unravelingwires

[unravelingwires]

The Halloween Story

As with most of my life stories, I have to clarify beforehand: Yes, this is real, and it is real because (and ONLY because) I am stupid. This is not something that happens to normal people because they wouldn't ever get close enough to a situation like this for it to happen. That being said, without estrogen my brain's "keep this idiot alive" switch was not turned on and I was, I think, biologically incapable of making good decisions.

Another thing to know is that I did not have a lot of friends as a kid because I'm terminally awkward; additionally, most of the friends I did have were maybe better described as "people who tolerated me but who I would take a bullet for." This is important for later.

Anyways, I was like 9 or 10 when this happened, and my littlest brother was like...5 or 6? This was his first Halloween where he was allowed to Trick-or-Treat past the end of our block, and he HAD to be accompanied by me or another older kid so he had begged me for DAYS to take him. And while I held the title of oldest brother, I feel like I put my whole pussy into being a good oldest brother, so I of course took the family's babiest of babies for his first ever trick-or-treat adventure!

I went dressed as Dartanian because I've been gay for a while, and he went dressed as a skeleton because he's adorable. We went trick-or-treating only in areas I knew, so mostly within the boundaries of our l'il Mormon ward, and we had fun. About a half-mile away from home, he started saying he was getting tired, so I told him we were gonna turn back and watch "Scary" movies, which was actually just two old VHS Scooby Doo episodes my mom let us watch because she only let us watch episodes where the monsters were fake because if they were real we'd get nightmares. So we start walking back. It's not too far and we know the way so it's going great. Littlest bro's first trick-or-treat adventure went swimmingly, we've got pillow cases full of candy, and we're about to watch scooby doo and eat skittles until we pass out. Life, for us, literally could not have been better.

BUT

As I walk around the corner of my old street, the far end of it, by a bush, I hear my best friend whisper-shout at me from a bush:

"Lizard, Lizard, stop, hide, quick!"

In most cases, my thoughts can be summarized by a humble: "Bwuh?" and in this case I'm pretty sure I said something like that out loud. I look into the bush, and I see it is JAM-FUCKING-PACKED with kids my age. Like 6 of them hiding behind this tall oleander bush shaking like they just saw a ghost. I wave to them, because I don't know what's going on, and tell them that Littlest Brother is tired so I'm going home. That's when one of them angrily grabbed me and littlest brother and tugged us into the oleander with them.

I think they thought we were hidden, but this was one shrub currently occupied by like 7 kids and despite how small we all were that was still more shrub-per-kid than the shrub could hide so me and littlest brother didn't actually fit. And I was squirming trying to get away because it was poky and scratchy and smelled bad and also I didn't know why I was being pulled into a shrub to begin with.

The ruckus of my squirming was freaking my friends out, who were all telling me to shut up and hide, and I was telling them I wasn't playing hide-n-seek and Littlest Brother was REALLY getting tuckered out so PLEASE let go so I can go home, when around the corner came three Big Kids on bikes.

These kids seemed HUGE and SCARY to me at the time, although realistically they were like in 8th grade and also dork-ass losers. They were on bikes with handlebar breaks, though, and they were wearing costumes ironically under hoodies, so they seemed scary at the time. They see me thrashing in a bush and correctly deduced that the kids they had been hunting down were in the bush too. This is when I learned that my friends were all scared because they'd been being hunted for sport by older boys. Like, actually, for real, we were being bullied on Halloween by kids who called us "dweebs" and shit, I cannot explain how that was actually happening in the early 2000s, that was a worn-out trope in the 80s, but it for real, actually, swearsy-realsies, happened to me.

They're bigger than us and have at least started puberty so they're a lot stronger than us. They fished us all out of the bush pretty easily and made us all line up. This was all happening on a well-lit suburban street in a Mostly Mormon neighborhood so again, I don't know how it all got this far, but it did.

Once we were lined up, they start quipping about our costumes and harassing us a little bit. Again, this is like STRAIGHT out of a shitty campy overdone 80s sitcom so I get that this sounds fake, but we were literally getting pushed around and called dweebs and nerds by some fuckass 8th graders who were all smoking a cigarette one of them stole from their mom. Finally they were getting bored so they told us that their terms to releasing us were that we give them our candy.

My friends, who are smart and wanted to be alive, immediately started grabbing fistfuls of candy from their buckets or bags to hand them. But I am stupid, and was trying to be a good older brother, and didn't understand the concept of mortality because HRT had not yet flipped that switch in my brain, and I saw littlest brother getting scared. His lips were trembling like he was about to cry, he was clinging onto me for dear life, and one of these kids comes over and is being all mean and calling him a baby (which he basically was, so like what even is the point?) and I got mad. So I took my prop rapier from it's sheath and started jabbing his ribs and head until he rips it out of my hand.

