#(this ones stupidly 2013 but i LOVE IT i eat it up every time)

[sludgeguzzler]

Rereading that one dirkjake fic where dirk is an imortal apostle to apollo and jake is a time traveler (my crack cocaine)

[jeanbie]

WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU #3 ★ masterlist.

pairing: armin x reader

genre: fake dating au, modern au | wc: 1.5k

⏤ Imagine the first time they say I love you. Imagine them bursting forth in the middle of a laugh, childish in their enthusiasm but shocking enough to silence all sound.

There are times where Armin looks back on his life and regrets it all.

Times when he cheated on tests, times when he overreacted in an argument with his friends. Times when he had pushed his grandfather further and further away from him, and times when he stupidly, stupidly fell in love with his childhood friend.

Although at the time, it was something that even he couldn't have even predicted. To be frank, Armin can’t quite remember the exact moment when he came down to the conclusion that he was in love. Love. He had never expected to fall in love so soon, let alone with you.

Love- something that is enormous and unavoidable. Something that makes up a whole relationship, something that leaves butterflies swarming in your stomach, something that leaves you with a warm sensation pooling out into a smile every time they walk into a room you’re already in. His parents had been in love, once. The thought of him falling in love, though…it terrified him.

But, it had happened. So unpredictably and unexpectedly that Armin didn’t know what had hit him until it was all too late, and at entirely the wrong time. His handful of regrets surrounding you started to pile up, reaching high for the sky, all from the moment you first stepped into his life. The moment you asked if you could sit by him during lunch, to the moment you kissed his knee better when he fell off the swing at the park. Armin knows for certain this time that the moment where things started to go wrong was the moment- the exact hour, minute, second- that you had uttered those words that haunt him: “I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend.”

Originally, he had refused. To jeopardise a friendship like that…he couldn't risk losing you to it. But, noticing the way your eyes seemed to beg without words, and the way you meant what you said about him being the only one good enough to pretend with, the only one you want to pretend with. The boy doesn’t know what came over him but all that matters was that he said yes, without ever really doubting it again.

Until today.

A bundle of blankets surrounded the lovers as you sit, comfortably, in the lap of your ‘boyfriend’. A cheek snug against your temple, you shift slightly to angle yourself perfectly towards the television at the front of the room. Across sits Eren and his girlfriend of three years and Jean and his girlfriend of two months. Both couples watch cautiously from the corners of their eyes as Armin raises both arms to let you settle between his legs, a perplexed look upon his features, a crimson heat on his cheeks.

“You’re so uncomfortable,” you huff, finally setting with your body sideways between him. As he raises a brow to argue, you add: “you’re too squishy that everywhere I move to, I’m too comfortable that it makes me uncomfortable.”

He sighs, “you’re so picky. Sit somewhere else then-”

“Why would I want to sit anywhere else?” you respond. “When I’ve got my boyfriend as my body pillow?”

A small, almost smug, smile appears on Armin’s lips as you settle once again. “That’s true. Sorry, Eren…anime body pillows are so 2013-”

“That was one time!” the friend argues, and Armin is partly distracted whilst you settle between his legs, a hand gingerly placed on his leg as you push yourself up, rubbing all the wrong places, hair in his mouth, feet touching underneath the blanket.

“Guys,” Jean proposes, “we should get some snacks for the movie. Pizza, anybody?”

A chorus of cheers erupts in the room as the boy rises to a stand, followed by his lover who mutters something about the menu on the counter. Then, Eren’s girlfriend rises from the couch to rush after Jean- “please get pineapple pizza!” “who the FUCK eats pineapple on pizza?”, followed by Eren standing up and yelling, “me!”-. as if by coincidence, the room begins to empty until it is only you and Armin, alone, in the living room. You barely register the fact, still trying to get comfortable.

“God damn, have you got the TV remote wedged down your pants?” you joke, and Armin whines, holding your hips as you rise and move to a less compromising position.

“Stop moving and it might go away!” he pesters. “It’s embarrassing for me, too, you know.”

“I’m sure,” you sigh. “It’s poking me, Armin-”

Armin can’t help but laugh and taunt- “Just like good old times.”

Eren’s girlfriend and the man himself peek their heads around the kitchen doorframe, watching as you scoff and turn in his lap. She squeezes Eren’s arm with anticipation when you almost straddle Armin’s lap and his hands, as if on instinct, come to hold your thighs, a grin on his face, his eyes bright and wide.

“You did not just say that,” you seethe, jokingly of course, and he knows this. It's a show. The grin only widens and he pouts, pawing your thighs with his hands.

“I think I did, babe,” he answers quietly. For a split second, a shocked look masks your features and Armin has minimal time for it to give him a kick. Rather quickly, he finds himself laughing as your lips upturn to a wide-mouthed grin, a baffled yet amused scoff leaving where your voice should. He pauses, although he can’t move anyways, in his movements as you turn in his lap, crotch over his thighs, grasping at his hands which extend over his head as he attempts to move away.

“You’re such an asshole,” you mutter, and Armin lets out a large laugh, releasing his hands from your fists and quickly, and tactfully, embraces you with his arms, grinning up at you. To be honest, he hasn’t actually realised the raunchiness of your position on his thigh, but, even if he had noticed, he wouldn’t be the first to complain.

“You love it,” he reminds sweetly.

“No, I don’t.”

“Sure you do!”

“Nope.”

“Come on, don’t lie. It’s just us here.”

“Armin,” you murmur, “the guys are in the other room…”

He hums thoughtfully, “they can’t hear us.” But he totally knows Eren and his girlfriend are watching from the kitchen doorframe. To them, this only looks like an ordinary scene between the two of you- play fighting isn’t limited to couples and trust me, Eren has seen this happen plenty of times before. What’s new about it? Upon thinking of that, the boy beneath you begins to panic internally, wondering if at any point of the night they have caught on. It’s not like they didn’t already doubt your relationship, anyways…it was rather sudden, and nobody expected it to actually happen.

Thinking quick, Armin sighs and looks back up at you, his thumbs smoothing crescent moons in your lower back, and a quiet hum slips from his throat.

“I love you,” he says. No, admits- no, declares.

The silence that follows is painful. But, Armin doesn’t mind; the way your lips part in pure shock and the way your cheeks burn to a sangria shade makes it somehow worth it, and after that, he can’t stop the bubble of laughter that leaves his lips: “didn’t you hear me? I love you. I love you!”

“Hey,” you manage out, squirming as his fingers run across your skin in a tickling motion. “Yeah, hey! Stop! C-cut it out!”

“I love you, I love you, I love you-”

“I love you too!” you breathe, gasping for air until he stops, promptly falling still: “I love you too.”

It’s later, now.

Roughly 2 hours after Eren announces that he has a “food baby” that needs tending to, Armin thought that was a good time to leave with his hand in yours, tackling the December breeze as it bites at your skin. The journey home is short and painless- only with a few sentences of him nagging you for not wearing something warmer. Eventually, though, the snow thaws and your feet arrive at the three steps up to your front porch, Armin’s hand lingering on your lower back as you turn to face him: “tonight went perfectly.”

Then, he nods, “right?”

“We had them fooled,” you grin, over the moon. “Honestly, thanks so much. You’re saving my life here.”

He is? “I am?”

You nod, “of course.” Even though a silence falls, you sigh and glance up at him, “what you’re doing for me…it’s a lot to ask. I’m really thankful, Armin. You’re an amazing friend.”

He winces, almost. “Anytime. Anything for you,” he replies.

Bringing you into a hug was easy. Saying goodbye with a simple kiss on the cheek was easy, too. 

But watching you leave with his heart in his throat, knowing that nothing will ever be the same again, was something Armin had little ease in doing.

[keelymewett]

Zombie Movie: World War Z (2013)

... did this movie predict 2020?

Okay let’s just get into roasting it why not.

We begin with our classic American (when I say American I’m referring to USA) zombie movie opening: news reports. These ones are pretty cool, we follow the descent from good news to climate change to things dying to oh now we’re having a zombie apocalypse. Honestly, with how 2020 is going I wouldn’t be surprised if that was our grand finale too. 

Karin (which is sooo close to Karen almost predicted that too) is played by Mireille Enos, who is my favourite mum character, who was the mum in If I Stay. She’s a legend - she full on kicks a zombie until it gets out the car. 

Watching the opening my one wish was for no one to die, because I like Gerry (Brad Pitt wait this is Brad Pitt??) and Karin and their kids and pretty much every character we meet, but this is a zombie movie so that’s an unrealistic expectation but... no spoilers but watch it and see for yourself. 

Gerry (which is so close to Jerry which would’ve been funny. Don’t know why just think Jerry’s a funny name for the lead of a zombie movie, considering like Ben and Jerry’s the soft, sweet ice cream) is incredibly smart, and worked for the UN which is a new thing for a zombie movie. Not quite sure exactly what he did in the UN - I don’t think I was paying enough attention - something to do with science? But yeah dude is observant. 

For example, the second I saw Subway Sam (a toy that makes noise) I thought that’s so stupidly dumb I hate this toy especially when it started making noise, but then Subway Sam came in handy. The counting to 12? Such a cool aspect. It gives us a time limit to know if you’re infected, which Gerry uses multiple times. 

Things it kinda predicted? 

- The wall. Need I say more. Given, it’s in another country, but it’s the thought that counts. 

- World War 3. Remember when that was a worry? Yeah feels like years ago but that was just January this year. 

- And a virus. Won’t say more on that

Random things kinda out of context

Okay so a big point of this movie is Gerry travelling around the world to different countries. First of all, how does he do it so quick? Secondly, they go to South Korea at one point and for some reason, there was not a single Korean person? In fact, the only Korean people we saw in South Korea was in a flashback when a guy bit a doctor. That’s it. And this is where I’m confused - why is there an American army base in Korea? Is that just a thing? Does America just have random army bases in every country even if there isn’t an active war there? Embassies I get, but military bases? 

“He turned in ten minutes. That doesn’t sound viral to me at allll.” ... That’s sarcasm, right? Because as current experience has proven, incubation periods can be 2 weeks. Gentlefriends that 20,160 minutes. In comparison, 10 minutes is pretty bloody viral.

So the clause of these zombies is that there needs to be a bite, and no teeth = no infection (they said in North Korea they removed everyones teeth in 24 hours and the spread stopped. Real confused on the logistics of that but I digress). But... isn’t it just saliva getting into the bloodstream? So you could like... spit on an open wound and it’d do the trick? I’m just saying, this isn’t I Am Legend, the zombies aren’t vampires. The bite isn’t the transmission, the saliva is (saliva coats teeth ergo). All I’m saying is, I’m preettyy sure you could still infect someone. I mean, look at 2020, no one’s biting each other and infection’s still spreading. 

“There’s only one way we’re getting you on that plane, and it’s quietly.” *aggressively squeaking bikes*

The “I got you captain” really hurt what the heck. 

Also, they don’t know where it started. Like how? Because it spread fast? I’m pretty sure it would’ve made news headlines in a certain country first if people started eating each other. 

The movie poster scene - yeah the one with the zombies climbing over the wall

We jump over to Israel, where the guy in charge says, “Every human being we save is one less zombie to fight.” This guy’s a thinker. 

So you’ve built a wall. And now you celebrate. With loud music. And the zombies climb over the said wall attracted to the sound. I can tell this is an American movie because despite this scene being set in Israel this is some American level of bullshit. 

