#anyway.. 'next year i buy all our supplies and we make the posters together. like we cant Technically team up but lets look like it'

[dallasstarsdyke]

do i. go ahead and text her what i'm thinking for next years campaign

[anciientboosh]

My prompts are typically garbage, but here’s one anyway if you’d like! Vince feels like he’s running through his fancy shampoo more quickly than he should. He doesn’t know where it’s going until he notices Howard walking around with newly luxuriant curls. And his outfit isn’t as terrible as usual. What’s going on??

Hello friend! Thank you so much for helping me keep entertained on my travels! Here is a lovely soft and sweet ficlet for you, I hope you enjoy!

Something is amiss.

Which, by its very nature, is something Vince has come to expect of his daily life. Arguably it would be more unusual for everything to be running smoothly around here. 

But the contextual clues of the past few days are adding up to some very bad juju. 

It starts with a rapidly depleting bottle of shampoo. To most, not the kind of thing that would even click as suspicious, but this is Vince Noir's shampoo. A concoction of fruit scented hair Potion that costs him most of his monthly pay packet to supply himself with; and thus, something he ensures he uses stringently. 

Vince knows exactly how long it takes him to get through one bottle. It's frankly one of the precious few things in his existence he manages to be anal-retentive about. 

So, of course, when he reaches for the bottle nine days into a twenty-one day cycle and finds the weight of it considerably lighter than it should be. It is the first step down a path of suspicion that can only lead to terrible things. 

The next piece of this wet jigsaw puzzle comes with Howard's altered appearance. 

It isn't even what most would consider a large difference. But to Vince it's like the man had shaved his head and begun wearing neon leg-warmers and tank tops and calling himself Moonbeam. Its jarring, and obvious. 

Howard's curls are styled. 

He notices one lazy Sunday morning as the older man potters about the kitchen sorting them some breakfast. Usually, Howard's shampoo was cheap and bought in bulk and basically, left his hair sort of-- in the nicest way possible-- horrifically unstylable. The brown ringlets often had a mind of their own, and at this length, never looked washed anyway so Howard never took the trouble. 

But on this Sunday morning? They're radiant. Catching the soft morning light. Curled delicately round his ears and dipping over his forehead. Vince all at once wants to sink his fingers into them and pull but he can't-- not least because they may be at a place where affection is coming naturally and sometimes they might kiss each other or share a cheeky touch… they still haven't actually said what they are yet-- because his suspicion just ramped up another level. 

Was Howard using his shampoo? 

There isn't even the chance to ask. He's too soon distracted by a crimp and a delicious meal that his hyperactive brain loses the will to hold on to such things as paranoia and worry. It can be tackled later. 

Later happens the following morning when Vince is watching Howard dress. Not in a creepy way, they share a bedroom for God's sake, but in a soft affectionate way. After being brave enough to slide under Vince's sheets this morning and press kisses to his cheeks and forehead Howard is vibrating with proud energy and its nice to witness. 

Right up until he pull a shirt from his wardrobe and ruins it. 

It's not patterned. It's not even a horrific colour. It's just a plain, quite stylish, button down that Vince remembers buying him years ago in the hopes of kick-starting a wardrobe revamp. 

Except watching him pull it on now does nothing but make him feel disoriented. 

Howard smiles at him, practically skips his way from the bedroom. Vince stays where he is just a moment longer, mentally trying to force the misshapen pieces of this conundrum together before the only logical solution springs at him from nowhere. 

Howard's been replaced by aliens. 

Armed with this knowledge, Vince for goes dressing properly in order to rush downstairs to the shop and confront their intruder. Pyjamas isn't ideal alien fighting apparel but needs must when you've got to rescue your best friend. 

And as if it couldn't get any worse, what he sees has him stumbling down the last few steps ungracefully. 

Howard is at the counter as expected. But in front of him sits a white paper bag that would normally set Vince off like an excited puppy. Topman. Howard's reaching into a bag from Topman. 

He's pulling out jeans. Actual denim. Jeans. 

It's the straw that breaks Vince's back. 

"Alright, you fashionable freak," He cries, Iwad jolts with his shock and drops the denim to the shop floor. "What've you done with my Howard?" 

"Wha-- your Howard?" 

"I swear if you've hurt 'im I'll kick your teeth in," The threat is enough to have maybe Howard's hands hooting up in a display of his innocence. "Then I'll get my shaman mate to curse you!" 

"Vince, you've gone wrong." Howard's hands drop to his sides once more. Apparently no longer threatened by Vince's over display of anger. "It's me, I'm Howard."

"No you're not."

"Yes. I am."

"Howard doesn't use my shampoo!" With the renewed annoyance of this accusation, Vince takes a solid step forward; a smug sense of pleasure twists in his gut to see the imposter take one back in response. His back hits the shelves with a noisy thud. "He reckons it's like washin' his hair with fruit juice. And my Howard wouldn't be caught dead in Topman-- he definitely wouldn't buy jeans. If he tried to put jeans on he'd dissolve into a puddle of beige fabric." The whole rant is rounded off with Vince stamping his foot like an angry toddler. "So tell me where he is."

Amusement is twisting on Howard's features, soft in its nature and endlessly affectionate. "You daft tart," He utters warmly. "It is me."

"Prove it, then."

"Remember when we were 14 and I caught you with that poster of--"

"Alright!" Where Vince's arms had previously been crossed over his chest defiantly, he now reaches out to shove gently at Howard's larger frame in warning. "Alright, you said you'd never bring that up again."

Howard shrugs casually at him; cocks a brow as if silently asking him what else he was supposed to do. Vince isn't dwelling on that, though, he is much too preoccupied seeking out answers to this bizarre few days of Howard transformation. "What's goin' on then?" 

The panic may have left Vince's frame but it creeps up Howard's now. His shoulders tense, his eyes dart away, the soft curves of his cheeks turn pink with his embarrassment. All it does is add to Vince's gathering confusion. "Howard?" 

With a deep breath-- all his bravery existing in that one action-- Howard admits, "I thought it would help." No further elaboration comes until Vince makes a point to cock his head to the side like a curious puppy. "With us. You know, our-- you like a certain look."

"What?" Vince exclaims on a laugh. 

"I've seen your type, Vince, and it's not me, is it?" Howard still hasn't looked at him. Prefers muttering his truth to the floor. "I thought if I looked more like the people you normally fancy we might be able to--" 

"You idiot." Vince declares confidently. Startled, Howard stares up at him with wide eyes. "Utter lunatic, are you insane? Howard I fancy you not the clothes you wear."

Howard continues to do nothing but blink owlishly at him. 

"Bloody hell, all of this was for me?" A nod. "Oh, Howard. Look I think your fashion sense is rubbish but it's yours. That's who you are, I'm not gonna change you. I don't want to, and I don't want you to want to change yourself either."

"Really?" 

"Really." Vince takes a confident step forward, tosses his arms around Howard shoulders. "Can't promise I won't make fun of how you dress but that doesn't mean I actually want you to be different. Whatever gave you that idea?" 

"Well all the jokes but," Howard hesitates over his answer, eyes flashing with discomfort. "But when I asked Leroy he said--" 

"Leroy?" Vince rolls his eyes. "Don't be taking dating advice from Leroy, that man had an affair with a succulent once."

Howard snickers; finds it in himself to wrap his hands about Vince's waist and tug him into an embrace. "Does this mean that we're...?"

"Boyfriends? Sure. But only if you go and take this mess off and put something normal on for God's sake."

"Fine. Drama queen." With an affectionate peck to his forehead, Howard starts for the stairs. 

"Oh and Howard?" Vince calls sweetly, Howard paused at the bottom step. "You ever use my shampoo again and you can kiss goodbye to your rare jazz collection."

[this-is-a-podcast-fanblog]

another esteban fic

You thought I was done. 

