#blue bayou series

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Napoleonville [Chapter 10: The House Of Saint Honoratus of Amiens] [Series Finale]

Series Summary: The year is 1988. The town is Napoleonville, Louisiana. You are a small business owner in need of some stress relief. Aemond is a stranger with a taste for domination. But as his secrets are revealed, this casual arrangement becomes something more volatile than either of you could have ever imagined.

Chapter Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), dom/sub dynamics, smoking, drinking, drugs, weddings, Willis Warning, infidelity, kids, parenthood, Rice-A-Roni.

Word Count: 6k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @marvelescvpe @toodlesxcuddles @era127 @at-a-rax-ia @0eessirk8 @arcielee @dd122004dd @humanpurposes @taredhunter @tinykryptonitewerewolf @partnerincrime0 @dr-aegon @persephonerinyes @namelesslosers @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @daenysx @gemini-mama @chattylurker @moonlightfoxx @huramuna @britt-mf @myspotofcraziness @padfooteyes @targaryenbarbie @trifoliumviridi @joliettes @darkenchantress @florent1s @babyblue711 @minttea07 @bungalowbear @bluerskiees @herfantasyworldd @elizarbell @urmomsgirlfriend1 @fudge13 @strangersunghoon @wickedfrsgrl

Thank you so much for loving this strange, sexy, sweet story. I hope you enjoy the finale. 🥰🧁

Your bare feet in warm grass, your hands around the ropes of the tree swing, no sounds except the ancient psalms of the earth: cicadas, mourning doves, goldfinches, bumble bees, bullfrogs, wind in the leaves of the dogwoods and southern live oaks. The adolescent alligator is at one end of the front yard, sunbathing up by the mouth of the gravel driveway; in the opposite corner are several nutria nibbling on cattails. The sky is a calm, cloudless blue. It’s hot, mid-80s, even when 5:00 p.m. comes and goes; but the breeze is cool as it evaporates the sweat from your temples, your palms, the nape of your neck. It’s as close as Louisiana ever gets to Heaven. It’s a good day for a wedding.

You remember thinking that it was the end of the world when you found out you were pregnant almost exactly eleven years ago, and then again when you realized you would have to divorce Willis, and so you have lived through enough moments like this—these quiet, infinitesimal apocalypses—to know that there will be a future beyond Aemond marrying Christabel. The sun will rise tomorrow, and then it will set, the lightning bugs will appear and the stars will tell myths in the night sky, and the phone will ring as orders come in for the bakery, and Cadi will be back in her bedroom playing her Nintendo, and life will roll on like currents through the bayou: slow, opaque, inevitable. The world isn’t ending, you know that. It’s just full of beautiful things that aren’t for you.

Out on Route 401, a Plymouth Gran Fury zooms by the house, squeals to a halt, and then reverses until Willis can take another look, squinting through his tinted windows. He turns down the driveway and steps out into golden July daylight. He doesn’t pay any attention to the gator as he strides past her. He belongs here, in a place that is old and strange and savage and full of beasts. You have carved out a home for yourself in the swamplands; Willis was born with veins like the roots of a mangrove tree and ancient silt instead of marrow in his bones.

“Hey, sugar,” he says, pushing his sunglasses up into his hair. The wind ruffles the dark curls of his mullet, the bumble bees flee as he tramples clovers. “Ain’t ya supposed to be at the weddin’?”

“I’m sick.” A lie. “But Cadi’s fine, she’s with Amir. She was so excited she actually wore one of the sundresses my mom bought her and had Amir braid a dogwood flower into her hair to match his. You should have seen it. You would’ve been so proud.”

“I’m always proud of her,” Willis says, smiling. And then: “Ya don’t look sick.”

“I am.”

“Ya got one of your headaches?”

You pause. You don’t, but this is a convenient excuse. “Yeah.”

Willis stalls, his hands on his belt. His pistol is there; you remember how he used it in the bayou, how he helped save your life. But he wasn’t the one who jumped into the water. Aemond was willing to risk his body for me, but not his soul. What kind of sense does that make? “Ya had me scared for a minute there,” Willis says.

“What? When?”

“When I thought ya were goin’ to end up with that Rockefeller boy.”

“Aemond?” you say, like it’s so shocking. “No. Absolutely not. It’s impossible.”

“And why’s that?”

You stare into the trees so Willis can’t see the tears welling up in your eyes, the tension in your throat as embers kindle there, pulsing with heat that could char flesh to the bone. “He can’t marry someone like me.”

“I could,” Willis replies, grinning. You glare at him until he recants. “Alright, alright, oublie ça. Pardonne-moi.”

“Why would you be afraid of me and Aemond being together?”

“An oil tycoon? A millionaire? He would never stay here for long. In a town like Napoleonville? Soon as he was done getting’ those rigs up and runnin’, he’d go jettin’ off to some other corner of the world, and he’d take you with him. And Cadi too. I wouldn’t be able to fight that. What’s a parish sheriff to a Targaryen? Who would listen to me? Cadi would be gone and I’d never get her back. It would kill me. It would rip the heart right outta my chest.”

You look up at Willis from where you sit on the tree swing, the soles of your feet colored with soil and grass. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“No?” he asks, perhaps suspicious, perhaps hopeful.

“No,” you promise. “Cadi loves you. Cadi needs you to be in her life. I would never try to take her away from you, Willis.”

He nods; he seems to believe you. And something relaxes in him, like there’s been a tension in the lines of his spine and shoulders that you didn’t notice for years. “I’m sorry about your petit ami.”

“Yeah. Me too.” It comes out like a whisper, brittle and frail. “I’m sorry about Lake Verret.”

“They might be able to fix it. Talk around town is they got some kind of desalination”—he says this with each syllable enunciated distinctly, like he’s put great effort into memorizing it—“process that can take the salt back outta the water. And if that don’t work…” He shrugs with a sly smile. “I’ll survive somehow. The world’s a big place. There’s always another lake.”

You consider him, and you remember—like a dream from the night before that just returned to you—how Willis can be unexpectedly deep, randomly tender. “They should put that on bumper stickers.”

He chuckles and waves as he heads back to his car. “I’ll pick Cadi up on Tuesday. Back to the usual schedule.”

“Sure.” Back to real life. Back to before I met Aemond. And you find yourself wishing that you could forget what it had felt like to be with him; the absence he left feels so much heavier than the nonspecific longing that existed before. Willis’ Plymouth Gran Fury rolls out of the driveway, and you stay precisely where you are on the tree swing, absentmindedly pushing yourself back and forth with your tiptoes and trying to believe that tomorrow this will feel easier, and then even easier the day after that, and eventually it will cease to be anything but a vague recollection, a relic in a rarely-opened drawer, a whisper, an echo. One day, you will stop missing Aemond. One day, you will stop wondering whether a sliver of his life would have been better than none at all.

Inside what Cadi calls the Fall-Down House, the phone rings. You ignore it; if it’s an order for the bakery, they can leave a message. But then it rings again, and again, and you have to answer it. What if your mother had a heart attack? What if Cadi and Amir were in a car accident? You hurry to the kitchen and grab the phone, pink to match the little Panasonic boombox that is presently silent.

“Hello?”

“Hiiiiiii,” Amir says, slow and something else too. Disoriented? Evasive?

Your forehead wrinkles with confusion. “Where are you calling from?” There are definitely no phonelines running to the Chapel of Saint Honoratus of Amiens, a tiny brick-and-stucco edifice built in the 1830s.

“I’m at a McDonald’s up the road. I’ve paid them $5 to let me use the phone.” And then, because he knows it’s the first place your mind will go: “Cadi’s fine. She’s eating Chicken McNuggets. Everyone’s fine.”

“Okay…?”

“I think you should come over here.”

“What, to the chapel?!”

“Yeah.” He’s talking to someone; you can hear an indistinct tangle of voices through the hand he undoubtedly has clasped over the transmitter.

I can’t see Aemond. I can’t see Christabel. There is a lurching in your guts; you are a fish that swallowed a hook. “I thought we agreed that I wasn’t going to go to the wedding.” I can’t handle it. It might kill me.

“Yes, we did, but now…um…I think you will want to make an appearance.”

“Amir, what happened?”

There is more muffled conversation on the other end of the line. “Look,” he tells you. “Things, uh…things are…occurring. And I think it would be better to explain in person.”

“Did you drop the cake?”

“No,” he says, defensive. “The cake is perfect, thank you for your concern. Not a single frosting wildflower was mutilated in the delivery.”

“Then why—?”

“Do you trust me?” Amir asks.

The answer is obvious. Of course. More than anyone. “You know I do.”

“Then go get in your car.”

You glance at the clock on the wall. “Okay, but you know it’s going to take me like 40 minutes to drive to Belle River.”

“That’s fine.” He confers with someone else. “Yeah, that’s good actually, that will work.”

“Great,” you say uncertainly.

“See you soon!” Then Amir hangs up, leaving you alone in the creaks and groans of your ailing house.

You take Route 70 around Lake Verret, gliding past fields of soybeans and sugarcane, paddocks of cattle and horses, marshes of cordgrass occupied by blue herons and white egrets and prowling alligators, stirring awake as the sun begins its descent into the west. More than once, you notice that your Chevy Celebrity’s odometer reports you are travelling well below the speed limit. You aren’t in any hurry to reach the chapel; you don’t want to carry the weight of what you will see there, Christabel in her wedding dress, Aemond in his suit, Alicent anxiously fidgeting and gnawing at her fingernails, Viserys parading around triumphantly. You can’t imagine that there is anything less than torturous for you there. You don’t remember what you’re wearing until you reach Belle River, a small, old town full of double-wide trailers and jetties that run far out into the lake: a simple cotton sundress you threw on this morning without much thought, modest but white and therefore forbidden for a wedding guest. The sky is turning from a sun-drenched cerulean blue to something more soft, more muted, as dusk lurks just a few hours away. The radio is playing Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car.

The Chapel of Saint Honoratus of Amiens was built by a man in extremis. An acclaimed mason by trade, he had been born in France and settled in the New World in Louisiana when it was still in the possession of Napoleon. The mason had a wife and children—some people say 5, others say 8 or 10, though details always seem to grow more elaborate in the retelling, don’t they?—and he loved them dearly. But tragedy struck when every single member of the family, except for the mason himself, fell ill with tuberculosis. When healers of the earth failed to offer sufficient remedies, the mason appealed to a higher power. He built the chapel to implore Honoratus of Amiens, his wife’s favorite saint—she was a baker and a florist, both professions that Honoratus presides over—to intercede with the Almighty on their behalf. This effort proved futile, and as each member of the family died, the mason interred them in a brick vault beneath the altar where they would spend eternity together. Perhaps this makes for a peculiar wedding venue, yet for over a century couples rich and poor, religious and secular have traveled to the chapel to exchange their vows. Perhaps there are few things more romantic than loving someone in the face of total futility: illness, distance, unrequitedness, prohibitions, death.

The chapel sits in a clearing surrounded by live oak trees, massive, hundreds of years old, hanging with Spanish moss, blotting out the sunlight as aisles cascade through gaps in the leaves. As you park in the grass—joining an army of Lexuses, Audis, limousines, Porsches, Ferraris, Cadillacs, Aston Martins, Alfa Romeos, and Amir’s blue Ford Escort—you observe that there are perhaps fifty guests in formal attire milling aimlessly around the building. You peer down at your white sundress, frowning. Well, I can’t go naked. The faux pas will have to be forgiven. You step out of your Chevy Celebrity and make your way across the clearing towards the chapel.

There is a long table set up in the shade with a tower of champagne glasses, an ice sculpture of a dragon, and the banana bread cake you and Amir baked for the wedding. Grim-faced servants in black suits are cutting slices and handing them out to guests on green china plates. You recognize Aegon’s wife Stephanie chatting with a flock of young women in extravagant gowns, golds and emeralds and sapphires. Helaena is among them, wearing a shimmering blue-green color like the scales of her chameleon Dreamfyre. Evidently, the Targaryens’ exotic pets have been left at the mansion for this excursion.

