#it’s called NEW BLOOD THAT 30 SOMETHING YEAR OLD MAN IS HAGGARD HE’S OUT OF STYLE

[colossalarmin]

Erwin fans responding to every single plot point with “this never would’ve happened if Erwin had been there” regardless of what it is and that cool speech he did one time is literally their only supporting argument

[joyfulpoet]

Modern AU where Lan WangJi collects all his fellow queer brothers to help him run a daycare. Still doing some editing and trying to figure out a title, will hopefully write more and post to AO3 eventually. 

~~~~Part 1

Shen Yuan use to be a high school teacher, but quit when his health started deteriorating. It’s one of those weird hereditary illnesses that depending on your luck in the genetic lottery may or may not pop up later in life. It’s not necessary life threatening, he just needs proper medical care, and to eat right, and get decent rest. He just gets sick easily and is always tired, and if he’s been pushing himself too hard he’ll might cough up blood, MAYBE pass out. IT’S FINE!

At first after finding out he’d lost in the genetic lottery Shen Yuan had decided to become a recluse and live off the inheritance his parents had left him. But Shen’s best friend Yue Qingyuan, an up and coming business tycoon, wasn’t pleased with this and set out to find some way for his friend to continue with his passion of teaching.

Though some business connections Yue Qingyuan finds out that an associate’s younger brother had decided to not to join the business industry. That he had instead started a daycare and was looking for a teacher to teach easy beginner preschool classes.

***

Xie Lian use to be a young master of a very old family. Some even speculated that the family might have had been related to the last emperor. But in Xie Lian’s 20’s, due to internal sabotage, Xie Lian and what was left of his family suddenly found themselves out in the streets with only the clothes on their backs.

Xie Lian, ever the optimist, then decided to start traveling and learning the trade of busking to earn a living. When passing though a city he stopped to entertain some kids in a park, then protected said kids from some ruffians. In all of this he met a kind younger brother who came to help.

When all is done and the kids were safe home, Xie Lian dusted his hands off and got ready to continue on with his travels. The younger brother unexpectedly stopped and asked him to come work for him at the Daycare he’s setting up.

***

Lan WangJi is the second son of the old head chairmen of the Gusu Lan corporation. His mother passed away when he was young. Grief-stricken, Lan WangJi’s father stepped down from head chairman and left not just the business world but also the material one. In his father’s place WangJi’s uncle, Lan QiRen, carried on the company while raising Lan WangJi and his older brother Lan XiChen until they were ready to take over the corporation.

It had been expected that Lan WangJi would join his elder brother in the business world when he was done with college, and for awhile he did. But something about it unsettled him so that he chose to sellout his business shares and to start . . . a Daycare? One that wasn’t even in the best area of city at that! The whole business world couldn’t wrap their brains around it.

***

Wei Wuxian was an orphan with no blood relatives. When he was still young his parent’s closest friend Jiang FengMian of the Yunmeng Jiang corporation took him in and treated the boy like he was his own son. Wei WuXian grew up along side Jiang FengMian’s only son Jiang Cheng, who was of the same age as him and Cheng’s older sister Jiang Yanli.

When WuXian was 17 years old the Yunmeng Jiang corporation suffered a hostile take over by the Wen Corporation. They lost everything. Jiang FengMian soon after fell into a deep depression, not even his wife leaving with their daughter to go back to her own family brought him out of it.

Wei WuXian and Jiang Cheng did their best to care for their father. WuXian even dropped out of the private school him and his adoptive brother were enrolled. He did this so he could get multiple part-time jobs to help pay for everything. WuXian even insisted that Jiang Cheng only worry about finishing school so he could go to the best business university possible and climb back up to the top of the business world.

Now after 13 years, at the age of 30, Wei WuXian finds himself an adoptive father to a 2 year old boy named Yuan. While trying to rearrange his life to fit in this new addition he realizes that he might be in need of a babysitter.

***

Luo Binghe, age 20, local hot shot delinquent gang leader. Wanted for multiple crimes, but no determinable evidence that connects him to them.

His biggest crime however was being too handsome and too charming.