Night Vale spoilers ahead for the recent episodes as well as for Spy In the Desert!

~~~

The Night Vale adoption agency is the most important place Cecil has been to in a long time. It’s also one singular office, about the size of a hotel bathroom, with a card table and folding chairs under a bright poster that says, “YOU CAN ADOPT! YOU WILL ADOPT! YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO ADOPT!” A very tired-looking case worker in a black dress sits across the table picking at a Nature Valley granola bar with one of her hands. Her other two are typing across a laptop. 

“So,” she says, “adoption in Night Vale isn’t like other places.” 

“Of course.” Cecil smiles and glances at his husband, who, thankfully, doesn’t look too nervous. 

“Naturally, there are no cases of children that need to be adopted within the city.” She gives them a knowing look over her glasses. Carlos frowns in Cecil’s peripheral vision. 

“Why is that?”

“Children in need of adoption are adopted by the Hooded Figures,” Cecil explains in unison with the woman. 

Carlos shifts in his seat. “Um, is that a good idea? Are the kids safe there?” 

“Of course. They have regular health and safety inspections from the Sheriff’s Secret Police, the Night Vale Board of Family Services, and the GrubHub delivery guy.” The case worker raps her nails definitively on the desk. “Plus, the kids have an indoor waterpark to play in once they get home from school. They’re very happy.” 

Carlos lifts an eyebrow “But it’s proportionally impossible for a water park to fit in the dog par-”

“NOT ALL THINGS SHALL MAKE SENSE!” booms the case worker, and Carlos stops talking. “Now.” She collects herself and resumes her smile. “We’ll be adding you to a database of parents, since you’ve passed all of your inspections and filled out your paperwork. If there are children entered into the system, case workers will consider you to adopt based on the child’s needs and location. You’ll be getting a call from us soon.” 

Cecil beams. He squeezes Carlos’s hand under the folding table. Carlos’s warm, perfectly soft thumb slides over Cecil’s wedding ring, an adorable thing he’s been doing for years now. Little touches like that are why it’s so easy to love Carlos. Carlos is an incredible scientist and husband, and soon, he’s going to be an amazing father. They both will be. 

“If you have any questions?” The case worker’s first two arms tap her papers into a stack, while the third throws out her granola bar wrapper.

“How much notice will we get?” asks Carlos, who has a list of important parenting questions written down.

“At least 24 hours, in case you need to fly out of the city. Anything else?” 

“Do you think babies prefer ducklings or froggies?” asks Cecil, who has been nesting for the past few days. 

“Ducklings,” says the worker. “You two have a lovely day.” 

They pull into the parking lot of Buy Buy Baby Not Bye Bye Baby, the best baby supply store in town. Cecil turns off the engine. Neither of them unbuckle. For a while, they sit in the silence of the car, watching a shopping cart roll away across the parking lot and into some ornamental bushes. 

“We’re going to be dads,” says Carlos at length, breaking the silence. 

Cecil turns to look at him. “How are you feeling?” 

Carlos smiles, laughs, ducks his head. He’s so adorable. Even his awed laughter is perfect. “Cecil, I don’t have any scientific words for how I’m feeling - I don’t even think I can quantify it, you know? Cece.” He bites his smile, which has begun quivering. “I’m adopting a baby. With my husband. I just...”

“Never thought it would happen,” Cecil finishes. 

Carlos nods. Cecil unbuckles his seatbelt and leans over to kiss the bridge of Carlos’s nose above his glasses. 

“It is real,” he promises. “It’s really, really happening! And now we have to go buy some onesies while they’re still on sale!”

“I will not let anyone get to the onesies before me.”

“They’re OUR baby’s onesies!” Cecil proclaims as both of them get out of the car and run to grab a shopping cart. 

The store is crowded today, moms and dads and parents jostling each other through the well-stocked aisles of formula and plushies. They are not like the Palmer-Scientist husbands, whose combined years of exceptional journalism and groundbreaking science have made them especially smart. Cecil and Carlos have their strategy planned. Carlos pushes the cart down aisles in the exact order that they need. Cecil stands on the front of the cart, shouting things like, “Hey, new dads coming through! If you don’t get out of our way you’re homophobic!

Back at home, they drag their purchases into a currently-empty room. This room promises to become a nursery, just as soon as one of them works up the courage to build the IKEA crib. 

“You shouldn’t be able to buy an IKEA crib at Buy Buy Baby,” Carlos comments, as he begins unpacking a bag of stuffed animals. 

“You shouldn’t be able to buy a lot of things at Buy Buy Baby! Oh, did we remember the -”

“-bloodstone mobile? Yup! I have it right here.”

“I love you.” 

They turn on music and set up the nursery. Gravity in the town conveniently shuts off for 12 minutes, so they stick glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling. They hang up curtains. When gravity comes back they set up the changing station, with a mat on the top shelf, baby powder and boxes of diapers on the bottom shelf. Cecil is obsessed with the changing station. 

“It’s so CUTE!” He gestures to one of the cloth diapers. “Look how TINY this is!”

“Babies are very small! Did you know that a baby’s head makes up more than a quarter of their entire body length?”

“No way!” Cecil thinks about adding that to the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner, but they’ve agreed together not to talk about their adoption on the radio. He places the dresser next to the changing station and places the equally tiny baby clothes into the drawers. Cecil already has matching outfits for all of the baby’s clothes. 

When Carlos gets frustrated over wrestling the IKEA crib, they take a snack break. They bring apple slices and peanut butter into the nursery, along with a bottle of wine, and sit on the floor to eat. 

“Did the case worker say whether our baby is male or female?” Cecil asks. 

Carlos pops an apple slice into Cecil’s mouth. “The concept of marketing color-coding to infants based on a gender they may not actually identify with is a capitalist tool to sell more baby clothes,” he says. “Also, it’s been scientifically proven that blue isn’t a more masculine color. And pink isn’t more feminine, it just isn’t.” 

“I know that. But we need to get our baby a Social Night Vale ID.” 

“Like a social security number?”

“More like a driver’s license. All kids under 18 have to have one, just in case they get arrested for not eating at Big Rico’s.” Cecil licks a smidge of peanut butter off of Carlos’s thumb. “Since not all kids can afford pizza, and so the law only applies to adults. It’s a get out of jail free card.”

“Huh.” Carlos frowns. “Even babies need one?”

“Yes. That’s the municipal decree.” Cecil stretches and refills his wine glass. “We can just put X on the form for now. City Council has to understand, I mean, we don’t even have the baby yet.”

“The baby,” Carlos repeats, like he’s savoring the word. “Our baby.” 

Cecil gives him a quick kiss. Carlos wraps both arms around him and pulls him close, the two of them tangling up on the floor, and they turn it into a long kiss. 

“I’m worried I won’t be a good dad, though,” Carlos murmurs as he sits up. 

Cecil dusts off his polka dot overalls. “I think being a dad is something no one starts off good at,” he says. “It’s like radio hosting. Or pouring out libations to the elder gods. It just takes a little time to get into practice. C’mon.” He tips his beret-capped head at the IKEA cabinet. “Let’s fight this thing some more.” 

A few days pass. Their nursery sits finished, though Cecil goes in every few hours to change the angle of a piece of furniture, or add another stuffed duckling to the pile of stuffed animals on a shelf. Carlos has added baby-proof handles to all of their doors, just in case the child they adopt is able to walk. “Did you know most babies take their first steps between nine and 12 months?” he says. “And then they start talking, like in little sentences, between 18 months and two years! But for some kids that kind of thing takes a little longer - I mean, I didn’t start talking until I was five. Or, some kids never learn to talk. And that’s okay!”

For the most part, they try to go about their normal lives. Guessing at what day they’ll get the call would only create anxiety. Cecil focuses on writing his shows and doing his outfits and makeup. “Babies need a lot of attention,” Carlos tells him. “We won’t have as much time for makeup or science or whatever.” 

“You’re learning a lot of scientific facts about babies,” Cecil comments as he laces up his hip-high boots. They’re boots so high that they can be worn as pants, though he’s put a skirt over them anyway, because fashion. 

Carlos nods. “Yeah. I’m... I’m worried, actually.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Worried that I’m not going to be as good of a dad as I want to be, you know? I want our baby’s life to be perfect.”

“Nothing is ever perfect,” Cecil assures him. Carlos nods, unconvinced. “I’m worried too, though. I understand. All we can do now is wait.” 

In the end, they don’t have to wait long. The Palmer-Scientists are curled up in bed, sound asleep, a week and a half after visiting the adoption agency, when Carlos’s phone starts ringing.” 

“Nhhh,” he mumbles. He tries to reach across Cecil to grab it and accidentally smacks his husband in the face. “I’m awake, I’m awake. Thanks, babe,” he adds as Cecil hands him the phone. “Hello?” Carlos sits up abruptly in bed. “Wait,” he says. “Really? Right now?”

“Put it on speaker.”

“Sorry, let me put it on speaker so Cecil can hear.” He fumbles with his phone through shaking hands. “Okay.” 

“Hello, Cecil,” says the case worker’s voice. “Can you get a flight tonight?”

Cecil can feel his heart hammering in his stomach, and in his brain, and all throughout his body, like somersaults of nerves racking his entire form. “You mean...?” 

“I’ve just received a call from the Children’s Hospital of Arizona,” the case worker continues. “They need an emergency adoption. A woman came in to their labor wing earlier this sick, but after giving birth, she fled. No one has seen her. She only left her baby, and a note saying she doesn’t want him.”

“W-why not?” Carlos asks. 

“Because he was premature. Initially, it looked like he wouldn’t survive for very long. Don’t worry,” she says as Cecil makes a cry of worry. “He’s been very sick, but has improved in the past few days. The doctors want him to leave the intensive care wing, but only if a family can take him in immediately and monitor his health. They also want a family that lives near a hospital. Fortunately, you meet all those conditions.” 

“He must be so scared,” Cecil whimpers, “All alone there.” 

“Which is why you need to get on the soonest flight you can. Tonight, if possible. From there, get a taxi or something to the hospital and check in at the maternal wing. And you’ll need an incubator at home, just as a precaution if he gets sick again. Okay?” 

Carlos nods and squeezes Cecil’s hand. 

“Okay. I’m looking forward to seeing you two in my office soon.” There’s a smile in the case worker’s voice. “With your son. Please call me if you need anything.”

“We will. Thanks.” 

Carlos hangs up. He sets down his phone on the bed and turns to Cecil, and when their eyes meet they both burst into tears. Cecil collapses into Carlos’s arms and buries his face in his shoulder, shaking. “Oh, my god, this is happening,” he whispers. “And-and he’s all alone, in Arizona, and he’s sick -”

“Yeah, and what if we can’t take care of him?” Carlos’s arms tremble. “If, if I’m a really terrible dad, and I make him even more sick? And he gets taken away from us? Or he grows up and he isn’t happy here, isn’t happy because I wasn’t good enough -”

“Carlos.” Cecil sits up and wipes his eyes. He cradles Carlos’s face in his hands. “Carlos, you are the most perfectly imperfect person, and husband, and you will be an amazing father. Okay? Like the case worker said, we’re right near the Night Vale hospital! We can help our son if he gets sick again.” Cecil sighs as Carlos keeps crying. “Sweetie...” 

This is new to him. Because when the town is falling apart or the grocery store stops existing or dragons sweep from the sky, Cecil has an answer for what Carlos doesn’t understand. Or when something in the world is confusing, Carlos has a scientific explanation for it. There are no explanations for learning, in the late hours of the night, that their future son is sick in another state, and that in the course of a few short hours, their entire life will change. 

Instead, Cecil cuddles Carlos closer and kisses the top of his head. “We will be okay,” he says. “And our son will be okay. I promise.” 

Carlos sniffles and dabs at his eyes with the sleeve of his nighttime lab coat. “B-but we don’t have an incubator.” 

“Okay... so only one of us will go to Arizona. You go, you know all the scientific facts about babies.” Carlos’s eyes go wide. “You do, Carlos. You know so much! And you’re better at leaving Night Vale, anyway.” The last time they tried to leave the town for a weekend getaway, Cecil kept teleporting back to Night Vale against his will. Aging did that to citizens. “You can do this, bunny. I know you can.” 

“I can do this.” 

“Yes, babe.” 

Carlos nods and takes a deep breath. “I’m going to go get our son,” he says. “And bring him home, safe.” 

“And I’m going to get an incubator and have his nursery all ready for him when you get back.” Cecil smiles. “This is exciting! Carlos, we’re finally going to have a baby! We’re going to raise a family together!”

“Yeah.” Carlos smiles and leans in to kiss Cecil. “Yeah, we are!”

They get up. Cecil packs an overnight bag for Carlos while Carlos packed a bag for the baby - diapers, formula, an outfit and a warm blanket for the plane. 

“Okay,” he said as he stuffed a blanket into the baby bag. “Do I have everything?”

“You’re forgetting your bag.” Cecil held it out. “This has an extra lab coat and your fidget magnets. Oh, and some snacks. Snacks are very important.”

“You are the best.” Carlos kissed Cecil’s cheek and took the bag. Then he drew a deep breath and looked around. “Well,” he said. “This is the last time we’ll be alone in our house for a while.” 

“Our entire life is about to change.” Cecil smoothed the lapel on Carlos’s lab coat. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come to the airport with you?” 

“No, I want you to sleep. We won’t be getting a lot of it, because on average, babies will wake up and cry two to three times a night, and they won’t go back to sleep until they’ve been comforted and fed.”

“That’s a good fact to know.” Cecil holds out his arms for one long hug. “I love you so, so much.”

“I love you too.” 

They break apart, kiss, hug again, break apart. “Okay,” says Carlos. “Okay.”

“Okay,” says Cecil. “Oh, wait!” He runs to the nursery and brings back one of the stuffed ducklings. “So he’ll have something to play with.” 

Carlos nods and tucks it into the baby bag. Cecil reaches up and gives him one last kiss. 

“I love you,” he says. “Bring our son home safe.” 

And then Carlos leaves, with the sound of a closing door and a revving car engine, and Cecil is alone in the house watching the lights of Carlos’s car fade through the window. He puts on one of Carlos’s lab coats, gets a blanket, and goes to the nursery. He double- and triple- checking that everything is in order. The sun-shaped clock on the wall proclaims that it is 3:12 AM. At eight, he will get up and drive into the shopping district for an incubator. 

For now, he curls up in the rocking chair. He watches the bloodstone mobile spin in a breeze that isn’t actually there. And, eventually, under the clock’s steady ticking, Cecil falls asleep in a coat that smells like his husband, in a room that will be his son’s. 

[wittystarkk]

The Last Five Years || Bucky Barnes || Part Seven

author: wittystark

word count: 2.8k

relationship: James “Bucky” Barnes/Reader

chapter title: A Summer In Ohio

A/N: Reader is in Ohio for the production of a script she'd written, and she misses her new husband.

Previous Chapter - Next Chapter

(Y/N) groaned when her phone reflected her own face at her, Bucky’s name in white font set across her forehead and “Dialing…” in smaller white font underneath that. She was sat on the uncomfortable mattress in her rundown apartment for the summer, exhaustion setting in after two miserable days of poor sleep and too much work. Her legs ached from swimming across the lake the day before, attempting to relieve (or rather, escape) her stress from the director of the play forcing her to rewrite the entirety of the second act. She wanted to brain the director to death with her laptop, and the fact that she was unable to talk to Bucky for two consecutive days wasn’t helping the problem. 

The moment he told her he was free she’d pressed the “FaceTime” button on her screen so fast she had hardly been aware she’d actually done it. Now she was sitting in jittery anticipation, listening to the dull dings of the ringer. 

When her phone changed from “Dialing…” to “Connecting…” her entire body tensed, her bottom lip tucking between her teeth. Bucky’s handsome face finally appearing on her screen made her heart ache with longing underneath her ribs. “Hi, baby.”

He gave her a wide smile, his whole face lighting up. “Hi,” He shifted a bit on the bed he was lying in, reaching across his body to pull the string to turn on the lamp. She smiled, being able to see him better. She’d struggled with having to leave him back home in New York, had hardly been able to part with her newly betrothed but the knowledge that he was now only a phone call away was comforting her just a tad. 

“How was your press yesterday?” She wondered, standing up from the mattress on legs that ached in protest. It took a considerable amount of effort to keep herself from letting him become aware of her sore muscles. 

“It was nothing special. I was bored most of the day, being shuffled from room to room. I wish you were here,” he added on as an afterthought. She frowned a little at his comment, slipping her feet into the tattered old Toms that were discarded beside the front door to her apartment. 

“I wish I were there with you too, babe. But instead I’m here in Ohio, withering away.” She put the back of her hand to her forehead, melodramatically acting as if she were going to die. 

“Hey, babe. Remember I’m the actor here, don’t come for my job.” He teased with a wink, watching his wife closely through the screen of his cell phone. “Where’re you right now?” He wondered, noticing the background behind her changing. 

“I’m walking out of my little apartment on the edge of camp. Though, really, it should be called a fucking hut the thing is so run down.” She sighed, walking past someone she knew, carefully angling the camera so that Bucky could see the man behind her. “That’s Carl, one of the other adults here. Has dwarfism.  He’s playing a role because he fits in with the children so easily. He’s kind of a grump and I am certain he hates me,” She informed Bucky who laughed. 

“(Y/N), c’mon. I’m sure he doesn’t hate you.” 

She panned the camera back to herself, nodding her head confidently. “No, he does. If it were up to him I’d be off of this stupid thing and they’d be using his play.”

“He’s a writer too?”

She nodded, “yes. In the most liberal of senses. I don’t think Carl is very literate.” 

He let out a howl of a laugh, shaking his head a little. “(Y/N),” he admonished. “Be nice.”

She rolled her eyes, making a mocking face at him. “I’m being nice,” she defended as she continued walking towards the camp. 

“So,” Bucky smirked. “How are you really liking the camp?”

She sighed, taking a moment to think. “It’s wonderful. I don’t think that there is anything that would beat being here. I mean, let me think. I could have a whole mansion on some hill in a remote country, and I’d be less content than I am here. I could have a satchel full of dollar bills, and I’d be like ‘pft. I shall not leave Ohio.” 

He rolled his eyes, smiling amusedly at his wife. “You’re something else.”

She shrugged, “I would certainly hope so. Who would want to be normal?” She wondered. She continued on her walk, gasping loudly when a thought crossed her mind. “Oh, shit. I didn’t tell you about the stripper, did I?”

Bucky widened his eyes in shock, “what stripper? You’re at a summer camp for children.” He reminded her, as if that weren’t painfully obvious already. She rolled her eyes, lowering her hand as she passed by a group of the children of the camp, not wanting them to see her talking to her phone. When they were a safe distance away, she raised her hand again, getting an odd look from her screen. 

“Why was I staring at your hip?” 

She shrugged, “kids were walking by.” She skipped a few feet, stopping near the dock. “So right, anyway. Her name is Alexis, right? She lives in Columbus but apparently is trying to get herself brownie points with the judge over some custody hearing thing with her kid. I don't know the whole story. Regardless, she used to be a stripper in Columbus before she got knocked up. You can tell, too. Just in the way she carries herself and dresses. She’s pretty great, honestly. Oh!” Her lips curled in a big smile as she kicked her shoes off, settling down on the edge of the dock, dangling her feet into the water. “She has a snake too. Guess it’s name?”

“Snake?” He ventured, unimaginatively.

“Wayne,” she supplied, resting her elbow on her thigh to support her arm. “He’s kinda gross, because he’s shedding right now. And you know how gross snakes are when they shed,” he nodded his head in agreement. He was smiling an almost lazy smile, just happy to be watching his wife and listening to her ramble on about the ongoings of camp and about the snake he would never meet. “Anyway. We share a room, whenever she actually bothers to come back for the night. I think she’s sleeping with the director of the camp, but. Who’s to say for certain?” 

“Who knew a children’s summer camp would have so much drama?”

Her smile was big, warming up her entire face. Bucky’s heart panged with longing, he missed her. Missed her more than he would care to let on. “How’s it apart from the stripper, and the illiterate dwarf?” Bucky wondered, shifting on his bed to get more comfortable. 

“Oh, it’s just horrible.” She groaned, rubbing her forehead tiredly. “I mean. Let me count all the things I would like more than being in Ohio for the summer.” She took a second to think before rattling things off. “Let’s see. Okay, I could literally shove an ice pick in my eye. This one.” She brought the phone a little closer to her eye, letting him get a good look at it before pulling the phone back to show her full face. “And it’d be better than this here state.” She grumbled. 

Bucky laughed, “really?”

She nodded, “yep!”

He rolled his eyes, “you’re really a drama queen you know that? I love you, I do. But c’mon. It can’t be that bad.” 

“No! It really is, Bucky. I swear to God. It’s horrible. I have no cable, no hot water - you know how much I hate having cold showers. I have no vietnamese food, which. How terrible, I miss our takeout joint. Whenever I have a bad day at rehearsal with the kids, all I want to do is cuddle up on the couch with a box of takeout. And the worst part. The very worst part is.. I don’t have you, Bucky.” 

Her frown was enough to make him feel sad too. For him to want to rush to Ohio on the first plane and pull her into his arms. To kiss her and rub her back and tell her how much he loved her. It was torture being away from her. It was torture for her to be away from him. It was all nonsense and if she never went back to Ohio, it would be too soon for the both of them. 

She sighed heavily, trying to figure out a way to lighten the mood. She came up with nothing and he had nothing either. He could smile at her, in that award winning way of his. Her heart melted. “Baby, I love you.” He said in a soothing way. She beamed a smile back at him, the smile reaching all the way to her eyes. 

“I love you too,” she responded, blowing a kiss at her phone. He grabbed at his chest, pretending like the kiss was a bullet to his heart. She rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight the giggle that escaped her lips. He was too much for her, and she was too much for him. They were under each other's spell, and marriage proved to only worsen it. 

His hand came up to rub tiredly at his eyes and she saw the glint of the simple gold band around his fourth finger. She knew that it was her ring on his finger. Her possession of him. She smiled big, “I love seeing your ring.” 

He chuckled, spinning it absently with his thumb and pinky. “I’m pretty fond of it myself,” he acknowledged. The two sat there for a moment in silence, both wishing they were together before she perked up.

“So, I forgot to tell you. The other day, the other adults and I took a quick drive to Kentucky, right?” He nodded, showing that he was listening. “And we stopped at Target because we needed to get some things. Anyway, I walked in and the entertainment section was directly to the right. Which was convenient because I have to solely rely on watching DVD’s for entertainment. And I looked over and guess who the hell I saw?”

His eyebrows raised in surprise, smiling. “Who?”

“You! You were on this like, big poster thing advertising your movie. Of course I walked over immediately and grabbed a copy. Richard followed me and he was like -” She changed her voice to be snarky, “‘All things considered I guess you don’t have to buy that’. Which, first of all? How offensive is that? Like, just because you’re my husband doesn’t mean I don’t have to buy your movie? Second of all, him being snarky about it made me want it even more. So, I smiled like Mona Lisa, walked over to check out, and bought that DVD before we even started our shopping trip.” 

Bucky laughed loudly, rubbing his hand down his face. “(Y/N),” he sighed. “You really didn’t have to do that. I know you were being petty and proving a point but you didn’t have to buy a copy of my DVD.” 

She shrugged, “like I said. We don’t have cable so I needed DVD’s to watch on my computer. It’s a good movie, baby. Like, really good.. You did such a good job in it. I’ve seen it a handful of times and every single time I’m still in awe of you, babe. I really am lucky being your wife.”

The blush on his cheek was so obvious it almost made her giggle. “You really are too flattering, babe.” She winked at him and the two dropped the conversation of flattery. 

“So, Richard. Don’t like him?” Bucky asked, bringing the subject off of himself. 

She laughed, nodding her head, her hair falling in front of her face. “No, I don’t, not really. But, God. He wants me, he really wants me. He flirts with me every single chance he can get and he doesn’t make it subtle at all. He just does everything he can to get time with me. And he’s the assistant director of this camp, so it’s not hard for him to get his way.” She shrugged nonchalantly, “it’s fine. He isn’t gonna get me. I’m kind of spoken for. I have a pretty great guy, you should meet him sometime.” 

He rolled his eyes at his wife, “yeah. I’ll make that a priority.” He rolled over onto his other side, placing the phone against a pillow to prop it up and free his tired arm. “Damn right he isn’t going to get you, though. You’re all mine.” He winked at the camera. 

She took a moment to look his face over, sighing dramatically. “God, look at you. I mean, look at me, and then look at you. Sonovabitch, I must be doin’ somethin’ right to have landed you.” She shook her head. “Hell we aren't perfect but. We’re pretty damn close, don’t you think?”

“Damn right,” he whisper cheered. 

Her head snapped to the side when she heard noises, seeing a gaggle of children running towards the lake in their bathing suits. She groaned, looking back at her phone. “I gotta go baby. I do, I’m sorry.” She sighed heavily, standing up from the dock, letting her feet dry for a moment. “Hurry up and get your ass out here to Ohio, you schmuck. I miss you.”

“I miss you too, baby.” He sat up in the bed. “I love you and I’ll see you soon.”

“I love you too,” she replied. “I gotta go though, babe. I’ll talk to you soon.” She pressed her thumb against the red ‘end’ button and turned just in time. The children all ran past her shouting ‘Hi Mrs. Barnes’ as they made their way into the lake, Richard following behind them.

“Interesting call?” He asked, raising his eyebrows at her, seeing her phone gripped tightly in her hand. 

She shrugged, “guess so. Anyway, I should probably get back and finish those last little edits to the script. I’ll uh, see you around. Good luck with them.” 

Richard’s jaw was set tight, nodding as he watched her leave. She was already missing Bucky. 