ALSO, WHO BUILDS A WALL WITHOUT WATCH TOWERS?? HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DEFEND THE WALL IF YOU CAN’T SEE OVER ON THE OTHER SIDE??? I love how this helicopter randomly shows up as the zombies start climbing over because WHERE WERE YOU EARLIER AND WHY WEREN’T YOU PATROLLING THE OUTSIDE WALL YOU DUMBASS. 

My proposal to disaster movies

After watching 2012, I would like to propose: storing extra fuel inside the plane and being able to refuel from inside. It just seems super convenient especially considering how intense those refuelling scenes get. 

Re: the ending (spoilers? ahoy) 

The first time I watched World War Z I knew they’d succeed so I literally skipped the whole tension bit leading up to him testing the “cure.” Watching it again I was very tempted to do that again but I forced myself to sit through it even though it kinda feels like it drags. For instance, no one besides like the scientist that was supposed to save us and that army guy died, therefore I’m not afraid of anyone dying therefore tension lost. Also, because no one died and there’s literally 20 minutes left, you can already tell it’s going to work, so this scene feels like it drags out for no reason. I dunno might just be a me thing.

And that’s that on that. Final zombie movie is Train to Busan, which is the best zombie movie I’ve ever watched. That should be up tomorrow for Halloween. I was going to do a couple more zombie movies, but I’ll save those for another time. In case you’re curious, I’ve watched American (USA), British, Australian and Korean zombie movies. If you have any recommendations, especially if there’s any South American, African, Middle Eastern or Central European zombie movies, I’m super interested in hearing them! 

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Karen Russell (2013)

THE SCARECROW THAT WE FOUND lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the “I” states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was how it worked in TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I couldn’t remember (my brain stole this image from the seven-grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist too, copying its homework).

This mission had nothing to do with us or with our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, bag ladies with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by the wraith white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was currently covered with a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a series of interlocking dicks spray painted to the scale of Picasso’s Guernica by Anthem’s tenth-grade graffiti kings; it had policemen, bus drivers, crossing guards; dolls were sold in stores.

And we were city boys. We lived in projects that were farm antonyms, these truly shitbox apartments. If flowers bloomed on our sooty sills, it must have been because of some plant Stockholm syndrome, a love our sun did not deserve. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broomin a Bermuda shirt, a broomwith acne, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts — once I’d heard a bag boy joke that it was there to spook the divorcees. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled the Food Lion scarecrow. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.

“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look — ” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese.

Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.”

“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo.

And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. It regarded its own innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.

I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw: dark gold and chlorophyll green strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside of him, I wondered — how long had it been inside of him? I looked up, searching the boy scarecrow for a rip. A cold eel-like feeling was thrashing in my belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a U.S. soldier calmly watching blood spill from his head. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes was lost behind the sticky pink sheet. The camera closed in; a second later the footage switched to the trees of a new country under an ammonia blue sky. I couldn’t understand this — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting his face dissolve into calm?

“Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.

“Nah, we better not.” Juan Carlos looked around the woods sharply; he looked up, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the pin oak. “What if this” — he pushed at the doll — “belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us…”

It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine — a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep — that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chip bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) had turned the Cone into a sort of sylvan garbage can. The tree spread above it like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.

Years ago, before we started loitering here in a dedicated way, the pin oak had been planted to commemorate an Event — there was an opal plaque nestled in its roots. We knew this much but we didn’t know more — some delinquent, teenaged forefather of ours had scratched out everything but the date, “1957.”

The plaque looked like a lost little moon in the grip of the tree’s arachnid roots. I always felt a little cheated by the plaque; it was a confusing kind of resentment; I didn’t really care about the “why” of the tree at all but I didn’t like how this plaque was an open secret either, a mystery that was always itching at us. It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?) Forgetting was one of my favorite things to do at Camp Dark; I felt like a squid, sending jets of inky thoughts into the Cone. The plaque was illegible, but the oak’s glossy trunk was covered in gougings that you could easily read: V hearts K; Death 2 Asshole Jimmy Dingo; Jesus Saves; I Wuz Here!!! We’d added ourselves:

MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

The “deep end” of Friendship Park we called Camp Dark. Camp Dark was Anthem’s lame try at an urban arboretum, a sort of surprise woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. These central acres of Friendship Park were filled with young deciduous trees and naive-seeming bluish squirrels. They chittered some charming bullshit at you too, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the true woods, which were about an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown, according to Juan Carlos — only Juan Carlos had been out there. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it,” was all we got out of him.)

Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: All the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poopstrewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular winter destination for geese and ducks but which had for some reason fallen out of fashion in the waterfowl society; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables — “pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, horrifying us, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really had tricked a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

We’d started hanging at Friendship Park four years ago, when we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games.We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a stupidly huge plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the pin oak, including a Sounds of Warfare Blazer that as I recall required something like sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a female guinea pig putting a brave face on her tuberculosis. Those were innocent times. Then we got shunted into Anthem’s combo middle-and-high school, and now we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. (“We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”)

Participation levels varied, but usually it was the core four of us at Camp Dark: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me — this was my own kindergarten trick to express a violent unhappiness. She left the room and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all of my folders. I answered to RUBIO, just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold onto the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase. Latching into pure space.

The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He had pale glass eyes and a molded wax or plastic face; under his faded brown shirt his “skin” was machine-sewn sackcloth, straw stuffed. So: He had a scarecrow’s body but a boy’s head. I took a step forward and punched his torso, which was solid as a bale of hay; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. I looked down — I was standing on a snarl of his guts. Would a scarecrow’s organs look like this? I wondered. Like birds’ nests. A grass kidney, a flammable heart. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the scarecrow didn’t cry out, I wanted to scream for him.

“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you put it here then, Ainsworth.”

“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

“Shut up.”

“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

Juan Carlos was jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, trying to cram it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh too, but I was scared, scared. The straw was scary to me, its pale colors and its smell. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs. Put it all back, Juan, I thought hopefully, and we’ll be OK.

“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo held the scarecrow’s left hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom.

“I mean, usually,” he added lamely, as if this were a normal topic to solicit our opinions on, the prevalence of scarecrow fingers.

“His body is soft.” Gus demonstrated this for us, punching it. “But his face is, like, a wax? Not-straw. Some other shit. Plastic.”

Only it wasn’t generic, like a mall mannequin. Even the dark blue eye color looked particular, familiar. His features were weird and specific, like the face of a wax actress in a museum. Someone you were supposed to recognize.

“What the hell?” Gus whispered, twisting the scarecrow’s face by its plastic chin. The chin was pocked with a fiery braille of blemishes and cuts, so convincingly nasty that you half expected them to ooze. The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I really the only one who remembered his name?

“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos ran a long finger down the scarecrow’s crooked nose.

“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now that I knew who this was I was afraid to touch his face, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

“His face is hard,” Mondo confirmed, knocking on the scarecrow’s forehead. “His eyes are…uh-oh. Oops.”

Mondo turned to us, grinning.

“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

“I can’t. The little threads broke.” Mondo held out the eyes: two grape-sized balls, an amethyst glass soaked blue by the last light of day. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?” Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. It was dusk, sunset; the park was now officially closed. “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding a little panicky now. “Anybody got glue or something?”

I stared at the sprigs of thread where the scarecrow’s eyes had been. Now his face was putty white from the “T” of his nose to his forehead. A little firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

Then I heard the question I’d been dreading: “Don’t we know this kid?”

Now Mondo stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s eyes with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — his mind was lost inside one of those baby-fat faces that he couldn’t seem to age out of, with big slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint, although outside of school Mondo could get pretty annoyingly energetic. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something.We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

In fact, as a “we,” Camp Dark was pretty fiercely uninterested in the details of its members’ lives outside of school or beyond the fenced urban woods of Friendship Park. Silence policed the shady meeting point under our oak. I didn’t know, for example, if Juan Carlos’s big sister was pregnant or just getting large on Hershey’s Kisses, or how Mondo got the yellowish bruises that covered his flabby upper arms. Inside of our “we,” nobody would ask you about your ma’s cancer or your alcoholic aunt, your moon-eyed half sister, your family’s debts, nobody commented on the emotions that might fly across your face and raise your fists and nobody demanded a bullshit weather report from you either, a reason for your anger — not like the teachers, who were always demanding that sort of phony meteorology from us. We cracked jokes together in Camp Dark, but I think it was the silence, all those unasked questions, that bound us. At school we beat down kids as a foursome and this too we did in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the red-brick Science Building — this march could look a little medieval, like some Gallows Day parade, each of us taking up an arm or a leg — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. For us, this process was a necessary evil. We were like four factory guys, manufacturing the quiet, a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble around our fists like glue.

It was Mondo who cracked the mystery. He didn’t solve it, I don’t mean that — in fact he made the mystery much worse. That’s what I pictured anyhow, when Mondo tapped the mystery with his little eureka! hammer — hairline cracks appearing in a round, solid shell. Yolk came oozing out of the mystery, covering all of our hands, so that we became involved.

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels and let out a bee-stung cry. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a step away from the tree.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand lost in the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

Then Mondo, grinning loonily like a Jeopardy! champ, grabbed the scarecrow’s left arm by the wrist and made it shake hands with the cold air between us. “Don’t you assholes remember him? Eric Mutis.”

Sure, we remembered him now: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried by Coach Leyshon from the room. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October of the previous year, a transfer kid. One day Mutant was sitting in the back row of our homeroom; the teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey, and generally the teachers made the New Boy or the New Girl parade their strangeness for us; but Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, much weirder even than the Guatemalan New Boy, Eric Mutis arrived in exile. He sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his oblivion, his froggy lashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Jilly Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a harpy. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Jilly, thrilling us with her acid tone, and only Eric Mutis would blink his large, bovine eyes at her and say, “I don’t smell it, Jilly,” in that voice like thin bluemilk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, incapable of shame. Even then, at age twelve, before our glands made us all swell into monsters, I felt allergic to the kid. His ugliness panned into a weird calm, and this combination was like a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

The courts, the grass behind them — that was where Camp Dark came to order. We did what you might call these “alterations” on the blacktop. At recess we’d descend on Eric Mutis like deranged tailors, trailing these little threads of Eric’s spittle and Eric’s blood. But his costume — the smoggy yellow cloud of his hair, his sickly bus-terminal complexion — it was his skin. We could not free him, we could not torch the costume off him. He wouldn’t change, no matter how often we encouraged him to do so with our insults and the instruction of our “pranks” and fists. We stole his Hoops sneakers, hung them up on the flagpole, we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times that year, his hideous glasses, with frames the width of my TV set; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same eyesore frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops sneakers, fresh from the Starmart box. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his blue bubblegum, and what we called “Anthem cologne” — like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stunk of diesel and fried doughnut grease and the sweet, fecal waft off manhole covers.

“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was our blood actually, but his voice and his monotone blue eyes made me furious. “WAKE UP!” I backed away to give Gus space to deliver an encore kick. “Listen, Mutant: DO…NOT…WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutant seemed terribly oblivious of his own appearance — that was the problem — he wore that stuff witlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we took Eric Mutis around behind the red-brick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. The school bathroom was tiled, naval blue for boys, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john; I’d cracked younger kids’ skulls on those tiles before. Eric the Mute knew this much about me — that was the one lesson he took.

“Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him.

