#*three hours the night before god

[horsemage]

I think we should bring back basic etiquette lessons such as shutting the fuck up when you’re watching a movie in a group that is not exclusively your friend group 🙂

[seventh-district]

.

[swordsmans]

CON CRUNCH IS REAL I THINK IM GONNA JUST START HOT GLUING SHIT TOGETHER TONIGHT FUCK IT WE BALL!!!!!!!

[mishkakagehishka]

But i think if anywhere that would go in "other" experience rather than "work" but also i'm thinking of putting "can work on a deadline ^_^" for the abilities knowing damn well this prof is gonna get this turned in at like 2am tonight

[anaalnathrakhs]

...i'm starting to wonder if i wasn't actually pretty often failed by the adults in my life as a young kid tbh.

[july-19th-club]

not my insomniac ass waking up seventeen times a night in the middle of the workweek once a fucking gain

[iron-niffler]

god im tired

[lunarsapphism]

my knowledge driving test is today and im so nervous :(

[milo-is-rambling]

Just remembered how one of my dedicated to people last roadtrip literally was like “oh actually I don’t think you can stay here tonight I have work early tomorrow :(“ after driving like seven and a half hours to him (and he texted me this when I was an hour away from his house and we had literally talked about my plans to stay there all day) like hello red flag red flag red flag

[gatorinator]

Can God translate me. Just for like 3-5 business days. I just need a little break—I’ll come back I promise.

[baladric]

one of my friends predicted a long time ago that i would end up married to a rat man, and i’ve been like nah i like pretty and fashionable people but now i definitely have what feels like the most fruitful crush i’ve had in a long time on a quintessential rat man and i’m like. äh, the ordeals of being known.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Might I inquire as to what, precisely, a Mustain't is? (Aside from a string of letters I hesitate to Google in that order.)

In October 2014 I went on a road-trip to the Dryest Place In America.

I was having a rough year, very depressed from having dropped out of college for the third time. I decided a road trip was in order to re-set my brain and get a little distance. Being that it was October, and therefore all the campgrounds in the American Southwest were filled with people who have the good sense to camp in reasonable temperatures, I elected to take my parent's minivan so I could car-camp anywhere suitably isolated, and looked up some of the southwest's geographic extremes- the highest place I could drive to (Pikes Peak), the lowest place (Badwater Basin), and for fun, the Dryest Place in the continental US, which turned out to be the Pinacate Volcanic field just west of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It gets rain maybe twice a century and has no standing water, despite being less than 100 miles from the gulf of California.

It's a startlingly beautiful and alien place. The ground is a deep chocolate brown to black volcanic sand, and in mid October, the rabbit brush is turning bright yellow as it shifts to autumn, the organ pipe cacti are a dark green and stand, partially concealed in the brush at exactly human height. The air is alive with birds and insects and bats at night. The stargazing is like looking into the eyes of God.

You get there by driving down a little dirt road called "El Camino Del Diablo", or "The Devil's Road".

I drove out about three hours from Glendale, AZ to get there, arriving at sunset, and felt a profound sense of peace. I stargazed, listening to the bats hunt and sing, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.

I stayed out there for three days, sketching and painting the landscape, taking strolls through this almost alien landscape, and enjoying the light and sound and total absence of human intrusion besides myself.

On the fourth night, it was a new moon, and I awoke in the middle of the night. Something was amiss, and it took me a while to realize it was because I could NOT hear the bats. I was sleeping inside the van with the rear windows rolled halfway down rather than trying to set up the tent, so I when I sat up, I looked out of the van's reflective windows to discover what at first appeared to be A Horse.

It was something between pale gray and bright white in the starlight, standing maybe a dozen feet from the van, sniffing curiously. It made sense- I was in the middle of mustang country and there was quite a bit of foliage in the area for it and it did look like a truly wild horse- lumpy where the bones were jutting out, dusty about the hooves and face.

I was instantly seized by the sort of paralytic fear Sleep paralysis is made of. I couldn't move. It wasn't quite looking at me because it couldn't quite see through the windshield into the shadowy into the shadowy interior, but I had the distinct impression that if I looked away, it would know, and get me.

I already had problems with horses. My beloved Aunt Helen's Prize mare tried to kill me on two separate occasions, and the year before I had to carry my sister-in-law backwards out of a slot canyon whilst reciting the Saint Crispin's Day Speech as loudly as possible to keep a mustang from trampling us to death.

This is approximately what it should have looked like:

Instead, it was... off. like trying to draw a horse from memory.

The waist tapered in.

The legs were slightly too long or the torso slightly too short, probably both.

The ears were Triangular.

The head wasn't quite right- Too narrow and the jaw wasn't heavy enough.

The tail was too long and arced unnaturally away from the body.

The neck arched.

The nostrils were too high and close

The mouth too long.

Whatever this is, a Mustang it Ain't.

I watched it from the back seat as it sniffed around the front of the van, curious with about the side mirrors. It moved around the van, nibbling experimentally on the front door handle. It came up to the side windows, sniffing like a dog, and it's breath didn't fog up the glass.

Finally, it came up to the rear window, which was rolled halfway down to let the fall night air in. Not even half a pane of glass and two feet of air between us, and I could clearly see it's bright blue eyes.

Horses have Elongated pupils to give them a wide field of vision, and eyes that rotate sideways in their sockets so the pupil remains parallel to the ground. Rather creepy to watch, especially the ones with blue eyes.