~~~

Two weeks later, she was drying her sweaty hands on her skirt clad thighs, watching the children all run around backstage, screaming and giggling while waiting for the cue that the show was going to be starting soon. To say she was nervous would be an understatement of the century. It was the first time that one of her scripts were to be performed in front of an audience. She’d helped with scripts in the past at the summer camp, editing here and there. Helping with dialogue occasionally. But never once was it solely her work. Never was it something that she had created and crafted all on her own.

She felt like she was on the verge of vomiting. Her hair had begun to come out of it’s neat bun, falling around her face and if she hadn’t just gotten her nails done she would have been anxiously picking at them. She didn’t know how people did this so often. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to it. 

Alexis noticed her legs nervous twitching, shaking her head a little at the bundle of nerves that was her roommate. “Listen,” Alexis said, walking over to (Y/N) with a pageant smile on her lips. “You’re not going out there to perform it, so there’s no reason to be nervous, okay?” She gripped (Y/N)’s shoulders tightly, rubbing them to calm her friend. “The kids all know their lines, and with any luck they’ll be half decent. Besides, they’re just playing to a bunch of elderly people. They won’t be the harshest of critics. Just breathe, and know your play is good.” 

She wanted to smile, but all that came out was a shaky laugh. “Thanks, Alexis.” 

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s wonderful. I’m excited to see it,” said a voice from behind her. Her entire face lit up as she shook Alexis’s hands off of her shoulders and spun on her heels, running to the source of the voice. She jumped into Bucky’s arms without a moment’s hesitation, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist while peppering his face with kisses. “Baby!” She shrieked between kisses. “I didn’t know you were coming.” 

He laughed, wrapping his arms around her waist to hold her against him. “I wanted to surprise you, babe. I wanted to be here for your opening night and your first performance of your first play ever.” 

She giggled, kissing him again. “You’re a wonderful husband, you know that?” 

He smirked, “so I’ve been told.”

~

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@petlaufeyson​, @lovely-geek

[zf7]

I feel like a ghost. I’m a 35-year-old woman, and I have nothing to show for it. My 20s and early 30s have been a twisting crisscross of moves all over the West Coast, a couple of brief stints abroad, multiple jobs in a mediocre role with no real upward track. I was also the poster child for serial monogamy. My most hopeful and longest lasting relationship (three and a half years, whoopee) ended two years ago. We moved to a new town (my fourth new city), created a home together, and then nose-dived into a traumatic breakup that launched me to my fifth and current city and who-knows-what-number job.

For all these years of quick changes and rash decisions, which I once rationalized as adventurous, exploratory, and living an “original life,” I have nothing to show for it. I have no wealth, and I’m now saddled with enough debt from all of my moves, poor decisions, and lack of career drive that I may never be able to retire. I have no career milestones and don’t care for my line of work all that much anyway, but now it’s my lifeline, as I only have enough savings to buy a hotel room for two nights. I have no family nearby, no long-term relationship built on years of mutual growth and shared experiences, no children. While I make friends easily, I’ve left most of my friends behind in each city I’ve moved from while they’ve continued to grow deep roots: marriages, homeownership, career growth, community, families, children. I have a few close girlfriends, for which I am grateful, but life keeps getting busier and our conversations are now months apart. Most of my nights are spent alone with my cat (cue the cliché).

---

Also, within the past year I’ve had a breast-cancer scare and required surgery on my uterus due to a fertility issue. On top of that, I’m 35 and every gyno and women’s-health website this side of the Mississippi is telling me my fertility is dropping faster than a piano falling out of the sky. Now I’m looking into freezing my eggs, adding to my never-ending financial burden, in hopes of possibly making something of this haunted house and having a family someday with a no-named man.

----

I used to think I was the one who had it all figured out. Adventurous life in the city! Traveling the world! Making memories! Now I feel incredibly hollow. And foolish. How can I make a future for myself that I can get excited about out of these wasted years?  What reserves or identity can I draw from when I feel like I’ve accrued nothing up to this point with my life choices?

h/t sean.  

this is a really poignant, vulnerable, self-deprecating letter in a tough situation.  how do you even react to someone with such a life-consuming issue that spans every facet of her life?  

i don’t love polly’s advice, but the comments are incredibly interesting.  some of them are “i told you so”, others seek to provide optimism.  there’s a lot of pretty antifeminist stuff.   see a psychiatrist!  get a dog!  do shrooms! go to church! volunteer!  date yourself/love yourself!  make an action plan and be strategic!  i was in the same place but everything got better!  i was in the same place and life sucks!  

aren’t women stuck between a rock and a hard place if people reach professional/emotional maturity at a later and later age (let’s say 30) but women’s biological clock deadlines still stay the same (let’s say at 35)?  what happens if they don’t want to date un-successful/matured men in their 20s, but then by their 30s, the successful/matured men want to date younger?  

more generally, the comments made me feel like the self-actualization self-fulfillment everyone-is-awesome movement has someone done us a disservice?  like if we are so focused on the no-wrong-choice rhetoric and we-are-all-beautiful and seek to squash people who are negative, isn’t that potentially giving people blind spots when they make decisions because they aren’t adequately aware of the drawbacks?

but like... that’s sort of the moral of the advice, also, right?  is that everyone IS awesome, just given the right framing and approach.  

the comments are so varied.  

anyway. my favorite comment was the following:

To Haunted: I did everything the opposite of you. Right now, we're in just about the same place. With a few exceptions of course. I invested. I bought my house before the bubble. I married my high school sweetheart, to whom I had every hope and intention of spending the rest of my life with. When that 18 year relationship ended (nearly a decade ago now), I figured I'd be good to go for whatever was next. I was in my early-mid-thirties, athletic, a great business person, smart as heck, and good at being in love. I wanted kids, wanted a life-partner, wanted to work hard, and was ready to make a great life out of the divorce my ex-wife chose. But I had just spent most of my savings on a masters degree. And I'm only 5'8" and went bald at 18. My beard already had a little grey in it. And I had no idea how to date. I'm charging into my early 40's now and, earlier this year, took the lowest paying job I've ever had. (Hooray for starting a non-profit!) I've got plenty of savings, but I'm earning less than I'm spending. And the job sucks, honestly. I've been mostly single (with some serial monogamy in the mix) since becoming single. And my occasional romantic partners keep getting younger. It feel bleak as hell, honestly. My point has nothing to do with my own personal shit-show. It's simply this: (y)our choices, (y)our actions, and (y)our "energy" are only a small part of what led to this situation. Our paths, looking back, are influenced heavily by the terrain through which we wander them. When the terrain helps dictate our paths, a lot of them tend to cross at the same saddle. (Apologies for the back-country hiking metaphor.) Keep wandering, friend. You could have made all your decisions differently. You could have made all of my decisions, the opposite of yours. And we'd still be high-fiving at the same saddle, the low-point, regrouping, on the way to the summit. Cheers, Eric P.S. If you're ever in Southern AZ, give me a shout. I'll buy you some tacos.

side note, one of my friends is having difficulty having a kid.  some of these lines are crazyyy

Date every night.... move home or move to a city with a high male to female ratio. Whatever it takes. I’m 39 now with a newborn and she has filled me with the worlds largest supply of heroin concentrated love. Your friends won’t tell you that because they don’t want to make you feel bad - but stable loving husband and baby will make you love every minute of your existence.

They didn't tell us the peace that you feel when holding a sleeping baby.

I'm 42. I have single female friends of the same age who bitterly regret not having children. I used to attend legal conferences where 50% of the people in the room were single 55 year old female lawyers. Almost none were married and almost none had children. None of them looked like they were particularly happy with life, even though they were probably top 5% income earners.

also this comment lol:

"my fertility is dropping faster than a piano falling out of the sky." According to Galileo's law of motion; all bodies accelerate at the same rate regardless of their size or mass. :)

[kris0ten]

The Truth About Aaron Pathammavong

I’m taking a moment to record the story of my last relationship. For no one in particular. For posterity. It’s been a couple months and I’m finally starting to feel like myself again - going through a breakup can feel like waking up from a coma - but naturally I’m still angry at how selfish and awful this one particular human was after I invested so much in him. Despite all this, I have high hopes for my future and I’m so relieved to be free from lies. This is what happened:

I met Aaron through friends and at first wasn’t terribly impressed beyond the fact that he dressed well. But we connected through Facebook and I saw that he was geeky and excited about a lot of stuff. I wasn’t sure if he was taken because he made this status about how he was going to fly to the east coast to surprise this girl. But months later I commented on his photo and we started talking. He asked me to hang out almost immediately. He said he’d make it “worth my while”.

I liked his earnest confidence. And we hit it off right away. We liked the same stuff, we had a similar sense of humor, good friends in common, and a natural chemistry and attraction. I noticed his impatience right away - he asked me what I was looking for in a guy on our first date (that I wasn’t even sure was a date) - but I thought it was refreshing to be with someone so straightforward and with whom I could be completely honest.

He kept asking me out and he was funny and a really great date planner. I was stunned and frankly intoxicated by how good things could be. Sweet, funny, tall guy with the cool industry job who loved creative, nerdy stuff just like me. On top of that well-dressed, clean, and so loving and generous to everyone around him. I kissed him first, but in most other things during our courtship phase he was the leader. He was so eager, had so much love to give. And falling in love with him was as easy as breathing. So when he asked me to be his girlfriend, I… made him wait 2 weeks. And then said yes.

Being the overthinking, overly cautious, careful, analytical person that I am, I told my roommate “This is too good to be true. There’s gotta be some sort of catch. This has been too easy.” And some of his issues did come out of the woodwork. There was that girl who emailed me out of the blue to alert me that he had been chatting with her on a dating app while also talking to me. I wrote her off as jealous. There were his trust issues from getting cheated on in the past - it made him prone to emotional outbursts. I made sure to create trust and safety and include him in my friendships with guys. When he’d have emotional outbursts, I’d comfort him and calm him and center him. I’d facilitate a discussion about his feelings and a solution for dealing with them and talking about them. And he’d always apologize and ask me for another chance. I thought he was scarred by traumatic things that had happened to him, and that by giving him a healthy healing relationship he’d be okay. Sometimes he was inappropriately generous - like wanting to buy expensive gifts for a friend who has a boyfriend. I’d have to reel him back in. But who can fault someone who just wants to make other people happy? I saw him as this overexcited puppy - a little over the top, but so well-meaning. Then there were the lies. They’d happen randomly about small, stupid things. He said he sold my old computer and he didn’t. He said he bought me a tote bag in Japan and he actually got it in the US (he lied 3x about this). Lied that he’d never borrowed money from his parents, when he had. Lied that he wasn’t talking to his ex, when he was. When I’d catch him lying, I’d confront him. The way I understood it, lying was his way of telling people what he thinks they want to hear in order to keep them around - a symptom of his abandonment issues from his parents’ divorce. So I’d sit him down, explain that lying didn’t make me happy. He apologized, added my fingerprint to his phone as a gesture of transparency, and asked for another chance. And I gave it to him every time. After all, if someone can recognize their flaws and want to work on them, isn’t that enough? His light seemed to shine so much brighter than his darkness. I didn’t realize they weren’t surface flaws from some unfortunate circumstances. They ran much deeper. But we’ll get to that. I took a chance of him, because based on the information I had at the time, it seemed more than worth it.

At the start he would say that what he loved most about me was the way I made him feel. That he could be himself with me. I said I wanted him to love me for me. And it seemed that with some time he did. He said, “I’ve found someone who can love me for who I am, that isn’t a pushover and has opinions of their own. Someone who can enlighten me and bring new things into my life from her experiences in life. Someone who can learn what it means to be loved by me, and wants me. I know there are parts of me that are still broken, and I wish I could fix them all right now for you. But it’s gonna take time, and I’m very happy to know that I have someone like you walking by me every step thus far. You’re a gift, you’re the most precious thing that has entered my life. I’ve learned to love again, and I’m gonna become a stronger and better man for you.” The sincerity always got me. I figured if I had a relationship built on being open and honest with each other, where we were committed to solving anything together, we would be okay. I didn’t know that I didn’t have that.

