#it's going. great

[visceravalentines]

exit music (for a film)

Would it hurt to pretend while bleeding out in a parking lot that it could've been different? That there was another way? Some fairy tale ending?

-Tags by @upwardsdescensum

He feels the first shot, but not the second, or the third.

The third one's the bitch, the one that knocks him flat. He barely registers the impact of his skull on the pavement. There's no pain, just a general awareness. A system-wide panic signal.

He thinks to himself, this is it, motherfucker.

He feels heat in his chest like water soaking through clothes. Like when you're eight years old and you piss the bed and you don't tell Ma because she'll whoop your ass. The carpet in his room is older than he is, worn and grimy. He can feel it, under his neck, under his arms. Sees the popcorn ceiling stained tobacco brown from the hurricane when he was ten.

"Why're you on the floor?"

The sound of Randy's voice in his bedroom catches him off guard. He rolls his head to the side and there he is, sitting on the edge of his bed, real as can be. Looking at him without a lick of fear, without reproach. Just looking at him.

"I like it down here," Benson says, and it's sort of true. He's slept in this spot more nights than he can count, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. He crosses his arms behind his head. "Super comfortable."

Randy scoffs, rolls his eyes, but he's smiling. Benson likes it when he smiles. "You're a dumbass."

Now that's funny. Benson laughs, delighted, and something tears in his chest. Something spills. "Watch your mouth, choir boy."

Randy gives him this look, this conspiratorial little sideways glance that reminds Benson of being in sixth grade and lighting up a Winston around the corner at recess.

He leans forward, whispers. "You're a dumbass."

Benson feels a swell of pride and affection and something seeping into his lungs. "You're a fucking spitfire, huh? World better watch out."

Randy leans back on his hands, kicks his heel against the bedframe. "Are you gonna show me that song or what?"

Benson looks down the length of his arm. His hand is resting on the shitty little boombox he saved up for when he was fifteen. "Oh. Yeah." He fumbles for the play button, fingers slippery. He can't remember what CD he's got loaded until it starts up.

That there, that's not me

Oh. Yeah. Fucking Radiohead.

I go where I please

It's kind of a bummer song and he can't remember why he wanted to show it to Randy, but he looks at him and the guy's got his head tilted back, and he's not really looking at the ceiling, he's not really looking anywhere, he's just listening. Like, actually listening.

I walk through walls, I float down the Liffey

Benson's eyes follow the line of his throat up to the plush of his lips and he swallows hard. His tongue tastes like pennies. Makes him think of the fight he picked on his last day of high school junior year, how long the blood stayed in the concrete of the sidewalk.

Randy looks at him with those eyes, blue as the ocean. He's only been there once, drove himself the day he got the Chrysler. Went alone. Felt so impossibly small, like maybe none of it mattered after all. Like maybe he was stupid for thinking it did.

I'm not here, this isn't happening

"This is nice," Benson says, and it comes out choked and wet. He's always wanted to do this. Sit and share music with someone. Anyone. The fact that it's Randy here, in his room, on his bed--too fucking good to be true.

"You sure you don't want to come sit by me?" Randy asks.

Of course he does. Of course he does, but he knows that's not an option. "Nah. I'm alright."

I'm not here, I'm not here

Randy furrows his brow. "Want me to come sit by you?"

"No, you stay there." Benson rests his hand on his chest and the weight of it surprises him. "You're perfect right there. You're perfect."

A blush creeps up Randy's cheeks. "I'm not...perfect."

Benson smiles, thinks about the day Randy started at the restaurant. How the last thing he wanted to do that Saturday was train some newbie shithead and how instead, this pretty blonde fawn of a boy followed at his heels and did everything right the first time.

"Yeah, you are."

Something starts to burn, deep in the center of his chest, like someone putting out a cigarette on his diaphragm. He looks up at the ceiling and it's black, cottony and starless.

In a little while, I'll be gone

"You like the song?" There's a tremor, a desperate edge to his voice that scares him. He's so sick and tired of being scared. He's so sick and tired.

He glances over at Randy and he looks...resigned. Regretful. He smiles, though, nods. "Yeah, Benson. I like the song."

The whites of his eyes are tinged red. No, blue. No, red. Benson hopes he isn't crying. He hates seeing him cry.

"You're gonna be okay," he says, a little too forcefully. "Yeah?"

Randy nods again. "I think so."

The moment's already passed

The burning is getting worse. Breathing aches, feels like drowning. He digs his nails into his palms. "You fucking better be."

Randy folds those knobby fingers in his lap, leans forward. "I'll do my best, Benson. I promise."

He smiles sadly, and Benson believes him.

Yeah, it's gone, and I'm not here

The carpet disappears. The asphalt underneath him is still warm from the sun. The ocean sloshes in his chest and now he feels it, now it hurts like he thought it would. The sky is black and cottony. Starless. The bed is gone, Randy is gone. He can still hear the song, though.

This isn't happening

He thought it'd be faster. Seems like it's taken years. But it's coming, now, after all this fucking time, the heat fading fast to a hollow, stinging cold, and then to nothing. His fingers and toes go first, hands and feet, and so on. He's got one good breath left. One more. And then it's over.

