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Inside DC’s Secret Covid Morgue

Written by Luke Mullins

April 21, 2020—The clerics have been sworn to secrecy. On this warm morning, they’ve come to a vast and empty parking lot, instructed not to tell anyone of its location. The pitch of asphalt is unusually secure, hidden behind a 12-foot chain-link fence that’s been swathed in sheets of black tarp to prevent anyone from peering through. At the front gate, armed soldiers stand guard.

Inside, large trailers are arranged behind tented canopies and banks of lights. Metal ramps are affixed to each trailer so that stretchers can be wheeled in. The interior walls of the trailers are lined with seven rows of metallic shelving, sturdy enough to support thousands of pounds. The temperature is 24 degrees.

The clergymen gather with a handful of city officials in front of the canopies. They form a circle, each six feet apart from the next.

Reverend Andre Towner of Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ.

Imam Talib Shareef of Nation’s Mosque.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom–The National Synagogue.

Dr. Donell Harvin, a top official at DC’s homeland-security department.

Kimberly Lassiter, a supervisor at the medical examiner’s office.

And Dr. Roger Mitchell, the chief medical examiner himself.

Wearing masks and rubber gloves, they bow their heads. Tomorrow, the first body will be sent here. Today, a blessing.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

One by one, the clerics offer prayers, solemn exhortations for strength and humility, courage and dignity, resonating above the grinding hum of the trailers. Imam Shareef invokes the victims—“Their deaths,” he says, “are not to be in vain.” Reverend Towner prays for the workers, that their bodies will be protected from the virus, that their minds stay healthy during the difficult days ahead. Rabbi Herzfeld stresses the righteousness of the mission. “In Judaism,” he tells the group, “we believe that the greatest kindness is to care for the dead.”

***

It’s an ominous time in the nation’s capital. Several miles away, federal officials are dismissing warnings about the deadly airborne pathogen that has exploded out of Asia. Their unwillingness to act has impelled local governments across the country to launch their own scattered efforts to prevent Covid-19 from decimating their communities. In the District of Columbia, where African Americans make up 46 percent of the population, the task is especially urgent, given the virus’s disproportionately cruel impact on people of color.

Over the previous month, the city has been locked down as panicked residents watch their leaders navigate a 100-year crisis in real time. Mayor Muriel Bowser shuttered businesses. The DC Council pushed through legislation to extend unemployment benefits. Health-department officials opened testing sites and implored residents to wear masks and keep their distance. But away from public view, a weightier matter has come to preoccupy a little-known but essential corner of the bureaucracy: the caretakers of the dead.

“There’s not going to be a parade for you guys. You’re not going to get discounts or big thank-you signs. The work we do, we do in silence.”

It’s a problem of space. As Drs. Mitchell and Harvin prepared for the pandemic, they realized that the city’s morgue didn’t have the capacity to handle the surge of fatalities that the virus would leave behind. And so, over the previous few weeks, they hustled to secure the land, equipment, and manpower necessary to build an additional facility.

The clergy who led prayers on the day the field morgue opened were there to make sure the space didn’t violate the tenets of their three distinct faiths, and to consecrate the site as one. Then the work began. Over the next two and a half months, Harvin, who describes himself as the “general in charge of the death troops,” and his top deputy, Lassiter, who has recovered bodies throughout DC for more than two decades, will oversee the makeshift mortuary. By the time the spring surge is through, 404 Covid victims will have passed through the site.

Still, through it all, almost no one in the city will have any idea the Covid morgue exists. The work is carried out in strict secrecy; staffers are instructed not to disclose the site’s location or tell anyone what takes place there, not even their own family members. A mistake—such as a body being released to the wrong family—would be humiliating for the mayor and the city. News footage of workers moving the dead could upset victims’ families, opening new wounds, or lure gawkers to the site. As much as anything else, though, the silence reflects the professional ethos of those who perform this work for a living. While they’re dispatched to every hurricane and school shooting, their efforts take place entirely behind the scenes. They are the first responders you never see.

The District of Columbua invited an imam, a rabbi, and a minister to consecrate the morgue.

***

“There’s not going to be a parade for you guys,” Harvin tells each new set of workers to arrive at the Covid morgue. “You’re not going to get discounts or big [thank-you] signs. The work we do, we do in silence. Not even the family members of the victims will know what we do. There’s a pride in that. There’s a silent pride in that,” he says. “You’re taking care of someone’s grandmother, grandfather, husband, daughter, son, and that’s a higher calling.” When it’s all over, they’ll return to their previous jobs or assignments and no one will ever know what they’ve done here. “It’s a heavy burden,” Harvin says. “It’s a very heavy burden.

“[But] the world is watching,” he assures them, “whether they see us or not.”

***

Donell Harvin is 48 years old, with a sturdy build and flecks of gray in his goatee. He’s married to a physician and has four daughters. He lives in Howard County and spends most of the year looking forward to his annual scuba-diving trip.

Over the last 30 years, Harvin has been an eyewitness to some of America’s darkest moments. As an EMT, he responded to the World Trade Center when it was bombed in 1993; after joining the New York Fire Department, he was there when the towers were destroyed in 2001. As a deputy director in New York’s medical examiner’s office, he led the effort to identify victims of Hurricane Sandy. And in 2012, at the request of Connecticut officials, Harvin assisted with forensics after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

His path from first responder to frontline bureaucrat began in the Bronx, where he spent his teenage years. After dropping out of high school, he got a GED and then a college scholarship from the Children’s Aid Society, enlisting as a paramedic. Though he loved the work, as a young father he began to worry about his safety. He was caught in shootouts while tending to accident victims and lost colleagues in ambulance crashes. On 9/11, his wife and daughters saw him on TV, racing away from the rubble, and then didn’t hear from him for 24 hours. Upon seeing their faces when he finally got home, he knew it was time for a change.

Harvin went back to school and earned a master’s in emergency management. Landing a position with New York’s chief medical examiner, he became an expert in mass-fatality management—the grim business of identifying and processing victims of large-scale tragedies. He also came to know Mitchell, and the two worked together on Sandy Hook. Two years later, when Mitchell was hired as DC’s chief medical examiner, he recruited Harvin.

Donell Harvin, who was at Ground Zero on 9/11, helped devise DC’s Covid death-handling protocols.

***

Their immediate task in the District was to turn around an office plagued by mismanagement. But an equally important project loomed. The previous year, Washington had been shaken by tragedy when a mentally disturbed government contractor gunned down 12 people at the Navy Yard. Although the medical examiner’s office had properly managed those deaths, officials realized that a larger or more complex disaster would have overwhelmed its capabilities. The city needed a mass-fatality division robust enough to absorb the kind of tragedy that Harvin and Mitchell hoped Washington would never face. They went about building it—securing federal funds, adding staff, and running mass-casualty drills.

By early 2020, Harvin had been in Washington six years. He’d since left Mitchell’s office and finished a PhD in public health. He was teaching at Georgetown and had become chief of homeland security and intelligence at DC’s homeland-security agency. But the imminent arrival of Covid meant the District was facing the catastrophe he and Mitchell had trained for, the biggest mass-fatality event in the city’s history.

On March 2, Harvin went to DC’s Emergency Operations Center for the first day of formal briefings about how the city would navigate the pandemic. Halfway through the morning, he found a quiet spot in the hallway and placed a call to his mother. “This is going to be bad,” he said.

***

The city morgue is located at 401 E Street, Southwest. In any given year, only a fraction of the fatalities that occur in DC pass through the facility. When a person dies of natural causes at a hospital, nursing home, or hospice, a physician will typically sign the death certificate and release the body to a funeral home. It’s usually only those who die alone or in unnatural or suspicious circumstances whose bodies go to the morgue, where medical examiners determine the cause and manner of their death.

Initially, Harvin and Mitchell planned to use this same approach for the pandemic, relying on hospitals—where the bulk of virus-related deaths would take place—to serve as de facto Covid morgues. But they quickly revised their thinking. For one thing, little was known about how contagious the disease might be postmortem. Would storing victims at hospitals risk infecting staff? At the same time, Harvin learned from former colleagues in New York—which was being ravaged by the virus—that hospitals were too overwhelmed to manage the bodies properly. The result was an appalling spectacle: forklifts carrying pallet-loads of bodies outside hospitals, decedents stacked on top of one another in trailers. At one point, police discovered nearly 100 rotting corpses in unrefrigerated U-Hauls parked by a Brooklyn funeral home. As the funeral home’s owner told the New York Times, “I ran out of space.”

The city handles the body of every Covid fatality, a process meant to ensure victims don’t pile up at overwhelmed hospitals, as in New York. Above, an autopsy room and viewing area at the city morgue.

***

The truth is that all mass-fatality events carry the potential for this type of disgrace. Amid the chaos of a calamity, victims get misidentified. Morgues fill up. “We saw that with Hurricane Katrina—bodies just left out there,” Harvin says. “And that��s a stain on our society.”

So Harvin and Mitchell made a decision that would set them apart from most coroners and medical examiners in the country. Instead of depending on the hospital system, the chief medical examiner’s office would assume responsibility. Every single person who dies of Covid in DC would be sent to Harvin and Mitchell’s team—a protocol that remains in place today.

By studying the mortality rate and projecting infection levels for the city, the men estimated that as many as 3,500 residents could perish in the pandemic. Or one in every 200. Putting aside the magnitude of the suffering, the math presented a serious logistical problem: The city morgue had an official capacity of only 205. The solution was apparent—they would have to build the Covid morgue.

Harvin immediately began acquiring the materials he’d need. He ordered six refrigerated trailers. He borrowed mobile light towers for nighttime work and generators for power. He acquired PPE, Porta-Potties, drinking water, 500 gallons of hand sanitizer, and heavy-duty body bags specially designed for mass tragedies, 4,000 in all. For families who couldn’t afford funerals, the District agreed to pay for cremations. And to prevent a backlog of fatalities, the city shortened the time it would hold unclaimed bodies before they could be cremated, from 30 to 15 days.

The truth is that all mass-fatality events carry the potential for disgrace. Amid the chaos of a calamity, victims get misidentified. Morgues fill up.

Meanwhile, Harvin combed the local and federal bureaucracy in search of an additional 30 workers—to volunteer. The Army agreed to detail members of its mortuary-affairs unit, which had operated similar morgues in combat zones. A trade association found out-of-state funeral directors who wanted to pitch in. DC’s Medical Reserve Corps, a group of volunteers willing to assist in health-related emergencies, provided workers. The DC Guard and the Air National Guard sent personnel.

As he rushed to get things in place, the virus was already spreading through Washington. Harvin felt the same sense of foreboding he’d experienced six years earlier when he was waiting for Hurricane Sandy to make landfall. “It’s like a slow-moving train,” he says. “You know it’s coming and you can’t stop it.”

***

While Harvin was acquiring equipment and manpower, his top lieutenant, Kim Lassiter, spent two days driving around the District, scouting possible sites for the morgue. At her last stop, she got out of her car and peered through the fence. The property had everything. It was city-owned land—a parking lot for DC employees, empty because staffers were now working from home. It was large enough for the trailers, and it could be secured with tarps and guards. Most important, the site was inconspicuous: You could drive right past it and not realize it was there. “This is perfect,” Lassiter thought.

Lassiter, a 54-year-old grandmother with a soft smile, is the second-longest-tenured medical examiner’s employee, with nearly a quarter century on the job. In the 1990s, she lifted the victims of gang wars off street corners and washed the blood from their wounds at the morgue. In 2002, she used x-rays to identify the remains of Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old intern whose murder had become the subject of national fascination when it was alleged she’d been dating a married congressman around the time of her disappearance. And in 2008, Lassiter carried the remains of four children—ages 5, 6, 11, and 17—from the house where they’d been decomposing for seven months, after their mother, Banita Jacks, became convinced they’d been possessed by demons and killed them.

Lassiter came to the work by way of her own personal tragedy. She grew up in a housing project in Prince George’s County, with five brothers and sisters. Her father wasn’t around, and her mother, who worked in healthcare, struggled to do it all on her own. She eventually fell victim to drug use. It was up to Lassiter—the eldest of the children—to run the household. She cut class three days a week to watch her siblings. At 12, she got a summer job to support the family. Even after she graduated from high school and entered the workforce, there were periods when she would drop everything to nurse her mother through the various chemical fogs and illnesses that encumber the life of an addict.

In 1987, when Lassiter was 21, her mother passed away. Lassiter was called to the hospital. A nurse escorted her to the elevator, and they rode down to the basement. There, in a frigid room, Lassiter found her mother lying motionless on a stretcher. Her eyes were still open. “I felt like,” Lassiter remembers, “she was waiting for me to show up.”

Kim Lassiter, a 25-year veteran of the medical examiner’s office, ran the Covid morgue day to day.

***

The nurse explained that her mother was being taken away for an autopsy. Lassiter didn’t know anything about the process, and the news frightened her. “If I could have gone with her through that,” she says, “I would have.”

Following the funeral, Lassiter obtained custody of her siblings, whom she supported through her job as a clerk at the US Department of Health and Human Services. A few years later, her life took an unexpected turn when she spotted an alarming story in the newspaper: The DC chief medical examiner’s office had released the wrong body to a grieving family. The incident sounded both outrageous and intriguing; more than anything, it reminded Lassiter—by then a mother herself—of when her mom had been sent to the morgue. She called the office, talked her way to a supervisor, and asked if she could help. She joined the office as a volunteer.

This was the late 1990s, and the agency was considerably smaller than it is today. Lassiter was quickly hired and eventually promoted, becoming one of seven technicians responsible for a full sweep of duties: fielding intake calls from police, snapping photographs at death scenes, transporting decedents to the morgue, and assisting with medical examinations and autopsies. She viewed the work not as some macabre responsibility but as an expression of love. While she hadn’t been able to care for her own mother after her death, she now looked after the deceased loved ones of others.

When arriving at a place of death, Lassiter is vigilant about wearing a blank facial expression, to acknowledge the gravity of the circumstances. She offers condolences, then completes her tasks—attaching the toe tag, placing the deceased into the body bag—at a diligent pace so as not to prolong the trauma of those looking on. Once an autopsy is complete, she uses tight, neat sutures to close the incisions. She then washes the stains from the body and wraps it in a crisp white sheet.

Occasionally, when working alone, Lassiter has found herself speaking out loud to the bodies. If she hits a pothole while driving someone to the morgue, she’ll apologize. I’m sorry. Upon entering the morgue’s cold-storage facility, she sometimes greets the people being kept there. Good morning. When examining a crime victim’s body—particularly when it’s a child’s—she often pledges to help get justice. I’ll do everything in my power to find the evidence needed to make whoever did this to you pay.

The hardest days are the ones when she finds herself face to face with someone she knows. One morning, as Lassiter was preparing for autopsies, she checked the manifest and saw a familiar name. It was an older woman, a friend of her mother’s who’d looked out for Lassiter as a child. She walked into the cold-storage room, slid the body out of its cabinet, and said goodbye. It was the only time she ever broke down crying at the morgue.

***

April 22, 2020—The day after the religious leaders consecrate the site, the Covid morgue begins to stir with workers in face shields, gloves, and white protective suits. It’s been six weeks since DC recorded its first case of Covid, and the death toll has exceeded the city morgue’s capacity. Now the first wave of bodies is arriving.

The process begins with a phone call. A hospital official, or sometimes a police officer, contacts the medical examiner’s office. Lassiter, who is chief of the transport unit, dispatches her team to the scene. Two workers, in full PPE, arrive in a black, unmarked van. They present paperwork for the physician’s signature. In the hospital’s morgue, they take custody of the body. Opening the body bag, they attach identification. They zip the bag closed and spray the outside with disinfectant, then place it into a second, heavy-duty body bag. They disinfect it again. The workers lift the decedent onto a stretcher and paste an identification tag onto the bag. They slide the stretcher into the back of the unmarked van.

Every body arriving at the Covid morgue is first accounted for at the intake tent, then transferred to a refrigerated trailer.

***

At the Covid morgue, the workers move the decedent onto a table in the intake tent. Here, they weigh the body, to help confirm identification, and enter the victim’s name into a computer. They wheel the decedent across the blacktop and up into one of the refrigerated trailers. Next, the transfer. If the victim is heavy, the workers—at least two, sometimes four—lift the body onto one of the lower shelves. If the person is light, they place the body on a higher shelf. The staff use internal coding—6D, 2A—to record the exact location. They exit the trailer, remove their protective suits, and put on fresh ones.

A victim typically remains at the Covid morgue a few days, rarely longer than a week. During that time, a separate team calls family members to help them through the paperwork. Once burial arrangements are made, the funeral director schedules a pickup. The workers wheel the victim out of cold storage and into a second tented canopy—the release tent. They again wipe down the outside of the body bag. They again spray it with disinfectant. The funeral director pulls up. They load the dead into the hearse.

***

Though it was difficult to find volunteers, Harvin had assembled what he called “a coalition of the willing.” The active-duty Army morticians and military reservists, the citizen volunteers, the funeral directors, along with medical-examiner staffers and UDC students. While many had backgrounds in mortuary services, others did not. “We had people,” Harvin says, “who had never touched a dead body before—never seen a dead body.”

When each new group of volunteers arrived, Harvin—“the general in charge of the death troops”—brought them together to discuss the effort. The victims had come to the Covid morgue after suffering lonely and terrifying deaths—hooked up to breathing tubes, surrounded by masked doctors and nurses. “These people often were dropped off at the hospital, and they couldn’t see their loved ones for two or three or four weeks,” he continued. “They expired around complete strangers.” The staff’s goal, Harvin told the troops, was to provide each person with a dignity in death that they didn’t experience during their last days of life.

The operation has depended on volunteers—students, funeral directors, military reservists with no prior training.

***

Then he turned it over to Lassiter, who ran the day-to-day operations. She instructed new volunteers how to implement the values Harvin had espoused. When carrying the deceased, move deliberately and with caution. Keep the body as horizontal as possible. Do not, under any circumstances, stack one on top of another. Check, double-check, and triple-check the manifest to make sure each victim is in the correct rack. And pay respect through your words. Lassiter never refers to the deceased as “corpses” or “cadavers” or “cases.” Instead, she calls them “my people.”

“That’s the only way I can get [the workers] to treat them the way they would treat someone that they love,” Lassiter says. “Because it makes them see how special these people are to me.”

***

Gerald Slater, 86, was a television executive at PBS and WETA.

Richard Paul Thornell, 83, was a Howard law-school professor who helped establish the Peace Corps’s first-ever program, in Ghana.

Jose Mardoqueo Reyes, 54, was a refugee of El Salvador’s civil war and a beloved internet-radio broadcaster.

Luevella Jackson, 87, was among the first female bus drivers in DC’s public-school system.

Samuel Shumaker III, 90, was an Army colonel who also taught English and creative writing at UDC.

Florence Gilkes, 97, was a loving wife and aunt, as well as a dedicated fan of the Washington Football Team.

Iraj Askarinam, 76, owned a restaurant in Adams Morgan, where he regularly provided free meals to the homeless. They called him “Mr. Spaghetti.”

***

By May, the pandemic’s bleakest days had arrived at the morgue. The daily influx of new decedents fluctuated—eight one day, 19 the next. As the volume swelled, the workers came face to face with the breadth of the city’s suffering. They began recognizing the last names of victims they’d been dispatched to retrieve, and it dawned on them that these were additional members of already devastated families. Payton McFadden, a UDC premed grad, describes the crushing duty of traveling to a DC hospital to collect the body of a Covid-positive baby: “We had went and gotten one of the [baby’s] family members one week prior. [Covid] was slowly but surely matriculating through the whole house.” In a searing example of the District’s racial inequality, 74 percent of the fatalities were Black. “I will never forget this as long as I live, ever,” Lassiter says. “It just took so many people at one time, so suddenly.”

