and B) why would Tony help Justin anyway? (That Darcy Thing I Outlined Here.)

Being in prison is essentially a monastic lifestyle he didn’t choose. (Overwatch Thing I Posted.)

She’s double insulted since he should know she can make his life hell, and that she can be happy in whatever circumstances. (One of many Arranged Marriage AUs (but not quite so many that I’ve busted out the Roman numerals yet.))

They save her a bag when the gym gets crowded, and help her brush off a follower. … Garen immediately leaves to look for spare garments in the car, as everyone can see her bra is see-through blue mesh. … They listen to music supplied by Professor Heimerdinger (Space Jam, Commander Thinks Aloud, Blue & Beautiful, etc.) … Slow-dance to Blue & Beautiful. (College AU/Gym Rat AU)

Gifts would appear out of nowhere, usually in a plain box, but once you opened it the wrappings were bold, obvious, Demacian blue and gold. (Kind of a Lux-being-a-stalker AU)

Conjoined households are seen as lower class because A) if you’re high ranked you’ll be stationed in the city, B) if you’re strong enough you can defend your household without help. (More of me making up weird societal rules about marriage because that’s fun for me.)

OKAY WE’RE SKIPPING THIS ONE. O///O (But the word was “help” - not “helping” or “helped” but “help.”)

A big old fish is just as likely to toss itself over the edge without her help (and without knocking her over the railing) so she stays inside. … He helps where he can (he can use the railings like parallel bars and kind of walk himself down using his hands, but he’s also kind of banged up from getting thrown against a lighthouse. (Lighthouse Keeper/Merman AU)

This one I was working on with someone else so IDK if I should share it, but it pinged on “help”.

Lux always completes her assignments above and beyond the call of duty, but with so little help, hope, experience, and cooperation (from both her superiors and her “clients”) her edges are beginning to fray… (Kinda… a Public Defender AU? Also a “DANG IT WHY ARE THERE ALL THESE “NOXUS WINS HERE ARE THE HORRIBLE CONSEQUENCES” AUs AND NO “DEMACIA WINS AND HERE ARE THE HORRIBLE CONSEQUENCES” AUs” AU)

Sequel: Darius is assigned to help Cassiopeia with Shurima because his Demacian tattoos will strike fear, but what happens when Demacians descend upon them? (Sequel to a Pirate AU where the Demacians are the Pirates (”Harsh justice of the sea” anyone?))

Ezreal and Janna decide to helpfully “prove” that she should avoid an arranged marriage. (Obviously an Arranged Marriage AU)

Draven’s thrilled, really wants to help with the wedding plans. (Double-Blind Marriage AU/Arranged Marriage AU)

“If you’re going to half my storage space I’m going to have you help me translate the ancient Demacian parts,” he said, sounding amused. (Magic Made Them Do It story, but set after “The Incident.”)

Ezreal is helping Jayce construct a device (recreate Ekko’s device?) (De-aging story)

OKAY WE’RE SKIPPING THIS ONE TOO. O///O (It’s not even that bad, I’m just easily embarrassed.) Pinged on “helping”.

But it’s a personal issue, so she’s willing to help. (Draven playing matchmaker AU)

He can’t help but agree internally. (Vampire/Werewolf AU)

…bathing him to help him smell more like pack. (We’ll just, uh, clip this one a little bit… ^^; )

KAT REALIZES SHE INHERITED HER FATHER’S JOB OF HELPING TALON INTERFACE WITH SOCIETAL STANDARDS (”Accidental” Baby Acquisition that I’ve mentioned before.)

[scarletrebel]

[wip] shattered

no one asked for these amount of feels, weeks before the dlc, for a character who we havent even seen yet, concerning a series of events about my clan and a certain shitty warlock that hasnt even been written 

and yet here we are 

sorry friends aha @mrpinstripesuit @nattiebug14

Avia only just, just, manages to make it out of the Lighthouse without threatening another cult member. She’s proud of herself really, those books the fanatics were flicking through did look pretty heavy. If one just… Fell off of the shelf, perhaps caused a nasty bruise or a dint in an exo-skull, no one would point the finger at her.

Well. Actually, they’d all point the finger at her.

She storms through the portal and onto the sandy dunes underneath the tower. What could pass for night bathes the caloris sink in a swathe of magenta. As she kicks up dirt, readying her hand cannon, getting ready for a fight; for something to take the edge off, she steps on a Cabal rifle.

“Beat you to it, I’m afraid,” Osiris’s voice chuckles behind her. “In another timeline, one of those cultists is dangling from the top of the tower, begging you not to let them go.”

“Well, aren’t you glad you’re in this one then,” Avia snaps back. “Can you find one where your little acolytes don’t annoy the ever-loving Light out of me?”

He grunts. “Such a reality doesn’t exist.”

It’s enough to make her laugh. She kicks the massive gun at her feet out of her way, walking over to where he’s leaning against the Mercury rock.

“What do you want, old man?”

His blue eyes squint. He looks down, stiffens, and pushes off of the pillar.

“Why do you return?”

His walk is slow, agile, and Avia can’t help but stiffen herself.

“You mean,” she points at the lighthouse, “here?”

He nods.

“What, you don’t want help controlling the Vex?”

“I’ve never asked,” he points out, and Avia shrugs, her lilac face contorting into confusion.

“Uh, well – I mean, for Grier, mostly. And Carver. They can’t get enough of your little fan club, considering they’re the only ones willing to share the information they’re after.” He stops in front of her, and she folds her arms. “Information that, I’m sure, you have in tenfold.”

Osiris chuckles. “It’s not information your friends are after, it’s knowledge. For someone who acts like they’d rather be bathing in radiolaria than spending another minute on Mercury, you keep close company with many a Warlock.”

“Well, you could spare me the pain of listening to Vance go on about your ‘formidable legacy’ and tell one of my ‘many Warlocks’ what they want to know.”

He laughs again, and it begins to grate on Avia, like an itch under the skin.

“Surely you know, their quest for knowledge will never truly be over.”

“I was afraid you’d say something like that. There a point to all this, Warlock?”

Avia wonders if the Osiris in the timeline where he stayed amongst the Guardians infuriates her as much as this one does.

“Oh, please,” a Ghost appears at the older man’s shoulder, whirling her decorative shell with all the frustration Avia feels. “Would you get to the point?”

Sagira blinks over to Avia, stage whispering; “I am so sorry about him. I’m sure you know what he’s like.”

Avia chuckles. “Oh, I know far too well.”

Sagira turns to her Guardian, and prompts him with a motion that would mimic a head tilt.

Osiris sighs, looks down. His eyes steel over and when he looks at Avia, she gets the feeling that they both know that she won’t like where this is going.

“Your friends return to garner knowledge. You return because you feel the need to protect them.”

“That’s what fireteams–”

He cuts her off with a swish of a hand. “I’m not talking about the duty of a Guardian. I’m talking about the camaraderie of a friend.” A pause. “Of a family member.”

Oh, she definitely doesn’t like where this is going.

“Grier has knowledge that I need, and so do you. Your clan, in fact. The ones who took down Oryx did so with the help of someone whose been looking for me for a long, long time.”

She can’t tell if it’s rage or dread that boils up inside of her.

“Avia,” Sagira says, softly, noticing the clench in the Hunters jaw. “We know what Toland put you through–”

“It wasn’t me he–” She spits, and then grunts. Taking a breath, she starts again. “He used Grier. He used all of us to try and preserve the Hive’s hierarchy. He fed Grier lies, he nearly drove a wedge between him and all of us in his twisted pursuit, some backwards attempt at learning more about the Hive. He didn’t care who he hurt.”

Sagira shares a look with her Guardian. Osiris pulls the scarf over his mouth down, but before he speaks Avia rambles.

“I mean, I guess I don’t – I’m not their keeper,” she laughs bitterly. “Grier would still happily tell you all about Oryx, the Raid, Toland. If you want to ask them go ahead, but just don’t expect–”

“I expect nothing from you,” Osiris says, soft, less imposing without the scarf. “You want to protect them. Yes?”

She nods, strong.

“I only desire to make sure that I stay hidden from that lunatic,” Osiris says, and Avia can’t help but crack a smile. “No knowledge, just information. I am asking for help – this is what that looks like, by the way.”

The smile stretches along her face and she mutters, cursing Warlocks in general.

“Does that mean…” She starts, her arms coming down to her hips. “That you could protect Grier from Toland, too?”

Sagira and Osiris share a look.

“I mean, what are you even planning on doing? You can jump through different realities and he’s trapped in the Hive wherever-the-hell, he’s no danger to you.”

“Overworld,” Ghost and Guardian correct her. Avia huffs.

“Whatever.”

“When the Traveler woke,” Osiris begins. “The Light spread to the far reaches of the galaxy. In doing so, the Vex began to understand it’s paracausal nature; our nature. The Hive are our foils, able to wield the Darkness as we do the Light; this Toland understood. But there is something Dark in the Vex that mirrors them, also.”

“You’re saying the Vex and the Hive are connected?”

Sagira whirls her shell. “Ooh, quick. For a Hunter.”

Avia saves the Ghost a scowl. “What does that mean for Toland?”

“We don’t want to wait to find out,” Sagira says. “We’ve seen some reports from Titan – Sloane seems quite adamant that the Hive are bringing something powerful to the planet.”