When asked to describe him men and women alike say he looks like a devil dressed all in black, riding a blood red motorcycle; but that he has stars in his eyes that make them want to drown in them.

That is to say that while he was terrifying, men and women a like would still be down for the pa pa pa! Only he didn’t seem all that interested in doing the pa pa pa, with like . . . anyone.

That is, until one day, when doing his best to seem like a well behave 20 some year old college student, out enjoy the early morning city air, he caught sight of a familiar figure of a school teacher going in the back door of a building. He felt his heart pinch, his brain even went a bit fuzzy. Before he knew it he’d followed his old Shizun in. Then found himself being interviewed for a job as a cook at the local daycare by a rather formidable looking older brother.

***

San Lang delivered fresh produce every other day to the Cloud Recesses Daycare and Preschool. Usually he arrived at the same time just after the doors opened for all the hurried parents dropping off their munchkins before running to underpaid jobs. Today he’d been an hour late, because of . . . reasons.

Before the owner Brother Lan had always been the one to signed for the order. Then once or twice a rather haggard man called Shen Yuan signed. San Lang’s sources tell him Shen Yuan used to be a high school teacher, but stopped teaching for ambiguous reasons. More recently, and rather concernedly, a one Luo Binghe, the scourge of San Lang’s territory, had been signing for the deliveries.

The first time he’d been so shocked that he thought he might have gone to the wrong address. But no, Binghe reassured him this was, indeed, the daycare. They’d both glared at each other thinking that the other up to know good. Both projecting a black aura of “don’t mess with me”. If anyone had been around to observe it they would have said that it looked like a wolf and a dragon were about to have a throw down. This terrifying black atmosphere was promptly ruined when Shen Yuan from inside the daycare called out to Luo Binghe.

“A puppy” is all San Lang thought as the terrifying beast of a youth turned to face the older man. He practically sprouted a pair of floppy ears and wiggly tail at the sight of him. San Lang wrote off one Luo Binghe as a non-threat after that.

But today was different. Today he was late by an hour. Today neither Brother Lan, nor Shen Yuan, nor Binghe answered his knock at the back door. Instead a soft, smiling face of an angel did. The face he’d wanted to see the most.

[rosemarytonks]

The Way Out of Berkeley Square, by Rosemary Tonks (1970)

Rosemary Tonks is now known as the poet who disappeared, thanks to a 2009 BBC program (“The Poet Who Vanished”) and features in the Guardian, TLS, the London Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation and others following her death in May 2014 and the reissue that fall of Bedouin of the London Evening, a collection of her poems and selected prose. In truth, she didn’t disappear as much as take a deliberate decision to step away from the life of London and literature she’d led since the mid-1950s. She had health problems, became a devout Christian, and spent her last thirty years in Bournemouth having little or no contact with the large circle of writers, artists, and friends she had known. Sometime in late 1981, she retrieved most of her souvenirs and papers from storage in London and burned them in her garden incinerator. In the years before her death, she read only from the Bible.

The reissue of Bedouin of the London Evening has done much to restore Rosemary Tonks’ standing as an innovative and challenging poet of the sixties. Though praised when her two collections of poems were first published, her poetry is aggressive, edgy, unsettled. “Her poems matched the forceful personality, being rhetorically explosive, with more exclamation marks than anyone else used,” one of her contemporaries recalled. She was neither feminist nor conservative: more than anything, she was an individualist. Several observers have remarked that she most admired the spirit of the flâneur — “equal parts curiosity and laziness” — as embodied in the work of Balzac and Baudelaire:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.

She was a creature of the city. As she writes in “Diary of a Rebel,”

For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness I need the café – where old mats Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves That are brilliant with the nap of idleness …And the cant of the meat-fly is eternal!

She told a Guardian interviewer in 1968 that she used to drive straight into the centre of London each morning, and then to a cafe south of Putney Bridge, where she had scrambled eggs. And the photo on the cover of Bedouin of the London Evening shows her at work at a sidewalk table, a large café-au-lait sitting beside a stack of books and papers. Bloodaxe Books is to be commended for taking advantage of ebook technology and included recordings of Tonks reading a dozen of her poems, along with an interview with Peter Orr, in the EPUB and Kindle versions.