“Well,” the princess of Monaco says sardonically as she takes a bite, the white cream cheese frosting covered with a kaleidoscope of wildflowers. “At least the cake is good. What is this, banana? Whoever heard of a banana wedding cake? I mean, it’s delicious, but still. I knew that Christabel girl was daft. Did you see her positively absurd dress? It looks like children doodled all over it…”

Is it over? you think as you weave through the crowd, largely unnoticed. Is the ceremony done already? Why would Aemond want to see me? To try to convince me to be his mistress one last time? To show me what I’m missing by severing ties with him?

But no: something else has happened. Viserys and Christabel’s father the marquess are embroiled in a heated argument; a nun and two priests are trying to haul them apart.

“You’re dead to me, Viserys!” the marquess roars. “And you’ll be dead to everyone back home once I tell them what you’ve done!”

“I did my part! This has nothing to do with me! Wait…wait…we can figure something else out! Wait! Wait! You can have Daeron!”

Wedding guests are gawking and snapping photos with their polaroid cameras. Upon hearing his name, Daeron glances over towards his father wearily. Alicent’s youngest son is kneeling beside where she has collapsed to the grass, patting her encouragingly on the shoulder as she sobs into a green cloth handkerchief. Criston is there too, trying to soothe her with sympathetic murmurs and a flute of pink champagne glittering with bubbles of carbonation.

“How did this happen?” she wails, peering up at Criston with her vast, dark, glassy eyes. The gold rings on her fingers clang and glint; they match the single hoop earring that Criston wears. Alicent’s gown is purple like royalty, but Criston is dressed in a suit of pale pink; it’s the exact same one Daeron has on. Groomsmen? you wonder. “He knows better than this! We raised him better than this!”

You think, stunned and petrified: Aemond, what the hell did you do?

As you approach the chapel, you note that it appears empty inside; you don’t spot anyone in the pews. Somewhere, a boombox is thundering Higher Love. At the entrance of the building, Christabel is sitting on the brick walkway in her wedding dress. It’s the one you told her to choose: elegant and timeless, long train and short flowing sleeves, silk wildflowers sewn into the white lace. Her bouquet is lying forgotten on the ground beside her. Her lips are a deep, lovely pink; her eyeshadow is gold. She’s smoking, something you’ve never seen her do before. There is a half-crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds and a lighter in her left hand, a single lit cigarette in her right.

“Um, hi, Christabel,” you say. And then, something equally brainless: “Is everything okay?”

“I should have known.” She’s staring out at the crowd, not at you. Her large blue eyes are dull, vacant.

“You should have known what?” Your heart is in your throat; blood pounds in your ears like the hooves of a racehorse.

“That he didn’t care,” she says listlessly. “I could tell that he didn’t. I could feel it. But I didn’t want it to be true, so I told myself it wasn’t. Isn’t that interesting? How we can lie to ourselves? Not that it was entirely my error. Other people meddled plenty. ‘Oh no, Christabel.’ ‘He’s just emotionally stunted, Christabel.’ ‘He’s busy with work, Christabel.’ What man is too busy with work to handle a five-minute phone call? It’s not like he was on the moon. He could have made time if he wanted to. I bet he made lots of time for you.”

“Uh.” You try to decide what to say. “I broke up with him, if that’s what you’re asking. I didn’t want to be his mistress. I didn’t think that was fair to you.” Or me, obviously, but right now doesn’t seem to be the opportune time to voice my own grievances.

“Next time, I’m going to choose who I marry,” Christabel insists, puffing on her cigarette. “He has to talk to me. He has to like me.”

Aemond called it off? What did he say? What is he going to do now? “Christabel…do you know where Aemond is? Or Amir and Cadi?”

“Alicent is so upset,” she says instead. “Poor woman. She’s sweet, in her own way. But I don’t want to end up like her.” Christabel holds up the pack of Marlboros and the lighter. “She feels guilty, I think. She gave me these. She had them in her purse, she has so many neurotic little habits, doesn’t she? It’s not very ladylike to smoke, but it’s not ladylike to get left at the altar either, so fuck it.”

You ask, afraid to know the answer: “Do you hate me? I didn’t know Aemond was engaged when I met him. And then…” Why lie now? What’s the point? “Then I was in love with him and it was kind of…too late to try not to be. But I’m sorry.”

“I don’t hate you,” Christabel replies immediately. “I know he would never be allowed to marry…someone like you. Your options were limited.”

You don’t know if this is meant to be an insult or not. “Thanks.”

“I don’t think I ever loved him either,” Christabel realizes, exhaling smoke. “I think I idolized him. I think I loved my fantasy of what our marriage would be like. But I didn’t love Aemond. I didn’t even know Aemond. You did, I suspect. Good luck with him. He’s a bit…complex.”

“I’m sorry,” you say again, rather compulsively. You aren’t sure what she expects from you. Abruptly, from wherever it’s coming from, Higher Love is cut off. “So, is Aemond, like…around, or…?”

“I don’t regret the sex part.”

“Okay.” You examine the crowd in the clearing again. You still don’t see Aemond.

“That went well,” Christabel muses. “I’m glad my first time is over and done with. I was terrified it would hurt like hell. And so few people know, so it’s almost like it never happened, right?”

“Right,” you say obediently.

“I think I’ll have a new rule. I won’t marry anyone unless he likes me and we sleep together first. Life is too long to spend it with the wrong person, don’t you agree?”

“I totally do.”

“He’s waiting for you inside,” Christabel says, flicking ashes towards the gaping doorway of the chapel.

“Really?” you peer into the shadows; there is indeed a solitary figure standing at the altar. “So…what exactly is happening…?”

“Go,” Christabel urges, and takes a drag on her cigarette. You leave her and cross through the doorway into the chapel.

The light is dim and gentle; fading sunbeams slant in through the glass of the cathedral-style windows. The mason’s inspiration was Gothic architecture, imposing, cavernous. Two candlelit iron chandeliers hang from the high ceiling; the floor is made of tiles of black and white marble. Small stone sculptures of angels watch over their realm like benevolent gargoyles. There is a single stained glass window above the altar: circular like a ring, red and gold like the sun.

He’s waiting for you in a pale pink suit, long disheveled hair, thin mustache with flecks of white powder in it, mischievous smirk. “Hey cake lady,” Aegon says.

“Um. I’m not marrying you.”

“No, you’re definitely not.” Aegon offers you his hand and you take it with some hesitation. “I’m here to be your guide. Just like on the Oregon Trail.”

“What…?”

“Let’s go.” He pulls you out of the chapel, past where Christabel is still sitting at the entranceway, and across the clearing towards the trees. When you look to the crowd, Otto is elbowing his way through disgruntled guests towards a limousine, already idling.

Viserys bellows at him: “Where the hell are you going?!”

“Back to Kiribati!” Otto shouts back, not breaking his stride. He vanishes into the limo.

“Hurry,” Aegon says. He leads you into the forest, a thick canopy of verdant leaves and Spanish moss and the narrow rays of sunshine that tumble down through the gaps.

“Aegon, I don’t think we should be in the woods, it could be dangerous—”

“No, this part is fine. We already checked.”

“Who’s ‘we’?!” You’re wearing flip flops that catch on gnarled roots; the shrieking of cicadas grows loud. One of them buzzes towards Aegon and he screams as he backhands it away.

“You good?” Amir’s voice calls from farther within the trees.

“Yeah. I’m fine. We made it.”

You turn to Aegon. “What’s going on—?”

Suddenly, there is booming music that startles you: “Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth! They say in Heaven, love comes first, we’ll make Heaven a place on Earth! Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth!”

“Aegon, what is that?”

“Uh, I think it’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth.”

“Yes, okay, but why?”

“Ask that guy.” You round a thicket and there under a colossal southern live oak tree, surrounded by hundred-year-old branches that twist down to the earth, is Aemond; but he’s not looking at you. He and Cadi are lighting the last of the candles. She picks them up, he ignites the wick with the same lighter he uses to smoke his Marlboros, and then Cadi places them back on the ground or on top of a branch. Amir is standing by the large black boombox, the same one Aegon always listens to by the Targaryens’ pool. Amir grins craftily, pushing his tortoiseshell glasses up the bridge of his nose. His suit is orange, the single dogwood flower in his hair white.

“Did we get them all?” Aemond asks Cadi.

“Yeah, I think so. Wait, no, there’s one over there!” Cadi darts to it and Aemond lights the candle, then spins around and sees you. He smiles. “Hi, Cupcake.”

“Hi,” you say, so shellshocked you can’t form any of your very vital questions.

“Okay, so we have the candles,” Aemond informs you as Cadi and Aegon go to join Amir. “White with wildflower patterns.” And you recall how Alicent mentioned needing to pick out candles with Christabel, and how you didn’t see any scattered around the chapel. They brought them here. They did it for me. “And we have some actual wildflowers.” He takes the boutonniere off the lapel of his white suit and tucks it into your hair behind your left ear. “And we have Heaven Is A Place On Earth.” He gestures to the boombox. “And I think those were the three things you said you wanted if you were ever going to get married again.”

I did say that. Just once, months ago, the first time he ever came over, the first time he ever touched me. “You remembered.”

“Of course I remembered.” He takes both of your hands in his own. Amir lets out a little squeal and covers his mouth as his eyes begin to glisten. Aemond takes a deep breath. “So, I don’t have a speech, because this is very last-minute. I mean extremely last-minute. But you were right about everything. And I realized I couldn’t live that way. It wouldn’t be fair to you or to me, but it wouldn’t be fair to Christabel either. So I broke it off.”

“Literally at the altar,” Aegon says. “In front of everybody. It was so fucking awkward.”

“Those are not necessary details!” Aemond snaps, then looks back to you and is smiling again. “I know what I want. I’ve known it for as long as I’ve known you. But I wasn’t a strong enough person to make it happen. I’m so sorry. I should have done things differently. I can’t change the past. But everything is going to be different now.”

You gaze up at him as Belinda Carlisle sings, thinking: This can’t be real. I’m going to wake up now.

“On the night we met, you told me you’d never felt chosen,” Aemond says. “I’m choosing you. And, you know.” He nods to her. “Cadi too. And Amir. And the bakery. And dealing with Willis too, I guess. All of it. I’m choosing you and your whole life and that’s exactly where I want to be.”

You can feel the warmth in your face, beaming and hopeful and full of possibilities. Under the shade of the southern live oak, the first lightning bugs are blooming in the air like stars. “What about your family?”

“I’ll figure it out. I don’t think my father can entirely disown me…turns out I’m the only one who understands how the stock market works. But no matter what, you and Cadi are the priority. And my father will have to learn to live with that.”

“Or he can drop dead,” Aegon says. “Whichever.”

It’s possible? We can be together? Not just for a night, an afternoon, a stolen moment, but forever?

“I said I don’t have a speech.” Aemond tells you. His right eye is bright, elated, gleaming like a mirror. “I don’t have a ring either. But I’m going to get you one, if you’ll let me. So I’m asking you, Cupcake: Will you marry me?”

“Say yes, Mom!” Cadi yells, and Amir bursts out laughing.

“Say yes, cake lady!” Aegon adds. “Unlimited Cap’n Crunch Treats!”

When am I going to wake up? When is this going to end?

But it’s not a dream. It’s real. And Aemond reads the answer on your face before you can say it, and so it’s only a murmur as he kisses you, a whisper, a prayer: “Yes.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The three of you drive from the new house all the way to San Francisco; you still call it the new house, even though you’ve owned it for a full year. The journey takes seven days, with overnight stops in Dallas, Wonderland Amusement Park in Amarillo, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Las Vegas, and Bakersfield. Aemond sold his Audi Quattro and replaced it with a Dodge Caravan. It’s July 1989, and Tom Petty’s brand new single Runnin’ Down A Dream is strumming from the radio. It’s always temperate in San Fran, in the 60s even at the height of summer. The sky is overcast and grey. When Cadi complains that she’s cold despite the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hoodie you packed for her, Aemond gives her his Marlboro jacket.

Amir, his boyfriend, and two other roommates share a sunshine yellow Italianate townhouse in the Castro District. Aemond parks his wood-paneled Caravan on the steep, inclined street—he narrowly misses colliding with a whooshing cable car, which he blames on poor depth perception—and then helps you carry the luggage inside. There are no alligators on the front porch, but there are neighborhood cats that Amir puts out Friskies for; there are no screaming cicadas, but there are swooping seagulls and the melodies of sidewalk musicians. When Amir opens the door, he nearly tackles you with enthusiasm. He still wears his loud colors and short shorts, but he’s traded in the dogwood flowers he once wove into his hair for dahlias.