“They’ve tried summoning rituals, more than once,” Avia sighs. “A lot of Guardians have died on Titan to the Hive.”

“Make no mistake,” Osiris says, taking a step closer to her. “Toland is not dead, I very much doubt he can die. I dread to think what he might do, what he might facilitate should another God come to our system.”

Avia wonders once again what this man was like as part of the Vanguard; what he could have been as the Speaker. It’s enough to spark a thought, and she takes it before it disappears.

“You said he’s been looking for you.”

Osiris stills.

“How do you know?” Avia asks. When the Warlock goes to answer, she stops him; “Don’t tell me what a Guardian wants to hear. Tell me what a family member wants to hear.”

Sagira whistles quietly. Osiris shoots daggers at her, and Avia smiles slyly.

He releases a breath, long, drawn out.

“He calls me.”

Avia’s eyebrows furrow.

“He taunts me. Reaches out from the darkest edges of the Overworld and – laughs. That’s how I know that the Vex and the Hive are connected. And that’s why I want to know as much I can about his – corruption. I want it to stop.”

There’s a quiet that reaches over them. Like the nanosecond before waking up; when your eyes are open but your brain hasn’t followed, the blissful ignorance, the warmth on the skin. Then it shatters.

“Grier…” Avia starts, but the memories bite. Painful, dull, like the blade that’s been forgotten. So much has happened and yet they still cut, sharp. “Grier heard messages, on the Dreadnaught. When Oryx first came to the system. I don’t know how he did it, but he traced the messages back to Toland, got him a new corporeal form and. Well. The rest, you can probably imagine.”

Osiris scrunches his face up, looks away in thought.

“You can ask Grier more about it. And they didn’t stop, Grier still heard him from time to time. It’s probably similar. Carver tried to figure out how Toland was doing it, but he only got so far, I’m sure he’d love to talk to you about it too. Like I said; I’m not their keeper.”

“I never said you were,” Osiris says.

“Then why are you basically asking me for permission?” Avia replies, exasperated.

“Because,” Osiris smiles. “I didn’t want to take the opportunity to protect them out of your hands. You’re family, after all.”

“Also,” Sagira cuts in. “He didn’t want to have to face your wrath if he went straight to the Warlocks.”

“Sagira–”

“We’ve seen you take down Oryx, Fallen Devils, Ghaul. He’s really just scared of you.”

Avia laughs, pushes a stray lock of hair back into place.

“If you know so much about me, you should really stop inflating my ego.” She thins her lips, takes the hand cannon off of her hip again. “Just do me one favour, with Grier. Don’t baby him. He’s a lot smarter than he looks, he’s just – excitable. If he seems happy about the idea of Toland still being alive, trust me, he’s not, he’s probably latched onto something you said half a second ago that proves a theory of his. He’s–”

“Like any Warlock?” Sagira provides, shooting her own a look.

“Ha, yeah. Like any Warlock.”

“And you?” Osiris asks.

“Me?” Avia replies, checking the magazine of her gun.

“Toland. Did he–”

“All he did was make me want to figure out how to get into the Overworld and kill him for good.”

She snaps the mag back into place.

“I know what corruption feels like. And I know what it looks like when someone falls into the trap of doing anything for someone who thinks their own ends justify the means.”

Osiris nods his head, and pulls his scarf back over his mouth. Before he turns, Sagira makes a coughing sound. The Warlock looks at her inquisitively, she motions towards Avia, and the Warlock rolls his eyes.

“Thank you.” He says, and then Sagira dematerialises.

Avia chuckles. “You’re welcome, old man.”

[iridiumring92]

conceal my fears

read on Ao3

Rating: G

Relationships: Noctis Lucis Caelum/Ignis Scientia

Words: 707

title insp.

For @ignoctweek​: “Taking care of each other”

In Caem, Noctis catches Ignis in a deeply personal moment of weakness. He is surprised to learn what his advisor feels behind his normally calm facade.

The first time it happens, they’re in Caem. Noctis can’t find Ignis.

He checks with Dustin and Monica, keepers of the old house there, but they aren’t sure where his advisor has disappeared to. He asks Gladio and Prompto, who only look up from their phones long enough to say they haven’t seen him, either. Noctis walks to the lighthouse.

At first he thinks maybe he’ll just go up to the deck to spend a moment alone, or stand next to the fence that borders the lot and watch the sun set. But instead his ears pick up the distant sound of—he has to strain to identify it—someone crying? Come to think of it, he hasn’t seen Iris or Talcott recently. Maybe he’s intruding on one of them. After all, what they went through in Lestallum had both of them shaken, and there’s been little time to recover.

But when he tiptoes around the corner to make sure, it’s not Iris or Talcott. It’s Ignis.

He leans against the fence, forehead braced on his arms, and his shoulders shake. Noctis freezes for a moment at the sight. Ignis is the calmest of any of them, the last to show his emotions on any given matter. The fact that he’s here is …

And he hasn’t told Noctis, hasn’t even let on, even after all they’ve been through together.

Noctis takes a few steps forward. He doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to interrupt, but he knows he’ll feel guilty if he lets himself walk away.

“Ignis?” he says, quietly.

Ignis whirls around, gloved hands frantically wiping any traces of tears from his cheeks. But he doesn’t catch all of them, and besides, Noctis has seen them anyway. His eyes are red-rimmed, but he’s still wearing his glasses.

“Highness, I am so sorry.” With shaking hands, he adjusts his glasses. The motion does nothing to lessen the air of anxiety about him.

“Shhh. Stop. Don’t apologize,” Noctis tells him. He steps closer, cups Ignis’s face in his hands, kisses his jaw. “What’s going on? Are—are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Noctis kisses him again, for good measure. “I want the true version, Ignis.”

Tears slip past Ignis’s lashes again, and Noctis wipes at them with his thumbs, carefully. Ignis takes a deep, shuddering breath. This Ignis, the one with no façade before him, terrifies Noctis. He’s grown used to letting Ignis take care of him—not the other way around—and suddenly he feels lost and selfish. For how long have these miserable, desperate feelings been clawing away at his advisor?

“I fear I am about to lose someone very dear to me,” Ignis says, finally.

“You mean in Altissia.”

Ignis nods.

“I can’t tell you that it’s going to be okay,” Noctis begins slowly. “But I’ll sure as hell do everything in my power. You know I will.”

Ignis nods again, even as he rubs his hands over his face and draws another shaking breath. “I can’t help it,” he says softly. “The three of you can reassure me all you like, and I’ll still find something to worry about. It’s not a choice. I can’t help it.”

“Is that why you’re always awake in the middle of the night?”

Ignis closes his eyes. “Yes.”

“Why haven’t you told me?” Noctis whispers.

“I didn’t want to burden you with the knowledge. I—you have enough to think about at the moment.”

Noctis’s breath hisses out through his nose. He presses his lips to Ignis’s cheek. “Don’t think like that,” he says. “You’re important to me.” Another soft touch of his lips to Ignis’s skin. “I love you.” Despite his best efforts, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth pressed into a thin line, tears still slide down Ignis’s cheeks. Noctis tries to kiss them away. “Let me help.”

“Yes,” Ignis answers, his voice barely a whisper, pinched with pain.

“I’m serious,” Noctis says. “Wake me up next time. I won’t mind if I’m with you.”

“I’ll try.”

Noctis traces a thumb across his cheekbone. “Do you need a few minutes?”

Ignis nods, his face pressed against Noctis’s shoulder. For a long time, they stand together, each letting the other’s warmth in, until Ignis’s shaking stops.

[hmhteen]

HMH Teen Teaser: HOW TO MAKE A WISH by Ashley Herring Blake!

It’s finally here! HOW TO MAKE A WISH by Ashley Herring Blake publishes today, and it is the book you have been wishing for for years. (Pun 100% intended.) When Grace’s fun-loving but emotionally immature mom uproots Grace’s life (again), she winds up living in her mom’s boyfriends house, right across the hall from his son—her ex-boyfriend. And things did not end well between them. She’s prepared to spend her summer moping and planning her great escape to Manhattan to study music, when she meets Eva. And suddenly she doesn’t want to escape her life, but live it as fully as possible, with the girl she’s falling for. 

Now you can read an excerpt of this emotional, poignant novel about first love and loving by letting go, right below!

CHAPTER ONE

She waits until we’re driving over the bridge to tell me. This is a strategic move. Wait until your temperamental daughter is suspended over the Atlantic Ocean to drop the bomb, thereby decreasing the chance that she’ll fling open the car door and hurl herself over the edge.

       My mother is many things. Beautiful. Annoyingly affectionate after a few drinks and mean as a starving snake after several. Quick-witted and hilarious when her latest boyfriend isn’t turning her into some sycophantic sorority girl. But a fool?

       No.

       My mother is no fool.

       She swerves to pass a car that’s already going at least ten over the speed limit. The ocean, a dark sapphire blue, swings out of my vision and back in. I grip the handle above the window, shifting my gaze over to Mom to make sure her I forgot this silly thing again seat belt is securely fastened.

       “What did you say?” I ask. Because I must have misheard her. Surely, my subconscious anticipated returning home to some catastrophe after leaving Mom on her own for the past two weeks, and it conjured up something totally absurd to lessen the blow.