Tonks’ work as a novelist, however, has yet to be rediscovered, for the simple reason that it’s almost impossible to get hold of one of her six novels. The cheapest copy goes for over $70, the dearest for over $400. And forget about finding Emir (1963) outside a couple handfuls of libraries worldwide (she disowned it, anyway). Thanks to the Public Library of India, however, you can find her first novel, Opium Fogs (1963), online in electronic formats.

With the help of my daughter and the University of Washington Library, I was able recently to read Tonks’ 1970 novel, A Way Out of Berkeley Square. At the time it came out, the book probably seemed too odd, too marginal to merit much consideration. “I’m thirty, and I’m stuck,” Tonks’ protagonist, Arabella, complains. Living with her father, romantically involved with a married man, and barely employed with the job of decorating some flats her father is renovating, she was neither the Victorian model of a spinster nor the Seventies’ vision of a woman taking charge of her own life. One reviewer dismissed Arabella as “30 on her driver’s license and 13 in her emotional development.”

This is pretty close to her father’s estimation. He would have her be both the Victorian spinster, serving up a hot dinner and keeping a tidy home for him, and a go-getter, diving into the business of interior decoration with a profit-minded zeal. The one thing he can’t accept is what she is:

My father can’t bear ordinary life; a woman in a dirty cardigan with two pockets on the stomach misshapen by handkerchiefs makes him bristle up, the sight of a coarsely-patterned formica table with brown tea-cup rings on it and large yellow crumbs will cause him a temporary loss of personality, his ego buries itself in one of his shoes and leaves the rest of his body to look after itself, grey, inert.

“I’m out of the habit of taking action,” she thinks. “I don’t have a proper stake in life, in the world.” She definitely doesn’t care for a future of caring for her father for decades until he dies — and then having nothing to show for it. But she’s also skeptical that there is any pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow of marriage and/or career:

Inside the showroom I catch the eyes of various men and women, torpid and haggard as drug-addicts, as they turn over the endless fabrics. I have never actually seen a face with an expression on it in this showroom; blanks, and more blanks with dead eyes. The suffering is awful, and it goes on and on, like writing out “I must not say bloody” a hundred times at school, until you’re free to rejoin the mainstream of life.

Yet she wonders, “Shall I take this bit of life, because if I don’t I may not have any life at all?”

Her one lifeline is her brother, who has escaped from London to Karachi, where he is trying to find the distance and energy to make a start as a poet. They write each other nearly every day — he consoling her over their father’s domination, she cheering on his efforts to embrace his new surroundings and work on his writing. When his correspondence suddenly stops, she worries — then panics when she learns after a gap of weeks that he has contracted polio and is barely surviving with the help of his cook. (This parallels Tonks’ own experience of contracting typhoid and then polio while living in India early in the 1950s.)

The crisis kicks her out of her doldrums. Though still very much dependent upon him to arrange for her brother’s care and return to England, it’s Arabella who prods her complacent father and forces the action. In so doing, she discovers a capacity in herself she had not suspected: “I’ve found out that strength is silent; it doesn’t have to be talked about, proved, or borrowed from others. It isn’t even called strength, but action.”

It’s likely that The Way Out of Berkeley Square would have a more favorable reception today. A fair number of women (and men) are stuck living with their parents into their thirties with the decline in earning power and finding the experience demoralizing and emotionally stultifying. And Tonks’ prose is studded with little gems of description. Of her father’s car: “His new Bentley is fully automatic, has doors as heavy as safe doors from the Bank of England, and a steel body as wide as a ping-pong table. Inside you serve from one corner of it, while burning hot air and noisy stereophonic music try to draw off your attention, subdue, drown and kill you.” Of her married lover’s best talent: “Now there are some men who are so good at getting women across traffic that it’s a form of love-making, in which the woman is touched, protected, and lifted forward, until she reaches the opposite pavement in a state of mild delirium.” Kirkus’s reviewer called Tonks’ prose “A decorative style but it’s all parsley.” Well, if that’s parsley, I say bring it on.

I was able to get my hands on a copy of Tonks’ last novel, The Halt During The Chase (1972), so I hope to post something on that as well as Opium Fogs soon.