We hit it off with each other’s families, with each other’s friends. As a Florida transplant, he missed the feeling of family, so I let him into mine and they welcomed him. And after enough talks about stupid lies, I really wanted to trust him. So I stopped checking up on him or asking him for proof. The problems seemed to be fixed. There were less emotional outbursts. Things felt amazing. And then he asked me to move in with him. He was getting kicked out of his place in Santa Monica and wanted to take that next step with me. At first I was extremely resistant - I didn’t want to give up my independence - but after talking and thinking it over I came around to it. I had a lot of fears about it, but he addressed them all. He said we would balance our time and our space, we’d figure out our mix of cleanliness (him) and chaos (me). He said his standards for being clean would be greatly relaxed. He committed to me. He said that marriage, that forever, was in the cards for us and he wanted to take this step to be sure. We even met with my parents to discuss it, and we took the plunge.

All my fears were unwarranted. We got along fantastically, I learned to cook for the both of us regularly, he’d make breakfast on the weekends, I’d shop for supplies, he’d dust and vacuum and do dishes. We had company over and our apartment instantly felt like home. It was a home we made together. Christmas tree and all. We traveled, worked hard, supported each other through difficult situations, watched our favorite movies and tv together, surprised each other, everything. I couldn’t believe this much happiness was possible. Not for one second did I doubt he was the one for me. I thought I was so lucky, because isn’t it rare to feel like you’ve found your 100% match? Most people feel like they have an 85%, and they wonder if they should shoot for that extra 15%. I didn’t. I was so, stupidly sure.

In October he drunkenly declared to me, “I’m gonna engage you so hard”, and "give you the wedding of your dreams”. In that moment I laughed in his face, but it touched my heart anyway.

On New Year’s Eve, after our small get-together at our apartment he said, “I didn’t want to say my real New Years resolution out loud in the group because it felt like too much pressure.” He paused. I waited a bit before prompting. “So what is it?“ "2017… is gonna be the year of the ring.” I froze. Didn’t even dare to breathe. And after a moment spent absorbing his words, I kissed him on the cheek. "Don’t forget to ask my parents first.” Shortly after that we did some ring shopping together - I was clear that there was ZERO rush, but this way we’d know what I like and then I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. He even named his budget and looked at some men’s rings too. At my request, we went to premarital/preengagement counseling - not because anything was wrong, but because I wanted to know what it means to be married, what it takes, and what to look out for.

Around the 18 month mark, the dynamic began to shift a bit - pretty subtly to me. I’d been in a long term relationship before, so I know what that’s like and I know that it’s bound to happen with anybody. I actually kinda like the stability of it. I warned him about it, for what it’s worth. I warned him that the honeymoon period ends. But I also told him that what kicks in after that is beautiful in itself - a love that isn’t just feelings and adrenaline, a love that’s a decision and a commitment to stand by your person even on the days when you don’t really like them that much. So I thought that’s what was happening, and while sometimes I missed the adrenaline of the courting stage, I found comfort in knowing that this guy was here to stay. We didn’t text so much during the day, but it gave us more to talk about at night. He started going to the gym and dinner with his coworkers twice a week and would get back late. I didn’t mind, I thought it gave us a healthy life balance. He cuddled me less and slept with his back turned more. I figured it’s because his arm falls asleep if we cuddle too long. We did a lot more watching tv and staying in together rather than going out, but I figured it’s because life had gotten really busy and what we needed was downtime. Particularly with my ailing grandparents now local, even seeing family was draining. But through all of this, I found comfort in the thought that if anything was bothering him, he’d let me know. If there was a problem, he’d let me know. Because that’s what our relationship was built on. Right? And it wasn’t as if our relationship became a monotonous, loveless “what do you want for dinner” routine. Our texts from the last month of the relationship were full of jokes and love and pet names and generosity and surprises. Offers of massages after stressful days. Compliments and I love you’s.

I don’t know how to start the story of the beginning of the end, because I didn’t see it coming. It probably gestated in his mind for months. For me, there was no warning, no protection, no chance. I guess I’ll start with what happened, and then go into my take on why/how. We were nearing the end of our premarital counseling. In private, he suddenly asked, “What if marriage just isn’t for me?” He said he was afraid of hurting me, of letting down my friends and family. Being my cool, calm, rational self... I didn’t take it personally. I said that it was a good question to ask now rather than later, because marriage is a big decision not to be taken lightly. I figured it was an irrational fear stemming from the failed marriage of his parents. I said he was brave for wanting to dig deeper into that question, and encouraged his idea to talk to the therapist one on one. I asked him if it was the idea of marriage in general that was the problem, or if it was me. He assured me it wasn’t me. We did a last session together - she said we were super compatible and was confident we could tackle anything together. The next week he went to therapy alone. Then he went to a work-related concert. He came home, I made him dinner, and then he tried to break up with me. It wasn’t exactly planned, but it seemed like he couldn’t hold it in anymore - despite the therapist’s explicit instructions not to tell me anything until they met again. He started by talking about his fears again, and I got the sense that they were less irrational fears and more warnings. “Are you trying to break up with me?!” He said nothing. I broke. My life and my future shattered before my eyes. I had no clue this was in the cards. I panicked. “Am I not making you happy?? Is someone else making you happy??” “To the second question, no - not at this point,” he responded calmly. Not at this point?! That’s like saying “Not yet” - and when I called him on that, he said “Oh I didn’t realize I said it like that, I’m so dense.” He asked me to hear him out. He told me he felt like he couldn’t be himself around me anymore, that I was too controlling. He said, “You don’t trust me. Not that I deserve your trust, but that’s the only way I’ll earn it.” That he was too busy trying to make me happy that he’d forgotten what makes him happy. I was shocked to hear this, as it’s the opposite of what he’s always said about me. But I was so sorry - I know I’m not perfect, and I was more than willing to work on my flaws. All he ever had to do was say something, otherwise I’d never know there was a problem. Because I was so willing to try and be better for him, he couldn’t break up with me then and there. He agreed to “work on it” with me.

He left to work the E3 convention and was in a hotel room with his friends for the next few days. He was in touch with me and would check in a couple times a day, but he was rather distant. When I expressed how I was struggling, he didn’t really respond or at least not with much empathy. I was distraught and stopped eating. But as the next few days passed, and I spoke to more people about it, it became clearer and clearer that it wasn’t really me that was the problem. The theory I formed at that point was that maybe his urge to please people - specifically me - had worn him out the point of him shutting down. And even though I never asked him to overextend himself to do things that he thought would please me, maybe he was blaming me in his self-pity, because he felt so drained. I guess that’s fine, but to never say anything and then suddenly say it’s over with no regard to my feelings? An extreme response. The new problem identified by the therapist was… could I be with someone who had the ability to be so incongruent? To say and do one thing, but be thinking another? To sit in premarital counseling and say “I can be myself with Kristen” but actually be thinking “I can’t be myself with Kristen” - could I trust someone like that? I agonized over this. I couldn’t be with someone who wasn’t honest and truthful and communicative - but I could be with someone who wanted to be honest and truthful and communicative. Could he be those things? I thought he was already, but it was suddenly clear he wasn’t.

Then my mom asked me if he had been spending a lot of time with his work friends lately. Yes, he had. “I think someone there makes him feel special.” It hadn’t even struck me as a possibility until that moment. Even though I had asked about it before, I had believed him when he said no. Aaron had been cheated on before, there was no way he could do that to me when he seemed to love me so much. Right? But I snooped his phone for the first time in over a year, and I uncovered so many lies. He had gone to premarital counseling with me and then drove straight to his lunch plans with her and lied to me that it was a group of coworkers. They chose our favorite restaurant and when I jokingly complained, he claimed everyone else wanted to go so he went along with it. Actually, he was the one to get there first and put himself on the waiting list for 2, & suggest they “walk around” afterwards. After he met alone with the therapist, he took her to lunch and then to the concert - the one he had apologized to me multiple times that he couldn’t take me to because he only got one ticket and they were sold out. He sent her photos of the udon place he came to love after I introduced him to it - it was clear they’d been there together before. He referred her to his favorite hair salon and she sent him pictures of her haircut and he showered her with compliments. They were going to wear matching Persona costumes to Anime Expo the weekend I was out of town. I had trusted him so much that I helped him with his costume. When I had expressed interest in wanting to go when I returned, he deflected with “I didn’t get any extra tickets.” Ironically, I had caught him a couple months earlier - he mentioned he went to the gym with her. “Just her?” I called him out on the double standard - I’m super careful not to trigger his trust issues when I hang out with guy friends. I told him it’s not that I don’t trust him… it’s that I don’t trust girls not to flirt with him. Well, I was wrong. It was him I shouldn’t have trusted.

I confronted him immediately. His response was at first defensive (“You blindsided me”), then spiteful (“You just want to win, don’t you?”). He went from denial to admitting that it was cheating - but he still made excuses, like it wasn’t HER but the IDEA of her that he fell for. Then he went straight into self-pity. “I’m a bad person. I’m never going to love, I make people happy at the expense of others, you’re never going to trust me again.” All about him. And he was so “What’s the point” about our relationship that I actually responded to him with comfort and reassurance. Old habits die hard, I guess. I told him he was a good person and he didn’t have to be this way. He said I had no idea how many times he’d lied to me. He said I just wasn’t the right mix of things that he missed from his ex - willingness to fail, openness to new things. (New reasons why it’s me that’s the problem) He said I had cornered him. I said that no matter what path we took from here, it would be painful. I wouldn’t guarantee success but I was willing to try. I convinced him to go to counseling with me, talk things through, and see if there was anything left to save. He said, “Fine” - then changed his phone password and went to bed. It was scary to see a bitter spiteful hopeless version of Aaron - was this what was hiding under his surface?

3 days later, we met with the therapist. He declared that it was all too big to fix, too much to fix. And that he just had the feeling that there’s something better out there for him. I told him that I didn’t want to live a life where trust was so broken. I didn’t want to be with a liar. And so in 2 weeks, my life went from picture perfect to ashes. I went from being excited about my future… to not wanting to continue living at all. Who am I? What do I want? Where will I live? How do I start over?

My educated guess on what happened? I don’t think Aaron has the capacity for lasting love. Love transforms over time, from the adrenaline rush of passion… to the commitment - the decision to be by someone’s side no matter what. There’s an incredible beauty in that kind of love, and I find comfort in it. That’s the kind of love I had for him, but I don’t think he wanted that love. I discovered that the whole time, Aaron’s actions had been true to his character. He is very self-centric. He’s all about what makes him feel good and look good. The tricky part was that his generosity and sweetness towards others were also in large part to make himself feel good - to feel like he was convincing people not to abandon him. And for a long time, acting the part of perfect boyfriend and going above and beyond to please me made him feel and look good. It must have been tiring to keep up the role for so long. I never asked for him to be anything other than himself - I thought he was being genuine. I’m sure to a degree he was. But eventually it didn’t make him happy anymore. But he saw that as me not making him happy anymore. He then tested out the waters with his wandering heart. To see if maybe someone else could give him that adrenaline rush, and make him feel and look good. He lied to me about it so I wouldn’t leave him first, so he could blame me and get away with it. I realize now that I carried the emotional stability of the entire relationship. I thought he was in touch with his emotions just because he had a lot of emotions, but that wasn’t true. He rode the wave of my strength and appreciated it at first because he was so dependent. Then, with time, maybe he saw how much weaker he was than me and resented it. Maybe it made him feel small. He’s ungrateful for all I did to try and carry or lighten his baggage. I thought I fixed him, patched him up to walk and talk like an emotionally intelligent adult with a 401k. They were just band-aids on a broken bone. Once he felt strong and confident and restored, he decided he wanted something “better” than me. He does not see my full value. He complained that I took him for granted, but it was the reverse. I am an incredibly strong human, who at my core values loyalty, honesty, integrity and communication. I am unafraid to face my flaws and work on them. I love fiercely and deeply. I don’t let people in easy, but once I trust you I’ll stand by you to the end. I am talented, funny, and smart. I will make an incredible wife and mother. I know what it takes to be a family.

Aaron will continue to chase the rush of adrenaline he gets from girls’ approval and affection. Only two weeks after the breakup - and after Lisa said she wasn’t interested in him (which was a lie to cover her ass) - he has set up hang outs with two other single girls in his office. I know he’ll keep chasing her, and he’ll see himself as the protagonist of some romantic drama. He’s trying to fill a void that none of them can fill - that even I couldn’t fill. His craving for love and family won’t go away until he faces the deep set issues he has. He cares more for the bells and whistles of attraction than true, quiet love. He is controlled by his fear of abandonment. I honestly kind of pity him. He has a long way to go to find healthy happiness with someone. And now he’s telling people that he just “fell out of love” because that’s the only thing you can say that people can’t argue with. But he’s not my problem anymore. I wanted to show him unconditional love. I made him a better human. He made me happy, but not better. He didn’t care much for helping me be the best version of myself. He instead left me with trust issues and brokenness - all in order to feel the least consequence to himself. He didn’t get away with it. I hope he’s brave enough to face himself - maybe even learn, or change? As for me, I’m going to surround myself with people who are authentic at the core. People who see and love me for who I am. In a way, my life feels fuller than ever now. On to infinitely better things!

[teamwave000]

Seven Steps to a Greener Workplace

Today, as I entered the call mettle where I business at my J.O.B., a poster was posted near the entrance, requesting goal from employees to green up our structure and our practices. Thrilled at the request, I sty to paper, jotting down all the ideas that had been swimming in my rosh just waiting for such an invitation.

Step 1: Employee Education

It's one entity to put a recycling bin in the lunch room, but quite another to apprise employees as to what should go in it and why.

Education on the lane of Going Green is essential. With our dwelling-place at ever-increasing risk, it may seem like we all should know how to reduce waste, conserve intestines and recycle, but, unfortunately, that theory may still be wishful thinking. Many of us just asphalt a few cans in a separate bag under the sink and call it recycling. Or we have replaced a duo illumination bulbs with energy-efficient fluorescents and we call that lessening our duplicate footprint. There is so scads more that we tins and should be doing, but maybe we just don't know enough approx sustainable livelihood practices.

Our enterprises could use a comprehensive educational school on how to become aware of and to instrument lawn practices both at business and at home. Green topics could include recycling basics, determination conservation practices, composting board scraps, consumer choices and a thorough plan of the foundation of the imperative for eco-conscious living. An employer-sponsored class, offered free of charge, would be a boon to those of us who poverty to know more. Taken a step further, a required 15-minute online practice during scheduled hours on lawn practices at occupation would pave the means to clear learning of Company Green-Practice policies.

Step 2: Filtered Water + Reusable Water Bottles

Fortunately, we have a filtered water dispenser, although, it could probably utility an upgrade. That's great! Employees should be made aware that they don't obligation to buy bottled water because it's there. Most bottled water is just filtered spigot water anyway.

Nobody monopoly plain tap water anymore and with good reason. At any given moment, our countryside water can get contaminated by farm waste runoff, chemical or bacterial contamination and additives to prey bacteria in the water that is treated before it comes out of the tap. Can you say, "Yuck, chlorine taste!"?