Amir’s boyfriend is named Don, but everyone calls him Donald Schwarzenegger because he looks so much like the Austrian bodybuilder turned actor. When Amir first arrived in the city, he got a job as a cake decorator for a very popular bakery, and quickly segued into handling much of their marketing as well. He’s thinking of getting a degree in advertising and trying his luck in corporate America. You very much enjoy teasing him for being a sellout; what would socialist Bayard Rustin say?

“Call your Daddy and let him know we made it safely to the West Coast,” you tell Cadi once her things are unpacked in the guest room she’ll get all to herself; you and Aemond are consigned to the living room futon. Cadi chats with Willis for a while, then says he wants to talk to you. You take the phone, slightly concerned; you hope nothing is amiss with the house. “Hello?”

“What the hell is wrong with this horse?” he demands. “That ain’t no pet. That’s a demon. It’s a goddamn Rougarou.”

“I told you not to try to touch him,” you say, amused.

“I feed him and water him, don’t I? Ain’t that the least he can do? Lettin’ me scratch his big ol’ idiot head?”

“Patches is not very well-behaved. But Cadi loves him.”

“And don’t even get me started on the dog. Ugliest fuckin’ dog I ever saw. Growls every time I show up. Shows its teeth and everythin’. I’d take twenty gators over that son of a bitch any day.”

“Vhagar is a girl,” you say. “Thanks for watching them while we’re out of town.”

“Sure thing, sugar. Although I still don’t understand why the bon a rien can’t do it.”

“Aegon isn’t always…reliable.” But he does seem to be improving. He’s cut back to mostly just booze and marijuana, because otherwise he and Sunfyre aren't allowed to stay at the new house for sleepovers. There’s a guest bedroom, but Aegon prefers the sunken conversation pit in the mauve pink living room. He likes to be where anyone can stumble across him if they wake up in the middle of the night for pancakes or ice cream. He likes to be where people are; he likes to be included. “Anyway, I gotta go. Cadi will call again tomorrow. Enjoy your fishing.”

“Will do. Maybe I’ll toss your accursed animals in as bait.” Lake Verret is still a bit too brackish for a proper freshwater lake, but that’s changing gradually with Daeron’s desalination efforts and a subaquatic plug affixed to the opening of the breached salt dome. He views it as a pioneering experiment in reversing such drilling accidents, potentially for application globally. Now there are more bass and lampreys and catfish, and less breams and gars, but life goes on in Napoleonville’s 14,000-acre lake. Daeron has replaced Aemond as Viserys’ heir apparent, and he is thriving in the role. He is bookish yet empathetic, focused but never ruthless. Furthermore, he happens to be genuinely in love with his aristocratic fiancée: Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

Aemond was right; Viserys didn’t disown him, but he did fire him, ban him from the mansion, and reduce his available funds to a modest living stipend. Fortunately, Viserys has a very limited comprehension of how money works for normal people, and he considers $200,000 per year to be “modest.” With that plus your bakery earnings and a paid-off house, you, Cadi, and Aemond will be living comfortably for the remainder of your lives. Also fortunately, no one else will enforce the no-Aemond rule at The Last Desire, so anytime Viserys is out of town—which is far more often than not—you get to visit the Targaryens at the mansion as much as you please. Cadi loves the water slide and the koi pond. She’s named the fish after Greek deities, her latest obsession: Zeus, Narcissus, Athena, Dionysus, Artemis, Apollo, Echo. Viserys will not acknowledge you, but the rest of the family is polite enough now that the drama of the broken engagement has blown over. When you finish the cookbook of Southern baked goods that you’ve been working on, Alicent had pledged to mail copies to all her friends and relatives back in the U.K. Otto has offered to take a box of them with him next time he jets off for Kiribati; the wealthy housewives marooned in paradise are always on the hunt for new reading material.

On your first night in San Francisco, Amir serves a dinner of cioppino, sourdough bread, and (not homemade) Rice-A-Roni. You provide dessert, a recipe you’re still perfecting: Saint Honoratus cake, a pastry that dates back to Paris in the 1800s. You want to be able to include it in your cookbook, along with photographs from your wedding in the chapel this past May, almost exactly a year from when you and Aemond first met. Your engagement ring has a gold band and pink diamonds arranged to resemble a rockrose, a dauntless little wildflower native to Aemond’s ancestral homeland of Greece. For over a decade you have loved that wildflowers are grown and not bought, small but tenacious, humble yet untamed. They do not wait for other hands to tell them where and how to grow. They are the architects of their own fortune.

When everyone is finished with dessert and gathers around the tv to watch The Golden Girls, Aemond says he’s going outside for a smoke break; but you know he’s trying to quit. You follow him into the small backyard and as soon as your bare feet touch the grass, he’s pushed you against the wall of the house, forced your thighs apart, slipped his hand down the front of your shorts as he watches the amazed, electrified desire rise in your face like heat from a stove. “It’s been a week, and I need you,” Aemond murmurs, his lips ghosting across your throat, his hips braced insistently against yours, and then he kisses you to stifle your moans as you bury your fingers in his hair, to swallow down the vicarious ecstasy of every wondrous thing he’s ever done to you and ever will. “I don’t even need you to get me off. I just need to see you like this.”

Trusting him, wanting him, letting him make me come.

Aemond has been accepted into UC Berkeley’s History PhD program and will start there at the end of August. He wants to write books about underrecognized heroes, extraordinary and yet unassuming people like Bayard Rustin and Bobbi Campbell and Phillis Wheatley. You’ll miss him of course, but there will be breaks for holidays and summers when he can return to Napoleonville, and you can fly out to visit him too, and there are phone calls, and postcards, and one day you’ll be able to go anywhere together—

You gasp, a shaky, starving breath, your lips grinning into Aemond’s. You’re close, you’re so close.

There is a shrill whistle from the back porch of a townhouse from the row behind Amir’s. “Get it, honey!” a man in a leopard-print robe cheers, waving the newspaper he’d been reading. You and Aemond unravel from each other, laughing hysterically.

“Okay,” you tell him, still panting. “Bad plan. We are clearly not accustomed to city life.”

“Tonight,” Aemond says, low and commanding. He returns to you, kissing the side of your face: temple, cheekbone, the curve of your jaw. His voice is dark, jagged glass; his lips are soft like kind dreams. “On the futon, on the floor, anywhere.”

You want it too, but you know the game. “No.”

He pins you to the wall again, powerful, irresistible, his hardness grinding against you through his jeans, everything about him—voice, flesh, rhythm, soul—promising you the peace only he has ever given you, proving that being at the right person’s mercy can make you free. “I’m in charge now. Let me take care of you.” And for a split second you almost beg: Just do it, Aemond, right now, please touch me again, I don’t care if a stranger sees. I want you now, I want you forever.

Instead you smile up at him, the whirls of your fingerprints skating harmlessly over his scarred left cheek as you answer: “Yes sir.”

[bucknastysbabe]

J. Bucky Barnes Master

All my fics for my most favorite brainwashed amend making meowmeow babykins James Bucky Barnes

I have some older ones on my Ao3 linked in bio :) also more on the kink bingo tag

Tags: Smut🍐 || SFW💚|| Angst🟢|| Dead Dove🔫|| Fluff🐼

Series:

40’s AU 🍐🐼

Can you handle that? Prequel

Walk your talk

My puppy is trained

God bless the inventor

Mirror, mirror

Star Wars AU

Through passion, I gain strength💚🐼

II🍐🟢⚱️

Handler AU🍐🟢🔫

Praise Kink

Shadowplay

Compliance Prequel

I think, therefore I am

I'm Your Man Epilogue

One-shots/Sequels:

18+ blurb🍐🟢🐼

Noble and Chaste🍐

From her to Eternity 🍐🟢🔫

Big Softie 🍐🐼

Flirting With Death 🍐🟢

Tommy’s Party 💚🟢

Let the right one in 🍐🟢🔫

What do they know? 🍐🐼

Oh Bucky you’re so fine 🍐

5+1 🟢🍐🐼

Candy🟢🔫

Bayou Bonding 🍐🟢

Pretty please?🍐🐼

Take what you need🟢🍐🐼

Feral🟢🍐🐼

Subby buck blurb🍐

I knew he needed me🍐🐼

Let’s face the music and dance🟢🍐🐼

Poolside Blues🍐🟢🐼

Holiday Cheers

Kink Bingo:

Well. How did I get here?🍐🐼

Pegging🍐🐼

Praise kink under handler AU

[nerdieforpedro]

Part Four of “The Lake Between Us”

What you look like during the day

Ezra AU x plus size OFC (Moonbeam)

This fic/blog is 18+ MDNI

Word Count: about 1.2k

Summary: Our nurse and reformed scoundrel meet in person. Are things the same as when they watch each other at night? Could it be better or worse?

Warnings: Ezra is his own warning, verbal sparring (someone did lose), HANDS (a Pedro character special)

Notes: Did I wait (stall more like it) in finally giving Ezra more than a line or two of speech? Yeah I did. I wanted to make sure it sounded like him to me and hopefully to you all as well. They've finally met after three parts. 😆 To be fair, I did say slow burn. 🔥 Simmering like some gumbo maybe? (Nerdie with the bad joke and we are complete. 😎)

Main Masterlist / Ezra Masterlist / The Lake Between Us Series / A03 link

Now a month and a half out from their initial meeting, they’ve had yet to speak face to face. Ezra has just finished giving another tour of the bayou. Regalling tourists with the history of it along with New Orleans with his expressive flair. He’s in the process of meeting up with the manager to get his check for the week. Today is friday so he’s going to go to the bank after this per his normal routine.

He recalls that black poofy tresses that he often saw from beneath the purple bonnet at night. They were tied up in a high ponytail. The same legs that rocked in the chair at night were across from him speaking to some basic looking man and a smile upon her face along with a child. Was she married? Was the child hers? For her to be out every night their relationship or marriage couldn’t be a happy one right? But she walks away with the child and speaks to a woman who takes the child as they begin to walk away. Maybe the woman is her girlfriend? The soft pink of her dress covered what was normally visible to Ezra at night. He was able to see that her skin was indeed the sensual caramel he thought it had been and the scoop neck of casual wear exposed the very tops of her breasts. The full lips were a brownish pink on closer inspection and her glasses were blue not black, an easy mistake to make in the dark. The most startling to him was her eyes. A sweet shade of honey hugged her pupils which formed her irises. He sees her waving at the woman and the child as they leave, so maybe they’re not together? Enough of this, he needed more facts and less speculation.

The business with the manager is quickly concluded and he jogs over to her, unable to move too fast in his hip waters. He’s wearing black suspenders and a white t-shirt that’s become semi-transparent from the heat. His chest is visible as you hear a voice say, “Greetings from across the lake, the daylight suits you as well. My name’s Ezra.” That’s how you knew who he was once you turned. The patch was indeed blonde and his beard patchy but it suited him. A roguish smile appeared on his face as he spoke and his hands were on his hips. His skin was indeed a smooth copper, partly from the sun and from his own tone. The chest that you’d seen at night was even more impressive during the day with biceps to match, flexed as he stood. Your feet carried you until you were a foot away from him. The tall waters looked to be slightly big on him, but his long legs still had his hips above the tops of them and he had a soft middle. The only part of the man that could be called cute besides his nose, large but the shape was pleasing to your eyes.

“Good afternoon neighbor. It’s good to finally see you up close. The sun has been kind to you too.” You half-joked. The freckles were something you hadn’t seen and you wondered how it would feel to trace your fingers over them and if they formed their own constellation. You told him your name and he repeated it twice to make sure he had it correctly, when you nodded, he extended his hand presumably for a handshake. Ezra’s hands hadn’t looked that large from your spot on your porch but up close, they eclipse yours as you shake his hand, making sure you’re giving him a strong grip but not your hardest. There was a smirk that formed on Ezra’s face as he let go of your hand, his calloused fingertips touching your palm. You gasped from the tickle and his smirk grew, your eyes lingered on his hands for a moment curious what was so funny, though you knew. He was gauging your reactions. Squinting your eyes, you gave him a slight frown, “something funny Ezra? I have been told I’m funny but I don’t believe I’ve done anything comical yet.”