More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, which was his baseball signal to the rest of us that he’d lost it, his patience with our dithering voices, his faith in debate fertilizing an action. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here — ”

“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? One way to learn what he is supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

“But, Gus.” I swallowed. “What if something does come to Anthem?”

“Well, Rubby…” Gus shrugged. “Then we’ll have some fascinating new information about this scarecrow, won’t we?”

We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? Not crows, that was for sure; but what was the Anthem equivalent, the urban crow? Rabid cats? A flock of mob gunmen, or sewer rats? Those poor Canada geese that kept getting sucked into the engines of jet planes at the Anthem airport? (That one was my idea.) What could a doll of a child scare away, a freak like Mutant?

The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.

“I’m with Larry. I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore, either,” said Mondo. “To cut him down. What if something really bad happens? It would be our fault.”

Juan Carlos nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic…”

Juan was still enumerating his understandable concerns when Gus, who had fallen quiet, walking around the tree and finishing everybody’s brews, stood up. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens. Down went Eric.

“GUS!”

We stood up just as the scarecrow shucked the oak permanently, and plummeted into the sky.Watching him go over, I felt dread without a drop of surprise — it felt like we were watching a horror movie that we’d seen a thousand times before, The Scarecrow of Eric Mutis Dives Into the Cone! I can still see the stars swarming around the pin oak and Gus sawing at the rope, Gus giving Eric Mutis’s doll a little push — joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swingset — the plaque catching at him like a stumbling stone, illegibly flashing, the doll launching over the roots, headfirst, into a night that shrank him, into the Cone’s collapsing sky, the doll falling and falling and then, not. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event — because the doll fell fast — but the doll’s descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown, his limbs all scrambled on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves and strata of our glass. Had it lost more straw? Black plants waved down there and I couldn’t tell which weeds might have belonged to the scarecrow. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.

“OK,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”

We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building. Awnings sprouted above all of the windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood on the dirty tarmac of the sidewalk, bathed in a deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment — but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet — a moth, watching the four of us from above, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries underneath the green air. It occurred to me that, given the lifespan of a moth, one kid’s twitch would occupy a year of insect time. The scarecrow of Eric Mutis would have twirled down for moth aeons.

“What the hell is so funny, kid?” the doorman shouted. I had been spawning a slow smile on my face, imagining the decades of moth time going by as my smile grew: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, sleigh bells ring, Mr. Moth, here comes spring…

That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital “T,” this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did — I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind — I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Camp Dark, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.

I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where? I tied myself to mental train tracks, juxtaposing my activities against Eric Mutis’s imaginary ones — was he blowing out twisty red and white birthday candles, doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your Popple, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow and I divided into two.

But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.

Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow of Eric Mutis in Friendship Park. It lay there in the sun, sleeping it off. Nothing much happened. There was a mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds flew out of exile, no new shapes came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us, I thought angrily, like a cut power line. Drowned in air, like the world’s stupidest experiment.

Had Eric Mutis’s scarecrow been babysitting a crop? Some Jersey version of the Amish seven grains? Years of city trash and plastic guns, that was Camp Dark’s harvest. I thought of the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face, the rocks and cans glowing like blind fish in the ravine.

“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”

“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”

“Where did he move to again?”

“Old Mucusoid never said — did he? He just disappeared.”

At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal” — the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. His yearbook slot was an empty navy egg between the school-mandated grimaces of Omar Mowad and Valerie Night. ABSENT, it read in red letters. We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face deep in a vending-machine cheeseburger behind the dugout.

“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry — his top drawer contained about five million pointless green pencils, a Note to Moi! memo, in pen, that read BUY PENCIL SHARPENER, and a radiant mélange of glues.

Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library, Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms — we thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called. Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him.

Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”

Again the yellow pages got consulted. This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy — some modern Mary Shelley? An artist, a child taxidermist? We looked for ridiculous things: SCARECROW REPAIR, WAX KIDS.

I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts — because what if he wasmaking scarecrows of us? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, baldman in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. This Gus learned on his twentieth revolution around the workshop, at which time the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a friendly wave, and told Gus that he had just telephoned the police.

“Great,” sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”

“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a lion, bro!” Mondo grumbled. Often Mondo’s reactions would miss the mark entirely and slam into a non sequitur, as if his rage were a fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.

“Chu, you have a brain defect.” Gus stared at him. “Something that cannot be helped.”

“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”

“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I’m walking to the bus, and I see Mutant in Vice Principal Derry’s office. Through that window that faces the parking lot, right? And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking pissed, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug — ” I could see it too, Mutant’s leech white face behind the glass, I had seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed in Derry’s leather chair, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked…bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”

“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.

“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”

This too was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.

Gus hadn’t stopped frowning — it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”

“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”

“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”

“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re right! That was a great movie!”

Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad…wasn’t it? Dressing like he was on welfare and shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”

I almost laughed at that — the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.

Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already an hour late for songs with Miss Verazain in Music I, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved.

That day we were set to sing some classical stuff, words floating uselessly on the surge of one of those “B” or “C” composers, Bach or maybe Chopin, these dead men whose songs sawed through time with violins and uncorked a forest to let a soft green light flood out, and into the voices of my friends — back then I would have said that Music I calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it. But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I twisted on my pillow and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for him, lashing my body to the pin oak and eating horsey fistfuls of a bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: squeamish, furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing lemming quick under the oaks of Camp Dark.

“Eric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my own ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at night and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? A squirrel watched me with an aggravating fearlessness as I entered Camp Dark, scratching its chest fur like a man in a soiled little shirt. I kicked it away and got on my knees and held on to the oak’s roots like my bike’s handlebars, peering down into the Cone.

“Oh my God.”

Whatever had attacked the scarecrow in the night had been big enough to tear his arm off at the root. Green and beige straw spewed out of the hole. You’re next, you’re next, you’re next, my heart screamed. I straightened and ran and I didn’t slow down until I passed under the stone arch of Friendship Park and saw the violet-gray speck at the bottom of the hill that became the glass umbrella of the #22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music I, where all of my friends were doing their do re mi work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.

“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Miss Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”

“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.

There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated — we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot “the bull’s eye,” so that you could shoot it:

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

We’d grinned and our four bodies in our white gym shirts made a grin too, where we’d gathered in the witchy grass of the back-lot ball field. We were up to our knees in the grass, advancing. Two halves of a circle. We didn’t corner the kid, Mutis, we made actual lips around him. From above we would have looked like a mouth, closing. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the field, and gave no sign of understanding it.

“You’re it,” I’d explained to Eric.

Everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.

“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He had a long stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. Long fingers brushed at the oatmeal of wet newspapers that covered his cheeks.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no doll.”

“One week ago,” I prodded, but you could tell that this unit didn’t mean much to the guy. He had amassed a slippery skin of newspapers on his legs with headlines from early August.

All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, the red playground foam looked like a giant’s dental equipment. We marched forward. I wasn’t the oldest or the tallest but I was the leader now, and why? Just because I knew the bad scene waiting for us behind the treeline. And, in fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on. I had some brewing theories, nothing I was ready to voice, about why the scarecrow had arrived in our city. It is a very good thing that we elect our presidents in America, I thought, because this had to be the wrong basis for picking a leader — if I was at this particular moment the best informed about the danger we were heading toward, I was also the worst scared.

“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”

“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno. I dunno.” Each word crawled like a gray mouse up the bars of my ribs to my throat. Mice dug their pink claws into my belly and my heart. (Could mice have done that to the scarecrow of Eric Mutis? Chewed off and carried away a whole arm? Could ants? Maybe the threat was multiple, pestilential, and smaller than I’d thought.)

Hypothesis 1: A human is doing this.

Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, are doing this. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums or something, the waddlesome undertakers of the park.

Hypothesis 3: This is being done by…Something Else.

But when we reached the Cone and they peered over the edge — I hung back, leaning on the oak — everybody started to laugh. Hysterically, a belly-clutching laugh, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was shocked. “Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, shit, that is a good one, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with a gloomy jealousy.

“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”

Eyes were rolling at me in a semicircle. I found myself thinking of Eric the Mute, Eric the Mutant, and what we must have looked like to him.

“Wait — ” I rolled my wet eyes back at them. “You think I did that?” Everybody nodded at me with a strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down into the Cone on a stolen phys ed rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the moon hanging over Anthem in a crescent, its light washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket; I watched myself approach the doll in the reeds, the doll that had been waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by the real Eric Mutis’s; I heard the doll’s right arm ripping away as I grunted the knife into the fabric, the moon shining on, the world watching us out of one slit eye, like a cat, a cracked Anthem stray. And then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried the arm out of the park in my book bag?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes…”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry retched again, listening to my friends’ peals of laughter echo around Camp Dark. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching — like disgorging my claims of innocence and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.” My lungs filled with and expelled this relief, which I knew would only last as long as we could loft the joke. After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. It was like a thunderhead, a stampede — sound poured all over us. We blinked at each other, under the laughter, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to…Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the treeline, city buses were wheezing a cargoload of citizens to and from work. Some of these were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self improvement book, on a two-hour commute to her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. I could not stop talking now, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“Rubio? Why… ,” Juan Carlos said slowly, picking around my body like an Inquisitor, “…the hell…are you telling us this?”

I was staring down at the scarecrow’s shredded body. A gash down his back had hemorrhaged a dirty-looking straw. A golden bird was hopping around down there, pecking and pecking. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought, watching the bird savagely tease out straw from the old hole.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s hands were gone. Both of them. I pictured the white fingers crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new and incognito life somewhere, perhaps with a family of unwitting tarantulas in New Mexico. Eric Mutis, the real Eric, he too could be living in a painted desert now, with a new father or a new guardian. Or in a mountain town, maybe. Living at a ludicrous altitude, his body half eaten by the charcoal clouds of Aspen. By the sea. In Salamanca, Spain. In a cold cottage on the moon.

By Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both coruscating Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. We’d stolen Eric Mutis’s Hoops maybe a dozen times last year, we stole Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair enraged me. The “H” logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor! Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for jerking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “How did you get out of the Cone with two shoes in your hands? This is some Cirque du Soleil bullshit! You got to try out for the Olympics.” He checked the backs of my arms for fresh nets of scrapes. “What, are you flying down there?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly. I was getting hoarse from saying that. I realized with a grim shock that I was leaning against the oak in exactly the spot where we’d found Mutis’s scarecrow.

“Maybe,” I said in a whisper, “we can fish him up…? Hook him out? Maybe we can get down there and, and bury it.”

“Are you crying, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” But they were the actors — believing their easy suspicion, pretending that I was the guy to blame. OnlyMondo would let me see his smile tremble, and I felt a little better, thinking hard at him: Mondo, whatever’s happening down there, I am not behind it, OK?

On Thursday, his second arm was gone. Ripped whole, presumably, from the cloth shoulder, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow. Not-it, not-it, not-it, I’d been thinking all week, a thorny little crown of thoughts.

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

Not it! I worried I was about to ralph again.

“You bet,” I said. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On a Saturday, after we discovered that the doll’s legs had disappeared — the scarecrow was starting to look like a disintegrating jack-o-lantern, pulpy and crushed, with a sallow vegetable pallor. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we left the scarecrow where it was, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

Afterward we walked very slowly across the park toward my ma’s apartment on First and Stuckey, where we lived in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us until our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the URGENT CARE parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, suitor food, a relic from my ma’s last live-in boyfriend — was it Curtis Black? Manny Somebody? Which one had been the jerky lover? As the son, I got to be on a first name basis with all of these adult men, all of her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I do think we need to go down into the Cone,” I started babbling again, “and bury him. What’s left of him. Please, you guys. I really, really think we need to do that.”