I'm not here, I'm not here

Fuck, he's relieved and he wishes he wasn't. Wishes he was anywhere but here. Anyone but himself.

He catches a glimpse of him in his periphery at the last second. Sitting on the curb like a kid left at the Winn-Dixie, all elbows and knees. He's crying, dammit. Benson supposes he can't blame him this time, because he's crying too. It's fucking tragic, all of it, the whole fucking thing.

Strobe lights and blown speakers

But it's okay, really. Randy's gonna be okay. He promised. Benson trusts him. He did what he could, he really tried. And maybe this, at least, he managed to succeed at.

Fireworks and hurricanes

The last breath hurts the worst.

I'm not here, this isn't happening

He holds Randy's name on his tongue for good luck. For safekeeping. For the hell of it. And he lets all the rest of it go.

I'm not here, I'm not here

The exhale is euphoric.

[cordspaghetti]

really factual recounting with no embellishments whatsoever

[flame-shadow]

hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???

i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)

[kind-of-a-shitty-wizard]

making ur pfp a pictue of ur favorite guy is great. the modern equivalent of some guy in the 50s pulling out his wallet and there being a picture of his wife inside and him sighing fondly at it

[mcapriglione-art]

what do you want!!!!!!!!

[so-many-ocs]

"why does writing take so long" because 60% of it is coming up with a sentence, realizing that sentence doesn't work the way you want it to, and staring at a wall

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[daisywords]

One of my biggest nitpicks in fiction concerns the feeding of babies. Mothers dying during/shortly after childbirth or the baby being separated form the mother shortly after birth is pretty common in fiction. It is/was also common enough in real life, which is why I think a lot of writers/readers don't think too hard about this. however. Historically, the only reason the vast majority of babies survived being separated from their mother was because there was at least one other woman around to breastfeed them. Before modern formula, yes, people did use other substitutes, but they were rarely, if ever, nutritionally sufficient.

Newborns can't eat adult food. They can't really survive on animal milk. If your story takes place in a world before/without formula, a baby separated from its mother is going to either be nursed by someone else, or starve.

It doesn't have to be a huge plot point, but idk at least don't explicitly describe the situation as excluding the possibility of a wetnurse. "The father or the great grandmother or the neighbor man or the older sibling took and raised the baby completely alone in a cave for a year." Nope. That baby is dead I'm sorry. "The baby was kidnapped shortly after birth by a wizard and hidden away in a secret tower" um quick question was the wizard lactating? "The mother refused to see or touch her child after birth so the baby was left to the care of the ailing grandfather" the grandfather who made the necessary arrangements with women in the neighborhood, right? right? OR THAT GREAT OFFENDER "A newborn baby was left on the doorstep and they brought it in and took care of it no issues" What Are You Going to Feed That Baby. Hello?

Like. It's not impossible, but arrangements are going to have to be made. There are some logistics.

[poisonpercy]

Gotta be honest, the popularity of blond Percy thanks to the pjo show is driving me insane because every time I see pjo fanart, I have a crisis over what little blond boy is being depicted

[roach-works]

pokemon theory i just thought of: new pokemon appear in the pokemon universe when they're designed in this one. they're created ex nilho but they have retroactive realness; they weren't here yesterday, but today they've always existed.

pokemon researchers have had to suss this out on their own over decades, and it's a really unpopular theory, made worse by the fact that no one can come up with a better one. from their perspective pokemon generate spontaneously but in both chronological directions, and the similarities of many pokemon seem to be detived from a conscious and creative understanding of the world--their world, though? what other world could there be?. there are ice cream pokemon and pokeball pokemon and sword pokemon and trash bag pokemon.

there are so many pokemon with both wings and a beak. is this like swords? is there an ur-flying type that this class evokes? there are so many canine pokemon. but what is a canine? is there such a thing? there's only one set of sword pokemon, right. one tea-set line. is *feline* a coherent category? would the ur-feline have two legs or four? why do so many pokemon have humanlike bodyplans-- but then again, why so few?

pichu has always been the prior form of pikachu. why didn't it get counted in order? why do we call it that instead of saying pikachu is the middle evolution of the pichu line? why can so many trainers remember finding this out well into their journeys? why didn't ash start with one?

this is why pokemon researchers do a lot of labwork, drink heavily, and use ten year olds for field research. you can't have an existential crisis if you don't even know what time is yet.

[solmesia]

the mosquitos sure are big around here

[golyadkin]

it's because i wouldn't let you kill the bounty hunter isn't it

[emberglowfox]

”discord is for gaming” “discord is for talking to classmates” discord is for popping open the general chat in a server at 3 in the morning to go “hey guys i just remembered i can recite all of psalm 24 king james version from memory. im gonna type it” and then doing that

[egophiliac]

queen of diamonds, upright + reversed 💎

I've redone this like eighty times, I have to just be done with it now and stop staring at all my mistakes oh no 🫠

[itsadancingdinosaur]

I'm so glad the fnaf movie just kept Balloon Boy as this creepy mf. No explanation. Why is he here. Who is he. Who cares? All the jumpscares with him were great

[ayo-edebiri]

#Tommy said 🤨❔🏳️‍🌈