A Chicago-area funeral director who asked to be identified only by her first name, Stacey, came to Washington to volunteer. She served in the medical examiner’s main office, calling families and guiding them through the process of finalizing death certificates and retrieving loved ones. On one occasion, she spoke with a man whose father was in the Covid morgue, and he dissolved into tears. The man explained that they’d been estranged for years. It was only recently that they’d finally begun speaking again. “We do help carry that burden of grief,” she says. “And it’s hard.” On another day, she had a series of conversations with a police officer whose mother was at the disaster morgue. When the officer suddenly stopped returning her calls, Stacey got hold of his wife, who told her he’d been hospitalized with Covid himself. Nearly a year later, she still wonders about him. “It is always in the back of my head,” she says. “I don’t know [if] he made it through.”

Routine tasks touched off bouts of anguish. A worker might spot a detail about a victim that resonated personally: a birthday shared with the worker’s daughter, the same last name as a best friend.

As the morgue’s lead official, Harvin was spending up to 12 hours a day at the site. “Everyone’s talking about Covid and fatalities, and it’s just numbers to them. We’re actually dealing with them,” he says. “I have a PhD and I’m in there putting on gloves and a [protective] suit and I’m helping the crews move bodies in and out of trailers. It’s visceral for us.”

The staff feared for their own safety. “The scariest thing was [potentially being] exposed ourselves,” says Denise Lyles, supervisor of the investigation unit. Lassiter grew terrified that she’d infect her family. “I have a husband that goes out and he works. I was concerned about him,” she says. “Grandchildren that are asthmatic, concerned about them.”

Routine tasks touched off bouts of anguish. While checking the manifest, a worker might spot a detail about a victim that resonated personally: a birthday shared with the worker’s daughter, the same last name as a best friend. Harvin and Lassiter did what they could to look out for their staff’s mental health. At the end of each day, Lassiter pulled people aside to see if anyone was experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, connecting them with counselors or chaplains. Over time, even veterans of the medical examiner’s office began struggling with the weight of their mission.

After several weeks at the site, Harvin found that when he returned home from work, he would drift into a haze. He had no appetite. He stopped engaging his wife in conversation. He passed entire evenings staring blankly into the television. “I don’t even know what I’m watching,” he recalls. “I had no motivation.”

Harvin, of course, had worked mass tragedy before. After hijackers flew the first plane into the World Trade Center, he approached the South Tower on foot. From two blocks away, he saw bodies falling from the sky and his entire body froze. He couldn’t take another step forward. Minutes later, there was a deafening sound and the tower disappeared into a cloud of gray debris. Out of the rubble came a speeding ambulance. Harvin jumped into the back along with dozens of other firefighters and cops. As they neared the North Tower, Harvin turned to one of them. “Doesn’t it look like this one’s leaning?” he said.

He spent the next two days at Ground Zero searching for survivors and recovering the dead. The experience was so traumatizing that he vowed never to return to the site. But he found the work at the Covid morgue even more emotionally taxing. “I survived September 11,” he says. “I didn’t know if I was going to survive this.”

“There were so many women. So many mothers there.”

While he was able to walk away from Ground Zero after the attack,the pandemic was taking new victims each day. Every time Harvin arrived at the Covid morgue, he confronted a fresh supply of misery, and there was no end in sight. “Your mind and your soul get worn down far long before you body [does],” he says. Recognizing that he was experiencing depression, he turned to colleagues at the homeland-security department and found solace in chatting with them virtually.

For Lassiter, the pain manifested not as psychological trauma but as profound sadness. The heartache was always there, growing more intense over time. May 9—Mother’s Day—was the hardest. It had always been a tough one, the day her own mother’s death was most painful. But there was an additional heaviness now; she couldn’t stop thinking about everyone at the Covid morgue. “There were so many women,” she says. “So many mothers there.”

Though she was scheduled to be off, Lassiter didn’t feel right staying home on that particular day. She left her house in Prince George’s County and made the 25-minute drive to the site. Arriving at the morgue, she put on a protective suit and greeted the workers. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “It’s Mother’s Day,”

“I know,” she replied, “but I came down because I wanted to really thank you for what you’re doing.” She understood that some of them were mothers themselves, and she appreciated them for spending the day at the site.

Lassiter walked over to the cold-storage trailers and turned to face her people. “Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms,” she said. As she returned to the car, she noticed a lightness of spirit.

“It felt kind of like a sign of relief,” she says. “Just to speak out. To let them know that someone cares.”

***

June 2020—As summer approaches, the pace at the Covid morgue begins to slow. Fewer victims are arriving; the number of bodies in the trailers is declining. By the end of the month, the volume is thin enough that it can be handled at the city morgue. Washington’s first wave of Covid has reached its conclusion.

It’s time for Harvin to shut down the disaster morgue, at least for now. But before doing so, he organizes a final ritual. On July 7, 2020, Rabbi Herzfeld, Reverend Towner, and Imam Shareef return to the site. They were present at the beginning, and Harvin wants them here today, too.

The faith leaders gather by the intake tent as a group of three dozen workers form concentric circles around them. They offer prayers of thanksgiving that the work is coming to an end. “It is at death that the earth receives its treasures,” says Imam Shareef. “And we want to honor the facility that now has allowed for individuals to be returned back to the earth.”

After the ceremony, Lassiter assembles the men and women on her team to thank them for their two and a half months of service. When she finishes, a soldier who was assigned to the site pulls a patch off his flak jacket and approaches her. “This patch has been around the world,” he tells Lassiter, “and I want you to have it.”

Though the pandemic rages on, Harvin and Lassiter can’t help but feel a certain triumph. They haven’t misidentified any bodies. None of their team has contracted Covid. They know they may be back. But in a dark and painful year, this is a good day.

Months later, Lassiter will remember it, the special pride she felt that despite dozens of workers toiling and thousands of pounds of equipment rumbling, despite 404 fatalities passing through, word of the Covid morgue never reached the public. Her colleagues hadn’t enlisted for accolades. They’d pressed through the fear and the grief in order to care for the innocent victims of a historic pandemic.

“It felt good,” Lassiter says. “Even if no one would ever know about it.”

It’s been nearly a year since the pandemic struck Washington. In the first four months of lockdown, the city lost three times as many jobs as it did during the 2008 recession. By July, small business revenue had been cut in half. Metrorail ridership has plunged by as much as 90 percent. Over the coming four years, the District is anticipating a budget gap of roughly $800 million. All told, more than 933,514 people in DC, Maryland, and Virginia have contracted the virus, and 15,148 have died.

Today, Covid fatalities are being processed at the city morgue in Southwest DC; although the number of deaths is once again elevated, it’s well below the peaks of last spring. At the disaster morgue, the light towers have been hauled away and the generators have gone silent. The trailers are resting on a deserted blacktop. Each day, thousands of cars pass right by the site, oblivious to what happened there. If they knew where to look, though, the drivers could see something that Harvin made sure to leave in place. The DC and US flags, rising above the fence.

***

This article appears in the March 2021 issue of Washingtonian.

#death #long reads #washington DC #covid-19 pandemic #luke mullins

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dillydedalus · 3 years

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april reading

oh yeah this is a thing. anyway in april i read about uhhh.... first contact (twice), murderers on skis & victorian church politics

the yield, tara june winch a novel about indigenous australian identity and history (now and throughout the 20th century) in three narrative strands. imo the narrative strand that consists of a grandfather writing a dictionary of his language (wiradjuri) in order to prove a claim to some land is by far the strongest, but overall i liked this quite a lot. 3/5

land of big numbers, te-ping chen a solid short story collection focused on modern china and young(ish) chinese people, both in china and the diaspora. i particularly liked the stories that had some slighty surreal or speculative elements, such as one about fruit that strongly evoke emotions when eaten and a group of people stuck in a train station for months as the train is delayed, which imo use their speculative aspects in effective (if not super subtle) ways to talk about society. 3/5

the pear field, nana ekvtimishvili (tr. from georgian by elizabeth heighway) international booker prize longlist! a short, fairly depressing read about a 18-year-old girl at a post-soviet school for developmentally disabled childred (but also orphans, abandoned children & other random kids) who is trying to get a younger boy adopted by an american couple. there seem to be a lot of novels set at post-soviet orphanages etc & imo this is a well-executed example of the microgenre, with the pear field full of pears that are never picked bc they don’t taste right as a strong central image. 3/5

the warden, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #1) ah yes, a 6-part victorian series about church politics in an english town, exactly the kind of thing i’m interested in. not sure why i committed to at least the first two entries of the series but here we are. despite this lack of interest (and disagreement with most of the politics on display here) i found this quite charming; trollope has a gift for an amusing turn of phrase & making fun of his characters in benevolent ways. 3/5

the lesson, cadwell turnbull first contact scifi novel set on the virgin islands, where an alien ship arrives one day. the aliens seem benevolent & share helpful technology, but also react with extreme violence to any aggression. they claim to be on earth to study.... something, but it’s never entirely clear what. the book makes some interesting choices (like immediately skipping over the actual first contact to a few years in the future, when the aliens are already established on the islands) but i thought much of it was kinda disjointed and confusing. 2/5

the heart is a lonely hunter, carson mccullers look, i get it, it’s all about the isolation & alienation (& dare i say loneliness) of 4 miserable characters projecting their issues on the central character singer, who is kind and patient and also deaf and mute, thus making him the perfect receptacle for their issues without really having to connect with him as a person and how that isolation hinders them socially, artistically, emotionally, politically, but like... i didn’t really like it. i didn’t hate it but i just felt very meh about it all. 2.5/5

acht tage im mai: die letzte woche des dritten reiches, volker ulrich fascinating history book about the last week(ish) of the third reich, starting with the day of hitler’s suicide and ending with the total surrender (but with plenty of flashbacks and forwards), and looking at military&political leadership (german and allied) as well as prisoners of war, forced laborers, concentration camp prisoners, and everyone else. very interesting look at what kästner described as the “gap between the not-anymore and the not-yet.” 3.5/5

firekeeper’s daughter, angeline boulley) i’ve been mostly off the YA train for the last few years, but this was a really good example of contemporary YA with a focus on ~social issues. ANYWAY. this is YA crime novel about daunis, a mixed-race unenrolled ojibwe girl close to finishing high school who is struggling with family problems, university plans, and feeling caught between her white and her native familiy when her best friend is shot in front of her and she decides to become a CI for an fbi investigation into meth production in the community. i really appreciated how hard this went both with the broader social issues (racism, addiction) and daunis’ personal struggles. there are a few bits that felt a bit didactic & on the nose (and the romance... oh well), but overall the themes of community, family, and the value of living indigenous culture are really well done & i teared up several times. 4/5

the magic toyshop, angela carter i love carter’s short stories but struggle with (while still liking) her novels so far. this one, a tale of melanie, suddenly orphaned after trying on her mother’s wedding dress in the garden, coming of age and awakening to womanhood or whatever. carter’s really into that. it’s well-written, sensual as carter always is, and the family melanie and her siblings are sent to, her tyrannical puppet-maker uncle, his mute wife and the wife’s two brothers, both fascinating and offputting (& dirty) make for an interesting cast of characters, but overall i just wish i was reading the bloody chamber again. 3/5

barchester towers, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #2) (audio) lol tbh i still don’t know why i am committing to this series about, again, church politics in 19th century rural england, but it’s just so chill & warm & funny (we love gently or not so gently - but always politely - mocking our characters) that i’m enjoying it as a nice little trip where people do some #crazyschemes to gain church positions or fight over whether there should be songs in church or whatever it is people in the 19th century fought about. it’s very relaxing. there also is a lot of love quadrangleyness going on and that’s also fun. trollope has weird ideas about women but like whatever, i for one wish mrs proudie much joy of her position as defacto bishop of barchester, she really girlbossed her way to the top. 3.5/5

semiosis, sue burke (semiosis #1) i love spinning the wheel on the “first contact with X weird alien species” & i guess this time we landed on plants! plant intelligence is interesting and the idea of plant warfare is really cool. i do like the structure, with different generations of human settlers on the planet pax providing a long-term view but this allows the author to skip over a lot of the development of the relationship between the settlers and the plant and locating the plot elsewhere, which i think is ultimately a mistake. i might continue w/ the series tho, depending on library availability. 2.5/5

one by one, ruth ware a bunch of start-up people go on a corporate retreat to a ski chalet in the alps, avalanche warning goes up, one of them disappears, presumably on a black piste, the rest get snowed in & completely cut off when the avalanche hits and then they get picked off *title drop* (altho really not that many of them). nice fluff when i had a miserable cold (not covid) but fails when it tries to go for deeper themes... like an attempt to address classism and entitlement sure... was made. also like what kind of luxury skiing chalet does not have emergency communication devices in case internet/phone lines are down... i’d have sued just for that. 2/5

fake accounts, lauren oyler the microgenre of ‘alienated intellectual(ish) probably anglophone person has some sort of crisis, goes to berlin about it’ is my ultimate literary weakness - i almost never really like them, they mostly irritate me & yet i can never resist their siren call. this one is p strong on the irritation, altho at least the narrator does not ascribe much meaning to her decision to go to berlin after she a) discovers her boyf is an online conspiracy theorist (probably not sincerely) and b) gets a call that said boyf has died, it’s really just something to do to avoid doing anything else. but other than that it’s so BerlinExpat by the numbers, like she lives in kreuzkölln! put her somewhere else at least! there is one scene that elevates the BerlinExpat-ness of it all (narrator asks expatfriend for advice on visa applications, expatfriend assures her that it’s really easy for americans to get visa, adds “especially now” while literally, as the narrator remarks, gesturing at the falafel she’s eating) other than that, the novel is.... fine. it’s smart, but not really as smart as it thinks it is, which is a problem bc it thinks it’s just sooo incisive. whatever. 2/5

the tenant of wildfell hall, anne bronte this is reductive but: jane eyre: i could fix him // wuthering heights: i could make him worse // wildfell hall: lmao i’m gonna leave his ass anyway i enjoyed the part that is actually narrated by the titular tenant of wildfell hall, helen (which thankfully, i think, is most of it) because the perspective of a woman who runs away from her abusive alcoholic of a husband is genuinely interesting and engaging, while gilbert, the frame story narrator who falls in love with helen, is.... the worst. i mean he’s not the worst bc the abusive husband arthur is there and hard to beat in terms of worseness, but he’s pretty fucking bad. imagine if helen had found out that gilbert attacked her secret brother over a misunderstanding, severely injured him & LEFT HIM TO DIE & then (when dude survived & the misunderstanding got cleared up) apologised like well i guess i didn’t treat you quite right! she’d have to run away from her second husband as well! poor girl. 3/5

#the books i read #long post #lol i keep forgetting to finish & post these #anyway gilbert fucking sucks! like his name is gilbert you can do better helen

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acecademia · 3 years

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Do you like history? What do you find difficult about history classes? Are there any famous people (from the past) that you would want to meet or historical events you would want to go back in time to (if these were possible)?

Hi, nonny!

This is a difficult question to answer. I don't know if I really like history, but I don't think I actively dislike it anymore, either. I think I mainly struggled with history in school because of the way it's presented and taught. You're given names and dates of battles and wars and laws and blahblahblah and it's just.... it's boring, okay? Like memorizing a bunch of important dates is not interesting. I also didn't like reading historical fiction as a kid and did so very rarely (things like American Girl and The Witch of Blackbird Pond being a couple of notable exceptions). (It also doesn't help that I'm not a fan of epistolary novels, and the Dear America books were very popular when I was a kid.)

I also spent 4 years in Yorktown, VA, where we took field trips to historical Jamestown and Williamsburg and the Virginia War Museum and other historically-relevant places. So colonial American history was basically drilled into my head. I don't know anyone else (aside from people who grew up there) who knows the names of the three ships that brought the original colonists to Jamestown (the Godspeed, the Discovery, and the Susan Constant). I can also still recite the last paragraph or so of Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" speech from memory. (We were required to memorize it the year we went on a field trip to Richmond and visited the church where he delivered that speech.)

I like random trivia and factoids, so weird and wild facts about history interested me. But what really got me to stop disliking studying history so much was having it presented to me as a story. I like stories. Humans tend to. So when I was in my MLIS program and my professor for my information books & resources for youth class had us read children's and YA information books, I found that I actually kind of enjoyed the history ones. There was a great one we read about Lizzie Borden and one about Bonnie and Clyde, and I was super into them. Turns out, all I needed was an engaging story to make me interested.

Without that thread of story to pull me along, I couldn't really bring myself to care about what precise year some battle happened or which old white slaveowner was on which side of a debate that happened 300+ years ago. We also really didn't learn much in the way of more recent history in school. My sixth-grade history class was supposed to cover all of US history since the Civil War, but after we finished the civil rights movement, it kind of fizzled out and only covered a couple of things after that. The civil rights movement (in the way that we study it in school, at least) ended in 1968. I was learning this stuff in 2006. That's almost 40 years of history that we just didn't talk about?? Like bro, when your students were born 30 years after the last big event you cover in school, you kind of can't just assume we know about what happened since then. Hell, a lot of people my age don't even remember 9/11--I sure don't! So the recency thing was a big issue for me as well.

I think if I went back in time, I would want to visit Victorian England for one reason and one reason alone: I want an authentic Victorian-era corset. Also some other clothes to go with it. Look, it's an a e s t h e t i c. And I'm here for it. I'd stay just long enough to get a trunk full of tailored clothes and then poof back to the present. There aren't really a lot of historical figures that I care about, so I don't think I'd be really jazzed about meeting someone specific or anything. I guess maybe if I could go back in time and meet Carrie Fisher... Yeah, I'd probably do that. I love her so much and I'm still not over her death. RIP Space Mom 💔

Who would you want to meet, nonny? What would you want to see?

#replies #anon #nicole speaks #nicole rambles #long post

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of-dxnger · 5 years

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ʻ / let me introduce you to a prized member of our mens lacrosse team , nicholas “nick” black . this cis-male aries has been a student at our institution for 3 years and is currently a twenty one year old junior . through the halls , he has always reminded me of maxence danet-fauvel , but there is always more than meets the eye , like the fact that his father has covered up the deaths of two of nick’s friends over the years. coral cape has made their future just as bright as their smile , i assure you . ʼ ( muse #7 , billie , 25 , gmt+10 , she/her )

your friendly neighbourhood nerd, hi. hit me up on discord ( one salty nerd#9483 ) if you want to plot. below are some facts and details about my misunderstood child nick.

~DOSSIER !

Name: Nicholas Xavier Black Nicknames: Nick Age: 21 D.O.B: 13th April Height: 6″1 Degree: Business/Economics Nationality: French-American Languages: English, French Gender: Cis Male Orientation: soooooo bi

~ HISTORY !

TRIGGERS: death, drugs, alcohol.

ʻ / The taste of his power is rotten; leaves left to fester beneath an autumn sky. Emotions like an ensnared animal, vicious, writhing, raw. That is how he grew, a black pit that demanded attention from everyone around him. His ability was to infect those around him, until it consumes everything and leaves only a vacancy for disdain.

His father had been a strong presence in his life, not always a positive one. The two of them butted heads almost every chance they got these days. Arguements about nearly everything, his lack of commitment, not attending mass, fighting, drinking and drugs, his choice of partners, turning up in shirt and jeans rather than a suit. Nothing he did was good enough so he stopped putting in the effort. It didn’t help that his little sister was the apple of his father’s eye. It had been harder growing up with that, constantly in competition, but it hadn’t taken him long to realise that it wasn’t worth it. He didn’t need his fathers approval, she could have him.

He wasn’t a mother’s boy either, but he certainly had a better relationship with her. He felt bad for leaving her in the house all the time with him. It wasn’t that he was violent to anyone in their family, by no means. But there was something corrupting about him, he didn’t want her to become like him. She was too good. She was usually the one that could get him to go against his own interests, a worried look, a pout, heaven forbid tears. Letting her down or breaking her heart wasn’t something he ever wanted to do, that was why he still did well at his studies, he never caused too much of a scene, although that was by his standards, not hers.

ʻ / Look at me walking around, all Black, free and ungrateful. How dare I, skip a “Hallelujah” to tell you the church is on fire.

