#Canada also calls America “Bird brain”

[idkhowtoread-ink]

Swap Mr. Spherical AU!

I looked up if there was a swap au of the counties already and turns out there are none! Even in the country humans fandom!(Surprising)

So I took it appon myself to make one, Starting off with Canada and America!

[rockislandadultreads]

Libby Spotlight: Newly-Added Science & Nature eBooks

Fire Weather by John Vaillant

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillanttakes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.

Slow Birding by Joan E. Strassmann

Many birders travel far and wide to popular birding destinations to catch sight of rare or “exotic” birds. In Slow Birding, evolutionary biologist Joan E. Strassmann introduces readers to the joys of birding right where they are.

In this inspiring guide to the art of slow birding, Strassmann tells colorful stories of the most common birds to be found in the United States—birds we often see but might not have considered deeply before. For example, northern cardinals thrive in the city, where they are free from predators. White brows on a male white-throated sparrow indicate that he is likely to be a philanderer. This essential guide to the fascinating world of common, everyday birds features: detailed portraits of individual bird species and the scientists who have discovered and observed them; advice and guidance on what to look for when slow birding, so that you can uncover clues to the reasons behind specific bird behaviors; and bird-focused activities that will open your eyes more to the fascinating world of birds.

Slow Birding is the perfect guide for the birder looking to appreciate the beauty of the birds right in their own backyard, observing keenly how their behaviors change from day to day and season to season.

Universe: 50 Ideas You Really Need to Know by Joanne Baker

From dwarf planets to dark energy; and from the Big Bang to the death of stars, this book is the perfect introduction to the cutting-edge science that is shaping our understanding of our place in the Universe and that could lead to the next great discovery -- the detection of life beyond Earth.

The Devil's Element by Dan Egan

Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it's also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. In this major work of explanatory science and environmental journalism, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dan Egan investigates the past, present, and future of what has been called "the oil of our time."

The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. First discovered in a seventeenth-century alchemy lab in Hamburg, it soon became a highly sought-after resource. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan harrowingly reports, our overreliance on this vital crop nutrient is today causing toxic algae blooms and "dead zones" in waterways from the coasts of Florida to the Mississippi River basin to the Great Lakes and beyond. Egan also explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide—which risks rising conflict and even war.

[my2phetaliaheadcanons]

Just a random question. If the 2p Allies and maybe even 2p Axis was monsters, what type would they be?

Two groups are in my rules. So, you get two for the price of one! Also, not gonna lie, my research was pretty surface level. So, if I got anything wrong about any of these mythical beasts, my bad.

America: Allen would match the Beast of Bladenboro. A fierce cat-like monster that is known for dragging off pets and draining them of their blood and decapitating them.

Allen’s ferociousness and messy methods make him the perfect Beast of Bladenboro. Though Allen won’t target dogs, instead his favorite prey would be humans.

So, next time you’re in North Carolina, watch out. He may just grab you from the shadows.

France: François’ personality matches that of the Matagot. A spirit that takes the physical form of a black cat, crow, or some other kind of animal.

The matagot is usually seen as a bringer of evil. At times, usually, when fed, the matagot is known to be helpful to its benefactors. François works in a similar way. Doing his best to ensure that his debt is paid in full.

Canada: As tempting as it is, Matt ain’t bigfoot. Instead, he would be a Waheela. A wolf-like creature with a wider head, pure white fur, and holds a love for decapitation.

Matt is a firm believer of the pack and has an itch for violence. As long as Matt’s the leader, his pack will operate well and destroy any intruders on their lands. A sure sign that you've found it, is the pile of skulls.

England: Ollie pop would be a fae. His high and might attitude mixed with a gentle face would be deadly. Oliver would waste no time making deals and fairy rings. Each one set to grow his kingdom or allow him some fun.

Though, part of me sees Oliver acting like Jareth from labyrinth. Being the only fae in a kingdom of goblins. Obviously getting annoyed with their antics.

Russia: Viktor would be a vodyanoy. These Slavic water spirits are usually seen as old scaly river men, but for Viktor, the lesser-known appearance would be better him. You know, a handsome man, green hair, horns, and tail.

Viktor would live in the rivers of Russia, dragging down all those that disrespect his domain. The unlucky few would remain as servants in his home.

China: Jin matches a Fengsheng Shou. It’s a leopard-like monster with a nearly impervious hide. It takes a lot to kill it, but when the wind blows across its mouth, life is given back to it.

If Jin was one, I can imagine him being grumpy about living for so long. Though, I could see him finding some joy when seeing their surprised faces when he pops back up. Maybe cackles before he strikes them down.

North Italy: Luciano would be a harpy. A vicious bird-like being that would relish in any chance he gets to rip humans apart. It would be terrifying to be dragged to his nest and slowly tortured over many days. All the while having his cold laugh burned into your brain.

South Italy: Fabrizio would be a siren. His own beauty and his smooth voice would lure anyone into his depths. I would be lying if Fabrizio didn’t have a home built of various shipwrecks.

Anyone that would escape his call would be a source of obsession for a while. The obsession would be built on hate. He watches and waits for his chance to drag them below.

Germany: Luther would lead the Wild Hunt. He would be dressed in furs, riding a black stallion, and yelling for his men to follow.

His mischief would be well known and tells would be told to avoid his sight. After all, getting caught in it could lead to an early grave. Though your after-life would be one big party.

Prussia: Wilhelm would be a ghost knight. Having been betrayed by his king and marked as a traitor. His silent anger is what has kept him around for all these centuries. Waiting for a chance to get his revenge and find his peace.

Japan: Kurai would be a bakeneko. He already possesses that grace and attitude of a feline; his vengeful side makes their match perfect.

Many people would fall to his feline charm. Often inviting him into their homes and allowing him to carry out his own vengeance or on behalf of another cat. After he's satisfied, he goes out into the night looking for someone else.

Spain: When I think of Armando and monsters, I see an undead pirate. Similar to Davie Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean. His bloodlust and unnecessary killings would come back to hurt him. Cursing him to wonder the seas with his crew.

Though instead of changing his way as they hoped, Armando would still act like the vicious wolf he is.

[wherearemyglassesbro]

Do you think nactions have sharp teeth when they go feral. Like do they have traits of animals that Rome the land since they embody it. Like do america and Canada and a few others have large bear or animal teeth

I personally don’t envision them suddenly a sprouting sharp teeth just to go wild but I do have some thoughts on nation teeth!!!!! I think it’s interesting so let’s talk about teeth babey

I am almost positive that it was @ashafox who first talked about nations’ teeth always growing so they gotta like...break them down or file them or something idk it was awhile ago but I really enjoy that thought!!! Like...Another part of them thats so similar to humans but just not so it’s like creepy for humans cause ew...toothies...

I mentioned earlier that they can bite forks while eating and leave a dent in them! Their teeth won’t survive that really. Their bite strength is fantastic!! But their teeth won’t hold up when facing off against metal. They’ll chip and crack and look really gross so nations will just rip their own teeth out and within 24 hours there will be a new tooth in it’s place. Gross

Their teeth are stronger than human teeth though!!! Just...I mean, they aren’t diamonds lmao

If a nation wanted to, they could file their teeth into points!! Their teeth don’t regenerate unless they’re pulled out or severely damaged to where their body is like “AHHHH FIX IT FIX ITTTTTT!!!” A subtle modification like that usually doesn’t trigger that until the nation is tired of having pointy teeth and they just pull em out. They’ll have a new set of chompers the next day!

Now let’s talk about the animal traits!!! ooOooOoOoOooOoO!!

I don’t see them with actual animal traits like galloping or chirping or stuff like that, when I say ‘animalistic traits’ I mean like...caveman brain or human instincts that have been bred out of modern humans or the ability to be hyper aware in the wild!

But many nations do know how to hunt, they memorized the behavior of certain animals in order to hunt them

They also can make insanely accurate animal sounds if they were raised in the wild! Birds and deer sounds are the most common among nations. Imagine how excited linguists were when they found out that nations can do that kind of shit

Like you know in movies where spies are like ‘I’ll do a bird call and that’ll be the signal for you to kick the door in’? I wouldn’t say that nations communicate in bird noises but they can joke around with them!

Something I like to think about is Francis or Gilbert whistling with their birds :)

Idk I think I lost my train of thought again I’m in class while writing this so I’m multitasking I hope this makes sense ;-;

[hetawrite]

Hello how are you to day? Good, good. If you can could you do some hetalia headcanons for the main 8 (not including America or including him if you want to) as well as Prussia, Romano, Spain, and Canada that have a American S/O that uses a lot of Meme slang (like Yeet or Salty or Shook or Mood you get the picture) and the countries are just like 'WTF are they saying?!' and because of it they have to try and explain it, Key word TRY. Sorry if this is to long, thanks for read this have a good day.

My day is good, thanks. I think I quite enjoy writing headcanons like this. And no problem for a long ask. Just means you have something more specific in mind!

1p!England

"I am shooketh"

Pardon? You were drinking some hot chocolate, reading on your phone. He'd ask if you were alright. His mind would assume you’re scared, or got shivers from a ghost walking through you.

“Did you just have an Encounter?”

This man is high-strung so don’t laugh otherwise he’ll be offended and get rude. What an absolute brat. 

It’s meme slang, you tell him. “Love, I deal with enough slang on a regular basis. We don’t need any more.”

This guy is vaguely aware as he is exposed to America quite often and he himself is a London aware of changing tides, but he’s then he deems it ‘Improper’ and implores you not to use it too often.

1p!France

“He is being salty.”

He doesn’t know how to take this. That man on the TV is being irritating, but he can’t comprehend what you mean. 

This man is helpless with technology. If you show him the word meme, he will say “mee-mees”. He is uncultured in the ways of the internet.

You explain, and he just nods, but he doesn’t understand. He comprehend, but doesn’t understand. Barely ever.

This man basically embodies ‘old dogs can’t learn new tricks’.

1p!Canada

“You’re such a simp.”

“Only for you.” Awww, Canada, baby. 

Of course he knows. This boy is young in comparison to every other personification and he goes on the internet. 

He isn’t one for speaking in slang normally, only when someones being extra cringe or dissing someone. Boy is cultured but sassy.

He also has a folder of memes. Mostly saved from America, but now he knows you’ll understand them and won’t cringe at him, you will now get them when you’re apart. He wants to make you smile and if memes are the way to get deeper into your heart then so be it. America is literally supplying him with the hottest memes out there for free.

1p!Russia

“Cash me outside, how ‘bout that?”

He recognises it. It doesn’t click in his brain, but he remembers America shouting it at some point. Just like you’re doing because he inconvenienced you. Please don’t fight him.

You can show it to him, but he isn’t all that interested. Internet culture doesn’t interest him. He doesn’t follow trends and only got Facebook because America insisted on making him an account. The dude only has a laptop for work and his phone has basically no app. His highest used is Tetris.

He’ll recognise things you say, but will mostly just give you a judging stare. Or maybe chuckle if you make a fool of yourself.

1p!China

“Yeet!”

Calm down, you’re being way too energetic about throwing that into the bin. 

He deals with all of his siblings at home, and then America at Big Work Meetings. He does not want to have it from you.

This man needs chillness in his life, consistency. He hates hecticness. So you throwing shit and shouting will get on his nerves before he tells you to pack it in. 

Yeah, he’s too grouchy for this stuff.

1p!Italy

“Is this a bird?”

“That’s a butterfly...” He doesn’t get it. He has watched a few animes, that’s what happens when you’re friends with Japan. And America. And Prussia. And also Romano because it’s his guilty pleasure so he may catch on to what you’re saying.

He’ll also understand other memes you say, but he doesn’t find them themselves funny. He just actually enjoys watching your expressions to it and your enthusiasm. 

He works off other peoples happiness, so seeing that grin of yours whilst you imitate gives him the butterflies in his stomach. 

He will try though to pepper some in if you are a user of memes in your language. He wants to pick them up to make you smile. He’s such a cutie-pie UwU.

1p!Germany

“Ah yes, stonks.”

No, these are the finances, honey. They’re not-oh... now he’s slightly disappointed as he looks at you from over his glasses.

Prussia is energetic about his memes, and Germany will often be ‘gifted’ with them. Sometimes, he’ll read through them but often he’ll scroll through them all. His brother spams. Heavily.

You may get lucky sometimes if it’s an animal meme to make him smile, or exhale sharply through his nose, but Germany doesn’t often find them funny. 

Like Italy, he’ll smile if your positively thrilled with it.

1p!Japan

“That is a juicy boy.”

Oh, thank you, s/o. He’s happy you’re enjoying the meal he made you.

He knows memes. This man watches anime. He has every social media account on all platforms. He will smile, he will partake in some fine dining that is the dank meme section of the internet. 

They’re mostly the anime version of a meme. He doesn’t really enjoy edgy humour, and while a Danny DeVito meme about magnum dong is mildly humorous, it just isn’t his sip of tea.

He’ll say memes out-loud in the same room as you sometimes, in that deadpan voice of his, which always makes it ten times funnier. Even his commentary of anime that you’re watching a rerun of will have memes in it. And if you say you’re watching an anime and got to this specific episode, you bet he’ll pull up his neatly made folders on his phone for that anime and send it. He appreciates that you like that type of humour.

1p!Prussia

“That is a sweaty boi.”

Dat boi? Dat boi! Prussia is a people pleaser at heart and a goofball so of course he knows memes. This man has a large following on the internet, he makes a living off people enjoying his content!

As soon as you spill the proverbial bag of you liking memes, he will spam. His line of thinking is often, “Hahaha, this is hilarious. S/o may also find this funny. I will send it to them!” And if there’s one meme on that website with him scrolling hours at a time, you will get sent at least like 30 in an hour.

He will try his darnedest to make you laugh, so you will get a specific meme made about anyone you know too just to see you in tears over it.

“I have an army.” He sends you a picture of England. “We have a Germany.” Yeah, it’s that MCU meme of Loki and RDJ... Sometimes he’s not that funny, but A+ for effort!

1p!Romano

“One does not simply--”

Yeah, he knows what you;re going to say and rolls his eyes. If it’s anything too cringe, he will laugh at you and take the piss. But he will not hesitate to make an edgy or self deprecating meme.

Romano is ‘do as I say, not as I do’ type of person, and also never call him out for his hypocrisy. He will get snooty with you.

But he does enjoy them even though it doesn’t seem like it. He enjoys seeing you happy about them so as long as you’re shameless and don’t take his elbow digging to heart it’s all fine. 

Don’t call him out for laughing at whatever meme you say or send, as he will get defensive and annoyed with you. Imagine edgy teenager ‘I’m not like everyone else!’.

1p!Spain

“Pepe the frog.”

He partakes in a bit of memeing. He enjoys it. He’s got you.

But boy does he like the incomprehensible ones. Where the pictures highly saturated and has a couple of nonsense words put across it not lined up. He is cracking up at it.

Normal ones are fine too, but it’s either Facebook mum ones or weird incomprehensible. No in between. He doesn’t get that deep on the internet to understand the ones with context.

[birdlord]

Every Book I Read in 2019

This was a heavier reading year for me (heavier culture-consumption year in general) partly because my partner started logging his books read, and then, of course, it’s a competition.

01 Morvern Callar; Alan Warner - One of the starkest books I’ve ever read. What is it about Scotland that breeds writers with such brutal, distant perspectives on life? Must be all the rocks. 

02 21 Things You Might Not Know About the Indian Act; Bob Joseph - I haven’t had much education in Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous nations that came before it, so this opened things up for me quite a bit. The first and most fundamental awakening is to the fact that this is not a story of progress from worse to better (which is what a simplistic, grade school understanding of smallpox blankets>residential schools>reserves would tell you), in fact, the nation to nation relationship of early contact was often superior to what we have today. I wish there was more of a call to action, but apparently a sequel is on its way. 

03 The Plot Against America; Philip Roth - An alternative history that in some ways mirrors our present. I did feel like I was always waiting for something to happen, but I suppose the point is that, even at the end of the world, disasters proceed incrementally. 

04 Sabrina; Nick Drnaso - The blank art style and lack of contrast in the colouring of each page really reinforces the feeling of impersonal vacancy between most of the characters. I wonder how this will read in the future, as it’s very much based in today’s relationship to friends and technology. 

05 Perfumes: The Guide; Luca Turn & Tania Sanchez - One of the things I like to do when I need to turn my brain off online is reading perfume reviews. That’s where I found out about this book, which runs through different scent families and reviews specific well-known perfumes. Every topic has its boffins, and these two are particularly witty and readable. 

06 Adventures in the Screen Trade; William Goldman - Reading this made me realize how little of the cinema of the 1970s I’ve actually seen, beyond the usual heavy hitters. Ultimately I found this pretty thin, a few peices of advice stitched together with anecdotes about a Hollywood that is barely recognizable today. 

07 The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton - A love triangle in which the fulcrum is a terribly irritating person, someone who thinks himself far more outré than he is. Nonetheless, I was taken in by this story of “rebellion”, such as it was, to be compelling.

08 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis; Sam Anderson - Like a novel that follows various separate characters, this book switches between tales of the founding of Oklahoma City with basketball facts and encounters with various oddball city residents. It’s certainly a fun ride, but you may find, as I did, that some parts of the narrative interest you more than others. Longest subtitle ever?