Bottled water output up to 1.5 million tons of plastic scuffle per year. That plastic requires up to 47 million gallons of oil per year to produce. Even though some plastic bottles are recycled, over 80 percent of plastic bottles are simply thrown away.

But please, make sure the water that goes into the coffee God is also filtered as those of us who mouthful hot beverages would like clean, filtered hot water.

Step 3: Vending Machine Overhaul

Yes, yes, I know. There are no vendors with healthy option to junk food. Why is that? Could it be because we are not requesting, in adequate numbers, that there be something besides oily, fattening, salty, sugary, high-cost, low-nutritional-value snack food in our vending machines? An online occupation for supplier may produce some interesting, healthy options. Organic food is a quickly-growing industry and healthy-snack vending machines are starting to become more widely available.

I say, removed them altogether if vendors won't fund what we poverty and need. Come up with an alternate system to make snack slab available to employees. Good healthy snack choices would be raw vegetables in snack bags, raw, unroasted almonds, walnuts and pecans (no peanuts, please, they contain high levels of mold), soy milk and yogurt, high-quality, organic chips and snack foods with natural sea salt and seasonings.

Step 4: More Potted Plants

There are precious few potted plants in our work areas. Did you know that, even in cities, outdoor shred is cleaner? The wisdom for this is that trees and plants are constantly washing the air. The best shred purifying plants are: Areca and Bamboo palm trees, Rubber plants, Dracaena plants, English Ivy, Ficus, Ali and the Boston Fern. Peace Lilies, Caladium and Spider plants do well indoors with indirect or artificial lighting.

Besides the benefits of bit disinfection which can cut down on air-borne illnesses and lung ailments, office plants tins bring life and cordiality to dull, drab chamber spaces. This evidence improve employee morale and productivity.

Step 5: Composting Bins

Hurray for the vegetable garden we saw next to the structure during the end raising season! Now, where's the greenhouse? And who gets to portion in the produce?

A great resources to get employees involved in the local backyard growing project would be to provide a compost basket for food scraps. Vegetable trimmings, dinners scrap and cafes basis all go into this bin. A lidded step-can lined with special compostable pants and placed next to the junk and recycling box would occupation well. The compost box can be emptied regularly into the compost slope outside or special, aerated, composting box in the (new) greenhouse. Add a few worms and maybe some leaf clippings and in a few months the compost tins be added to the garden. This is a great means cut down on the commercial fertilizer while creating a sustainable-living practice.

Composting makes use of valuable nutrients in foods to produce nutrient rich manure and create organic, nutrient-dense vegetables. It also reduces the amount of bit that goes into the rubbish and out of the trash disposal. Food scuffle from rubbish disposals is screened out of the water and eventually goes into the landfill, using more of our precious water appliances to wash it down the pipes and creating climate-threatening methane.

An motive to employees is to have a aperture to participate in the garden not only by contributing to the compost but by sharing in the planting, weeding, and harvesting. This liveliness also contributes to personal awareness of the benefits of home-grown vegetable gardening, a healthful and eco-conscious practice.

Step 6: Encourage Alternative Methods of Transportation

It may be difficult to device alternatives to driving during slower times of the year because of work reduction and scheduling. During ben business times, though, carpooling sign-up food could be a great funds to cut down on fuel consumption and costs. Those that live near one another tins see who has signed up with the same scheduled hours and portion a ride to work. Those that live close to the center could even bike or walk to employment on (our few) good weather days.

Creating more Home Agents would also decrease employee fuel intake and lighten that footstep even further. Many employees ambition 40, 50 or even 60 miles a day round-trip. That's a lot of emissions.

Step 7: Implement a Green Team

Many companionship across the dirt are supplying "Green Teams" whose positions description includes configuration sure the Steps outlined above are put into practice. They could also devise intestines efficient and ecologically sound programs on an ongoing basis, write articles for the employee newsletter and retaining everyone on their lawn toes. The Green Team's payment tins probably be covered by a rule tax incentive program or grant, a nice win-win situation.

These Seven Steps to a Greener Workplace, when added together, will greatly supplement employee understanding and partaking in lawn practices. This, in turn, will lead to lawn practices at home. The enterprises testament also be working toward pruning the collective coal footstep of our buildings [ https://teamwave.com/pipedrive-alternative ], our pole and our staff's families. It's great to work for a firm that cares and takes the time to implement eco-conscious practices leading to happier workers and greener communities.

[ecotone99]

[RF] Lovebug

LOVEBUG by Brandon Haffner

I’d been huffing model airplane glue for two years before I met Beef Gilbert, but he was the first person to make me feel stupid for it. The few friends I had couldn’t be counted on to look out for me; they could hardly look out for themselves. Those poor teachers at Woodland Acres Middle had bigger messes to clean up. And Mama—she was clueless. Too busy watching Golden Girls or The Price is Right or The Twilight Zone—didn’t matter what it was as long as it buzzed bright on that box of hers—and I couldn’t blame her, because Pops died in a freak accident when I was six, so she was all alone with me. This was another thing drew me and Beef together. His pops was dead, too.

By all accounts, Beef Gilbert was a maniac. He showed up at our school in August of 1987 and soon became known as “the kid who cut that cow open.” Like, if you were to see him for the first time, from afar, you might nudge the person next to you and ask: “Hey—is that the kid who cut that cow open?” Hence the name: Beef.

Around school he roamed the halls alone. Ate lunch by himself at one of those corner tables by the stage where the lighting wasn’t very good. He liked to remind people, loudly and half-grinning, that his mom worked at Wal-Mart and that he lived in a trailer park south of Jacinto City. Word spread that you could get him to do almost anything if you paid him enough.

I was on my second detention when I met him. Early September, the last breaths of stinky, sweltering Texas summer pouring in through broken window seals and cracked concrete. The air conditioning couldn’t keep up. During every lesson—x and y and z axes, power paragraphs, Ulysses S. Grant—we were melting.

I was fourteen and the only girl in detention that day. He was fifteen—he’d been held back a year at his old Houston school—tall for his age, slick blond hair, sweaty, and fat. His breath was a gargling wheeze. His too-big Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt sagged off him. His square, thick-rimmed glasses were the kind you’d find on a ninety-year-old man.

He sat surrounded by empty seats. The other kids huddled in the corners to sleep or draw or read comics. Beef was flipping through a porno mag. No effort to disguise the naked woman on the cover. I glanced at our detention monitor, Mr. Briggs, who was young and nervous, and my guess was, being a fresh fish, he didn’t want to bother with this notorious big boy.

If you asked me back then why I, a somewhat self-respecting girl standing on a fragile reputation built from hard-edged coolness and occasional witty jabs, sat next to Beef Gilbert that day, I would have shrugged and said I was bored out of my skull. Which wouldn’t have been a lie—I thought, as eighth graders do, I’d seen the whole world.

“Heard you cut up a cow or something, over the summer,” I said. “Why’d you do it?”

He put down his porno mag and glared at me. He wore dirty gray sweatpants and I saw under the desk he had a little hard-on.

“Me and that cow had a political disagreement,” he said.

I laughed. Then he laughed.

“Poor cow,” I said, joking now. “Was it still alive when you did it?”

“Check this out,” he said. He flipped the magazine around so I could see. On the page was a naked Asian woman on her hands and knees.

“I see the appeal,” I said.

“I doubt it,” he said. “They even got smut where you’re from?”

“Where I’m from? I live four blocks from City Hall,” I said. “I’m not some rich girl.” I thought about my bedroom the size of a janitor’s closet. Mama’s rusty Cavalier I could hear coming three blocks away. Frozen corn dogs, frozen fish sticks, canned noodle soup—our dinner rotation. Bedroom air conditioner that rattled and hummed all night.

But secretly I was flattered. All any fourteen-year-old girl stuck wearing off-brand clothes and cheap hand-me-down jewelry can hope for is that her sweet style and perfect makeup fool someone into thinking she doesn’t live in a run-down duplex.

Flatly, quickly, as if he’d said it before, he said: “Yeah, you’re not rich, and I’m not a lard-ass.”

I don’t know what it was like at other schools, but at Woodland Acres, teachers used detention on kids the same way I use duct tape to fix broken stuff around my apartment. Skipped a class? Detention. Late to school? Detention. Broke into a locker, tore down a poster, stole a kid’s pack of gum? Detention. Made fun of or disagreed with a teacher? Hit a girl, kissed a boy, spit a spitball, made a paper airplane out of a math test? Brought booze or weed or the wrong kind of glue to school? Didn’t stand up during the Pledge of Allegiance? Detention. Hell, if your parents called enough times to whine about your grades, you could go to detention for getting a D. Which meant some kids, God bless them, got detention just for being dumb.

With Beef and all his strangeness waiting for me, detention became something I looked forward to. Like the bell ringing at 3:15 every day, I could count on him being in that room when I got there. Same porno mag, same circle of empty chairs around him, the other kids keeping clear of his body odor.

“What’re you in for?” we started to ask each other, like new cellmates.

And he’d tell me the story, usually something like, “I threw my apple core at Miss Gracie. Ryan Bishop gave me fifty cents to do it.”

And when he asked what I was in for, I’d say, “Same as always.”

And he’d shake his head and say, “Stuff’ll fry your brain,” followed by, “Check out these titties.”

And I’d say, “You know I see titties every day. In the mirror.”

And he’d peer down at my chest, and when Mr. Briggs wasn’t looking I’d pull my shirt up to my collarbone, just for half a second, to show off how good they looked in my pink bra.

This, more or less, became our routine.

One afternoon in detention, I wrote Beef a note. Mr. Briggs had silenced our conversation with an urgent, pleading glance, and in the silence I stared at my notebook. Usually I would have drawn some crazy thing—a dragon with broken wings, an upside-down truck on fire—but that afternoon I was feeling chatty.

I wrote down some jokes about Mr. Briggs. Scratched some doodles of Mr. Briggs with various classroom objects up his asshole. I added, as a P.S., a suggestion that if Beef were to wear some clothes that fit him, clothes that maybe had been washed recently, he might look better. Not good, not handsome. Just better.

I passed it to him, and he gave me this look: anxious, embarrassed, confused. He seemed more shocked by this piece of paper than by my bra flashes. As he stuffed my neatly folded note into his sweatpants pocket, he coughed and asked, “You going to Ghoulish?”

The Ghoulish Gathering was the Woodland Acres Halloween Dance, the kind of mid-year, low-budget, cafeteria event that attracted only the school’s most desperate and dorky.

“No way in hell,” I said.

“Me neither,” he said.

I continued to write Beef little notes and to receive little notes from him. When he started calling me Lovebug—never in person, only on paper—I returned the affection.

“Dear Lovebug,” we’d start off.

His drawings were faceless stick figures with enormous penises, or terribly drawn motorcycles, or symbols of sports teams. Sometimes he’d draw abstractions, lines and curves and dark spots that had me searching for some deeper meaning. His letters were short and disjointed.

Dear Lovebug, one of them read. I ate like no food this week and am still fat. The universe is unfair. Please stop sniffing glue. It’s gross. One of these days you got to tell me how your dad died.

That was it. No sign off.

About a year before I met Beef, my best friend Mia—who was the type of girl who said “fuck” for no reason and dyed her hair a wacky new color each month and wore rings on all her fingers—walked me over to the gas station one afternoon to buy me my first tube. It felt weird in my hand, hard like a rock, only I could push the sides in a little. Testors brand. “Works the fastest,” Mia said. That same summer she showed me how to stuff tissues into my bra in a way that didn’t look lumpy and I showed her how to cut little slits into the front of her jeans to show off some thigh. “You bad little tease,” I said when she put the jeans back on.

At school I huffed straight from the tube. But at home I used the bag. To get the best high, you squeeze half an inch into the bottom. Place the bag over your mouth and nose. Inhale, exhale. Repeat, repeat, repeat, each breath deeper than the last, and soon you’re riding an escalator up a grassy, flowery hill, above the clouds, and if you’re lucky, it’ll be sunny up there, and if you’re luckier still, you’ll meet Jesus Christ. Boredom was never so beautiful.

Beautiful for about twenty good minutes anyway, and then I’d start finding myself in the bathroom wiping blood from my nose with toilet paper. I started buying tissues at the gas station every time I reloaded my supply.

I started looking for Beef in the halls between classes. One time, I stopped by his locker and asked him about the pictures taped to his door. Mostly cutouts of women in bikinis. A few photos of his Rottweiler.

“His name’s Ass Wipe,” Beef told me.

“Fitting,” I said. “He looks like shit.”

“And this one’s my dead dad.” He pointed to a young-looking, physically fit bald man wearing a collared shirt, clean white dress pants, and shiny dress shoes. He was sitting in a rocking chair, smiling at the camera.

“How’d he die?” I asked.

“Overdose,” Beef said, laughing and wheezing, then coughing. He looked at the photo and pressed his index finger against his dad’s head. “Yeah. He was a dumb bastard.”

And another time by his locker we were playing rock-paper-scissors to see who’d get the last piece of gum in the pack we’d pooled money to buy from Patrick Hutchins last detention. Beef threw paper and I threw rock, so he covered my little fist with his big hand, then said, “I don’t want it,” and handed me the last piece.

“Thanks Beef,” I said, popping the blue stick in my mouth. “What’s your real name anyway?” I asked.

“Dennis,” he said. I’d expected a war to draw it out of him, but he didn’t hesitate. “Dad used to call me Denny.”

“Denny? Like that breakfast place?”

“I told you he was a dumb bastard.”

I was only trying to play along when I said, “Well at least someone’s continuing his legacy.” I even elbowed him in the shoulder and winked big and hard to exaggerate the sarcasm, but I knew as soon as I said it I’d cut some place in him that was dark and bruised.

“Whatever. At least I don’t wear kiddie clothes and a gazillion layers of makeup,” he said, punching his locker shut. “You look like one of those creepy five-year-old pageant girls.”

Normally his lines about my dress weren’t so vicious. More like failed attempts at flattery. This particular year I wore a lot of pink. Pink fingernails, pink T-shirts, pink bobby pins, pink shorts. I even owned a pink watch. I didn’t wear all this at once, of course. Tasteful pink. “Your highlighter shorts are blinding me,” he’d say, or “My little cousin has a Barbie in that same outfit.” He’d gurgle and wheeze and laugh at his own joke and I’d roll my eyes.

But when he crossed the line—“I bet you got a whole dresser full of pretty pink panties,” for instance—I’d make a point, in front of whoever was watching, to demean him.

I’d say, loudly enough for a few bystanders to hear, “Give you two bucks to fall down these stairs,” or “Give you a buck fifty to slap Mr. Briggs on the ass,” or “How about you full-on sprint to each of your classes today, Beef? A quarter per class.”

Sometimes Mia was with us. She would help me find loose change to give him.

“He’s hilarious,” she’d say. “He’s something else.”

He’d do whatever I asked. Every time. Didn’t matter how many people were around to laugh at him, or how much detention it landed him, or how bad his coughing got afterward. He took the money up front. Usually he smiled about it, his dorky sad smile beneath those gigantic glasses. The kid was a walking cartoon character and he knew it. A clown. Almost everyone seemed amused by his act.