"Jesus Christ, you little faggot. I'm keeping this, you're not getting your sword back."

"K, fine, just leave my brother alone."

"I leave him alone if you give me ALL your candy."

He says it with this shit-eating grin, like he's got the upper hand. But I'm mad and suicidal in the same way a horse is suicidal, which is to say I don't care if I die as long as this fucker dies too, so I tell him if he wants my candy he can have it, and I wallop him with the candy sack. Hard. I put all 70 lbs of 9-year-old rage into that whump, and to my credit it caught him off guard. He steps back and rubs his face and the biggest kid in the group steps into his place.

"You wanna fight?" He's trying to act tough but he's also trying to square up with an unquestionably faggy 9-year-old Dartanian so it's tough. It's also a stupid, stupid question to ask, since I literally DID want to fight and he was just posturing.

So I hit him too. Again, all the rage my 9-year-old body possessed channeled into a pillow case filled with Dum Dums and skittles slaps into his face. I move to smack him again, because he's looking at me all incredulous like he doesn't think I'm serious. He tries to grab the bag but I kick his shin and he has to step back for a second because he was on his bike with only one leg on the ground and I had just kicked it so he was trying to keep balance. I took advantage of the momentary distraction and whapped him in the belly. That, I think, was the final straw for him, because he (seriously, yes, for real) took out an actual knife.

It was a real folding knife, I could hear the little mechanical click as he flicked the blade out and the locking mechanism secured it in place. He looks at me with murderous intent for like a tenth of a second before one of my other friends asks,

"Dude, are you serious?"

And it clicks that he just threatened someone with a real weapon. He takes a step back and tells me, trying to sound brave but now far enough out of his own comfort zone that he's starting to wonder what happened in his life to bring him here (which is dangerous, confused people do confusing shit).

But I'm horse-style suicidal and I honestly didn't think it was real, so I swing at him again. Full-body swing right for the face, and he slashes at the candy pouch and it tears. And I'm like "Oh shit, that's a real knife!" and he's like, "Oh shit, this kid is gonna beat me until I stab her or run!'' And that's when my Knight-in-Emo-Armor arrived!

The kid was like the archetypal "Bad Boy" of my childhood. He wore black hoodies to church and said "damn" instead of "dang" and "shit" instead of "shoot." He listened to metal music and told his grandma (who adopted him after his mom lost custody for drug use stuff) to shut up sometimes. He smoked. He was a moody goth/emo/scene/whatever enigma of rage from his shitty family life. He was also known for being actually real-life dangerous. The kid in front of me was contemplating stabbing me, but my Knight had actually broken someone's jaw in a fight before.

The whole time we were getting held up, he was just walking down the street listening to an honest-to-God MP3 player, stoned as all hell, angry at the world, and watching this all unfold. And he recognized a bunch of kids from church he barely gave a shit about, but then he recognized *me* and although he didn't know *me* super well, he fucking LOVED my dad because my dad was super nice to him at church, and he knew I was my dad's kid. And he knows the kids talking to us are bad news because he's friends with some of their friends and he knows they're all wannabe tough guys. And he makes a decision.

This guy, my knight, was tall, mean, scary, and crabby, and EVERYONE knew that, not just the Mormons in my life. And in all black, with black hair and black nail polish, he had remained almost perfectly hidden as he walked in the middle of the road on the tar-black Arizona asphalt until he suddenly emerged from the shadows right behind the kid with the knife.

"Bruh, what the fuck are you doing?"

This kid whips around and sees my knight and just blanches. Like, all-the-way white-as-a-sheet scared.

"Oh, Knight, h-h-hey, I didn't see you. You know these kids? We're just teasing them!"

"Hilarious joke, cocksucker. That's a real knife. Fuck off."

They almost left a cartoon dust cloud in the shape of their bodies as they left. My friend and "friends" from church all followed suit - Knightboy was BAD news with a capital B-A-D and they were probably more scared of him than the original trio. But I knew Knightboy because he teased me a lot in his last year elementary school and sometimes came over to talk with my dad so I knew he wasn't a bad kid. He bends down and picks up the plastic sword the first kid dropped and gives it back to me.

"This is yours, I think."

I took it, sheathed it, and said, "Thanks! You shouldn't swear."

"Man, I'm too stoned for this shit, just get out of here."

"Ok, thanks Knight! See you at church tomorrow!"

And I toddle off with Littlest Brother. I take him to some of the best houses on our street for a second round of trick-or-treating so he can calm down, and we go home. My mom puts Scooby Doo on and asks me how everything went - I tell her it was fine, it was fun. She said that Littlest Brother said something scary happened, and I said "Oh, I think he got spooked by Knight is all." And she just shrugged and walked off. By the end of the night, I honestly forgot it even happened. I was more invested in trying to figure out how to grow up to be like Velma and lining my skittles up by color so I fully did not even remember.