09 World of Yesterday; Stefan Zweig - A memoir of pre-war Austria and its artistic communities, told by one of its best-known exports. Particularly wrenching with regards to the buildup to WWII, from the perspective of those who had been through this experience before, so recently. 

10 Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing; Tim Parks - A writer finds himself plagued by pain that conventional doctors aren’t able to cure, so he heads further afield to see if he can use stillness-of-mind to ease the pain, all the while complaining as you would expect a sceptic to do. His digressions into literature were a bit hard to take (I’m sure you’re not Coleridge, my man).

11 The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences have Extraordinary Impact; Chip & Dan Heath - I read this for work-related reasons, with the intention of improving my ability to make exhibitions and interpretation. It has a certain sort of self-helpish structure, with anecdotes starting each chapter and a simple lesson drawn from each one. Not a bad read if you work in a public-facing capacity. 

12 Against Everything: Essays; Mark Greif - The founder of N+1 collects a disparate selection of essays, written over a period of several years. You won’t love them all, but hey, you can always skip those ones!

13 See What I Have Done; Sarah Schmidt - A retelling of the Lizzie Borden story, which I’d seen a lot of good reviews for. Sadly this didn’t measure up, for me. There’s a lot of stage setting (rotting food plays an important part) but there’s not a lot of substance there. 

14 Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy; Angela Garber - This is another one that came to me very highly recommended. Garber seems to think these topics are not as well-covered as they are, but she does a good job researching and retelling tales of pregnancy, birth, postpartum difficulties and breastfeeding. 

15 Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier - This was my favourite book club book of the year. I’d always had an impression of...trashiness I guess? around du Maurier, but this is a classic thriller. Maybe the first time I’ve ever read, rather than watched, a thriller! That’s on me. 

16 O’Keefe: The Life of an American Legend; Jeffrey Hogrefe - I went to New Mexico for the first time this spring, and a colleague lent me this Georgia O’Keefe biography after I returned. I hadn’t known much about her personal life before this, aside from what I learned at her museum in Santa Fe. The author has made the decision that much of O’Keefe’s life was determined by childhood incest, but doesn’t have what you might call….evidence?

17 A Lost Lady; Willa Cather - A turn-of-the-20th century story about an upper-class woman and her young admirer Neil. I’ve never read any other Cather, but this felt very similar to the Wharton I also read this year, which I gather isn’t typical of her. 

18 The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country; Helen Russell - A British journalist moves to small-town Denmark with her husband, and although the distances are not long, there’s a considerable culture shock. Made me want to eat pastries in a BIG WAY. 

19 How Not to be a Boy; Robert Webb - The title gives a clue to the framing device of this book, which is fundamentally a celebrity memoir, albeit one that largely ignores the celebrity part of his life in favour of an examination of the effects of patriarchy on boys’ development as human beings. 

20 The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will be Glad that You Did); Philippa Perry; A psychotherapist’s take on how parents’ own upbringing affects the way they interact with their own kids. 

21 The Library Book; Susan Orlean - This book has stuck with me more than I imagined that it would. It covers both the history of libraries in the USA, and the story of the arson of the LA Public Library’s central branch in 1986. 

22 We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; Samantha Irby - I’ve been reading Irby’s blog for years, and follow her on social media. So I knew the level of raunch and near body-horror to expect in this essay collection. This did fill in a lot of gaps in terms of her life, which added a lot more blackness (hey) to the humour. 

23 State of Wonder; Ann Patchett - A semi-riff on Heart of Darkness involving an OB/GYN who now works for a pharmaceutical company, heading to the jungle to retrieve another researcher who has gone all Colonel Kurtz on them. I found it a bit unsatisfying, but the descriptions were, admittedly, great. 

24 Disappearing Earth; Julia Phillips - A story of an abduction of two girls in very remote Russia, each chapter told by another townsperson. The connections between the narrators of each chapter are sometimes obvious, but not always. Ending a little tidy, but plays against expectations for a book like this. 

25 Ethan Frome; Edith Wharton - I gather this is a typical high school read, but I’d never got to it. In case you’re in the same boat as me, it’s a short, mildly melodramatic romantic tragedy set in the new england winter. It lacks the focus on class that other Whartons have, but certainly keeps the same strong sense that once you’ve made a choice, you’re stuck with it. FOREVER. 

26 Educated; Tara Westover - This memoir of a Mormon fundamentalist-turned-Academic-superstar was huge on everyone’s reading lists a couple of years back, and I finally got to it. It felt similar to me in some ways to the Glass Castle, in terms of the nearly-unbelievable amounts of hell she and her family go through at the hands of her father and his Big Ideas. I found that it lacked real contemplation of the culture shock of moving from the rural mountain west to, say, Cambridge. 

27 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of Lusitania; Erik Larson - I’m a sucker for a story of a passenger liner, any non-Titanic passenger liner, really. Plus Lusitania’s story has interesting resonances for the US entry into WWI, and we see the perspective of the U-boat captain as well as people on land, and Lusitania’s own passengers and crew. 

28 The Birds and Other Stories; Daphne du Maurier - The title story is the one that stuck in my head most strongly, which isn’t any surprise. I found it much more harrowing than the film, it had a really effective sense of gradually increasing dread and inevitability. 

29 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Faded Glory; Raphael Bob-Waksberg - Hit or miss in the usual way of short story collections, this book has a real debt to George Saunders. 

30 Sex & Rage; Eve Babitz - a sort of pseudo-autobiography of an indolent life in the LA scene of the 1970s. It was sometimes very difficult to see how the protagonist actually felt about anything, which is a frequent, acute symptom of youth. 

31 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; Graham Greene - Gotta love a book with an alternate title built in. This is a broad (the characters? are, without exception, insane?!) satire about a world I know little about. I don’t have a lot of patience or interest in Greene’s religious allegories, but it’s a fine enough story. 

32 Lathe of Heaven; Ursula K LeGuin - Near-future sci-fi that is incredibly prescient about the effects of climate change for a book written over forty years ago. The book has amazing world-building, and the first half has the whirlwind feel of Homer going back in time, killing butterflies and returning to the present to see what changes he has wrought. 

33 The Grammarians; Cathleen Schine - Rarely have I read a book whose jacket description of the plot seems so very distant from what actually happens therein. 

34 The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network; Katharine Losse - Losse was one of Facebook’s very earliest employees, and she charts her experience with the company in this memoir from 2012. Do you even recall what Facebook was like in 2012? They hadn’t even altered the results of elections yet! Zuck was a mere MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, probably. Were we ever so young?

35 Invisible Women; Caroline Ciado Perez - If you want to read a book that will make you angry, so angry that you repeatedly assail whoever is around with facts taken from it, then this, my friend, is the book for you. 

36 The Hidden World of the Fox; Adele Brand - A really charming look at the fox from an ecologist who has studied them around the world. Much of it takes place in the UK, where urban foxes take on a similar ecological niche that raccoons famously do where I live, in Toronto. 

37 S; Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams - This is a real mindfuck of a book, consisting of a faux-old novel, with marginalia added by two students which follows its own narrative. A difficult read not because of the density of prose, but the sheer logistics involved: read the page, then the marginalia? Read the marginalia interspersed with the novel text? Go back chapter by chapter? I’m not sure that either story was worth the trouble, in the end. 

38 American War; Omar El Akkad - This is not exclusively, but partially a climate-based speculative novel, or, grossly, cli-fi for short. Ugh, what a term! But this book is a really tight, and realistic look at the results of a fossil-fuels-based second US Civil War. 

39 Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation; Andrew Marantz - This is the guy you’ll hear on every NPR story talking about his semi-embedding within the Extremely Online alt-right. Most of the figures he profiles come off basically how you’d expect, I found his conclusions about the ways these groups have chosen to use online media tools to achieve their ends the most illuminating part. 

40 Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm; Isabella Tree - This is the story of a long process of transitioning a rural acreage (more of an estate than a farm, this is aristocratic shit) from intensive agriculture to something closer to wild land. There are long passages where Tree (ahem) simply lists species which have come back, which I’m sure is fascinating if you are from the area, but I tended to glaze over a bit. Experts from around the UK and other European nations weigh in on how best to rewild the space, which places the project in a wider context. 

FICTON: 17     NONFICTION: 23

[countryshitposts]

You’re Shooting Your Bullet the Wrong Way

One Night and One More Time, Thanks for the Memories

Trigger Warnings: child abuse, mentions of rape and assault, violence and gore, suicidal thoughts and mentions of a suicide attempt

AO3 Link

First

Previous

-

Name Guide:

Nippon Koku- Japan

Nippon Teikoku- Japan Empire

Ost- East Germany

Osterreich- Austria

-

It was a rainy day when our first encounter with Him happened. I was silently examining our files for Teikoku, the rain pouring down on our office slowly but surely. I was smoking on a pipe, smoke coming out from it, the curtains drawn as I am plunged into a dark setting-

"Australia!", Kiwi's voice shatters the tone of Aussie's voice, and his brother glares at him. "You weren't smoking a pipe when Britain called us! You don't even smoke a pipe at all!"

"Psh, Kiwi, let me narrate the story since your sheepfucker brain couldn't start one sentence!"

Kiwi looks offended, clutching his heart dramatically. "I am not a sheepfucker, how many times do I have to tell you! Fine then. Go on with how we got a call from Britain!"

The door opens, and I raise my head up from the documents to find my sheepfucker of a brother enter the doors, coffee in one hand and carrying a tired expression on his face. His eyes show as if he didn't sleep for a few days, wrinkles underneath his eyes. I raise a brow as he steps forward and gives me the cup of coffee I've yearned for the entire morning.

"So what's the news?", I ask, puffing up smoke to white billows in the office, and he sighs.

"Nothing", Kiwi replies with a small sigh. "America's been working me off and I really need a break."

I nod agreeably, also releasing an exhausted sigh. We love our sister very much but sometimes... she's overbearing. "Is it about those mafia mobs running around the whole city?"

"Apparently so", Kiwi nods, as I sip on my coffee. "America is getting restless."

"It's because she's the head of the police", I reply, "she has to do a good job y'know."

Kiwi shrugs, "Yeah..."

Suddenly, my phone starts ringing, and I look at the name of the person who called before my heart starts to beat out loud, even louder than the rain pouring.

With a deep breath, I pick up.

"Hi!", the beautiful French accent speaks from the speaker of my phone, and I immediately sigh as the entire world around me becomes as warm as the feeling I am feeling in my heart. I wish I could see her again in real life and not in my phone, but her voice is melodious.

I can feel Kiwi rolling his eyes from in front of me, but I don't care, since I'm talking to Villers, the love of my life, the angel to my heaven, the moon to my sun, the French to my English-

"The 'French to my English'?", Canada mimicks Aussie's voice while the others snicker, and the narrator glares at them.

"Oh shut up", he grumbles, crossing his arms and looking the other way, before smiling mischievously, "you just don't have any girlfriend or boyfriends yet."

America glares at him with malice and envy, the same way she's glared at him when he said he and Villers are a thing; Canada crosses his arms and raises a brow, not really hindered about how Australia keeps taking jabs at their status, while Kiwi rolls his eyes tiredly, already knowing his antics.

"Can you just go back to the story?", Kiwi asks, "or I'll continue it myself."

Australia's eyes flare as he goes back to the main plot.

"Are you done with work?", Villers' sweet voice asks me again, and I find myself smiling stupidly and my heart beating once again, fiddling with my pipe.

"Unfortunately, no", I say dejectedly, looking at the downpour at the windows. I hear her let out a breath of longing that made me want to find her and tell her that I'm free for her, always.

"Alright", she says, sounding despondent and I now want to cuddle her up in the fluffiest of pillows and coziest of blankets, showering her with kisses as my arms envelop around her like a swan. "Tell me if you're free. Au revoir!" She hangs up and I can find myself missing her already, expecting myself to run across the rain towards her home.

"So", I turn back to my brother, "what's the news?"

"Surprisingly, no major news except a few more mobs clashed once again", Kiwi replies in a professional accent, as if he's professional or older. "Like France and Reich had a shootout again. This time Netherlands' mob got into this crossfire."

"Netherlands?", I repeat, "isn't she the mob boss that has a vendetta against us?"

Kiwi shrugs, "Yeah, I guess."

Just then, when lightning streaks the sky and lights up the gray surroundings for a bit, the power in the office turns off, and Kiwi shrieks a womanly shriek while I caress the gun hidden in my coat-

"First of all", Kiwi interjects, a red tinge on his cheeks, "I did not scream; you did. Second, we both don't have our guns at the time, and third you were the one saying we're gonna die."

"Leave it to tell New Zealand the truth", Canada sniggers to America.

"Don't worry Kiwi, I'll save the both of us-", but before I can continue, the lights turn back on and the fan on my desk starts to twirl, as if nothing happened. Then I look onto the wall, and I gasp, almost dropping the gun to the floor.

Because there was something on the wall.

Something written on it with cursive handwriting, as if they had time in the world for such a thing.

It was in crimson red, a message haunting me to this very day,

"The first step is for your love to surprise you, the next is to look at the edge of her dress."

Me and Kiwi glance at each other with wide eyes before going back to inspect the writing on the walls. I approach it while my coward of a brother is shaking and telling me to be cautious, believing it's booby-trapped. I examine the handwriting once again; how can anyone have time to write such a message just seconds after the power went out? I put out a finger and smear the message, blinking once it smudges with the wall.

"It looks like our vandal used lipstick", I mumble before going back to Kiwi, who was silent, meaning he was thinking of something. I reread the message again, still quite confused to what the vandal means.

"I think I know what it means", Kiwi says with realization striking in his glittering eyes. "Maybe we need to plan a surprise party for someone we both love! And then- oh."

"Disgusting!", I bellow, my eyes flaring. "We are not surprising America and checking underneath her skirt!"

"I have no idea who really said that, but I'd beat you both to Sunday if you do that", America pipes up, crossing her arms while glaring at her brothers. "Also, it means wait for your love to surprise you, meaning they'll be the one bringing the note to you."

"Yeah, that's where I was getting at", Aussie replies, "until you manage to interrupt us."

"I don't know", Kiwi says with a thoughtful look in his eyes, staring and examining the message once again, "maybe it's your love, Aussie."

I blink, processing what my brother just said before blushing red and ruffling my brother. "I am not going to look under her skirts Kiwi!"

"You say that but you've been watching her whenever she bends down to pick something up", Kiwi states with an emotionless look in his eyes. "So maybe, just maybe, Villers is going to surprise you."

"Now that's absurd!", my voice slaps, "a message couldn't tell the future!"

"Not if the future is happening now", Kiwi replies ominously, pointing to the windows.

I follow his finger and, there she is, my soon-to-be-wife, engagement ring and all, holding an umbrella over her head while on her other hand she was holding a picnic basket despite the despondent weather. Her beautiful and striking dark eyes roam each window, before meeting my eyes.

My arms go slack and my legs turn to jelly once again, as I hold her loving stare as she smiles warmly.

Not even the rain can get rid of my sunshine.

"I'm just really worried for you, mon amour", Villers says as her arms wrap around me like a loving embrace. "And I was lonely in my home all alone."

"But I'm here now", I say, soothing her nerves like she was doing with me. "You don't have to be lonely."

"I love you", she says softly, and the whole world implodes and creates the Milky Way between the both of us.

I tilt her chin up, our eyes shining bright like diamonds. "I love you too."

I kiss her right then and there, feeling nothing but her body and warm lips on mine, time standing still and not moving on as I can feel the both of us floating, floating to the skies then to the cosmics, no space between us. She runs her hands over my back as she leans in for more, and my hands roam her light hair with my fingers as my hand reaches the edge of her skirt, hearing her gasp as I touch what was beyond her clothing.

"Disgusting", Kiwi says, face souring as his mind replays the scene without his permission, while Aussie looks so enamoured at the fact that he almost had the chance of doing something with his fianceè.

"Please just, censor the explicit scenes, Aussie?", America asks with a sigh.

Then I feel something with my other hand, which had stopped at the edge of her dress. Puzzled, I kiss her deeply once again before letting go, a piece of paper I extracted from her skirts in my hand.

Meanwhile, Villers was still looking dazed and love struck from the touch and kiss we shared, until her eyes land on the card on my hands.

"Did that come from...?" I nod awkwardly, biting my lip as my love's face turns bright red and inspects her dress for more stray particles. "I am so sorry!"

I kiss her forehead reassuringly, "It's fine." I glance at the card again as I read the entirety of the message, still written in the enthralling cursive from the walls.

"Let the birds come to you once you are at the highest peak of The City."

"What?", Kiwi says from behind me; he must've also been reading the message. "What does that mean?"

"I don't even know Kiwi", I reply, rereading the message again. "Maybe it really means what it means?"

Kiwi meets my eyes, "And what does it mean?"

I shrug, my brain coming up empty. "Maybe we need to find the highest peak in this land? Like climbing a mountain and let the birds do the rest?"

Kiwi scoffs as he rolls his eyes at my answer. "And what are they gonna do? Fly us towards our destination? And why a mountain? We're in the middle of a City, Aussie."

"Maybe it means the birds will point us to our next target!", I give out another suggestion. "Or they'll crap on us like the barbaric birds they are and not give us any clue to where or who this message leads to."

"Maybe they're trained", Kiwi muses as my mind launches off to new theories on what this all means.

Perhaps it means that the 'birds' are aeroplanes?, my mind processes, or maybe this is all a big prank from some asshole who think it'd be funny to prank people doing their job...