Sure, I stood and watched with the rest as he performed. But if anyone had glanced in my direction, they’d have seen how I felt. More than once I caught myself pressing my hands together and shifting my weight from foot to foot, hoping to God the poor idiot didn’t hurt himself.

Now that I think back, it wasn’t nervousness or even guilt. It was much more. It was that sick, stabbing pain in my gut, almost how you feel when your lover betrays you. Disgust. Disbelief. It was that he’d truly do anything. It was that, after a long day of shit grades and nasty looks from teachers and throbbing glue headaches, sometimes all I wanted was detention, his big dorky eyes looking at me and his sweaty notes making me laugh. It was fear that this poor fat boy loved me. It was fear that I could love him.

Tuesday after Labor Day I sat on one of those concrete benches overlooking the school’s brown front lawn, waiting for Mama to pick me up. She was late as always.

I pulled out my notepad and drew gargoyles and princesses. When detention got out, Beef walked through the glass doors and sat next to me.

“You got any pot?” I asked. “I been thinking about trying pot.”

“You know I don’t do any of that shit,” he said. He shook his head for emphasis.

“Just fooling with you,” I said. “Grump.”

We sat. An airplane ripped the sky open. Someone far away pumped some life into a lawnmower.

“When I first heard about you I thought you’d be some tough guy,” I said. “Some brute. A name like Beef. Beef who killed a cow. But I bet you’ve never even seen a cow in your life.”

No response.

“Sorry I missed you today,” I said. “What were you in for this time?”

“Wasn’t my fault. Just some assholes being assholes,” he said. “Like always.”

“You gonna beat them up?”

“Shut up, Emma.”

“I bet you never hurt anything ever.”

“How much?” he asked.

I looked at him.

“How much you want to bet I’ve never hurt a thing? For real,” he said. He was wheezing again.

“You should see a doctor about that chest problem you got,” I said. “Because that shit ain’t normal.”

“How much?” he asked.

“A buck,” I said. “Show me what you got.”

We went behind the school and into the woods, down a long hill on a foot-worn pathway, over a wooden bridge, and across a creek littered with beer cans and cigarette butts and candy wrappers. I’d never been back here before. After twenty minutes, the woods opened up into a green-yellow pasture, a few sun rays spotlighting the place, including, in the distance, an old blue farm house and its grey barn, and, just beyond the barn, the highway coming into the city.

Beef grabbed hold of the low wooden fence in front of us. Just a few feet away, like a joke, was a “No Trespassing” sign, accompanied by a bigger, handwritten sign that read, “I Will Shoot You.”

“Seems taller than it was before,” Beef said, running his hand along the fence. He lifted a heavy pale leg over the wood, made a grunting noise, and landed clumsily on the other side.

Then I climbed over. He watched me.

“Even I’ve got more grace than you,” he said.

I punched his arm. He pretended it hurt.

I followed him away from the house and down near an algae-covered pond. Mosquitoes swarmed.

“Here it is,” he said, pointing down at our feet.

It was so much a part of the earth it was hardly noticeable. But yes, indeed, there was a dead cow, or a pile of dried-up cow parts I should say, in fact not recognizable as a cow at all, except that I knew what I was looking for. There were no flies because the flesh was gone. Just a few bones, dead grass, and a big dark-colored spot on the ground.

“Tell me the truth, Beef,” I said. “You did this?”

“Fuck yeah, I did,” he said. “I’m a murderous cow-killing machine.”

“A true psychopath,” I said.

“A raging psychopath,” he corrected.

“Twenty bucks says you found this cow dead of natural causes.”

He kicked the small pile of fragile bones. Dirt and bone fragments everywhere. The mosquitoes were giving us both hell, and he swatted at them crazily, like each bite was a surprise.

“I like this dance you’re rocking,” I said.

Then he grabbed my wrist hard and he pulled me away from the bones. He led me back to the fence. My wrist started to hurt and my fingers were going numb, so I yanked my arm away.

“What’s your problem?” I asked.

“You don’t have to insult me every second, you know,” he said.

We walked through the woods without talking. The crunching leaves. His labored breathing.

When we got back, Mama’s brown station wagon was waiting for me.

“Want Mama to give you a ride home?” I asked him.

But he ignored me. He sat on the bench, took his glasses off, and set his chin in his hands as we drove away and left him there to wait for whoever.

I spent a lot of time in my room that year. I listened to Blondie and The Clash. I drew two-headed unicorns and tornadoes uprooting neighborhoods and man-eating plants. I threw darts at an old dartboard I’d found in a Pizza Hut trash bin when Mia and me were wandering around town one night looking for stuff to do.

And I talked to Beef on the phone. He was sometimes funny, sometimes stupid, sometimes sweet. But always surprising.

I’d ask, “What are you doing right now?”

And he’d say, “Taking a dump,” or “Training for the Olympics,” or “Waiting for you to come over one of these days so I don’t have to play checkers by myself anymore.”

And I’d make suggestions for the future, like the time I said, “Once you get your license we should go to the Cinemark. You like horror movies?”

“Nah,” he said. “My life’s a horror movie.”

I laughed. One morning later that week, though, I got the sense of what he meant. I found a note in my locker he must have slipped through the little vent:

Dear Lovebug,

Chase who is my asshole step-brother and me and my cousins went to that pond last summer and they gave me a knife and said stab that cow. They didn’t pay me so I said no way. But they got this syringe and stuck me with it. They pushed me down so I wouldn’t get away. They are doing all sorts of drugs all the time with my stepdad so I might have gotten some drugs in me. They said stab that cow or we’ll keep on sticking you. I didn’t do it on purpose.

It could have been my imagination, but that note changed us. I mean, we never spoke about it. I made sure of that. In fact I made sure the word “cow” didn’t even come up in conversation. But this secret, twisted story had an effect. We joked less. Maybe we were nicer to each other. At least until those miserable weeks after Ghoulish.

One late night on the phone, after Mama’d gone to bed, I told Beef how Pops died in a factory fire, and that I hardly had any memory of him, just a flash here or there from some tiny corner of my brain, his image fading more each year.

Beef asked, “Was your dad nice to your mom?”

I was on my knees on my bedroom floor and prepping a huffing bag. I brought the bag to my face and breathed in, breathed out, in, out, in, out.

“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t remember what you’re doing?”

“If Pops was nice to Mama. Too young I guess.”

Sometimes our conversations went so deep into the night we’d start to nod off, phones pressed to our ears. One of those nights, I was in bed with my eyes closed and the lights off. A long stretch of silence went by. Beef was breathing slowly, loudly.

“You awake?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Me neither.” I said.

The rumbling air conditioner switched off. The crickets in the yard hissed and pulsed. A streetlamp buzzed.

“Why don’t you like your mom?” he asked. “I want to meet her. Decide for myself.”

“She’s lazy. Sits around the house all day. Gets her welfare check and goes straight to happy hour. And she hates me,” I said. “She hates everything. She’ll hate you too.”

“Well your taste in music is pretty terrible. And your drawings. If I were your mom I’d be disturbed by those drawings.”

“I don’t even think she knows I draw.”

“I’d send you to an institution.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if she did. Get me out of the house.”

“You should show her. Draw something not so gross. I’m being serious. You know, guilt her into putting it on the fridge and shit.”

“It’s a little late for the fridge. I’m not six years old.”

My ear was getting hot, so I switched the phone to the other side.

“She a druggie?” he asked.

I almost laughed. “Mama’s not cool enough to do drugs.”

A long silence.

“Did your pops?”

“Did Pops what?”

“Do drugs,” he said. “You know. Crack. Pills. Meth. Weed. Glue.”

“He drank a little,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I tried to picture Pops. Maybe it wasn’t my memory—maybe it was Mama’s complaining for years after he died that created the picture—but with my eyes closed, my brain all afloat on glue air, I could see Pops with a glass of brown liquor on ice, sitting on the orange couch in the living room, watching MAS*H. That couch was the one our old cat, Juniper, used to piss on, the one Mama and me took sledgehammers to a few years ago. Juniper—I’d almost forgotten about him. Raggedy gray hairball, always hissing at everybody but Mama. If you wanted to find him, you’d just look under that couch—two narrow yellow eyes and a low growl would be there to greet you. Mama loved that cat. Saw herself in him a little bit, I think. Not long after we tossed out the couch pieces, I came home from school to find Mama crying on the floor holding a limp, lifeless Juniper. I can’t say I was too upset about that cat’s passing, but for Mama it was almost like Pops had died all over again.

“Emma?” Beef said. I realized he’d said it several times. I was almost asleep.

“Oh,” I said.

“Goodnight.”

Two weeks before Ghoulish, a tall boy from my lunch table asked me to go with him and I said yes. In detention one afternoon I shamelessly told Beef all about him, hoping, I think, to see the hurt on his face. The boy’s name was Alfredo, he was from San Antonio, and he said corny shit like, “You’ve got a great Emma-gination,” his eyes were starry green, and his hands were that perfect blend of soft but firm on my hip in the lingering moment after a goodbye hug in the hall when he didn’t want to let go just yet.

“Sounds like an asshole,” was all Beef could muster.

But a week later Alfredo either forgot about me or changed his mind because he asked out none other than my Mia, and when I told Beef, he said, “Your Mia? Mia Mullins?” and I said, “That’s the one,” and Beef said, “What’s he thinking? She’s got more acne than you and me combined.”

As we parted ways, surprised to find my hand shaking a little, I handed him a note, which went something like this:

Dear Lovebug,

Have a hot date yet for Ghoulish? If not, want to go with? Don’t get ideas.

He handed me his response in detention that afternoon:

Dear Lovebug,

Hope you break dance cause I’m a champ.

That week on the phone, all he wanted to talk about was the dance. He said things like, “I’m going to bring a bag of sugar in case they play ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me,’” and “I bet you’ve slow danced with like a hundred guys.”

“I want to cut out like halfway through,” I said. And I told him I’d pictured the two of us talking in a corner, not dancing at all, maybe heading back to my room to listen to music and draw and talk, like Mia and me used to do.

“Your mama won’t mind?”

“Have you been listening to anything I’ve ever told you? Mama doesn’t mind anything.”

“Okay, but we gotta slow dance once,” he said.

“No promises.”

“Number one hundred and one, here I come.”

But of course we didn’t get that far.

Mama left me $20 a week. Every Monday morning there was one bill on the kitchen counter. Given that Mama had no job, I always wondered where this money came from. I found out later it came out of Pop’s life insurance. The poor man was funding my glue habit from the grave.

Back in 1987 you could buy a lot with $20. Four or five movie tickets. A new shirt. A Sony Discman. A decent dinner out. A shitload of ice cream.

Or a dozen eight-ounce tubes of Testors.

But the day before Ghoulish, when it came time to resupply, I found the Walgreens completely out. So instead I picked up some paint thinner—I thought I’d heard about one of Mia’s friends using it. Came in a plastic bottle a little taller and narrower than a soda can. I walked home and ran up to my room and stuffed the bottle under my mattress.

Then I went downstairs for dinner; I remember this dinner well. For some reason Mama’d cooked lemon pepper chicken and some type of stuffed pasta with actual dinnerware, not the plastic plates I usually took up to my room. It was the most impressive meal I’d eaten in months. Before sitting down, I asked:

“What’s the special occasion?”

I got this nasty look from her and some response like:

“Does it need to be a special occasion if I want to cook some damn chicken for us?”

“What’s up your ass?”

“If you’re gonna talk like that don’t talk at all.”

“Fine with me.”

We ate the delicious meal in dead silence, save for the smacking of our lips and the clinking of our forks against our plates. When I finished, I went upstairs, locked the door, cranked “Death or Glory,” stuck my hand under my mattress, pulled out the now-warm can, shook it, heard my liquid destiny sloshing around, and took, as they say, the plunge.

Dear Lovebug,

When I wake up to get ready for school in the morning and put my clothes on, I sometimes pretend my clothes are ancient armor. Many, many girls for hundreds or thousands of years have worn this same armor and now it’s mine. It’s all rusty and it’s got some holes because you know it’s so old, but for the most part it’s good trustworthy armor. Now that I write it down this seems dumb. But even though it’s pretend and I know I’m too old to pretend, the armor has got me through lots of mornings when I just didn’t want to go to school. You know what I mean? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Anyway I’m writing this note at the hospital so I won’t be at the Ghoulish and you’re probably not going to get this note in time but I thought I should write it anyway.

Yes, I’m in the hospital for the reason you’re thinking.

I guess that’s all.

Emma

At the bottom of that note was a drawing of my own face, frowning, a tear streaming down one cheek. The finished product—eyes way too big and wide, too many half-erased sketch lines around the edges, crazy hair, pointy nose—looked nothing like me.

As any idiot could tell you, huffing paint thinner isn’t anything like huffing Testors. Less like riding an escalator up through clouds than like riding a train that’s on fire and the cabins are full of smoke and the whole thing is sailing off the tracks down into a ravine and you know it’s just a matter of time before you hit bottom and blow up into smithereens, but until then your stomach is flipping and churning and you feel weightless and terrified at the same time as the whole world rushes past you at terminal velocity or whatever.

The instant I unscrewed the cap, my face a good foot from the bottle, the fumes filled my room. The smell swept me back to those lighter-fluid-drenched junk heaps in the woods. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I stuck my nose into the opening and took a huge sniff, followed immediately by another huge sniff, figuring I could skip a step—the bottle acted like a bag by way of concentrating and trapping those wonderful toxic fumes.

Who knows why we do these things to ourselves?

Imagine using two mortars to mash up some glass and habanero peppers, then jamming those glass-and-habanero-caked mortars up your nostrils. Even after I yanked my face from the bottle, grabbed a tissue, and began blowing, and even after those bloody chunks started falling out of my nose more thickly and rapidly than the tissues could contain—my khaki shorts and pink carpet were soaked with red by the time I passed out—the inside of my nose burned so bad I was crying.

If my life was a movie, I’d have woken up in the hospital bed. Peaceful and rested, surrounded by “get well” balloons and some doctor giving me a solemn but hopeful look. No such luck for 14-year-old Emma. No, I woke up in the ambulance, where the pain in my nose was still intense and burning. No way my nose survives this, I was thinking. It’s gonna have to be surgically removed. I’m gonna be noseless forever and they’re gonna make fun of me worse than they make fun of Beef.

Added to my nose pain was this unbearable headache, as if I’d banged my head on the ambulance door as they stuffed me in. I couldn’t stop coughing. My heart raged against my chest like a deranged gorilla. I was surrounded by fast-talking, stressed out, overworked strangers.

Other things I remember: Real bumpy ride. Blurry vision. Lights hurt my eyes. Cold as a freezer. Why was the air conditioning up so high in there? Where was Mama? Wet blood slowly drying on my face. Tried to open my mouth to ask for a Tylenol or something, but nothing came out but another painful cough. And no eye contact with the strangers. Not the whole way to the hospital. What I can’t tell you is if I was avoiding their eyes or they were avoiding mine.

After they got me all fixed up with tubes and oxygen, Mama walked in the room. There was no window, and everything was beige. She sat in the chair next to my bed.

