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theverybestpencilsoftuscaloosa · 4 years

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I wrote something again! This time it’s... well, to be honest, kind of weird, not least because of its history: it started off as a school assignment to create something in the style of a Southern Gothic author (Harry Crews) and then took on a bit of a life of its own when I did another pass to place it in the background of a possibly cyberpunk Earth. Whatever it is, I hope you enjoy it!

These are the facts as I have been relayed them, and I am telling you them truly now.

The two men sat in a truck, bumping along to the tune of the road. Its bed, floating loosely above its magpoints, swayed lazily a beat behind. The sun glared down with a merciless and dispassionate gaze, cooked everything it saw to a dry bake. Neither one spoke. They had nothing to say the other had any particular wish to hear.

The driver was called Jack Stacy, had been called so since he was a boy although Jack was not the name his mama gave him and Stacy was not the name his daddy had passed down to him. This suited Jack Stacy just fine because he had seen no trace of either one since he was old enough to toddle. He was short with a twisted spine and a face so monkey-ugly it almost could be mistaken for handsome. The passenger’s only name was Wayne, although he may have had another stored away for a special emergency. Each man was dressed in a well-made and ill-fitting suit -- Jack Stacy’s dusty blue, Wayne’s brown -- and each carried a revolver, a .38 special, in the pocket of his coat -- although Jack’s was after-market, with a snub railbarrel capable of accelerating a slug to unnecessary speeds.

They came from the town of Buchanan, the nearest thing in the region to a city, although it must be understood it was no La Merzia, no New Reno, no spiral-spired Havengate. Now it was even less of a city due to the removal from its populace of the five persons whose bodies jostled limp and lifeless in the bed of the truck behind the two men. Neither Jack Stacy nor Wayne had shot any of the people, although they would have if they had been asked. Somebody else had done that. They who did had been given the order from a third party altogether, the same which had told Jack Stacy and Wayne to drive three hours and forty-five minutes out of the city to dispose of the bodies. They did not question their orders. You might as well question the sun or the rain or God.

A long quilt of burlap sacking covered the bodies haphazardly. Here and there a foot poked out. Jack Stacy and Wayne gave it little thought. They had no expectation of an encounter with anyone on their way who would care to notice the contents of the truckbed, no expectation of an encounter with anyone much at all.

Fortunately for any patrollers, sheriffs, or rangers who might have been in the area, the two made the trip without a soul seen.

The truck’s destination was a lot five minutes off the main road into which a hole had been dug in the ground deep enough for a body and wide enough for the truck itself. Jack Stacy carefully drove around the hole and then backed up to it. The bed of the truck hung about six inches over the lip of the hole when he cut the engine and the rumble of the truck’s heart finally came to a rest.

Jack Stacy got out first. Wayne pulled his hat from over his eyes a moment later and swung his legs out of the cabin unhurriedly. They kept their silence as they pulled the cloth from the bed and climbed in: Wayne rather easily lifting himself up and throwing both long legs in one after the other, Jack Stacy boosting himself on the wheel and clambering inside with a clumsy loss of dignity.

The two worked in concert. The bodies were laid carefully end to end in the truckbed and Wayne and Jack Stacy easily grabbed them at the shoulders and ankles and heaved them one by one into the hole, filling it with a tangle of limbs and pale bloodless skin.

At last, when the truck bed’s contents were fully transferred to the hole, Jack Stacy reached for the burlap only to have it plucked from his fingers by Wayne. He took it ponderously in his hands and folded it onto itself again and again until it made a sort of cushion, which he laid at the end of the truck bed to protect his suit from the assorted viscera still strewn about.

Jack Stacy watched in some mixture of disgust and amusement as Wayne retrieved a wide-mouthed insulated soup flask and fork from the cabin of the truck, sat down on the burlap, and twisted the top open to reveal a thick cocktail of red sauce and meatballs. The sauce had been made by Wayne himself out of tomatoes and a great many other things which few people but Wayne (and none outside his blood family) could list in full. It looked a little like catsup and smelled a little like pizza sauce but had a texture unique to it and it alone. The meatballs were deli-bought. The entire soup had been heated some hours earlier to an even higher temperature than the air around them, and it was indeed hot enough still for the contents to steam as the lid was twisted off. The heat of his lunch bothered Wayne very little, almost as little as the bodies in the hole below. He was protected from the smell by a childhood illness which had rendered his nose all but useless and protected from the horror of what lay inches below his dangling feet by a bullheaded unwillingness to care.

For some time the only sounds were the buzzing of insects and the smacking of Wayne’s lips as he put away his food with obscene delicacy. Then Jack Stacy shifted behind him and Wayne turned his head.

“Thought you said there was gonna be a man. With the dirt. When’s he gon’ git here?”

Jack Stacy stood tall as his twisted spine would let him in the truckbed and licked his lips. “One more thing gotta happen first.”