BUT.

My mom is friends with all the other moms at church - she has to be because she has a master's degree in a church that teaches that employed women are failing God and their families so she ended up as a high-achieving woman working as a stay-at-home mom and if she didn't make friends at church she would fully go insane.

And at church the next day, my mom is approached by a tiny pack of mothers all saying "Wow, Lizard is so brave, aren't you so proud of her?"

And because she's a Good Mom who Loves Me So Much, she says, "Yeah, totally, why do you ask?"

And they say, "Because she tried to fight off some muggers last night! She hit them with her candy bag!"

And my mom says, "Haha, Yeah, she's fierc-wait what in the fresh hell did you say?"

And they all tell her the story, and my mom is PISSED that I didn't mention, but she also knows I am capital-D Dumb, so she pulls me out of Sunday school and asks me,

"Lizard, baby, did you scare off some muggers last night?"

And I said, "Oh yeah, kinda! Knight was the one that actually scared them though."

And she says, "Lizard, baby, why did you not tell me?"

And I said, "Oh, I forgot."

And she just nodded and tried unsuccessfully to push my little "Alfalfa sprout" strand of hair down, and gave up, and then pushed me back into class. And later that day she made like 3 lbs of chocolate chip cookies and drove them all over to Knight's house to thank him. And basically ever since then I was in Knight-in-shining-armor's good books (although he wasn't very good at showing it for a bit), and I had an undeserved reputation among the kids in my church as a badass for like a year, which I felt pretty good about.

Anyways, the Halloween Story is so weird that sometimes I question my own memory of it, but I am telling it now based on my memory as best as I can recall and after fact-checking it with my mom a few times.

[unravelingwires]

The Kadez is a medium-sized river chelicerate, living in particularly pure, well-oxygenated streams. It tolerates very cold temperatures and as such is often found in mountain streams. They turn over pebbles with their legs in search of small invertebrates, roe, and other small prey to eat. It is quite an active creature, and in areas where they are abundant, they'll often come up onto land for other food sources. That said, they are quite skittish, and surprisingly fast -especially underwater-, so it isn't always easy to approach them.

[unravelingwires]

Sectarianise

“Why are you still religious?” Jay asked. “Wait, that’s not what I mean. I just– um–”

Vidya sighed, not stopping her flower arrangement. “I understand you grew up after the recent millennium’s passing, but I did not. I will not be offended by your questions. I have heard worse.”

“I just meant that Ambrosia and Katie both seem irritable with their old religions. Now that you know that magic and vampires exist– and vampires are, er, European-style myths–”

“European myths? How old do you think Ambrosia is?”

“I just assumed– uh–” Jay wished Vidya ever had expressions. “I thought that someone must have described and documented our species and that’s where Dracula comes from. Or something.”

“How much blood do you drink on a daily basis?”

“Um…”

“I have, in my near 300 years, never had to avoid sunlight, nor am I particularly vulnerable to garlic or holy symbols. We do not sleep in coffins. Only Katie has a problem with mirrors. There are many supernatural creatures from around the world associated with immortality and desire. Why do you think we use the European term despite its inaccuracy and outright offensiveness?”

“I– huh. Is there a better term?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really care about language. Just… don’t be ignorant.”

[unravelingwires]

הבל | hevel

This is how it goes: God whispers in Cain’s jealous ear, drawing his attention to the Sin crouched at his doorway. Sin has haunted eyes and a mouth that has been kissed. Let there be no doubt that Sin has been kissed, with a wet-red mouth that may taste of blood or pomegranate or the electric crackle of a stoplight. Cain looks at Sin. He runs his tongue over his teeth.

This is how it goes: Cain leaves the house at one am in bare feet and a hoodie, careful to avoid the last stair that creaks, and treks out into the Field. There are many fields in the world but there is only one Field. Cain feels the difference in the grass when he crosses the border from field to Field, the way the grey-green blades stand up at attention in his wake, the way the dirt turns ice-cold and furious beneath his heels. The earth is good with foreshadowing. The tree of Knowledge has deep roots.

This is how it goes: God says, I will take you or your brother.

God says, You get to choose.

And Cain says, “When you split me and my brother in the womb, you did not divide us evenly. He got kindness, and I got longing. He got complacence, and I got ambition. I want to kill him sometimes. I think sometimes he wants to die.”

I have never made brothers before, God explains. That is how I thought they were made. What more do you want?

“I want to steal some of his kindness,” Cain says, and shakes his pocket knife out of his sleeve.

Back at home, Abel sits up in his bed with a start, heart racing. That was close, he thinks, that was a damn close one, and does not know why.

In the Field, the ground warms as blood seeps into the dirt. 

[unravelingwires]

Transmembrane

“What’s with the electric lights?” Jaya asked. “I mean, if you already have the enchantments?”