       “Grace, don’t make a big deal out of this. It’s just an address,” Mom says, and I bite back a bitter laugh. She loves that word. Just. Everything is just. It’s just one drink, Grace. A birthday is just a day, Grace. It’s just sex, Grace. My entire life is one gigantic just.

       Well, I’m just about to go ape shit if you’re serious, Mom.

       How’s that for a freaking just?

       She steers with her knee for a few terrifying seconds while she digs a cigarette out of her purse and sparks it up. She blows out a silver stream of smoke through the open window, and I watch her fingers. Long and elegant, her short nails perfectly manicured and glossed eggplant purple, like always. She used to press our fingers together, kissing the joined tips and making a silly wish on each one. I would measure my hand against hers, eagerly waiting for the day when mine was the same size. I thought that the older I got, the older she would get and the less I’d have to worry about her.

       “Pete’s place is really nice,” Mom says. “It’s so unique. Wait till you see it.”

       “Pete. Who the hell’s Pete?”

       She glances at me and frowns, flicking ash out the window as we exit the bridge and drive onto the road that leads into town. “I started seeing him before you left for Boston. I told you about him, right? I’m sure I .º.º.” She trails off, like not being able to finish a sentence automatically releases her from any obligations.

       “You’re serious, aren’t you?” I ask, struggling to keep my voice even.

       She laughs. “Of course, baby. This is a good thing. Our lease was up and that dickhead of a landlord wouldn’t renew it because he claimed I still owed him three months’ rent for that dump he called a beach house. And things with Pete were going so well. He’d just moved and needed a woman’s touch.” She giggles and snicks the cigarette butt out the window. “That’s what he said. A woman’s touch. Such a gentleman.”

       Oh Jesus. I recognize that tone, that girly giggle, that glassy look in her eyes. I can almost mouth the next words along with her, reciting the lines of a painfully familiar play. I’ve been off-book for this shit show for a long time.

       Cue Mom’s dreamy sigh.

       Three .º.º. two .º.º. one .º.º.

       “He might be the one, baby.”

       My fingers curl into fists on my bare legs, leaving red nail marks along my skin. When I left a couple weeks ago, I swear to hell Mom didn’t have a boyfriend. I would’ve remembered. I always remember, because half the time, I’m the one who reminds her of the asshole-of-the-month’s name. Okay, maybe that’s a stretch, but I really thought she’d run out of options.

       Cape Katherine—Cape Katie to locals—is a tiny spit of land jutting into the Atlantic with about three thousand residents, a quaint downtown with lots of local shops and restaurants, and an ancient lighthouse on the north end that’s still maintained by a real-life lighthouse keeper. We moved here when I was three, and in the fourteen years since, I’ve lost count of how many guys Mom has “dated.”

       And the whole lot of them has had the honor of being The One for about ten minutes.

       Mom turns onto Cape Katherine Road. The Atlantic rises up on our left, flanked by rocks and gravelly beach. Early afternoon sun spills coppery sparkles on its surface, and I take a few deep breaths. I’d like nothing better than to jump ship, streak down the beach, and throw myself under its waves, letting it roll over me. Let it have me for a few minutes, curling my body this way and that, transforming me into something free and weightless.

       But I can’t do that.

       For one, it’s cold as hell this early in the summer.

       And whatever knot my mother’s woven herself into with He-Might-Be-The-One-Pete, I’m the only one here to untangle it.

       “Okay,” I say, pushing my hair out of my face. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. In the twelve days since I’ve been in Boston, you moved everything we own into a new house I’ve never seen to live with some guy I’ve never met?”

       “Oh, for god’s sake. You make it sound like I’m dragging you into some disease-ridden jungle or something. I’m telling you, you will love Pete’s house.”

       I don’t really give two shits about Pete’s house.

       I’m more concerned about Pete.

       Mom flips on the radio while I try to decide if I want to vomit, scream, or cry. I think it’s some awful combination of all three.

       “Mom, can we please talk about—”

       “Oh, baby, hang on.” She turns up the volume on Cape Katie’s one and only radio show, hosted by Cape Katie’s one and only radio host, Bethany Butler. It’s on every morning and evening, and people call in and tell Bethany sob stories about their missing cat or how their coffee burned their taste buds off or something equally inane and irrelevant. Mom freaking loves it. She’s a total sucker for anything potentially tragic and unrelated to her own life.

       “You heard it here first, Cape Katians, so keep an eye out for Penny. She was last seen on East Beach .º.º.”

       “Who the hell is Penny?” I ask.

       “The Taylor family’s corgi!” Mom says, a hand pressed to her heart. “She got loose from Tamara while she was walking her on the beach, poor thing.”

       “.º.º. And remember, Penny is very skittish around men with red hair and—”

       I flip off the radio. “Seriously, Mom? A corgi?”

       “It’s sad, that’s all I’m saying. They’ve had her for a decade. She’s older than Tamara.”

       “Yeah, cry me an effing river,” I mutter, looking out the window, the familiar sights of my town flashing past me in a blue-and-gray blur. “So do we still live on the cape, or are you just swinging by our old place for one last haul?”

       “Of course we live here, baby. Do you really think I’d take you away from your school and all your friends right before your senior year?”

       I choke down a derisive laugh. I’m not sure which is funnier: her comment about all my friends or the fact that my brain can’t possibly conjure up half the crap in my life that comes from being Maggie Glasser’s daughter. I would never think any of it. But it all seems to happen anyway.

CHAPTER TWO

Ten minutes later, Mom pulls into a familiar gravel driveway. It’s one I’ve seen a million times before. As kids, my best friend, Luca, and I used to fly over this winding, rocky path on our bikes until the trees split and revealed a little sliver of adventure right there at the edge of the world.

       “Mom, what are we doing here?” But she just grins as she throws the car in park and opens her door. “Mom.”

       “Stop being such a stick in the mud, Gracie. Come on.”

       She climbs out and I follow, craning my neck up, up, up to the top of Cape Katie’s whitewashed lighthouse. A red-roofed bungalow sits below it, tucked into its side like a little secret.

       Mom comes to my side and slides her arm around my shoulder. The wind tangles her dirty blond hair.

       “This is going to be so great,” she says.

       “What is going to be so great?”

       She giggles and gives my arm one more squeeze before practically skipping up the drive toward the house. I gulp briny air, willing the crashing ocean to swallow me whole.

       I shoulder my duffle and follow her to a small detached garage next to the side entrance to the house. The yawning door reveals stacks of open cardboard boxes, some of the contents draped over the sides. Glass beads, scraps of metal, and a soldering iron from Mom’s handcrafted jewelry business are spread over a large plastic table. I spot a pair of my sleep shorts—black with neon pink skulls—puddled on the dirty cement floor, along with a few piano books.

       “I’ve done a bit, but we still have a lot of unpacking to do, baby,” Mom says, heaving a box overflowing with our decade-old towels into her arms. She chin-nods toward another box, but I fold my arms.

       “Are you for real? Mom, the last I heard, the lighthouse keeper was about a hundred and ten years old. Please tell me you’re not shacking up with Freddie Iker. His best friend is his parakeet.”

       She breaks into laughter, dropping the box in the process. Her tank top strap slides off her shoulder as she guffaws, really throwing all she’s got into it. My mother’s laugh has always been infectious, clear, and light. I hate to crack even a hint of a smile at the stuff my mother finds funny, but most of the time I can’t help it.

       “Good lord. I’m not that old.” She pulls her hair into a sloppy bun on top of her head and picks up the box again. “Or that desperate.”

       My smile morphs into a massive eye roll. Over the years, Mom’s traipsed guys as young as twenty-one and as old as fifty-four through our many homes, so I’m not sure how to even begin to respond to that one.

       “Freddie retired and Pete took over last week. He’s got an electrical background and has some really innovative ideas for the museum. He even wants to incorporate some of my jewelry in time for next tourist season. Isn’t that something?”

       “It sure is.” I grab my sleep shorts and music books from the floor and tuck them under my arm. Not sure which is better. An old geezer who can’t even get it up or some starry-eyed electrician with ideas. Ideas are dangerous around my mother.

       I shade my eyes from the sun hanging just over the tree line and take in my surroundings. My new home. An SUV with peeling black paint on the hood is parked on the other side of the garage. It looks vaguely familiar, but considering there are dozens of these kinds of cars on the cape, that’s not too surprising.

       “Pete’s at some budget meeting in town, but I think Julian’s home,” Mom says, heading toward the main house. She sticks a key in the side door, and the hinges squeak as she nudges it open with her hip. Cool air rushes out to meet me.

       “Julian?”

       “Pete’s son. He’s a nice boy. I think he’s about your age.”

       And with that, she disappears into the house, leaving me open-mouthed in the doorway. This just keeps getting better and better. What’s next? Sharing a room with Pete’s mother? Maybe a lunatic ex-wife is bunking in the lighthouse tower who screams like a banshee at night and has to be chained to her bed. Hell, at this point, I’m waiting for Mom to tell me Pete’s actually a polygamist and she’s been chosen as a sister wife. I comb through the roster of my high school for a Julian, but I’ve got nothing.