“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They already had a good answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic formy friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. We’ll be the scarecrow’s scarecrow, haha… ,” I gulped, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly…”

Mondo winced and snapped the TV on.

“Nice try, Rubby!” Gus crunched through a taco shell. The pepper specks that covered the yellow shell looked exactly like the blackheads on Gus’s broad nose. “Oh, I bet you’d love that. Nighttime. Phase Two of your prank. Get us all good in Camp Dark. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, kid — what sort of Friday the Thirteenth ending you got planned for us. But we are not just going to walk into it, Rubby.”

It felt like we sat there for hours before somebody asked: “What the hell are we watching?” Nobody had noticed or commented when the station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient, crappy RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and little rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic to me than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom comedy families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. My apartment was as silent as the rainbowed screen; with the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio! What the fuck we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

For three days, little pieces of the doll of Eric Mutis continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric’s scarecrow that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half of the scarecrow was gone; with a sickening lurch I understood that it was too late now, that we were never going to tell anyone about him. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe that it had been a doll of Eric Mutis.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice, gazing down at the quartered scarecrow. In the Cone, his light spring-and-autumn straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. His naked head was still attached to the sack of his torso, both of these elements of Eric Mutis intact and ghoulishly white.

“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”

I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’m still not sure how that silence overtook us. How did we know that we’d missed our window to tell an outsider about the scarecrow? Why didn’t we at least discuss it — bringing the police to Friendship Park, or even V.P. Derry? This might have been an option last week but now, as mysteriously as the parts themselves had disappeared, it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.

That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a little ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. It was me, I realized, that they were afraid of. All of the laughter at my “prank” had fizzled out. I was afraid of my friends — terrified that they might actually be onto something.

“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.

“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.

“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”

Hypothesis 4.

I think this knowledge sat on the top of my mind for days and days. But it must have been unswallowed, undigested, like a little white bolus of food on a tongue — because I didn’t exactly know it. Not yet.

“I think we made him,” I told Mondo that night on the phone. I don’t know how, I don’t mean that we, like, stitched him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason…”

“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready — ” He hung up.

About the static — sometimes that was all you could see in Eric Mutis’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth, two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. The overriding feeling I had at these times was that I couldn’t stop hitting him — OK, I shouldn’t be hitting him at all, I’d think, but if I stop I’ll make things worse. The right light would return to his eyes and he would know what I had been doing. Stopping the punishing rhythm, without any warning, I’d risk waking him from a dream. Me too, I’d wake up breathless. Somehow I swear it really did feel like that, like I had to keep right on hitting him, to protect him, and me, from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my own wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.

Only one time did anybody stop us. “Leave him alone,” said a voice approaching from the awning of the Science Building. We all turned. Eric Mutant, breathing quietly in the weeds below us, rolled his eyes toward the voice.

“You heard me,” the voice repeated, and, miraculously, we had. We stopped. The four of us followed Mutis’s example, and froze. This voice belonged to our librarian, Mrs. Kauder, a woman whose red lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.

Somebody wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve, a decoy swipe. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. The librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — every one of us except for Eric she had known in elementary school.

“Now you go back to your homerooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from a book. “Now you go to Math, Gus Ainsworth — ” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell. “Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio…” Her voice was as nasally as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.

“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “That is a no-no! We do not treat each other that way…” She finished with a liquidy rattle, so that you could almost see the half-sunk moon of her optimism bobbing up and down inside the sentence (this librarian was a forty-year veteran of her carrels and I think that light was going out).

“Now you, Eric Mutis,” the librarian said softly. “You come with me.”

And here’s the thing: That was just a Wednesday. That was nowhere near the worst of what we did to this kid, Mutis. I think we needed the librarian to keep reading us her story of our lives, her good script of who we were and our activities, for every minute of every day — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.

“Do you think Eric is alive?” I asked Mondo. We were alone in Camp Dark; Juan Carlos had improbably gotten a job as a Food Lion bag boy and Gus was out with some chick.

Mondo looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked. Even the junior size of the Choco-Slurpo contained a swimming pool of pudding. The junior was like the idiot adult son of the gargantuan “jumbo.”

“Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead.” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.

“Well, what if he died? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”

“Maybe he still lives right around the corner! Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up! Is that it, Larry?” he asked, offering me the fudgy backwaters of the Choco-Slurpo.When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid. “Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”

“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the junior cup into the Cone, our trash can of yore, momentarily forgetting that the Cone was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak; not new, judging from its scarred and etiolated look, but new to us:

ERIC MUTIS

SATURDAY

The letters oozed beneath an apple green sap and were childishly shaped; the kid had pierced the heart with a little arrow.When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart raced in such a way that my own death seemed a likely possibility. Mayday, God! O God, I prayed: Please, if I am going to die, may it happen before Mondo Chu attempts CPR.

“Look!” Mondo was screaming. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant was here! Mutant had a girlfriend!”

So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.

Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I set foot in Mutant’s bedroom: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom. “You think this will fit you, Larry?” Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized. “Uh-huh.”

“You better now, Larry?”

“Terrific. Extra super.” I was, in fact, almost out of my mind with embarrassment — I had been riding my bicycle on the suburban side of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when I felt a fierce pain in my side and I went flying over the handlebars — I landed a little way from my bicycle, where I sat in the street watching the front bicycle tire spinning maniacally with a pebble in my fist that turned out to be my tooth. I knew the car — it was the green Cadillac. It was that gargoyle from the school parking lot who had almost killed me. I was still sitting in the road, hypnotized by the blue sea glare on the asphalt, when I watched a pair of Hoops sneakers come jogging toward me.

“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”

I had been planning to say: “Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know.”

Instead I watched my hand slide inside of Mutant’s hand and form a complicated red-and-white mitt. It was a slippery handshake, my palm bleeding into it, my bike stigmata — I waited for Mutant to say something about that time I smashed his specs. But his ugly, big-eared face lowered to me and then I was on my feet, following him through a scarred wooden door, number 52, the knocker of which was a brass pineapple with filth-encrusted tropical checkers. Tackiness and incoherence, that’s what awaited me in Casa Mutis, as augured by that fruity knocker — the living room was a zombie zone of grime and confusion. Chaos. The furniture was arranged in a way that made it look like a family of illegal squatters, the plaid sofa rearing on its side, even the appliances crouched. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom, his, I guessed; here he was, going through drawers, looking for a change of clothes to lend me. If I went home covered in blood and toting the twisted blue octopus of my bicycle, I explained, my ma, terrified by how close I’d swerved toward death, would murder me. I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.

“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.

“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”

I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. It was sitting on a little mountain of food, the rabbit. It had piled that food so high that its tall ears had pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made this rabbit look like a European swimmer.

“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”

Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets filled all the corners of the room, sharing space with less bucolic stuff: a shitty purple tape deck and a vat of roach-zapping spray, grimy cartoon-print pajama pants and underwear that looked like free-range laundry to me, no hamper in sight. Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. (Where did Mutis get his rabbit funds from? I wondered. He got the free lunch at school and dressed like a hobo.) Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. Alfalfa — plus calcium! said one bag below a humongous Swiss cheese–colored rabbit with what must have been, for a rabbit, a bodybuilder’s physique. The rabbit smiled gloatingly at me, flexing muscles you would never suspect a rabbit possessed.

“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”

But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the trembling rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his lovenest a secret from my friends?

I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering a love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Mutant kept changing until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really soft to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own with Eric’s sleeve.

Inside the cage, the rabbit twitched phlegmatically, breathing underneath waves of Eric Mutis’s love. The rabbit didn’t change at all. Not one whisker trembled. This struck me as pretty rude behavior, on the part of the rabbit. I was just a bystander to their little feeding here, and I could feel my heartbeat getting steadily faster. Behind the bars, Saturday was wrinkling her nose into a joyless, princessy expression, as if breathing air were an onerous obligation that she wished she could give up. What was the big attraction here? I wondered. This pet rabbit had all the charm and verve of a pillow with eyes.

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“No.”

But then I realized that I could do this; nobody was watching me but Mutant and his voiceless rabbit. Some hard pressure flew away from me like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my hand through the door of the cage and brushed the green straw off her fur. Still I thought this pet was pretty stupid, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.” At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Eric Mutis opened a drawer; there was so much dust on the bureau that his elbow left a big tiger stripe on the wood. There was so much dust everywhere in that room that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had bobby-pinned to her ear, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to the usual, magical algorithm of rabbits coming out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. Even “found,” hugged inside the photograph, the creature was escaping its owner. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared plaintively. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble at the exact same tempo as the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with every color of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“OK.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard, even Saturday, with her rumpshaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter the maple cavity of their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet,me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d all be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! fliers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST! MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you.”

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents too.

“Yes. That is correct. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. For some reason I was putting on my one-hundred-year-old voice, the gruff one I used when I ordered pizzas on the phone and requested the Golden Years senior discount. I heard myself reciting in this false, ancient voice the address of the house where Saturday and Eric slept.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back. “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

Eric Mutis’s eyes, locked inside the gray corrals of his Medicaid frames, now became a second, dewless glass. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his face showed the pruny strain of a weight lifter, puckering inward and then collapsing, as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks. When we finished with him they had looked like a doll’s eyes — open, staring, but packed solid with frost, like the blue Antarctic. Permafrost around each pupil. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry — ,” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional. “Jesus H., are we graduating from something?” I grumbled. “Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

Mondo had stopped walking in the middle of the playground. One of the few pieces of playground equipment that had survived the city pogrom and the red foaming were the zoo pogos, the little giraffe and the donkey on a stick. Mondo sat on it; the pogo groaned beneath his weight. He turned and looked at me with the world’s most miserable face.

“I am not going.”

I said nothing.

“I am changing my mind,” he said, the little pogo donkey listing east and west beneath him. He leaned a fat hand on its head and broke its left ear off. “Goddamn it!” He stood up, as if some switch inside him had broken off. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to convince him of anything. I was glad, even, that he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to satisfy whatever force was feeding on the doll of Eric. It wasn’t a good one, but the other option was to leave the scarecrow untouched down there until it disappeared.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there…”

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His chubby face looked tumescent and red, not unlike the playground foam, as if his cheeks were swelling preemptively to protect him. Far away a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

“Shut up, Larry!” Mondo yelped near the duck pond, when a car backfired and I jumped and brushed the flabby skin of his arm. “Watch where you’re going!”

Our flashlight beams crossed and blinded one another. After this we did not talk. Night had fallen hours ago — I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone. Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the treeline, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

“How’s it going tonight, Mutant?” Mondo asked in a nervous voice when we reached the oak. He chucked something into the Cone — the plaster donkey’s ear. It landed squarely on Eric’s back. This was all that was left of the doll of Eric Mutis, his last solid part. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. The same golden stuff I’d seen bagged that day in the Mute’s dark bedroom. I took a big breath; I wished that I could imitate the scarecrow and leap into the Cone, swim down to him, instead of crawling along the rock wall like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away, inch by inch, the zipper twinkling in the moonlight as the pouch pushed over the roots.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, staring at me with real fear as if we’d never met, as if I’d only been impersonating his good friend Larry Rubio for all these years, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It took almost forty minutes to lower myself into the Cone, but in fact my friends’ suspicions had prepared me for this descent — I had already imagined myself backing into the ravine. I stumbled once and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was OK, I was OK (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lacunae between its frozen roots like tiny underworld lights. Much farther away, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball round and came loose.