The confidant look on his face remained, “We just met and I’m already being accused of something? Not unusual, but still a bit hurtful my dear.” He placed most of his weight on his right leg and ruined his left foot and knee outward, despite the hip waters, it was still quite a sight and exposed what they had been covering up. Your eyes flipped down and the back up to his face where his smirk had widened. This man…you cleared your throat and exhaled. “I think we can come to some accommodation that would mend my bruised ego.” Your arms crossed in front of you, shaking your head and on the verge of a laugh so you bite your lips though the side of your mouth still curve upward.

When you feel like you’re not going to chuckle, “What pray tell would you have me say or do to mend this fragile ego of yours Ezra? Mind you we just met in person less than five minutes ago.” You added with Ezra now being the one to try and not laugh. It was an entertaining game to see who would break first, you’re trying to keep up with him, but you’re not quite sure you can.

Putting his hands up as if he’s gotten caught, lowering his head and making his chocolate brown eyes sullen with a frown to complete the look. “Now I would never be so discourteous as to ask a luminous lady such as yourself to do anything untoward.” Your mouth is covered by your fist to hold it in. He’s purposely laying on the ham extra thick. “I think we should just start with sharing a drink on the same porch. Being a gentleman, I will come to you and may bring you dinner if you’d like an adventure of a culinary nature.” His request was along the lines of what you were going to ask anyway so you nodded and moved your hand away from your mouth to tell him yes, resting your chin on the back of your hand. Upon hearing your answer, he runs his hand along your arm that your jaw sits upon. The calloused pads of his fingers have your skin jolting with electricity, a breathy sigh escapes your lips as you watch him speak.

“My dear Seraphina, I am anticipating that my ego shall be fully repaired after our evening encounter. Lady’s choice of course.”

Ezra’s gaze is as heavy as his words. His meaning is not hidden from her and he’s left if it happens or not up to her. The time has been agreed to as well as the menu and location. It appears things are changing tonight, what will Seraphina’s choice be? She’s not one to shy away from an adventure or a challenge, not at this stage in her life. Both her arms drop and her hands land on her hips, and a smirk plays on her lips. Ezra’s fingers didn’t leave Sera’s arm, still strumming the pads of them along her forearm. “I’ll take you up on both your company and dinner. I’ll provide the drinks. I have rum and tequila, so I can stop by the store on the way home if you prefer something else. How’s seven sound to you?”

Part Three Part Five

Taste-testers of Ezra’s gumbo 🍤: @rav3n-pascal22 @maggiemayhemnj @morallyinept @survivingandenduring @bonezone44 @magpiepillsjunior @yorksgirl @gemmahale @missredherring @missladym1981 @alltheglitterandtheroar @megamindsecretlair @readingiskeepingmegoing @pedroshotwifey @tinytinymenace @inept-the-magnificent @vivian-pascal @jessthebaker

[fandomtherapy44]

Klaus x reader

Summary: This story is from the perspective of Y/n Marshall the younger sister of Hayley Marshall. Side note I love Hayley one of my favorite characters. Basically Y/n will be pregnant instead of Hayley and I will be changing some things up but then that it should stay pretty close to the series. I hope you enjoy the story! Also, if you like I have a Castiel x reader

Paring: Klaus x reader

Word count: 1,449

Warnings: Some language, Typical the Originals violence, Spoilers for season one of The Originals, Pregnancy

I got the divder from

saradika

 Chapter 4: Girl in New Orlens

POV (Y/n)                      

“Look I'm sure Y/n feels great right Y/n.” “Uh well-” “See she’s fine.” Agnes the witch had suggested that we go see a doctor for the baby and Hayley was not happy. “She’s overdue for a checkup Hayley.” I would love that but I can’t get my sentence without my protective sister talking for me. “ What is she gonna do? Pop into the Quarter for a quick ultrasound? A pregnant werewolf escorted by a witch and another werewolf? Nothing to see here!” I was about to speak for myself before Rebekah had something to say herself.

“A lot of women would kill to have a child. It strikes me as odd that you're not letting your sister take better care of hers.” I can hear the resentment in her voice because I use sound and feel the same way whenever I saw a pregnant woman before. “Um If I may Hayley I appreciate your concern but I do need a checkup and I'm sure there has to be some doctor that will see people in my special condition right Agnes.” “Yes there is, out in the Bayou, off the beaten path. Now, I took the liberty of making an appointment for you. Tonight, after-hours, just us. Vampires will never get word of it.” “See Hayley everything will be okay plus I'll have a werewolf bodyguard.” I moved to hug her and she rolled her eyes and caved in. “ Okay, fine. Bayou-baby-doctor it is.” I squeezed her with excitement. 

Agnes and Hayley walked out the room and I was left with Rebekah. “Shouldn't you be off to get ready for your appointment.” Ahh there’s the venom in her words again. “Look Bex, I hope that’s not to forward . I don't know if you knew but before a couple months ago it was a fact that I could not make my own children.” She looked stunned. So I went on. “So I know that pain of seeing around what you want but can’t have. But I was given a miracle so my wish is that you have the same.” I looked at my stomach with a small smile and walked out. “Wait, why tell me?” “So you wouldn't feel alone.” 

We drove up to the bayou doctor’s house and from the outside it did not look promising. “This is the doctor's office?” Hayley was looking and was thinking the same things as I. “Dr. Paige is only this far out because Marcel's men kept terrorizing her patients. Go! She won't bite!” Hayley and I get out and walk to the shady looking front door. 

“Alright dear you can go ahead and lay down here.” Dr. Paige patted the bench for me. “So first off all why don’t we go ahead and do the ultra sound huh?” She pulled out some gloves and blue gel and an old school medical tv screen. “Please lift your shirt and it might be a little chilly.” She put the gel on and I looked on the screen and there was my little girl. “Oh my gosh Hayley, do you see her!” Hayley grabbed my hand. “Yes I do, I can already tell she’s going to be beautiful.” At this moment only one more person could make it perfect, Klaus.

“Would it be possible to get some copies of it?” I asked with so much hope. “Of course darling just give me a few.” She came back with some pictures and I wanted to cry. “Thank you, thank you.” I was almost clutching them. “Why don't we finish the checkup so mama can get home and rest.” “Yes of course doctor.” “Your baby's heart rate is perfect.” “I knew it. She's a tough one, like her mom.” I said and smiled in response. She hands me some tissue to clean up the gel and looks at my shoulder.

“That's a unique birthmark.” Hayley handed my sweater to me. “We're pretty much done here, right?” She responded standoffish.  I looked at her in wonder as to what was happening. At that moment Bex sends me an text reading "Where are you?"” I responded quickly. “Your blood pressure is a bit high, I've got something for it.” The doctor turns away and Hayley get startled by a wolf howling. We get up and look out the window and see a car pull up and some not so friendly men get out. The doctor turns back with some medicine and Hayley gets on her defensive stand.

“Ahh, you know, I'm-I'm actually not that good with pills.” “Heh, neither am I, truth be told.” She turns around again to prepare some kind of shot when We see the men start to come to the house. She turns around with the shot but I quickly headbut her. And Hayley grabs the syringe and gives her the whatever was in there. At this point those men were about to enter the room I locked it. And we ran out the window into the woods just in time as they bested in.

The men who raided the clinic are still looking for us in the woods behind the clinic, and they pass us, not seeing that we are hiding behind a tree. Hayley runs up to them and kicks the first man she encounters in the gut before knocking him to the ground. I jump and kick the second man down as well as I snap his neck.

A third man tries to attack us but Hayley grabs a knife from his hands and cuts his neck with it as she spins in the air. When a fourth lunges toward her, I grab his shotgun and knock him to the ground, and possibly kill him as I kick him and beat him in the head with the butt of the gun. As I crouched into a defensive position on the ground, my eyes flash werewolf-gold as I look around for any more threats. A large, burly man descends upon her, but before Hayley can react, his neck is snapped from behind by Rebekah, who has just arrived.

"Have to say, I'm impressed.” “How did you find us?” I ask. “Your text got me halfway, vamping here did the rest. Who are they?” “Witches. Warlocks. Whatever.” “There're more of them. Run!” Bex yelled out and we ran as she fought them off. We hear grunt and i turn to see a arrows enter heart. “ Rebekah!” We both yelled out as we did arrows shoat us in the shoulder making us pass out.

I wake up with one Hell of a headache and realize I didn't see Hayley. “HAYLEY!” “Y/N!” I ran to give her a hug. “What happened?” “I have no idea N/n but let's try to find Rebekah. “I nodded my head in agreement. 

As we walked back to the clinic I saw the person I really wanted. “Klaus…” I whispered to myself. “Y/n! What happened? Tell me what happened.” He rushed over to me and started to check to see if I was visibly hurt. “ I can't remember. Can you Hayley?” “No.” “You've completely healed. There's not a scratch on you.” Klaus at this point was holding my face.

“One of the perks of being a werewolf, remember?” “No, not that fast.” Bex ran over to me to help sit me down on the steps. “Leave her alone! [She thinks for a moment] It's the baby. The vampire blood-- Klaus' vampire blood-- in your system. It can heal any wound.” “This baby really is a miracle huh.” Klaus just started at me smiling a little bit.

“How did you escape? You were outnumbered, unarmed? Those men were ripped to shreds!” Hayley answered for us. “ I think it was the wolfs. I think there trying to protect us.” “The witches were supposed to protect you! When I get my hands on Sophie Deveraux–” “ It wasn't Sophie. It was Agnes.” I now said with venom. “ Fine! Agnes, Sophie, it's all the same to me! I'll slaughter the lot of them!” “Not if Elijah gets there first.” “Elijah? Did you find him?” Hayley asked with hope.

“He's been in touch, and he has a plan. All he asks is that we take care of you two.” She finished looking at the both of us. “ Hey, so... can we go home now? I'd really like to sleep for a few days…” I started to get up but my body could not handle it and was about to collapse when Klaus caught me. ”Ooh, I've got you, love. I've got you.” That was the last thing I heard before I passed out from pure exhaustion. 

Hey Yawl hope you enjoyed the chapter. It was so fun writing about the werewolf fighting and of course Klaus concern with y/n. See you in the next one! Also if you like supernatural I have a Castiel x reader.

[talesfrommedinastation]

Redneck Neighbor Doug: Why Belters are Space Cajuns

If Mandalorians are space rednecks, then Belters from The Expanse are space Cajuns. This is not up for debate, according to the nerdiest Southern man of all time, my neighbor Doug, who, it turns out, loves this show too. I'm 99% sure he's also a TNG and Battlestar fan, but that would just kill me with exhaustion if we went into full deets about it.

Onto our friends in the Belt and why they have so much in common with the French-Americans who reside in the wilder parts of the deep American south of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

I will elucidate now, via Doug, on what Belters and Cajuns do that make them…them:

They make do: First thing we see in the entire series is how much the Belters are royally crapped on by life. They live in space, which permanently alters their bodies, to the point where they can not survive on a planet. To quote, “Belters work the docks, loading and unloading precious cargo…never meant for us”. They don’t have the wealth of Earth or the incredible military drive of Mars, but they’re scrappy, innovative, and do what they can to survive, whether it’s by smuggling, pirating, or allying themselves with powerful folks. Like the French folks in Acadia who got flung from their homes to the bayous of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, who scrape a living by fishing, boatmaking, bartending, and/or serving as a member of the X-Men. Cajuns and Belters do what they can to survive, giving them an edge that others do not have.

They party hard: Belters love drinking, having parties on their ships and in port, banging everyone on the crew, and overall just being wild. After all, you never know when you’re going to get your air or water cut off by the Inners, might as well live it up. And Cajuns, well, they invented Mardi Gras and their saying is ‘Laissez les bons temps rouler’ or ‘let the good times roll’. Life isn’t easy on a swamp that is constantly wacked by floods or hurricanes, but they party as much as they can. Just like the Belters.

Their women: Some of the best damn characters in the series are the angry ladies of the Belt (Camina Drummer and Naomi Nagata). Man, they something else. They’re loving, fierce, smart, crazy, and can go from Bambi to Banshee in five seconds. Cajun women love to host parties, help with church, and cook and make an amazing roux from dirt and crayfish, but God help you if you piss one off. Those pot carrying arms can snap a neck quicker than a blue crab shell. 