       I follow Mom into a shabby-chic-styled kitchen with chrome-rimmed white appliances, white cabinets, and navy blue curtains with red lobsters all over them framing the window above the sink. The living room is a mixture of our old leather recliner and scarred coffee table and a bunch of junk that looks like it just got dragged out of a frat house. There’s a plaid couch sporting a busted spring and duct tape, along with a TV the size of a car mounted over the fireplace. The only redeeming thing about the whole weird scene is the wall of windows revealing the sprawling blue ocean sparkling under the sun.

       We head down a narrow hallway. At the end, Mom opens a door next to the bathroom and gestures me inside with a flourish of her hand.

       “This is you. Isn’t it nice? So much natural light.”

       I enter the room, and it’s like walking into one of those dreams where everything seems familiar and foreign all at once. The space is square and small and white. My twin bed is shoved into the far corner under the wide window that’s also facing the ocean. White furniture, mine since I was four, is arranged smartly around the room. Mom has already spread my plum-colored sateen comforter that she found for half-price over the bed and filled my closet with my hanging clothes. The few books I own are stacked neatly on my little desk, and framed photos are displayed on the dresser. Sheer white curtains sway in the breeze from the open window. My eyes drift to the wall above my bed, taking in the framed print of a beautiful grand piano on the stage at Carnegie Hall, an empty auditorium lit by golden light and waiting to be filled with an audience, a pianist, music. Luca gave it to me for my birthday two years ago. Mom’s actually managed to hang it straight, no cracks in the glass or chips in the black wooden frame or anything.

       Aside from the stray things in the garage, Mom has worked on my room. My eyes burn a little, imagining her organizing my space before she even unpacked her own things.

       “So, Pete’s and my room is at the other end of the house, and Julian’s just across the hall,” she says. She peers anxiously at me, no doubt searching for signs of an impending explosion.

       And, oh, do I feel it brewing. Despite the homey feel, this is still a room I didn’t choose and never planned for. My throat feels tight from holding back all the eff-bombs I want to drop right now. Not that I usually rein them in too much in Mom’s presence, but she looks so damn hopeful. She’s trying really hard to make this a good thing.

       “Okay,” I say, as usual.

       “It’s going to be so lovely, baby,” she says. “I mean, it’s the lighthouse! I know you love this place and have always wanted to live right on the beach.”

       I nod, looking out my window at the rocks dotting the shore, angry waves spitting white foam all over their surfaces. She’s right. I used to love this lighthouse. It always seemed so magical when I was six or seven, but you can only hold your own mother’s hair back while she pukes up vodka so many times before you get a little disenchanted.

       “Oh!” Mom says so loudly, I startle. “With the move, I almost forgot.” She grins at me and digs into her back pocket, retrieving a folded rectangle of paper. She opens it up, her smile growing wider as she holds it out to me. “This is for you.”

       I take the wrinkled paper, almost scared to look at it. Because what now? As usual, when it comes to my mother, curiosity and hope nearly smother me. My eyes devour the writing.

       When the content registers, my head snaps up, gaze locking with Mom’s. “For real?”

       She nods. “For your audition. We can drive there pretty cheap and stay at that hostel, tour the Big Apple during the day, eat off the street carts. We need to plan ahead if we want show tickets. I’ve picked up a few shifts at Reinhardt’s Deli, and with some help from Pete, I’m saving a little. You need to do more than audition when you go, baby. You need to see where you’ll be living next year, and I want to be part of that. I’m so proud of you.”

       I stare back down at the paper, which tells me there are two beds at a New York City hostel reserved under Mom’s name for July thirtieth through August second. Underneath that is Mom’s chicken-scratch handwriting, listing all the things we’ve always talked about doing in the city. It’s got the usual stuff, like visiting the Empire State Building and Times Square, Central Park and Ellis Island. But it’s also got the Grace stuff—auditioning and touring Manhattan School of Music. Seeing Hedwig on Broadway. Finding a way to get a backstage tour of Carnegie Hall and standing on the stage, maybe even sliding my fingers over one of their piano’s keys.

       “Thank you,” I manage to whisper. Part of me knows she timed telling me about this trip to perfectly coincide with this move to the lighthouse, a little peace offering. The bigger part of me doesn’t care.

       “Of course, baby. It’ll be the perfect weekend. Just wait.” She pulls me into her arms, crushing the already-crinkled paper between us, and presses a kiss to my forehead.

       “Well, I know you’re tired from your bus ride,” she says, releasing me. “Get settled in. You can meet Julian later and .º.º.” Mom must see all the roiling emotions mirrored on my face, because she pats my shoulder and is out the door without finishing her sentence.

       I drop my stuff and sink onto the bed, finally overwhelmed. To clear my head, I close my eyes and mentally go through the beginning of Schumann’s Fantasie in C major, Opus 17. The piece plagued me at the piano workshop I just completed in Boston, the complicated, rapid fingering and the ethereal, dreamlike quality of a first movement a pleasing sort of torture. The music is pretty kickass, all chaotic and angsty. And it kicked my ass, which I have to appreciate.

       Now I play it on my bed. I imagine myself on an auditorium stage or in a practice room at some college. Manhattan School of Music. Indiana University. Belmont in Nashville. Though Manhattan is my white whale, my dream, and the thought of going far away and staying in dorms that I can actually live in for longer than three months makes me giddy, it also freaks me the hell out. I can’t imagine actually moving away. Leaving Mom alone to flit from one house to the next, one guy to the next, one skipped meal to the next bottle of beer.

       My fingers fly over the wrinkled comforter, the music alive and real in my mind. Nerves coil in my stomach—but whether from auditioning and laying my whole future on the piano keys in front of a few judges or leaving Mom, I’m not sure. Either way, I keep pressing into the soft cotton until my left hand collides with a box. My eyes flick open and absorb the room again.

       My room.

       I unzip my duffle and dump its contents onto the bed, sorting through dirty clothes and the ones clean enough to wear again, even though they smell like the inside of my bag. I rearrange a few things around the room, moving my composition paper from desk to my nightstand—when I can’t sleep, I make up dumb little songs in bed—and find a picture of Luca and me that Mom had tossed on a shelf in the closet and place it on my dresser. Luca looks predictably happy, grinning through his curly mop of hair with his arm slung around my shoulder at the beach last summer.

       Halfheartedly, I order my little universe. No matter how many times I tell myself it doesn’t matter—that I’ll have to pack it all up in a matter of months anyway—I can’t resist trying to make a place my own. This lighthouse that I used to love and now suddenly hate is no exception.

       I grab my toiletry bag and venture into the hallway to check out the bathroom. It’s clean, a claw-footed tub with one of those wrap-around shower curtains sits against the wall under a frosted-paned window. The tiled sink is cobalt blue, and an antique-looking light fixture sends an amber glow through the room. It smells like wet towel mixed in with some crisp, boyish scent. Aftershave, maybe. A navy blue toothbrush sits in a holder by the sink. I throw mine into an empty drawer. Call me unreasonable, but sharing toothbrush space with a guy I’ve never met just seems weird.

       I unpack my face wash and deodorant and then stuff my empty bag under the vanity before flicking off the light. As I enter the hallway, the door to my left swings open and my eyes dart over.

       I swallow a few colorful words and press my back against the wall.

       He’s tall. I mean, of course, I knew he was, but he looks gigantic in the tiny hallway. Intentionally messy light brown hair. Hair I used to yank to get his lips back on mine whenever he started sucking on my neck too hard.

       “Oh my god,” I choke out. “What are you .º.º. How did you .º.º. Why are you .º.º. ?” I swallow, trying to get my breath back as his mouth—a mouth I know way too damn well—bends into a smirk. It pisses me off to no end.

       “What the hell are you doing here?” I finally spit out.

       Jay Lanier pops his hands up on the door frame and leans toward me. Leather cuffs circle each wrist, and ropy muscles in his forearms ripple with tension. His smirk morphs into something so self-indulgent that I wish I had long fingernails so I could claw it right off his face. His gaze trails up my body, pausing at every possible spot that I never planned on letting Jay Lanier glimpse ever again, even through a tank top and shorts. I glare at him, but my hands are trembling and my stomach heaves, my mouth watery.

       He laughs softly—demonically, if you ask me—and leans closer.

       “Did I ever tell you that Jay is my nickname?”

       My mouth drops open.

       He smiles, a maddeningly slow spread of his mouth like the fucking Grinch. “No. I don’t think I did.”

       I try to conjure some insult, anything to put me on equal ground here, but only incoherent combinations of four-letter words come to mind.

       “Welcome home, Grace,” he says.

       And then he slams the door in my face.

We are so excited for you to read HOW TO MAKE A WISH! If you liked this excerpt, click the links below to purchase the full book.

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[ecotone99]

My Dad took a job as a lighthouse keeper, the caretaker left a list of rules.

The street lights had become few and far between, every passing burst of light illuminating the interior of our 1997 Toyota Camry driving us onward to our destination. My father liked to drive in silence, almost trancelike, his personal meditation only broken by the occasional cigarette. I occupied the passenger seat and my silence with the company of my cellphone. The relationship with my father was largely like this the past two months, after losing my mother to breast cancer. Neither of us able to share our grief with the other, it was left to fester. Maybe that was one of the reasons dad decided to quit his job at the machine factory and uproot me in the middle of my junior year of high school. Whatever his reasons for relocating us to Maine and taking on a roll as a lighthouse keeper, I was sure it wouldn't heal our broken family.