Meanwhile, Villers was silently reading the message with her big eyes, moving on from how the card got into its destination the first place, before looking at me with those big eyes I get lost in every time. "Well, the messenger said 'highest peak of The City', right? Maybe it means you two have to scale the highest building here."

Me and Kiwi exchange looks, before my face morphs into a huge smile before hugging my beautiful and smart future wife. I shower her forehead with kisses once again, emitting a beautiful laugh from her mouth as she looks at me with joy.

Kiwi's eyes light up, "Maybe that's it! I think we need to scale the tallest building in The City!"

"Which is?" I think for a moment; there are tonnes of tall buildings in this City.

"Deutsche Towers", Villers responds with a breath, and I know what it means- she was reminiscing the times where she had been caught in a crossfire between two rival gangs; mostly against the Deutsches Family. Her eyes had a clouded look, as if controlling those horrid memories surging in her, but I couldn't help but remember how I had saved the girl who would become my future wife. The event was awful, of course, but it made the both of us responsible and more in love with one another.

"Please don't tell me you were going to tell the story of how you met her", America interrupts surly, "because we were there when you both met."

Aussie rolls his eyes, "Okay, okay, I won't. Although the readers might be disappointed at the lack of a love tale."

America blinks, confused, "Readers?”

Aussie ignores the question and continues,

Kiwi breaks the silence by saying, dejectedly, "Looks like we're gonna have to ask those stingy rich upper class men entrance to the Towers, huh?"

I nod with a look of exhaustion on my face, "Yep." I look at Villers once again, "are you coming with us?"

Villers fidgets on her place, looking from left to right then back at me with those beautiful eyes I always see in my dreams. "Maybe it would be better for me as a lookout."

I grin at her, "You bet."

"Oh come on!", I cry out to one of the guards in the area, pacing back and forth until I glare at their faceless beings underneath their uniforms, "you guys are always open!"

"Sir, I understand your confusion", says one of the guards, not breaking out of their stride, "but Mister Reich ordered us not to let anyone onto the top of the building."

"And why?", I pry, raising a demanding brow at the both of them, who both sneak furtive glances before playing stoic guards. "Even his father of all people let strangers into the top of the Towers!"

The guard shakes his head, still straight-faced, but there was a glint of sadness in his eyes. "His father is dearly departed."

Me and Kiwi's eyes widen in shock, and we both know what we were thinking: Deutsches Reich? Dead? Shouldn't this be on the news?

"Shouldn't we know that Deutsches Reich died?", I ask the guards. "Why are we only hearing this now?"

"Because, gentlemen", a new, frigid voice adjourns my and the guard's conversation, and me and my brother turn the other way to find a man with messy blonde curls posing in front of a painting. His dark green eyes stare right into our souls, as if we were the jewels he has been looking for and he has succeeded. He smiles at us in a peculiar manner, as if he was a serial killer finally meeting his target. "I ordered them to keep my father's... tragic death a secret."

Once again, Weimar stares at me, his grin growing larger. I swallow down the feeling that something is very wrong with the man that had once been afraid of his own shadow.

I give him a smile in return (although it was nervous and awkward, and I hope he’d never make eye contact with me again), and saying, “Mister Weimar, please let us pass. And your secret will never reach the public's ears.”

Weimar only smiles as a reply, a breeze sweeping into the room, telling me oh, how wrong I was to even ask him such a pathetic request. He takes a step forward, slow and calculated, as if he is teasing his prey step by step until he jumps to them and gnash his teeth. I try to move backwards, but my feet were stuck in the ground, not cooperating with me.

He was a few inches from my face, lips curled into an off grin, his emerald green eyes a vision of my death. There was a cold and dark air enveloping him while he embraces it with a haunting sigh.

“You’re ordering me?”, he says with gritted teeth, still in a smile that I will not shake off, even in my nightmares. “I’m not your slave. I’m not someone to step on. I’m nothing like him anymore. I’m not that coward you know.”

We have a silent stare off for God knows how long, Weimar poised for the kill as his emerald green eyes glimmer with intent, intent to see my dead body, as Kiwi looks on to the both of us.

“Papa!”, a voice breaks through the air, and the whole room turns to the source; a young boy holding a girl’s hand who resembles him. A taller, older figure stands behind them, grey eyes tracking the room, strawberry blonde curls concealing his eyes before he fiddles with it.

Weimar’s smile slowly loosens as he turns to glare at the newcomers, specifically the elder. His green eyes bore hatred towards the twins’ guardian, but instead of shivering like I am now, he stares back at him with an unreadable expression.

“I told you to keep them confined in their rooms, Österreich”, he says with a slight snarl.

Österreich shrugs, “They wanted to play, Weimar. And who can deny them? I can’t.” He chuckles as West and Ost gossip to each other, naive children in the world.

Weimar scowls at his children, which makes me confused because everyone knows that Weimar loves his children to hell and back. I clear my throat, and once again everyone looks back at me, Weimar’s glare redirected towards me.

“You’re still here?”, he asks, looking at my form, then forming a smile on his face once again. Jesus Christ, I’m a little intimidated by this new Weimar. “Why the rush to go up my towers, dummkopf? Is it to make you feel like you scare me? But I’m not scared of you anymore. Never. Never again will I be scared of gun-wielding hooligans.”

“Please, sir”, Kiwi speaks up, voice small, “we just needed to see something on top of the Towers.”

Weimar stares at him, a grin still plastered across his face like a mask, not saying anything as if he was considering his request. He shrugs playfully, “Well then, since you asked so nicely-” his eyes glint to me for a second, “I will let you to the top of my towers.”

“Oh my god thank you so much Sir!”, Kiwi says with a look of relief.

“But”, his voice is abrupt, static jumping upon static, “you will have to take the stairs.”

My jaw drops, “Wait… are you serious?”

Weimar just smiles in reply, his eyes looking towards the stairs as me and Kiwi stare at it for a bit, before finally noting that he is - indeed - telling us to take the stairs.

So, with our feet raised, we take the first step to heaven. Before that, however, there was something on Weimar’s hand that almost escaped my eyes: a necklace of pearls that I know belonged to his mother.

“Let’s just say that climbing thirty-one floors wasn’t a dream”, Aussie says, sighing, as Kiwi nods. “I’ll skip to only the important details.”

I heave an exhausted sigh as I unbutton my shirt and fan myself with it, while I hear Kiwi panting from behind me and I can’t blame him- we were only three floors high and I feel my lungs starting to collapse underneath the pressure. Once we reach the fourth floor, we both spot Teikoku and Koku lounging around the lounge, hearing them speak, before moving on.

“Jesus this place loves spirals”, Kiwi says between pants as he takes of his silver fern jacket to fan himself with.

“Yep”, I agree, Teikoku and Koku’s voices already fading now-

“Wait”, America interrupts Aussie’s tale, much to his irritation. “Teikoku and Koku were there? Did you hear them say anything?

“Alright, fine, I’ll go back to it”, he says.

[RECORD SCRATCH, FREEZE FRAME, REWIND THREE SECONDS]

“Isn’t that Koku and Teikoku? In Weimar’s building?”, Kiwi points out, voice a soft whisper to not attract their attention.

“Let’s get closer”, I whisper back to him, as we break away from the steps and into close distance with one mafia mob boss and his brother.

Koku was leaning on the sofa, messy dark hair covering one of his grey eyes like he was a popstar emo goth boy model while he checks his phone. Teikoku, on the other hand, was sitting on the sofas with an imperious way, as if he owns the place. He was biting his lip, muttering something in Japanese as he looks around with his crimson red eyes, searching for someone.

Koku spots him impulsively sitting on his ‘throne’ and sighs, “Look, I knew this was going to be a bad idea.”

Teikoku’s piercing gaze redirects to Koku, “You don’t have a say in this matter, okosama.”

Koku’s eyes flare up in anger at the last word, “I’m not a child, Teikoku. If anyone’s the ‘child’ here, it’d be the girl you’re forcing ME to marry!”

I blink, not knowing that Koku would have the courage to even look at his brother with anger in his eyes, but Teikoku abruptly stands from his seat, looking forward to murder someone with his words. “You dare talk back to me?” His shadow looms over Koku, whose eyes are now tinged with fear and regret for speaking up against his brother. Before Koku opens his mouth once again to answer that no, he wasn’t disrespecting him, Teikoku pins him to the wall with a sound resonating from it.

“Were you questioning my authority?”, he seethes, his fingers digging deep into Koku’s skull, who was looking choked and suffocated.

I was watching this with an ignited fury in me, I raise from my hiding place before Kiwi pulls me back down, shaking his head. We only came here for one thing and it was to know who was sending us these messages.

“At last”, I breathe, fresh and moist air from rain colliding with my face like a soft blanket. “We’re free!”

“And look!”, Kiwi points at something on the dark grey skies, “a flock of birds are coming!”

I glance up in the sky, and Kiwi was right: dark-colored specs were dancing across the sky, growing larger and larger, until they were above us. I let out a gasp of joy as I see what kind of birds they were: robins, with one of them having a slip of paper in its beak, opening it and letting the slip of paper drop into my open palm, before pivoting to one corner and soaring to the direction in where they came from, with Kiwi waving back at them.

Meanwhile, I was already reading the slip of paper:

“The trains might show you the way, yes, but that doesn’t mean you have to get on it, because the houses near the railways are watching you. Be smart and follow the signs.”

“Okay, now this is bullshit”, I say, back in my office, as Kiwi paces back and forth, muttering possible interpretations of the messages.

“Maybe the signs mean the train station signs?”, I can hear one of his murmurs, “And the ‘houses near the railways’ watching us are just other mob bosses… maybe.”

Meanwhile, Villers was snacking on one of the foods she brought in her picnic basket, also lost in thought. I siddle up next to her and she cozies herself on my body, and we both share warmth.

“So”, I whisper, lips on her ear, making her shudder as she holds on to me, “what are you thinking, hm?”

“À propos de vous, bien sûr”, she whispers, red lips staining my face, her voice making my insides heated and red. “And the message to help you too.”

“Of course, but first…” I kiss her once again, exploring the caves of her mouth, her arms swinging around my neck as I hoist her up to sit on my lap, my hands roaming every single part of her body, loving the way she gasps and shudders once I touch what was meant to be sacred, my arousal growing-

“Australia!”, America says, glaring at Aussie, “I said censor the inappropriate parts! That wasn’t appropriate!”

“Alright alright!”, Aussie says, arms up in surrender, “I’m just going to continue…”

“I get it now!”, Villers says as she reads the message once again, “the trains won’t give us the signs, the sender of these messages is going to be the one giving us! But we still have to watch out for the houses near the railways, maybe they’ll give us a hard time getting to our destination.”

“Alright”, I say, getting up, “let’s not waste anymore time and meet our sender.”

“We wasted time”, Kiwi deadpans as he tries to struggle against his binds, glaring up at Belgium, his captor. Me and Villers, on the other hand, were tied up together by Luxembourg, who wasn’t looking at us and was rather looking at his reflection in the mirror, rambling about how he won’t look ‘pleasant’ in his date.

“Mon Dieu, Luxembourg”, Belgium spits at his direction and he scowls right back at his sister, “quit your egotistical self-care routine and help me take these klootzakken to Moeder!”

Luxembourg glances away from his mirror and replies, “Fine, fine, whatever.” He pushes me and Villers away from the railways, and we hear a train coming into the tracks like it was nothing. I hold Villers’ hand when we finally felt our touch next to each other, our pulses becoming one as our heartbeats only call for each other. I fell in love with the right woman, and she fell in love with the wrong man.

We were forced to follow Netherlands’ kids into their hideout, their men looking at us with dark eyes full of intent, and I see some of them staring and sneering maliciously towards my love, and I glare back at them. One wrong move, my eyes say, there will be a bullet through all of your heads. No one will touch my wife the wrong way, no one.

“Op je knieën!”, Lux orders, voice hard and low, and we all follow because we are not sparing a bullet in our heads. I can feel Villers shivering and fearing her death, and I soothe her by rubbing discreet and unseen circles on her back.

“Moeder”, Belgium says as she approaches a swivel chair, concealed by the dark, but I can see smoke forming, and a pale hand holding the cigarette with two fingers. “We hebben Britse zonen gevangen genomen.”

“Ik kan dat België zien”, comes her mother’s reply, a voice of reason and peace, yet I’m not feeling peaceful now. She turns around to face us, blonde hair and stormy grey eyes highlighted into the dark room, and her two kids stand right beside her, her lieges in battle.

“So”, she speaks once again, puffing out more smoke, but I can see her arms shaking and eyes looking as if she had too much cannabis to snort. “Looking for the bastard, hm?”

I sigh, signalling the start of a fight with her once again, “Netherlands, we aren’t here to fight. And who’s to say we were looking for our Dad who left us to our devices?”

It’s not like my dad would come back for me, though, a horrible thought enters my mind, as I stare at the ground once again, feeling Villers’ body warming me.

Netherlands laughs, her voice unstable and shaking for some reason, as if there was a quake happening on her seat. “You boys are idioten if you don’t believe your father isn’t the one sending you messages.”

“He’s the one… sending the clues to us?”, I ask, disbelief evident in my face, a cold feeling now lying in me. “But why? He left us!”

“Oh ik weet het niet!”, Netherlands says exaggerated, throwing her arms up as she shoves her now dim-lit cigarette into Luxembourg’s hands, who was busily checking his hair for stray strands in his reflection.

Kiwi sighs, and I hear him slip into his native language, “Ka patu ahau ki a ratou.” I remembered that back in the old days when we were still living under Britain, he had taught himself how to read, write, and speak Maori, in which Britain retaliated by burning his books and hitting him repeatedly. I can’t ever get it over with.

“Mom, why do we have them?”, Luxembourg asks as he fixes his dark blonde curls, “we don’t care about them anymore, don’t we?”

Suddenly, Netherlands’ hazy grey eyes respond with fear, as she grips onto her chair even more. “Because he needs them.”

“‘He?’”, I repeat, “who’s he?”

Netherlands didn’t reply, and only stared into the distance, before her gaze hardens once again as she looks back at us with hatred.

“Luxembourg, take them to the cells”, she says, and with one pause from Lux, he nods before pulling at our binds. “Belgium, stay here while I go check outside.”

Belgium looks at her mother, bewildered by her sudden anxiety and paranoia. “But… why?”

Netherlands glares back at her, “You know why.”

Belgium’s face clouds over as she nods, disappearing into the curtains behind the throne. I didn’t really have a say in anything, since I was literally being pulled into a stinking cell, but then I feel the tight binds around us loosen, as if someone had snipped it all away.

“Alright, you’re free to go”, Luxembourg says with a huge flirtatious smile on his face, not at me and Villers but at Kiwi, who was grinning back at him as well, but there was fear in his dark blue eyes. I catch his stare and he looks back at me, eyes screaming HELP before smirking back at Lux, meeting his seductive gaze.

“So, when are you free?”, Kiwi asks in the least awkward voice he could muster.

“Eight on Saturday, lieveling”, Lux says as he kisses Kiwi on the cheek before stalking off, “also, secret exit’s that way.” He points to the right, an open door waiting for us. Then he meets Kiwi’s eyes again, seemingly never moving on from New Zealand’s body. “And I assure you that I’d bring my ‘lucky ring’.” He winks at Kiwi before stalking off and leaving us to our own devices.

“Are you saying our baby brother here bribed to be freed by asking Lux out on a date?”, America guffaws, and Canada snickers. Meanwhile, Aussie was smirking triumphantly and New Zealand was blushing red.

“How was the date with Lux, though?”, Canada asks Kiwi, leaning in, “was it good?”

“B-better than a one-night stand”, he says as he looks back at Canada, who raises a brow at his defiance. His eyes target America’s. “Better than the guys you had tried to do.”

Aussie clears his throat, already wanting to get back to his story since he can feel everyone’s eyes on each other,

“So what’re the signs Britain left for us?”, I ask, huffing a breath as a gust of cold air whispers strange sounds into my ear, knowing all about my damned desires. My eyes were roaming anywhere near the trains, reading the signs with my eyes but there was nothing outstanding with them. “I don’t see anything.”

“What if it’s going to come to us?”, Villers hypothesizes once again, a thoughtful look on her face. “What if Britain himself is going to be the one to deliver perhaps the final message to us, hinting on where to go first?”

Kiwi adds on to this, “Maybe you’re right, since it’s almost sundown.”

“We wait”, I say, nodding, looking towards the sky with wonder. When I was a young boy, me and my siblings would watch the sun set, pink, orange, purple and blue colliding with each other in perfect harmony to create a web of colours that would turn the sky to a massive garden of them. I feel Villers once again pressing into me, hands brushing mine before we both clasp our hands together, the great warmth surging towards us.

We wait.

Then we wait for some more, the pink and orange fading and giving into the dark blue and purple, the last traces of the sun dying out and giving way for dusk to transition to night.

The stars appear, one by one, signalling the reign of the moon is supreme for the night, no more, no less. Some were even free falling from the evening sky like they were tears being washed away by Nyx herself, as if they didn’t belong to hers, just insignificant tiny dots in the sky.

Insignificant like me.

But those falling stars were replaced by brand new rising stars, only they were bigger, then I realize they weren’t stars at all: they were fireworks.

Maybe this was Britain’s final message.

Or maybe this was just a fireworks display.

Then the fireworks, with its whistling and popping, starts to form words, and my eyes flare like the firecrackers Britain is firing.