[The Neglected Books Page, 16 August 2018]

[jolun-rohthocoudis-blog]

Oct 2 - Splatter

                                                 Oct 2 - Splatter                                         By Jolun                        The sweat beaded slowly down his old face has while his rough hands gripped the brush. The loud swish of the bristles rang aloud on the old stone wall. The light of day was draining slowly as the warm fall day gave way to the chilly autumn night. He arched his back, his body tired and haggard from many years of hard labor.            “Please. Please, no more.” He begged the wall as he continued to scrub. “Please just come off.” He pleaded again with the stones, the blood-stained pattern on the wall haunted him as he looked on. He stopped for a moment, wiping his forehead and taking a deep breath in. Before the sound of the bristles once again filled the air. “This, this has to do it, this time it has to come off.” Soft tears filled his eyes as he continued to scrub.            A piercing shriek filled the air, as he looked back onto three children as they just turned the corner onto the small alley road. The children stumbled about as they ran terrified. All three of them bore backpacks, two of them young boys, another a young girl, sprinted as swiftly as they could. Their backpacks stammering about as they screamed. Down the road a few porch lights lit up as they ran. A few curious individuals in the quiet neighborhood stepping out to see what the issue was. The children were too terrified to stop. They ran only toward the safety of the house they knew. “DAD DAD!” The tallest boy screamed as he rushed onto the porch, banging on the door.             “MR CONNOR!” The girl yelled as they reached the house, their hands collectively knocking on the door as hard as they could. “HE’S BACK! HE’S BACK!” The smaller boy cried.            Mr. Connor approached the door; a look of concern and weariness filled his face. He quickly unlocked the door as the children poured in immediately. “Nathan, Nathan, I’m here. Dad’s here, you’re safe. What’s going on?” Mr. Connor tried to calm down his son.  He knelt down and hugged his son tightly for a few moments, his father’s embrace easing him. All three of the children gathering around him. “We saw him, we saw old man Rob! He was out there! HE WAS SCRUBBING HER BLOOD!” Nathan pleaded with his father. “He was, we saw him too! He was old and he looked terrified and he had a big brush, and there was blood!”  the girl affirmed. “Mr. Connor there was someone there, Mr. Connor we all saw it!” The other young boy agreed.            Mr. Connor sighed as he reached his arms wide, bringing in all three children. He hugged them, giving them a tender squeeze to reassure them all. He took a moment with the children, his embrace lingered a bit. He could see his son’s nose ran with snot, as he looked on at Anna and Xavier, both of them looked nearly as bad. “Come with me, kids.” Mr. Connor motioned for the children to follow him as he looked outside for a moment then closed the door, going back in.            Mr. Connor had grown up in Marion all his life, and knew well the story of Old Man Rob. Mr. Connor had pity on him, as growing up he actually met Old Man Rob when he himself was young when Rob was quite old, he seemed kind, but tremendously sad. The legend was Old Rob was rich and greedy and had murdered his wife and child at the spot the children feared so much to keep her from spending his money. His ghost returning to cover up his crime. Yet Mr. Connor knew the true story, a far more tragic tale to Mr. Connor.  Many years ago, even before Mr. Connor was born ‘Old’ Rob was a recently wealthy man, several of his investments after the war paying off well. His wife Carla, and their new baby were walking home one night from a late fall Church Service. From out of the shadows a man jumped out and pulled a knife on Carla. He demanded their money for her safety. Rob had been a vet of the Second World War, and always carried his service pistol from the war on him. He pulled it on the attacker in an instant. With one shot he thought he had saved his wife. Instead the bullet went straight through the attacker, through Carla, and then into her baby that she clutched so tightly to her chest.            