I got my first glimpse of the lighthouse on the horizon from behind the dusty glare of the windshield. I guessed it was close to 70 feet tall, and just as old, if not older. The outside was solid stone and mortar, no frills or decoration. The top came to an equally unimpressive and plain crown shape. The lighthouse was situated on a jutting peninsula maybe a half mile wide and two miles long, ending in 50 foot cliff face on the ocean. Our new home.

I think my dad saw the look of apprehension on my face.

"Jake, I know this is a big change from the city, and lord knows we have both been through enough recently. I know how hard this is moving and leaving all your friends behind. But I think this will be good for us, a chance to start new and make new opportunities" he said as he exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"No, I understand dad, whatever you think is best" I replied. I didn't want to upset him even though I felt as lonely as the lighthouse looked.

We returned to our normal silence over the next thirty minutes as we made our way though our new town, "Cape Heights". My mood continued to sink during our trip through town. "Cape Heights" offered little in the way of entertainment or shopping. The town seemed to have barely made it into the 21st century.

Dad lit another cigarette as we finally pulled into the small gravel patch at the light house that acted as a parking lot. We parked next to an old Chevy box truck that seemed to be more rust than truck. As we exited the car we were greeted by the caretaker,a tall graying man leaving the lighthouse.

"Good morning folks, you must be Paul. "

My dad shook his hand and flicked his cigarette out.

"Yes sir, I'd like to introduce my son Jake."

"Nice to meet you sir" I said as I shook his hand.

"Call me Sam" was all he said.

I guessed Sam had to be in early sixties. He was close to six feet tall with shaggy graying brown hair, a thick mustache and eyes like stormy seas. He was wearing a faded brown jacket and faded blue jeans. On first impression, he looked like a man raised on the seas.

Sam invited us into the lighthouse for a tour and to explain the responsibilities of dads new job. The inside of the lighthouse was surprisingly modern with an open floor plan and three big bay windows that faced the water from the ground floor. The kitchen was retrofitted with new appliances and granite countertops and a landline phone. There was a fully stocked pantry as well as food cellar full to bursting. The dining room had a solid oak table, china cabinet and even a mini chandelier. The living room had a 50 inch TV and a comfortable leather couch to watch it from. I would even be happy with the bedroom once I hung up some posters. I began to think maybe living here wouldn't be so bad after all.

After showing us the basic living quarters Sam took us to the top of the lighthouse.

"You get used to walking the steps after a while" he commented, "doesn't ever get easier but it gets familiar. I've walked these stairs plenty of times over the last twenty years as caretaker, know each of em by heart. "

As we continued upward Sam told us the history of the lighthouse.

"I suppose I'll start with the history of 'Cape Heights'. The land the town is on originally was settled by Native Americans known as the Red Paint People. Those original people claimed this land was sacred and the waters off the coast as well, claimed there was spirits in the water and other things as well, some old deep magic. They lost this land to the French sometime in the 1600's. The French claimed they fought like devils, all covered in red war paint, fighting with weapons made of bone from other conquered native tribes. They eventually lost though, bone don't hold up to steel weapons. The land then went back and forth between the English and French till the English kicked em out for good and made it a colony. The lighthouse was erected just after the Revolutionary War when more ships started coming from farther up north taking fish and lumber down south. After a number of trading ships disappeared of the surrounding coast here the new Americans decided to build this lighthouse. The light has weathered many a storm since then and never has her light extinguish, cept for once. Every caretaker and keeper has been charged with that duty, to always keep the light shining."

Once we reached the top Sam explained the light to dad. The light now is all electrical, the housing consisting of six huge bulbs that rotated on a giant plate enclosed by lenses on all sides. Sam e plained how it all worked, I grew bored quickly only listening long enough to gather there was a breaker box downstairs in the kitchen where the power switch was, a switch for a foghorn and that the most maintenance required by us would be changing out a bulb every once in a while or flipping a breaker.

I daydreamed while staring at the ocean until my dad's calls for me to join them interrupted my thoughts. We all headed back down stairs in the kitchen.

"Now that I've given ya a proper tour and explained the basics of how the light works you should be good to go. But I would be remiss to not leave you fellas with two more things" Sam said " I told ya the light has never gone out cept for once. Even if you see no ships you must keep that light going. That light is the difference between life and death, and you are the keeper of that light. The protector of life. That light must never run out, the town dependson it. If it does, darkness comes and hell with it. "

His last statement filled me with unease and I could tell it made dad uneasy as well.

"Secondly" Sam continued, "As I've explained the maintence is easy enough, you know where replacement bulbs and parts are, as well as the food stocks in the cellar. I've left my number on the fridge as well as a list of rules you must follow. This list is vital in keepin the lighthouse operatin as it should, and keepin y'all both safe. Do not deviate from this list and follow all instructions to the letter."

With that Sam left us and assured us he would be back in a week to check on us and our supplies.

" What was all that about darkness and hell coming with it and the town depending on the light?" I asked dad.

"I don't know" he said as he drew a cigarette from his pack, "but he seemed pretty serious about it, must have caused a ship wreck when the light went out before, small towns remember things like that, accidents here affect more people and aren't as easily forgotten like in the city."

"Yeah, I guess so." after Sam's cryptic warnings I was curious to see what rules he left.

Dad grabbed the paper from the magnet on the fridge and we read together.

YOU MUST KEEP THE LIGHT LIT FROM DUSK UNTIL DAWN AT ALL COSTS.

AT DUSK YOU MUST LOCK ALL DOORS AND WINDOWS. DO NOT LEAVE THE LIGHTHOUSE UNTIL DAWN.

YOU MAY HERE CRIES FOR HELP COMING FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE CLIFF. IGNORE THEM DO NOT RESPOND.

IF YOU SEE A SHIP WITH 3 RED SAILS ON THE HORIZON AT DUSK SOUND THE FOGHORN 3 TIMES.

ALWAYS MAKE YOUR BED WITHIN 5 MINUTES OF WAKING UP IN THE MORNING.

DO NOT MAKE A PHONE CALL OR ANSWER THE PHONE AFTER 8 PM FOR ANY REASON.

Dad and I stared at each other after we both finished reading the list. Neither of us sure what to say.

"This can't be serious" I said, "Most of these rules make no sense, what's gonna happen if I don't make my bed? What if there is an emergency at night and i can't call 911?"

"There has to be some reason Sam left us these rules, afterall he has been caretaker for 20 years. Let's just do our best to follow them. Ok son? I want us to start fresh out here. Maybe we can both find some peace here, lord knows we both need it. I love you Jake, can you try for me?"

I smiled gently at my dad and agreed to give it my best effort. I still had my doubts, and Sam's list of rules on top of his earlier warnings had made me curious. I had the feeling there was more to this lighthouse then the caretaker let on, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it.

submitted by /u/drjones5991 [link] [comments] source https://www.reddit.com/r/shortscarystories/comments/dnbk05/my_dad_took_a_job_as_a_lighthouse_keeper_the/ via Blogger https://ift.tt/2qHZ1LP

[lodelss]

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”

“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.

A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in.

Last June, NOAA released a report on high-tide flooding in the United States over the course of 2017. Atlantic City and Boston were tied for second place with 22 days of flooding from high tide alone. The only metro area more affected, with 23 days of flooding, was Sabine Pass, which sits on the Gulf Coast, where Texas meets Louisiana. “Sea level rise is very spatially dependent,” said Maya Buchanan. Buchanan is the resident expert on sea level rise at Climate Central, a research center based in Princeton, New Jersey. “So even New Jersey and New York are expected to have a different amount [of flooding] because there’s a lot of different factors. Some of them are global, some are regional, and some are very, very local.” New York is built on bedrock — metamorphic rock specifically, once incredibly hard and hot; that’s why so few dinosaur fossils have been found in the city. New Jersey’s soil is considerably more porous. “Atlantic City in particular,” said Buchanan, “but even New Jersey writ large, are expected to experience more sea level rise than the global mean.”

*

The decade since the recession has been rough for everyone except the wealthiest, but here the recession was a disaster. According to the South Jersey Economic Review, more than 25,000 jobs were lost in the past decade and the city’s real GDP declined by 21.4 percent between 2006 and 2015, the largest dip of any metro area in the country. Five casinos shut down in two years, and the day after the 2016 election the city was taken over by the state in order to avoid default. Oliver Cooke, an economics professor at nearby Stockton University, has referred to the past 10 years as Atlantic City’s “lost decade.”

The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab.

For the first time in a while things are looking up. Last year violent crime and property crime were down 36 percent since 2017 according to the Atlantic City Police Department, and the boardwalk was markedly busier this past summer. The only place Trump’s name still appears in the city is on an old mural in the bus station, and the shuttered Trump Taj Mahal reopened as a Hard Rock Café in June. Come hell or high water, it is always sort of 2005 in South Jersey (a lot of Simple Plan on the radio) and the Hard Rock is designed to capitalize on that. In place of the Taj Mahal’s famous chandelier is a giant guitar, and what was once a jewelry store has been reborn as a shrine to Boomers called the “Rock Vault.” A Kramer Pacer, painted in the style of acid-wash jeans, hangs on the wall. bon jovi, it says. new jersey. As far as I could tell the only holdover from the Trump Taj was a sandwich chain called White House Subs, although it’s unclear whether or not that’s a nod to the president. When I walked by, a man was standing at the counter wearing a Rob Zombie T-shirt that read, 100% corpse fucking flesh eating zombie loving god damn son of a bitch.