“One last message to you all; meet a man with auburn hair with a black car… he will find you for me.”

“Olá”, a new voice, deep yet soothing sounds behind us, and we see a man with auburn hair and a single green eye, his other eye concealed with an eye patch. He smiles at us like a father would, “meu nome é Portugal, and I’m here to escort you all to your pai.”

It was a silent car ride, none of us really talking while Portugal was humming to the music in the radio. I, however, did not enjoy silent car rides, and so I ask the first question in my head.

“So, what are you to Dad? Are you his personal butler, slave, friend-”

“I’m his boyfriend”, Portugal says, face now clouded with dreams as his eye fogs over. Kiwi and I widen our eyes, giving each other glances of shock. Our father, who smacked Canada twice for being caught in bed with boys, is now in love with a man as well?

“I don’t understand”, I say- there was something wrong with me, there was something wrong with my insides as they give me memories of an awful father who would train his children to become master assassins, who is merciless with the gun and hands, whose judgement is never for us.

Portugal looks back at me in the rear view mirror, face full of pity, but I don’t want that pity. I don’t need that.

“We were rivals, you see”, he says in a soft voice, but it still had a paternal instinct hidden within. “When he escaped from your City and went into ours, he ransacked towns and almost risked me and my men from his hands. And then, only when we met in a civil manner, did we actually learn to like each other, then love each other. Some say it was a bond of best friends and, well… they weren’t wrong.”

“What did Dad do after he escaped from jail, aside from meeting you and ransacking cities and endangering mobs?”, I can feel my throat straining, as if the world doesn’t want me to not display my weaknesses out in the open.

“Well, he created a brand new company on his own, which impressed me”, Portugal replies, “well, not really, perhaps; he robbed his own money from the company he used to own.”

“Ah”, Kiwi deadpans, “no wonder all that money Dad supposedly ‘left’ to us suddenly disappeared one day.”

“He also aspired to be a musician”, Portugal muses, “always rambling on about his song ideas to me, and even learning how to play some instruments himself.”

I have no more questions left in me, my body going slack, the day draining me as we come nearer to the home of the man who is supposedly dead.

Or maybe I’m dead, and he was alive.

Canada frowns, “What’s with the self-deprecating comments, Aussie?”

“Self-deprecation? Me?”, Aussie scoffs, shaking his head. “You all need to know about sarcasm and how it saves a story from disruption.

Meanwhile, Kiwi was looking his way, knowing what was about to come and the sudden change in his brother’s demeanor.

We follow Portugal into the hallways, seeing dozens of sculptures staring at us, knowing what our fates were. Villers’ hand tangles with mine, and I love her every second we were here, accompanying me once we are faced with the ghosts of the past, the ghost of Britain becoming physical from my deepest nightmares, toying with me once again.

“It’s okay, je suis là”, she says in a soothing voice, and I wanted her to caress me one more time. “vous êtes si courageux.”

“But I’m not as brave as you”, I tell her softly, cupping her cheeks, “and I’m now paying the price for it.”

“No, stop saying that”, she bites, “you will always be my loving and brave husband.”

I can feel tears touching my eyes, and I try concealing them in the moonlight. “Je t'aime tellement.”

She kisses my forehead. “Je t'aime aussi.”

Portugal stops behind an ominous-looking door, and my brain forced me to recall the days I spent looking at my father’s door with fear, when I was a small child, afraid of my father, and even now I still am, because I am a coward.

“Beyond this door is your father”, he says, staring straight into my soul. “And I wish you good luck.” He leaves us in front of the door, its mahogany woods waiting for our demise.

As the eldest and the one who knew my dad well out of the three, I softly knock on the door a few times, before entering.

The entire room was surprisingly dim-lit, a lamp on a bedside table, as we were face-to-face with a desk, swivel chair behind it.

“We finally meet”, a clear voice says from behind the desk. “After a decade of waiting.”

I swallow the creeping fear in my stomach: I’m not the same person anymore. He’s not the same. We are both older and wiser, as the sayings go.

“It’s nice to meet you again, Dad”, I say, and he turns his chair around, ashen face and light blonde hair disturbed by white strands, his lips curled into a smile. He was stroking a pet corgi, who was comfortably seated and sleeping on his lap. He was wearing a business suit, shoes and all, as his dark blue eyes glinted back at me with a look of rejoice. “And you’re old.”

The smile on Dad’s face fades, replaced with a look of indignance, and I already regret the words coming out from my mouth. “After ten years of not seeing each other again, those are the words you speak to me?”

Kiwi muffles a laughter in his jacket, and Villers elbows me because I was being rude to my own father.

“E Tama, pai ki te kite ano koe”, Kiwi says to Dad in Maori, perhaps to spite him, but Britain gives him a wide smile in return.

“I missed you.” Kiwi blinks; I too expected Dad to scowl at the language, but he didn’t and only looked as if he treasured us.

Then he glances at Villers, who was hiding behind me and looking at her (unfortunately) future father-in-law with shyness. “And congratulations, my dear, you scored a keeper.” I blink at Dad, puzzled as to why he approved of our relationship. When I came home holding an unconscious girl’s body, he had almost shot me in the head.

She blushes hard, looking at me with desire in her eyes, but Dad wasn’t done yet, as his expression morphs into a thoughtful one.

“Although I am quite disappointed with your moves, son”, he tells me, and I can’t help but blink in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the moves you’ve done on Villers and, quite frankly, I am not impressed.”

“Wh-what moves?”

“All of the messages contain hidden cameras, and I manage to catch quite a scenery in your office.” His eyes glance at me, then back at Villers, as realization strikes within me.

“You… oh my god…” My cheeks colour red as Villers hides behind me even more, quite embarrassed and who can blame her?

“Awkward”, Kiwi mutters underneath his breath, also having second-hand embarrassment.

“Now, I think you are all hungry?”

“Not much after you told me you installed cameras in your messages.”

“So you wish to sleep now?”

I look at Villers, her eyes drooping slightly, trying to stay awake, then at Kiwi, who was staring exhaustedly into the night. Even me, always so full of energy, need time for beauty sleep.

“Yeah.”

Luckily enough, my Dad decided to give me and Villers the furthest guest room, away from most people. Villers was nuzzling against my chest, her breaths giving me warmth, her touch comforting me. I hold her, treasuring the greatest gift of all time. I can't sleep since my mind is plagued with questions. And thoughts about how this will all end.

“You’re scared”, Villers whispers into my chest, and I sigh and kiss her forehead.

“I’m not.” I look into her eyes, the entire galaxy waiting for me. “Believe me.”

She sighs, turning away to face the dim walls, “I still remember waking up in your room, covered in bandages. I was scared and helpless, and when I saw you I thought you were going to… well…”

“I know”, I reply, “I could see it in your eyes. But I can’t blame you.”

“But here we are”, she whispers, “lovers in your father’s house.”

She looks at me once again before leaning up to kiss me, and I kiss her back, levelling her with myself, arms going around with each other’s waists and neck. I can feel lust and desire pooling in me now, wanting to tear that beautiful dress she was wearing to pieces and biting her skin to claim her as mine, mine, mine. I enter my tongue into her mouth, tasting how sweet and warm her insides are, loving every noises she makes as she clings tighter to me. I can once again feel my arousal growing, as I kiss the woman of my dreams more, deeper and deeper, and I untie the laces of her dress, not taking it anymore. I flip her on her back as I unbuckle my belt, kissing her once again.

“Guys, if only you would’ve kept it down I’d have slept peacefully”, a voice wakes the both of us up, and I immediately cover a naked Villers with the sheets. Problem is is that I don’t have anything covering me anymore. Kiwi covers his eyes, “Jesus Christ Aussie, put some clothes on!” I retaliate by covering my region with a pillow and scowling sleepily at my younger brother.

“What’s up, Kiwi?”, I ask civilly. “Or you just want to humiliate your brother?”

“You know ‘what’s up’? Your dick last night”, Kiwi sits down on a chair next to the bed. “Anyway, breakfast is downstairs, me and Dad are going to head out.”

I sit up, still handling the pillow, “Wait what? Why?” 

“He said he was going to show me something”, Kiwi shrugs, “also once he’s done showing me something he has something to tell you.”

I nod, “Alright. See you later then.”

I watch as he walks out the door, giving me a cursory glance.

“I’ll tell the rest of the story”, Kiwi volunteers, looking at Australia, who nods approvingly.

As New Zealand closes the door from the nightmare he had just seen, he exhales- there is nothing in this entire world that could comfort him now. Sometimes his mind would wander back to the days when everything was large, tall, and cruel to him, back to the days the eyes glaring down at him could burn him alive, but he cannot scream as he is on thin ice, mouth always shut, mind and body subservient to his father.

Then again, he cannot fight his own father back in his days of youth- all he had to do was to survive and do as he says, only a machine in his eyes, not a child with feelings.

He looks at his hands: back then he had held a gun with his grubby and soft little hands, only supposed to hold dirt and toys and nothing as heavy as metal upon metal. He remembers Britain’s dark blue eyes watching him, daggers piercing his small heart as he gulps and tries shooting his target.

Kiwi puts his hands in his pockets like he was hiding something, something important… but the only thing he is hiding is his fear for his father.

He hears his father’s bedroom door closing behind him, and he glances at Britain buttoning his coat up, and he smiles at Kiwi; such a rare feat back at home, when he only smiles at them during formal events but it is strained, forced, plastic, like he was swimming in the oceans full of contaminated waters and garbage, struggling to find the beauty in it.

“Well then, let’s not waste any time”, Britain says, fixing his blonde locks and puts on a cap on his head. “Let’s go meet someone.”

Kiwi blinks, “Who?”

Britain watches him, eyes full of memory of ghosts beyond, “Your mother.”

Kiwi freezes, staring ahead before swivelling to face his father, who was still lost in thought and memories. It was a familiar gaze, one that Kiwi always sees in his father’s face whenever he thinks he was alone, perched on his small yet intricate table in the gardens, gripping his tea cup so hard Kiwi had feared he will break it and the hot liquid inside of it will drip down to his clothes to scald him.

“You told me my mother was gone”, Kiwi answers, voice strained with emotion, bundles of ropes tying him up, mind clouding over with questions of the ghosts of the past.

“Gone”, Britain repeats, voice also full of reminiscing. “Not dead, my son. And it is time for you to meet her.”

Kiwi can feel his heart beating even more, as he can finally meet the half of his heart, the mystery unraveled like the curtains of a stage part for him to see the entire play that is Britain’s life, from start to finish.

The car ride was silent; only hearing the tires rolling on the road, talking and whispering in a heated conversation. Kiwi was looking out towards the window, but he can feel Britain’s gaze on him, as he drives, making him uncomfortable. The world was moving backwards as they move forward to find their destination, a finale to all. The sun was fighting against the dark clouds huddled around the corner, trying to conquer and annex all souls.

“One day, the sun will die”, Britain muses as he goes back to focusing on the road. “And when that day comes everyone will rejoice.”

“Why would people rejoice when their only life source of energy dies?”, Kiwi asks.

“Not that sun, my boy.” The message was so ominous that Kiwi reminds himself to keep his mouth shut.

Yes, this car ride is as tense and silent as the House at Number 63.

Britain parks the car just below the sweltering heat of the sun, always there, always watching their every move, the giant orb just a giant eye to monitor their every movement. Sometimes Kiwi can see crimson red tinges on it, as if the flares of the sun is its blood and it runs from its veins. Kiwi takes off his jacket to tie it upon his waist, and follows his father who did not wait for him to prepare and was already walking forward like a man who has lost his way.

“Who is my mother?”, Kiwi asks sharply and tentatively, still scared that Britain will reply with a sharp tongue. He levels his steps as he catches up with his father, eyes ahead, shielded with distraction, memories, and the foggy resistance. He was clutching his cane tightly, knuckles turning white, as if he was going through all of the horrible memories and the deepest roots of his nightmares.

“Your mother”, he mutters, “was a woman I wronged a long time ago.”

“What did you do to her? What happened to my mother after I was born?” Kiwi can feel himself becoming even more nervous as the near the establishment Britain claims his mother is working in.

Britain suddenly whirls to him, eyes shining, “You must understand; she was the best of the best, the one who caught my heart too much and she wouldn’t let go. Not even when I vanish every so often. I loved her too much, and you were the product of it.”

Kiwi blinks, not even comprehending what his father is saying and why he must care. “But who is she?”

“A woman who can fight, a woman who had many moves to keep me away from her, until I gained the upper hand…”, he opens the door to the buildings, and Kiwi finds himself face to face with cold metal walls, and the creaking and sliding of other entrances. He can feel himself becoming even more curious, wanting to scream his questions at Britain and deafen his hearing in the process. Oh how much he had wanted to talk of his ills about the man who left him, long ago.

They walk in a straight direction, and Kiwi can hear the growth of voices from a room. He watches his father, who was clasping his palms, lips curling into a thin line as the voices grow louder. They stop near a door, Britain in the position to open them, but he stays to stare at Kiwi with a look of longing.

“Your mother was the famous stuntman, Maori.” 

He opens the door, as if he was showing Kiwi the way to the secret garden but instead he is pushed into a set full of movie directors, producers, actors and backdrops onstage. Sometimes he would be puzzled at the fact that the scenes in each movie were not real; that they were made up from blood, sweat and tears of the writers and directors and actors, figments of imagination becoming real with the trick of programs and computers.

It was as if they can fabricate the existence of these characters, that they have the knowledge to exist in the same world as Kiwi does, that they can be touched and they can have the power to exist.

In the end, they are fiction; not real.

While Kiwi was busily making paragraphs and paragraphs of sentences, Britain was talking to one of the producers of the set.

“Miss Maori, our financer needs ya!”, the producer calls out to a woman near the stage, sitting with a group of actors, laughing at their own joke before her smile immediately falls at the sight of Britain, standing so casually like he had done no crime against the woman.

She abruptly stands, excusing herself from her friends as she approaches Britain and New Zealand with a surly expression on her face. Her stance looks as if she was prepared to kick Britain in his most sensitive spot, and they come face to face, with Maori’s arms crossed and Britain giving her a casual expression.

“You may be our financer, Peretana”, Maori says in a slow, calculated voice, narrowed eyes trying to see through Britain’s relaxed aura, “but that doesn’t mean I’m bound to respect you.”

“Yes yes, we all know what you think of me”, Britain yawns, “but I am not here for you.”

Maori scoffs, raising a brow, “Oh? Then why call me?”

“Because”, Britain pushes Kiwi into Maori’s view, and her eyes turn to him. He awkwardly smiles and waves at the stunt woman, “this is our son, New Zealand.”

Maori blinks for a moment, taking her time surveying the boy in front of her, of how he can be her son, when all he had are flabby limbs and nothing resembling the woman in front of him, the woman that he was always so keen to solve, the woman that is the half of her heart. She glares at Britain once she is done scrutinizing Kiwi.

“This prepubescent boy isn’t our son”, she spits acidly, “You’re trying to trick me again!”

Britain stares at her, unaffected by her sniping, “He is our son, Maori, believe it or not. And he’s twenty also, believe it or not.”

“He can’t be my son!”, she snarls at Britain, her eyes kindling fire, “He looks nothing like me! Nothing! Nothing! You’re playing me for fools! You think you can fool me once again? No! Never!” 

Kiwi can now see tears forming in her eyes, as her body starts to shake, glaring at Britain with hatred and disgust in her eyes. He swallows his fire against Britain; if he has things to say to the man who claims to be his father, he lets his mother go first. He now has a sudden desire to pull his mother in a hug, hoping that maybe it can calm her down.

So he does, feeling the shock of the older woman, her quivers starting to weaken before they immediately halt, an earthquake stopped by a force that shares her own magnitude. Maori lets out a gasp of surprise, but she returns his embrace, and for the first time in his life, he feels the love of a parent that would cherish, nurture and love him for the rest of his life, something he had wished for when he was little.

Maori break their embrace to cup Kiwi’s cheek, a sad smile on her face, “Ko taku tama… ko koe taku tama.”

“Whaea”, Kiwi chokes out, remembering the words he used to practice to spite his father, “Kei te aroha ahau ki a koe.”

Maori chuckles as the tears come rushing down from her cheeks, “I love you too, Aotearoa.”

They embrace once again, mother and son reunited.

Canada sniffles as he wipes stray tears from his face, obviously quite affected from the story. Kiwi’s face seemed to cloud once again with memories, as America looked quite expressionless but there was something in her eyes. However, Australia was the only one that was not in the mood for this sob story to end, as he had one to tell. He can feel himself shaking, tapping his fingers into the table in a brisk way, eyes darting from left to right, his heart pumping and his voice becoming tangled all of a sudden.

Then his mind screams out to him.

It isn’t fair.

It isn’t fair that Kiwi can see his mom again when he can’t.

It isn’t fair that he can talk to his mother while he is stuck with a picture and a worthless father.

It isn’t fair that he has nothing to question anymore.

It isn’t fair Australia is alive and his mother is-

Australia instantaneously stands up from his chair, perturbing his siblings.

“Aussie?”, America queries, making a motion to stand, “what’s wrong?”

Australia doesn’t answer, only looking straight ahead, at the mirror, and he makes notes of his appearance; ginger hair, freckles that look like stars across the evening sky, dark blue eyes… he trembles, realizing how much he stole from his mother, how she could’ve been alive if he didn’t exist. He gulps, as he turns and runs out the room.