To make the tragedy worse, while he was severely wounded the attacker survived. Although the state of Vermont put him away for many years for their deaths, ‘old’ Rob blamed himself. He visited the site often, keeping it clean, and could be seen mumbling to himself about a mess no one else could see. In his later years he couldn’t help but to scrub it, over and over again, claiming the mess was still there. Even after he passed, people have whispered they could hear the bristles of his old brush scraping away, or see an old man hunched over the spot. Growing up in a small town the myth grew and changed as things are want to do with different generations all changing the story as needed to terrify that generation. Mr. Connor remembered hearing at one-point Old Rob would try to lure other children to be his kids, or Old Rob would attack people near the spot, thinking they were the assailant. Mr. Connor always felt sad for Old Rob and abhorred the stories. “Sit here on the couch,” he motioned to the children as all three climbed on. “I need to call your mother Xavier.” Xavier’s eyes grew large, for a split second he seemed shaken, all the work Mr. Connor had done to calm him undone. “No calm down, you’re not in trouble.” Mr. Connor quickly assured him. “She’ll just be expecting you all soon, I need to tell her what's going on. You did nothing wrong.” Xavier sat back down on the couch.  Mr. Connor took in a deep breath as he dialed her. As the phone rang he walked into the kitchen, looking around the fridge and opening the freezer to see what food he had to offer the three young kids. “Hello? Mason? What’s going on.”  He heard through his phone. “Hey Candice, I’m sorry I sent the children over about 30 minutes ago, but they saw something over by Rob’s Spot, and they came running back. I got them now.” “Oh, Oh lord not this again. Are they alright? How’s Xavier?” Her voice mirrored how he felt.              He was totally over this entire ghost business. This was the third time in as many weeks these three made a fuss about the spot. Mr. Connor and the other parents were tired of it. The last time Nathan carried on about hearing the bristles for three days. Mr. Connor considered for a moment making the brushing sound outside his room just to mess with his kid. Before realizing he would never get a good night's rest for the rest of the year. Still once again Rob’s Spot had claimed the imagination of their children. “They’re fine. They were really shook up when they came banging on the door, but I got them calmed down a bit. Look if its alright with you I'll feed them tonight and then walk them over in about two hours or so.” Mr. Connor said, conceding the beginning of his night to the children. “You sure?” She seemed a bit surprise. “Yeah, Phil doesn’t get home till 10 tonight anyways. He’s being kept late, so we’ll still be able to have an evening, and I think escorting them over would make them feel better. Besides it’ll be dark by then anyways.”  Mr. Connor assured her. “Hey I appreciate that Mason, gives me a chance to get a glass or two of wine in me then. Christ if the kids saw Old Rob again they’re going to be up all night.” Candice sighed, chuckling a bit in resignation.  Mr. Connor frowned a bit and swallowed. “Yeah it's no problem. Look for us around nine.” He said, trying to reassure himself more than her. “Sounds good, thanks again for letting me know. Give my baby some love for me.” She said, Mr. Connor knew Candice liked to make mischief for her kid. “Will do.” He replied, a second later he hung up. “Xavier!” Mr. Connor called out. “Yes sir?” He heard Xavier meekly respond. “Your mom said she loves you bunches and bunches and you’re her favorite QUE TEE PIE.” He said smarmily, with extra emphasis on the cutie pie. “AAHHHHHHH Noo!” Xavier cried out embarrassed, as he heard Nathan and Anna laugh at him. The children started giggling as he sighed in relief.

           Mr. Connor set about making them some dinner. He figured a movie might distract them. Given it was fall he wanted a more halloween theme movie. But he knew if he did so he might as well keep the children all night as they would be too terrified to go anywhere. Only one movie he could think of would get them so off track they would stop thinking about Old Rob. One movie he hated so much he almost wish Old Rob’s ghost would shoot him. He sighed deeply. He loved his son, and his son’s best friend’s so much, but my god he needed some time alone with his husband. He sighed in resignation, ‘just 2 hours, and then you get the whole night. You’re free. Just two hours.’ He thought to himself. He turned the oven on to preheat as he walked to the living room.  “Hey kids!” he said, mustering a sense of enthusiasm he didn’t have about anything anymore. “Y-yeah?” Their collective response carrying  both trepidation and anticipation. “Who wants Dino chicken nuggets and mac and cheese!?” He said loudly. The children’s face’s perked up, happy and enthused. Nods of approval coming from them all. “And who wants to watch Frozen?”