They speak in patois: Ever heard Cajun French? It ain’t from Paris, that’s for sure. It’s mixed up and raw and beautiful in its own right, and for many generations, it was looked down upon by English-speaking neighbors. Belter creole is similar, a smashed up beauty of a language that has come out of life in space, filled with English, Chinese, Farsi, German, Hindi, and other languages. It even has a similar lilt to the bayou! 

They are ungovernable: There’s a reason the Cajuns were never quite able to fully rebel against the various governments that took over their swampy goodtimes. They’re loyal to each other and their land, and that’s about it. Belters are the same–they’ve tried with the OPA, and even then, there’s different factions and squabbling (Anderson Dawes vs Fred Johnson, for example) and it’s only until there’s a genuine, alien threat to they get all united (plus Camina Drummer comes to power, but that’s neither here nor there). 

They’re good at figuring out solutions: Cajuns live in gator and snake infested swamps that flood and hurricanes smash through routinely. But they live and thrive regardless, with their pirogues and their bridges and their houses on the water. Same with Belters: their lives are lived in space, with crappy gravity and air. But they’re scrappy and tough and figure out how to survive. A Redditor pointed out that many of the more ambitious, driven Earthers left generations ago to live on the Belt, as the option was staying on Earth and living on an increasingly overcrowded, shitty planet. Not unlike the ancestors of the Cajuns who left France. 

The Spice Must Flow: Belters have to pack their shitty food full of peppers and spices to make it palatable, to the point one of the nicknames for their most famous dishes is called ‘red kibble’. And have you ever had proper Cajun food? Crawfish, alligator, boudin, and frogs are freaking amazing when done properly, although my fancy British friends were horrified that I enjoyed them. Pass me them mudbugs with some Cachere’s seasoning, collards, and corn, I wanna feel the pain. 

They work in weird and hard places: See above for both Belters and Cajuns. Jobs Cajuns have had range from oil fields to swamps to cities filled with yellow fever. But they take it and have a good sense of humor about it. Same with Belters–they work on rough ships, in radiation filled places in space, and don’t bitch about it. To quote the gaunt Belter, ‘They built the solar system on our backs’. 

Everything and anything can be used as a weapon: A gun? Peshang! Guns are for fancy Inners. Belters will use guns, AND pipes, chairs, each other, elevators, fists, a toothbrush, shives, you name it, they’ve killed with it. They’re tough and scrappy, and so are the Cajuns, whose fights are notorious in the bayou and beyond. Don’t mess with them. 

So yeah, Space Cajuns.

[heranubis]

LAST HOUSE IN THE BAYOU: Infernal Alex Keller mini-series ◇ chapter III. FIREWEED ◇ img cred ◇

◇ CONTENT WARNINGS: alex bites out of aggression and wound is vaguely described being treated

- ◇ - ◇ - ◇ - ◇ - ◇ - ◇ - ◇ - ◇ - ◇ - ◇ -

The dreams and long, sleepless nights continue as time slowly crawls by. Weeks into months as you work on bringing life back into the old house. The demon torments anyone who tries to offer help - hiding tools, making screams far off in the bayou, even the shadows move like something evil and ugly. But you are not deterred - and simply take up the jobs yourself.

Many days are spent with you on your knees ripping up old carpets and humming along to your old radio as he stands in the doorway, his hooves clicking as he shifts his weight. You still don't have a name for him, nor does he have yours. He growls and hisses and speaks in a language that hurts whenever you try to call him anything other than 'demon'. You gave up shortly after the first nose bleed.

The next project is perhaps the most tedious and annoying. You decide to repaint the walls before installing new flooring - and every time you decide on a color, the nightmares start up again. Still you as a child, still those sharp claws digging into your shoulders. But the old woman doesn't save you again - you simply stand in the hallway with him behind you until morning arrives and the sun saves you from his touch. When you decide on a soft shade of blue, his grip doesn't seem as tight.

- ◇ -

You decide on carpet - picking a soft gray that pairs well with the blue on the walls; it also masks the sound of his hooves, gives your brain a moment to forget he's there and watching. He's not as hostile as he was in the beginning, and you think perhaps it's time mellowing out his temper - or maybe he finally realized you're not going anywhere.

And then... you have another dream. This one is different from the others, it feels like something you're not meant to see, but your eyes won't open.

It's a battlefield, and there's a gun in your hands - but this body is not your own. "Alex" you hear a voice call, and your head involuntarily turns to greet it. "Cmon, man - we can't save them. We have to go!" You don't know who they are, or who this Alex is, but you know the words hurt him. It feels like knives shoved between the ribs and twisted with an anger no man should possess. It hurts and it burns and you feel like you're dying.

Everything moves fast and slow, a blur and crystal clear. There's pain in your left leg and then suddenly... you don't feel anything. Your eyes open and you're looking directly at the demon as he leans over you on your bed. His clawed hands braced on either side of your head, his knees pressed tightly against your hips and his tail swaying angrily. His lips curl back in a snarl as he glares down at you.

"Stay out of my head. Or else" he growls - and then, in the blink of an eye, he's gone and you're alone in the bed.

- ◇ -

The demon doesn't disturb you for the rest of the month, but you see him in doorways and shadows. He never stays long enough for you to get a good look, but you know he's there. You almost... feel bad for him. Clearly he'd been through something traumatic as a human, and maybe it was that anger that kept him bound to this world. Privately, in the safety of your mind, you call him Alex. And you think the wallpaper matched his eyes almost perfectly.

- ◇ -

Making peace with the demon is far harder than you could even begin to imagine. The whiskey bottle you had hung in the soul tree for him constantly shatters, and yet you always find one to replace it. It's almost a daily ritual, changing out the bottles and silently hoping this one lasts longer than the others - but it never does.

You leave out sweets and desserts for him. Bottles of strawberry jam, a pile of honeysuckle blooms, even a spare bottle of moonshine you'd found tucked away in the cupboard. It seems this type of offering is accepted - as you find a ghost orchid resting on your pillow the next time you lay down for sleep. He doesn't stomp as often, nor does his tail lash so violently. He almost seems... demure, tamed.

- ◇ -

The first time you call him Alex is when things truly reach their peak - he bites you. Right on your shoulder, you feel his sharp teeth break skin and the smell of blood in the air and then he's gone. You're too busy tending to the wound to notice how he slinks into the bathroom behind you and places clawed hands on the sink, trapping you between his arms. "Don't call me that" he says - his voice soft and gruff; he hasn't truly spoken since that one time you'd told him to get out.

"It's your name, isn't it? Alex?" you mumble softly, tenderly wiping the blood from the bitemark, ignoring how his eyes burn into you. "Nobody's called me that for a long time" he whispers, his tail curling tightly around your leg, his head almost hesitantly nestling against the back of your head. "A thing like me doesn't deserve a name"

You pause at that, and make eye contact with him through the mirror. His eyes are the same blue as the walls that surround you - and he looks tired. But this is a tired no sleep can fix, this is the exhaustion of existance.

"I'm not human anymore. Don't call me that" he hisses again, his eyes now hard and pupils sharp - slitted like a crocodiles. "I don't want you here - why won't you just leave?! Like everyone else - just go! Get out!" he practically snarls, his voice inhuman and otherly as his words seem to claw down to your bones.

You look at him through the mirror - and you see the hurt, the fear. Turning around, you look down and finally notice why his hoofbeats sound off. Just below the knee, his left leg is metallic and skeletal - he notices your stare and shifts his body to remove it from your sight. His tail whips and he disappears, the smell of sulfur strong enough to make your eyes water.

- ◇ -

The next time you walk outside, the whiskey bottle in the soul tree is on the ground - perfectly intact, as if someone had cut it free. You kneel down and pick it up, glancing back at the other bottles, and you notice something. All of the other bottles have slips of paper in them - names written down with words of love and warmth scrawled across. Aged by the elements yet remaining - you know what to do now.

Brown glass shines dully in the sun, held up by a thick cord and deep in the belly of the bottle lays a paper with a name carefully inked.

Alex.

[ereborne]

1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, 17, 20, 26, 32, 44, 46 (weird or genre-defying books), 47, 50

Thank you for so many prompts!! This was so fun to do and now it is so long. I hope it's as good to read as it was to write out!

1) Name the best book you've read so far this year: I answered Aftermarket Afterlife by Seanan McGuire to digs just a moment ago, but I'm glad you asked too, because honorable mention goes to Inheritance by Nora Roberts. It came out in November, not technically 2024, but time is fake and 2024 is just beginning anyway, so I'm counting it. Inheritance starts pretty slow and for a bit I was wondering how it was going to manage a satisfying resolution, and then I realized she was doing something new! (unfair. she's been building to this since 2015, it's just that now is when it's starting to really click with me) Instead of a trilogy with three couples whose romance arcs each get centered in their own book, this is going to be a trilogy focusing on unraveling the family curse/haunting, with the four main characters growing tighter as a unit (and forming their two romantic pairs, of course) throughout. I really like the characters and I am delighted by the curse/haunt storytelling. Cannot wait to see more.

2) Favorite fantasy book(s): this is so hard. okay, okay, brief rundown. brief. I can do this. bookshelf by bookshelf, I think. we'll take as granted everything by Seanan McGuire, sure. Bayou Moon and Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews. By the Sword and From a High Tower by Mercedes Lackey. Bryony and Roses and Summer in Orcus by T Kingfisher. The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane. The Long Patrol-Marlfox-Taggerung by Brian Jacques, which I always read in a shot as if they were one book. Similarly, the Protector of the Small and Magic Circle quartets by Tamora Pierce, and the Icewind Dale trilogy by RA Salvatore. Tangled Webs by Elaine Cunningham. The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien (really all the LotR trilogy, but even I cannot say I sit and read them all three straight through as if they were one). The Wee Free Men and Thud! by Terry Pratchett.

4) Favorite science fiction book(s): The Ship Who Sang and Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. Exit Strategy and Network Effect by Martha Wells. The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers. Rescues and the Rhyssa by TS Porter (also a favored queer fiction book, but I love the alien worldbuilding so much it has to be here)

8) Favorite queer fiction book(s): Humanity for Beginners by Faith Mudge. Nightvine by Felicia Davin. the Harwood Spellbook series by Stephanie Burgis (also a down-in-one-shot series). Holly and Oak by R Cooper.

12) Favorite horror book(s): I haven't read too many horror books, so my pool is limited here, but The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher both gave me the shudders so bad.

15) Which genre(s) are your favorite? Fantasy! I love all the fantasy subgenres, and especially the magical realism overlaps.

17) Favorite finished book series: How finished is finished? A lot of my serieses are made up of several trilogy/quartet subsets together in a world. hmmmm. The Protector of the Small quartet again by Tamora Pierce, I think.

20) Where and how do you find new books to read? I mentioned in my reply to digs that I'm subscribed to a ton of newsletters, but I feel like I undersold their effect on me. I don't know how many I'm subscribed to--just sat here and off the top of my head counted to eighteen that post at least weekly and I'm so sure I'm missing some--and I love having that regular infusion of book progress and reviews and writing thoughts and commentary. I really do recommend that folks subscribe to their favorite authors.

26) Favorite novella(s): Silver Shark by Ilona Andrews. The Seven Brides-to-Be of Generalissimo Vlad by Victoria Goddard. Jackalope Wives by T Kingfisher.

32) Name your favorite author(s): massive overlap with everybody else I've listed here. who haven't I mentioned? Jennie Crusie, Jayne Ann Krentz, JD Robb (which is a Nora Roberts penname but they've got distinct enough works I want to list them out separate). Patricia Briggs, Patricia C Wrede, Max Gladstone, Gail Carriger, Nalini Singh. And Ed Greenwood, about half the time.

44) The book(s) whose stories have become part of your very makeup: The Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien. Watership Down by Richard Adams. Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie. Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Phoenix & Ashes by Mercedes Lackey. The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard.

46) I like (weird or genre-defying books), recommend me a book to read, please: First thought was the Humans Are Weird series by Betty Adams, though that might not be what you mean. They're intensely fun collections of 'humans are space-orcs' style vignettes. Maybe more directly books that are weird would be the Craft Sequence series by Max Gladstone and Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw. Very toothy complicated magical realism. And my favorite genre-blending books are always the Elemental Masters books by Mercedes Lackey. A Study in Sable for instance is equal parts a Sherlock Holmes story and a retelling of The Twa Sisters fairytale, and also a coherent installment in an ongoing historical fantasy series about elemental mages in early 1900s England.