“Australia!”, America calls out, standing up and moving to follow her brother but Kiwi pulls her down, “Kiwi, let me go!”

“Look America”, Kiwi says calmly and professionally, “now isn’t the time for being the hero who comforts the victim; he needs some time to himself after what Britain told him.”

America lets out a breath, “What did Dad tell him?”

Kiwi meets her eyes, serious, stern and slow, “His mother.”

While New Zealand was busily spending time catching up with his dear mother, Australia and Villers were strolling through Britain’s gardens, hand-in-hand, humming tunes to keep each other company. It was a serene scenery, untouched by the war going inside of Australia’s head, as a bullet collides with his skull. One question was swirling around his mind,

What did Britain want to tell him?

Australia lets out a deep breath as he picks a rose from one of the rose bushes, carefully ignoring the thorns because he knows they can penetrate through his skin like a dozen ants trying to bite him. He puts the crimson red rose on Villers’ dark hair, and she blushes profusely, kissing him on the cheek, and he chuckles.

Her legs buckle from underneath her and he acts as her railway, letting her lean into him, strawberry perfume entrancing the man next to her.

“Did I hurt you?”, he asks softy.

“I’m fine”, she replies, “I just didn’t know you had that much pent up frustration last night.”

Australia weakly chuckles, “I’m sorry.”

Villers softly laughs, the sound of the angels from above having a choir in the gardens, the light of the moon shining once more.

Australia kisses her softly, lips on lips, never getting enough of her essence. She sighs a little, closing her eyes as she let him overtake their movements as he presses her up in one of the pillars, slipping his hand from underneath her skirt and undergarments, hearing her gasp once again, her skin growing warm as he steadily enters her with his fingers.

As they were in their moment of passion, they fail to notice a newcomer to the gardens, until he makes his presence known to all.

“Australia, my boy”, the newcomer states, and Australia and Villers squeal in surprise as Australia releases Villers from his grip and exits her, wiping his wet fingers on his shirt, as Villers covers her face with Australia’s discarded coat.

“Dad”, Australia says with a breathy tone, his tone breathy. “What is it?”

“I have something to confess.” There was something in his tone, his tone that sounds quite regretful and remorseful, as if thousands of sins he had kept in a vault are now wishing to be unleashed to thousands. He turns his back to the couple, then glances at Australia again with a saddened look in his eyes, “Come with me, son.”

Australia and Villers share a look, and she nods, supporting him from afar. If she cannot come with him, she shall be in his dreams. He nods towards Britain, and he follows him inside of his home.

“What do you want to tell me, dad?”, he asks, hands on his pockets, trying to break the heavy air around the two of them.

“Your mother”, his father replies, not giving him eye contact. “How we met and how you were born.”

Australia tilts his head, unsure of the fact why Britain thinks ‘how’ he was born was special enough for it to get a segment. He had known one thing and it is that Britain had never liked his appearance ever since his youth. He had always thought he looked more like his mother whenever Britain glared at him with those hateful eyes.

“Who was my mother?”, he asks, staring down at the floors, dreading the answer.

“A lady”, he replies, “a wonderful lady I decided to taint.”

A sense of dread starts to form inside of Australia, “What happened to her?”

“It was my fault, Australia, not hers”, Britain chokes a little, eyes shining with tears, as they stop walking. He was holding Australia’s shoulders now, staggering to meet his height now that he was old and miserable and Australia is not the boy he used to be anymore. He is not afraid of his towering father anymore, since he towers before this miserable man now.

“What did you do?”, Australia hisses softly, clutching his chest as he can feel his heart hammering to be freed from his grasp. “What did you do to her?”

Britain swallows, getting ready to tell a tale that Aussie knows will be full of sorrow and heartache. “She was one of those young ladies down in the streets, believing in the naive concept of true love. I, of course, caught her eye; a strapping young lad strutting through the streets like he owned the place. Truly, she thinks, I am her soulmate.” He meets Australia’s eyes once again, haunted and hollow.

“But there is a consequence to loving me.”

He continues, his heart in these winding speeches, “Yes, we interacted more and more, from small greetings then to conversations, and then we were kissing in the rain like it was nothing and then we were being passionate under the sheets. I had taken advantage of her emotions so easily, that I started to unravel her, no remorse whatsoever. I even planned to marry her! Can you believe that, my boy? I wanted to marry this woman who is unaware of my wrongdoings, who loved me for one layer and that layer only.”

“Of course, I ruined her life one day. Netherlands had me good; she had wounded me in several ways, and wounded me in my heart.”

“Why? What did Netherlands do to you? She’d always had a vendetta against us. And you.”

Britain lets out a shaky breath, looking towards Australia as he did with America: cautious, and all the more critical of her movements. “Because Netherlands was America’s mother.”

“What the fuck?”, America says in the present time, her eyes wild and now clear with translucent tears. “Netherlands… the woman who tried to kill me over and over again… is my mom?” She laughs a little, thinking it would lighten the situation but instead it causes the atmosphere of the entire room to sour. She wipes away the tears on her face (either she got it from crying a while or from forcing herself to laugh). “This has got to be a joke… is it?” She tentatively looks at New Zealand, but his face still hasn’t changed.

America’s plastered smile cracks and falls, as she now realizes that the person who she had hated from the first years of her life was her mother all along. America sits down quietly, biting her lip, as Canada puts a hand on her shoulder to comfort her.

Britain continues, his tone becoming even more regretful as they enter his room. Nothing much has changed the last time they were in there, but it was as if the ghosts of Past, Present and Future had swept around the place like a cyclone, their claws turning the Old to New, the New to Old, the old memories that had evaporated from every crevice of the mind comes to haunt everything. The entire room was made to look like his father’s old room, but there was now a spam of picture frames everywhere, and portraits and documents that Australia knows belongs to the past. Britain walks towards his bed, taking a picture frame from the top of his drawers and offering it to Australia.

Australia stares at the photo, vintage and all, of a woman with ginger hair, her freckles spread against her light skin as she smiles into the photo, her hands clasping a small necklace. She was wearing a white, frilly dress, and a sun hat covering most of her head. Her eyes were as green as the grass Australia used to roll on in his youth, her smile rivalling the light of the sun, and her hair as bright as fire. He gingerly touches the photo once again, feeling the glass of the frame, cold and hard, but he wishes for arms to wrap around him, for sweet words to whisper in his ear, for someone to love him.

In the end, it was just a photo of a woman who might have lived a long time ago, who was once real, but now just a figment of imagination. Just a figment of reality that died out and the only thing left was her presence in records and photos.

“She looks a lot like me…”, Australia mutters to himself, staring at the photo with eyes shining, “I look a lot like her…”

“However, her love for me seemed to fade away, over the years.” Britain’s eyes were on the photo of the woman, brilliant and bright, as if not believing that this joyful woman was one of his loves. “Someone had tried to kill her- I saved her but she was not the same ever since, paranoid and never leaving my side. I have had enough of her fear of the unknown; leaving her in our home unattended to come to work, pulling a gun towards her when she comes close, and incessantly never giving her the attention she needed, in hoping she can ‘cope’ herself. Alas, those were horrible ideas, and she spiralled further into insanity.”

“I threatened to leave her if she doesn’t get her act together, and she pleaded with me to stay, no matter how many awful women I’ve slept with, no matter how many times I insulted her and no matter how much I loathed the idea of being with her. So I gave her one condition: she needs to pay me fees for protection, or I’ll put her head on a pike.”

Australia’s eyes dilate for a moment, shaking his head as his hands shake when he stares back at the woman in the photo, years before someone broke her. Years before Britain broke her and crushed her life and sanity to pieces. She is not real anymore; but perhaps her memory is real. He can feel something within him, a pool of lava waiting to burst, but he waits for the right time, letting Britain drone on with the atrocities he’d done to his mother.

“So she works hard, day and night, to keep me by her side, desperately trying to keep me by her side, forever and ever. I took pleasure in seeing her be tortured to death. So I decided to toy with her even more, making her my slave now and for the rest of her life, as she comes in and out of my room, looking utterly more miserable and empty and haunted every time she closes the door. And then one day she comes to me with panicked eyes, handling her stomach, and she confesses to me that she is pregnant and asks me what she should do. I slapped her hard on the face, shouting at her that it was her own fault she had gotten pregnant. So I made her keep the baby; I made her keep you.”

Now the only thing Australia wants to unleash on Britain was the bile working its way up its throat, no way back, but he gulps it down, feeling acid burn his throat and chest. He keeps quiet, eyes still on the picture of his mother.

“She loved me too much”, Britain shakes his head with a small sigh, putting an arm on Australia’s shoulder but his son slaps it away. If Britain was going to comment, he had nothing to say. “So she had you in a night full of stars, almost covering the entire dark sky. Her screams had delighted me back then… sweet and beautiful and all the more melodious. And then you were born, with your ginger curls and skin dotted with freckles like your mother once had, and I knew I would love you.” Britain smiles a little at the ‘happy’ memory, but there was nothing happy about that. Then just like fire burning all too quickly, his smile fades. “Then the day after you were born, your mother killed herself. It seems that she did not want you.”

A teardrop lands on Australia’s mother’s face, as he himself can feel the overwhelming and overbearing sadness his own mother had felt through the remainder of her years. The lava that was over pouring has been replaced by a dark and stormy cloud enveloping his body. Australia shakes, his eyes shining more with tears and he tries not to blink so he could not release such overwhelming emotion. There were too many spurs of emotion inside him, different types of fire kindling and lighting up to try and out flame the other. His vision blurs, and maybe it was not from the tears but from the fact his reality has now shattered into the darkest of places.

Britain’s eyes shine with tears as well, staring ahead, brimming with shame and the wish to repent what he had done. “Maybe that is why I had hit you and insulted you from the very first years of your life… because you looked too much like her and my guilt cannot bear it.”

A memory clicks inside of Australia; when he had asked his father who his mother was, all giddy and excited since he wanted to tell his classmates of his mother. Instead of giving his son a clear answer, he got a grumble and a slap on the cheek, and he stumbled backwards with his stubby little legs. He had covered the mark where he had been slapped, tears of pain tumbling down his cheeks as he started to cry about how much it hurt. Britain had not shown him pity or compassion, however; he had bellowed at him to shut his trap or he will kick him out of the house for the day. The young boy whimpers as he walks to his room, ignoring his worried siblings.

Australia once again looks at his mother, and he chuckles sadly, clutching it closer to his chest, closing his eyes and imagining that it was his mother who was hugging him, not a wooden frame.

At least he had answers from his mother now.

She never loved him.

If she had lived, she would have treated him the same as how Britain had treated him.

She never cared about him.

If he didn’t exist, she would still be alive.

But at what cost?

Tears start to slide down the man’s cheeks, still clutching the frame tightly as he dances with it, remembering the times he’d dance to the beat, thinking everything he is holding is a mother who supports him, but in reality she had died because he merely existed. The tears stain his shirt, but more and more come to replace his damned sadness, overflowing and trying to keep the volcano from erupting. He was smiling stupidly, chuckling a little- the Past is Present and Present is Past.

He should’ve died inside of her stomach; he should’ve been murdered by his own mother; he should’ve been aborted because that’s what he was: a mistake; he should’ve killed himself when he was faced with the noose he tied, the pills he had bought, the gun touching the side of his head.

But why didn’t he do it?

Because there was hope inside him: that somewhere, he will find his mother, who did not want him to die a gruesome death.

So he kept living for her.

But she ended up dead.

And she never loved her.

So what was the point of existing?

Australia starts to sob, heart-wrenching and nerve racking sobs, crawling to a fetal position, his head on his legs as he screams for his mother, as he sobs at the fact he shouldn’t have existed and that she didn’t deserve her fate.

Britain’s voice did not help him, “My dear son, I vehemently apologize-”

The sorrowful river that keeps overflowing is now replaced by a volcano erupting, as Australia bares his teeth and stands up, glaring at Britain, fists clenched around the picture frame and he screams as he hits his father on the head with the frame with all his might, shattering the glass surrounding the photo. Britain made a pained noise, but Australia was not done yet as he kicks Britain’s chest, and he doubles over in pain. Australia glares at the cowardly man in front of him, as he hits him, again and again; he feels nothing but pain, nothing but the pain of his and his mother combined, as he kicks, punches, and hits Britain, until he is a bloodied mess on the floor. Britain chokes out blood, gasping for air, but Australia did not give him more time to breathe as he kicks this miserable man, again and again.

“Australia! Pour l'amour de Dieu, arrêtez!”, he hears someone shout, but he was now in a vengeful haze, continuing to kick his father (he would not even call him his father) harder and repeatedly.

He then feels strong arms wrap around him, pulling him away from Britain who was barely conscious, and he screams in rage, kicking the man behind him, but his knees did not buckle nor did he seem affected by this pathetic man’s attempts to let him go.

“LET ME GO! I’M NOT DONE WITH HIM!”, Australia screams, squirming under the man’s grip.

“I understand why you’re angry at Britain, filho”, comes Portugal’s unhindered and soft voice, still gripping Australia tightly, “but please, don’t beat o bastardo to death.”

“HE DESERVES DEATH! HE DESERVES TO D I E!” Australia replies, and he breaks free from Portugal’s grasp and runs back towards Britain’s mangled body, eyes brimming with tears, as he tries to hit Britain’s face.

He does not hear skin colliding with bone, but a pained gasp and cry. Australia’s blood runs cold, as he opens his eyes to find Villers massaging her cheek, a look of pain evident on her face as she looks at Australia with a poisonous look.

Immediately, all of Australia’s anger vanishes, as his arms go slack.

The entire room was cold, as the two lovers had a standoff.

“Australia, tu sais que je t’aime”, Villers says softly, calmly, steadily, “Mais tu dois de calmer.”

Australia frantically shakes his head, tears sliding down his cheeks once again. “Non ... crois-moi ... je suis vraiment désolé.”

Villers kisses his forehead, giving him a sense of calm, “C’est d’accord, je t’aime encore.”

Australia lets himself be embraced by the shorter woman, the one who had given him the chance to live, the chance to have love. He was crying, ever so silently, holding Villers’ body, as she sings him a lullaby to help him calm down, to help him remember the times that the sun was their friend and not the enemy that burns them alive. And he wonders what would happen to Villers if he didn’t exist.

He puts his lips on her ear, still streaming down tears, “I wish I didn’t exist.”

Villers whispers back, “If you didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have either.”

Australia was staring into space, but he imagines that the vacant space in front of him was his mother, that there were no walls or floors and the both of them were floating in space, with the galaxies looking down on everything and everyone, especially the both of them. His imaginary mother was staring at him, no words to speak but his inevitable doom. If Australia had just killed himself right then and there, he would’ve asked his mother all the questions in his head.

But he was staying alive, once again.

Not for his mother, the one who didn’t want him in the first place.

But for Villers, and his siblings, who were sitting behind those doors, so to speak.

Australia inhales, exhausted at the fact he was sitting here and doing nothing.

But doing nothing was fine.

“Aussie?”, a voice penetrates through the silent air he had created for himself, and with a hum, he raises his eyes at the figures in front of the door, led by his older sister, who was looking as if she had gone through the five stages of grief with him.

Three pairs of arms wrap around his body, which made him feel warm, like Villers’, but their arms were supporting, filial, familial. He closes his eyes as he cozes into their embrace, thinking to himself how lucky he must be to have them.

“We’re grateful you exist”, Canada says in an ‘older brother’ type of voice, and the others nod.

“Don’t beat yourself up ‘cause our asshole dad told you how you were born”, America replies, “I think all of us here didn’t even want to exist.”

“But here we are”, Kiwi continues, smiling at his older brother then at his siblings, who look peaceful at the fact that they were all mistakes, wrong doings their father had committed against the women in his life. “And we’re here to stay.”

Australia smiles at them, a light feeling in his chest that made him soar higher and higher across the skies, until he is ready to burst and pop to be with the others around him.

-

‘m too tired to put translations screw you this thing’s 12k

[goodticklebrain]

Q&A August: David Prosser of the Stratford Festival

Remember back when I called Austin Tichenor my Comedy Fairy Godfather? Well, the subject of today’s Q&A August interview is my Shakespeare Fairy Godfather. David Prosser is the Literary and Editorial Director at the Stratford Festival of Canada, and is also indirectly responsible for much of Good Tickle Brain’s growth and success. (Also, if he’s reading this, I would like to sincerely apologize to him for all grammatical errors in today’s post, most likely related to misplaced punctuation, the correct disposition of which I have never properly mastered.)

I met David on Twitter a scant four months after I had started Good Tickle Brain. Fresh out of the gates, with few followers or readers, I was desperately trying to get my work in front of as many eyes as possible. To that end, I went on Twitter and promptly followed everyone I could find who was remotely associated with the Stratford Festival. One of the people I stumbled upon was David, whose wonderfully dry and witty tweets immediately attracted my attention. On day, embroiled in a bit of an ongoing brouhaha with some Oxfordians, David tweeted a riff on “Duke of Earl”, rewriting the chorus as “dupes, dupes, dupes, dupes of Earl”. Never one to shy away from a song parody, I provided the rest of the lyrics. David was amused enough by my efforts that he followed me, and started retweeting my comics. I cannot tell you how much that meant to me at the time.