Wayne grunted and turned back to face the hole, forked another meatball past his lips. Mouth full, he said: “What?”

Jack Stacy smirked. “One more body gotta fill th’ hole.” In a single smooth motion he drew his revolver, pulled the hammer, and discharged one rail-assisted shot directly into the back of Wayne’s head.

That is what might have happened. Instead Wayne froze at the word ‘body,’ twisted at the word ‘hole,’ and brought one ham fist into Jack Stacy’s knee as he clutched at the hammer. Jack Stacy swore as he went over and then Wayne was on him, punching and cursing and spitting. The noises of the fight grew and writhed and changed shape a few times, the two in their anger sounding less like men and more like fighting cats, whining dogs, spitting geese.

A keening, whining gunshot rang out.

About five minutes later, the truck peeled away from the hole, going so fast the dirt road was redrawn behind it.

It was all a terrible surprise a few hours later, when the third man arrived with the dirt.

#cyberpunk #southern gothic #cybergothic?#mine creation

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bisexualtimothylawrence · 7 years

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Ok, so. I said in the tags of my last reblog that I had an example of how toxic and pervasive diet culture and fatphobia is in the US. Here goes.

This is LONG so. Under the cut. Mind the trigger warnings for discussions of weight, calorie counting, caloric restriction, fat shaming, food shaming, abusive behaviours, misogyny, and the military. If I missed anything, I apologise, and please let me know so I can tag it.

A note in case this is distributed beyond my followers: I’m a transgender male. The experiences I talk about below are about military training for women, as trans people could not (and cannot) serve as their true gender in the US. Do not refer to me using she/her pronouns or terms such as “woman”, “female”, or “girl”. The use of the words “women” and “men” below should be understood to refer to assigned gender at birth, and not the actual genders of anyone involved.

I used to be enlisted in the Marines. You know, the branch of the US military that prides itself on being the toughest, most combat ready branch - every Marine a rifleman and all that jazz. (Spare me your opinions on the military; that’s not the point of this post.)

Now, one of the things they really go hard on is that every Marine receives the same basic training, and I can say from personal experience it is difficult, physically demanding training. You are up at 0500 and not going to bed until 2200. Most days on Parris Island start with PT - usually some mixture of running and body weight exercises - continue on to walking fucking everywhere, have several nice sessions of practising synchronised walking, and include martial arts training. In addition, you will more likely than not receive incentive training - a polite way of saying you’ll be doing pushups or side-straddle hops until your drill instructor is tired. And you’ll be expected to work on physical fitness during your free time - oh, they don’t flat out tell you what to do, as it is free time… but it’s highly encouraged. Highly. Encouraged.

So. You would think. That because of how demanding all this is. That men and women would eat the same.

Wrong.

I know this because I was part of the 4th Recruit Training Battalion - the only training battalion for women Marines. Which meant I got to see the difference in chow, as during rifle training, women recruits eat from one of the male battalions’ dining halls - it’s by the rifle range. I think it was 2nd Bn’s, but it’s been a decade and I don’t recall exactly, nor do I want to look it up as this post is emotionally taxing to make as it is.

The 4th Bn chow hall had caloric contents posted for everything. The 2nd Bn chow hall only had it for the diet food.

The 4th Bn chow hall, you were served one slice of toast or half a bagel. 2nd Bn served two slices of toast or the whole bagel.

4th Bn you could have margarine OR peanut butter. 2nd Bn could have both butter and peanut butter.

The box lunches provided from the 4th Bn hall had: one meat and cheese sandwich, one apple, one orange, one hard-boiled egg, one granola bar, catsup, mustard, and miracle whip.

The box lunches provided from the 2nd Bn had: one meat and cheese sandwich, an apple OR an orange, two hard-boiled eggs, one granola bar, a bag of chips, and some form of dessert. Plus the condiments.

(Vegetarian lunches got a peanut butter sandwich, but I don’t recall what replaced the egg. I digress.)

We were made to hand the chips and dessert over to the drill instructors, and some of them would take the granola bar too - dunno why, because it was also part of the women’s box lunch. I guess because we were getting an extra egg - I’m getting to why that’s my guess in a moment.

Official policy, of course, is that we were allowed to eat anything provided. As the drill instructors angrily pointed out one day in the 2nd Bn chow hall. I don’t know who had the balls to complain about the fact we were yelled at when we ate the entire bagel served to us, or that we were supposed to ask for the diet option… but the next few meals were supervised by the officers.

See, the big thing the drill instructors harped on was that we weren’t here to be fat. Women Marines are not fat, never fat, fat is disgusting, eating chips is disgusting, cookies are disgusting… you get the idea. (Thus why we had to turn in the granola bar from the male box lunch - it was basically a cookie, and we had an extra egg so we didn’t really need the granola bar, now did we? Fuck the vegetarians I guess, as they had to hand over theirs as well because otherwise they’d be getting ‘special treatment’.)