Mama folded her hands in her lap and said, “Emma.” She’d been crying. It was obvious. Puffy red cheeks, wet eyes, that permanent frown of hers. Her half-gray,-half-black hair was a mess.

She put her hand on my hand. I was too weak to move it away.

I expected Mama to get up and leave after an hour or so. But I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was morning, and she was still there, asleep in the chair, her head leaning awkwardly on the beige wall. Later on it would dawn on me that this was the longest stretch of time we’d been in the same room together since Pops was alive.

Mama went and got me breakfast from the hospital cafeteria and came back and we ate together in silence.

“Are you depressed?” Mama said when we finished. When our eyes met I realized she’d been spending most of breakfast working up the courage to ask.

“No, Mama.”

“Did some boy hurt you?”

I laughed, then coughed.

“Well then what?” she asked, impatient. “What is it? People don’t do this for no reason.”

“Sure they do,” I said.

The nurse came in, drew my blood, and left.

“She seems nice,” Mama said.

“I don’t like her,” I said, which was a lie.

Mama stayed with me for the next day and a half.

“It’s no trouble,” she kept saying, as if I’d told her she was outdoing herself. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”

They rolled in a TV and we watched whatever Mama wanted to watch. I went in and out of sleep. The doctor told me I was a “perfectly healthy young woman,” but that I wouldn’t be this way much longer if I kept “poisoning my body,” and “brain damage” and “heart damage” and “sudden death” and this and that, and he handed me a pamphlet with the words “FREEDOM FROM ADDICTION” written at the top in all caps, which I threw in the garbage outside the hospital, and which Mama fished out of the garbage and clutched in her lap with her non-steering hand during the drive home and then studied at the kitchen table through her reading glasses for like a gazillion billion hours.

I must have called Beef fifteen times that weekend. On Sunday night, his mama answered the phone. She told me Beef—she called him Dennis—was resting up and wouldn’t be at school for a bit. Then Ass Wipe started barking and she said she had to go.

Mia told me the story at lunch that Monday. Turns out Alfredo had showed up to Ghoulish drunk. Slurring his words, not walking straight. Beef was there searching the crowd for me in his I’m-sure-ridiculous-looking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume. He found Mia and asked her where I was, and Alfredo, who was standing right there, asked Beef how he could be so stupid as to think I’d actually dance with him. Acted like I’d set the whole thing up as a gag. So Beef plopped down at one of the tables behind the crowd and just sat there like a lonely egg. But when Mia went to the bathroom, Alfredo tracked Beef down, acted all remorseful, told Beef I wasn’t worth getting all depressed over, that I wasn’t even that good a kisser—which is a lie—then offered Beef fifty bucks to sneak behind the cafeteria stage curtain, climb the spiral staircase to the catwalk above the stage, and jump off while hollering, “Cowabunga dude!”

So he did.

The stage exploded as if Beef were a human bomb. Broke his left leg and nearly his hip. But the worst part: this little shard of wood came up and stuck Beef right in the eye. Blood was everywhere. As Mia put it, “Everyone was running around screaming like it was the end of days.”

Monday of next week I finally saw him during my break between Spanish II and study hall. He walked toward me down the hallway on crutches, a black eye patch over his left eye. If I hadn’t heard the story first, I would have figured somebody was paying him a buck or two to act like a disabled pirate. When he came close enough to hear me, I took a risk and made a joke of it. I said, “Ahoy there!” But he didn’t respond. Didn’t even crack a tiny grin. Instead, from his right eye, he shot me this wild glare, kind of like the glare a horse—or a cow—gives you when you walk too close to the fence. Like they’re scared and pissed at the same time.

Then Beef lifted the patch to reveal a mess of purple and black flesh.

“Give me a dollar,” he said, “and I’ll let you touch it.”

I stood there like a dope.

“People been handing me money all day to put their fingers in my eye socket,” he said. He reset the patch. “Some people are so disgusting. Wouldn’t you say, Lovebug?”

I didn’t agree or disagree. I dug around in my rotten brain but the words were buried too deep. And after a few awful seconds, he limped off into the crowd.

At home that evening, in my bedroom, my paint thinner was nowhere to be found. My bed was made, too. And the next Monday morning, there was no $20 bill on the kitchen counter.

Weeks went by. I wound up in detention less and less often. The sweltering summer heat was replaced by breezy windbreaker weather. Beef and I still talked sometimes, in the halls. Not like before, but little stuff, like, “Does Mr. Briggs still pretend those ladies in your magazine aren’t naked?” and “Your mama got a new boyfriend yet?” Stuff like that. Then one day he told me he was moving to Louisiana over winter break to go live with his grandpa. Set to go to some high school in Baton Rouge. He’d already been out to visit.

“Best part is, everyone’s a lard-ass out there,” he said. “Even lard-assier than me. For real. I’m gonna be the hot jock.”

“The Hot Jock Cyclops of Baton Rouge.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

His mama’d had a heart attack or something, he said. Hence the move.

Christmas Eve. In my bedroom. Beef had been gone a week. “Train in Vain” blasting on my stereo. I was wrapping a present, believe it or not, for Mama. A pencil drawing of nothing special. A river, flowing down a canyon, and in the middle of it, this big zig-zaggy tree emerging from the water, branches reaching up toward the sky. It was pretty bad even by my standards—never was much of a nature drawer. Figured I might as well give it away. Plus once I’d finished and stepped back from it, that crazy tree kind of reminded me of her. Weather-beaten and old and strange. The type of tree all the tourists would come to see and snap pictures of while asking impossible-to-answer questions like, “How the hell did it get in the middle of the river in the first place?” and “Why hasn’t it fallen down after all these years?”

When she opened it on Christmas morning she cried so many tears it was like God had opened a bottle of champagne all over our living room. She gave me a hug—our first hug in I don’t know how long—and thanked me over and over. It was a little excessive.

After presents, we sat on the couch. She held my hand while her terrible Christmas music played in the background and we sipped the lukewarm hot chocolate she’d made. As she stared out the living room window—where there was nothing but cold, frosted lawn and a deserted street—she had this odd little smile. Her face was still wet. After a few minutes I cleared my throat, and she stood up and asked if I’d like her to reheat the rest of the hot chocolate. From her eyes I understood she wanted me to say yes.

I thought of a thousand smart responses. “Sure, nothing more delicious than chocolate water garnished with powder clumps,” or “But wouldn’t reheating mean it was once heated?” But when I practiced them in my head, none of my one-liners was the clever little needle I wanted. On this quiet Christmas morning, everything I thought to say was a jackhammer, a chainsaw, a blowtorch. So I gave it up.

Inhale, exhale. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

“Sure, Mama,” I said, handing her my empty pink mug.

Published on May 9, 2019

submitted by /u/pottsofgold [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2Nyg8en

[fictionpractice]

Project 1, chapter 1

A lot of things happened during these few months. I don’t think I can process all this on my own. So I’m writing this down. Maybe this will help.

Let’s start at the beginning of all this crap.

My name is Cassandra Pinewolf. I’m 16 years old and before this whole thing started, I was a Junior at Lowwood High School. I lived in a average-sized apartment near  Downtown Los Angeles with my family of four: Mom, Dad, me, and Dean. I was pretty happy with my life, and I think my family was too.

Dad - his name was Andrew - worked as a researcher in a Corning laboratory. His specialty was chemistry, and with his help, the laboratory was able to manufacture a new, more advanced kind of optical cable. Cornell earned millions of dollars, and Dad was given a promotion. That was three years ago.

Dad was a great guy. He was always busy, sometimes even rushing to the laboratory in the middle of the night, but he never was too busy for us. whatever he was doing, if I approached him with a question, he would try his best to give the best answer. If Dean wanted to go to a volleyball game, Dad would gruffly tell Dean to study more, but would secretly buy tickets. And he really loved Mom. During all 16 years of my life, I had never seen a full-blown fight between the two of them.

Mom’s name was Amy, Amy Stuart. She and Dad were together since they were studying in university. Her hair always smelled like it was dipped in really good shampoo, which made me kind of offended, because I could never get my hair to smell like that no matter how much shampoo I used.

Anyways, she did volunteer work at a library near our apartment. That was a lot of help for my studying, since she knew exactly what book I needed for my school projects. Also, since my social skills were never that good, it was a comfort to see someone familiar when i was in a library full of people.

Dean was my ten-year-old brother. He went to Tiger Rock Elementary School, and unlike me, had a lot of friends. He loved to run around in the park, playing tag with Dad or chased by a random overexcited dog. That was quite a sight.

Apparently all those running paid off, since he made it into the racing team. For the past few weeks, he had been coming home late, having been trained by the P.E. teacher to run and run until he was too tired to go any longer. We were all really proud of him, and Dad (who is an atheist) even prayed for Dean to win his first race, which was to happen two days before things started going to hell.

It was another normal day for me, at least until i came home. I walked into class ten minutes before the bell rang, took out my stuff, and began reading a book. I had just started it, so I was only a few chapters in.

If I was anyone else, Ben McCloud would have been all over me, taking the book out of my hands and ripping it to shreds. As it is, it happens that I’m one of the few people he’s actually scared of, so I didn’t have to worry.

The truth was, when we were sophomores, he had asked me out a bit forcefully over text. I still don’t know how he got my number-I never give it out. Anyways, he started threatening me with select insults, so I sent some pictures of him smoking pot and other drugs to let him know I had leverage. Since then, he went the other way when he saw me coming his way in the hallway.

When the bell rang, Mrs. Swanson marched into class, a large hulking figure with round glasses, and lips that were squashed together in a way that resembled a dumpling. She taught calculus, and thank god I was good at it, she gave out the hardest tests anyone had seen. All in all, Mrs. Swanson was the stereotypical grumpy teacher.

The rest of the day was a blur. We studied, read, ate lunch, studied some more, and watched the homeworks stack more and more with despair. By the time school was over, I had to write an essay by Thursday, analyze a book by Friday, and solve 200 differential equations by tomorrow. Life in the advanced class was not easy.

The walk back home took about half an hour, which gave me plenty of time to continue on that book I was reading. It really was interesting. i had read to page 241 when I reached the apartment.

As soon as i opened the door, I knew something was wrong. For one, Dean was home. He never came home before seven on a regular weekday.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Dean, confused.

He shrugged. “Mom called Mr. Rainfields and I got to go home early.” Mr. Rainfields was the name of his P.E. teacher.

Just then, Mom walked into the living room. Her hands were clenched tightly on her phone, her face was pale, and her long hair was sticking out in various directions; she had been tugging at it.

“Kids,” she began to say. It was never good news when she called Dean and I ‘kids’. She always called us by name. The only time she had called us ‘kids’ was when Dad had gotten into a car accident and when our trip to the Grand Canyon had been canceled.

Mom hesitated for a moment, then exhaled. “Kids,” she began again. “Dad’s laboratory’s been.... closed down.”

My brain went blank for a moment.

“Closed… down?” Dean asked.

Mom nodded. “He’s lost his job.”

A moment later, Dean understood the situation and began to cry. Mom walked up to him and hugged him tightly, tears streaming down her face as well. I considered crying with them, but I had a question I wanted to answer. I walked into my room.

I was in shock. No, confusion. I mean, Dad was one of Corning’s most prized scientists. there were plenty of other, less important laboratories Corning could close if they were financially unstable. But to close down their recently most successful lab… it didn’t make any sense.

My room was simply furnished: A bed to the right, and a desk with a lightstand right next to it on the left. There were the remains of some boy band poster a former friend had given me on the left side wall. Other than that, the wall was empty. I didn’t like boy bands or posters.

On my desk was the silver macbook I had gotten for Christmas three years ago. I opened it and punched in the password. Within seconds, the familiar screen was on the monitor. I quickly opened chrome and looked up the stock price of Corning Incorporated. It was $35.22 per stock; the price had actually risen!

Now absolutely nothing made sense. Corning was actually better off than before. Shutting down a lab along with a successful scientist could do nothing good for themselves. So why were they doing this?

Because someone inside the establishment hated Dad? Could be, but again, only an idiot would cut off a potential supply of big money for petty revenge. That couldn’t be possible.

Maybe Dad had quit by himself and lied to Mom about Corning firing him? But everything Dad did was for a good reason. Why would he give up on a well paying job he liked? Also, why would Dad lie to mom?

I frowned, and turned the laptop off. I would ask Dad a lot of questions when he came home.

A few hours later, Dad returned home. Like me, he looked more confused than shocked: his face was set in a frown and he was in deep thought.

As soon as he set foot on the apartment, Mom ran over and hugged him. Dad hugged back, a bit awkwardly. I could tell he was still lost in his mind.

I spoke up. “Dad, what’s going on?”

He focused his eyes on me. “I don’t know, Cass,” he replied. “Everything happened so quickly.”

Mom finally let go of him. Her hair was in a mess and she was trembling slightly. I had never seen her like this before.

Dad sighed. He seemed tired. ”Listen, kids, let’s talk about this later.” he looked at the clock resting on the kitchen wall: almost 7 o’ clock. “Hey, it’s dinnertime. How about eating out?” He sounded almost cheerful: possibly he was in denial.

So in about thirty minutes we were pulling up the road to Tourniquet, a fancy restaurant we visited once a month. It was Mom’s special favorite, and I think Dad had that in mind, since she was taking this situation much worse than the rest of us.

“What are we gonna do,” she would whisper. “We still have to pay rent, and electricity bills, and groceries, and…” she would list every single thing that cost money until Dad comforted her by saying, “We still have some money in savings. That’ll last us a while.” Then she’d look a bit better and quiet down, only to burst into the same routine a  few minutes later.

Dad was high school friends with the owner of the restaurant, a cheerful, burly man with a long moustache he seemed to be really proud of, but others felt was a bit too large. He was a really nice guy though, and sometimes he gave Dean stickers he kept for who-knows-what reasons.

As we walked into the crowded place and took a table, the same big man ambled along to us from behind the counter. “Hey, Andrew!” he exclaimed pleasantly in a fake-ish italian accent. “ Long time no see, eh? Amy, beautiful as always. Wonderful, just wonderful to see you… And how are the kids? Cassandra, doing well at school? And Dean, I hear you made the racing team!” He had not noticed the gloomy mood my family was surrounded in. He wasn’t the sort of person who would.

Nobody was speaking up, not even Dad, so I decided to be polite. “Uh, hey, Mr. Williams. I’m doing fine at school. How are you?”

“Oh, just doing great!” He chuckled, clapping his hands together. “So, how can I serve you today?” He whipped out a menu plate from under the table. “Today’s special is shrimp dipped in a special sauce.” He wiggled his eyebrows when he said the word ‘special’.

“That sounds great, George. We’ll have that.” Dad said. Clearly he was in no mood to chat with his friend. Mr. Williams nodded happily and walked away to the kitchen.

I decided this was the perfect time to ask Dad my many questions. “So, Dad, what exactly happened today?”

Dad looked wearily at me. “I was working, Cass. Doing experiments on stuff. Then all of a sudden some guy from Headquarters comes up and tells me that my lab is shut down for”-here he made quotation marks with his fingers-”’unknown reasons’. He wouldn’t tell me even when I asked him.”

“Then why do you think it was shut down?”