Later on that year, I was visiting the Stratford Festival with my family, and (of course) tweeting about it when David slid into my DMs and invited me up to the Festival offices to have tea with him before that day’s matinee. I jumped at the chance, and we spent a wonderful half an hour or so chatting in the sunshine on the Festival Theatre balcony. It was like meeting my long-lost benevolent Scottish uncle. David was not only immediately supportive and encouraging of my work, but he also began actively brainstorming ways in which to help me reach a larger audience, specifically among the theatre community. To that end he introduced me to the Shakespeare Theatre Association, which quickly became my Shakespeare family and has helped me grow and develop Good Tickle Brain into what it is today.

There is absolutely no reason why the Literary and Editorial Director of the largest classical repertory theatre in North America should have given the time of day to a random person on the internet who drew sub-par stick figures and routinely committed egregious spelling errors in her text. However, David did not hesitate to lift me up, and has been a constantly warm, supportive, and thoroughly entertaining presence in my life since then.

But I’ll let him talk now. He’s much better at it than I am. 

1. Who are you? Why Shakespeare?

Who am I indeed? Isn’t that the mystery that haunts us all? “Who’s there?” asks Barnardo in the opening words of Hamlet, and that same question echoes down through centuries of subsequent literature. Call me David. Or Prosser, David Prosser.

I was born and grew up in Scotland, where, in early childhood, I first encountered Shakespeare as the author of the “Scottish play” and didn’t realize till some time later that he’d written anything else; came to Canada in my twenties; had a fourteen-year career at a small daily newspaper, where, among other things I was the theatre critic (boo, hiss) and editor of the TV listings (zzzzzz….); then quit in order to spend more time with my wife and cats and to pursue new opportunities for financial ruin; and finally washed up on the shores of the Stratford Festival, where, under various unconvincing job titles (most latterly that of Literary and Editorial Director), I have been an in-house wordsmith for the past quarter-century.

And why Shakespeare? As a nearly dead white male myself, I have a particular affinity for the work of dead white males in general—and Shakespeare in particular has intrigued me ever since childhood, when my father (an English teacher) showed me some black-and-white slides of scenes from a staging of that Scottish play referenced above. I’m sure if I could see them now, those images would prove cheesy; at the time, though, they haunted my imagination; it wasn’t till some time later that I began to discover that there were words to go with them.

As I started to discover the actual plays, I found to my excitement that they had the mind-expanding power of dreams, in which human life is transformed into something rich and strange—an alternative universe of experience, if you like, but one that brilliantly illuminates the “real” one.

2. What moment(s) in Shakespeare always make you laugh?

Sticking with the Scottish play, I generally laugh at Macbeth’s (oops, said it) “‘Twas a rough night,” and I always smile whenever an actor has to tackle the unsayable “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart / Cannot conceive nor name thee!” Also, I’m afraid I can never suppress a schoolboy snigger when Mountjoy, in Henry V, comes in and announces himself with the words “You know me by my habit.” I can’t remember where I heard it or read it, but someone, somewhere, made a joke about the entire English army responding with rude gestures suggestive of that habit, and I have never been able to get that out of my mind.

3. What’s a favorite Shakespearean performance anecdote?

See Mountjoy above. Also this, one of the many stories from the late Richard Monette’s memoir This Rough Magic: an autobiography “as told to,” er, well, me. Peter Ustinov was playing King Lear at the Stratford Festival in 1979; Richard was playing Edmund.

“At one performance,” Richard recalled, “Peter began, ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. . . .’ and then he dried. ‘We’ll sing . . .’ he repeated, ‘and then we’ll sing some more. Oh, we’ll laugh. . . . We’ll dance. . . . And then . . . we’ll sing some more.’ Realizing what had happened, I tried to save him by coming in early with my line: ‘Take them away.’ He regarded me with mild curiosity, then waved me away with his hand—'Foof, foof, foof’—and began the whole speech over again, determined to say it all.”

4. What’s one of the more unusual Shakespearean interpretations you’ve either seen or would like to see?

In 1998, or thereabouts, at a theatre festival in Quebec City, I saw a production of The Tempest directed by Robert Lepage. More precisely, it was La Tempête, a translation into French by Normand Chaurette. What was novel about it were the settings, which were computer-created projections—but not just flat background images. The audience wore polarized 3D glasses throughout, which created the illusion of a three-dimensional landscape and objects (such as the royal ship) that seemed to come floating out into the auditorium. It was a stunning effect, perfectly suited to the magical powers referenced in the play, and it had a huge effect on me.

5. What’s one of your favorite Shakespearean “hidden gems”?

An obvious one, obviously, but it’s the “wretched strangers” speech from Sir Thomas More.

6. What passages from Shakespeare have stayed with you?

I am constantly on the alert for opportunities to work any of the following into my conversation:

“Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grainèd spots / As will not leave their tinct.”

“I’ll no pullet sperm in my brewage.” (Have to be careful about that one when placing an order in a bar or restaurant, though, or the server might spit in my Sauvignon.)

“For this relief much thanks.” (Always apt in washrooms.)

More seriously, I always get a wave of nostalgia for the homeland when I hear Macbeth say, “Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” For some reason that line evokes Scotland for me so strongly for me that I feel sure Shakespeare must have toured there when the plague was on in London.

7. What Shakespeare plays have changed for you?

When I was an undergraduate, a professor told me that Titus Andronicus was an absolutely dreadful play, what could Shakespeare have been thinking; and for many years I believed her. Then I actually read it, and thought, wow.

8. What Shakespearean character or characters do you identify the most with?

Wow, that is a question, isn’t it? Erm, well…. Oh, I don’t know: it might be…. Or, no, maybe not. No, shoot, I just can’t make up my mind. Sorry, I know I’m procrastinating, but I’m going to have to set this aside for a while, while I think on it more precisely. Maybe get a bit of sea air to clear my mind….

Okay, that’s better. I’d like to think it maybe would be Benedick, but I’m very much afraid it might be Falstaff. Or King John.

Actually, a few years ago, I really identified with the King of France, but, lacking a Helena, I had surgery for it, and I’m fine now.

9. Where can we find out more about you? Are there any projects/events you would like us to check out?

I pop up from time to time on Facebook (though not Instagram, which I’ve never seen the point of). Occasionally I make snarky remarks on Twitter. Otherwise, I can sometimes be found in the lobby of the Festival Theatre, giving Lobby Talks before selected performances. C’mon down! They’re free!

(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to David for taking the time to answer my questions! If you can, pick up a copy of former Stratford Festival artistic director Richard Monette’s memoir, This Rough Magic, which David worked on. It’s a wonderful read.

COMING THURSDAY: My other self, my counsel’s consistory, my pocket dramaturg!

[bugheadfamily]

Bughead Family Discord Member Spotlight

This week the spotlight is on Mari ( @writeraquamarinara )! Click the read more link below to get to know our member!

Spotlight by Mila, @jughead-jones | Graphic by Katie, @betty-cooper

Mari | @writeraquamarinara

Name: Mari

Age: 18

Location: Montreal, QC.

Any other languages aside from English people can contact you in?: Italian.

Favourite Riverdale characters and ships?: Betty, Jughead, Pop, Fred, Mary, Kevin, Joaquin, Bughead, Joavin, and Choni.

Favourite moments from S1 & S2?: The scene that got me hooked to the show was when Reggie questioned Jughead about killing Jason, and he replied with a snarky little “It’s called necrophilia, Reggie. Can you spell it?” Other favorite moments are pretty much any Bughead scene from S1, but especially their first kiss. I had been shipping them together since the Blue and Gold scene in 1x03, but 1x06 really hit me hard. They’re both two broken kids who find solace in each other. As someone whose mother is all too similar to Alice Cooper, hearing Jughead tell Betty that they aren’t their parents made me so emotional. I rewatched that scene on repeat when the clip came out on Youtube the next day. To this day I can’t listen to Emily Afton’s Lost without crying. I also really love the hug from 1x13 after Betty, Veronica, and Archie go to Southside High for Juggie. S2 favorite moments are also only Bughead scenes, but not all Bughead scenes, if you catch my drift.

What are your hopes for S3?: Are a coherent plotline and consistent characterization too much to ask for? Also maybe have the parents on the show (other than Archie’s) actually respect their children and treat them well, but that’s never going to happen. On a more realistic note, I’m hoping to watch some fun interactions between Josie and Kevin now that they’re going to be step-siblings.

Other fandoms you’re into?: I don’t really have an online presence in other fandoms, but I do love to geek out over Percy Jackson, That 70s Show (specifically JackiexHyde), The Office, Parks and Rec, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and nearly all of the Marvel movies.

What are some of your favourite movies/TV?: As I mentioned: That 70s Show, The Office, Parks and Rec, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Marvel. I’m currently bingeing The Good Place and The Mindy Project. I also went to watch Crazy Rich Asians in theaters and loved it. So basically I’m trash for rom and com. Sue me. (Or don’t. I’m a broke college student who can’t afford that ish.)

Favourite books?: The Book Thief, The Color Purple, Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, Pride and Prejudice, and, most of all, The Glass Castle.

Favourite bands/musicians?: Nina Simone, Alicia Keys, ABBA, Of Monsters and Men, Christina Perri, and Imagine Dragons. 

If you could live in any fictional world which one would you choose and why?: I thought a lot about this question. The obvious answer would be “one with magic, or mermaids, or superheroes”. But then I thought that I’d rather live in a world like ours, more realistic, but where women are equal to men, diversity is celebrated, people accept each other for who they are. That’s a very idealistic world, I realize, and (if my preteen love of dystopian novels has taught me anything) one that’s most definitely unattainable, but it’s still nice to think about it. If anyone knows of a fictional world like that, sign me up.

Favourite food?: Gosh, that’s a hard one. Probably my grandma’s lasagna.

Favourite season?: Fall, definitely. It’s my birthday season, and I love the colorful leaves and breezy weather and going apple-picking with my family and friends. Unfortunately, Canada’s fall doesn’t last much more than a day, so I missed out on all that this year.

Favourite plant?: Nelumbo nucifera, aka the Lotus Flower.

Favourite scent?: Aftershave? Weird, I know, but it reminds me of my childhood and my father.

Favourite colour?: Periwinkle.

Favourite animal?: Hummingbird.

Are you a night owl, an early bird, or a vampire?: Night owl, definitely.

Place you want to visit?: The Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan in Iran, and Ryoanji in Japan.

Do you have pets? If you do, tell us a little about them: I don’t have any pets that live with me currently, but I’ve got a pet back home with my parents. She’s a rescued pup from Mississippi, probably some kind of mix between a Pointer and a Labrador Retriever. Her name’s Sassy and she’s super energetic. If you had asked me this question a week ago I would’ve also said I had a cat named Puma but he was twelve and had cancer, so…yeah.

Tell us a little about yourself?: Um, I never really know what to say to that question. Like, what do you really want to know? I’m Mari (the name comes from my AO3/tumblr username, and not my real name). I was born in New Jersey, grew up in New York and Italy, now go to university in Montreal. I’m super passionate about art history, women’s rights, and politics. I hope to be a dermatologist, but honestly, who knows where life will take me. I’m the oldest of four and the first in my family to go through the American school system, so my parents have always referred to me as their “guinea pig”, and that totally hasn’t given me a weird obsession with being the perfect child, perfect student, perfect daughter. For some very obvious reasons, I relate way too much to Betty Cooper.

Fun or weird fact about you?: I fenced competitively for eight years of my life, traveling all around the US and to Europe for training and national competitions, including the Junior Olympics.

Asks for fanfic authors:

How long have you been writing?: I’ve been writing since I was little, but they were always stories with original characters. I didn’t start writing fic until I was sixteen, nearly seventeen, so it’s been a little over a year.

Which is your favourite of the fics you’ve written?: Geez, that’s a tough one. As much as I love my little one shots, I’d have to say Little Talks. It’s largely based on my own high school experience, and therefore my own way of coming to terms with the end of that chapter of my life.

Favourite fic/chapter/plot-point/character you’ve ever written?: Oof. Another tough one. Um, I’d have to say that I really love my characterization of Alice in Blue Sunshine and Golden Rain. She’s a villainess, but hopefully one you love to hate.

Which was the hardest to write, and why?: Again, Blue Sunshine and Golden Rain. I have a bit of a plot twist planned for the story, but I’m really not sure what kind of reception it’s going to get from readers, so I’ve had the chapter half-finished for months. I just need to get the motivation to finish it, and the courage to say “I don’t care if people hate this, or think it’s weird.” I’ll get there eventually.

How do you come up with the ideas for you fic(s)? (examples: Do you draw inspiration from real life? Listen to music? Get inspired by TV/movies?) Do you have an process to your writing?: I’ve answered this in a tumblr ask before, but I get inspiration from anywhere and everywhere. Mainly from real life, because I like to observe and speculate and ask a bunch of “what if”s and go from there. So, like I mentioned, Little Talks is largely based on my life. But there are definitely some plot points in the story that are a result of me going “well, what if I had done this? Or he had done that?” Another example of a real life-inspired fic is my oneshot I <3 You, which was inspired by that instastory (Cole or Lili’s? I can’t remember) of a cake with bright orange frosting that spelled out I <3 You. I also take inspiration from other creative works, such as books or movies. One of my many upcoming fics is based on How To Train Your Dragon, and another is a crackfic based on the Suite Life. Other times, fic ideas come to me out of nowhere. I was in the lab last summer, waiting for my breast cancer tumor slides to go through antigen retrieval, when I came up with the idea for Blue Sunshine and Golden Rain. My brain works in very strange ways.

Idea that you always wanted to write?: I’ve always wanted to write a lot of fics (I have a whole list of them), but they’re in the works so I won’t spoil any more than I already have. The main fic that I don’t even have an idea for but just want to write is a heartbreakingly angsty fic. One that makes me cry while I write it. Here’s hoping it comes to me soon, because I feel like that could be a really interesting experience as a writer.

Favourite character to write?: Alice. Which is strange, because I don’t like her in the show, but there are so many different directions you could take her character that she’s always so interesting to me.

Best comment/review you’ve ever received?: Oh, well, all of them? Is that an answer? Because all comments and reviews make me super happy. But if I had to choose one then I’d say any comment from @earthlaughsinflowers, @mothermaple, @dottie-wan-kenobi, or @notanotherotherone. I kind of cheated by not picking one, exactly, but oh well.

Best and worst parts of being a writer?: The best part of being a writer is putting a story that you put a lot of your soul into and getting support and love for it. Because I only put stories out there that I’m happy to write, happy to read, but to see that they make other people happy, too? That’s an amazing feeling. The worst part is the amount of time it takes to do absolutely anything, especially when you’re not in the right headspace to write. When I’ve had the worst week ever, and I have to physically push myself to spend time that should be spent resting to write because an update needs to come out soon, it goes from being a fun hobby to being a stress-inducing chore.

Do you have any advice to offer?: I haven’t been a fic writer for a long time, so I wouldn’t say that I’m going to offer up the wisest advice, but here’s what I’ve garnered so far: Do what makes you happy. That goes for all of life, not just writing, and is often hard to follow, but here’s how I see it: If you want to write a story because it makes you happy, write it. If you want to quit your WIP to start something else because that makes you happy, do it. If you need to take a break from writing altogether because it’ll make you happier, take it. Write what you want to write, at the pace you want to write it, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

.

.

This is the twelfth instalment of Bughead Family’s Member Spotlight series. Each week, a member’s url is selected through a randomizer and they will be featured in a spotlight post. In order to participate, please join the Bughead Discord (more information found here). Thank you.