It’s a start, but the reality is that people don’t gamble the way they used to. According to a YouGov poll from May 2018, 47 percent of millennials find casinos “depressing,” and next door to the Hard Rock, where the former Revel has reopened as the Ocean Resort, business was much quieter. The Ocean is visually striking — an enormous mass of curved glass — but it doesn’t seem to have a real identity besides ‘playing a lot of Frank Sinatra’ and several of the pushcart operators that work on the boardwalk told me they’d placed bets on how long it will last. As I was walking past, a woman asked a couple if it was as beautiful inside as it is from the boardwalk.

“Not really,” they said.

*

A little more than three years ago, as hope for a revival began to ebb, an architecture firm called Perkins+Will proposed a plan. Within the range of plans for Atlantic City, this one was unique — it was responsible. Atlantic City is four square miles, about the size of some college campuses. The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab. The idea was to take the city’s vulnerability to the sea and turn it into an asset. Atlantic City would become a global hub for climate science, casinos gradually replaced with laboratories, the convention center reinvented as a training ground for civic leaders. “We weren’t talking about abandoning Atlantic City,” said David Green, one of the primary architects behind the project. “We were talking about repurposing it and bringing in academic and research partners to kind of rehabilitate the area as a kind of research hub.” Scientists would study ecological changes, sociological changes, and the way different kinds of buildings respond to sea level rise. One of the central parts of the plan was something Green called The Line, which would be a physical reminder of the changing coast and a way to make clear to the public what was happening. “You’re testing not just the physical community, but social community elements,” said Green. It was a good idea, but maybe a couple years ahead of its time. Climate change hadn’t settled into the national consciousness yet, and in the confusion of casino closings and the 2016 election Green’s plan failed to gain traction with local politicians and eventually died off.

*

In the early 1950s, two writers for the New York Daily Mirror named Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published a book of all-American gossip (communists! grift!) called U.S.A. Confidential. New Jersey did not fare well. “There is no such place as New Jersey,” they wrote. “It is a breeding bed, playground and refuse dump for New York and Philadelphia and a refuge for their criminals. It is a highway between the two great cities. Few who use it ever stop off or look behind its billboards. If they did, they’d see plenty of ugliness.”

There is no such place as New Jersey. Pretty harsh! But Atlantic City leaned into it, learned to monetize it. The referendum to bring in casinos, paradigmatic non-places, was passed in 1976, but their success was contingent upon maintaining a duopoly between Atlantic City and Vegas. Once gambling was legalized in New York, Connecticut, and (especially) Pennsylvania, things started to decline. “What happened was that we lost the convenience gambler,” said Heneghan, “and that was a big chunk of the market. The regulators in Pennsylvania, I think very, very wisely on their part, chose sites close to the [Delaware] river to kind of create a barrier. With apologies to Winston Churchill, there was a casino curtain drawn around New Jersey.”

The city has been struggling to develop a coherent comeback plan for years. Last June, Philly Mag ran a feature on the arrival of John Longacre — a developer and bar owner who helped gentrify South Philly and is looking to open a bar in Atlantic City. Others are looking to esports — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is in the process of finalizing a deal to install 6,000 square feet of secure servers in the city, and souvenir shops prominently display shirts that read do you even fortnite bro? Because most of the esports audience is underage, it won’t exactly bring an economic boom, though. The New York Times threw its money on sports betting, which was legalized in New Jersey in June and could help bring in revenue during the city’s lean winter months. None of these reports mention climate change.

You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out. Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom.

Heneghan, like everyone else I spoke to, doubts that sports betting will be enough to fix the city’s economic problems. At the time we spoke, the only nearby states in which it was legal were Jersey and Delaware. But Rhode Island legalized it in October, Pennsylvania in November, and New York and Connecticut are expected to follow suit in 2019. Essentially, it’s the casino curtain all over again. “I think sports betting will generate some additional revenue,” said Heneghan,“but it’s not the panacea, no.” When I asked him what the city wants to be, he had trouble answering. We were standing at the top of the lighthouse now, overlooking the Absecon Inlet — once called Graveyard Inlet because of the frequency of shipwrecks — and the small section of the boardwalk that was destroyed in Sandy. “I remember in January of ’76 I went to a meeting with the local press corps and one of the city commissioners was the speaker,” Heneghan said. “He was an older guy who had been a member of the governor’s cabinet and had been state commissioner of banking. This was before casinos and he was kind of bemoaning how quiet things were in Atlantic City. He said when he was a kid, Atlantic City was a place to go to with somebody you shouldn’t be seen with. Do things you couldn’t do at home.” The bars, Heneghan reminded me, never close here.

*

Last spring, Climate Central published a report on the injustice inherent to Atlantic City’s floods, focusing on a single block called Arizona Avenue. The casinos are protected by large dunes and the Army Corps recently finished building a sea wall with recovery funds from Sandy. Along the back bay though, residents largely rely on aging, undersized bulkheads, and where there are vacant lots there’s often no barrier at all. Things have not improved much over the past year.

“They’re always saying ‘We’re trying to work on it, the sewer systems, blah blah blah,’ but honestly I mean, come on. How do you not make a contingency plan knowing that the bay is right there, the ocean is right here,” said Raymond Mendoza. Mendoza works as a porter and a barback at the Borgata and lives about a block and a half from the back bay. When I met him he was walking a very fat, amiable beagle named Roy. “I’m always worried. When it’s really bad I just watch the tide, ’cause once I see that,” he said, pointing to the water, “come this way, I’m taking my car and driving it right into the casino [parking garage].”

‘Nuisance flooding’ is the technical term for this, but it doesn’t feel adequate. It only takes six inches of fast moving water to topple a grown man. Two feet can sweep a car out to sea. As the water rises so will structural damage. Black mold will spread, kids and the elderly will get sick, and the already debt-ridden National Flood Insurance will edge further toward collapse. “You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out,” said Neto Alavez. Alavez moved up here from Maryland to work for his uncle’s painting company. “Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom. All they have to say is ‘just go somewhere else.’ They protect all them places over [by the boardwalk]. You know what I’m talking about, the fancy stuff.”

Everyone I met spoke of Hurricane Sandy as the high-water mark for catastrophic flooding, but Sandy — despite the damage it caused — didn’t hit Atlantic City directly, and by the time it made landfall in the Northeast it was only a Category 2 hurricane. There is a pervasive Tale of Two Cities narrative that hangs around Atlantic City — the obscene wealth that circulates within the casinos butting up against dilapidated row houses outside — but the reality is rich people don’t really live in Atlantic City, they just come for conventions. It’s a city of waitresses and bartenders, and many of the residents are elderly. Others moved here after being driven out of Philadelphia and New York by rising rents. Some of them do not have anywhere inland to which they can evacuate. A stronger hurricane, a more direct hit, and people will lose everything.

“A lot of people see sea level rise as just an inundation risk, right? Or this slow problem that’s encroaching,” said Buchanan. “But any flood is basically the summation of sea level and tides and storm surge. Anything that’s adding to that platform just makes a flood that much more likely and it can really increase the frequency and severity of floods.” Last year, scientists at Rice University and Texas A&M released a paper on fossilized coral reefs that showed sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis.

Things could get bad here very fast, and all of the revival plans are short-term fixes. We’ve already locked in a certain amount of sea level rise at this point, so for Atlantic City it’s a question of when, not if. According to Climate Central’s risk map, even if we cut carbon emissions to zero yesterday the city would still flood by 2100. It’s likely to happen much sooner, but in that scenario at least, the Borgata is one of the last places above the waterline. Mendoza has been parking his car in the right place.

*

The news was bad this past year. In April, a lawyer named David Buckel lit himself on fire in Prospect Park to protest the world’s continuing use of fossil fuels. In early October, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that we only have until 2040 to drastically alter the world’s economy in order to prevent an effectively uninhabitable planet. In late October, the World Wildlife Foundation released a report estimating that humanity had managed to destroy 60 percent of wildlife since 1970. In November, the deadliest wildfires in a century swept across California. This January, Science released a report that showed oceans were warming 40 percent faster than previously believed. In Atlantic City, a man by the name of David Dichter began petitioning lawmakers to take action. Dichter grew up in Atlantic City and served overseas as a Marine Corps officer and a foreign service officer before retiring. “I think I came back,” he said, “with a pretty good understanding of how screwed up the environment really was.”

Sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis … Things could get bad here very fast.

Dichter’s plan was more modest than David Green’s, but the foundational idea was the same: Atlantic City is really going down this time, the question is whether it can figure out a way to make the transition less painful. Dichter focused on tourism — if Atlantic City could position itself as the place for climate conferences, maybe that would lead to bigger things. At the very least it was a way to bring in revenue.

A resolution to turn Atlantic City into a hub for climate science and conventions was passed through the Atlantic City Council, the county freeholders association, and the state legislature, but it’s unclear how committed lawmakers are to specifics just yet. The city was still under state control and about $450 million in debt as of June 2018. The first climate conference took place the weekend of January 25th at the Claridge Hotel, and Dichter has been speaking with David Green about the way things might progress, but it’s been slow going so far. Atlantic City is, for lack of a better term, behaving like Atlantic City. In December, the mayor, Frank Gilliam, was arrested after getting into a fight outside of a casino. (Asked by a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer if he was still mayor, Gilliam replied, “Today.”) A few weeks later he was being investigated by the FBI.