“I don’t know. Probably Corning was going downhill, and decided to close up some labs to save  money. But it still doesn’t make-”

“Dad, I looked it up. Corning’s actually doing much better than it was a few months ago. There’s absolutely no reason for it to fire you.”

Dad stared at me, surprised. “Really? There’s no way…”

I opened my mouth to ask him another question, but with perfect timing, his phone started ringing. It was a little disconcerting to hear ‘Saturday Night Fever’ while I was trying to solve a question, so I waited, a little disgruntled, while Dad fumbled around in his pockets, trying to answer it. He finally grabbed it from his right coat pocket and pressed the little green icon.

“Hello? Yes, this is Andrew Pinewolf.” He said into the phone. He frowned. “Yeah… but how do you-” he listened for a moment, and looked out the window at a small man standing alone on the street. The man had his phone tightly - too tightly - pressed to his ear and was looking right at us.

‘Who is that?’ I mouthed at him.

Dad shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ he mouthed back. Next to us, Dean and Mom were watching the man with interest.

“Okay, alright.” Dad said, as he hung up his phone. He stood up.

“Where are you going?” Mom asked. She was no longer having a panic attack, but she was confused as hell. Well, we all were.

“That guy outside is... offering me a job. In a university. I have to check it out.” Dad looked as perplexed as the rest of us.

“Wait, he knows you lost your job? That was barely twelve hours ago!” I said, incredulous.

Dad nodded. “It’s weird, I know. But I do need a job, and a job at a university is pretty good. I’ll be right back.”

Mom grabbed his arm. “Andrew, what if this is a scam or something? This can’t end well.”

Dad shrugged. “Maybe, but there’s always a chance it isn’t. Right now, I’m not in a position to be picky.” he gently let go of Mom’s arm and quickly made his way through the tables.

I looked back at the small man standing in the street and observed him closer. I had a great view of him since he was next to a streetlamp. He was wearing a long trench coat that looked two sizes too big, so it was almost touching the ground. His hands were resting stationery by his side. Overall, it looked like he was a kid dressed up as a scientist for Halloween.

But there was something odd. There was something I couldn’t grasp. The face was white, with green eyes that were following my Dad as he walked towards him. The nose was a bit large, and the lips a little small. But that wasn’t why I felt a little strange watching him.

Then it came to me. His body was too still. For normal people, even if they try to stand still, they always move slightly each moment because the human body is a dynamical system. But this guy, he was standing perfectly still. Nothing in his body moved except his eyes, which were still following Dad. There was an eerie determination in them.

Dad finally opened the doors and approached the stranger. They exchanged some words and began to talk. I strained to read their mouths: they were saying-

“Voile!” I whipped my head around. Mr. Williams was coming towards the table with a large plate of shrimps.

As he set the dish down, Mr. Williams looked up and saw Dad speaking outside. He looked mildly surprised - I guess he must have thought Dad had gone to the bathroom.

“What’s he doing there?” he asked, confused.

Explaining the whole situation to him would have been tedious, and apparently my thought was shared, so nobody said anything. We sat in an awkward silence for a few moments before Mom spoke up.

“He’s, uh, talking to a… work friend. They’re working together.” she was a terrible liar.

Thankfully, he bought it, and with a nod, walked away. Did I mention he was a little gullible?

I turned to the window again just in time to see the man reach inside his coat, produce a yellow folder, and hand it to Dad. He looked a little hesitantly at the folder before taking it.

As soon as the file was in Dad’s hands, the little man turned and briskly walked away to an old car parked across the street. Dad watched him leave for a moment, then he too turned and came back in the restaurant. As he took a seat, He opened the folder and took out a few A4 documents.

“What’s all this?” I asked, as he examined one of the papers.

“That guy there was a employee from the University of some place called ‘Ankur’.” he said. “He offered me a job as a professor teaching chemistry.”

“Come on, Dad. That sounds totally fake,” Dean said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Even if that university was real, It’d be in India or something.” I mean, what was a place called ‘Ankur’ doing in the United States? It sounded like some place where ancient Babylonians worshipped their gods.

“Well,” Dad interjected. He was reading a piece of paper. “Seems like it’s pretty real, and it’s not  in India.” he gave me a glance. “It’s somewhere in Nevada, look.” He handed me the document. I grabbed it and began to read it with Dean, who had leaned over to see.

‘Instructions on reaching Ankur’, the page said in black Times New Roman. Under the title was a map of California and Nevada, which filled about two thirds of the page. It was in color and a thick blue route was printed on it, the starting point being Los Angeles and the ending point being somewhere north of Las Vegas.

I frowned. It seemed like the ending point was somewhere I knew, somewhere I had extensively researched when I was 13 and in my ‘creepy stuff’ phase. Somewhere I was certain a university wasn’t in. And it wasn’t called Ankur.

“Dad, this place is in Area 51.”

[felicezhukov]

:: Dear Nicolas Jaar::

This is another edited entry of a previous post, I wrote it drunkenly, in despair, on Sunday night / Monday morning...

 I haven’t written for a long time, my life has been a series of misadventures, mishaps, missteps and misjudgements. It’s also been an awful lot of fun, now I’m lying in bed taking 2 rest days to recoup, fast and detox and attempt to get back to level ground again. Last night I was laid out on the sofa necking cider and cramming chocolate hob nobs into my mouth whilst Sunny in Philadelphia crackled on the monitor and my ex tapped his feet in his computer chair. It was the final scene in a spiral of consumption and intoxication: on fire with emotion and insatiability, bouncing from place to place in the darkness, with knobbly gnarled knees, a scratched face and a progression of shorts and dresses as the backdrop was engulfed by thick hot sunshine, beating down over this metropolis I call home.

Field Day is this week, you’ll be here soon, they’ve been prepping for over a month, as you enter the mile end part of Victoria Park you are greeted by gates and fences for as far as the eye can see. At first it was just the large cocoon like structure they were erecting by the road, which is where I assume you’ll be playing, but now its expansive, the 3 metre tall green fence encompasses the entire length of park that I walk on my way to work. There’s a large screen at the entrance, at first it confused me on Saturday because it was displaying information about Field Day, advising not to buy tickets from touts and that Saturday was sold out, they must have been testing it.

You must travel from sphere to sphere landing in these shrines to music, where so much love and dedication is put into you being there, these structures that take weeks to erect, which only shelter you for a short time, I hope you appreciate that. There has been so much advertising for Field Day, posters seem to grace every part of London that I travel through, by my studio in Clerkenwell, in Hackney Wick as I walk to work, on the walls of the places in East London I’ve been revelling in. When I walk past the posters specifically of you, I touch your face, not because I’m in love with you Nicolas Jaar, you are now a manifestation of freedom to me.

So then, Tuesday, my open studio’s, all around the studio an energy building from the temporary structures being erected in the adjacent car parks, sheds plonked lovingly in the front and a multimedia installation by shazed dawood, arching against the side of the building. It felt exciting, many of my neighbours in the studio expressed surprise at how there seemed to be an anticipation building, a lot of money had gone into Clerkenwell design week, the audience was tidy, well presented in light flowing fabrics and glossy shimmering eye makeup.

I’d been in the studio solidly for 3 days preparing the installation that is my life, gently folding christmas decorations over heaters and sprinkling flowers under chairs, pegging my clothes up overhead. By the evening it was time to let people inside, there had been promise of a set of art based philanthropists coming to the studio, but it never surfaced and although to me this was a matter of easy come easy go I think to others it might have engendered the evening with disappointment. As I surveyed my studio at 6pm I was satisfied with what lay before me, an odd sort of forest populated by these objects that have travelled with me from place to place for so many years, it was poignant and melancholic, a sight we rarely get to see, our lives in all their finery, as decoration, suddenly making the usefulness of everything you’ve ever possessed somehow obsolete.

People came, many friends I’d contacted last minute walked into my museum, took their shoes off and sat with me on the dirty duvet covers and sofa bed which has never served the purpose it was supposed to have had. What became clear and now is startlingly apparent is that I am selling remnants to friends, no collectors or third parties have expressed any interest in buying anything thus far, it’s people that have touched my life somehow who are walking through my doors, to pick up a little memento of our time together. This is heart warming and has given me a new perspective on how my art travels, what it means and to who. I sold more than I was expecting, particularly to one woman who recently sent me a message that spoke to my soul, about what my art meant to her, about how even after fucking 2 cucumbers you still have to do your washing and tidy up. We haven’t spent a lot of time together but she means alot to me.

And I think that’s a large part of what’s happening here, for the first time in months I have the space to reach out to all the people in my life that mean something to me, invite them to come see what I have accumulated and lived with, to purchase any of it if they desire but mostly to use this piece as a backdrop to re establish relationships.

Outside of this Tuesday was a naughty, silly sort of evening, a collection of me and my neighbours convened and regressed to a childlike state. Stealing a box of prosecco and gulping it down on a bench nearby, laughing and behaving with reckless abandon. I paid for the theft the following day, as karmically no bad deed goes unpunished, at least for me anyway, but I also finally got to know the creatives that reside by me a little better and start to build the foundations for friendships that will blossom as time passes.

I wonder if the bank holiday has been a factor in the ensuing debauchery that’s taken place and the hijinks I’ve been running through. It’s not an alien topic in these letters, I’ve addressed it previously, something about bank holiday weekends just always seems fertile and strange.

On Thursday, I sold a picture of my ex husband to a complete stranger, it was one of those images that's burned into my psyche, I remember the weekend I took it as if it’s just passed. He’s lying on a pulled out sofa bed, the covers still lapping over his legs, with the laptop I’m now typing on, perched on him and an ashtray precariously placed on top of it, in his hand is a cigarette, thick plumes of smoke ebbing out of it are illuminated by the light in the background coming from a partially opened window. His face is one I recognise as I’ve seen it so often, he’s rubbing sleep from his eyes and I just know he’s at that brittle stage where he needs to be left alone or he’ll be rude.

It was at my sister and ehr ex husbands house, we went down to see them and walked about the park, drank lots of lager and wine and sat in their studio apartment talking and jesting till the early hours, then he and I went on to Alton Towers and were both to delicate to enjoy any of the rides. So instead we spent the majority of the time huddled together in the rainy gardens in matching cagoules, we won a cuddly toy each, grey and goo, matching seals and stayed in a lovely b&b in the surrounding area, which is leafy and has a fairytale like quality.

I sold the photo for £3.

Spurred on by the emotional discharge of such a transaction I went to meet a friend and go out to Alibi, a fairly notorious club in Dalston, well known for being a bit of a dive bar and for accommodating the surrounding area’s punters once kick out time has occurred. Without fail Alibi has provided me with some unique and bizarre nights and it didn’t disappoint again, we rolled through a series of interested suitors, talking to a kind man who took the time to read the last entry I wrote you, indulging in whatever was on offer and enjoying the attention we received.

Once outside at the end of the night I found myself in the midst of a group of Frenchmen, who I hadn’t seen in the club, always the driving force for travelling onwards to an after party I encouraged them in their pursuit of the next venue and waved goodbye to my friend who disappeared into the night with the kind man. We ended up in the kitchen of a neat anthropologists house, divided into groups, I sat with a visiting financier and heckled his friends for not speaking to the host, I get bossy when I’m drunk. But they wanted to go to bed so then we ended up in Haggerston Park in crisp morning light, on the cycle tracks which I walk past daily. For a while I just ran around the track but gravity intercepted and I fell a few times, they came over to pick me up and, in a feral state I then veered into the bushes alone, allowing the inner beast to take over and guide me, for some reason this is not the first time this has happened in the same park, after a night at Alibi, I guess these whims are somehow guided and we end up repeating ourselves in the most unusual of ways.

Eventually I launched out of a bush, covered in blood from scratches and scrapes, at a lady who was taking her dog for a morning stroll. She was kind and atypical of the area we were in, having lived out her own odd creative life before becoming more settled, we spent a while together, concern rife in her face rather than horror, and then I charged my phone in a plumbing supplies shop and managed to get in touch with the frenchman I’d been with earlier, who had my bag.

He was an unusual and strangely innocent kind of man, in the throes of finding a house to move to as his 3 year relationship had ended due to his careless lifestyle. In his eyes was a gentle acceptance, a total lack of judgement or ego. We went back to the beautiful top floor flat he was staying in and spent several hours enraptured by each other, slept for a bit and had food in a local pub which was a favourite haunt of mine and my exes before we broke up. He looked at me like he was in love with me and I felt enveloped in this and safe, broken from kissing and behaving like a savage in the park it was healing to have this moment with him. Then he went on to a bar and I met my friends and hung out on her stoop listening to music and laughing for a few hours before getting back to my exes and dragging myself to bed.

I was broken on Saturday.

On Sunday I’d kept seeing some characters that exist on the perimeters of my job, I’d never seen them outside of work before, or inside of work for a while either, so seeing them twice in one day from a distance was unusual and leant an odd tint to the day. I was so broken, my face healing from kissing friction burns, my knees covered in deep scrapes, my eyes puffy and delicate, that I’d never of approached them, so instead just waved and wondered what they were upto. My friend came to visit at the end of the shift, to check out the bar I work in, which is going to be the location of a few arts based nights I want to hold and curate. We decided to go out again, the energy of the weekend still pulsing through us.

More random events and switching of locations ensued, meeting people on the canal, going to a warehouse party for a little while, wandering the streets with a horny mancunian boy and taking him to the boat under the bridge to drink my cider, wading through a downpour, powerful heavy rain which cut through the night and somehow perfectly enshrined the hot beauty of the day.

Then taking a taxi to meet my frenchman in Shoreditch at a house party in an expensive place across the road from the church. This frenchman clearly wandered in circles which were wealthier than mine I thought as we sat at another window looking out over the city whilst he despairingly mapped out the details of his finances, he earned 4x the amount I did a month, and why he had no money. Because he kept spending it on trips, parties and the excesses that go alongside such things. He said he wanted to give up but part of me was saddened by that thought, in all truth if he wants to spend his life from party to party dancing and singing songs I don’t know if I’d consider that a waste, he seemed otherwise content with his choices as far as I could tell. Anyway I got back to my exes around 5am on Monday morning, he shouted at me, I wrote you the original draft of this entry, ate crisps, I’ve eaten a lot of crisps this week, and passed out.

Then I crawled out of bed again, somehow managed to put makeup on and get out of the house and to work, fuelling myself on coca cola and alka seltzer. Last night is another story I won’t write about now.

I’m lying here now, fully accepting of the fact that I won’t be getting dressed or leaving the house, content with this and now I’ve written down the vast portion of what’s happened able to see the patterns and just why this week has not been a write off. I’ve been panicking, worried that I won’t sell all of my things, perhaps also spurred on by the fact that I haven’t produced anything this week, which is rare, essentially unheard of, for me. But being an artist is not just centred in the act of making, I remember watching a talk with your father that illustrated this point.

You have to live, observe, digest and distill what’s going on around you. I guess I’m getting better at these days of reflection but have not had a solid moment of living in quite some time, I’ve met so many people in the last few days, have messages and new contacts etched all over my phone and got to spend time with someone totally out of my normal realm who gave me a kind of unconscious care that healed and centred me, despite it being brief.

I’m happy Nicolas, I hope you are to.