47) What are the last three books you read? Indexing by Seanan McGuire, Die in Plain Sight by Elizabeth Lowell, Pirate's Honor by Chris A Jackson

50) What kind of book have you never read but always hope to find at some point in the future? This is such a fascinating question. I don't know that there's anything in particular that I've always wanted and never found, but there are things I'm always looking for more and better examples of. I'm extremely picky about soulmate AUs, so a good one especially captivates me. Oh, or a really well-handled impromptu adoption! Child characters and bureaucracy are both tricky to write and things I know a lot about, and when they're done well they hook me so hard.

[isabellehemlock]

Image descriptions under the cut

The first image compilation features a mock up of two eyeshadow palettes. The one on the left is open to display a backdrop of The Azalea with various colors to represent the makeup, and the one on the right features palm leaves for the Mardi Gras wallpaper, as well as religious symbolism. Peeking out from behind it is a smear of blue eye shadow, and along the edge, various stacked make up brushes. Just underneath reads: “make up inspired by” with the series’ logo beside it.

The second image features a still of Louis and Lestat sitting at the Azalea with the colors in circles along the edge of the frame. To the right reads the titles of the colors: “Blue Glass, Azalea Bush, Rose Red, Dark Gift, Piano Notes, Church Windows.”

The final image is of Louis and Lestat dancing at the Mardi Gras celebration with the colors in circles along the edge of the frame. To the left reads the titles of the colors: “The Bayou, Judas Kiss, Palm Leaves, Lavender Fields, Violet Delights, Incandescent Eyes.”

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

Top 10 horror movie or TV series in your opinion?

I don't know if I'll do a top ten in order, too hard for me to decide, but I can list my favorites.

Note that some of these I'd qualify more as thrillers, or in American Psycho's case actually a comedy, but I'm not really a fan of pure horror films so this is what you get. So, in now particular order here we go.

Movies

The Shining

The Exorcist

Alien

The Thing (1982)

The Fly (1986)

Jaws

The Silence of the Lambs

Misery

Rosemary's Baby

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Blue Velvet

American Psycho

Rear Window

Psycho

Vertigo

Eve's Bayou

Shows is a little more iffy, a lot more iffy, and I've included things that have horror-ish episodes (e.g. Twilight Zone) if they aren't horror shows themselves.

Shows

Shiki

Mononoke

Blood-C

The Promised Neverland

Hell Girl

The Twilight Zone

The Outer Limits

[krejong]

Get to know me

Danke für die Tag @caromitpunkt🌞

Share your wallpaper: Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse. (↓)

The last song you listened to: Maghreb by Saint Levant & Bayou

Currently Reading: The Eye of The World (the first part of the Wheel of Time series—I've heard...things so IDK if I'll ever finish the series but so far I'm enjoying this book) by Robert Jordan and So weit die Störche ziehen by Theresia Graw (it’s supposed to be a very chicklit-y romance, which isn’t usually my type of story, but I’m just trying to ease myself into committing to actual books in German by not going too highbrow right off the bat.)

Last Movie: non-Tatort-related was ‘Fack ju Göhte 2’ because the girl I like thinks that it’s a staple in German cinematographic culture and that I couldn’t possibly graduate as a Germanic philology student without having seen it.

Craving: Something I can actually taste! My nose has been completely blocked for several days now and I miss flavours 😢

What are you wearing right now: my trusty ski socks, blue Snoopy pajama pants and a green-and-white striped shirt that I’m pretty sure is sized for a teenage boy. Queen of style, as per uzhe

How tall are you: about 1m78

Piercings: just two sets of earring piercings and one in my left nostril

Tattoos: I remain tattoo-less, for now. 

Glasses? Contacts?: Glasses, always! I sat on them a while back though so I should really go get new rims instead of walking around with these crooked ones, but I’ve gone and gotten attached now…

Last drink: Ginger and honey tea.

Last show: Because this is my First Life 

Last thing you ate: Shakshouka my beloved 😋

Favourite colour: GREEN

Current obsession: …does it need saying?

Unrelated Obsession: unnecessarily pretentious period dramas (not Bridgerton though, sorry)

Any pets: Nope!

Do you have a crush on anyone: Unfortunately so. I’m planning on telling her after our exams finish though, so if it all spectacularly blows up in my face and I go around whining on Tumblr now you guys will know why. Sorry in advance 🙃

Favourite fictional character: Is this what being quartered felt like? I guess Isabelle Grandjean, but just for the record this is an evil, evil question.

The last place you traveled: Aachen, Amsterdam or Antwerp, depends on what we’re counting as ‘traveling.’

Tagging @disappointingsalad @karin-in-action @lucy-in-space @anafrndz and @punchandspade

[pressedink]

obligatory pinned post or whatever (written with very much non-whatever energy)

my fics!

Prelude to Ecstasy | WIP, 1/12 chapters | a series of interconnected stories on love craved, found, and lost; based on The Last Dinner Party’s debut album Prelude to Ecstasy

James Potter vs. the World | complete, 8/8 chapters | Scott Pilgrim vs. the World AU; James Potter battles 7 evil exes to win Regulus Black's heart and Remus Lupin is Anna Kendrick

Stick It to the Man | WIP-on hiatus (please send turkey subs for fuel), 5/? chapters | School of Rock AU; Sirius is Dewey Finn, Remus is Principal Mullins, Regulus is Ned Schneebly, and James is a completely made-up, enthusiastic music teacher

be specific | complete, 3/3 chapters | Marlene is dared to kiss everyone in the room; Lily is one of those people

notes app graveyard | collection of microfics | notes on love/longing across several marauders pairings

Public Transportation | complete, 1/1 chapters | James Potter rides public transportation for fun and finds a beautiful stranger along the way

———————————

fics i will be in love with forever and always!

saccharine | by moonymoment

Dear Your Holiness | by MollyMaryMarie

'tis the damn season | by moonymoment

just lovers (like we were supposed to be) | by bizarrestars

The Right Thing To Do | by LovesBitca8

A Black Mass Over Highway Ninety | by greenvlvetcouch

Seek and Find | by serpent_and_sage

———————————

fics i've recently come to love!

divinitus | by damagecontrol

Of His Bones | by MesserMoon

edge | by pinkpalaceapartments

———————————

music lately!

Francesca | Hozier

The Air That I Breathe | The Hollies

Blue Bayou | Linda Ronstadt

Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying | Labi Siffre

First Love/Late Spring | Mitski

No One Knows | Queens of the Stone Age

Summer Breeze | Seals and Crofts

White Room | Cream

Love Is The Drug | Roxy Music

Lagoon | Dora Jar

Alright | Kitty Craft

Tangerine | Tommy Newport

Cherry-coloured Funk | Cocteau Twins

Something to Believe | Weyes Blood

All I Ever Asked | Rachel Chinouriri

the entirety of The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We | Mitski

[lboogie1906]

Lynn Whitfield (born February 15, 1953) is an actress. She began her acting career in television and theatre before progressing to supporting roles in film. She won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie and received a Golden Globe Award nomination for her breakout performance in The Josephine Baker Story. She was born in Baton Rouge, the daughter of Jean Smith, a former president of the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency, and Dr. Valerian Smith, who was a composer who wrote the musicals, The Supper and The Wake. She is the eldest of four children and a third-generation BFA graduate from Howard University. She played leading roles in several made-for-television movies and had several starring in theatrical films, including The Slugger's Wife, Silverado, The Women of Brewster Place, The George McKenna Story, Jaws: The Revenge The Slugger's Wife, Silverado, Jaws: The Revenge, A Thin Line Between Love and Hate, Gone Fishin', Eve's Bayou, Stepmom, Head of State, Madea's Family Reunion, and The Women. She has starred or appeared in over 100 films and television productions. She starred as Lady Mae Greenleaf in Greenleaf, for which she won critical acclaim and garnered two NAACP Image Awards and a Gracie Award. She has won a total of seven NAACP Image Awards. She first garnered attention on the stage by performing with the Black Repertory Company in DC. She married playwright/director/actor Vantile Whitfield, one of the company's co-founders and a pioneer of Black theatre. She moved to New York and appeared off-Broadway in such shows as The Great Macdaddy and Showdown Time before earning international acclaim touring the US, Australia, and London's West End in the play "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf". She made her professional screen debut in Hill Street Blues. She appeared in the comedy film Doctor Detroit. She was a regular cast member in the series HeartBeat. She has been married twice. She married Vantile Whitfield. She married director Brian Gibson, with whom she had a daughter. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #alphakappaalpha https://www.instagram.com/p/Corsfi6LhVD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[feathersofvibranium]

𝐓𝐀𝐆 𝐏𝐄𝐎𝐏𝐋𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓 𝐓𝐎 𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐓𝐎 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 !

𝙵𝙰𝚅𝙾𝚄𝚁𝙸𝚃𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙻𝙾𝚄𝚁: Blues

𝙲𝚄𝚁𝚁𝙴𝙽𝚃𝙻𝚈 𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙳𝙸𝙽𝙶: Mystic Bayou series by Molly Harper (well, audiobooking them) Listen, no one knows my NEED for a sam and mystic bayou crossover (and only half because they’re both based in Louisiana/the bayou. I would love to see and rp marvel characters with mystic bayou kinda powers

𝙻𝙰𝚂𝚃 𝚂𝙾𝙽𝙶: this sam music video

𝙻𝙰𝚂𝚃 𝚂𝙴𝚁𝙸𝙴𝚂: She-Hulk

𝙻𝙰𝚂𝚃 𝙼𝙾𝚅𝙸𝙴: Dr Strange MoM (rewatch)

𝚂𝚆𝙴𝙴𝚃/𝚂𝙿𝙸𝙲𝚈/ 𝚂𝙰𝚅𝙾𝚄𝚁𝚈:  Sweet but really a balance of all tho

𝙲𝚄𝚁𝚁𝙴𝙽𝚃𝙻𝚈 𝚆𝙾𝚁𝙺𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙾𝙽: nothing productive oops ... I should really be working on revamping my entire sam blog here because CAPTAIN AMERICA

𝚃𝙰𝙶𝙶𝙴𝙳 𝙱𝚈: @particlexxdealer

𝚃𝙰𝙶𝙶𝙸𝙽𝙶: @hxrbingxr @taliaromanova @imxthexhandler @pervyyzimniysoldat  @withoutawar feel free to steal~

[nevillehousegardendistrict]

Artist Jay N. Davis and his American bulldog Johnson at home in Davis’s Monroe Garden District art studio.

Local Artist Jay N. Davis Talks Feathered Strokes

Mark your Thursday evening in the last week in July for an occasion you will not want to miss! Neville House will be hosting a very special solo art exhibition, Bird & Bloom, which includes the latest works and feathered strokes of Jay N. Davis. Davis, an established artist and Monroe native, just so happens to live and work out of his Garden District home/studio located only a few blocks over from our historic property turned community art collective – talk about a creative corridor! His lush paintings and drawings of Northeast Louisiana’s flora and fauna capture the region’s unique natural beauty in an array of media including oil, charcoal, watercolor and colored pencil. The art event will take place on Thursday, July 28 from 5pm to 8pm at Neville House located at 217 Hudson Lane (corner of Hudson and North 3rd). Guests will have the chance to meet Davis and speak with him about his never-before-seen original works, limited edition prints and signature lifestyle pieces. Learn more about Davis, his latest series of paintings and his local inspiration in our chat below.

Blue Heron, 2022, limited edition of 50, linoleum block print on handmade cotton paper, 11 x 14 inches

Rebekah Lawrence (Neville House): We just love the heron that was featured on the invitation for your upcoming Neville House solo art exhibition event. Can you tell us more about this work? 

Jay Davis: This is the most recent piece I have created. The heron here is flying over the Ouachita River and it was originally going to be called Heron on the Ouachita. Then I decided to make smaller runs of the print in different colors, and this one became The Blue Heron. It’s a linoleum cut block print. I recently took a linocut workshop at the Masur Museum of Art here in Monroe and was inspired to make this. I had 50 prints made from the linocut, which will be available for purchase at the Neville House event and on my website. 

RL: How does Monroe and the NELA region affect your work?