What seems to be lacking at this point is grassroots community involvement. “[The city] should invite the people that organized themselves in Staten Island [after Hurricane Sandy] for the buyout,” said Klaus Jacob. Jacob is a geophysicist and Columbia University’s disaster risk and climate expert. He became somewhat famous for essentially predicting the effects of Hurricane Sandy on New York’s transit system a year before it hit. “It came from the community, it didn’t come from the government. Invite one of those main macho people that organized that neighborhood for a buyout and get a little primer from them. I’m a geophysicist, so what am I talking about here? Not my field of expertise. I just have seen it happening over the last ten, twenty years — where things are moving and where they don’t move … Wherever you look, unless there is a buy-in from neighborhood families — forget it.”

*

Climate change can’t be solved, or really even mitigated, by tourism, and there’s no shortage of people who stand to profit from future disasters. But South Jersey is much poorer than the rest of the state and as the water rises and fire spreads across the West, Dichter and Green’s respective plans might be a way for Atlantic City residents to avoid being lost in the shuffle. Whether or not the city ultimately ends up donating its body to science, there is something oddly endearing about this last push for revenue. There is no such place as New Jersey, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote 70 years ago. Turns out, they weren’t all wrong! The state will be significantly smaller in a hundred years. But if this plan moves forward, Atlantic City — a place that, for all its faults, has always tried to make the best of a bad situation — may at least be able to go out in something like style.

I reported most of this story over the summer, and every time I came back to New York I had to walk through Times Square to get to my subway stop. Mel Chin’s Wake and Unmoored had just opened — an exhibition put on by No Longer Empty and the Queens Museum. Wake was a 60-foot wooden sculpture meant to mirror a sunken ship or a whale’s ribcage, and Unmoored added context. Chin had paired with Microsoft to create a VR rendering of what Manhattan might someday look like should climate change go unchecked. When you put on the VR glasses boats began to float above you, crowding the airspace until they suddenly disappeared in a rush of plankton. It was a little too obvious and the boats looked like something out of Minecraft, but it was effective in spite of itself. The water is already above our heads, we just can’t see it yet.

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller based in Philadelphia. She’s written for The Awl, The Outline, Medium, and others. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Factchecker: Ethan Chiel

Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

[lodelss]

Atlantic City Is Really Going Down This Time

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than eight feet you hit water. A couple blocks away from the beach, the Absecon Lighthouse is built on a submerged wooden foundation for exactly that reason — so long as you keep wood wet and away from oxygen, it won’t rot. “We haven’t tipped yet,” said Buddy Grover, the 91-year-old lighthouse keeper, “but it does sway in the wind sometimes.”

“The problem with barrier islands is that, sort of by definition, they move,” said Dan Heneghan. Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. He retired this past May. He’s a big, friendly guy with a mustache like a push broom and a habit of lowering his voice and pausing near the end of his sentences, as if he’s telling you a ghost story. (“Atlantic City was, in mob parlance … a wide open city. No one family … controlled it.”) We were standing at the base of the lighthouse, which he clearly adores. He’s climbed it 71 times this year. “I don’t volunteer here, I just climb the steps,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting than spending time on a Stairmaster.” The lighthouse was designed by George Meade, a Civil War general most famous for defeating Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. It opened in 1857 but within 20 years the beach had eroded to such an extent that the water was only 75 feet away from the base. Jetties were added until the beach was built back out, but a large iron anchor sits at the old waterline, either as a reminder or a threat.

A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. My first night there I met a woman named Juliana Lykins who told me about Tucker’s Island — New Jersey’s first seaside resort, which had been slowly overtaken by the sea until it disappeared completely. This was a month before the election. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape had just broken, it was pouring rain, the city was on the verge of defaulting on its debts, and 2,000 casino workers were about to lose their jobs. At the time — my clothes soaking wet, falling asleep in a Super 8 to the sound of Scottie Nell Hughes on CNN — it was hard to understand what Lykins was saying as anything other than a metaphor for the country. I missed the larger menace and focused on the immediate. Trump was elected obviously, but Tucker’s Island wasn’t a figurative threat; it was a very straightforward story about what happens to coastal communities when the water moves in.

Last June, NOAA released a report on high-tide flooding in the United States over the course of 2017. Atlantic City and Boston were tied for second place with 22 days of flooding from high tide alone. The only metro area more affected, with 23 days of flooding, was Sabine Pass, which sits on the Gulf Coast, where Texas meets Louisiana. “Sea level rise is very spatially dependent,” said Maya Buchanan. Buchanan is the resident expert on sea level rise at Climate Central, a research center based in Princeton, New Jersey. “So even New Jersey and New York are expected to have a different amount [of flooding] because there’s a lot of different factors. Some of them are global, some are regional, and some are very, very local.” New York is built on bedrock — metamorphic rock specifically, once incredibly hard and hot; that’s why so few dinosaur fossils have been found in the city. New Jersey’s soil is considerably more porous. “Atlantic City in particular,” said Buchanan, “but even New Jersey writ large, are expected to experience more sea level rise than the global mean.”

*

The decade since the recession has been rough for everyone except the wealthiest, but here the recession was a disaster. According to the South Jersey Economic Review, more than 25,000 jobs were lost in the past decade and the city’s real GDP declined by 21.4 percent between 2006 and 2015, the largest dip of any metro area in the country. Five casinos shut down in two years, and the day after the 2016 election the city was taken over by the state in order to avoid default. Oliver Cooke, an economics professor at nearby Stockton University, has referred to the past 10 years as Atlantic City’s “lost decade.”

The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab.

For the first time in a while things are looking up. Last year violent crime and property crime were down 36 percent since 2017 according to the Atlantic City Police Department, and the boardwalk was markedly busier this past summer. The only place Trump’s name still appears in the city is on an old mural in the bus station, and the shuttered Trump Taj Mahal reopened as a Hard Rock Café in June. Come hell or high water, it is always sort of 2005 in South Jersey (a lot of Simple Plan on the radio) and the Hard Rock is designed to capitalize on that. In place of the Taj Mahal’s famous chandelier is a giant guitar, and what was once a jewelry store has been reborn as a shrine to Boomers called the “Rock Vault.” A Kramer Pacer, painted in the style of acid-wash jeans, hangs on the wall. bon jovi, it says. new jersey. As far as I could tell the only holdover from the Trump Taj was a sandwich chain called White House Subs, although it’s unclear whether or not that’s a nod to the president. When I walked by, a man was standing at the counter wearing a Rob Zombie T-shirt that read, 100% corpse fucking flesh eating zombie loving god damn son of a bitch.

It’s a start, but the reality is that people don’t gamble the way they used to. According to a YouGov poll from May 2018, 47 percent of millennials find casinos “depressing,” and next door to the Hard Rock, where the former Revel has reopened as the Ocean Resort, business was much quieter. The Ocean is visually striking — an enormous mass of curved glass — but it doesn’t seem to have a real identity besides ‘playing a lot of Frank Sinatra’ and several of the pushcart operators that work on the boardwalk told me they’d placed bets on how long it will last. As I was walking past, a woman asked a couple if it was as beautiful inside as it is from the boardwalk.

“Not really,” they said.

*

A little more than three years ago, as hope for a revival began to ebb, an architecture firm called Perkins+Will proposed a plan. Within the range of plans for Atlantic City, this one was unique — it was responsible. Atlantic City is four square miles, about the size of some college campuses. The shuttered casinos — windowless basements filled with slot machines — were perfect for a lab. The idea was to take the city’s vulnerability to the sea and turn it into an asset. Atlantic City would become a global hub for climate science, casinos gradually replaced with laboratories, the convention center reinvented as a training ground for civic leaders. “We weren’t talking about abandoning Atlantic City,” said David Green, one of the primary architects behind the project. “We were talking about repurposing it and bringing in academic and research partners to kind of rehabilitate the area as a kind of research hub.” Scientists would study ecological changes, sociological changes, and the way different kinds of buildings respond to sea level rise. One of the central parts of the plan was something Green called The Line, which would be a physical reminder of the changing coast and a way to make clear to the public what was happening. “You’re testing not just the physical community, but social community elements,” said Green. It was a good idea, but maybe a couple years ahead of its time. Climate change hadn’t settled into the national consciousness yet, and in the confusion of casino closings and the 2016 election Green’s plan failed to gain traction with local politicians and eventually died off.

*

In the early 1950s, two writers for the New York Daily Mirror named Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published a book of all-American gossip (communists! grift!) called U.S.A. Confidential. New Jersey did not fare well. “There is no such place as New Jersey,” they wrote. “It is a breeding bed, playground and refuse dump for New York and Philadelphia and a refuge for their criminals. It is a highway between the two great cities. Few who use it ever stop off or look behind its billboards. If they did, they’d see plenty of ugliness.”