I crouched over the scarecrow’s torso, which at this moment could not have looked less like a scarecrow’s anything — if you didn’t notice the seam of straw, you might have thought it was a battered sofa cushion. Featureless and beige. I plucked up a green straw and felt a lurching sadness. Anybody with a mirror in his house knows the strangeness of meeting himself, his flaws, in light. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed. A face started to stutter together, shattered whitely away.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it sort of less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the relic of the scarecrow, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t Saturday — I couldn’t steal Saturday back, I’d figured that would appease or solve nothing, but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror — “You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?” Many of the products that this pet store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the near sky, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to letmy guard down now. I kept my feet planted but sometimes I’d move my arms crazily, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. When I thought a bird was coming our way, I hollered it away. Shapes caught at the corner of my eye.Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a reversal of its birth from my black book bag — first went with its furry ears, its bunching back, the big, velour skis of its feet. I was there, so no birds dove for it or anything. I was standing right there the whole time. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling me faintly from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or come up yet. Owls, I worried, city hawks. The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

[cirquedufreak-rp]

WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS [Clarity].

[Evonna Falk] will reside in the [Violet] tent. At home, she is assigned to home number [239]. [Clairvoyance] will be useful to the Midnight Circus. Remember our only rule: Once you join, you cannot leave.

Faceclaim Information Name: Kim Ahyoung (Yura) Group: Girl’s Day

Character Information Name: Evonna Falk Stage Name: Clarity Age: 24 Tent Assignment: 239 Home Island Cottage Assignment: violet

Skill:

Clairvoyance is the ability to interpret the thoughts and memories of other people. Memories that surround items can be seen if linked with significant emotional energy. The ability is only triggered by physical contact through the inside of her hands. Strong emotional energies linger and cause exhaustion. She is also unable to identify emotions unless obvious in thoughts. Clairvoyance does not pertain to species other than humans. Objects hold no influence without strong human attachment and reading objects weakens her eyesight

Member Status: Since June 2013 Performance Details:

Clarity isn’t an audience performer, but instead a sideshow in a smaller tent that is dimly lit by string lights. Customers come by the singles and couples usually. The clairvoyant uses a special tarot deck that she made for herself.. She allows the guest to shuffle the cards and cut the deck before they hand her the deck back and she makes hand-to-hand contact. She pulls however many cards the customer(s) pick and interprets the “findings” for them. Her favorite part of performing is giving people peace of mind.

Personality:

Evonna quickly loses energy when it comes to socialization. Living in generally isolated territory for most of her life she has developed comfort in being alone; in fact, if she goes long periods without being to herself, irritability quickly sets in. She is also predominantly a conscientious woman, giving her personal duties proper attention and being prepared for countless scenarios.

Contrary to Evonna’s relaxed demeanor, she is not completely emotionally stable – some might even say ‘neurotic.’ Guilt and jealousy are the two most prominent attributes of her instability. Thankfully she isn’t easily swayed to anger or fear, though.

Another key trait of the clairvoyant is her openness to experience, as living in a predictable tundra would inevitably lead to a taste for adventure and new knowledge. Finally she also has a tendency to be agreeable – in conflict she searches for resolutions, and in social interactions there is a dominant sense of caring and understanding.

Background:

Evonna was born May 16th, 1993 in Busan, South Korea. Due to ‘financial barriers’, her birth mother had previously arranged adoption plans where a couple by the name of Ethel and Claudis Falk would bring Evonna back to their home in Germany once she was ready to leave the hospital. Ethel and Claudis were fairly decent parents, but they had their quirks surely. Instead of hugs, she might have been given a carving knife and instead of “I love you,” she would hear “don’t go alone.” It’s no surprise of how rigid her adopted parents were, however, when their living conditions were taken into consideration. Far enough outside of civilization to be called Siberia, Evonna and her parents had to remain as self-sufficient as possible; therefore, they had to be as tough as possible. Affection wasn’t displayed openly, or at all really.

Evonna’s particular talent hadn’t always been a part of her life; in fact, for her first thirteen years she remained fairly oblivious to the state of her parents – even moreso with the rare stranger. A family based on defense and rigidity had no room for emotional intelligence.

Not long after her thirteenth year, though, little happenings began that made the young girl question her sanity. There were moments when her mother would touch her and Evonna could hear her mother speak but in an echoed tone filling the entire space. Never did her mother address her in these moments, but instead referred to herself.

Eventually the contact-triggered hallucinations became more vivid audibly and visually once flashes of daydreams set in the past began revealing themselves. Around the age of sixteen Evonna would finally concur that she had some innate connection to other’s thoughts and memories through physical contact. Ethel and Claudis were given hints over the years, but never took the matter seriously as their excuse was “Cabin fever. Happens to everyone out here.” The more her mind clarified, though, the less she could treat the occurrence trivially. One day, out of frustration, she grabbed her father’s arm and told him to remember something he’d kept secret. She saw the moment he found his younger brother, dead in the snow after them being separated in a blizzard. After consoling her father and gaining his trust and astonishment, she questioned her parents pressingly why this would be happening to her.

The teenager’s birth mother, Lee Chanmi, had been involved in witchcraft, according to Claudis and Ethel. Ethel told her daughter that the clairvoyance was a sign that past a certain age the devil would come to reclaim her. Claudis and Evonna took these statements as jokes, for they were rare and nothing else would be mentioned. But fear developed and grew within the cold woodland household, when Evonna woke up to Ethel praying at the foot of her bed every morning. After becoming suddenly ill at the age of eighteen, her father had found out that for over a week Ethel had been poisoning Evonna’s food, her excuse being “She’s almost old enough.” Panic filled Claudis as he slowly processed his wife was truly delusional. He promised his wife of 25 years that the very next morning they would travel to the closest town and find her a doctor.

That night, Evonna, in her frail and sickly state, tossed and turned as she dreamt of all her mother’s devilish claims. Pulled from restless sleep in the middle of the night, a horrifying fantasy had come to life as Claudis stood at the side of her bed calling her name and huffing in distress.

“You have to go, she’s going to hurt you!”

Thankfully her reaction skills were above average living in an icy terrain. She pulled herself out of bed as quickly as she could and began packing supplies.

“Are you coming?” She asked her father almost casually but inwardly hoping for the right answer.

“I can’t,” he replied solemnly. Tears filled Evonna’s eyes as she ran in for a final hug goodbye. As she hugged Claudis, her being was surrounded with loving words that could only have come from her father’s mind. “She won’t hurt me, she needs me,” he spoke. Across the house Evonna could hear her mother banging on the walls and door of their bedroom. “I’ve got her locked in our room, but she’s equipped, so it’s best you hurry.” With haste the young woman traded a bracelet hand-made from her mother with the one her father was wearing just before she rushed out the door and into the cold night.

Hunting had developed many skills for the woodland woman – agility, environmental awareness, and stealth; however being fatally ill for several days would have an adverse effect. Days passed before she reached a town, mainly due to exhaustion and inability to travel at night for the abundance of predators. After finally reaching civilization, Evonna took to the streets, trying for the attention of anyone who would look at her - hoping for small donations so she could eat. Not much time needed to pass before she realized nobody wanted to give the handouts she desired, but around this time she also noticed a young man at a table and chair on the side of the street. He was shuffling a deck and pulled out two cards that seemed to be for the woman standing opposite of the man. He had a jar filled with money on his table and Evonna wanted to know what his method was. He didn’t look that much better off than herself.

After nearing the table for a noticeable amount of time, the man called her over. He could read her confusion and explained to her that what he was holding was a “Tarot” card deck and it offered insight. Evonna wanted to learn more so she watched as he performed for countless people passing by. It was amazing; he offered them the same information she had access to, except she had even more knowledge. After weeks of stealing meals and regaining her health steadily, she had finally accumulated the funds to buy her own deck, and from there she took to the sidewalks just as the young man had. Passerbys were amazed when she would draw a card, touch their hand, and reveal their darkest secrets or reassure their concerns. The gig was not a steady one, though, as authorities would take force if she didn’t move along after a day or two.

In the summer of 2013, she had made it to Gwangju, South Korea where she came across a circus that only opens at midnight. After being invited by one of the ringleaders Evonna dedicated her life to a new home and a new family. Nearly a year later she joined the remaining members in fleeing from Asahikawa, Japan after one ringleader’s death and the group’s steady decline. She spent the next four years replaying the part of her life where she traveled alone. Eventually she gathered the courage to return to the abandoned camp out of curiosity of what might be left. What the young woman found was an extraordinary sight – people, familiar faces and new – and she couldn’t help but grin stupidly.

[jdw-juseyo]

i am new to ifnt and rly dont wanna make anyone mad but i don't see the big deal abt woohyun. yes he is hot and can sing but why does every1 love him so much? i dont mean it in a bad way jst that i dont see how he is more popular than others. also i dont see how his voice is so different to other kpop singers? but then again i am new so maybe i dont kno wht i am talking about. pls help me to understand more?

You caught me at the absolute pinnacle of my Woohyun feels, which happens every year around his birthday. And therefore (with a little help from my friends) I have constructed this little list of reasons why Woohyun is absolutely deserving of the amount of love he receives from Inspirits and why it’s kinda hard not to love him, even if he isn’t your favourite member…

1. WOOHYUN’S LIVE VOCALS

Woohyun is known for having what many call a ‘power-house’ vocal. You can always rely on him to hit those incredible high notes in INFINITE songs. He’s known for being able to bellow out his lines; his voice is strong, loud and instantly recognisable. But he also pours a lot of emotion into his vocals, every note dripping with it. His solo album Write.. and his subsequent appearances on Immortal Songs 2 showcased another side to his vocals too; a softer side, gentle, quieter but without lacking that trademark emotion in his voice. It really proved he’s a versatile vocalist, and not just there to yell at the top of his lungs (but it’s still incredible when he does). Here is Woohyun performing on Immortal Songs 2. This appearance earned him the highest score for an idol on the show at that point. 

He is (in my opinion) one of the best live singers in kpop at the moment. I can’t think of many people who could hold a candle to him, really. Yet he is still improving and working on his voice; he still admits he has far to go. 

2. WOOHYUN’S FAN SERVICE / HIS LOVE FOR FANS

Woohyun is known for being the ‘fan idiot’ in INFINITE. He’s got a different heart for every occasion and is usually credited with popularising the ‘finger heart’ that everyone uses nowadays. In 2012 he came 3rd in Weekly Idol’s Fan Service poll (as voted by idols), and the video shows some good examples of him showering Inspirits with love. He consistently refers to fans as his ‘girlfriends’, to the point his twitter bio even says it (팬=여친fan=girlfriend). But his love for Inspirits runs deeper than superficial hearts and displays of cuteness. INFINITE and Inspirits have had a close relationship since debut, and it has continued on to this day. During One Great Step, INFINITE’s first world tour in 2013/14, Woohyun personally went out to buy roses and small rings to present to fans at their shows, spending his own money. He wrote and composed the song ‘함께 (Together)’ during OGS, and dedicated it to Inspirits, saying it was about fans (see the lyrics here). 