A real horse that was curious about the interior of the van would have come up to the window more or less sideways, and looked at me with something like this:

Instead, the damn thing walked up and faced the back window head on, staring back at me with this:

I'm not sure how long we watched each other like that, eyes locked. My eyes burned. I couldn't blink. My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow. My throat began to ache. I couldn't make a sound. My skin began to twitch, like I was severely dehydrated. I couldn't move. My lungs burned. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move.

Something was touching the side of my hand on the seat next to me. It's my water bottle.

The realization must have broken the terrible paralysis in the lower parts of my brain first, because by the time I consciously realized I could move again, I was already flinging my water bottle out the window at it.

The top was open, and splashed out the window at the Mustain't.

I've never heard such a scream out of an animal. Something halfway between the sound of unquenchable rage vibrating in someone's chest and the way rabbits cry out to God when the dogs catch them.

It jumped back, pivoting away from the van, snarling at the water bottle. I don't think you're supposed to be able to see All of a horse's teeth at once, no matter how angry it is.

I watched it run into the night for some distance, it's pale body visible against the black sand and the dark gray shadow of the ancient volcanic cone it was headed for.

When the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the bats again.

I debated leaving right then, but I didn't want to get out of the van with that thing in the area, nor litter by leaving the water bottle out there. I also had the awful idea that if I left now, it might somehow be able to follow me home. I ended up staying up three hours to watch the sunrise, shaking and trying to figure out if I'd woken up from a vivid dream, if my meds had stopped working, or if that had really happened. I didn't dare move until I actually felt the temperature rise, before stepping out of the van to grab the bottle. I had my camera ready- I was still using a DSLR back then- to take pictures of the hoofprints, to show how close it had gotten to the van.

No hoofprints.

Beetle tracks in the soft sand around the van, and the clear foot-and-wing prints of a bird that had hopped around then taken off. But no hoofprints.

I went over the entire campsite with the tent broom, to make sure I removed every scrap of evidence I had ever been there, including my footprints, grabbed my water bottle, and drove the three hours back back to Glendale, then decided to do seven more hours of driving to Moab, Utah just to put more than 500 miles, the state line and at least nine things that could be considered "running water" between me and the Mustain't.

-

I still have that water bottle. It has a dent in the bottom from hitting something, but that could have happened at any time. Strange thing though. I can't drink that bottle dry. I'll have it on me, drink whatever I've put in there- water, juice, iced coffee- and eventually feel like I've drunk the whole think and that it's empty. But I open it up and it's still at least a quarter full. I drink that. I get thirsty. I open it up again. ...and there's always a mouthful left.

Not sure what the side effects of drinking from a bottle cursed by a Mustain't to always have some left are, but it lives in the Emergency Breakdown Kit in my car now, just in case I meet another one.

---

(I'm a disabled artist and make my living telling stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Pre-order the Family Lore book on Patreon)

[piplupod]

disgruntled bc I can't tell if I'm getting sick or if I'm just worn out (sleep deprived) and have a weird sore throat/bad chest combo because of the pill that seemingly burned my throat this morning

[sophiagrimes]

when i remember

[tojisun]

no matter how hard you try, you just can’t make yourself cum tonight.

the position is wrong, your toy is still dead as hell so you had to resort to using your fingers, but those aren’t hitting somewhere deep and scratching that itch you have of wanting to be filled, and it has you crying in frustration.

god, you just wanted to fuck yourself into a good orgasm once. but your fingers are starting to feel numb, and your arm is cramping up, and you feel annoyingly sore already. you know you should call it quits; that you should just douse the flames of your desire with a cold shower and just retire for the night, but you are so, so stubborn and angry and—

you snarl, ripping your fingers out of your cunt before twisting to snatch your phone from where you’d flung it close to the wall. you use your clean hand, wiping the other one on your bedsheets—you might have to wash them tonight, anyway—and sends a message to johnny.

cant cum <

fuck me pls <

you drop your phone to your stomach, hearing yourself heave as your body catches up to the exhaustion. you stare up at the ceiling, trying to ignore the blazing heat and the soreness and the emptiness, and focusing instead on the little spark of need that you refuse to extinguish because you know johnny. you know he’d reply soon.

(he’s always fucked you good; filled you up with slurring words crooned to your ears, his big hands stretching across your stomach because he swears underneath all this skin and fat, he feels his cock fucking in, in, in.

he loves taunting you when your quiet tears turn into soft sobs—ye gonna cum soon, bon? show me yer cummin’ face, huh? c’mon bon.

he is so, so mean, and you need nothing less right now.)

true to your thoughts, your phone buzzes two minutes later. you pick it back up, grunting in confusion when instead of johnny’s name, you see john’s.

is he alright? did he need something from you? god, you think he’d let you do it tomorrow or at least in a couple of hours?

you tap at the notification, only to feel the curiosity bleed out of you to be replaced with startling horror. it’s like ice water was dumped on you, extinguishing every embers of your libido because there, on your screen, was john. replying to your message.

you had—

> quite forward of you. well, since you asked so nicely, we’re on our way.

you had sent the message to—

three knocks—taptap-tap—suddenly thud on your door. you gasp, looking up from your phone to stare at your locked door, dreadful.

you sent it to the damn group chat.

-

part 02

[hxneylavendxr]

Hello

hi