Church had always been a big part of their family, they’d always been catholics the Blacks, every sunday was a family trip to mass. Neatly kept hair, fresh pressed clothes, polite hand shakes and smiles reserved for those that he was supposed to respect. It was exhausting. He went and did as he was told, sitting there quietly daydreaming, musing to himself. His attendance waxed and waned, but everytime his mother fussed and worried about him, he felt guilty and would go for her. There were many aspects of being catholic that bothered him, but he was more concerned with being himself, it was why he didn’t feel ashamed when he discovered he was into guys as much as girls. His father had given him a warning to not let it ruin his future, Nick had laughed, and clearly ignored him. His father was so hellbent on imagery and what the public thought of their family, but Nick couldn’t care less.

He’d found himself in the cathedral at university twice in his three years there. The first was when he was just in there for the peace and quiet. He may have been a little high, and laying down on the pews with the stained glass windows bathing him in a kaleidoscope of colours was mesmerising. The second was when he’d gotten so stuck in his own head, panicing and re-living past events, a panic attack wrapping its way around his heart, the only place that made sense to him was the church. Strange, but it worked.

ʻ / Prayers whispered on trembled lips; a wish, a hope that he wasn’t beyond redemption. Pressed to his forehead were the rosary beads of a long dead family member that he’d never met.

Seventeen. How does one learn to cope with losing a friend? Losing someone is never a thing that someone should have to go through. It is only made worse by the fact that no one knew what happened exactly. There was a party, being the rich and spoilt kids that they were, there was of course alcohol and someone had drugs even though there wasn’t supposed to be, that was a problem with spoilt kids, they didn’t like rules. Bryce had been drinking a lot and there was supposedly drugs in his system but Nick was sure he hadn’t taken any, everyone knew him and everyone had talked to him or interacted with him to some degree, so there was an easy to follow timeline. Up until Bryce died. Supposedly falling down the stairs, a nasty wound on his head. But it never sat right with most of the peoeple that really knew him. Friendships dissolved, suspicions tore people apart but the world moved on. What Nick didn’t know was that his father had helped keep the story from reaching the media, had kept certain aspects of the case quiet. He’d never been overly religious, but after this his faith began to falter, he hadn’t properly attended church in a few years, but now he almost felt ashamed to.

Nineteen. He and his lover at the time, Tobias, were perched at the top of a building, not that high. But high enough. Legs swaying in the breeze as they looked over a city that he would one day rule. They’d been up there to talk, somewhere private, yet calming. Nick was calling things off. After sitting there so long in silence, the boredom and finality in his voice was abbrasive even to himself. Tobias hadn’t taken it too badly, obviously there was emotion and as he went to stand up off the ledge and leave, he’d slipped and was dangling from the roof of the building. Nicks fingers gripped so hard at his jacket and wrist, wishing that he had more upper body strength, or the will to lift up other. But after what felt like forever, there was an emptiness in his hands, followed quickly by the disfugred body below. The first thing he did was call his father, call it intuition, or perhaps because he knew deep down that his father wasn’t above dealing with such things. It had taken him so long after that to trust himself to let anyone in, he’d tried rationaising with himself that it was an accident, but it had taken so long for him to truly believe it, there were still times when he didn’t think it was. He’d let go. He never went back to church after that. Occassionally walking by it and considering it, his rosary beads still hung in his room, not quite ready to get rid of them compeltely, but he felt damaged, damned even.

Was he due for another death? After all, things came in threes and he was twenty one now.

ʻ / Trust given without being earned loses meaning; a rotten power he inherited from his father. He tastes it in the smiles of his lovers and the glances of his classmates, in the teachers who congratulate his achievements, and the friends who invite him to party after party. He is wanted and praised, yet not loved.

It was his last name, his family. It opened so many doors, a situation he was willing to take advantage of when the time called for it, but it also meant that a lot of people that tried to ingratiate themselves in his life, were fake. There only to get in good with the family and make their own opportunities. It was bareable at a young age, even invisible. But as he grew it became more obvious and more exhausting to deal with. To the point where he tries to hold off on people finding out he is a Black.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be part of his family. But sometimes the name came with too much baggage. Some his own, some his siblings or parents. But the reverse of his wanting to stop people trying to use him for what his family could give them was to fiercly protect what was his. His friends, his loved ones, those that he truly cared about... there was nothing he wouldn’t do for them. He’d crossed a boundary once before for a friend and it didn’t bother him as much as it should have. But that’s who he was in his core, protective of his own, once again much like his father. It was infuriating how much of his father he saw in himself when he looked in the mirror.

ʻ / Calloused fingers tracing his bloodstained lips – only to have it wipe away. Shrill screeches of the final whistle, they’d won again. Smug grins were worn that could rival the devils. Yes, they had a reputation for being a rougher team, but it just meant they did whatever it took to win. The blood clinging to net of his crosse, lightly spattering his lips only confirmed this.

Lacrosse had been an exceptional distraction when he’d first started playing for the university during his first year. But it became a rather delightful way to channel his anger and frustration while using his smarts to play tactics. His father told him he should have gone into something stronger, but that was part of the allure of lacrosse, the rebellion. Nick was able to have something that was truly his that his father couldn’t ruin. At least not yet. It was almost a ritual of his to step off the field and smoke a joint before hitting the showers. Something to help mellow him out a little before his shoes hit the flagstones of the university.

Getting his hands dirty wasn’t something he was afraid of, there were plenty at the university that focused on nothing more than books, looking down their noses at sports. Hard work and getting down in the mud were things he guessed he’d picked up from his father, but he knew that his fathers penchant for getting his hands dirty had grown into something more twisted and sinister since he’d left university. It would not be the path that he walked.

~ TL;DR !

From a catholic family.

Has daddy issues.

Sees too much of his father in him (and hates it).

Knows someone who knows someone. Has used drugs. Only shares his stash with a select few.

Likes to be the centre of attention, usually not in a good way.

Antagonistic.

Will start an argument/fight because he is bored.

Is remarkably intelligent.

He finds everyone attractive, super bi, used to feel bad about it, doesn’t care anymore.

May or may not be responsible for someones death.

Lowkey thinks his soul is damned.

~ CONNECTIONS !

( plots are open to anyone and everyone regardless of gender ^_^ )

~~ THE RIDE OR DIE ;; someone who has become increasingly close with nick, they share almost everything with one another, inseperable is a word to describe them, but not so clingy. { OPEN! }

~~ THICK AS THIEVES ;; friends, cause who doesn’t need friends. he’s never really had many close friends. { OPEN! }

~~ THE TEMPTATION ;; someone that acts as a corrupting/distracting influence. { OPEN! }

~~ THE FORBIDDEN TASTE ;; a relationship kept on the down low due to whatever reason, someone he is attracted to. { OPEN! }

~~ THE GIRL NEXT DOOR ;; living next door or down the hall from one another, they could hang out, maybe not? do they get along or merely tolerate one another? { OPEN! }

~~ THE LOVER ;; someone he has been seeing, this is not only about the physical, but the attraction of personalities. neither has taken the initiative to ask themselves if this could be something more. { OPEN! }

~~ THE SAINT ;; a friend or just someone who looks out for nick and often acts as a conscience or moral compass to him, or rather they try to. { OPEN! }

~~ THE EX ;; whether it was a one night stand, a small fling or something more serious, things were broken off for whatever reasons (plots). this could have been a mutual agreement or ended on bad terms. { OPEN! }

~~ THE THORN IN THE SIDE ;; not quite enemies or rivals, but someone that bothers him, or gets under his skin easily. { OPEN! }

~~ THE RIVAL ;; someone that he has a rivalry with, both equally matched, and the tension can be caused by anything, mutual friends, lovers, goals etc { OPEN! }

playlist

anyways that’s my boy, i’m terrible at these so please feel free to message me with any and all plots ^_^

#about #connections #nick #capecoral:intro

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wefibon446-blog · 4 years

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Small Acts Of Kindness Make A Big Difference

It's 8:00 in the morning I walk the same route to work every day and see the same places and familiar faces. I drive past the bus station and busloads of merchants from the northern suburbs of Minneapolis and scatter the city in many buildings and office fees. Also Read: https://www.bloglovin.com/@caxem49865/business-marketing-consultants-for-your-small

I go to the muffin shop where there is always a line for muffins and coffee. I see people line up for dry cleaners and Starbucks for laundry in the morning.

I pass through Marshall Field and walk past the security guard in front of a men's shirt in standard uniform, black pants, black shoes and white shirt. He is a tall, thin, handsome, mustache and inconspicuous African American. The security guard greets all who pass. no one left. "Hello good morning how are you". He talks to many passersby, appreciates their associations and congratulates them.

I admire how many people he knows by his first names. Its simple hello makes people feel special. He is more than a security guard; That morning rush is the main one. His presence and happy smile will be a part of my day. If it is absent, it will be noted. I think a zero.

The first time I see a security guard, I do not greet him when he says hello to me. I am in my world, thinking about the day's activities. I'd say hello the day before. It takes a few weeks. "Hello good Morning". We greet each other day and night. Then one Friday morning he wished me a good weekend. Then he wishes me a good weekend again next Friday.

On Monday, the security guard asks me "How was your weekend?" I tell him about a trip to California to see my mother, who has stomach cancer. I share how I meet them every month. And last weekend, Mom and I went to say goodbye to the family cabin near Lake Tahoe before selling the cabin. "My time with mom is very precious because I know that all the time can be final. I feel sad. I have a feeling of love. I consider myself lucky by having the gift of time."

He seems like a concerned friend he has known for years. He feels my sorrow and my love. He tells me that he is very sad to hear from my mother. And what a gift it is to spend time with what I have.

He tells how he lost his father to cancer two years ago. "I understand what you are going through. I think about my father every day. He died while on duty in Germany. It took me three months to retire for over 22 years. Circumstances." I can't because of that. " I cannot say goodbye or attend the funeral. I wish I were with him. Hugged him. Told him that I loved them. Well said. You are lucky enough to receive the gift of time. "

As I say goodbye I realize that I don't even know his name. I am impressed by the sharing and kindness and understanding of the security guards. He is more than a security guard or a stranger, he is a person who has touched me and understands what I am doing. he is a friend.

The next day, on my way to work, I stopped by the men's section at Marshall Field. In front of the shirt is a security guard with his charming smile, who sees people passing by with a glow in his eyes and wishes everyone good morning. When he congratulates me, I wish him good morning. Not after a second, I say: "After we talked all the time yesterday, I don't know your name." The security guard reacts with "Gary". I reply: "My name is Deborah". "Have a nice day," Gary says. I say: "Thank you, have a nice day."

Every morning we greet each other by name: "Hello Deborah", "Good Morning Gary". "Deborah, every Friday is a good weekend". "Gary's a good weekend too, see you on Monday."

I stop talking to Gary on Monday morning. Gary photographed his 7-year-old daughter from her late year. The two spent the weekend together at church and cinema. Gary broadcasts his 20 years of service experience and travels the world. He shares the importance of teamwork in the military and talks about lost friends in Kosovo. He shares his vision of going to school to become an airline pilot. I share my dreams of working for myself.

We talk a few times a week, week after week. We share our weekends, our dreams and stories about our families.

At the age of eight, Gary followed his heart, started pilot training and went back to school for a business degree. A few months later, he received a call from the ROTC, which offered him a job at the University of New Mexico. Gary accepts the job and walks away. It's been a few years since I last spoke to Gary outside the men's section, but the memory feels like yesterday.

I began as a namaste to a stranger and turned into a friendship, sharing stories of dreams for the past and future of the heart. Gary touched me and reached out with his hand to make my morning the best part of the day. I experienced the beauty of friendship and love.

In the hustle and bustle of life, we often forget how easy it is to say hello to a stranger and how big and permanent the difference can be. When you greet a stranger and share with you heartily, you become a pebble in the lake. With each wave you make, you spread a love that lasts a long time. Make up your mind to say hello to a stranger today. You will pass any gift you give. Read this: https://www.bloglovin.com/@caxem49865/business-marketing-consultants-for-your-small

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qupritsuvwix · 5 years

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my father died a year ago this month. I was talking to his widow yesterday, his sixth wife. She was with him six years. Now she’s in an independent living facility. It is weird talking about the life of a male who basically abandoned his two sons and spent the rest of his life with other people’s families.

She had been divorced three times and had lived alone for twenty-five years before she went online at age 80 to look for a friend. They were the same age. He was an ordained minister and she was an agnostic. She was from New Hampshire. He was from Southern Illinois. He had a couple of degrees and a varied resume, having worked for the railroad, in an auto factory, preached, and worked for the state in mental health. She had raised her children and worked in the handmade crafts field, and some other stuff.

There was a lot of stuff he apparently didn’t tell her, and some stuff he probably shouldn’t have. He had a couple of preliminary health burps before he finally stroked out in an emergency room. He had months of warning and a couple of major moves in a couple of years to sort his shit out. He had hundreds of records and books and a thousand cds. It was left to his widow and her kids to sort it out and haul it away.

He gave me three things, a fascination with graphic art, a love of reading, and a curiosity about music. He was also fascinated with politics and white people church, but I find those topics so closely related that I yawn. He introduced me to jazz, the Greatful Dead, and Harlan Ellison. I knew Charlie Brown and Snoopy before I knew Dick and Jane.

I never knew how he felt about having children, nor his philosophies on sex and women. I felt abandoned at an early age, even before my mother chased him off. He had been chased out of the pulpit at a couple of churches in the south, Savannah and Atlanta. His father, who had wandered out of his life when he was ten or so, lived in Sarasota, Florida, operating a lift bridge on a shipping channel. He remarried within months of the divorce, as did my mother. My brother and I attended both ceremonies, I have photos to prove it.

I had initiated communication with him sometime between 1981 and 1984, I don’t remember how or why. I spoke to him almost monthly after that. After I ended up in Austin, he visited several times, most notably to officiate at my wedding to my ex. His second marriage exploded into violence, cheating, and lies. His third lasted almost two decades until two cancers in a row ate her up. He went back to school and remarried. That didn’t last more than a few years and on the rebound he married a waitress at a Cracker Barrel who was on only a couple years older than I was. That lasted almost twenty years and through his retirement from the state. She had better places to be and he agreed. Divorce number 3. He moved into an apartment and went to work for Walmart as a greeter and then in produce.

The most time I ever spent with him, outside of his trips to visit, and the trip I took to the old sod in 2012 or so, staying at his house that time, was when my ex, my daughter, and my father and I went to Six Flags Over Texas. It wasn’t a bad event, not even with a seven year old, and there were moments of usefulness, but I don’t like bemusement parks, and I’ve been to Sick Flags two other times as a chaperone for the middle school band trip.

He was cremated with half his last bride’s wedding dress. She wears his wedding ring on her middle finger. She wears his bible college ring on a chain. I don’t wear jewelry. I had a necklace or two for a few years in my teens and twenties. I can’t stand rings or watches. His ashes are in a hole in New Hampshire.

He had a chance to make a difference with my brother and I. Turned out he had better things to do.

#my father is dead #what took him so long?

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officialjessicajewett · 5 years

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Short story (although I beg you to read the entire blog): I’m selling a drawing of the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain house and donating the profits to preservation and restoration efforts.

BUY THE CHAMBERLAIN HOUSE ORIGINAL ART HERE. BUY THE CHAMBERLAIN HOUSE ART PRINTS HERE.

Now, let’s have the whole story. The links will be at the end of the blog again too. I don’t know if my efforts will be successful but my hope is you’ll feel my passion by the end of this blog.

We’re here to talk about something very near and dear to my heart – the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain house in Brunswick, Maine. The porches that Chamberlain himself built on his home of over fifty years are in structural danger. Together, you and I are going to help. Buildings like this one belong to all of us.

Briefly, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a Union general in the American Civil War who rose to that rank without formal military training (he was a professor before the war). He volunteered for service, and then later became a four-term governor of Maine, followed by president of Bowdoin College.

His wife, Fanny, was a rare example of an independent woman, having a career of her own as a music teacher and an artist before she decided to get married. The two of them were quite liberal in a lot of ways; believing women should be admitted to college wherever they chose, believing in the right to contraception and family planning, believing in racial equality, and so forth.

For a bit of context into the time and place the Chamberlain family lived, they knew Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and attended church with her for years. Stowe sometimes held gatherings of Bowdoin College students in her home where she read chapters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin aloud. Chamberlain took Fanny to some of these readings while they were “dating” (dating wasn’t the term in those days).

National history largely forgot Chamberlain until Ken Burns heavily featured him throughout his documentary series, The Civil War. Then in the early 90s, Jeff Daniels actually played Chamberlain (seen in character on the left) in the film, Gettysburg, followed ten years later by playing him again in Gods and Generals.

His impact reaches far beyond Maine. Even I live in Atlanta and I’m just three miles from both Chamberlain Street and Oakland Cemetery where one of his best friends, General John B. Gordon, is buried.

You’re beginning to see why this family and this house matter to American history. We could sit here discussing Chamberlain’s fascinating life and undeniable affect on Maine history until we write a book. In fact, there are a lot of books about him, his military commands, and his family.

Not only did the family live in this house for over fifty years, but Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rented rooms in the same house before they bought it. Longfellow’s presence in the house is still felt today in the upstairs parlor where a portion of the wallpaper he put up is still there.

This is the house today. Originally, it was only one-and-a-half floors. Chamberlain had the entire structure moved to the corner of Potter and Maine, and then lifted about eleven feet off the ground to build an entirely new first floor addition. He designed most of the first floor himself, including a beautiful curved staircase that greeted guests upon walking through the ruby red foyer. It’s is one of the most architecturally important houses in the state of Maine due to the odd mixture of building and decorating styles blended together from different popular aesthetics in the nineteenth century – Cape Cod, Gothic Revival, and some Art Nouveau influences. Chamberlain wasn’t even a trained architect or interior designer.

The Pejepscot History Center (PHC) rescued the house from demolition in 1983 after decades of being rented out to Bowdoin College students. It had been chopped up into seven apartments and the interior was painted psychedelic colors when they acquired it. Almost 37 years under the careful stewardship of historians and volunteers has seen great strides toward preserving and restoring the home to the way it stood when Chamberlain lived there, but only partially so.

As of my last visit, renters still live in the upper portions of the house in, I believe, three apartments because renting brings in money for upkeep. Many of the unoccupied rooms upstairs haven’t yet been restored either, including all of the Chamberlain family bedrooms. The downstairs bathroom with original fittings and the master bedroom upstairs were being used for storage instead of teaching and tourism. It takes a lot of money to preserve and restore historical buildings. Brunswick is a small town and Maine is a small town state.

Why does the decay of an old house matter to me?

My family name is Jewett. That was, once upon a time, an influential name up in Maine, so much so that if you take a drive over to South Berwick, you can tour my ancestors’ home. I’m related to Sarah Orne Jewett and she left her home to Historic New England when she died. If you click on her name, it’ll take you to the website for that house. There, you’ll see the potential when important places have the resources for full, meticulous restoration and preservation. I have a vision for the Chamberlain home being just as preserved, studied, and restored as the Jewett house.

I’ve had the privilege of visiting the Chamberlain house twice. Tour guides were wonderful and well-informed, the gift shop was better than most battlefield gift shops, and there was a beautiful wheelchair ramp built onto the back porch – a rarity for historical landmarks. In the above photo, you’re looking at my first trip to the house twelve years ago when I was quite sick and underweight compared to now. Sick or not, historical preservation is my passion. So I went to Maine.

I’d like to show you more photos from my trips to the Chamberlain house. I quickly grabbed some from my collection so you can see how special this place is to many of us in the American history, women’s history, and Civil War fields.

In 2018 and 2019, the PHC raised $48,000 for serious restoration work on the exterior of the house. They even got the wheelchair ramp rebuilt on the back porch as a bonus. It was a really spectacular job and it all looks like it belonged on the house from the beginning, although General Chamberlain never had a ramp back there.

The old ramp and porch.

The new ramp and porch.