At Dream Concert in 2016, Woohyun performed as a solo artist for the first time, and even other fandoms began to feel jealous at the amount of attention he gave to Inspirits. [Even more reactions here] He sang just for them, never taking his eyes off their section of the crowd and taking out his earpiece to listen to them singing along. Okay, so later all of INFINITE roasted Inspirits for not being able to sing well, but at least Woohyun then tried to explain how to sing properly.

It should be noted too, that after this performance, Woohyun and INFINITE gained a lot of new fans who were impressed by him. 

3. WOOHYUN’S PASSION FOR SINGING / MAKING MUSIC

As I mentioned above, Woohyun wrote and composed ‘함께 (Together)’ for INFINITE while they were taking part in their first world tour. During their movie, Grow, which showed the behind the scenes of OGS, you see Woohyun jumping up in the middle of eating to go and compose. 

He was excited about this song and wanted to share it with the rest of INFINITE once he was finished, asking them to contribute to the lyric writing too. Then his solo album Write.. was released in 2016 with 3/6 tracks having Woohyun’s direct involvement: ‘향기 (Scent/Nostalgia)’ which was entirely written and composed by Woohyun, and ‘Gravity’ and ‘Everyday’ which Woohyun co-wrote and composed [source]. You could tell he had worked extremely hard on these songs, and could tell how proud he was of them when he spoke about them in interviews. Whenever Woohyun takes the stage, you know that the energy and enthusiasm he exudes isn’t just an act… He truly loves singing, is passionate about performing and wants to share his talent with the world. For example, look how stupidly in his element he is performing Everyday in Singapore during INFINITE’s second world tour (© Honey Tree ) :

4. AND EVERYTHING ELSE:

Those were just three main points focused on Woohyun as a singer, performer and idol. There are so many other sides to Woohyun too, and so many reasons to love him. 

He loves cooking, and his instagram is full of videos of him making food

His relationships with the other INFINITE members are really sweet. Just one recent example would be: even when everyone was teasing Sungjong and being kinda mean (including Woohyun), he did then reassure him that there would be plenty of INFINITE schedules soon and that he needn’t worry. He’s also super affectionate with the others, and you’ll often find him touching them or correcting their hair/touching their face/leaning on them.

Actor Woohyun!!! He’s been in multiple dramas, but my personal favourite is Hi School Love On, where he played Shin Woohyun… Please watch it if you haven’t already, it’s so good (and it’s all available on KBSWorld’s youtube channel with subs, here)!

His friendships with other 91 line celebrities, especially SHINee’s Key with whom he debuted as the special sub-unit ToHeart in 2014. 

Like you mentioned, he is ridiculously good-looking and is known for not having had any surgery - that nose and that jawline are aaaaallll natural, ladies ~~ 

He loves football and plays for FC Men (FC 멘), an all-star team affiliated with the Suwon Bluewings alongside other celebrities. 

My closing statement is this: usually when you stan a group you’ll have a favourite member, one you look at more than the others, one you might pay a little more attention to during MVs or performances or shows. But then often (and in most cases when it comes to my Inspirit friends), you end up loving them all. Your bias might even change (maybe even many times). You’ll find it hard to stick solely to one member, especially when the rest of the group are so damn lovable. Soon enough, you realise you’re OT7 biased and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Do yourself a solid and give Woohyun a chance. I’m sure you’ll see why everyone likes him so much in no time. 

[canaryatlaw]

Well, today was interesting, on a few levels lol. Woke up at 6:30, half hour early as they're doing a whole breakfast thing at work this morning, all went as it should and I got to work and DIDNT set off the regular metal detector for the first time in literally months, so that adds to my suspicion that it had something to do with my winter coat (cuz I wouldn't set it off at the other courthouse when I put it through the machine). So that was interesting. Got to my office in plenty of time and offered to help set up but nobody wanted my help haha they were all like "no no we got it you're fine!" Lol. It was also apparently bring your kid to work day, so there were a bunch of cute little 10-12 year olds running around with name tags and then "future ____" whatever they wanted their profession to be, which ranged from president to superstar. But they had a really nice breakfast spread so that was quite enjoyable. After I went to my office and decided if I didn't have anything to do (I didn't) I was gonna start studying for crim pro II (start studying less than a week before the test, God I'm such an upperclassman it's awful) on quimbee. I didn't want to be watching their videos and like drawing attention to myself so I just took their little quizzes after the videos to see where I fell. Their quizzes are weird though, because they always turn on like, stupidly specific facts that don't really matter, but their explanation of the law at least is helpful. As I neared the end of the quizzes (they have a whole lot less material on this half of crim pro than the other half, sadly) I started feeling really sleepy, as a result of having woken up early presumably, so I closed my door and rested on my desk for a little bit, then tried to go back to work but kept being like, overtaken by sleep and every so often I would like jerk awake and I would form some plan to go to my supervisors office and tell him I needed to go home and sleep before slipping back into unconsciousness, and that probably happened about 6 or 7 times until I was actually woken up by everyone finally coming up from court. So I check my phone and it's 1 o clock......which means I dozed off for probably a solid hour and a half and everyone was in court so nobody caught me/cared? It was just weird for me because I'm like not just the kind of person who falls asleep sitting up, like I can't even remember the last time that's happened (when I was on tour everyone would sleep in the vans on the way to the schools since it was typically like 4 am but I never could get myself to fall asleep) so this was very strange. And I was definitely under the impression my being jerked awake were a lot closer in time, like every 20 seconds maybe, not every 20 minutes lol so that was odd. They got an hour for lunch though since court ran long, so since it was my out to lunch day I went out with my supervisor and only one other lawyer for the calendar was able to join us unfortunately, but we went to the little bakery across the street that sells everything and I'm quite fond of their pizza haha, and I also learned that the family that owns it is also the owner of lemonheads- like the sour candy things? They always had them at their register but apparently my supervisor went to law school with one of the sons and that was their thing. He's so funny, he was like "oh I haven't been here in like 15 years!" and then of course he totally loved it and was like "I'll have to come here more often!" And I'm just like lol you're such a cute older man (not in a romantic way obviously, just dorky and cute in an awwww kind of way). So we had a very nice lunch, then ended up running back into court for which was one of the most interesting cases I think I've seen really. It's been in the system since 2013, and the judge is really frustrated about that fact because he thinks that's way too long (it is) plus at least three of the four kids have had upwards of 10 placements which is INSANE but the issue is whether they want to keep working with the parents or terminate and go to adoption, and honestly it was a rough call. The parents were putting in efforts, that's for sure, but they were still dropping the ball in some important areas. The agency had clearly made up its mind towards TPR but everyone else was a bit more hesitant. Our GAL said several times that his clients (the 3 verbal ones at least, the youngest is 1, and was there today and is oh so cute) have expressed on numerous occasions that they want to go back. And the two girls in the middle aren't in a stable placement that wants to adopt, but we also don't want the case to just languish in the system, so it's really a tough call. What really got me at the end though was when the bio dad and the foster father of the baby girl addressed the court. They had been having full family visits at the foster parents house twice a month with both parents and all the kids. And the bio dad just got up there and you could tell he was a "tough guy" or whatever but he started getting very emotional about how hard they're trying to do everything right here but life things do tend to get in the way, but you could just really really tell that he loved his children, like LOVED his children, and even when there's plenty of parents in this building that want their kids back, that kind of raw love isn't all that common in this courthouse. The foster father is what really got me though. Apparently it was a fictive kin placement since the baby was born after the case came in under risk of harm, so she went to the godparents, and from what I can tell the foster father is also the pastor of their church. And man, he just got up there and spoke about how they're the only people they get to see the parents interact with all the kids and how much the parents love the kids and how badly the kids want to be returned home to their parents, and he described how he would have to drive the two middle girls back to their placement (it was a ways out of the city) after the visits and how he was the only person there to hear their sobs and screams that they wanted their mommy and daddy, and that was the point at which I had to close my eyes and just breathe so I didn't start crying in the middle of court. And like, of course emotion complicates things, but you can't just ignore them here when it's such an important part of the decision, really. The judge ultimately decided he wasn't going to enter a goal today (a goal meaning what the case is working towards- a return home goal versus a termination goal) and he wanted to talk to the kids themselves before doing so, which I thought was a smart assessment. It's just such a hard case, because you want to keep giving the parents chances, but I mean, 4 years, that's a lot of chances been given, where does it end? It's such a hard call. I think it was really good though that the foster parent was aligned with the bio parents, and even though they've had this baby girl since she was 9 days old and have completely raised her as their child, they would still willingly turn her over to her parents, and I mean, that's amazing for me to think about. But yeah, we ended eventually, and went back up at like 4:36ish, at which point I had to review my final review for field placement with my supervisor. Most of it was great and very complimentary, there were a few small commends about some of the attorneys saying I didn't like seek out work enough but that was definitely something I had been doing recently so I'm not concerned about that. So that was nice. And yeah, that was my last day, for now at least. I don't know if I'm gonna end up on the same calendar really, I guess we'll have to see what happens, but I really hope I do. Alright, so after that I left and headed to school to chill for a few before the PAD event tonight, and chatted with a nice lady from appeals for most of the trip. Once I got to school I got back on quimbee and took their "final exam" for that section that's 20 questions, and reviewed the answers on that for a while. I think I'm in a fairly good place with the class right now. I'm gonna keep studying obviously, but I'm feeling okay about my chances at a good grade for now. After not too long other people showed up, I heated up and ate the rest of my pizza because I knew there would only be shit food at the event I couldn't eat, lol, then we headed over, it was right close to school. The captain of the PAD mock trial team/former justice was there already, along with that guy she brought to judge one of our scrimmages that I'd had some fun conversations with. So I sat with them for a while and chatted and it was nice, then he said he had to go get his girlfriend's laundry out of the dryer so it didn't wrinkle, which I found to be an unfortunate statement because he was rather cute but *shrug* oh well. So I just talked to other people for the rest of the time and it was nice, we took some pictures of the old and new boards so that was nice. I ended up leaving a little after 9, and decided to uber home because it was cold and windy AF and I somehow actually misjudged the weather in preparing for it (I'm usually very good at this) and just had my suit jacket and I was like yeah no this walk home from the train isn't happening. So I figured that being that I wasn't under any specific time crunch this would be a good time to see if my uber app was actually up and functional, so I did and went for pool just for kicks and because it was like $6 instead of $20, and it did work, so I got in the car which showed up soon, then we drove a bit and picked up another lady who I started talking to pretty much immediately, she's working on a Latino Theatre Initiative here in Chicago which apparently has never been done before so of course we talked about theatre and other things as they came up, and it was a nice refreshing discussion. She got dropped off, then me a bit later, around 10 pm. I decided to watch designated survivor because I am honestly quite addicted to the show, though I suppose I'm not following any of the fandom (if there is one? It strikes me as kind of an older-viewer focused show that might not have a whole online young people following) on here, but still I've been quite enjoying their episodes. I have to say, they're pulling off the whole huge government conspiracy thing really well, probably the best I've seen done. Prison Break put forth a strong effort on that point, but "the company" still always felt a bit contrived. DS is really rocking it though, the episodes are so compelling and the storylines work together very well, so I enjoyed that immensely. After I had just switched to live tv to find that once again friends was on, and this time I could actually stick around to watch it being that I get to mostly sleep in tomorrow. It wasn't an episode I particularly remembered, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Unfortunately as I was watching I was trying to get all my field placement shit turned in so I could just have it off my plate, I discovered that in order to meet the requirements I technically had to have one more meeting with my faculty advisor, even though we've discussed it all to death over the last two semesters, so I sent her an email saying I'll come in whenever works for her along with one to the head of field placement saying I had everything else finished but that and was working to get a meeting, and part of me is hardcore hoping she just responds and is like "it's fine you can just go with what you have" but I don't think that is very likely at all, lol. I guess we'll see though. One more thing to get done. Ugh. Tomorrow is open except for PT, so hopefully I can convince myself to actually get some shit done, hopefully on the paper, I really need to buckle down and figure out the whole budget and all the other math stuff that is going to hurt my history/English/literary analysis brain that is not meant for math/science and such. Oh well. Just gotta get it done I guess. Okay, that's plenty of writing for now, and I am quite tired at this point, so I'm looking forward to sleeping in. Until then, goodnight my peeps. Happy Friday.