So, whilst they’d figured out that male recruits needed a fuckload of calories to complete training… they hadn’t figured that out for the women.

It seemed like once you were labelled a “diet recruit”, that label stayed with you no matter what. But “double ration” recruits? Unless you came in with MEPS saying you needed extra food - rare, as this generally required a weight waiver - you could be pulled off double rats as soon as you hit minimum weight. Only to be put back on at next week’s weigh-in when you dropped below minimum. And you lost double rats if you were moved to a different platoon, until weigh-ins there.

Maybe those things happened to the men, too. I don’t know. But male recruits still got more food overall.

Because we also weren’t allowed double rats at the rifle range because “the men’s chow has more calories.”

My weight was in a constant state of fluctuation because I couldn’t eat enough to maintain minimum weight for someone two inches shorter than me on regular rations. So I’d drop below minimum by a Lot. Get put on double rats. Gain weight. Hit minimum just in time for weekly weigh-in. And since Women Marines aren’t fat, I’d get dropped back to regular rations. You would think at some point someone would have noticed the pattern, but no.

Remember how I said caloric contents were posted? I decided to calculate how much I was eating. I figured out that on regular rations I was hitting 2800-3000 calories a day, on days I got everything I was allowed to… which was most days. Unless they were serving turkey curry. (Gd that stuff was a unique brand of awful.) Which means on doubles? I was eating 6000 calories. At the rifle range, I was lucky if I hit 2200 calories, as we had to - ahem - sorry, I meant were strongly encouraged to eat like male diet recruits.

Diet recruits were at ~1800 a day, iirc. I honestly don’t know how they survived; I remember one woman who was obviously becoming thinner, but the scale showed no difference. A sensible person would have realised she was (somehow) gaining muscle.

She got extra incentive training and closer supervision at meals because clearly she was sneaking food because she couldn’t stop being a fatty.

Oh, and the above caloric intake doesn’t accurately represent the average recruit’s intake. Nominally you have 20 minutes to eat, from the time you sit down. In reality, the drill instructors count starting when the first recruit in the platoon sits down - if you’re lucky. If you aren’t, time starts when the first recruit enters the chow hall. Either way, unless you’re one of the first people in, you’re fucked. And generally they had the diet recruits go first so they could be more supervised… and double rats went last.

(See, I got very good at eating quickly. Too good, actually. Apologies to anyone who was ever in a platoon with me, because I was typically near the end of the line no matter what, and I was typically one of the first recruits up and out the door. Mainly because once ONE person finished, they started yelling about the rest of us being slow and taking our good ol’ time. It was less stressful for me to finish up - clean tray always because they also yelled about wasted food - and head outside to recite knowledge. Unfortunately, it meant everyone else got yelled at because, “[Blue] is done and [he] sat down after all of you!” ::wince:: )

A common impression was that most women just couldn’t hack it because they were too weak… stress fractures were a common reason women got dropped back in training. The other most common reason was not meeting PT standards. Most women I met in the separation platoon were either too sick or injured to complete training… or suicidal.

I personally wonder how much of those problems would have been fixed with adequate nutrition. How many women suffered injuries they shouldn’t have because they were malnourished? How many women crumbled under stress because they were malnourished? Lack of nutrition weakens the body and causes and exacerbates symptoms of mental illness.

This post is hard to write because - again, spare me the opinions on the US military complex, I know it’s bad - I spent so much of my life wanting to be a Marine. I wanted to die for the longest time after being discharged. I spent six fucking months on Parris Island. And how many of the problems I had could have been solved by just being allowed to fucking eat?! How. Fucking. Many.

The hardest weeks were the ones where I was frantically stuffing as much food as I was allowed in my mouth, knowing it wasn’t enough, and knowing I’d be in trouble if I tried to get more. The rifle range was where I fractured my sacrum and had my first mental breakdown - ‘coincidentally’, that was when we were all forced to eat like diet recruits.

It. Really makes me wonder. Really fucking makes me wonder. If we, as a nation, could get past the fucking preoccupation with “fat=bad”, how much better off everyone would be. Because I could have completed recruit training if I’d just been allowed to eat. And I don’t know if my life would be better…

but I do know that it is really fucked up that even the United States fucking Marine Corps is so fucking worried about women getting fat that they’d sooner starve recruits than risk a woman being more than exactly the minimum weight for her height. That what is supposed to be one of the best fighting forces in the world cares more about what women look like than anything else.

So, yeah. Fuck anyone who says it’s about health and physical fitness. Because even in the military it’s all about the idea of fat bodies being aesthetically displeasing, regardless of what they can do or how healthy they actually are, to the point of literally starving people just to make sure they don’t get fat.

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