I’m showing you this because I want you to see what’s possible through the help of donations, foundations, and grants to not only restore historical landmarks but also to make them accessible to more people in the future. Places like this really depend on tourism for cash flow in addition to the few grants that are available. Tourism matters economically to small towns. It pays to have interesting landmarks, speaking in practical terms. We’re American. We understand that money talks.

Take a look at this photo of the house from the 1870s. Do you see the glass porch on the first floor, and then the open air porch above it? Pay attention to those.

I’m letting the Pejepscot History Center explain what happened. This is from their fundraiser page. I’m not sure if the fundraiser page is still open, but if it is, I’ll update this blog with a link.

Thanks to $48,000 raised from foundations and individuals over 2018-2019, we were able to undertake extensive exterior restoration work on the Joshua L. Chamberlain Museum starting in the spring of 2019.

Four faces of the building have now been lovingly restored, but in the process, considerable rot due to deferred maintenance in the past was found and corrected.

This led to fewer funds available for addressing the final part of this Phase I restoration effort: the two historic porches on the southeast corner of the building, which have some of the most interesting architecture on the building, and provide considerable structural support.

Unfortunately, they too have more deterioration than originally anticipated, necessitating additional funds to repair and rebuild the porches correctly.

Chamberlain raised the house 11 feet in the air in 1871 to add the lower story, thereby adding the first floor porch himself. He especially loved these porches. Over the years, he and the family enjoyed sitting on them and raising plants in the ample southern sunshine.

So I decided to make donations interesting. Individually, none of us can afford the $20,000 the PHC needs to raise to save Chamberlain’s porches from decaying and deteriorating. I know I can’t.

But what I can do is use my skills as an artist to draw attention to the house and make it worth your effort to help rescue the house. I’m a portrait artist most of the time, selling commissions of ordinary people as well as portraits set in highly researched historical scenes. To me, the Chamberlain house like all other historical houses are like living things with souls and sets of memories all their own.

The idea occurred to me that if people were willing to buy my portraits of people, perhaps they would be willing to buy a “portrait” of a house. I had already done a Christmas-themed piece of art showcasing the Chamberlain family’s church, First Parish, and I was interested in doing another piece anyway. If I could use my artistic drive to raise awareness for historical preservation, all the better.

So I got to work. Watch the video below to see me in action.

Yes, the manner in which I do my art is a bit different. We’ll go ahead and address the elephant in the room since many of you might be new to my website and my art. If you didn’t guess from my other photos, I’m physically disabled. I was born with a condition called Arthrogryposis and the nature of it means I need to do everything with the tools in my mouth, whether it’s writing, typing, chopping vegetables, sewing, or creating art. I’ve had about nineteen surgeries to date with a high probability of two more surgeries in 2020. Selling art is how I make extra money.

This time, however, I’m not making money from the art. I’ve decided to sell both the original and various sized prints made from the Chamberlain house piece for the benefit of the restoration project. When I sell this piece, I will make a donation from 80% of the profits (I need 20% for shipping, materials, etc.) to the Pejepscot History Center and I will make public all of the pertinent documents. That way everything is crystal clear and there are no questions.

This is the completed piece of art.

It took me about three weeks to complete it. I used a combination of Pentel mechanical pencils with .5 mm lead and Prismacolor Ebony pencils on 11×14-inch mixed media paper. Each detail of the house was researched and replicated to the best of my ability down to the placement of the trees, the curtains from the 1870s photographs, the wrought iron fence design, and the woodwork. If you look up top, you’ll see the famous chimney Chamberlain added after the war with the Maltese cross. He was a Fifth Corps officer and the Maltese cross was their insignia, a symbol found throughout the house.

You’ll be able to purchase this piece of art in my shop.

BUY THE CHAMBERLAIN HOUSE ORIGINAL ART HERE. BUY THE CHAMBERLAIN HOUSE ART PRINTS HERE.

The original, as in the actual piece of art I worked on, is 11×14 inches and costs $385.00 USD. Prints (5×7, 8×10, or 11×17) range in price from $12.00 USD to $24.00 USD and are made on high quality cardstock with a glossy finish.

Orders larger than 8×10 inches are shipped in a tube with the art rolled inside to protect it from rough postal workers. Orders 8×10 and smaller are shipped in flat bubble mailers reinforced with cardboard. All customers are given a tracking number so they can keep an eye on their packages with the postal service as well. Every order within the United States includes free shipping. Shipping for international orders will be calculated at the time of purchase.

Please consider purchasing this piece. It’s such a worthy cause. I realize there is a lot happening in the world, and I’m doing my part for those causes too, but we should care about American history too. We need to be thinking about what kind of tangible legacy we’re going to leave our children and grandchildren. Wouldn’t you want to teach your descendants to celebrate and honor a man who believed in the qualities of a better world that we’re still fighting to create? What better way to honor him and his family than to help preserve the place they loved and called home for over half a century?

If you’re not interested in buying my art, that’s quite all right. There are choices.

One option is to let me collect the donations at PayPal.me/ArtByJessicaJewett and I’ll get it to the Pejepscot History Center for you. Please specify that you are donating to the Chamberlain house in the notes. I’ll send donations on the 15th of every month (when there are any) and I will give you copies of the receipts.

Or you can make a donation directly to the Pejepscot History Center, but please make sure you specify that your donation is for the Chamberlain house. They don’t have digital donations aside from the annual membership drives. The new 2020 membership drive hasn’t been created yet since they are closed until February 4.

To donate by mail:

Pejepscot History Center 159 Park Row Brunswick, ME 04011

By phone: Call (207) 729-6606 to provide a credit card number. They take all major cards.

In person: Drop by their offices at 159 Park Row during open hours.

The Pejepscot History Center is a non-profit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. Your gift is tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law.

I’m not affiliated with the Pejepscot History Center in any way, nor do I work for them. My fundraising efforts are as a private citizen.

Donation

Please consider making a donation to help me keep up with the cost of art supplies, living expenses, equipment related to my disability, and so forth. The minimum is set at $10.00. Thank you for your generosity.

$10.00

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Buy a piece of art to help with restoration projects on the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain house. Find out why it's important. Short story (although I beg you to read the entire blog): I'm selling a drawing of the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain house and donating the profits to preservation and restoration efforts.

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mybeautifulchristianjourney · 5 years

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Prayer

by Leonard Ravenhill

The Gospel Of Prayer

There's nothing more transfiguring than prayer. People often ask, "Why do you insist on prayer so much?" The answer is very simple - because Jesus did. You could change the title of the Gospel according to St. Luke to the Gospel of Prayer. It's the prayer life of Jesus. The other evangelists say that Jesus was in the Jordan and the Spirit descended on Him as a dove - Luke says it was while He was praying that the Spirit descended on Him. The other evangelists say that Jesus chose 12 disciples - Luke says it was after He spent a night in prayer that He chose 12 disciples. The other evangelists say that Jesus died on a cross - Luke says that even when He was dying Jesus was praying for those who persecuted Him. The other evangelists say Jesus went on a mount and He was transfigured - Luke says it was while He was praying that He was transfigured. There's nothing more transfiguring than prayer.

The Scriptures say that the disciples went to bed, but Jesus went to pray - as was His custom. It was His custom to pray. Now Jesus was the Son of God - He was definitely anointed for His ministry. If Jesus needed all that time in prayer, don't you and I need time in prayer? If Jesus needed it in every crisis, don't you and I need it in every crisis?

The story goes that a group of tourists visiting a picturesque village saw an old man sitting by a fence. In a rather patronizing way, one of the visitors asked, "Were any great men born in this village?" Without looking up the old man replied, "No, only babies." The greatest men were once babies. The greatest saints were once toddlers in the things of the Spirit.

C. H. Spurgeon was converted at the age of 16 and began preaching in London at the age of 19. When he was 27, they built him a tabernacle seating 6,000 which he packed twice on Sundays - that's 12,000 - and once on Thursday nights. How? He waited on God. He got alone with God. He studied...and he prayed.

Desperate Prayer

God makes all His best people in loneliness. Do you know what the secret of praying is? Praying in secret. "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door..." (Matt. 6:6). You can't show off when the door's shut and nobody's there. You can't display your gifts. You can impress others, but you can't impress God.

I Samuel 1:1-15 gives an account of the yearly trip Elkanah and his wife, Hannah, made to Shiloh to worship and sacrifice to the Lord. During this time, Hannah had been distressed that she was not able to bear a son for her husband. This passage of Scripture gives quite a descriptive account of her time in prayer concerning the barrenness of her womb. It says that Hannah wept. More than this, she wept until she was sore. She poured out her soul before the Lord. Her heart was grieving; she was bitter of soul, provoked, and of a sorrowful spirit.

Now that's a pretty good list of afflictions - sorrow, hardship, and everything else that came upon this woman. But the key to the whole situation is that she was a praying woman. In verse 20 it says that she reaped her reward. "And it came about in due time, after Hannah had conceived, that she gave birth to a son; and she named him Samuel, saying, 'Because I have asked him of the Lord.'"

Now I say very often - and people don't like it - that God doesn't answer prayer. He answers desperate prayer! Your prayer life denotes how much you depend on your own ability, and how much you really believe in your heart when you sing, "Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling...." The more self- confidence you have, the less you pray. The less self-confidence you have, the more you have to pray.

What does the Scripture say? It says that God takes the lowly, the things that are not. Paul says in I Corinthians 1:28 that God takes the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no flesh should glory in His presence. We need a bunch of "are nots" today.

The Language of the Poor

Prayer is the language of the poor. Over and over again David, the King of Israel, says, "Incline Thine ear, O Lord, and answer me; for I am afflicted and needy" (Psalm 86:1). And do you remember that one of the greatest psalms he wrote says, "This poor man cried and the Lord heard him..." (Psalm 34:6).

The apostle Paul overwhelms me with his spirituality, his pedigree, his colossal intellect. Yet he says that he's very conscious that when he's weak, he is strong. He was always trying to prove to himself and to others that he was a nobody.

True prayer is a two-way communication. I speak to God and God speaks to me. I don't know how the Spirit makes communication - or why God needs me to pray - but that's how God works.

"Get Up And Pray!"

One day I was at a conference with Dr. V. Raymond Edman of Wheaton College, one of the greatest Christian educators in this country. He told us of an experience he had while he was in Ecuador as a missionary. He hadn't been there long before he was sick and dying. He was so near death that they had already dug his grave. He had great beads of sweat on his brow and there was a death rattle in his throat. But suddenly he sat straight up in bed and said to his wife, "Bring me my clothes!" Nobody knew what had happened.

Many years later he was retelling the story in Boston. Afterward, a little old lady with a small, dog-eared, beaten-up book, approached him and asked, "What day did you say you were dying? What time was it in Ecuador? What time would it be in Boston?" When he answered her, her wrinkled face lit up. Pointing to her book, she said. "There it is, you see? At 2 a.m. God said to get up and pray - the devil's trying to kill Raymond Edman in Ecuador." And she'd gotten up and prayed.

Duncan Campbell told the story of hearing a farmer in his field who was praying. He was praying about Greece. Afterward, he asked him why he was praying. The man said, "I don't know. I had a burden in the spirit and God said, 'You pray; there's someone in Greece that is in a bad situation.' I prayed until I got a release." Two or three years later the farmer was in a meeting listening to a missionary. The man described a time when he was working in Greece. He had been in serious trouble. The time? Two or three years ago. The men compared notes and discovered that it was the very same day that God had burdened a farmer, on a little island off the coast of Scotland, to pray for a man in Greece whose name he didn't even know.

It may seem the Lord gives you strange things. I don't care. If the Lord tells you something, carry on with what the Lord tells you.

Who Shall Ascend to the Hill of the Lord?"

There's another experience Duncan Campbell told about when he was working in Scotland.

"I couldn't preach," he said. "I couldn't get through to God. The heavens were solid. It was as though there was a 10 ft. ceiling of steel." So he quit trying to preach. He asked a young man named John Cameron to pray. The boy stood up and said, "What's the use of praying if we're not right with God?" He quoted the 24th Psalm, "Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord?"

You can't approach God unless your hands are clean, which means your relationships with others are clean and your heart is clean. "Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? He who has clean hands and a pure heart..." (Psalm 24.3-4).

After the boy recited Psalm 24 he began to pray. He prayed 10, 15, 20 minutes. Then he suddenly said, "Excuse me, Lord, while I resist the devil." He turned around and began to tell the devil where to go and how to get there. He fought for all he was worth. You talk about having on the armor of God and resisting the devil! When he finished resisting the devil, he finished his prayer. He prayed for 45 minutes! When he finished praying it was just as though God had pulled a little switch in heaven. The Spirit of God came down on that church, that community, on the dance hall at the other end of town, and the tavern on this end of town. Revival was born in that prayer!

At the end of Malachi it says, "And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly (that's the word I like, suddenly) come to his temple" (Malachi 3:1). Remember what it says about the shepherds? They were watching their flocks by night when suddenly there was the sound of the heavenly host. Do you remember a bunch of men that had been waiting in the upper room? Suddenly the Holy Spirit came on them in that room.

There's a date in history that I love very much. It was Wednesday, August 13, 1737. A little group of people in Moravia were waiting in a prayer meeting. At 11:00 suddenly the Holy Spirit came. Do you know what happened? The prayer meeting that began at 11:00 lasted 100 years! That's right. That prayer room was not empty for a century! It's the longest prayer among men and women that I know of. Even children six and seven years old travailed in prayer for countries the names of which they couldn't even spell.

Why We Don't Have Revival

In an old town in Ireland they'll show you with reverence a place where four young men met night after night after night praying for revival. In Wales, there's a place in the hills where three or four young men only 18 or 19 years old met and prayed night after night. They wouldn't let God go; they would not take no for an answer. As far as humanly possible they prayed a revival into birth. If you're thinking of revival at your church without any inconvenience, forget it. Revival costs a lot.

I can give you one simple reason why we don't have revival in America. Because we're content to live without it. We're not seeking God - we're seeking miracles, we're seeking big crusades, we're seeking blessings. In Numbers 11, Moses said to God, "You're asking me to carry a burden I can't handle. Do something or kill me!" Do you love America enough to say, "God, send revival or kill me"? Do you think it's time we changed Patrick Henry's prayer from, "Give me liberty or give me death," to "Give me revival or let me die"?

In the 30th chapter of Genesis, Rachael goes to Jacob and throws herself down in despair. She says, "Give me children or else I die." Are you willing to throw yourself down before God to seek the spiritual birth of spiritual children in our country?

People say, "I'm filled with the Holy Spirit." If the coming of the Spirit didn't revolutionize your prayer life, you'd better check on it. I'm not so sure you got what God wanted you to get.

We've said that prayer changes things. No! Prayer doesn't change things. Prayer changes people and they change things. We all want Gabriel to do the job. God says do it yourself - with My sufficiency and My strength.

We need to get like this woman, Hannah. What did she do? She wept, she was grieved, she said she had a complaint, she fasted - and she prayed.

Jesus, the anointed of God, made prayer His custom. Paul, with his background and intellect, depended on prayer because he said he was weak. David, the king, called himself a poor man and cried to the Lord. Hannah prayed for a son and gave birth to a prophet. The prayers of a handful of young men sparked revival.

There's nothing more transfiguring than prayer.

#Prayer #Leonard Ravenhill #The Gospel Of Prayer #Desperate Prayer #the language of the poor #transfiguring #petition #the Lord #crying out to God #submission #Holy Spirit #transformation #revival

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azvolrien · 5 years

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Iceland - Day 3

We left Vík at about 9 for the first stop of the day: Reynisfjara, a nearby beach marked by treacherous waves, a long sweep of black sand, and towering basalt cliffs and stacks, home to thousands of nesting seabirds including puffins. The weather was somewhat dreich, but the beach looked quite dramatic in the rain and it cleared up a bit later in the day. Reynisfjara is famous for its killer waves; there are warning signs telling you to keep back from the surf and not to turn your back on the sea, but some hapless tourist seems to get swept away every couple of years regardless. Those waves have carved some tall but shallow caves into the cliffs and worn the distinctive basalt columns into otherworldly shapes.

After a quick grocery stop in Vík, we piled back into the bus and set off across an eerie landscape, full of jagged a’a and barren except for moss: the vast lava field of Eldhraun, almost 600km2 in area and, if not the biggest, one of the world’s biggest lava fields to stem from a single eruption – in this case, the cataclysmic Laki eruption of 1783. After a 10-minute stop in the lava field, looking at some odd little cairns, and another at a viewpoint (still in the lava field), we continued on the Laki theme and stopped at a small visitor centre showing a somewhat harrowing short film about the eruption. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many lives the volcano claimed, but 10,000 Icelanders (and many livestock) died to the gas, the lava and the famine that followed; indirect deaths worldwide could number in the millions, as the ash cloud caused widespread harvest failures and food shortages and may have helped to trigger the French Revolution. It’s also estimated that, if a similar eruption were to happen today, the results would be catastrophic, disrupting air traffic and satellite communications on a scale that would make Eyjafjallajökull look like a stiff breeze, and there’s not really much we could do about it; every so often Mother Earth goes ‘hold my beer and watch this’ and everything crawling on the surface just has to get out of the way. The visitor centre had a small bookshop; I bought an English translation of an eyewitness account of the eruption written by Jón Steingrímsson, a local priest who supposedly turned aside the lava flow with a rousing sermon, saving his church and the people sheltering there, and was thereafter nicknamed the Fire Priest. The lava actually stopped because it hit a river, but it’s a good story. A memorial chapel to Jón and the victims of the eruption stands just across the road from the visitor centre, near the site of the original church. I also considered buying a book about the geology of Iceland co-authored by my old Director of Studies Thor Thordarson (I wondered if I’d come across him at some point) but decided against it. Maybe if I see it again I’ll know it’s fate.

We moved on to another viewpoint, this one looking out towards the Skaftafell glacier – a tongue of the vast Vatnajökull ice cap, the biggest in Europe – and with a sculpture made from the remains of a bridge washed away by a jökulhlaup – a glacier flood. Shortly after that came the Skaftafell visitor centre, where we stopped for lunch – I’m not sure the meat content in the soup was high enough to justify calling it ‘meat soup’ – and I browsed in the gift shop for a while, eventually buying a Vatnajökull National Park t-shirt and some postcards to send later in the week.

We then moved on to the Fjallsárlón, a glacial lagoon at the foot of Fjallsjökull (another tongue of Vatnajökull) where we took a boat ride in a little inflatable dinghy out to see the icebergs that calved from the snout of the glacier. It was quite windy, so the lagoon was choppy and there was a lot of spray (I had to finish drying my jeans with a hairdryer), but it was definitely worth the trip and was much less crowded than the bigger and more famous Jökulsárlón (Glacier Lagoon) nearby, which we visited shortly afterwards. The icebergs on Jökulsárlón are spectacular, displaying the pure blue-white of glacier ice to great effect, but they can be admired just fine from the shore and it’s a lot more crowded, with whole coach-loads of visitors always coming and going.

Another hour’s drive brought us to our base for tonight in Höfn, a sleepy fishing town a bit like an Icelandic Fraserburgh, but which nevertheless is a bustling metropolis compared to Vík.

The hotel – Hotel Höfn, it’s just called – is not bad, but I would say is the least nice of the three hotels so far; it has a good location overlooking the sea and the beds are clean and comfy, but the bathroom could do with some refurbishing and the walls are thin enough that I can hear someone snoring in the next room. It does, however, have a rather nice restaurant called Ósinn (not sure what that means) which isn’t too expensive by Icelandic standards and serves a decent pizza. Pizza with lobster was an option, but I went for a plain Margherita.

Also, looked up the word ‘kría’. It means ‘tern’, not ‘skua’. That’s probably a better name for a hotel.

#Iceland #holiday diary

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hvckleberried · 5 years

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yeah, he’s smoking inside. fucking sue him. miles leans back against the countertop and watches these idiots actually work. he takes a long drag. blinks. are you gonna, like, help at all, man? his exhale’s elongated; he watches his own breath fade into the rafters.