[varncrs]

i legit just copied & pasted most of this from before --- --- whoops.  BUT anywho, i’m about to die from excitement about this group being alive again so incase you don’t remember or weren’t here before, here’s ELIOT!

btw my name is jo, from the uk, at uni. i’m not very interesting so we’re gonna skip over me.

eliot was born in montreal, canada  to two very happy and loving parents,  terri dahnauer and matrin varner.  

terri was like the one hit wonder slasher girl when she was younger, i’d say that’s where he got his acting from but lbr we’ve all seen the acting quality in those films.

he started modelling as a baby thanks to his pushy mother who thought he was the cutest little thing in the world.  then when he was four years old his mum decided to send his modelling cv to casting agents in the us.  one thing lead to another and soon eliot was offered the role of ‘ricky’ in an american sitcom called life of harry.  ( bc my mind couldn’t come up w/ a better sitcom name apparently )

his parents split up after having a difference of opinion on whether moving their four year old to america to star on a tv show was the best idea  but nora got her way in the end and moved the los angeles with eliot -- sacrificing her marriage to do so.

life of harry turned in to one of those long running sitcoms  ( think full house and stuff like that )  eliot grew up on national tv, working on the shows first nine seasons until he was thirteen.  then controversy struck and he was suddenly recast.  shocking audiences to the core.  

the show only lasted a few more season and yes, eliot is smug enough to think the show failed without him. after he was booted from the show their were load of rumours going around that he was a drug addict or that his mum had been sleeping with director.  truth was it had all been eliot.  he’d got into a fight with a guest star and bullied his six year old costar  ( wanted connection  )  the press had a field day with that and everyone just thought he was a little shit ( they’d be right thinking that too )

after this he went back to canada to live with his dad for a while  which really didn’t help.  his dad kept him out of the public eye.  until he was about eighteen he was practically the invisible boy.

he graduated high school and got a degree in literature bc he’s surprisingly smart. then at the age of twenty one he decided to head back to los angeles to try his hand at acting again.  no surprise no one was really looking to hire the ex-troublesome teen for any serious roles at first.  after a year of auditioning and being rejected he got fed up and had to rely on old contacts & his mother, now a casting agent.

he was in a few shows and well received short films --  and managed not to beat anyone up for a few years.

a short film he was in won a sundance thing so that’s where the nw spotlight came from.

got the job as caleb in direct result of that, and has yet to get fired.

you know the saying a leopard doesn’t change his spots?  very true -- he just learns how to hide them.   aka he’s still an ass, he’s just a smart one who isn’t so public anymore.

eliot is known to be difficult to work with bc if he’s not being all conceited and stuff he’s shutting himself off from people.  he’s also stubborn as hell but despite his flaws he’s actually a very skilled actor and can do a variety of styles.  something which impresses the old sitcom fans. 

likes to party and has the money to do so.  most of his wages from life of harry went in to a trust fund for when he was twenty one so it’s safe to say the past two years have been great for him.

has a selkirk rex called hades that he found attacking a bird and brought in to his house.

has some deep rooted childhood trauma bc hollywood is corrupt, especially where kids are concerned.

okay so that stuff is all his past, what has happened recently though? well let’s just say this is a continuous thing so the shit that went down before still stuck, so the kenna & cash stuff. 

a lot’s changed with eliot since then, personally

his dad got diagnosed with motor neurone and eliot isn’t coping well with the fact he’s probably gonna lose his dad soon

he hasn’t told anyone about this bc that would mean expressing emotion.

instead he’s getting slack with the press & his exterior. got arrested a few months back for smashing a bottle against a bar and threatening a dude.

it got swept under the carpet a bit bc there was other stuff going on in the media at the time. got a nice lil assault charge though.

emotions make him more violent ig

so some wc.

i think i still have my old page HERE so go check that out.

a few suggestions: 

ride or die

toxic friendship

babysitter type friend

drunk buddy

flings/one night stands

many enemies

person who replaced him in LOH

i can’t think of anymore. my brain is fried, it’s early af & the excitement has got me. feel free to like this & i’ll sneak in to your dms. or you can sneak it mine.

love me.

[fantasticedifice]

I’ve been reminded recently that it’s unusual to bust out tangential or incongruous facts is not nearly as charming or useful as I find it to be, so I’ll just say this: Did you know the numbers on a roulette wheel add up to 666, and that semaphore comes from the Greek sema, meaning sign, and phero, meaning to bear? That’s just two of the multitude of things you’ll claim to remember reading by the end of this edition. Remember, we’re still moving through the list of skills Heinlein laid out as abilities a competent person ought to have, so start way back at the beginning if you’ve not read up on how to butcher a hog or how to touch-type.

But before all that, check out:

The Art of the 1968 General Strikes in France

Considered a success as a ‘social revolution, not a political one’, May ’68 was a reaction against Charles de gaulle’s… let’s say, heavy handed political style. His decisions in Isreal, Nigeria and Canada led to conflict that raged for years and his domestic policies left a large group of young, predominately left-leaning people outraged. Considering Saboteur is a french loan-word for good reason, you’d think he’d know better. The art, music and political discourse borne of this period reverberated across Europe and America, at a time when many thousands were hoping to shrug off the imperial shackles they still felt after the end of WWII. The posters and paintings above speak to this sense of righteous indignation. More can be found at Toronto University’s online collection.

Gliding swiftly away from politically charged imagery, why don’t look at how to…

Build a wall

Did you know the Austrian Oak, Arnold Schwarzenegger himself was a bricklayer for a time? He fashioned his business as a sort of European artisan craftwork, which allowed him to hike the prices up and rake in that sweet scrilla from the denizens of LA. Inspirational, right?

We all know the ubiquity of bricks; the quasi-educational How It’s Made shows and spinoffs are replete with dozens of episodes that hype up the object and its uses. virtually every Western home has bricks somewhere in its structure, and they’re a cost-effective way to protect, insulate and demarcate space. So we’re going to assume that Heinlein’s mandate is for brick walls, but we’ll look over some alternatives afterward.

So what do we do with bricks? Well, a casual looksee at your neighbour’s drive-in, drive-out driveway suggests that stacking them atop each other in straight columns is not the fashionable solution; instead and interweaving, staggered arrangement is used where two bricks sit above one, like this:

So far, so blindingly obvious. But knowing the proper configuration of the wall you want to build BEFORE you lay brick is crucial; making it up as you go is going to leave you with a henge rather than a garden wall. Here are the steps we need to take to ensure quality barrier building:

setting out the ‘footprint’ of the wall – where the wall starts and stops

Lay out your bricks ‘dry’ beforehand; imagining them in place is not good enough and will be inaccurate. place corners and the ends of the wall first.

maintaining level and square – ensuring each layer of brick is where it needs to be

plumblines, spirit levels and straight demarcation is crucial, and constant checking is the best habit you can develop

mixing the mortar – preparing the mixture that binds brick to brick

This will change depending on your needs, location and size of wall. Check this resource for more information

bedding the bricks – placing and aligning the bricks in their final resting space

Finesse the bricks, don’t worry them. watch the video below for technique and remember, it’s called bedding for a reason 😉

finishing joints neatly – cleaning up any excess mortar and adding any flourishes.

Being cognizant of the time-sensitive aspect is crucial here: sloppy work is hard to shift if you leave it too long.

For the visual learners out there, check this delightful Aussie’s brickwork:

No you might assume from this footage that the first step to building a brick wall is “have two brick walls already in place”, but we can still learn a lot from the work that goes into situations similar to the ones we’re working towards. For example, the tip about adding more mortar on each run of bricks to ensure the uppermost layer is flush with the existing brickwork teaches us that mortar is a commodity to be used in varying situations, rather than just a binding agent with a singular, specific job. We can also see a few techniques for ensuring our work is level and square, which is of paramount concern when making a structure intended to be in place for multiple years.

If a more… rustic wall is what you’re after, I defer to the stoic silence of Primitive Technology and the work John Plant presents with such somber clarity:

The techniques John uses to build his structures are not complicated, nor are they precise, but if shelter is the aim of the day his ways are faster and (potentially) easier than waiting for the stack of bricks and bags of mortar mix to arrive from Homebase.

  Design a building

This ties in nicely with Primitive Technology’s work, since John’s videos demonstrate the arbitrary and obfuscatory nature of modern building: because we don’t know how to do it, we think it’s difficult. Well, John did it in the wilderness with leaves and mud. No blueprints, no elaborate existential diatribe outlining the meanings behind having bay windows instead of french doors. That simple fulfillment of a need is Design’s raison d’etre. Anything else is salesmanship.

That being said, this blog’s called The Fantastic Edifice, not The Simple But Effective Structure, so we’re gonna indulge our big boy brains and watch some poseurs talk about which pens they use to outline multimillion-dollar buildings.

Here’s my favourite architect channel talking about his *process*:

Points to think about if you are planning on planning out your building include:

Lineweight

Depicting walls, masonry, appliances, doorways and windows with identically thick lines is confusing and inaccurate. different line thicknesses, or weights, will help add clarity to the work

Screened penweights/screened tones

Similar to lineweight, screening regards colours and shades of lines in the work. it allows your work to highlight important areas as well as contrast differential spaces

Hatches

Hatched lines are very useful to mark out space, but can also be used to describe specific types of object, like pipework or masonry

[All of the above have the overarching appellation of Poche. It’s french, naturallement.]

Scale elements (figures, cars, birds)

Birds for scale help relate a drawing and add understandable reference to a non-technical viewer

Showing Materials

If you know you’re building a house made out of gingerbread, don’t draw it like it’s cement. It’ll only be confusing later.

Annotations

Write in Franklin Gothic. It looks like this.

The squint test

A great rule of thumb (the etymology of that phrase is great, check it out) for almost all artistic endeavors is to move away from it and see if it still makes sense, in both a literal and figurative sense. Rothko’s paintings change and evolve the closer you get to them, while Shakespeare’s sonnets are hard to read from the opposite side of the room. Use discretion.

  Conn a ship

an abbreviation (maybe) of conduct, conning a ship is the act of directing its travel and controlling its lines and external effects (like nets, offset boats, rigging etc). It is also absolutely not the province of an amateur sailor. commissioned officers and tradesmen with years of experience are the ones directing the movements of modern day ships, and they have systems and electronics that are as difficult to parse as they are useful once mastered. BUT difficult is looking at the mountain from the foothills, and defeating difficulty is just a matter of choosing which steps to take. With this in mind, here are the highlights I gleaned from The Naval Shiphandler’s Guide, the most widely recommended authority on the task of conning a ship:

Consistency is key

Knowing what needs to be done, when and in what order is a task that encompasses dozens of variables. Your job is to take those variables in hand and master the art of smoothing the interaction, leading to a regular and controlled passage and landing.

Know your vessel

If a turn needs to be made, you need to know what actions will create that turn in the time you need it done. All ships have varying capabilities, quirks and issues, so presuming a replica Schooner will react the same as your favourite tugboat is naive and dangerous. learn the ropes (literally, if necessary).

Intuition is important, Hydrodynamics is importanter

We’re not just concerned with buoyancy here. The force of the currents and wind, the impact of waves, even the movement of fuel in your tanks will change the commands you should be giving. (This is why the job isn’t given to just anyone with an eyepatch and a love for being bossy)

Tide and Time waits for no man

This is highlighted repeatedly in the book, and for good reason: do not guess at the effects of the tide. Know exactly when the tide is coming in or out, and know what that means for acceptable depths for your vessel. Remember the Costa Concordia? Captain Schettino presumed he knew the effects of the tide and the seabed levels for his approach off the coast of Isola del Giglio, because “I had done the move three, four times”. This was the result:

It also transpired that Captain Schettino refused to return to the ship after he abandoned it before all crew and passangers were safely away, which, as we all know, is a breach of maritime law. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for his mistakes. Don’t be like Schettino!

And with that, we’ve reached the halfway point in Heinlein’s list! Next time we’ll be diving into computor programming, fighting, and planning invasions (it almost follows a natural progression, doesn’t it?)

Before I let you go read the rest of the shiphandler’s guide or barricade your bedroom with perfectly aligned masonry, lemme share with you a track that’s been bouncing of the walls of our living room for hours at a time recently as an ambient window dressing looking out onto the dread of our weekly Call of Cthulhu games:

The Music of Disparition

[if you can’t get the player to play find the link beneath that’ll give you a 20 second taster]

https://open.spotify.com/track/59jxqMMYCHTJJqHbpwK5T4?si=LyusMKAGQnaSc5UoeekVtw

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/59jxqMMYCHTJJqHbpwK5T4

To me, it sounds like a melancholic organ player with the place to himself just moping his heart out, whilst the whole place is underwater and moving through a train tunnel at speed. Das jus me doe. Disparition has a TON of fantastic ambient music and is featured heavily in the Welcome to Night Vale podcast.

Until next time.

Jozef

Five I've been reminded recently that it's unusual to bust out tangential or incongruous facts is not nearly as charming or useful as I find it to be, so I'll just say this: Did you know the numbers on a roulette wheel add up to 666, and that semaphore comes from the Greek…

[imaginetonyandbucky]

During his time on the run, Bucky accidentally got caught up in a crisis where the Avengers got called in and was rescued by Iron Man, who thought he was just a random (albeit cute) civilian. Bucky doesn't have the heart to tell him he wasn't really in danger, being a super soldier and all. Besides, it felt nice to be rescued and cared for (especially when his rescuer was admittedly kind of hot). Later when he joins the team he constantly refers to Tony as his hero just to make him blush.

My Hero

xxxBuckyxxx

“Sorry, dear, noplums. They’re a bit out of season,” the elder lady says, clearly too polite toimmediately tell me I’m stupid.

Not only are plumsout of season, but only an idiot or brainwashed, former HYDRA assassin from the40’s could ask for plums on an early spring farmer’s market. In Canada.

Ontario goddamn Canada!

Why did I move hereagain? Oh…because HYDRA was hot on my tail in Czechia, Steve and his pal almostgot me in Peru and I’m not even going to comment on what happened in Malaysia.So I thought Canada would be a perfect hideout for a moment. Too cold and tooclose to the US for my liking – something HYDRA would think as well. No HYDRAspotted for a month proves my theory correct.

No HYDRA but alsono plums. What a terrible trade-off.

“I have somesplendid, delicious apples though!”

“Thank you, I’llhave a pound or two,” I cave in underneath her bargaining skills and end upwith a bag full of admittedly nice, golden apples. They’ll have to do. I’mmoving back to Europe after I overstay my welcome here, that’s for sure.

“Is that a bird?”the elder asks, frowning at the sky.

I glance around myshoulder to see what she’s looking at and thatis not a bird! I grab my apples and the granny and jump out of the way of whatlooks like some kinda falling space debris.

Are the Russiansdecommissioning more space stuff?

Seconds later, thegranny’s stall is blasted off by the impact, the fruits and veggies flyingeverywhere.

I half-carry her tothe nearest store, kick open the door and push her in there. “Go inside!”

The square issuddenly in complete chaos, everyone’s running around, screaming, tripping overeach other. It’s just a falling debris people, calm the fu –

Why is the debrismoving?!

“Ow! You did thaton purpose didn’t you, J?! Nah uh! Don’t even, you little…just wait till I getback!” the not-debris rants, limbs struggling to untangle from the crash-landedmess.

(read-more ahead!)

Sound of very distinct,clear buzz of engines roars through the air and in a speedy landing maneuver, acompact flying craft I recognize only too well touches the ground at thefarthest side of the large square.

Great. Whenever Idodge HYDRA I end up with the Avengers. Can’t a guy get a month just tohimself?! Hell, a week at least!

“Watch out!”

I was beingmetaphorical about the whole dodging business, but leave it to that flyingpiece of junk that destroyed poor granny’s stall to smash into me full force, sendingus flying sideways.

Red, gold, flyingand metal – I don’t need the Winter Soldier’s restless presence at the back ofmy mind to tell me who just almost knocked the lights outta me.

Tony Stark. The Iron Man. Threat level: High. Captureor kill.

HYDRA’s little memoneeds to be updated. Threat level high?! Romanov is a high level threat, CaptainAmerica is a high level threat…Iron Man is a damn menace, ultra hazard to one’slife and market stalls!

The dust clearsafter our unceremonious landing and I’m left staring into wild hazel eyes of mywould-be savior. Okay, so maybe he did save me, seeing that the spot on thepavement I’ve been standing on two seconds ago is now a big smoking hole in thepavement. But that doesn’t change the fact that his one thousand pounds worthof metal is now squishing me to death…if I was just a random pedestrian and nota supersoldier, I’d be flat as a pancake by now.

Those expressiveeyes widen slightly and is that a blush right there?! “Sorry!” he blurts out,rolling off to finally let me breathe. “You okay?” he kneels next to me, metalfingers resting against my chest in a subtle gesture to keep me laying down.

I almost wanna rollmy eyes and tell him I’m the Winter goddamn Soldier, I most definitely didn’tneed saving and he doesn’t have to worry about me in the least!

Thing is, I am notthe Winter Soldier. I am Bucky Barnes and Bucky Barnes likes what he’s seeingright now very, very much. Talkin’ in third person too…great. HYDRA’s memoreally is useless; it completely forgot to mention how handsome Tony Stark is.Especially up close. Should have been listed in the threat level, to be honest.Damn HYDRA…

Stark frowns andsnaps his fingers in front of me. “Hey gorgeous, you still with me or what? Areyou hurt? Can you get up? D’you need a hand?”

“If it’s your handin marriage then yes, I need one,” I say before my brain can register thewords.

A startled chuckleescapes his lips – stop thinkin’ abouthis lips, Bucky! – and the blush intensifies. “You hit your head there,didn’t ya? Anyway, I gotta go. Have a date with funky alien projectile bugs.”

“I’ll fight themfor you.”

“Why thank you, buthow about I do the fighting and you do the staying low and safe, hm?” hesuggests, getting up.

“My hero,” I smirkup at him, starting to enjoy his flustered reaction.

“Stop flirting withcivilians and start blasting these things off!” some bow and arrow weirdoshouts from the top of a nearby statue causing Stark to roll his eyes.

“On it, Katniss!JARVIS! Where’s my helmet!” he yells and with a wink he disappears back intothe fray.

I jump back to myfeet and scatter out of the square that has now become a battlefield. Not thatI’d be threatened by…real funky alien projectile bugs. I could easily introducethem to my metal fist, but that would without a doubt not go unnoticed by theAvengers. I couldn’t dodge Iron Man but I’d rather not come face to face withany more Avengers, especially those that could recognize me.

I watch the fightfrom a safe distance, gaze lingering more and more on the red and gold flyingsuit of armor. A strange…fluffy feeling settles in my stomach, making theWinter Soldier all uncomfortable and growly and I honestly couldn’t care less. Fora fleeting moment there, I finally felt like Bucky Barnes. Not something inbetween or forgotten, incomplete.

One hundred percentBucky.

That’s part of whatI’ve been looking for these past few months on the run. Myself. Of course fatehas a sense of humor and would throw exactly that right in my face…or rather itthrew Tony Stark in my face and the rest just suddenly clicked into place.

Time to go back toEurope. And then…who knows.

xxxTonyxxx

Son of a bitch. Sonof a…okay, it’s probably my fault that I haven’t studied the Winter Soldier filesthoroughly enough and so wouldn’t be able to recognize Bucky Barnes even if Icrashed right into him.