            Whatever excitement the dino chicken nuggets had were lost to the waves of euphoric screams that  filled their chest once again at the mere mention of Frozen. This time joy grasped their hearts as all three of the children lost themselves shouting. He nodded as his work was done. He had made a deal with the devil for the peace of the children’s mind and the hope of a good night with his husband. It only cost him the grating shreds of his sanity watching that movie for what must be over the 300th time. He sighed as he went over to start the movie. How many times must he listen to Let it go before he killed himself? He prayed one more wasn’t the answer.            9:03pm rolled around as Mr. Connor knocked on the door. Candice answered with all the cheer she could muster. The two glasses of wine, immediately draining from her face as she looked at the enthused kids. They cheered as they walked into the house. Broken versions of ‘Let It Go’ being sung poorly by all three. “Mason, I thought we were friends. I trusted you.” She sneered a bit at him as they stood in the doorway. “Look, you don’t know how upset they were. Chicken nuggets and Mac and cheese, DINO chicken nuggets only got a lukewarm response. Give it an hour they’ll be out, they had a big fright and then a good evening after. They are spent.” Mr. Connor made his case.            He felt her pain. Frozen was on the banned parental care list and he violated it. He knew Teresa would let him know her displeasure too, but he stood by his decision. They didn’t see the looks on their faces this time. Even if Old Rob wasn’t a real ghost, they were real to them. He felt justified in its use. “Did they have any trouble walking past it with you there?” She asked, her stance a bit relaxed as she could see how far the event was from their minds now. “Honestly I just took the long, long, way around through Camden Park. If I’m going to show them that movie I’m not going to jeopardize suffering through that for anything.” He unzipped his jacket a bit. He thought it would have been colder out, but the fall air still felt a bit warm to him. “Well alright.” Candice reached out to warmly hug Mr. Connor, as he did the same. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a nice night with Phil. Y'all deserve it. Oh, the hours he works.” “Thanks Candice” he said hugging her back warmly. Then releasing her. “It means a lot.” He nodded to her and walked away. This time taking the short way back.            He let out a sigh of relief. The whole ordeal was over. He still had plenty of time to get home, shower up, fix something nice for Phi and have a good evening. He was looking forward to this. The night air was pleasant. Perhaps they could open a bedroom window tonight. He blushed for a second, ‘no that would be bad,’ he immediately told himself. The last thing he needed was to have the neighbor’s hear Phil and him. He turned the corner, the darkness of night pierced by the streetlamps across the town. Yet in this alley road, the light was scarce. This was where Rob’s spot was, the alley that so many children dreaded and where so many stories and myths in this small town swirled. A slight tingle filled his spine as he walked down the alley. He saw down the alley where the spot was. Across from it was the outline of a man across from the spot was visible. He stammered, almost tripping where he stood.            Mr. Connor took a gasp of air in as his eyes focused on the spot. His brain told him all the ways ghost were impossible, yet his heart began to race with even the slightest possibility. He walked slowly. His mind recounting that he was a purple belt in Taekwondo from back in college. A small argument then broke out in his brain over how useful martial arts would be against ghosts. Each step filled with more trepidation as he got closer. The outline of the figure appearing more and more solid and less like a specter. The thoughts of ghosts and ghouls vanished as quickly from his mind as they appeared. Within sight now he saw the figure truly. An old man, distinctly not Rob, stood there directly across from Rob’s Spot. 

            As Mr. Connor’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and he was closer now, he could see the spot clearly. It looked faded and worn, a wide circular path around it seemed discolored as if years of scrubbing on the stone discolored it from the area around it. No matter who painted it or washed it, that area never would yield to the same color as around it, fading quick and adding to the legend. Mr. Connor assumed it had always been some of the old harsh chemicals Rob used repeatedly, soaked into the stone and made it hard to apply anything to the area. Yet the old spot called out to the old man. The comfort Mr. Connor had gained seeing he was a human and not some ghost was starting to leave him. “G-good evening, is everything okay?”, He inquired.