“ oh, does this bother you ? ” he asks, feigning concern. even cocks his head to the side for good measure. he lifts the cigarette in question to confirm their distaste. the other boy nods. miles’s forefinger taps against the cig and flicks ash onto his stupid west ham high shirt. and there it is. the smirk.

“ my. bad. ”

or, alternatively : ‘tis i, linc, with *dj khaled voice* anotha one !! greetings & salutations to huckleberry jeremiah vernon. call him MILES or he actually might kill you.

[ m i l e s v e r n o n –– OPEN FLAME .

✔ oc + wc┊❝ ( aria shahghasemi. he/him &. cismale ) eighteen year old huckleberry jeremiah vernon was listening to "paint it, black” by the rolling stones when the field trip buses turned around. rumor has it he spent two years in juvie & is the unbeknownst father of becca’s child, but who knows if that’s true? what we do know is that their friends describe them as alluring & deft, even if they’re known to be a little anarchic & noxious from time to time.

( &&. general information )

full name: huckleberry jeremiah miles vernon

nickname(s) or alias: miles, vernon, fuckleberry finn ( west ham football team, freshman year ), that asshole, the scary one, the kid ( his foster parents )

preferred name: miles. call him anything else and it’s your funeral, fuckface.

current age: eighteen

astrological sign: scorpio

gender: cismale

preferred pronouns: he/him

sexual preference: bisexual

romantic preference: biromantic

home environment: the kiersney household. a manor-like three-story at the edge of west ham’s easternmost woods. it looks like ikea ate pier 1 imports and fucking barfed up its bones the next day. statement walls. matching furniture. modern art on the walls. his foster parents have a motherfucking sculpture in the front foyer. it’s sickening. suburban. tame. tidy.

current occupation: student. delinquent.

language(s) spoken: english. i’ll-wring-your-neck-with-just-my-eyes. spanish, barely.

native language: english.

current relationship status: his knuckles kissing your face.

( &&. background )

reason behind name: huckleberry jeremiah vernon won his name in the lottery of misfortune: at least, that’s what his aunt used to say to the young boy. he doesn’t know a lot about his parents. enough to know they were royal fuck-ups, crackheads with nothing better to do than fuck and get high and have an accidental kid. they thought it’d be a hilarious form of payback: this monster takes nine months of their precious time, so they’d make his life hell. simple. so when his parents died when he was just an infant, his aunt had the opportunity to change his name. shift the tide. but she couldn’t bring herself to go against her dead sister’s wishes, however fucking twisted up she got because of her bad-news boyfriend. she took huckleberry in and insisted on calling him by his birth name until, at three years old, he was sent home from school with a drawing of his aunt with x’s for eyes. “ my auntie if she keeps saying it ”. from that day forward, he was jeremiah. then miles. only miles.

birth order: first and only for his biological family. the second-youngest of his cousins, when he lived with his aunt. they had a massive falling out after he returned from juvie. she chucked him out like he was rotten meat. the oldest ( or perhaps same age ) as his current foster brother.

ethnicity: what’s it to you. iranian-american

nationality: american.

religion ( tw: death, acts of violence ): fuck that shit. there’s no god. if there were a god, it’d be fucking him. this wasn’t always miles’s view; it started when he was 4, and accidentally killed his aunt’s cat in front of his cousins. they always hit people when they were doing something wrong in cartons! the cat was trying to steal his cheese stick. so... he hit it with a book. his aunt she made him go to bible camp that summer, where he was vilified for his name. “huckleberry’s a dingleberry! hahaha! where’s tom sawyer, huh?” whatever god there was wouldn’t let him have this name. or this life. he wouldn’t have let his parents die: huckleberry would later find the news clipping. “ bronx couple found shot dead in stolen vehicle, ruled double-suicide. ” religion’s the opiate of the masses. it’s how pansy people sleep at night. young huckleberry wasn’t allowed back at church after he dropped one of those big candles and watched the altar go up in flames. fine by him. he started playing with fire. messing with the wrong people. getting wrapped up in sketchy city boy shit. any shred of faith left in his body was torn away when he and his older buds planned to rob a bank: miles was 12; his cohorts ( ty & presley ) were 18. miles did most of the electronic work: hacking the cloud, derailing the security system. they stormed the fucking bank of america. one of them whipped out a gun. miles... stabbed somebody in the shoulder, to get them off of ty. he watched that security guard die, that day. but not before his bullet ripped through ty’s head. juvie happened. two years. aggravated manslaughter. he got off easy, as a minor. presley’s still behind bars. so, yeah. there’s no motherfuckin’ god out there. and if there is? he can kindly suck miles’s dick.

political views: politics. are. bullshit. go cry to somebody else about your opinions. there’s 7 fuckin’ billion people on this planet and you think your thoughts on zoning laws and gun control matter? cry him a fucking river.

financial status: he’s secure, because of his foster parents. he keeps testing ‘em, to see if they’ll fuckin’ send him back. broken merchandise; we want a refund. but they don’t, so he... just keeps taking. stealing money from their wallets. selling expensive shit from the house to buy good shit. pocket knives. lighters. alcohol. a gun.

hometown: bronx, new york city, new york. now it’s west ham. fuck that.

level of education: high school junior. because of his time in juvie, he entered school in west ham as a freshman at 15. he’ll turn nineteen before his senior year. not that it matters. he’s already planning his escape. he’s lifted enough money to skip town soon, go back to new york. avenge ty’s death. he’s got the other security guard’s details, from that day. it pays to be skilled with a keyboard. he’s brilliant, when he wants to be. sharp-witted. his idea of a prank last year was sending an anonymous tip in to the school saying the whole place might blow. hacking the database to make it look like it was sent from a real address. he’s still surprised people aren’t more fucking grateful. he secured them a stupid day off. he’s also known to hack into the cloud to get test answers, and sell ‘em to people that don’t completely make him want to punch them.

( &&. physical appearance )

looks like (or face claim, if applicable): aria shahghasemi. he’s got these midnight black curls. piercing gray eyes.

height: 5′10. but don’t let that get your guard down.

figure/build: lean and muscular. won’t be caught dead in west ham’s stupid gym, but he’s fit. his foster parents put in a whole boxing studio in their basement just for him. he’s been known to get into fights, throw punches. it was their way to kind of, like... get his anger out. joke’s on them; he’s not giving it up. that shit’s his.

hair colour: black.

hair length: mid-length. curly, so it looks shorter than it actually is.

eye colour: gray.

glasses?: no. just shades.

skin tone: olive. smooth.

tattoos: he got one in juvie, on the side of his right wrist. a cross. makes him laugh. irony. he’s in the process of self-tattooing fuck between his left forefinger and thumb, but only the jagged f is there right now. it’s a process. he can’t stomach the needle.

piercings: one diamond stud in his left ear. it’s about the side of a pencil eraser. stolen.

birthmarks/scars/distinguishing marks: a few faded cross-hatches near his hairline, from fights that resulted in stitches. a six-inch line across his chest. knife. a few patches of scar tissue from burns on his palms. all juvie.

dominant hand: left-handed. you can tell because that’s the hand he always uses to flick his lighter on and off, on and off. he’s always playing with that damned thing.

if painted, what color are their nails?: who do you think he is, fuckin’ bowie? jesus.

usual style of clothing: black on black on black. did i mention black? black t-shirts, leather jackets, denim jackets, dark jeans, boots. wouldn’t be caught dead in fuckin’ sneakers. failed gym because he wasn’t about to put on dowdy shorts and t-shirts just to run around a glorified prison for 30 minutes every day. oh, there’s a pep rally? we’re supposed to wear centurion colors? fuck you.

frequently worn jewelry: he wears a thin gold chain around his neck every day. sometimes he’s got rings.

describe their voice, what accent?: his voice is very punchy, low. cat-like. glimmers of some new york peppered in here and there.

what is their speaking style (fast, monotone, loquacious)?: clipped. acidic.

describe their scent: amber. tobacco. smoky.

describe their posture: he stands tall, defiant, aloof. chin always tipped up in the face of oncoming threats. his whole body’s a proverbial middle finger to the world: yeah, i’m here. bite me.

( &&. legal information )

any speeding tickets?: yep. went 80 in a 25 zone.

have they ever been arrested?: yes. at this point, the west ham police force is really tired of his shit.

do they have a criminal record?: absolutely. various misdemeanors. cybercrimes. property damage, breaking & entering. shoplifting. aggravated assault.

have they committed any violent crimes?: hAs He CoMiTtEd AnY vIoLeNt cRiMeS ??? ( he’s laughing. )

property crimes?: affirmative.

traffic crimes?: should be the least of your concern.

other crimes?: don’t even get me started. the moral compass on this kid is... nonexistent. the answer to the world’s problems is fuck ‘em. anarchy.

( &&. medical information )

blood type: o negative.

date/time of birth: december 3rd. 3:32am. witching hour. ha.

place of birth: shitty hole-in-the-wall crackhouse. his parents dropped him at his aunt’s before freewheeling.

vaginal birth or cesauren section?: vaginal birth.

sex: male.

smoker? / drinker? / drug user?: yes / yes / yes. what can he say? he’s an equal-opportunity employer.

allergies: grizz visser. fuckin’ ass. nosy people. pop music.

ever broken a bone?: his nose in second grade: the other kid got it worse. his hand in fifth grade. worth it. couple ribs in juvie. his arm, when he was a baby. his parents wanted to see if gravity was, like. real.

any physical ailments/illnesses/disabilities: nah. not that he’d tell you anyway.

any medication regularly taken: nyquil, sometimes. helps him sleep.

( &&. personality )

direct quote from them: *blinks at you like you’re speaking swahili*

positive traits: alluring, deft, crafty with computers. sly.

negative traits: anarchic, acerbic, explosive. heedless. noxious.

likes: the flick of the flame. beat poetry. darkroom photography. scared glances. messing with the system. sidestepping boundaries. wintergreen lifesavers. blueberry slushies. ac/dc, the stones, lynyrd skynyrd, sting, the offspring, kansas. buttered toast. milk duds. history. cigarettes: he’s always got one tucked behind his ear.

dislikes: fucking football team. working on yearbook ( detention punishment ). catch him taking photos of those morons with his middle finger in frame. his roots. his aunt, for casting him out. his foster family, for giving him so many chances. he doesn’t deserve them. his name. bright sunlight, hurts his eyes. pistachios. remembering. weak alcohol. fraternizing with the idiots of west ham.

strengths: he’ll figure out your nervous ticks within two minutes of talking to you. he can go hours watching someone ramble and not say a thing, and not break his expression. making others feel small. digging his fingers into your dirt. finding back doors, loopholes, and getting through cybersecurity like a hot knife through butter. baking – but tell anybody and he’ll end you. tying cherry stems with his tongue. making sense of ginsberg. remembering stupid historical facts. pope gregory ix executed cats and that allowed rats to spread the bubonic plague in masses. still fuckin’ like your religion, asshole?

weaknesses: vengeful. his definition of justice is very much based in vigilante action; an eye for an eye. he’s got an aloof disposition, but his past wounds are still seething. empathy. expressing emotions other than anger. patience. impulse control. he can’t hide that you’re pissing him the hell off. swears in front of kids, often. probably slept with your aunt two towns over. can’t lose an argument, ever. even with authority figures.

insecurities: what if he... caused ty’s death? what if that’s on him? is he worth shit? he’ll make himself worth something. he’ll get them back. all of ‘em. he’ll make ‘em pay.

fears/phobias: hates needles. but fucks with ‘em anyway. fears oblivion, but puts up a front like he’s chill with it. fears he’ll never muster up... a purpose. or whatever the fuck people call it. fears this is all he’ll ever be: an eighteen-year-old fuckup with a record, hands that itch to fight, to crush, to destroy.

habits: playing with his lighter. chewing on toothpicks. popping milk duds like pills. glaring at everyone, no one, nothing. everything. laughing in the face of authority. making unprecedented digs at people, just because he can. propping his feet up on the desk in front of him when his teachers ask him to answer questions, twirling a pencil in his hands like he’s god. grabbing a slushie from 7/11 just to have something to do with his hands. messing with the popular kids’ social medias, just for fun. hacking the online lunch menu to see his classmates get fuckin’ pissed when mozzarella sticks are served on friday, not today, sorry. driving to neighboring towns’ parties and hooking up with chicks there. masquerading as a man with a reason. hitting up college parties often. lingering in shadow. living in gray areas. writing his own notes in the front of library books, on the title page, in sharpie. “ fuck you ten thousand ” on the school’s copy of pride & prejudice. “ kindly die, thanks ” in gone with the wind. “ congrats, you’re literate ” in the front of catcher in the rye.

quirks: always sits in the back left corner of the room, near the window. he literally jumped out, sophomore year, when the school security officer tried to bust him for selling pills to a freshman in the hall earlier that day. popping his earbuds in during lectures. maintaining unbroken eye contact with teachers as he does so. getting ~very close~ and speaking ~very low~. purring threats. can never drink lightly. skipping school often, fabricating online attendance to avoid suspension. barely eating the food his foster parents prepare. leaving the table early, unexcused. digging into the leftovers after everyone’s gone to bed. severing ties. if he’s lucky, never makin’ ‘em in the first place. his new yorkisms come out when he’s drunk, or high, or tired.

hobbies: darkroom photography. reading poetry. burning shit. smoking. walking around the mini mart like he’s a hunter in the wild, just to make the clerks uncomfortable.

guilty pleasure: he listens to “lore” and “my favorite murder”. but he disguises that shit, saving the album covers of the podcasts as seether.

desires: to avenge ty’s death. get the fuck outta west ham. to find a reason to be here. a reason why.

wishes: his parents didn’t kill themselves. cowards. they deserved to deal with him. they deserved to be tortured, for doing this to him. he wishes he hadn’t pulled that knife on his aunt. then at least he’d still be in new york city, instead of here, with this stupid fuckin’ foster family that just won’t let him go.

secrets: killed a guy. the reason for his juvie sentence is redacted on his public record. he’s lonely, a lot of the time. and, oh yeah: he’s becca’s baby daddy.

turn ons: no bullshit. sarcasm. intellect. no strings.

turn offs: sentimentality. smileyness. too much perfume. caring.

lucky number: 1. he’s all he’s got.

pet peeves: chewing gum: fucking pellegrino and his damned bubbles. bubbly people. cassandra pressman and the tree-sized stick up her ass. foot tapping. prying. school involvement. slow drivers. slow walkers. slow thinkers.

their motto: “ fuck you very much. ”

( &&. favourites )

food: falafel. shut up.

drink: he brought vodka to school in a water bottle once. diet coke.

fast food restaurant: wendy’s. he likes the chocolate frosties.

flavour: chocolate.

word: fuck. for a vast array of reasons.

colour: black.

clothing: his most worn leather jacket. touch it and he’ll end you.

accessory: the gold chain ‘round his neck. it was ty’s.

candle scent: smoke. tobacco. whatever that shit is, patchouli.

game: fuck games. fuck fugitive. leave him alone.

animal: he has such a soft spot for caterpillars.

holiday: christmas. he likes baking shit. but if that ever gets out, he’ll flip.

weather: pouring rain, with patches of sun in between. it’s rare, but damn. it’s kind of beautiful.

season: summer. fast drives, windows down. no school. no bullshit.

book: on the road, jack kerouac.

artist: aerosmith.

band/group: ac/dc, kiss, guns ‘n roses, van halen, def leppard.

song: we’re not gonna take it, twisted sister.

movie/film: star wars. fuck off, it’s good.

tv show: history docs. he likes those decade pieces on the history channel.

sport: boxing.

possession: his lighter.

number: 1.

person: that’s the dumbest question he’s ever heard. himself. he’s lying.

( &&. skills )

talents: hacking. lying. breaking rules. testing limits. photography. playing people.

ability to drive a car?: yes. recklessly.

can they ride a bike?: yes, chooses not to.

do they play any sports?: tonsil hockey. heartbreaking. boxing.

anything they’re bad at?: empathizing. serenity.

do they have any combat training? why?: yep. his friends in grade school. juvie.

( &&. firsts )

childhood memory: crushing a handful of cheerios in his tiny hands and feeling... powerful.

crush: ava watson. she said she liked his eyes.

email address: [email protected]

job: reception at a local gym in west ham. lasted a day; he punched a guy.

phone: flip-phone. now he’s got an iphone.

kiss: hanna parler. 6th grade. said she’d miss him before he left for juvie.

love: HA. nice try, dick.

sexual experience: josie thwaites. 6th grade. they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.

( &&. childhood )

best childhood memory?: try again.

worst childhood memory?: seeing ty’s eyes go dim.

what were they like as a child?: angry. electric. not easily tamed.

any crushes growing up?: some. he doesn’t do that now. crushing.

( &&. this or that )

expensive or inexpensive tastes?: expensive.

hygienic or unhygienic?: hygienic.

open-minded or close-minded?: close-minded. his way or bust.

introvert or extrovert?: introvert. buzz off.

optimistic or pessimistic?: pessimistic. optimism’s dead.

daredevil or cautious?: daredevil. caution’s an early grave.

logical or emotional?: emotional.

generous or stingy?: stingy.

polite or rude?: rude. so rude.

book smart or street smart?: both.

popular or loner?: loner. notorious, though. everyone knows who he is. wonders what his deal is. he’s got this... dark magnetism. if you’re smart, you’ll stay away.

leader or follower?: leader. follows his own path. likes disrupting order.

day or night person?: night.

cat or dog person?: cat. despite what his childhood mistakes might lead you to believe.

closet door open or closed while sleeping?: open. come get him.

( &&. social media )

do they have a facebook? twitter? instagram? vine? snapchat? tinder/grindr? tumblr? youtube? yes to facebook and instagram. no twitter, no vine. has a snapchat, rarely uses it. yes to tinder.

if so; name on facebook: miles vernon.

instagram user: milesvernon.

snapchat user: milesvernon.

( &&. musical tastes )

theme song: paint it, black –– the rolling stones.

makes them sad: anything by the beatles. makes him think of his aunt’s apartment. and then he gets angry.

makes them dance: nope. he wouldn’t be caught dead dancing in front of the likes of you. when he’s drunk, anything with a decent beat will make him sway his hips a little.

( &&. miscellaneous )

do they have a fake i.d.?: hell yeah. a couple.

are they a virgin?: ha. no.

describe their signature: chaos. barely legible.

how long would they survive in a zombie apocalypse?: he’d bite a zombie’s fuckin’ head off, if that answers your question.

do they travel?: nah.

one place they would like to live: anywhere but here.

one place they would like to visit: anywhere but here.

celebrity crush: camila mendes. tell anybody and he’ll hunt you down.

what can you find in their pockets/wallet/purse: cigs. lighter. some form of tic tac.

place(s) your character can always be found: in the shadows. on rooftops. places he shouldn’t be.

when does your character like to wake up?: 7:03am. he doesn’t like rounded numbers.

how does your character spend their free days?: reading. burning some stuff. driving out to other towns to do reckless shit.

what’s your character’s bedtime routine?: read some poems. have a cigarette. knock out.

what does your character wear to bed?: boxers, no shirt.

if your character can’t fall asleep, what are they thinking about?: ty’s brains. that knife. juvie. getting back. making them pay.

what is their idea of perfect happiness?: revenge.

on what occasions do they lie?: on what occasions don’t they lie ?

most marked characteristic: his ghost-gray eyes. his smirk. his hair.

what is one thing they’d most like to change about themselves?: only one?

how would they like to die?: in a blaze of fucking glory.

do they snore? no.

can they curl their tongue?: yes.

can they whistle?: yep. he likes doing that yoo-hoo kind of whistle. makes people uncomfortable.

do they believe in the supernatural?: nope. bullshit.

has anyone ever broken their heart?: no.

have they ever broken anyone’s heart?: yes. on purpose.

are they squeamish?: not at all.

have they ever seen anyone die? what happened?: see above: ty. that security guard. he’s sure they won’t be the last.

are they a lightweight?: not at all.