JD: I grew up exploring the woods and playing and exploring this area, just out in the bayou and the woods. So that makes up a big part of my inspiration to this day. When I moved back here after living in many different states and countries, I was inspired all over again by the wildlife and fauna of the area and I’ve been focusing on the natural environment in this immediate area in my work right now. 

RL: I see a little bit of personality in this heron and in many of the birds and wildlife you paint. Where does that come from?

JD: I worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation for a little over 12 years. It was my dream job; I had always wanted to work at Disney after graduating from college.When I left Disney, I took a botanical illustration class which dovetailed with my interests in the natural world and tapped into my background in architecture. It all works together in the paintings I’m creating now. And yes, I still like to bring that element of animation and characterization to my paintings of local wildlife. 

Davis’s Spoonbill accent pillow from his signature lifestyle collection will be available to purchase during his solo art exhibition at Neville House on July 28.

RL: What's your favorite work from the upcoming exhibition at Neville House?

JD: I love the Spoonbill painting. I love the way the colors came out and the attitude of the bird that comes through in this work. That painting hasn’t been shown before. We will also have the Spoonbill bird available on a pillow for purchase at the exhibition.

RL: Who are your biggest artistic influences?

JD: I grew up loving Dali and M.C. Escher. I am a fan and collector of the contemporary artist Christopher Ulrich, whose work is very strange but very beautiful. And I also love Walter Anderson, who is a Louisiana artist. It’s probably no surprise that I’m a fan of the classical old botanical and zoological drawings too. 

Crawfish Dinner, 2021, acrylic paint on 1/4 inch steel plate, 17 feet 4 inches x 12 feet

RL: Can you tell us about any other recent projects?

JD: Yes! I painted a big mural for Monroe’s zoo – Louisiana Purchase Gardens and Zoo – this year. The mural is called Crawfish Dinner and features a giant egret and a heron hunting in the marsh. I loved painting wildlife from Northern Louisiana as opposed to the more typical Southern Louisiana wildlife for this. The zoo mural was a dream project and I feel so lucky that I was able to do it. It’s a little bit like how Disney was my dream job for so long, and then I had the opportunity to have that dream realized for more than a decade while I worked there. And now this is my dream thing to do—painting what I love. Making art is awesome!

Devil at the Crossroads, 2009, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches

RL: Describe the best piece of art you've created.

JD: This painting Devil at the Crossroads was the first painting I completed and the first painting I ever sold. It started out as a painting about Robert Johnson at the crossroads selling his soul to the devil but the painting became more about the depiction of the devil. What I love about the painting is that the sky has depth and it’s terrible and wonderful at the same time. It’s also very abstract.

RL: What's next on the drawing board? JD: I am just getting started on a series for a gallery in Baton Rouge. I am also collaborating with a music professor at University of Louisiana Monroe, where I am making a painting that will inspire a musical composition. There are so many things I want to paint! I’m experimenting with acrylics and being looser with my art. Architecture and botanical illustration is tight, and I like working loose with more energy and broader strokes.

Vol Fantôme, 2022, acrylic on panel, 8 x 8 inches

BIRD & BLOOM

Stop by Neville House on Thursday, July 28 between 5pm and 8pm to view the Jay N. Davis solo art exhibition, Bird & Bloom, and to meet him in person. Davis’s exclusive lifestyle collection featuring stationery, pillows, totes and more designed with his artwork will also be on view and available to purchase during the art exhibition event. 

EXHIBITION INQUIRIES

Rebekah Lawrence, Proprietor/Curator at Neville House, 318.348.6045, nevillehousegardendistrict@gmail.com, @neville_house_garden_district

lead and last images: Meredith Mashburn Photography; all other images courtesy of Jay N. Davis

[aethertownusa]

I'm going to post some of the first three chapters of my playtime college novel in a series in order. I've enjoyed rereading it. I had been working for years on a quite serious quite restrained novel and this one was just what happened when my anxiety about trying to graduate and get a good internship lifted the little weight floating on the surface of my heart toward the little bell that rang and bonked the dominos which fell and dropped the ball bering down the tiny slide which made me write a mostly comic novel set in Louisiana, a place I have still never been, and composed, I am very sorry to say, partially in completely-invented dialect.

Joachim (Kim) is a successful indie musician who has been invited to a low-key friend reunion in his hometown in rural Louisiana. His friends transparently have other aims. Kim brings along his bandmate, Benjamin. Enjoy my eccentric use of hyphens as em dashes, my antique habit. Also enjoy some attitudes I have since outgrown. None are outright hateful but you know.

Isaac’s house had belonged to his grandmother. Throughout his youth Isaac slept in his parents’ tract house on Beaufort but each conscious moment he had spent in or around this octopod wreck, breaking bones in the swamp and running up and down the staircase with a noise like warfare.

The boys and girl of Kim’s friend group had grown up comfortably poor and relatively urbanized, in the country way; though they lived at the hem of the swamp and the wood it was only Isaac who made any significant use of the natural world. Each came from tiny homes with jail cell windows and space enough to hang a backpack and eat a sandwich. This was why Isaac’s grandmother’s home had become commons.

And that was why they had each of them become competent filmmakers: they had started out movie heads, music video freaks, but it was learning to film within the insane confines of the Douin house which gave them any skill to speak of. The single wood beam which was plunged inexplicably through the otherwise cavernous dining room. The man-big windows in half the house - and the landlocked black of the other half. The ambient sounds of pipping and popping, from no source anyone had ever identified. Kim had become interested in microphones because of those noises. And so the house was probably why Kim had become a musician. It was certainly why he had become a good musician.

Now the house belonged to Isaac, and under his influence it had become a place you’d fear to find if you were lost on the bayou. To a friend of Isaac’s it was suffused with his friendly medieval brilliance. If you did not know him and his ways, it looked like the home of a dangerous lunatic.

Lamps on top of books. Glowed gold by lamplight, and half blue from the light without, a watercolor painting, six feet tall at least: a fairy woman. Blakeish. A red dot, a yellow dot, a blue dot in its corner, like printer’s test paper. Kim saw it through another room and did not have the moment to ask about it. Certainly he’d never seen it before.

They sat around Isaac’s dining room table and ate directly out of barbeque tins. They talked about high school. Kim set them going. In grade nine Zeline brought a snake to school. Did they ever think about that day?

 “The thing you don’t know,” said Zeline, in her customary bellow, “Was that I brought him to school lots. You people just didn’t care to look in my backpack or ask anything about me.”

“Whenever we looked in your backpack there were snakes,” Ray pointed out reasonably. “Why would we seek that out?”

“He was a good guy,” said Zeline. “There’s a video of me drawing him and you can see him pose.”

“The thing I remember you doing,” said Kim to Zeline, “Whenever you spring to mind, is how you never looked like you were doing anything -”

“Fuck you!”

“- and then you’d come out and be like, Here’s a whole cartoon, hey I painted a whole wall, here's a book I made."

Zeline sat back from the table and put her hands into pawlike fists. “Well, that’s okay, then,” she said. “You can think of me like that.”

Paul agreed with Kim. “When she’s in the background of the movies, there’s two Zeze categories. She’s either,” Paul slumped in his chair like a corpse and widened his eyes. “Or she’s painting an entire wall with her, her little guys.”

“Lizurbs,” clarified Zeline, ringing Kim’s tinnitus.

Zeline had a doll’s face. Her face had always been good and good to look at: she’d moved through adolescence like a foreigner, her features clean of narrow looks, conniving, boredom. She’d dressed like a doll, too, until they were about sixteen. Her mother was a seamstress—she made church clothing for the black ladies and the white ladies, stiff pastille-colored skirtsuits and big silky hats; and she made pageant clothing, petticoated gingham in blazing Lisa Frank. Little Zeline liked the look and had committed to it. Too much amongst boys, perhaps, and certainly too socially numb to know any better, she showed up to school day after day in full formal dress, bright as an electric bouquet and petaled with eyelet underskirts.

Then in grade ten, abruptly, she’d started dressing like a boy, in sports sweatshirts and Paul’s castoff metal tees. They’d teased her about it and she’d disconcerted them by bursting into tears, so they’d dropped the subject instantly and forever. Now, grown, Kim recognized his own idiocy - not an unfamiliar feeling. Zeline sat wall-straight, clearly a labored-for habit, and her breasts in her pink sundress were huge, like a pair of submarine noses. She was the sort of woman Kim would be afraid to talk to in the ordinary world.

Hard to know what Zeline had made of growing up almost exclusively with boys - what it had made of her. Kim was not insightful enough to say. In his mind, when he thought of her, in fact he saw her sitting quite still; but in this thought she was looking to the side with her glassy abstracted eyes, watching.

The nocturnal birds started up, and acoustically scrambled by the Douin house their noise seemed to come from the kitchen into the dining room. Some heron made his grunt like tires inching on wet asphalt. Kim’s fast attention moved between these sounds and the table talk, which he had only occasionally to wind and set going. In his mind he lifted up the shape of the swamp and the house at its end and felt it from outside and was in it. A black hot sweet-smelling planet, its roots and pipes waving in the air like in water. He and these good people floating into the empty sky, outside of time.

“You guys seem a bunch similar to one another,” said Zeline to Benjamin as they unrolled the lid from the second mac-and-cheese. “Which—and this is weird—I don’t mean as an insult.”

Benjamin agreed in his glum Canadian sing-song: “We both like football movies.”

Jean-Daniel looked heartbreakingly hopeful—Kim thrust his palm out. “He doesn’t mean it,” Kim said to Jean-Daniel. “Put that smile away. The joke is we hate them.”

Jean-Daniel turned to Benjamin: “Do you know just what kind of a boy you got here? Do you know half the weird shit he got up to at the turn of the century?”

“I mean,” Ray equivocated, “That might not be a subject to introduce.”

Isaac said, “That’ll get all over everybody.”

“Every single one of us got up to some weird shit,” said Paul.

“Give me the weirdest shit,” challenged Benjamin, leaning forward. “Top three weird shits.”

“Here we go,” said Jean. He clapped his enormous hands and began to speak but was clamored over.

“Forreal don’t,” said Zeline.

“Bad plan,” said Isaac.

Kim liked to talk about himself and hear about himself: “I tried to summon a demon once,” he supplied, mostly because this was old news to Benjamin but sounded spectacular. Against his expectation, there was an instant’s quiet at the table. After Kim had been struck by surprise but before he could consider it, Paul shifted the focus - “A couple of us kept trying to do D&D nights but Kim was always too cool for that.”

“No, I wasn’t,” said Kim.

“Of course not,” said Paul. “What I mean is you thought you were.”

“I asked you to get me one of the Shannara books from the library,” said Zeline. “When I was sick. And you wouldn’t do it when you saw the cover, because it had like a dwarf on it. You were like, No, nobody gonna see me checking this out. You wouldn’t get it for me, Kim. When I was sick.”

“That is absolutely not true,” said Kim, happy and warm because everyone was looking at him.

“Stop sinning,” said Isaac. “It completely is. You hated all of that. You thought our dragon stuff was bullshit.”

Somewhere, there was a video of Kim saying, “Your dragon stuff is bullshit.”

“You were all about everything else, though,” said Paul. “Like you said. All the voodoo.”

“We were those guys,” said Kim to Benjamin with theatrical apology - as if Benjamin did not know.

“Tell us about yourself,” said Isaac to Benjamin, friendly. Benjamin turned his head like a willow in air. “Oh,” Benjamin said, embarrassed. “... No.”

The party was going well. Benjamin was very popular. Kim was unsurprised—it was an old story. Ben had been smoking with nerves all afternoon, fucking with the hotel’s coffee machine and isolating himself on the balcony with his phone. He hated attention and new people and always anticipated the worst. And when the time came, when Benjamin entered any bunch of gathered humans, he was immediately a friend and immediately well-liked. Kim’s friends took to him as everyone did.

Benjamin discerned a theme in the conversation. “Did you guys just keep a closed circuit camera running?” he asked.

“We have so many movies of us,” said Jean-Daniel, eating athletically.

“We were the best-documented teenagers on this planet.” Isaac nodded at Zeline. “Her garage is a museum. A hugely well-researched museum on a subject literally no one cares about.”

Isaac sat at the head of the table because it was his table. He bent over it like a wooden martyr. Kim got them talking about their present lives and Isaac looked over each face and made an evaluation: “Yuck.”