[fadingfartconnoisseur]

AK Monthly Recap: August 2017

Hello. I’m thirty-three. And I’m more balanced than I’ve been in a year and a half.

It took a long time to get this point. When I moved to New York in early 2016, I knew it was time — and I was so happy. Even so, I struggled with anxiety. Was I not traveling enough? How would I manage my travels and build a life in New York? Would my readers leave me?! How would I earn enough money to survive in New York when it was so much more expensive than traveling and I would be doing less of the travel that would actually earn me money in the first place?!

Balance is fallacy, I wrote on my 32nd birthday last year.

I still believe that perfect balance is an impossibility. That said, while my life is not 100% balanced, it’s pretty close right now.

For one thing, I’m thrilled to be working with so many US-based destinations this year. A few years ago, only European destinations had budgets, so this is a welcome development. I love exploring my own country and sharing it with my readers. I love that I can swoop in on a quick flight, work an intense 3-5 day campaign, then fly home and do the rest of my content creation work from New York.

And this schedule is working very well. Every 2-3 months, I do a 2-3 week trip, and in between I do short trips of 3-5 days. This allows me to live fully in New York without wondering that I’m gone too often.

Maybe I won’t be as happy with this schedule in the future — but for right now, it’s excellent.

Destinations Visited

New York, New York, USA

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Vail, Denver, and Boulder, Colorado, USA

Oulu, Kuopio, Porosalmie, Oravi, Porvoo, and Helsinki, Finland

Minsk, Belarus

Favorite Destinations

Vail. A kickass mountain town with fabulous hiking and wonderful, warm people.

Porvoo. A pretty little wisp of a Finnish town.

Helsinki. Still one of my favorite offbeat European capitals, and this time I got to explore more islands.

Highlights

Turning 33 in style. I turned 33 on August 2 (no, no birthday post this year, but I might write one this month) and went to see Waitress on Broadway with my friends Beth and Amelia. There was a special reason for that: my cousin Matt was in the show! He’s been in the cast for months now, also serving as the understudy for Earl (the mean husband), so when he announced that he’d be playing Earl for a two-week run, we got tickets!

I hadn’t seen Matt in something like 20 years, but he invited us backstage after the show. It was so nice to reconnect and chat about our grandmothers — and take lots of pictures with pies!

Also, we got the cheapest tickets possible ($49 plus $12.50 fees for a total of $61.50 on the TodayTix app) and were in the very back row of the theater, but the seats were still quite good. If you want to see Waitress, go ahead and buy the cheapest seats — you’ll be fine!

After the show, the three of us planned to go to Guy Fieri’s restaurant as a joke, but they were closed and we went to the revolving restaurant on top of the Marriott instead. That’s how I learned that at 33 I get nauseous at revolving restaurants. Ha!

The next day, my sister Sarah and Beth and I grabbed Korean bar food and discovered a chocolate and wine restaurant next door. SO good.

A chance to revisit Philadelphia. I’ve always considered it my least favorite city in the US, so when Booking.com invited me to revisit my least favorite city and see if I could have a better time, I was excited to go. And I had a great time! It was awesome seeing my old friends Dave and Jeff and making new ones, like my reader Maria, and I ate and drank my way across Philly’s best restaurants and bars.

My friend Lisa came to New York oh so briefly! She came in for a day trip on the day I returned from Philly, so we met up for a nice lunch and stroll through the city, concluding at the magic that is Eataly.

New sunglasses. I wear sunglasses constantly, so I allow myself one designer pair per year. My 2017 pair, pictured in the top photo of the post, is by Tom Ford. I LOVE THEM.

Enjoying glorious Vail in the summer. I made my first-ever visit to Colorado (I know, I’m shocked too) this month, focusing on a campaign to showcase Vail in the summer months. Vail is one of those places I had always heard about, but never considered visiting because I don’t ski. Well, it turns out Vail in the summer is amazing — it’s so beautiful, the air is crisp, and it’s far less busy than during the winter. It’s most locals’ favorite time of year!

For me, Vail was all about the glorious hiking. I especially loved the hike that I did with llamas (!!), and I enjoyed exploring the town, getting to know the locals, spending time in the spa at the Sonnenalp Resort, and eating at so many delicious restaurants. Stay tuned for more on Vail very soon.

Spending time with friends and family in Colorado. My cousins Colleen and Cynthia live in Denver and I was stoked to finally visit them on their turf and check out the places they’re always posting about — namely The Tattered Cover bookstore and D Bar, an incredible dessert restaurant, as well as Hop Alley for dinner.

I didn’t meet these cousins until we were adults and I’m so glad to have them in my life now — we get along so well and have so much in common. The three of us love books and writing and travel, Cynthia loves Scotland as much as I do if not more, and Colleen is the author whose books I review often here.

In Boulder, I met up with two friends from different walks of life: Carrie, who came on my first Central America tour in 2015, and Matt from the world of travel blogging, a.k.a. Expert Vagabond. The three of us checked out Boulder’s best offerings including brunch at Snooze (you guys, I had a chilaquiles Benedict with poached eggs and barbacoa over tortillas with cheese and salsa AS WELL AS a giant blueberry danish pancake AS A SIDE DISH), plus a stop at Dushanbe Tea House, which was disassembled in Tajikistan and shipped to Boulder piece by piece. Oh, and there were a LOT of people out protesting circumcision.

Watching the eclipse in New York City. We didn’t have a total eclipse this far north, but it was still an outstanding event. I went to the Museum of Natural History with my friend Amy and we watched the eclipse surrounded by science-loving New Yorkers.

Finally seeing the Air Guitar World Championships. I’ve wanted to attend this competition for years — since long before I started the blog. Finally the opportunity arrived: my friends at Visit Finland invited me to do another summer trip in summer, and I immediately asked if I could go to the championships. They loved the idea and I was so happy we were able to make it work out!

This was one of the most fun festivals I’ve ever been to. The performers were so enthusiastic and funny, and I got to know several of them at the super-fun after-parties. That’s the Jinja Assassin, my favorite, pictured above. He tied for second.

Chilling out in the Finnish countryside. I stayed at an incredible resort called Järvisydan, which has been some kind of guesthouse since 1658 (!!) and one of the owners is an 11th-generation hospitality worker (!!!). I explored the islands, forests, and fishing villages, and spent time in the best spa I’ve ever experienced.

After that, I headed to the pretty town of Porvoo for some photography and a fitness class out in the forest. Porvoo reminded me so much of my beloved Rauma, but on a smaller scale. Next I headed to Helsinki and met up with a few Finnish friends: Sami, whom I met in Kuala Lumpur in 2010 and who took me on a 20,000-step walk around his island, and Katja, with whom I delivered a kickass conference speech in Italy in 2013 and who took me out to lunch in the city.

A new country: Belarus. Cool to visit country #71 and my fifth-to-last country in Europe. I had a nice walk along the riverfront and discovered a cool coffeeshop, but the rest of Belarus belongs in “challenges”…

Challenges

I killed my computer in Vail. Since I had bought my MacBook Air in spring 2012, I knew it would be time to upgrade to a new one soon. Yet I wanted to wait until it was absolutely necessary. Then it suddenly became necessary — I STUPIDLY spilled water on my keyboard and none of the top keys worked!

I ordered a refurbished 13″ MacBook Pro with maxed out RAM and it arrived in New York shortly after I got back from Colorado. I’d like to thank the Travel Blog Success community for helping me choose the right laptop for me. That Facebook group is worth the membership alone.

Oh, also — I picked up a cheap silicone keyboard protector. Because I’m not letting another spill destroy this machine.

The good news? I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE MY NEW COMPUTER. Man, you don’t realize how bad your old one was until you get a new one and everything flies at the speed of light…

The flight over to Europe was pretty awful. As much as I appreciated flying direct to Helsinki on Finnair, I hated leaving at 5:40 PM and arriving at 8:20 AM, or the equivalent of 1:20 AM New York time. They started serving breakfast at the equivalent of midnight. Yeah, I didn’t sleep a wink. And the woman in front of me had her seat back the whole time…and I was in a middle seat…I got a lot of reading done, but that was the only redeeming factor.

Minsk was rough. Definitely the most challenging place I’ve traveled in Europe. A significant language barrier, which I expected, plus some other quirks — like subway stations that have names in both Russian and Belarusian (often VERY different names) but sometimes the stations only have signs in one language and are announced only in the different language!

All that plus the fact that nearly all wifi is only available via receiving an SMS code — so if you don’t have a SIM card (and I didn’t), you basically have no wifi. Good thing I had it at my apartment…

On top of that, I didn’t find there to be much tourism value in Minsk, though I know I could have seen a lot more if I had made more of an effort. I did love my walk along the river, though. I would only recommend Minsk to experienced travelers. It’s hard.

And a small qualm — as soon as I got on the train to Philadelphia, I realized that my lone pair of sunglasses had lost one of its pads. Wearing them hurt like hell!

Most Popular Post

How I Stay Healthy While Traveling — A guide to staying well on the road.

Other Posts

A Different 24 Hours in Philadelphia — What I did in my former least favorite city.

Portraits of New Yorkers During the Eclipse — I loved the shots I got!

Most Popular Instagram Photo

I took this picture in Kuhmo, Finland, three years ago, and shared it as a preview to my upcoming trip to Finland. Just looking at that makes my heart swell with memories of the midnight sun! For more photos from my travels as well as live updates, follow me on Instagram at @adventurouskate.

Fitness Update

My sister bought me a foam roller for my birthday! I was about to buy myself the same thing. That really says it all.

Beyond that, I’m considering revamping my diet. I’ve been thinking that I should reduce my consumption of meat. I think I’m going to start small and slowly reduce it over time.

This flies in the face of eating mostly paleo, which I still believe to be the healthiest diet, but as someone who flies a lot for work, I need to reduce my impact on the climate. I already do a lot of the top climate recommendations — I don’t have biological kids, I live in an apartment as opposed to a house, I don’t own a car and rarely drive — but a plant-based diet is the most effective method that I’m not already doing.

So. I’m not going to go full vegan, but I plan to eat a lot less meat, especially red meat, which is the worst for the climate. I plan to eat a lot more nuts, seeds, and eggs. We’ll see where it goes.

Also this month, I got my first Fitbit — the Alta HR, which is slim and cute but is a heart rate monitor as well. I’m finding it interesting what burns more calories and what doesn’t. Also, my resting heart rate went up super-high when I was in the Rockies!