#newhamhq: intro

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artificialqueens · 6 years

Text

You And I (Trixya) (Chapter 1/?) - Kiwific

Trixie and Katya were best friends for six long years. Growing up, summers spent at her aunt’s in Trixie’s small Tennessee hometown were the high points of Katya’s year. After her parents split and those holidays stopped, they lost touch for a while, their lives both unfolding in different ways. Now, after a messy breakup and an unexpected gift of a certain farmhouse, Katya finds herself living in the last place she would have expected. Everything is the same, yet so, so different. Not only because of her sudden crush on a certain blonde musician…but that definitely doesn’t help.

Notes:

Hi, it’s your local delusional flightless bird/piece of fuzzy fruit here. I can’t believe I’m finally getting around to uploading some of this. It’s been an absolute mess of words and ideas on my computer for months now. The idea from this came from a mixture of listening to ‘Little Sister" off Trixie’s album far too many times, mixed with my own feelings of living in a small rural town. I’m pretty sure at least part of it came to me in a dream. Any-who, this is still a WIP. I have a few chapters edited into a semblance of a story and the rest just kind of lives in my head until I find the motivation to actually write it down. Cool? Cool. Enjoy, comment, like, abuse me, whatever floats your boat.

Notes: Katya is 26, Trixie is 25.

Bronte (Trixie’s town) is named after Charlotte Bronte. Because I’m a literary nerd. Bronte is in no way a real place, I’m not even American so feel free to point out any glaring errors in that respect.

Also on AO3 under Kiwific <3 Come share the love.

It’s been a long time since you came around,

Been a long time but I’m back in town

And this time I’m not leaving without you…

Dear Trixie

I hope it isn’t too weird that I’m writing to you like this after all this time. I know - Facebook is a thing that exists, and a much faster way of communicating, right? I unashamedly stalked your page and it looks to me like your parents still live in the same house you grew up in, so I’m assuming this will get to you somehow. Hell, you live in Bronte - the postman has probably known you since you were two, has kids that went to middle school with you, and knows exactly where you are at any given time.

Anywho, the reason I’m writing is that, well, I found our old letters when I was packing up my apartment and wanted to tell you this the old-fashioned way. I know it’s been a while since we talked, but you’re going to want to hear this…

I’m moving to Bronte!

I can hear your disbelief from here, and seriously, I know. What the actual fuck, Katya, right? Believe me, I’ve been asking myself that question enough when it comes to understanding the decision on a philosophical level, so let me just give you the facts:

When Aunt Stevie died, she left her house to me and Anya. Annie moved to Russia last year and couldn’t give a flying fuck what happens to the place, so I guess it’s mostly mine.

I’m a college graduate and a free house is definitely something that makes my future look much less ugly (loans are painful and I want to eat something other than ramen before I’m thirty).

Recent developments in my life have made me want to get far, far away from New York, and what could be further than Bronte?

Anyway, I’ll be there mid June! I’d love to catch up if you’re around and reminisce on old times… like the time we made toffee “apples” for the town fair, except they were really onions. And the time I made your friend cry when she wanted to be Baby Spice for that concert we put on fat your church (you were the best Baby Spice ever, by the way). I can already smell that sweet nineties nostalgia.

Please message me when you get this, I don’t expect you to write back, plus I might be out of this apartment by then. The sooner the better, in my honest opinion.

See you soon!

Katya

P.S. Fact number 5 - I miss you.

June

Katya could feel the dust in the air before she even stepped out of the car. She stretched her jean-clad legs out in front of her, feeling the heat heavy in the air as she stood up. Placing her hands at the small of her back, she groaned, feeling the effects of her two-day drive seep into her bones. Looking around, Katya (not for the first time ) questioned the wisdom of her decision to relocate to a southern state in the middle of a scorching summer. The whole plan was absolute insanity - who would have ever thought in a hundred years that she would move to Tennessee. This wasn’t the first time she’d had second, third, or even fourth thoughts about the move, and looking around at the picturesque town around her did very little to ease her nerves.

How the fuck did she end up back here?

Logically, the plan made sense. She had free accommodation here - a house that, beyond all belief, was hers alone. She would have time to write, time to sort her shit out. Time to stop moping over Rachel and get her head back in a healthy space. That, or she would slowly go insane with boredom. Or forced out of town by dyke-hating, pitchfork-wielding townsfolk. Too far?

Above her, the gas station sign leered down.

Bronte, Tennessee. Last gas stop for 20 miles!

Katya snorted to herself. Last anything for thirty miles, more like.

Filling up her ancient, cherry-red BMW, Katya peered down the main street. It had been approximately eleven years since she’d last been here. Growing up, her aunt Stevie had an old farmhouse just out of town. They would fly (sometimes drive, to Katya and Anya’s mutual horror) and stay for weeks in the summer, Katya and her sister spending the long, hot days playing in the fields, climbing trees and swimming in the river.

Katya barely remembered the town itself, but a few things stood out: the general store with its array of mismatched soda signs, the diner with the hideous pale pink facade (still faded and chipped after all this time), and the water tower looming over the long line of shops. It had been years, but to Katya it looked like nothing had changed. She felt her cynicism draining away as she looked around, fond memories of her childhood drowning out the panicked voice in her head telling her this move was a mistake.

They had stopped coming here when Katya’s dad walked out - a disappearing act to rival any world-famous magician- and while Stevie tried to keep in touch, it got too hard for Katya’s mom to stay close to her ex-husband’s family. Stevie had always sent birthday cards, though. Right up until the year she got sick. Katya’s mom didn’t know what killed her, but no one was more surprised than Katya herself when a lawyer showed up at her apartment in New York with the news that Stevie’s three-bedroom farmhouse in hicksville had been left to Katya and Anya. Anya wasn’t extremely interested in the news, she was enjoying her new life in Russia with mom’s family. Katya didn’t think she cared either, maybe one day they could sell the house and use the money for their own city apartments…

Until the shitstorm happened with Rachel.

She had been utterly blindsided when Rachel walked out, she had to admit that. One minute, Rachel was moving in with her and Katya was thinking about their happy future together. The next, Rachel was packing, leaving a broken Katya alone on their bedroom floor as she walked out. Katya should have seen it coming, and the fact that she didn’t was one of the things that had hurt so much.

The petrol pump stopped and Katya shook her head, trying to clear her suddenly foggy thoughts. Enough of that. She was away from Rachel and from New York. As far away as she felt she could possibly get. This wasn’t some bullshit heartbroken woman moves to the country to find herself after a breakup saga, this was just her… getting away from everything in the city that would sabotage her. Getting away from the version of herself that she was spiraling back into before making the decision to move here. Saving some cash in the process too, because hey - free accommodation would do a wonder on her savings.

Moving her car to one of the parks at the front of the station, Katya decided to take a walk and visit some old haunts. She had planned to head to the house first and come back into town when she’d settled in a little, but something was gnawing at the back of her mind. Someone, rather.

Trixie.

When Katya had written to her friend, she’d been a little overwhelmed at the excited reply. Trixie had messaged her the minute she received the letter announcing her move, and for a while there her excitement was contagious. Katya couldn’t help but feel a knot of anxiety when it came to seeing Trixie in the flesh again, though. What if it was awkward? What if they didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore? What if they had both changed too much?

Trixie had been Katya’s best friend for the better part of six years, despite the fact that they only ever saw each other in the summer. They had met one scalding hot day down by the river at the back of Stevie’s property - Katya and Annie went there everyday to cool down, and Trixie and her brother were swimming with their dad. A precocious eight year old Katya had snobbishly told seven year old Trixie that it was her auntie’s river and that her Barbie swimsuit was gross and too pink. Trixie had pushed her in the river.

They were best friends from that day on. Every summer, Katya counted down the days to their trip to Bronte, marking the days off in her diary (black, with a wolf howling at the moon on it. She had been a weird kid). They swam, played in the fields, terrorized the locals of Bronte year after year. They told each other everything, sharing their deepest secrets, navigating the joys and disappointments of growing up. When they weren’t together, they wrote to each other. Almost every week, Katya would get a letter on brightly colored Lisa Frank stationary, Trixie’s neat handwriting filling the pages. Her own letters were scrawled back as fast as she could write them, words falling from her as she tried to fit her thoughts onto the small pages. When Katya’s parents started fighting, Trixie was the first person to know. When Trixie got her first period, Katya had been the person she had written to.

When Katya’s dad left, she’d written a letter to Trixie that had to be at least seven pages long. She had been so angry, so scared, so worried about what to to when her mom barely came out of her room. Trixie told her everything would be okay, and it was. Eventually, it was. The next summer, however, had confirmed Katya’s growing suspicions. They didn’t go back to Bronte.

She and Trixie had kept up their friendship through letters and occasional phone calls, but these tapered off over time. New friendships came along, more for Trixie than for Katya, but eventually the letters stopped all together. Katya thought of her sometimes when looking at the photos in her mom’s old albums - her favourite was one of the two of them passed out on a mattress in the back of a pickup truck after a party at Stevie’s place, straw in Trixie’s thick hair and a blanket covering the two of them.

A few years ago, Trixie had sought her out on Facebook and they had talked occasionally, reminiscing about old times. Katya didn’t realize until she shamelessly stalked Trixie’s profile how much she had genuinely missed the other girl, and she’d been startled to realize she was crying after finding the same picture of them in the truck in an album Trixie had labelled ‘Old times’.

Katya couldn’t help but steel herself for disappointment as she prepared for the move to Bronte. She logically knew that things couldn’t be like they used to be - there was no way they could just pick up where they left off and be as close as they had been, and that was fine. They had been kids. Trixie had her life her, her friends, she probably didn’t need Katya hanging around all the time. Katya wanted to try, though, she wanted to give their friendship a second shot.

In truth, a friend was what she desperately needed right now.

#lesbian au #cisgirl au #friends to lovers #trixya #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #fluff #eventual smut #kiwific #violet chachki #pearl liaison #vatya in later chapters #tw mentions of drug use #rpdr fanfiction #you and i by kiwi

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whatdoyouthinkmyjobis · 6 years

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Hunters on the Hellmouth

masterlist

first chapter

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TW: Discussions of rape and miscarriage. Major feels. Here’s a cheat sheet for keeping track of the Potentials.

Chapter 39: The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Spike bit his fingernail down to the bed, spilling blood on his lips. He spit on the floor, repulsed by the memories.

Buffy had been missing for three hours. He’d tried to follow her immediately after she disappeared, but couldn’t get any further than singeing his shoes. The portal was Slayers only. To pass the time, he read the spell book Buffy had given him. It explained that “finding the path” wasn’t a vision quest, but a portal. The gibberish started to weave together a coherent story, though still not one that made sense. The Witch, it explained, had ousted the King, who by all accounts was a philandering, temperamental murderer. The Witch had help from the Huntress. Later the Huntress was struck with remorse for the King -- her father -- and tried to bring him home. For this act of betrayal, the Witch put the Huntress to sleep and locked her away.

“Fairy tales,” Spike snorted. But then, the shadow casters were only supposed to work for the Huntress, and they had worked for Buffy. If disappearing for hours counted as working. For all Spike knew she was being tortured, punished for the crossing the yellow tape. He started chewing the nails on his other hand and considered getting Dean.

There was a pop like air rushing into a vacuum. The writhing men comprising the shadow figures flew apart, leaving a soaked Buffy on the ground in their place. Spike gathered her into his lap, her wet hair and clothes seeping through his shirt and jeans. “Hey! Hey, Goldilocks. Did you find anythin’ you liked at the Bears’ house?”

Her eyes flew open and she punched him in the nose. Bone crunched and blood spewed from his face. Then she kicked him in the head. Everything went black.

After throwing Buffy out, Dawn and Willow had clutched each other and cried, using phrases like tough love and the right thing, though neither of them felt convinced. Now that it was morning, Dawn’s head still pounded, her empty eye socket raged.

She wanted to set the world on fire. She wanted to cry. She wanted her sister back.

Dawn stood at the top of the stairs listening. She listened to the Impala’s purr as Sam and Dean left at daybreak to look for bodies in the rubble of the winery. To Andrew worrying about Spike not coming in last night. To Xander and Anya arriving with more food and medical supplies. To the Potentials padding up and down the stairs to use the bathroom, and when they tried to talk to her, she pretended not to hear.

She couldn’t see them on that side of her anyway.

Downstairs, Dawn could hear the Potentials debating the veracity of what Dean had told them. The Potentials had insisted on knowing what was going on. (She couldn’t blame them for that; though she blamed them for everything else.) After watching Buffy ousted from her own home, Dean delivered a no-holds-barred, fire-in-the-belly speech including everything from angels trying to force God to return to what the demons did to Sam.

It seemed they were stuck on the part about alternate dimensions. Some believed in them. Some didn’t, despite Anya having explained about hell dimensions in her introduction to demons lecture. However, she had also told them demons were poor, misunderstood creatures.

Downstairs, a girl asked, “D-do you think Lucifer brought any h-hellhounds with him?”

Dawn closed her one good eye, rested her head against the wall, and let the voices of the girls downstairs mix into an unintelligible buzz. After a while, she sensed someone was sitting on the step by her. Peeking through her lashes, Dawn saw Wook staring into space.

“Did you tell her?” Dawn asked. “Did you ever tell Sophia how you felt?”

For a split second, horror took over Wook’s face. Then she shook her head. “Sophia...she was not like me.”

The crush had seemed obvious to Dawn and several other people. “You should talk to Willow. You could probably use a good cry and --” Dawn pointed at the bandage over her missing eye “-- I’m only up for half a cry right now. I hope it helps.”

Dawn slowly walked downstairs. As the Potentials noticed her, a wave of silence fell over the room. She curled up in a chair by the window, fixing her one good eye outside. When it was clear she didn't want to speak to them, the girls resumed their whispers.

“Maybe the angels?” asked Steph. “If they brought the Winchesters here, maybe they’ll come help us?”

Dark circles around her puffy eyes, Maya curled her lip in disgust. “Are you joking? They sound bloody terrifying, like cosmic toddlers throwing a fit for daddy.”

“The angels aren't coming to save us,” said Dani. “God is out of the game. No one is coming, but maybe we can move home field.”

“Move the fight off the Hellmouth?” asked Karen.

“Bigger,” said Dani. “Lucifer is only here because he followed the Winchesters, so let's move the Winchesters back where they belong.”

Dawn stifled a snicker. She couldn’t imagine any of these girls making the Winchesters do anything. When Dean returned, she’d share Dani’s plan.

“You have a magic portal in your pocket?” Betje asked, rolling her eyes.

“Well, no, but --”

Keisha held up her hand to stop Dani from continuing. “I can't even begin to tell you how upset I am about what Dean said. I'm a life-long church girl, and this is not my Heavenly Host. However, I am not about to sell out Sam for my own safety.”

Kate squeezed into the circle. “It's not about you or Sam; it's about saving everyone.”

“I think the people in their world would disagree with you,” Karen countered. “A Slayer’s duty is to save people, not pick and choose lives.”

Dani threw her pillow across the room and released a frustrated growl. “We’re out of options! Either everyone dies or half the people die.”

“It’s not like they’re real, not like us,” Kate added.

“Then we go down fighting!” said Keisha, matching Dani’s volume. “Maybe Buffy was right yesterday? Maybe we just have to attack as much as we can?”

The room disintegrated into bickering about Buffy’s leadership, the realness of unmet people, and the blame the Winchesters bore. Again, a hush fell over them. Someone hovered by her.

“Hmm, Dawn, you’re missing something.” Xander’s hands were shoved in his pockets as he casually inspected Dawn’s new face. “Rumor is, pirating requires a beard. Or a parrot. Both would be better, but you have to have at least one.”

Despite herself, Dawn felt a small smile trip across her lips.

“Good news though! No beard means it’s easier to eat this.” He handed her a candy bar, one of the good ones with chocolate and peanut butter.

It was ridiculous and exactly what she needed. She unwrapped it slowly. “Willow tells me I can get a glass eye. I could get something that totally matches my other one, and then, like, pop it out on Halloween to scare kids.”

“That’s the spirit!”

“Not that we’ll see another Halloween with this bozo army.”

“And the spirit is gone.”

Dawn took a large bite and glanced out the window. “Shut up! Buffy’s outside.”

Xander and Willow’s hearts were heavy but happy as they crossed the street to talk with Buffy.

Buffy stood staring at the neighbor’s lilac bush as if she could set it on fire with her mind. She plucked a heavy bloom. “They love me. They love me not,” she said as she pulled the petals off.

“Buff, that’s not fair,” Xander blurted. Not the foot he’d wanted to start on. He was still uncertain if he hadn’t spoken up in her defense out of cowardice or agreement. The bruise on his cheek felt like the latter.

“We love you!” said Willow, reaching out to rub Buffy’s arm. “We just think you need a break. All the stress is affecting your judgement.”

“My judges are the guy who left his fiance at the altar and the woman who tried to burn the world? Both less than a year ago. What do you know about stress?” Buffy asked as she crushed the flower in her fist.

“A hell of a lot,” said Willow in a low voice.

“You’re not the characters I came to Disneyland for. Where’s Dean?”

“He and Sam went to deal with the bodies at the winery.”

“Then you two can Hi-Ho your butts back in the house, and I’ll wait here,” she said with coldness in her eyes.

“I know you’re mad and all, but come in for some --”

“I’m not here for you,” their friend snapped. Her eye twitched. “Not yet. Now go back inside or I’ll give you more than a bruise.”

To Dean’s surprise, other than missing doors and a blackened entrance, the winery was still standing. “Two cans of gas and a building full of alcohol.”

“Wine doesn’t have a high enough alcohol content to burn, so it probably put the fire out,” Sam explained.

“Wow, even the things you know about booze are nerdy.” Although, Buffy would be relieved to know his anger-move hadn’t been any more effective than her plan.

“We going in?”

The dark maw of the building stared him down. Less than a day before, that place had claimed five of them and incapacitated even more. A chill ran down Dean’s spine. “Can’t afford it. Let’s go.”

On the way back to the Impala, his phone rang. Xander wanted to warn him that an angry Buffy was waiting for him at the house. Angry. Crying. Dean didn’t care. He needed to see her.

Haloed by the purple flowers in the neighbor’s yard, Buffy looked stunning. Her hair was in loose, natural waves, and her face bare of makeup. It was her soft-with-sleep, content-in-his-arms beauty, though he doubted she wanted to be held.

When he gently called to her, her icy resolve melted away. “Dean!” A smile blossomed on her lips as she breathed out his name. "We need to talk.”

“Buffy, I'm so, so sorry for the shit I said.” He took her small hands in his; it was the first time he’d touched her in what felt like forever. Exhibiting no hesitation, she lightly squeezed his fingers. He’d never been so thrilled to hold a woman’s hand. “I hope you believe me when I say I didn't want any of this. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

She nodded, the light catching on the fan of her lashes. “It’s hard for people to see a bigger plan in the moment.” Looking up at him with curious eyes, she said, “Speaking of, do you have a plan for Lucifer?”

“It was a bitch of a night, sweetheart. Treading water as fast as we can, but look around you.” Every house on the block was empty. “The tide’s comin’ in.”

“Do we head for the hills with the girls?”

“Of course not. We’re the line between him and the rest of your world. We gotta hold it so the world doesn’t go all I Am Legend.”

Worry swelled in Buffy’s eyes. She opened her mouth several times, but said nothing. Finally, she swallowed and said, “What about Michael?”

“Michael? I don’t think that douche even knows we’re here.”

The worry washed away. She gazed into his eyes and appeared surprisingly happy for knowing it was the end of the world. “It’s like a burn one, get-one-free special.” She laid her head on his chest, her arms encircling his waist. Dean embraced her, content that if they were going to die at least they would die together.

She shifted, and he started to let her go. “No,” she said, “keep holding me, baby.”

A shout down their deserted block drew his attention. Blood streaming down his face, Spike ran at them yelling something. Confused, Dean looked down into Buffy’s black eyes.

He fell back in terror, numbness taking over his body. Everything seemed to slow down and speed up all at once. His brain screamed, No! No! No!

“Hey baby, surprised to see me?” the demon inside her cooed. She grabbed him by the arms and tossed him into a flower bed.