Paul’s conclusion was different or accessory. “No wives,” he said. He looked at Zeline. “And no husbands, excuse me, miss Zeline.”

“I don’t know about you assholes,” said Zeline, “But I plan on getting married. I’m a catch. Keep those eyes open and I’m gonna shock you right to hell. Rich widower. Loves animal paintings.”

“We’re a sad bunch,” said Isaac merrily.

“You really should get a wife,” Zeline rounded on Isaac. “Like if nobody else gets married, you really better, just for medical reasons. You cannot co-habitate long with possums. You got to eat fresh food someday.”

Isaac pointed at her. “I eat exactly what I need to eat.”

“Don’t make him show you his nutrition planner,” said Jean-Daniel, with some real earnestness.

“So it’s just me and Benjamin,” said Kim, but no one rose to his bait.

“Y’all are hitched,” said Zeline without interest or faith.

“Christ,” said Benjamin.

“You did good,” said Jean-Daniel. “Good work, Kim. More than you could’ve hoped for.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Benjamin.

Kim laughed, even though his terrorism had not come off. Benjamin stubbed out his cigarette elaborately. Kim laughed some more. He liked anything which made Benjamin sigh under the weight that was his association with Kim—Kim liked it because every deliberate manifestation of weariness meant that no such weariness existed.

The table was doing okay. There was not much money sitting in these chairs, besides Kim’s, which was music money and therefore tricky and enchanted. It didn’t mean so much; none of them had been poor enough in their childhoods to long seriously for wealth. Maybe Jean-Daniel. Beautiful Jean—“He looks like handsome-Squidward,” Paul said, showing off Jean-Daniel with an extended arm. Pool-blue eyes, face the thick angular perfection of a Picasso girl; he was even handsomer than the last time Kim had seen him, Dutch angle, in one of Jean-Daniel's video calls.

As a boy Jean had been a bald-headed little thug, thematically chilling to the rest of them: at nine, while Ray and Zeline were drawing homemade Pokémon cards, Jean-Daniel was drinking his uncle’s beer and setting fences on fire. Then he hit fifteen and his arms caterpillared out like Popeye’s—he joined the football team. At sixteen his face started slyly assembling itself, and it became clear that he was very handsome; he dropped football and joined the drama club, where the girls were. At seventeen his adult voice burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid man, and so while Ray and Zeline were cutting lithographs of Pokémon cards, Jean was working the farms to pay for acting lessons in the city.

Jean had grown up near Ray, but the space between Ray’s home and Jean’s was precisely the margin where the neighborhood turned trash. All the same, Jean and Ray had played together as boys, and with the negligence of youth had never thought to stop.

Now Jean-Daniel made a good living doing commericals. He’d have made more if he’d come West like Kim, but he would commute north to Chicago or more rarely New York, and lived to care for his uncle, depleted by addiction and now a dry-leaf old man - Jean’s life revolved around this caretaking. That was what Kim had been told, at least, in the series of emails by which Paul had arranged for this visit.

Kim knew from the horse’s mouth that Paul was having the hardest time. Kim had sat outside at the beach-adjacent Starbucks in Malibu, fluffed on every part of his body by the pink of bougainvillea and peaceful in his girlfriend’s company and he had read Paul’s first email. He’d read it through sunglasses and then he’d read it with his bare eyes. It was only a few lines long—how was he, Paul’d been keeping up with his work (great stuff), Zeline would be in-state this June and they were going to do a party, Ray was coming down too, what would Kim say to visiting. Teresa, now Kim’s ex, was an arm’s length away, reading the paper; and yet the ground between them stretched like a cat as Kim looked at his phone, and she was very far from him.

Singular among the old group, Kim and Paul had not kept in touch. Kim had not corresponded so closely with the others that this seemed particularly strange; sometimes Jean-Daniel Facetimed him, randomly and not well- he and Ray would meet when Ray went to conventions - Zeline sent him postcards of her own work- a few times a year Isaac would write him letter-long emails. It was perhaps stranger that most of them still spoke than that he and Paul had fallen out of contact. And yet reading the short first email, Kim was washed with a weird dread - why hadn’t Paul spoken to him in all this time? The thought had never occurred to him before, and now it came on him like horror in a dream - I left my sister in the oven - why hadn’t Paul written, not once since 2008?

After a brief exchange, their emails fattened and grew frank and friendly: Paul was a musician, too, which Kim knew, of course—they left at the same time, Paul because he graduated early and Kim because he simply split. Paul went to a conservatory up north and paid for it with scholarships and then restaurant work. Now, Paul explained, he was a failed musician, a bassist ejected from a band which went big a month later, then member of bands which never coalesced or were so far below his ability that he left them in shame. He taught guitar to children and worked as a line cook.

He had dragged himself from one fiancé to another. Alcoholics, script abusers. One stole his record collection and a rare pressing - Kim read that and immediately bought the same pressing off a friend in Berlin. He’d meant to ship it to Paul straightaway. He’d reconsidered. He put the record on the top of the shelf like an art piece. Then he put another record in front of it.

At Isaac’s table in the light of the blazing lamps, Paul looked exhausted. He wore a beard—deliberate, unlike Isaac’s—and his hair was neat in fine shining box braids, looped at the top of his head like a samurai. His arms in his tshirt were thick and his body was strong, like a man who lifted daily. But his face was bloated, the pockets beneath his eyes were ashy, and he had a gut. He sat at an angle, a hand pressed to his knee, pushing himself away from himself. Passing behind Paul on the way to the kitchen, Kim reached down and wrapped a hand up Paul’s head, chin to ear, and bent and kissed him on the cheek. Paul put his hand up to Kim’s forearm and said, “Aw.”

Ray and Kim stood in the kitchen and visited. Kim had come in for water. They’d laughed so hard that Kim had fallen off his chair and lain on the floor beneath the table laughing noiselessly - Jean-Daniel came to get him but had scarcely touched Kim before he was laid low, and then everyone was laughing at Kim and Jean-Daniel. Kim’s torso was sore like he’d taken a beating. He’d been weak, and dehydrated. Ray had come in to fetch the desserts as Kim had leaned his head over the sink to drink from the tap. They’d gotten to talking.

“I was scared this was going to be a shitshow,” said Kim, low, in mostly whistle and consonant. “But it ain’t, it ain’t, it’s all really easy.” They were eating pie.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Ray. “No, it’s fine. It’s just the old folks.”

“That’s what scared me.”

“I think it’s better than it used to be. And it wasn't bad.”

“No,” said Kim, passionate. “It was wonderful.”

“But it’s better now.” Ray’s high voice wound about him, consoling. “We’re not so clueless. We got manners.”

Mr. Ray, white as dough, amiable and bizarre. Since they were young he had feared nothing on the planet earth, though plenty made him tired and bored. His fearlessness either amounted to or expressed a cosmic open-mindedness - hard to say which had come first - to the effect that it was impossible to feel self-conscious in his company. He’d been a sweet boy and had remained a sweet adolescent, perhaps astonishing given his million mockable traits: he was shapeless and girl-voiced and nerdy and flat-faced, he couldn’t run, he made high marks and was liked by teachers. But he’d proved too baffling to mock: he’d just laugh and agree. “You're one trout-looking motherfucker,” so-and-so would say; “Ha ha! I sure am,” Ray would reply.

Now he did technical support at Loyola in New Orleans, accidental to his two real passions, which were video games and a vast, obsessive reading habit about which Kim knew almost nothing and into which Kim had been prying since they were fourteen years old.

“When you been last down?” Kim asked. “About September?”

Ray shook his head. He put another foot-big forkful of pecan into his mouth before speaking: “Been coming round pretty frequent since January.”

“Really?” Kim was confused. “Is something up?”

“Hey, guess what.” Ray took an aggressive drink from his bottle of beer, like a lamb. “Jean-Daniel got baptized.”

“What?”

“In a river.”

Kim ate compulsively, in befuddlement.

“We all went,” said Ray, piling it on. “We wore white slickers.”

“You have got to be shitting me.”

Ray showed him photos on his tricked-out, hot-to-the-touch Android.

“I absolutely cannot understand this,” said Kim at last. “Is he still dicking around?”

Ray laughed like a horse blowing its lips apart: “Are you kidding me? Zeline’s the only woman in the state he hasn’t fucked.”

“Then what’s up, baby?” Kim leaned in close, practically dripping the sweat off his forehead onto Ray’s. “Is he sick?”

“Nobody’s sick,” said Ray.

“It’s because of his uncle,” Kim guessed.

Zeline came into the kitchen and took all the pies away.

[phoenixlionme]

Pieces of Media that prove the whole "Go Woke, Go Broke" slogan and those with that belief is utter bullshit

NOTE: No ranking involved.

A Different World

Aliens franchise - specifically the first two

All of Us Are Dead - Korean zombie TV series

Arcane

Atomic Blonde

Avatar The Last Airbender

Avatar the Legend of Korra

Bad Boys franchise

Barbie 2023

Beef 2023

black-ish franchise

Blackkklansman

Blade trilogy

Blue Eye Samurai

Bones TV show

Bridesmaids

Brooklyn 99

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Cagney and Lacey

Candyman 2022

Captain Planet

Carmen Sandiego franchise

Charlie's Angels - not the most recent one

Cinderella 1997

Craig of the Creek

Crazy Rich Asians

Creed franchise - sequel movies to the Rocky franchise

Cyberpunk Edgerunners

DCAU's Justice League

DCAU's Static Shock

DCEU's Aquaman

DCEU's Wonder Woman

Disney's Aladdin

Disney's Amphibia

Disney's Beauty and the Beast

Disney's Big Hero 6

Disney's Elena of Avalor

Disney's Fairies franchise

Disney's Filmore

Disney's Frozen franchise

Disney's Gargoyles

Disney's Kim Possible

Disney's Lilo and Stitch

Disney's Moana

Disney's Mulan

Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves 1937

Disney's Tangled

Disney's That's so Raven

Disney's The Emperor's New Groove

Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Disney's The Litte Mermaid

Disney's The Owl House

Disney's The Princess and the Frog

Disney's W.I.T.C.H.

Dora the Explorer franchise

Dreamworks' Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

Dreamworks' She Ra and the Princesses of Power

Dreamworks' Trolls franchise

Eve's Bayou

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Fresh Off the Boat

Fullmetal Alchemist - Brotherhood version

Get Out

Girls Trip

Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim

Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth

Hair Love short

Hairspray film

Halloween franchise

Harley Quinn 2019 TV series

Heartstopper

Hidden Figures

Insecure TV series

Invincible 2021

I Love Lucy

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken

Kill Bil Vol 1 and 2

Kill La Kill

Kim's Convenience

Laika Studios' Coraline

Little Women 2019

Living Single

Love Simon

Mad Max Furious Road

Matilda - the one with Danny Devito

Maya and the Three

Moonlight 2016

MCU's Black Panther

MCU's Black Panther II

MCU's Captain Marvel

MCU's Daredevil

MCU's Jessica Jones

MCU's Luke Cage

MCU's Shang Chi

Molly of Denali

My Life as a Teenage Robot

Never Have I Ever

Nimona 2023

Paper Girls

Pixar's Brave

Pixar's Coco

Pixar's Inside Out

Pixar's Turning Red

Pose TV series

Powerpuff Girls

Prey 2022

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Rent - musical movie

Reservation Dogs

RRR - Indian film

RWBY

Sailor Moon

Scream franchise

Searching/Missing movies

Sex and the City

Silence of the Lambs - first one

Sony's Spiderverse franchise- ITSV and ATSV

Spawn - Todd MacFarlane TV series

Spy Kids

Squid Games

Star Trek - mainly the OG one

Steven Universe

Studio Ghibli in general

Teen Titans animated series

The Book of Life

The Casagrandes - sequel to The Loud House

The Dragon Prince

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (only the OG one)

The George Lopez Show

The Golden Girls

The Last Of Us

The Legend of Vox Machina

The Legend of Zorro

The Loud House

The Nanny

The Old Guard

Thelma and Louise

To All The Boy I've Loved franchise

Totally Spies

Winx Club

X-Men 1990s animated TV show

Yellowjackets TV series

Yotsuba!

Yuri on Ice

Please feel free to add but be respectful.