“It makes the nonmagical clients feel more comfortable,” Cylene said.

“You let splits in here?” Jaya asked, started. “Oh, er–”

“Magical problems do not exclusively impact magical people, Myr. Narayana. You will never use such language in my store again.”

“Yes mam.”

“Or anywhere else.”

“Yes mam.”

[unravelingwires]

Barrelful

“How did they even get this much blood up here?” Ellie asked.

Jaya jerked out of her reverie – the half-congealed dripping lines, the spray past her bed onto her trunk, the words carefully shaped to ensure legibility despite time passing – and brought out a bottomless vial. “The same way I’m going to get it out.”

[unravelingwires]

Tendence

Em understood why people thought of Kali as calm. She put a lot of effort into appearing calm. Their world was better because she seemed calm. Nevertheless, watching Kali meticulously smash a table into splinters, he wished people would realize – the grass was brown, the stars green, and Kali was very, very angry.

[unravelingwires]

Sidedness

Jaya is functionally ambidextrous. Only Theodore, Artemisia, and Aaron have noticed.

[unravelingwires]

Falcate

“That cannot be practical,” Aaron said.

Raine looked to where Jaya was twisting a crescent-shaped knife around her hand. “So cool, though.”

[unravelingwires]

If you're looking for reasons to keep going, consider this: there will be more photos of Bug to see.

[unravelingwires]

Overkind

“That’s so pretty,” Astra squealed.

“Thank you,” Vanity said. “If you’d please ex–”

“You have to show me how you embroidered those so neatly. Are you that good at all flowers, or did you just learn lilies? Have you thought about shifting the colors to make them seem enchanted? Oh, you could–”

“Myr. Ravenwood.”

Aster shrank back. “Sorry, am I being rude?”

Vanity sighed. “I– no. No, of course not.”

“Well, do you think–”

[unravelingwires]

Tumular

Kali examined the hill of human bones, ribs woven into a door in the middle.

“Kind of overkill,” Des said.

Kali sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”

[unravelingwires]

Biceps

“The gala will start in two hours,” Mother said. “I expect you downstairs in 30 minutes.”

Jaya was doing push ups, her legs propped up on her bed frame. “Yes, Mother.”

“And be careful with that, please. You’re going to end up bulky.”

[unravelingwires]

Upspoke

“I can set a fire down the hall or something to get her moving,” Lilith suggested.

“We’re trying to be subtle,” Aaron said. “For heaven’s sakes, don’t you ever–”

“Give me more information on her,” Jaya ordered.

“Eliot Lancaster, more commonly known as Eli,” Aaron responded. “She works in infrastructure – the plastic plate system was actually her baby, way back in the day. She’s been trying to reestablish communication lines since the war started, but she’s not enough of a threat for anyone to do anything more than put her off indefinitely.”

Jaya got up and raised a hand with a wave. “Myr. Lancaster, isn’t it?”

“Oh– yes, that’s me. Uh– you are…”

“Myr. Tricia Pays, from Rollins University. I’m doing a report on civic infrastructure, and I was just wondering–”

Lilith started creeping behind the two women. Aaron hissed “Give her a second to actually move,” but nevertheless followed them.

[unravelingwires]

Whoopies

“Uh– you good there?” Lexi asked.

Nila looked up, frowning. “Fine. Why?”

Lexi glanced at the pile of mutilated not-oreos in a bowl and chose not to answer.

[unravelingwires]

Hydroxylated

Lakshmi might have thought she had the most difficult job on the ship, but Lucian knew who actually did. Lucian had to deal with all the uncertainty that Lakshmi did, but he also needed to physically implement solutions. Case in point, he’d sent a mystery solution down to Navarro to act as fuel, and now they were apparently going to use it in the dimension-hopper.

“Physics, I need an answer,” Doctor snapped.

“Fucking — I say you’ve got a margin of 10 Kelvins, and if I’m wrong, don’t blame me!”

Lucian flinched, because that tone coming from Lakshmi meant she was making a vaguely educated guess. “Wait—” he said, but Navarro was already laughing.

[unravelingwires]

Nodalized

Lakshmi scowled at her calculations. This was going nowhere.

The thing was, she knew the issue. She’d boiled her hypotheses into models she could test, and in doing so, simplified a little. Usually, this was fine: it was rare, even in physics, that you needed to account for literally every variable. It was also rare that you were traveling between dimensions, each of which had their own rules, with a group of absolutely useless soft-science assholes who expected you to predict what would happen when they blew up top-of-the-line spaceship engines given random modifications by the kind of engineer who felt the need to give his mechanical ants proper eusocial colony structures.

“Physics, I need an answer,” Cap yelled.

“Fucking — I say you’ve got a margin of 10 Kelvins, and if I’m wrong, don’t blame me!”

“Wait—” Lucian started, but he was cut of by ‘Neering’s mildly manic laughter.