Spike jumped her, but she threw him over her shoulders.

“I thought I killed you.” Buffy pulled a knife from her boot. Spike blocked the blow to his chest, leaving a gash on his forearm.

Dean pulled her off, causing her to whirl back on him and slash his cheek. “Gonna cut your pretty face --”

Then she stopped. Stopped talking. Stopped moving. The black in her eyes swirled wildly. Buffy trembled, then collapsed in a heap. Behind her, Spike stood holding a bloody rock.

Buffy didn’t know where she was. It was so dark, she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. She tried to feel for a wall, a door, a light, but she couldn’t move her arms. It was like fighting off a deep sleep.

She wasn’t alone. Someone -- some thing -- was laughing. It sounded like broken glass, like a punch knocking teeth loose, like being lost and alone; yet somehow Buffy knew it was a laugh.

I like it in here, said a voice that was a cross between a bark and a hiss. So many toys.

Suddenly, Buffy was in bed. Angel’s hands slid from her breasts to her thighs as he kissed her neck with tantalizing slowness.

That laugh.

Buffy was at her high school. She was holding a gun. Angel stood before her, pleading. Shaking, she pulled the trigger.

That laugh again, like cold water running down her spine.

Now Buffy was struggling on the bathroom floor, tired and terrified, trying to push Spike off of her.

Fuck, this is fun.

Then Buffy could see. She could see Dean standing in front of her, saying something she couldn’t hear. Buffy tried to say something, anything -- he was right there -- but no words came out. Then he was holding her. It was bliss and torture all wrapped together.

The voice practically sang, Gonna kill your boyfriend. Gonna make you watch. Gonna snap his neck. Oh yes! Oh yes!

Whatever this thing was, Buffy wasn’t going to let it win. She managed to loosen her grip on Dean, but she heard her voice ask him to stay. For a brief second, she felt the thing look away, distracted by something Buffy couldn’t see. She seized the moment, and threw Dean away from her.

Blackness and laughter. A flash of Spike and blood. Buffy tried to move, tried to scream, but she could see her own arms lashing out with a knife. Now Dean was in front of her, blood on his cheek. Buffy focused on his eyes, those deep green eyes. She pulled up all the love inside of her, everything she had done and hope to do with this man, and shoved it to the front of her mind.

The laugh was cut short. Buffy’s body was holding still.

Then everything went black.

This was a nightmare. If Dean opened his eyes, he would see Buffy sound asleep with little pillow creases on her face. Instead, Spike, his face a sickly shade of purple, sat sprawled on a chair while Anya sewed up his arm. The mysterious book Spike had brought consumed Giles, who looked like he’d aged ten years.

The kitchen was packed with everyone who cared about Buffy. And the guilty, Dean thought, bitterly surveying their downcast faces.

“How’s Dawn?” Xander asked Willow when she returned to the kitchen.

“Sleeping.”

“You put her under?”

“I hate to use the word hysterical -- because sexist, but it applies. She was hysterical and crying, which isn’t helping her heal. She kept saying this wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t kicked Buffy out.”

The Potentials averted their eyes.

“She’s not wrong,” Dean grumbled under his breath.

Keisha started to apologize, “If I knew this could happen--”

“No,” said Betje, shaking her head. “What’s done is done. We have to fix this demon problem.”

Karen took a bloody towel from Spike and handed him a fresh one for his split lip and broken nose. With the power off, they had nothing cold for the swelling. “Recap for the new girl? My head was spinning too much to get all of that.”

“Kind of ‘urts to talk,” moaned Spike.

Anya sighed. “Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Kicked out of the house with her tail between her legs, Buffy thought she’d do a vision quest to learn more Slayer tricks. Only the vision was more of a touch-and-feel experience. Poof! Gone. Poof! Back with bonus gross demon parasite.”

“You’re grossed out?” huffed Willow.

Anya finished bandaging Spike’s arm and repacked the first aid kit. “Demons may maim and kill and sew chaos, but there are lines. Very few demons possess, and they’re social outcasts. This goes off the map into unknown heebee jeebee territory.”

“Okay, Robin, that was very helpful,” Sam said as he came in the back door and hung up his phone. “Unhelpful asshole. He doesn’t know anything.”

Sam handed Willow a small necklace. “You too, Giles,” he said.

“No anti-possession charms for the rest of us?” Xander asked.

Sam handed another to Spike. “The rest of you aren’t vessels. You can’t be possessed. Just witches, slayers and vampires.”

“And Potential Slayers,” Willow added as she slipped on the necklace. “But that got explody last time.”

After securing unconscious demon Buffy in a devil’s trap in the basement, they had moved most of the Potentials to the neighboring house for safety. Some were too injured to move. A few, wracked with guilt, refused to leave.

His nose buried once more in his book, Giles muttered to himself, “Where did Bernard find this? These were lost. They’re all dead.”

“Giles, mutter reassuring things or don’t mutter at all,” Anya snapped.

Giles snapped his head up, seemingly surprised the conversation had moved on without him. “In any other circumstance, holding this book would be a rare treat. Scholars thought they were lost when the Order of the Oracle was wiped out.”

“Order of the Oracle?” Sam said. “I have one of their books. I found it online.”

Giles glared at Sam over his glasses. “Could I see this book?”

“Yeah, it’s in the car.”

“It’s in your bloody--!” Giles took a deep breath and muttered into his book, “Let’s just keep rare texts in our cars next to our mixtapes. Heaven forbid we use bookshelves like civilized people.”

“We do an exorcism, right?” asked Karen. “Some pea soup, head spinning, and Buffy’s back?”

“No,” said Dean, tired of listening to them.

“No? It was good enough for me,” said Spike.

“That demon was making you a vampire. That’s the gig here. This one, I don’t know where Buffy found it, but it’s from our side of the tracks. I think it knows me. We need to find out how it got here and if more are coming.”

“If there are?” asked Xander.

Dean didn’t want to tell him it dropped their chances from zero to zilch.

Karen’s eyes darted from person to person in spinning confusion. “Can we go back to Spike being a vampire -- because what?”

The basement door burst open and Andrew collapsed on the ground wheezing. “Buff-- She-- It? Waking is happening.” Anya and Giles followed the Winchesters while everyone else hid their faces.

In the basement, Dani was standing dangerously close to the outer line of the demon trap inspecting Buffy, black eyes fluttering, with the curiosity of children taunting a lion at the zoo. “Doesn’t look so bad. She couldn’t be worse than a Serparvo or a Haxil Beast.”

Laying on her side, Buffy opened her eyes.

“Dani, step back!” barked Sam.

“Help me! I’m afraid!” whimpered the demon.

Dani leaned across the circle, her face close to Buffy’s. Before Dean got to the bottom of the stairs, the creature jerked toward the Potential and bit into her cheek. Dani reeled back screaming. Buffy smiled, a chunk of skin hanging from her teeth.

“No!” shouted Anya her finger wagging at the bloody-faced creature. “Bad demon! Naughty! You’re the kind of demon that gives demons a bad name. What kind of demon are you anyway?”

“The real kind.”

Anya looked at the Winchesters with fear and confusion as she lead Dani upstairs.

The demon spit the piece of cheek on the ground. For a brief moment, the edge melted from her glare as Buffy coughed and spit blood from her mouth. Then she grinned an awful, red grin. “Sam and Dean. I missed you boys! Haven’t seen you since I sicced my puppies on your last girlfriend.”

“Meg,” growled Sam.

“In the flesh -- or rather your girl’s flesh, huh, Dean?” A satisfied chuckle bubbled from her throat as Dean bit his tongue to keep from reacting. “I think of all the bodies I’ve possessed, this one is my favorite. No offense, Sammy.”

“Don’t get comfortable,” said Dean.

“Too late. I love exploring her nooks and crannies. All of her dark places. The secrets in here!” Meg shimmied with excitement. “For instance, Giles,” she said, directing her attention to librarian on the stairs, “do you remember telling her you would always support her? It’s one of those memories a girl with daddy issues goes back to when she's having a down day.”

“I remember,” whispered Giles, his eyebrows furrowed with agony as he beheld his only child strung up like a puppet.

“Until she fucks up, of course. Then she’s out on the street.” She still smiled her bloody smile, but her eyes were pleading.

Giles glared at her with steely resolve. “The consequences for my actions have been dire, and I won’t leave her now.”

“Enough!” Dean snapped. “How’d you get here, Meg?”

“Hard work and clean living?”

He crouched by the edge of the demon trap, so he could look into Meg’s black eyes. “You think I don’t know how to get information out of you?”

“I know for a fact you couldn’t hurt your Girly any more than you’d hurt your Sammy. She’s barely spoken to you for weeks, and you’re still jumping through hoops like a trained bitch to get her to notice you. You got it bad, Dean, and she’s ready to run away screaming.” Buffy slammed her body against the floor. Once. Twice. Three times. She rose to her knees slowly, awkwardly, Buffy’s long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders and neck, a wry smile on her red lips.

“You know what pushed her away? It wasn't the Apocalypse or the Potentials or anything else you’ve blamed.” Her smile disappeared. Her mouth clamped shut. A twitch washed over her muscles like a personal earthquake. The smile returned. “It wasn’t any of that. It was the baby.”

The more Buffy focused, the more she could move. She beat her fists against the darkness and screamed, screamed to get out. She shut out the taunts, the memories, and focused. I’m near my house. Dean is here. Spike is here.

She tasted blood. Cold crept into her bones. Dean’s voice, far off and muffled, snapped the silence. Dean is here.

The laugh again.

Buffy threw herself against the blackness once more and felt a hard smack. The air rushed from her lungs. Pain was good. Pain was present.

Then she could see her basement. She was in the demon trap they’d painted for Spike. Dean and Sam stood outside of the circle; Giles on the stairs. Dean’s jaw twitched with rage.

Suddenly, there was a white hot stab in her gut. Buffy screamed in agony.

Oh yes, let’s share that, the voice growled.

Buffy tried to put her hands over her mouth, to bite her tongue. To keep it in. Still the word erupted into the air, plump and sad.

Baby.

Dean clenched his jaw. The ploy was low even for Meg. “You're lying.”

“Why? Because she would have told you?” she said in a mocking whine.

“Because you’re a sack-a-shit demon.”

“And this sack of shit is wearing your girlfriend. I have access to memories and thoughts you couldn’t imagine. She may let you rut around in this body, but it's not yours.” Quickly, Buffy slammed her body back into the wall with a gasp.

Then a laugh. “She never forgot your dream of starting a family together, Dean. Buffy battles monsters for a living, but the mere idea of spawning your green-eyed ankle-biters made her want to vomit. Then she got two little lines on the test.

“I know what you’re thinking. Wracking your brain counting back the days since she let you fuck her. Wondering if you always used a condom. Blaming her for messing up her pills,” Meg twisted Buffy’s lips into a smirk. “What’s funny is that you two morons with your supercharged bodies thought the conventional would be enough.”

Dean wasn’t thinking any of that. Instead, a cold grief crept into his bones that Buffy had carried the burden alone. Another person he loved was too scared to tell him the truth. He shook his head and whispered, “You can shut up.”

“Or what? You’ll make me?” She grinned from ear to ear, her tongue caught between her teeth. “Already called that bluff, dickwad. Besides, if you want the truth, you can ask Giles.”

Giles’ eyes flitted between Dean and the demon. The unasked question seemed to press him smaller. “Awhile ago, Buffy wanted to come when I drove to Los Angeles to pick up two Potentials at the airport. I thought it was odd, but I was happy for the company. She was distant, quiet. We had a strained conversation. As soon as we arrived in LA, she got a ride into town, leaving us at the airport for a couple hours. She never said what she was doing. I...I had assumed she went to see Angel.”

“Is she pregnant?” Dean whispered, trying to keep the shattered feeling from his voice.

Meg laughed, made all the crueler in Buffy’s voice. “Not now, baby daddy. I took care of that before I came. Bad enough I have all the memories of fucking you; didn’t want any part of you sharing my meatsuit too. Took a lot of poking around in there. In fact, I made sure that if you exorcise me, she’s going to bleed out.”

Dean bit the inside of his cheek so hard it bled. Sam whispered in his ear, “Go upstairs, and let me handle this.”

The holy water and salt Buffy could handle, but that wouldn’t break Meg. Ruby’s knife tucked into Sam’s belt worried him. “I’m fine.”

“You’re white as a sheet,” said Sam, concerned.

Upstairs, people started to scream.

“You pretty much had to chain me to fight me,” Buffy shouted into the blackness.

This isn’t fighting, Firework. This is subjugation. Humans belong under a boot.

“You forgot something.” Buffy smiled, confident she could end this. “I’m the Slayer.”

The laugh. I don’t care if you’re the Pope. You’re still my puppet until I break you and toss you.

Buffy closed her eyes. It wasn’t just her and this thing trapped in here. Buffy was full of memories and love, of joys and comforts this monster couldn’t imagine. She dug down deep. She filled her mind with bright memories of her sister and mother. Of Dean’s tender kisses. Of her friends fighting by her side. She dug down into the parts of her that were warm and soft, the instinctive, protective parts.

That’s where Buffy found her.

At the first scream, Giles bolted upstairs. Sam took the stairs in twos.

Dean wasn’t sure if it was a trick -- another demon, maybe Caleb -- but he knew that he had to stay. He had to get Meg out of Buffy if they were going to win.

In the demon trap, Meg looked at the ceiling in wide-eyed horror. Buffy’s began to glow as if she’d swallowed a small sun. She fell to the ground, shaking and flailing. Then the room flared white.

Through the spots in his eyes, Dean could see a black cloud swirling above Buffy’s body. He pulled her free from the demon trap and held her in his arms. Small beads of sweat formed on her pale skin. Her eye fluttered for a moment before settling on him. “Dean.” Her voice was weak and fading.

It sounded like goodbye.

Willow’s sleep spell hadn’t worked as long as she’d hoped. She sat on the living room floor with Dawn sobbing into her shoulder.

Xander rubbed Dawn’s back. He’d known her since she was nine -- plucky, needy and already showing signs of teenage resentment. “Dean once told me a friend of theirs was possessed but managed to overpower the demon. Buffy’s gotta be stronger than that guy. You’ll see.”

“It’s my fault,” Dawn repeated. “We’re made for each other, and I pushed her out.”

“Maybe we should take her over to the neighbor’s with the rest of the girls,” Anya suggested.

Dawn sat up and glared at her with her one good eye. “No! I’m staying with my sister. I want to see her!”

The Potentials observed their domestic scene from the dining room, the bandage on Dani’s maimed cheek already red. Heading upstairs, Willow said, “I’m going to get more bandages and painkillers.”

Without warning, Dani was consumed by a blue light. She screamed, but other than lending their voices, everyone flattened themselves against the wall. The blue light floated off of her, toward the living room.

Another blue light appeared, but it quickly faded, leaving a short man with a small pursed mouth and golden eyes.

The first light surrounded Xander and Dawn. It was warm and tingly with occasional jolts of fire running through it. The man tapped the light, and it too became a man, with dark messy hair and piercing blue eyes. He pulled the bandage from Dawn’s eye, revealing a blue eye where there had been an empty socket. Frenzied, Dani yanked the bandage from her healed face.

“Keep doing that and you’re going to blow your vessel, Castiel.”

Castiel turned his head to the side like a dog trying to understand. His eyes darted between Spike and Rachel before choosing the girl. “People are hurt from our war, Gabriel. What else should I do?”

Sam and Giles burst into the room. “You!” Sam shouted, lunging at Gabriel. Gabriel flicked away, reappearing at the other end of the room with lightning arcing from his back.

“Lucy! I’m home!” he said with a grin. “Miss me?”

“Cas, we need your help.”

Gabriel laughed but was unamused. “Surprise, surprise. Heard you screwed things up with my brother. Grab Dean; I’ll take you home.”

“What? No, we have a situation in the basement.”

“I’m sure it’s dire, drama queen, but do you remember the little Apocalypse you left behind? There are still two Horsemen riding around in Satan’s saddle. Get your brother. We have to go.”

“You owe me, you son of a bitch!”

A darkness washed over Gabriel’s face before Castiel clamped his hand on his shoulder. “You promised you’d help. You promised you wouldn’t hurt them. Take me to the basement.”

Sam lead the two men and most of the curious group downstairs, where a black cloud swirled inside the devil’s trap, and Dean, his face wet with tears, cradled Buffy, pale and still in his arms. “Cas?” he said, his voice small and broken.

“Check on the girl. I’ll deal with the demon,” said Gabriel. He plunged his hands into the cloud.

Once more, lightning began to shoot from his back. The Potentials, Anya, and Andrew bolted back upstairs. In a second, the demon was gone.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas said. He put his hand on Buffy’s head and furrowed his brow. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“What do you --”

“I mean, I could wake her up, but she probably needs the rest. Did she expel the demon on her own?”

Shocked, Dean could only muster a nod.

“Fascinating.”

Buffy wiggled her head like she was fighting an early morning dream. She gazed at Dean through half-open eyes, leaned her head against his chest, and fell back into a dead sleep.

Dean didn’t know or care why angels were in Sunnydale. He didn’t care about what trick Gabriel was there to play. All that mattered was that the woman he loved, the woman who he thought had just died in his arms, was breathing against his neck. The Scoobies and Potentials pressed themselves against the wall as he carried Buffy upstairs.

He laid her on the bathroom floor and drew a bath. Dean felt gutted, his insides shoved back in every which way, sewn up with dental floss. He worried it wouldn't hold, one wrong move and his guts would spill out on the floor.

Dawn burst into the room, Willow right behind her. “She's okay?”

“Good as new. Just tired. I see your pirate career is in shambles.”

Dawn smiled. He couldn’t remember the last time she had smiled. “Those guys downstairs, they're angels aren't they? Your friend Castiel?”

“Yeah.” While he was thrilled to see Castiel, he knew this wasn't a casual visit. “Willow, you mind?” he asked gesturing at the bath. Buffy needed rest, but he knew she usually liked to clean the blood off first Willow, who seemed unusually pale and skittish, grabbed towels.

He heard a whimper as he started to get up. Buffy was reaching out to him, her voice crackling and raw. “It wasn't true. She lied.”

“I know,” he lied.

Downstairs Sam and Gabriel were already in a tense argument, the rest of house looking on in confusion and fear.

Everyone but Spike. “Come on! Get with the healing! Starting to feel like the only girl at the prom without a corsage.”

Castiel stepped toe-to-toe with Spike, their faces inches apart. “What sort of creature are you?” the angel asked.

“Lately, punching bag.”

“Good to see you, buddy,” said Dean, embracing the angel who believed he was worth saving.

“And how the hell do you think we can kill Death?” Sam shouted.

“I can get you the weapon. I need you to do it,” Gabriel said as Sam towered over him.

“What's going on?” Dean asked.

“This asshole--”

“Have some respect, Sasquatch.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Supreme Asshole wants to take us back home to kill Pestilence and Death, because he's too scared to do it himself.”

“This isn't a matter of fear, boy. Someone is going to have to keep the demons off of you.”

“Pestilence and Death? Why?”

Andrew cleared his throat. “Something about rings and a quest and a cage. It sounds like it should have swords and its own Hans Zimmer score.”

“You have the rings of Famine and War,” Gabriel explained. “Collect all four, you got yourself a door back to the cage.”

“Cage is open. Big freakin’ deal,” said Dean. “Lucifer's not going to walk in there on his own.”

“We are still working on an alternative to Sam's possession,” said Castiel.

“What, you got mine sorted?” said Dean.

The angels exchanged quick glances. “Zachariah found another.”

It was the Winchesters’ turn to look confused. That didn't make any sense. Dean was the result of years of cupid interference, breeding vessel with vessel. He was Michael’s only hope.

“They raised Adam,” Castiel explained. “They promised him that if he said yes, they would bring back his mother.”

“Adam? There's an Adam now?” asked Anya.

“We had a half-brother,” Sam said. “He was killed before we met him.”