What I Read This Month

I swore I was going to finish the Popsugar 2017 Reading Challenge this month, but I just barely missed it — only one book to go! I’ve read 51 books so far this year, all of them fulfilling categories of the challenge. I’m proud to have read so many books, definitely a record in my adult years, but I’m looking forward to getting back to reading what I want to read without worrying about category fulfillment.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind (1985) — I actually first heard about Perfume from a guy I dated awhile back who had lived abroad in Europe. “Everyone in Europe has read this book but hardly any Americans have,” he told me. And it’s true — I hadn’t even heard of it, but my friend Dani, who is German, saw it poking out of my bag and exclaimed, “Oh, Patrick Süskind!”

A baby is born in the streets of 19th century Paris, abandoned, and is soon discovered to have no scent, unnerving everyone he meets. However, he has the keenest sense of smell and uses it to his advantage — working with perfumes, using the power of scent to influence people, and eventually becoming a murderer. I won’t give anything away more than that.

I loved this book — rich and literary, such an original idea, so many dark twists, and a protagonist who is pure evil yet you can’t help wanting him to succeed. Not to mention a bit on the short side, which I appreciated. Not a word was wasted (take note, Murakami). I enjoyed this book far more than I expected and I highly recommend it. Category: a book that takes place over a character’s life span.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007) — I fell in love with Junot Díaz’s writing when I read the superb This Is How You Lose Her in 2015, but it took me quite a while to read his most famous novel, the one that catapulted him to fame and won him the Pulitzer Prize. Oscar Wao is a very non-traditional Dominican-American — he’s a geek, he’s overweight, and he has absolutely no game with the ladies. But that doesn’t matter when there is a fukú, a curse, leering over the heads of his family, waiting to strike.

This book is a soaring exploration of Dominican history, the immigrant experience, and relationships between friends, lovers, and family. And it’s told in Díaz’s brilliant style, English and Spanish and profanity and uninhibited revelations. But for me, the book didn’t truly come alive until Díaz inhabited the voice of Yunior, the same protagonist of his other books, This Is How You Lose Her and Drown. Yunior is unforgettable. And I’m fairly certain that Yunior is a not-so-fictitious version of Díaz. I’m glad I finally read it, but I still think This Is How You Lose Her is Díaz’s masterpiece. Category: a book that’s been on your TBR list for far too long.

American Fire: Love, Arson and Life in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse (2017) — Over a period of several months in rural Accomack County, Virginia, fires filled the night skies. Several dozen arsons were committed, new fires appearing almost every night. In a community where the only firefighters were volunteers, it took them forever to find the culprits — but once they did, they realized it was a local couple tied up in a crazy love story.

I love true crime, but reading about the graphic murders of innocent people (like In Cold Blood) leaves me feeling uncomfortable, like I shouldn’t be reading about that. American Fire was different — while property was damaged, it was mostly abandoned houses and most of the damage was the terror on a local community, where people in eternal fear of where the next fire would take place. More than anything, I enjoyed this close look at a once-wealthy part of rural America now struggling to keep its residents financially afloat. Category: a book with a subtitle.

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell (2013) — For the challenge I needed to pick a book that I’d read before that always makes me smile. To be honest, most of the books I love deeply don’t make me smile — or they make me smile in spite of grueling sadness, which is always what gets me emotionally. But Eleanor and Park is a book that makes me smile with its sweetness.

This book is about first love between two high school outcasts in Alaska — the lone half-Asian kid in a white midwestern town and a girl living through poverty and an abusive home environment. To me, the brilliance of this book is how Rowell gets you to feel every thudding emotion throughout your whole body. Perhaps it’s simply the universality of first love. Whenever I read this book, I feel the happiness skimming underneath my skin, flowing through every inch of my body. I really can’t describe it any other way. If you haven’t read this book, do, and let me know how it affects you. Category: a book you’ve read before that always makes you smile.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2004) — I’m a fan of Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid’s Tale, but I was not a fan of this book, the first in the Maddadam trilogy. It takes place in the future and is told by Jimmy, a.k.a. Snowman, presumably the last human left on Earth after decades of unchecked genetic engineering ruins the planet. He’s left in charge of a tribe of childlike genetically engineered quasi-humans, the creation of his best friend and brilliant scientist, Crake. The book tells the story of how the world got to be this way, plus the love triangle between him, Crake, and a Southeast Asian child prostitute turned teacher named Oryx.

It’s a realistic and scary dystopia, which often makes me uncomfortable (hello, The Road), but what irritated me the most was that this book was all exposition. Additionally, Oryx was the epitome of a manic pixie dream girl — the happy, beautiful, perfect girl who loves you for no real reason. I’m surprised to see that dreadful trope appear from a feminist author like Atwood. And a lot of reviews call this a love story, but no, I wouldn’t call it that at all; it was a tale of an infatuation. I doubt I’ll be reading the rest of the series. Category: the first book in a series you’ve never read before.

What I Watched This Month

Looking for something funny to watch on Netflix? Check out Ali Wong’s comedy special, Baby Cobra. I LOVED THIS SPECIAL and Ali Wong is one of my new favorite comedians. She is hilarious and it’s especially relatable viewing if you’re a woman in your early thirties. Oh, and she did this show while seven months pregnant!

Coming Up in September 2017

The month is starting in Minsk and then I’m off to a few more countries! First to Lithuania, where it looks like I’ll only have time for Vilnius (I wanted to see Kaunas, too, but there was a snafu on September 1 that you’ll hear about in a month…). Next up, Estonia: Tallinn and a day trip to Lahemaa National Park.

Then a brief stop in Helsinki and a ferry trip to St. Petersburg, Russia! I’m taking the St. Peter Line ferry from Helsinki, which is one of very few ways US citizens can visit Russia without a visa. There’s not a lot of reliable information about it online so I look forward to writing all about it for you.

I’m finishing with two more days in Helsinki and then I fly home to New York. After that, I’ll be staying put for the rest of the month, maybe taking a three-day trip somewhere if I have the time and/or energy.

Any suggestions for Vilnius, Tallinn, or St. Petersburg? Share away!

via Travel Blogs http://ift.tt/2gJmVSi

[ricelumps]

2k16 was one of the worst years for me. But the journey from 2014 to now is just so crazy I need to write it down.

I left my parents’ house on January 2014 because I had recently gotten a boyfriend (who is not Korean) and my parents threatened me and my bf constantly until I would break up with him. 

My dad would yell at me for being a shit daughter and ruining our family with my actions. All i did was spend the night at his apartment a couple times. I was 21. He would threaten me with death threats towards me and himself and even my younger siblings. 

“There’s no point in living with a daughter like you” , “I should just kill you because you ruin everything” , “If that boy steps into the house one more time I’ll kill him myself” , “I’m packing up and I’m going to leave you all and I won’t care if you all die.”

That’s just some of the stuff he’s said to me, his first born, his “pride and joy”, the daughter that made him weep the day I was born (happy tears apparently) I realized that every day even before I started dating Charles I constantly thought about jumping out of my second story window or drive off a bridge on my way home from work / school. My parents used constant guilt and degrading comments to keep me low enough to be submissive to their behavior. I wanted to kill myself so many times, but never really tried. Plus I have amazing friends who believe in me when I can’t do it for myself.

My parents Korean and straight up OLD Korean. My family moved here a long ass time ago, but god you would think they would learn to grasp some sense that living in America and raising your kids in a different country they’re going to adapt and GROW into that culture. I kept to being more Korean than American for most of my life and then when I got to college (commuting) I was still under my parents rule, but it was more open ? It was easier to get away with things for sure. 

Most of 2013-2014 was me going through my “gotta do everything” phase. Which just meant that I was just attractive enough to catch people’s eye and hook up. 

I met my current boyfriend on Tinder amazingly and we’ve been together since my birthday that year. He’s been amazing and caring and loving. He’s been through my bullshit parents and helped me by letting me move in with him after I left the cursed house. One of my oldest friends helped save me and moved all my shit into her tiny Volvo and moved it all to the apartment I was gonna call home for a couple months. (She was even there one day when my dad yelled at me and threatened me. In the same room. She went home crying for me, and I’m constantly so sorry for her to see that happen.) 

I avoided all contact with my family (minus my siblings) for about three or four months. Coming from a family centered culture, and me being the first born and just leaving ? Scandalous. I missed seeing my cousin’s new baby, because my mom lied to them saying I was in another state studying. I couldn’t talk to my brothers without the fear of my parents grabbing the phone and yelling at me to come home. My heart was broken and Charles tried to help me feel better, but this was a feeling words couldn’t fix. I was so depressed being away from my family (even though they were horribly toxic) that I thought about killing myself again and again BECAUSE I WAS GUILT RIDDEN FOR LEAVING THEM. During this time I tried to just focus on working and moving into another apartment where it was just me and Charles without any other roommates, bc the ones we were living with were just awful. 

Come March and we moved into the city that was a lot closer to my university. After a horrible car accident (in my friends volvo that her parents had graciously let me borrow. AND GOT WRECKED. I still feel completely awful.) I found another job and was working two jobs to help rent and school. I had to quit the first job because the boss was a dick and also Korean. He kept me underpaid and treated me like a slave. He said “She doesn’t deserve a raise.” and when my amazing manager kept pushing my raise he raised it 25 cents. I’ve been working there for about two years. He was a fucking dick. Alex B, fucking dick Korean ASSHOLE. His mother was in love with me and wanted me to marry his 33 yr old ass, because he couldn’t get a girl his age. 

ANYWAY we had moved in and it was stressful, but I was so much happier than I was living with my parents. Moving out gave me something that made me feel better. I was a commuter so I never had fun party stories or campus stuff to talk about with my friends. I was always jealous of them being able to just do stuff like that, but living in my own apartment is just as good. Especially since I lived in a nice small city ! I loved it and I was loving living with my boyfriend and having a place that I could call my own and have my friends come by without bothering my parents. 

Later on in 2015 I gathered up the courage I collected and called my parents to try and talk to them. My mom made me cry because she told me she was worried and asked me if I was eating well. She told me that she cried every night since she saw my room bare. My dad sounded tired, and willing to just talk. It went well for about a couple months, but then they asked me to help them out at their store again. I stupidly agreed and I’ve been helping them out since. 

2016 was pretty much learning my sister was being irresponsible and selfish towards my parents. I know they’re shitty, but they help pay for her private school tuition and they’re in heavy debt (who isn’t in 2016 lbr) Lately they’ve given me the responsibility to deal with their debt with this “loan helper” business. I tried to do as much as I can to help, but again I’ve fallen to the cycle of them yelling at me but for their own mistakes. 

“YOU WENT TO AMERICAN SCHOOL HOW COME YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND?!!!!”

HIGH SCHOOL DOESN’T TEACH YOU CRAP ABOUT BEING IN DEBT AND FALLING INTO THESE TRAPS.

Recently I fell back into my depressive thoughts. My parents were placing blame on me and themselves and my sister being a spoiled entitled brat is making it harder for the family. 

However my brothers, my boyfriend, and my close circle of best friends keep me afloat and they help me remember how much I have to live for. My heart aches whenever I have dark thoughts because I remember them and I don’t want to think about how they would feel if they found out I killed myself in someway. I feel selfish for thinking about these things because the people closest to me don’t deserve that kind of pain. Sometimes life is hard and just plain unbearable, but I know that someday it’ll be worth it someday.