There is no such place as New Jersey. Pretty harsh! But Atlantic City leaned into it, learned to monetize it. The referendum to bring in casinos, paradigmatic non-places, was passed in 1976, but their success was contingent upon maintaining a duopoly between Atlantic City and Vegas. Once gambling was legalized in New York, Connecticut, and (especially) Pennsylvania, things started to decline. “What happened was that we lost the convenience gambler,” said Heneghan, “and that was a big chunk of the market. The regulators in Pennsylvania, I think very, very wisely on their part, chose sites close to the [Delaware] river to kind of create a barrier. With apologies to Winston Churchill, there was a casino curtain drawn around New Jersey.”

The city has been struggling to develop a coherent comeback plan for years. Last June, Philly Mag ran a feature on the arrival of John Longacre — a developer and bar owner who helped gentrify South Philly and is looking to open a bar in Atlantic City. Others are looking to esports — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is in the process of finalizing a deal to install 6,000 square feet of secure servers in the city, and souvenir shops prominently display shirts that read do you even fortnite bro? Because most of the esports audience is underage, it won’t exactly bring an economic boom, though. The New York Times threw its money on sports betting, which was legalized in New Jersey in June and could help bring in revenue during the city’s lean winter months. None of these reports mention climate change.

You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out. Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom.

Heneghan, like everyone else I spoke to, doubts that sports betting will be enough to fix the city’s economic problems. At the time we spoke, the only nearby states in which it was legal were Jersey and Delaware. But Rhode Island legalized it in October, Pennsylvania in November, and New York and Connecticut are expected to follow suit in 2019. Essentially, it’s the casino curtain all over again. “I think sports betting will generate some additional revenue,” said Heneghan,“but it’s not the panacea, no.” When I asked him what the city wants to be, he had trouble answering. We were standing at the top of the lighthouse now, overlooking the Absecon Inlet — once called Graveyard Inlet because of the frequency of shipwrecks — and the small section of the boardwalk that was destroyed in Sandy. “I remember in January of ’76 I went to a meeting with the local press corps and one of the city commissioners was the speaker,” Heneghan said. “He was an older guy who had been a member of the governor’s cabinet and had been state commissioner of banking. This was before casinos and he was kind of bemoaning how quiet things were in Atlantic City. He said when he was a kid, Atlantic City was a place to go to with somebody you shouldn’t be seen with. Do things you couldn’t do at home.” The bars, Heneghan reminded me, never close here.

*

Last spring, Climate Central published a report on the injustice inherent to Atlantic City’s floods, focusing on a single block called Arizona Avenue. The casinos are protected by large dunes and the Army Corps recently finished building a sea wall with recovery funds from Sandy. Along the back bay though, residents largely rely on aging, undersized bulkheads, and where there are vacant lots there’s often no barrier at all. Things have not improved much over the past year.

“They’re always saying ‘We’re trying to work on it, the sewer systems, blah blah blah,’ but honestly I mean, come on. How do you not make a contingency plan knowing that the bay is right there, the ocean is right here,” said Raymond Mendoza. Mendoza works as a porter and a barback at the Borgata and lives about a block and a half from the back bay. When I met him he was walking a very fat, amiable beagle named Roy. “I’m always worried. When it’s really bad I just watch the tide, ’cause once I see that,” he said, pointing to the water, “come this way, I’m taking my car and driving it right into the casino [parking garage].”

‘Nuisance flooding’ is the technical term for this, but it doesn’t feel adequate. It only takes six inches of fast moving water to topple a grown man. Two feet can sweep a car out to sea. As the water rises so will structural damage. Black mold will spread, kids and the elderly will get sick, and the already debt-ridden National Flood Insurance will edge further toward collapse. “You gotta be up the whole night just to push the water out,” said Neto Alavez. Alavez moved up here from Maryland to work for his uncle’s painting company. “Unless you got a big-ass vacuum to suck it up, you gotta do it with a broom. All they have to say is ‘just go somewhere else.’ They protect all them places over [by the boardwalk]. You know what I’m talking about, the fancy stuff.”

Everyone I met spoke of Hurricane Sandy as the high-water mark for catastrophic flooding, but Sandy — despite the damage it caused — didn’t hit Atlantic City directly, and by the time it made landfall in the Northeast it was only a Category 2 hurricane. There is a pervasive Tale of Two Cities narrative that hangs around Atlantic City — the obscene wealth that circulates within the casinos butting up against dilapidated row houses outside — but the reality is rich people don’t really live in Atlantic City, they just come for conventions. It’s a city of waitresses and bartenders, and many of the residents are elderly. Others moved here after being driven out of Philadelphia and New York by rising rents. Some of them do not have anywhere inland to which they can evacuate. A stronger hurricane, a more direct hit, and people will lose everything.

“A lot of people see sea level rise as just an inundation risk, right? Or this slow problem that’s encroaching,” said Buchanan. “But any flood is basically the summation of sea level and tides and storm surge. Anything that’s adding to that platform just makes a flood that much more likely and it can really increase the frequency and severity of floods.” Last year, scientists at Rice University and Texas A&M released a paper on fossilized coral reefs that showed sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis.

Things could get bad here very fast, and all of the revival plans are short-term fixes. We’ve already locked in a certain amount of sea level rise at this point, so for Atlantic City it’s a question of when, not if. According to Climate Central’s risk map, even if we cut carbon emissions to zero yesterday the city would still flood by 2100. It’s likely to happen much sooner, but in that scenario at least, the Borgata is one of the last places above the waterline. Mendoza has been parking his car in the right place.

*

The news was bad this past year. In April, a lawyer named David Buckel lit himself on fire in Prospect Park to protest the world’s continuing use of fossil fuels. In early October, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that we only have until 2040 to drastically alter the world’s economy in order to prevent an effectively uninhabitable planet. In late October, the World Wildlife Foundation released a report estimating that humanity had managed to destroy 60 percent of wildlife since 1970. In November, the deadliest wildfires in a century swept across California. This January, Science released a report that showed oceans were warming 40 percent faster than previously believed. In Atlantic City, a man by the name of David Dichter began petitioning lawmakers to take action. Dichter grew up in Atlantic City and served overseas as a Marine Corps officer and a foreign service officer before retiring. “I think I came back,” he said, “with a pretty good understanding of how screwed up the environment really was.”

Sea level rise did not happen gradually at the end of the last ice age, but rather in fits and spurts with brief periods of stasis … Things could get bad here very fast.

Dichter’s plan was more modest than David Green’s, but the foundational idea was the same: Atlantic City is really going down this time, the question is whether it can figure out a way to make the transition less painful. Dichter focused on tourism — if Atlantic City could position itself as the place for climate conferences, maybe that would lead to bigger things. At the very least it was a way to bring in revenue.

A resolution to turn Atlantic City into a hub for climate science and conventions was passed through the Atlantic City Council, the county freeholders association, and the state legislature, but it’s unclear how committed lawmakers are to specifics just yet. The city was still under state control and about $450 million in debt as of June 2018. The first climate conference took place the weekend of January 25th at the Claridge Hotel, and Dichter has been speaking with David Green about the way things might progress, but it’s been slow going so far. Atlantic City is, for lack of a better term, behaving like Atlantic City. In December, the mayor, Frank Gilliam, was arrested after getting into a fight outside of a casino. (Asked by a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer if he was still mayor, Gilliam replied, “Today.”) A few weeks later he was being investigated by the FBI.

What seems to be lacking at this point is grassroots community involvement. “[The city] should invite the people that organized themselves in Staten Island [after Hurricane Sandy] for the buyout,” said Klaus Jacob. Jacob is a geophysicist and Columbia University’s disaster risk and climate expert. He became somewhat famous for essentially predicting the effects of Hurricane Sandy on New York’s transit system a year before it hit. “It came from the community, it didn’t come from the government. Invite one of those main macho people that organized that neighborhood for a buyout and get a little primer from them. I’m a geophysicist, so what am I talking about here? Not my field of expertise. I just have seen it happening over the last ten, twenty years — where things are moving and where they don’t move … Wherever you look, unless there is a buy-in from neighborhood families — forget it.”

*

Climate change can’t be solved, or really even mitigated, by tourism, and there’s no shortage of people who stand to profit from future disasters. But South Jersey is much poorer than the rest of the state and as the water rises and fire spreads across the West, Dichter and Green’s respective plans might be a way for Atlantic City residents to avoid being lost in the shuffle. Whether or not the city ultimately ends up donating its body to science, there is something oddly endearing about this last push for revenue. There is no such place as New Jersey, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote 70 years ago. Turns out, they weren’t all wrong! The state will be significantly smaller in a hundred years. But if this plan moves forward, Atlantic City — a place that, for all its faults, has always tried to make the best of a bad situation — may at least be able to go out in something like style.

I reported most of this story over the summer, and every time I came back to New York I had to walk through Times Square to get to my subway stop. Mel Chin’s Wake and Unmoored had just opened — an exhibition put on by No Longer Empty and the Queens Museum. Wake was a 60-foot wooden sculpture meant to mirror a sunken ship or a whale’s ribcage, and Unmoored added context. Chin had paired with Microsoft to create a VR rendering of what Manhattan might someday look like should climate change go unchecked. When you put on the VR glasses boats began to float above you, crowding the airspace until they suddenly disappeared in a rush of plankton. It was a little too obvious and the boats looked like something out of Minecraft, but it was effective in spite of itself. The water is already above our heads, we just can’t see it yet.

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller based in Philadelphia. She’s written for The Awl, The Outline, Medium, and others. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Factchecker: Ethan Chiel

Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

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