“Oh goody. More Winchesters,” she grumbled. “Only good can come of this.”

“Granted, this is not my area of expertise,” Giles began, “but Dean is Michael’s true vessel. Wouldn’t possessing anyone else be playing with a handicap?”

“Ten points to Gryffindor.” Gabriel shrugged. “He couldn't wait on you forever, Dean. Especially when he didn't know where I hid you.”

“You?” asked the brothers in unison.

“Lemme guess, you thought Cas had the juice to get you here? Please. He didn’t even know about this place.”

Someone tapped Dean’s shoulder. It was one of the Potentials, looking not at all eager to meet angels. “Willow sent me. Buffy wants to see you.”

“Come back tomorrow,” he told Gabriel.

“Do you have any idea how difficult it was to even get here?” the angel asked.

“Been a bitch of a day, Feathers. Come back tomorrow.” Dean raced up the stairs to find the bathroom empty. Wrapped in a towel, Buffy sat on her bed, her wet hair dripping on her sister, who looked like she had no intention of ever letting her go.

Buffy smiled at him softly when he entered the room. “Dean, would you take me home?”

next chapter

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readingraebow · 6 years

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The Color Purple: The Whole Book

1. How does Celie come to get married? So Mr. ____ expresses interest in marrying Celie's younger sister Nettie and Celie wants Nettie to get married so she can get away from their father (who rapes Celie) and have one good year before she becomes a woman. But their father says no. He says Nettie is the smart one in the family and he wants her to be a schoolteacher and he'd never give her to Mr. ____. Instead, he says he can have Celie because she's getting to old to still live with them and even though she's ugly (father of the year), she's good with children and she could help Mr. _____ with the kids he was left with when his wife died. At first he says no but eventually he comes back to look at Celie again and then agrees to marry her. 2. What do Celie and Mr. ___ tell Harpo to do to get Sofia to listen to him? How does this turn out? Mr. ____ suggests hitting her. He says that wives are like children and you have to use the same approach to let them know who's boss. Celie thinks for a minute and apparently decides that Sofia needs to be knocked down a peg before agreeing that Harpo should hit her. Well, this works not at all since the first time they see Harpo after telling him this, he's beaten to a pulp. He has a lot of excuses about what happened to him but we all know that Sofia is stronger than him (both physically and her will) and the first time he tried to lay a hand on her, she beat him instead. Then one day Celie witnesses one of their fights and sees Harpo trying to hit Sofia but Sofia just not having it and beating him. (Which. Wow. I honestly find kind of funny? Because while I don't condone domestic violence, I think it's kind of hilarious that Harpo literally can't hit Sofia to make her mind because she's literally stronger than him and she just Isn't Having any of his trying to hit her.) 3. What happens when Sofia meets the mayor and his wife? So the mayor's wife is looking over all of Sofia's children and notices Sofia has a nice watch and they have a car and she comments that the kids are very clean. So then she asks if Sofia wants to be her maid. And Sofia says "Hell no" and when they can't believe what she said, she repeats it a few times. So then the mayor is mad because Sofia "sassed" his wife and he slaps her and, well, no one slaps Sofia so she literally knocks him to the ground. And that's when the police show up and literally beat Sofia to a pulp before taking her to jail. When Celie finally gets in to see her, she says that Sofia's skull is cracked, her ribs are cracked, her nose is torn loose on one side, she's blind in one eye, she's swollen from head to toe and her tongue is so swollen she can't even talk. 4. What is Shug’s surprise? So Mr. ____ thinks she's getting him a car for Christmas since she makes a lot of money now. And sure enough, on Christmas morning they hear a car pulling into the driveway. But when they go out to see her, she has a man with her. She says his name is Grady and he's her husband. Which basically hurts both Mr. ____ and Celie since they both love Shug. 5. How does Celie get a letter from Nettie? What does it say? One night Shug is asking Celie about Nettie and Celie tells her that Mr. ___ kicked Nettie out of his house and Celie would never see her again and she hasn't seen her since. She hasn't even heard from her. And Shug asks if Nettie would be living somewhere with funny stamps because sometimes when Mr. ___ gets mail out of the box, there's a letter with funny stamps which he puts in the inner pocket of his jacket. So, it turns out Nettie has been writing to Celie all this time but Mr. ___ is the only one who gets the mail so he's been keeping the letters. But Shug gets one from him and gives it to Celie. It says that Nettie wants her to know that she's not dead and she figures Mr. ___ has been keeping the letters. But she says she's going to come home within the year and she's going to bring Celie's children with her. 6. What has Nettie been up to? So after she left Celie's house, Mr. ___ followed her and when they were far enough away from the house, he tried to kiss her. But she fought him off and hurt him bad enough that he left her alone. But he was mad and he said that for what she'd done, she'd never hear from Celie again and Celie would never hear from her. So from there, Nettie makes it to town and there she goes to the Reverend ____'s house, like Celie told her to, and she ends up living with them as their maid. They have two children, Olivia and Adam, who are actually Celie's children. Well, Nettie has a good life with them. They're nice to her and they teach her a lot and she loves their family. But Nettie can't find work so she's knows she'll soon have to leave that town and go somewhere else. But, the Reverend's family-- Samuel is his name and his wife's Corrine --are about to go on a missionary trip to Africa. Well, the girl who was supposed to go with them can't go so they invite Nettie. So she goes with them. They travel through New York then sail to England. Then they sail to Africa. So Nettie has been living in Africa all this time with Celie's children and their adopted parents. And she honestly sounds really happy except she really, really misses Celie. 7. How do the men in Olinka remind Nettie of her father? They don't believe their women should be educated and when Nettie helps educate Olivia's friend, the girl's parents come to reprimand Nettie. Here's how the men of Olinka remind Nettie of her father: they only listen long enough to issue instructions. They don't look at women when women are speaking. Instead, they look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. And then, in turn, women are not supposed to look at men when they are speaking. To look a man in the face is considered a brazen thing to do. Instead, they are to look at his feet or knees. All of this is exactly how their father used to treat women: like they were objects instead of people. 8. What does the road mean for the people of Olinka? Well, they believed that the road was just for them and it was to help them reach other villages so when the road was "finished" or had reached the edge of their village, they threw this huge party celebrating the road. But then the next morning, the workers were back out there, building the road again. And that's when they learned that the road was supposed to go another 30 feet, right smack through the middle of Olinka. And anything that was in the way of where the builders had been told to build the road, would literally be torn down. This meant a bunch of fields, their school, church and Nettie's hut were all leveled within a matter of hours. Well this all seemed insane so the village chief traveled to the coast to find out why they were building a road through the middle of Olinka. When he finds the white man in charge, he discovers that all the land, including the village of Olinka, was bought by a British rubber company. So now Olinka doesn't even own their village anymore and will have to pay rent for it as well as for water. And in addition to the road coming to Olinka, the forests are also being torn out and rubber trees planted instead. Which makes it harder for the people of Olinka to hunt so they have to rely more on the food they grow. So the road means that for the people of Olinka, their way of life has just abruptly ended. 9. How did Samuel and Corrine come to adopt Olivia and Adam? Samuel says he's never told Corrine this story but once upon a time there was a farmer who was fairly lucky and everything he did generally ended well. Well, he owned some land and he did so well at farming that he decided to open a general store and the store, as well as the blacksmith shop attached to it, also did well. It was doing so well that he asked his brothers to help him run it and the three of them prospered. However, the white merchants got together and decided the store was doing too well and it was taking away their black customers and even some of their white. So in the middle of the night, the store was burned and the man and his three brothers were dragged out of their houses and hanged. Well, the man had a wife and small girl child at home and his wife was pregnant with another baby. When she saw her husband's body, she went into labor and gave birth to another girl. She, however, went out of her mind with grief. She couldn't care for her family and relied mostly on the neighbors to even feed them. Well, when the smallest girl was still a baby, a stranger came to town and he eventually married the widow. She was still quite ill from the grief of losing her first husband and she wasn't quite right in the head. But she was soon pregnant by her new husband. And every year after, she had another child and grew weaker and weaker and more mentally unstable until, finally, she died. Well, two years before she died, she had another daughter who she was too weak to keep and then a little boy. These children were Olivia and Adam. And the man who'd fathered them had been a friend of Samuel's before Samuel joined the church. And when the man showed up at Samuel's door first with Olivia and then later with Adam, Samuel found he couldn't refuse the children but, also, he saw them as an answer to his prayers since he and Corrine had been unable to have children of their own. But this story also means that Celie and Nettie are the two children from the first marriage and their Pa isn't their pa after all. 10. Shug and Celie have a discussion about what God looks like. What is your God like? So I was raised very Christian and for years I sat in church on Sunday learning that we don't really know what God looks like but he's an all powerful man who looks down on us and watches our actions and so we have to be good because he's watching. But, now that I'm older and I've done some soul searching, I honestly don't believe in God. And I honestly don't think I ever really did. And I agree quite a bit with what Shug said. I never found God in a church. I found a lot of other people waiting around, hoping he'd show up. And, to me, "God" is just an explanation for something we can't explain. So I don't really believe in God. I believe there are things that we can't explain and questions that we can't answer and that's okay. 11. How does Celie start to provide for herself when she’s with Shug? Well before they left for Memphis, Celie and Shug started making pants. Every day they would sew and read Nettie's letters. So when they get to Memphis, Shug is on the road a lot so Celie starts making pants. And finally she makes the perfect pair of pants. It's for Shug and it's perfect for when Shug is on the road. Then Squeak finds a pair that she likes. Then Shug tells Celie to make a pair for Jack. Then she starts getting orders from everyone. Finally, one day Celie tells Shug that she loves making pants but she needs to find a way to provide for herself. And Shug tells her she thinks she already did. Shug tells Celie she can have the dining room and they'll hire a couple more girls to do the sewing and Celie can design. And they'll put ads in the paper and raise Celie's prices quite a bit. And then she'll be well on her way to making her living doing what she loves: making pants. 12. Do you have any thoughts or comments on how the women’s relationships with one another in this book help them to face their struggles? I honestly found the relationships of the women in this book absolutely fascinating. Because they all took care of each other and it was like their men were irrelevant. Half the time they'd swap husbands and it didn't even affect the relationship of the women. The one that touched me most was when Sofia returned from jail/living in the mayor's house and Squeak had spent all that time helping raise Sofia's children but now Squeak wanted to go pursue her dreams and Squeak's had taken a liking to Sofia so Sofia offered to help raise her. It was like a trade off for Squeak helping Sofia for all those years. And even when Sofia left, when she was in trouble, Celie was right there to help her when she needed it. I just really liked that this was a book about women taking care of women, no matter what their circumstances. That was probably my very favorite aspect of the entire book.

Reading Journal

So. The beginning of this book was hard. The first hundred or so pages were honestly an emotional struggle, especially when Celie still lived at home, with her daddy raping her, and then immediately went into a loveless marriage just to get away from that situation. All of that was such a struggle. But then once Celie meets Shug and all of the other ladies showed up, this was an amazing book.

One that was super weird and bugged me a lot was that the timeline was super hard to follow? We had absolutely no concept of how much time was passing (example: Celie is 14 on the first page and then about 4 pages later, when she’s about to get married, she’s suddenly 20) and years would just pass in pages. It was honestly a little hard for me to follow? I wish the entries would’ve been dated because that would’ve at least given some continuity.

And I also hate it when books are written with horrifying grammar just to show you that it’s being written by a former slave. (Though that chapter where one of the girls sewing for Celie tries to correct her grammar and Celie Isn’t Having Any of It was hilarious. But you can also tell the difference between Celie and Nettie’s education levels because the grammar is perfect in all of Nettie’s letters.) Anyway, it just slows down my reading process when I have to process what they’re saying but you do get used to it and I think Celie actually gets a little better by the end of the book???

Anyway, I honestly really loved this book and this story. I loved the relationships between women. Celie, Shug, Sofia, Odessa, Squeak. What a group of strong women. And the backbone of this story was all of them constantly helping each other through their entire lives. They all played the husband swap but when, eventually, their relationships with the men ended, the women always came back together. And I loved that.

This was also a pretty progressive book. Celie is a lesbian (and pretty openly by the end, at least to her family) and Shug is bi. Grady has a pot empire. These are all issues that are big in our current world and in this book, they’re just the norm. Which I found interesting. (Also that chapter with Celie teaching Harpo and Sofia to smoke was also hilarious.)

So, I’m honestly really glad I read this book. I flew through it. It was a fairly easy read and (once you get past the first hundred pages or so) honestly a pretty fun one. Because I loved the end. Celie’s pants business and making peace with her past life. And Nettie returning home to her. I honestly wish the book would’ve kept going. Because now I’m invested in her family.

And I really do want to see this movie because the casting looks AMAZING. Sofia is my favorite character in the book and Oprah is honestly perfect casting. Though where was Angela Basset when this movie was made because she would’ve been a perfect Shug. Anyway, if I do manage to dig up a copy and watch it (or find it streaming somewhere since I haven’t even looked yet), I’ll definitely be sure to post a comparison here.

But yeah. Great book. I’m glad we read it. I definitely see why this is required reading in a lot of schools.

#trcbooks #2015: the color purple #2015 reading challenge

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the-record-newspaper · 6 years

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My first love and the truest of all true love stories

Carmel Schmidt Toliver

By JERRY LANKFORD

Record Editor

Sweet Home Alabama was playing in my head in the summer of 1982, as I left Birmingham, Ala., in the window seat of a Greyhound bus on my journey back to North Carolina.

I was 18 and was a troubled young man. I was leaving my sweetheart and first love, Carmel (pronounced Kar male), behind. We had been nearly inseparable since we began our relationship the previous summer in Upward Bound – a college prep club in which we spent six weeks each summer on the campus of Appalachian State University.

Carmel was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. We were partnered in a canoe during a week-long trip on Lake Watauga in Tennessee and really hit it off. We started dating and quickly fell in love. Our first kiss was on a rooftop in lower Manhattan on a field trip with that club. We were looking across the river into New Jersey and were happy.

A year later I’d wound up in Alabama.

I had ridden to Atlanta with my late brother, Mike, who went there to finalize a divorce. The Lankford brothers slept that night in Mike’s old sky-blue Ford Maverick in the parking lot of an apartment complex in the rough side of town with pistols under our legs. Mike drove me to the train station at daylight, walked me in so I could buy my ticket to Birmingham and waited until I was safely on the train. I still remember his smile as he waved goodbye.

Carmel had been living in Boone with her father and stepmother, Sigurd and Leah Schmidt. She had left by train from Greensboro in the middle of the night to go visit members of her late mother, Eva Slaughter’s, family. My buddy, Mark Brooks, and his girlfriend drove us to the train station because I’d blown up my Chevrolet Vega, and after several wrong turns, we finally found the depot. I walked with Carmel as far as I could before she boarded an Alabama-bound train.

We were happily in love — as much as we could possibly be. It was the kind of love that glows red in your belly and typically consumes all rational thought. It made me sick to see her go.

After a couple weeks, and hours of long-distance telephone conversations, Carmel convinced me I should come to Alabama and that I might want to stay. I knew that would be a hard sell – trying to convince me to move there - but I wanted to see her badly.

It just so happened that at that same time Mike needed to make his trip to Georgia. He said if I was really serious about running to Carmel, I could save train fare money if I left from Atlanta instead of Greensboro.

If you’ve ever ridden on a train, you likely noticed that they mostly travel through the more industrialized sides of towns, leaving the scenery a little less than pristine. Along my way there was some lush greenness to savor, although there remained an unpleasantness due to very frequent stops, the unceasing bumpy-bump rhythm of the tracks, and the obnoxious porter who flirted continuously with an unwilling lady passenger.

Finally in Birmingham, Carmel met me at the station. One of her family members (I can’t recall which one) drove us to her Grandmother Lorene Slaughter’s home on the outskirts of the city. It was hot and mosquitoes were fearsome.

Lorene Slaughter

Mrs. Slaughter’s home was an oasis – with a “Welcome Home” feel and filled with love from room to room, and from corner to corner. As for Mrs. Slaughter, she was a pure pleasure to know. She had sparkling eyes and a great head of beautiful white hair. Her food was incredible – especially her homemade pimento cheese that rivaled my Granny Lankford’s. And her soul was huge – speaking in a Deep South dialect I’d only heard in movies.

She took me into her home as part of the family.

Carmel and I each had our own separate bedroom and very generous amounts of cool air blasting from the vents.

There was a little store around the corner where Carmel and I would walk. I'd buy her M&M's and we’d play the big quarter-fed Space Invaders video game machine. There was also a nearby park with a large pond where we would go exploring in the waning hours of those lazy afternoons.

Finally it came time for me to leave. I was missing home and by that time - much to her family’s chagrin – Carmel had agreed to return to North Carolina a couple of weeks later.

We had learned from the Schmidts that some of their friends – Joe and Cindy Pacileo – at that time, were in Gadsden, Ala. That’s about an hour or so by bus from Birmingham. The Pacileos were there visiting Joe’s relatives. They’d offered me a ride in their van from there as far as Boone. My momma, Willa Mae Lankford, said she’d pick me up there. And thus my return home was arranged.

Again, I was parting from my love. I watched her wave goodbye to me until the bus turned the corner and I could no longer see her.

I was heartbroken when the Pacileos retrieved me from the bus station in Gadsden. They are wonderful people. I remember Joe as being a collector of many great paperback Westerns and a great cook who puts raisins in his meatballs. Cindy - whose sweet smile would warm the coldest of hearts - is a well known artist, having created many forests of little sculptured critters over the years. My sister, Ellen, still has one of her tiny frogs.

As we started out for the Blue Ridge Mountains, I remember Cindy handing me their copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull to read on the way back. It was as if she knew exactly what I needed. I didn’t just read it, I devoured it. I never realized how much that little book would come to mean to me.

It wasn’t long before Carmel returned to Wilkes. We were married in August of that year in Momma’s living room in her home in Millers Creek with a few close relatives and friends there as witnesses. A year later, our first daughter, Jennifer, was born – on Aug. 22, 1983. Anna came on Dec. 22, 1988.

Carmel and I divorced, found other loves and married them. But as years passed, we again became good friends.

My Momma and Carmel truly loved each other. She and my sister, Ellen, also maintained a strong bond. I always loved Carmel, too, somewhere deep down inside — if nothing else but for the fact that she was the mother of two of my three wonderful daughters — the third being Gabriella, who is now 16. Carmel had four more daughters, Diana Pless, and Destiny, Cassidy, Samantha and, stepdaughter, Leslie Toliver.

Carmel’s girls: back, left to right, Leslie, Jennifer, Destiny, middle row: Samantha, Cassidy and Anna. My daughter Gabriella is in front. This photo was taken in 2012. Inset is a photo of Carmel’s daughter, Diana.

Carmel was born on Oct. 9, 1963. She died of pancreatic cancer on Sept. 6, 2014. Hospice had brought her home to Wilkes from Forsyth Hospital in Winston-Salem on a Friday afternoon to spend her final hours with her family. She was surrounded by daughters along with our little grandsons, Sammie and Charlie. Throughout the night, her husband, Ken Toliver – who has become one of my dearest friends – held her hand until she took her last breath the next morning.

That is certainly the truest of true love stories.

Carmel and her husband, Ken Toliver

Before Carmel died, she told her husband, Ken, that she wanted to be buried near my mother in the cemetery of Arbor Grove United Methodist Church in Purlear. He made sure that she was.

I know it sounds strange – or maybe I’d just never noticed a particular occurrence around here in September — but right after Carmel died, I saw dragonflies nearly everywhere I went. This past September (when I wrote the first draft of this column) I saw the reflection of one hovering in the glass of the front doors of The Record offices as I came into work. I thought it was going to follow me inside.

It is likely that dragonfly that brought Carmel and that period of time of our teenage years back to mind — the memories of my first love, that journey, and a little book entitled Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

I guess at that stage of our youths we are all trying to learn about life and flight.

Carmel, thank you for the two daughters you gave me and the entire beautiful family you helped create. May you always be carried on dragonfly wings.

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