            His pace slowed as he came slowly towards the spot. The question seemed to startle the old man, somehow unaware of Mr. Connor. The old man clutched his chest in fright for a moment. His old form feebling looking back out towards Mr. Connor as he closed in. Mr. Connor felt relieved at his fear. He had no reason to suspect the man meant any ill towards him, yet nonetheless if they were both a little scared, that’s okay Mr. Connor concluded. “Oh, um yes. I’m sorry. Am I bothering you? Am I in your way?” The old man meekly responded.            The old man looked up at Mr. Connor. His eyes were a bit cloudy, his face was rough, and the skin on him hung loosely. Age had not held a kind hand to the man. Still his voice seemed gentle in a way that made Mr. Connor feel bad for startling the old man. “No no- you’re fine. I - I just saw you staring at Rob’s spot. Kids could mistake you for a ghost you know.” Mr. Connor half heartedly chuckled. “Huh, Rob’s spot?” The old man seemed confused for a second. “Well I don’t suppose I’m dead yet.”            Mr. Connor rubbed his hands, as the air gained a sudden chill to it. Mr. Connor noticed him shiver a touch. Something about him was off, his clothing seemed ill fitted and both newly worn yet very old. Mr. Connor had a brief internal debate. His younger meaner self yelling at his older for caring too much and giving too much of a damn. ‘Let this old creep go!’ he thought, to no avail as he turned to the old man. “Hey if you’re cold I live just nearby; you can come over and get some food and warm up. Or if you ne-” “No” He was interrupted by the old man. “I, I appreciate your kindness. In more ways than I can say. But no, I’m right where I need to be.”            His eyes shifted away from Mr. Connor, as they drifted down until they were once more fixed on Rob’s spot. Mr. Connor worried for the old man, but he wasn’t going to put his night with Phil in danger any longer. He nodded to the old man and zipped up his jacket. The air now uncomfortably cold. He slowly walked away, the old man’s sad look clinging to his mind for a moment. As he turned the corner his phone rang. Its sharp buzz spooked him for a moment. He looked down and saw it was Phil calling him. ‘Oh thank god.’ he thought as he answered the phone. He needed the comforting voice of his husband now more than ever. 

           The old man stared at the spot. His shallow breath rose from his mouth as the air chilled sharply. He stepped close to the spot. The cloud cover began to break, allowing ever so much more light from the moon to creep into the alleyway. The blood freshly dripped from wall, as his eyes welled with tears. 

           “You see it don’t you?” Rob said as he walked out next to the old man. He took his brush, trying his hardest to scrub the blood from the wall.  

            “Yes. I saw it that night. I saw it on the floor of the court as they read the verdict. I saw it every night on the ceiling of my cell, and every morning when I woke up on the floor. Nothing will remove it. No prayer to god, no plea to the devil. No amount of liquor or drugs, nothing I've ever done will remove it.”  The old man said as he began to weep the spot.

           “Oh, I’m sure it’ll come out. It’s not your fault. It’s just a tough stain. It’s been on here for too many years.” Rob looked at the old man, his eyes carried the pain of all the years he mourned for his family while he was alive. They carried the agony of life lost, and choices made. But within them the old man could not see any hate. Not for him, nor for the world. Just the pain of loss, and the misery of loneliness.

           “I- I know what will get the Blood stains out.” The old man said. Rob placed his hand on the old man’s shoulder as Rob’s eyes stared into his then nodded. The icy chill of his touch shivered the old man to his core. Still the old man looked at Rob, and then nodded back. Knowing full well what he needed to do. His hand went into his pocket, reaching deep before he pulled out a pistol. The old man looked up to Rob once more.

“I’m- I’m so sorry. I cou-”

“It’s okay.” Rob said. He took a step back from the spot. “This stain isn’t gonna remove itself.”

           The old man turned to face him; the gun barrel reached up to his head. In the cold air of the night he hardly noticed the cool steel of the muzzle pressed to his head. With a sigh he smiled at Rob, the hammer pulled back as he squeezed the trigger. The gun flash lit up the alleyway as thunder rang out in the neighborhood. The old man’s head spilled forth all over the wall. A shower of gore flew out in meaty chunks, splattering thick out over the spot.

           Rob looked at the wall, freshly painted with the old man’s blood as the old man’s body slumped heavily to the ground. He picked up his bristle and began to scrub at the blood stain. The old stains and the new began to merge together, the grizzly fresh blood with the ghostly old. “Oh!” he explained joyously. “Oh, thank you, thank you. You were right. This is finally coming off.” Rob exclaimed in joy as the sound of his’s bristles filled the alley one last time.