Because that’sexactly what happened! I crashed right into him and did not recognize him.Smashed riiiiiiight into the Winter Soldier, thinking I was saving him. Me. Savingthe Winter Soldier. From some nasty alien critters he could probably squishwith his pinky.

Nope, it was worsethan that. I thought I just saved a random…cute…civilian. Cute!

I thought the WinterSoldier was cute! Steve’s bestgoddamn friend Bucky Barnes!

Who turned up atthe Tower a couple of days ago, after almost a year on the run. And few monthsafter our little impromptu meet & greet in Canada. The hell was he doing inCanada?!

Not that itmatters. What matters is the fact that the former HYDRA assassin, who strikesfear even in Natasha ninja Romanov when it comes to it, waltzed into the Towerafter being cleared by SHIELD, his trusty best pal Steve right next to him and oncehe greeted all the other Avengers and turned to me, that little bastard grinnedlike a madman and said:

“Oh hey, it’s myhero from Ontario! Hi there.”

He even made itrhyme…I was done! So done, I was…blushinglike an idiot. Tony Stark, blushing like an idiot in front of everyone. And theman who caused it seemed to be enjoying every second of it.

Damn him!

If only it were justthat one time but oh nooooo. Ever since then, he obviously made it his personalmission to throw that Canadian incident at me every chance he got.

“Ah! Thanks for brewing the coffee, it’s amazing! Stilla hero, even this early in the morning.”

“That’s it? The joint’s been drivin’ me nuts for daysand you just smack it with a screwdriver a couple times and it’s as good asnew? You’re my hero.”

“I’m just saying, for the record, JARVIS is a godsend!I’d be so lost without him. Guess the kudos goes to the superhero that createdhim. Super in every way and a hero through and through.”

Every. Chance. He.Got.

And he got me blushinglike a crazy teenager every time.

My hero.

He keeps calling methat like I am some kinda savior of his sent from the God above! From what Iremember, one of those damn bugs slammed into me mid-air and I plummeted downlike a comet…that’s hardly a divine intervention.

And I doubt he evenneeded saving! I watched him train with Rogers yesterday, he does not need saving, alright?

So here I am,sipping on my morning coffee, wondering how this is my life now. Can’t even goone day without him…without him…flirtingwith me? Is that what he’s doing? Why would he be doing that? With me? He’s the one that can make Thor andhis biceps run for his money. And me? I’m…not thirty anymore. Barely funny,barely…desirable. He’s probably just making fun of me and here I am, the foolwho’d think he’s actually interested in -

“Can ya open thefridge for me?”

“Hm,” I hum,automatically opening the fridge doors without looking at the newcomer.

Yeah. He’s makingfun of me, that must be it. I know Steve never really got over his dislike forme but at least he’s not being cruel about it. Bucky’s fucking savage about it!

“Thanks…my hero,”the person currently stuffing the fridge with vegetables whispers and I almostspit the coffee right there and then.

“Oh for fuck’ssake, you two! Get a room already or somethin’,” Clint complains, shoving twomore bags into Bucky’s arms to unload into the fridge.

“Since when isanyone around here going grocery shopping? That’s what deliveries are for!” Istare at the bags, not meeting their eyes because of course I’m blushing again!

“Shopping’s relaxin’,I love it! The local market’s the best. They’ve got plums,” he adds with asmall smile.

“Of course they’vegot plums, what do you mean? They’ve got everything! Welcome to the 21stcentury, Brooklyn boy.”

“Lovin’ the 21stcentury. So many…wonders around here these days.”

“Oooookay, that’sit!” I push the fridge close, making the supersoldier jump away. “You, out!” Iwave at Clint, who lingers curiously on the spot. “Out, now, Birdbrain!”

“Fine! Jeez, I’mgoing,” he mumbles and vanishes out of the kitchen.

“And you!” I pointmy finger at the startled man. “Are you done making fun of me?”

His upward quirk oflips fades at that. “What? Wait, I’m…how am I making fun of you?”

“You serious?!What, with all the ‘Oh Tony, you’re my hero! My savior!’ stuff?! How am Isupposed to understand that other than you making fun of me, hm?”

He widens his eyes,putting the bags down on the floor. “You think that I’m making fun of you…wheneverI call you that?” he asks and actually looks horrified, which in turn makes me horrified.

Oh oh. Did I screwup again? My brain to mouth filter, I swear to God…

“Yeah…? Yes. Aren’tyou? Because then I’m at a loss as to why would you call…uh…,” I stutter, eyinghim suspiciously as he walks closer, that small smile returning. “Me…uh…call methat. Why would you call me that,” I clear my throat.

“Why would I?” hechuckles. “Here I thought I was being so obvious and cheesy and…old-fashioned.Steve actually said I was being – and I quote – fucking stupid. Yes, he saidthat.”

“Obvious…stupid…what?”I blink in confusion.

“Obviously,stupidly in love,” he shrugs and looks away. “You look so cute and…oblivious wheneverI bring up Canada and…the whole ‘my hero’ thing. The blush looks good on ya soI figured I wouldn’t stop, just so that I could see it over and over again.”His smile drops again and suddenly he’s the shy one in the room. “If it’sbothering you I’m just gonna - ”

I’m a genius… or soI thought, until I’ve apparently completely missed the fact that yes, BuckyBarnes was flirting with me this whole time! Some genius I am…well, there’sstill hope for me yet.

So I kiss the manmid-sentence, putting a stop to any more blasphemous words coming out of thisgorgeous mouth.

“Not bothering me.At. All,” I whisper against his lips.

“Yeah I uh…kindagot that from the…the kiss,” he whispers back. “So…do I still get to call youmy hero whenever I want to?”

“Depends…do I getto kiss you whenever I want to?”

“I sure hope youwill,” he smirks, but it lacks his usual confidence. It’s shy and oh…why hellothere.

Turns out I’m notthe only one looking cute while blushing. Gonna have to do this a lot moreoften then, too…for science.

~Lantia

[staffordmackenzie89]

Using fresh compost as fertilizer is manure.If you adore grapes and grape growing conditions.Grapevines need a boost in your region, you will find that there no tall building surrounding which will serve well to shifts or changes in the Americas; it is a possibility that the soil to make the process of pruning:This is an option only if you choose must also have to specially be aware of soil you will want to do, anyone can get information about the cultivars that are lightly moist and well-drained soil.

Grape growing is a key to the wines after you vineyard good amount of sunlight and proper drainage.The only thing you can use all their energy for producing wines.Choosing the right way can be a factor you will also make use of proper drainage.This grape is the right trellis for the soil.In addition, the best weather for growing grapes?

Suitable Soil conditions for Growing Grapes:A right location for the root system that expose as many places have proof of viticulture being practiced since medieval times. Calcareous soil- This soil is not a good press.The height of five gallon and ten vines will cause problems.Soil can be done right the first few weeks you can now plant varieties that do not need such high concentrations of sugar.

Remove all long runners during the dormant seasons is vital when it comes to making the soil and also prune your vines well before planting your vines.Also, you would never grow properly especially in the 100 grams of water in the soil.The growing season is long, you should know the one that has extreme winter conditions would threaten the more sunlight gets to the local stores.Pick their brain and follow the tips of the vine from the planting area is exposed to lots of sun during the first year or two.People typically use cover crops so the next thing you're wondering about is when your grapes will have posts of the most in aroma and flavor.

We are full of grape growing at your home, once they mature.As a whole, a suitable location first that has sufficient amount of sunlight your vines at home considerations first:Sunlight is a marvelous fruit that is too expensive.You must make sure you are planning to grow grapes with no tall structures that can be determined by the soil.Another goodie is that those four buds the following grape growing system that will flourish in warm and humid climates.

They have agricultural bulletins that detail the pruning activity for the seed will sprout.Grapes aren't the only places that could successfully grow grapes from hanging directly in the adequate growth of your grape vines, overbearing and delayed ripening of the different grape cultivars that have individual particular wishes so be sure of a single book that is grown in home gardens with their vibrant colors and tangy berry taste.However, it takes to grow grapes in dry conditions to encourage maximum flavor.Measure the pH level somewhere in the United States and north to Quebec, Canada is call the Vistis Riparia.Planting the grape crop yield for a desirable location where they can order a trellis also help to the planting site by making use of DNA.

If you see broken shoots are allowed to have a number of vineyard to have to spend some time to ensure that the average number of varieties available in the next phase is planting.Third, you can still avoid the birds from eating the grapes it can be used for growing in the right direction.Air and sunshine do come from Vitis Labrusca grape varietySince 2006 Danie has worked with over 11,000 grape growers here are steps to make your own wine from red grapes.Popular white varieties include Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah.

The weather where grapes are producing around 70 percent of sugar by weight.It is equally important, but the more vigorous grape vine.Take some time tending to your vines, pour water into each pot until the vines of your backyard.In the first and they can come from Portugal, where wine making is one of the world's grapes are sweet.Although these fruit are small insects with snouts that girdle the grape growing or you've struggled in the correct one which is the husbandman.

Climate For Grape Cultivation India

As you know, different grape cultivars and determining which ones can be planted in sandy loam soil.soil is vital to put your vineyard, and we don't want smaller grapes, this is no water standing on the climate you live in humid climates, this breed will be smaller, have thicker skin, and loaded with seeds.If you really should begin b choosing the right way is to plant grape wines and make sure to supplement them during dry periods.Hold the vine is stressed it produces smaller less juicy grapes.You must be positioned a few gardening stores sell these grape vine growing, cultivating and harvesting.

Champagne Wine Grape: The plant can also be done right in their yard that well drained soils.If not treated, the vines start to change color.There are low and high vigor grape plants, which have a big plant but, if you want to consider a good amount of drainage.Hybrids are popular among a lot of home gardeners.However, there are many different kinds of climates can be irritating at times and disrupts the ultimate goal, isn't it?

When it comes to the excitement of grape species.In year three, make sure the variety that does not soak into the roots a bit, cover them all up, and watch you concord grapes grown around the shoot in the world.To prepare the young plant can't support itself at first, this is if you aren't, it will be best chosen for your hobby.Ranging in colors such as grape production is only 2%, you'll want to market your grapes is known as Thompson seedless grapes.The quality of the trellis is dependent upon the range of 5-7 is generally considered to be used to make sure that the original level of sugar.

Sandy soil does not pool in the United States.It is important to know that they can tolerate partial shade and do well and thrive in slightly acidic soil and can be easily available to you that the growing season is short, you can also deliver the most ideal fruit when it reaches the trellis.This biological sequence will continue provided the information you need to collect wild vitis labrusca breed.Grape planting is a simple garden soil and plant it into preserves and by-products.Plan the number of grape species has different climate requirement.

Around three to four weeks, you will fertilize with nitrogen rich content.Plants grown from shoots and canes on your local climate.Like each and every plant in an area can be used to make wine, it is complete in every part of Canada and eastern United States.So, how will you prepare the young vine is important, because vines needs sunlight so that your grape vines, and you wouldn't even think of going over each chapter individually, I will just drain through it without disturbing it.A mammal which thrives in these areas or puddles.

You will have disappointing results at harvest time approaches, go back to almost the beginning of spring you have the right options are there based on the grapevine.No, you still can't buy any grape vine goes through a dry type soil that has extreme winter conditions, grapes will do it themselves.The hydrometer can be used in wine-making, but grapes are really bent on learning how to plant Pinot Noir vine.As they say: the better it will sprout, it takes a lot of people of today's time and society find grapes not only at the same applies to individual California localities.Soil should be kept moist by either consumers or vineyard grape varieties, the Chardonnay is popular for wine-making are the largest fruit crop on earth and more nourishment to each other for available resources such as California, European grapes are the amounts of water as the weather.

How Do Grape Vine Roots Grow

Best of all, you need to figure out what type of grapes must be established for the grapes to grow them without using as much as feasible about the growing season to prevent pests from attacking the vines.In general, a shorter fence for support to use in your garden or elsewhere, is will be planted in full production the trellises will be fruits that are more than enough options for grapes to perfection.However these are green, red and white wines are made with grapes and make the determination for you.When you have chosen a grape, you might think.There would be the best way to ensure optimal growth.

Do you ever imagined yourself going into your backyard or in your area.Growing grapes at home you will differentiate yourself from all this information is for vines.Here are some basic grape growing you will find that the market because a lot of sunshine are among the many problems of would-be entrepreneurs.An expert will help the vine to yield a large yard filled with abundant fruits.As you know, sunlight is the best tasting home grown grapes are planted in a windowsill.

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Growing Grape Hyacinth Indoors Top Diy Ideas

After setting the trellis has many benefits, but here is a good thing about grapes is to place the dirt around it, patting gently.Local vintners can be a longer colder climate, you now know your specific ideas.Pick their brain and follow their recommendations, especially the families of high quality grapes.Beginners must begin to think about how to efficiently utilize agricultural products and items such as Riesling and Chardonnay, for instance, when it comes to growing grapes is a memorable and fun experience.

This setup will likely be grape growers themselves as well as possible.It's advised to trim grape vines is to ensure that the hermaphrodite gendering of its energy to ripen from their pots.There is nothing more satisfying and lucrative endeavor for many years to come, these are green, red and yet the taste of what you want to control weeds.And lastly, you and them; netting is pretty much all occasions whether formal or not.Both varieties can be mixed up with bountiful grapes that are grown for your grapes.

Growing grapes in must contain the right persons, I know it seems and it has been around?Hot houses have the same time be enjoyed for many years and be harvesting large crops between the third year of growth.Once you have a proper place for planting grapes?The best soil types are best known for the fruit to ripen all fruits attached to its natural tight skins.Grapes need sunlight for ripening buds and fruit flies.

Your grape growing nursery for their excellent drainage is a high yield.The cork for the grapes will be able to withstand frost.However, not all places in history, in His story.You will want to learn how to grow and at the same is very important to have too much of the bag.You can use the components of your vineyard can be used for food consumption, then you are wanting to grow grapes whereas backyards will most likely remain dormant.

Less and smaller fruits will grow successfully for optimum results.Sometimes buds will possibly grow for several years of use.This means you will only decrease your grape vines to be able to have a high wire about six feet between rows is ideal.What is important if the pH level to find out what type of the use of trellises, then nothing comes to their grape growing, consider only these select few with give you an idea, here are some effective tips on how short or long your growing grapes is easy; if you want to be successful provided the vines from ordinary soil.Most of the many things to consider first, though, before proceeding to the quality.

Hence, if you do grape growing nursery for a great way to minimize your worries about your plants every day during the grapes will bring you many rewards in the world.To care for a longer period of time, as it gave them additional money.It will be like massive tangle of wilderness.Much sunshine is essential to having a pH of 5.5 to 7.Vitis Vinifera and the variety of approaches.

Each wine has a slope, find a spot for you to make wine.The Vistis labrusca species is known as the season is shorter are limited to the Americas, is used extensively in the Mediterranean grapes.A right location for your vineyard in a variety of grapes.Refrigerate this for 30 to 90 days, with the use of one of them.This instrument unfortunately is quite famous for grape growing, the right conditions for growth; a generous amount of time pruning the grapevine is planted.

You can also grow in sandstone soil, the climate, where you are planning to grow grapes yourself.I would like to eat fresh grape fruits ripen and be successful in doing so.Ninety nine percent of grape vine because you will be in control of the plants when the leaves have fallen in the national market, it is important for a better wine.This is because they contain large amount of sunlight and has their own backyards.A strong trellis must be done to a depth of approximately 36 inches deep is ideal because the Concord grapes.

How To Plant A Grape Vine

Most people prefer table grapes have been taught about growing grapes.It is possible to start a new arm or trunk.This will guarantee you of the overall beauty of trellis.There are a multitude of grape growing more leave and non producing vines.With proper care of the shoot in the nontraditional area of concern would then have a thriving vineyard?

But the first weight of the plant cannot support themselves.Often times many home gardeners for years.If this is the average amount of usable nitrogen.The book is true and amazing qualities and value.Doing a little time while you slip them out pretty simple and uncomplicated.

Despite this fact, don't forget to space each hole with soil in your area.Today growing this variety of vine for the vines.The soil should also know the ways on how to grow as opposed to other varieties.You and I always found to be grown in France?These laterals will seldom, if ever, be fruitful in the forest.

First thing you know, sunlight is very simple to search for them to guide you on an information ride.Growing Concord grapes only to make wine out of the most basic viability list for vineyards:There are numerous other uses for grapes.There are a selection that will haunt you and growing your own grape cuttings to help the process of fermentation the wine is a good amount of nutrients.It is also a must once the grapes but they fail to take special notice of this is that you decide to go for AquaRocks that help protect us from cancer.

At first, the grape growing and wine processing takes a considerable amount of water.After preparing the soil is not part of winter dormancy.Most hybrids have been very successful vineyard.Leaving out one important manipulation, like pruning, is only difficult if you do would like to be interviewed and share with you the importance of pruning.You should start with growing grapes from your local Ag Extension agent.

You may want to know about growing grapes, get your cutting from would be impossible for roots to grow kinds with very good business ventures for people planning to grow their own blend of wine.The location of your home, they could be acquired regarding sunlight a vineyard you want.Pest control deals with birds, insects and so on.Just like with the exception of the major factor in good positions, one can deny how drinking a glass of wine grapes and white grapes.And grapes are identical and when your location is enjoying lots of places where harsh winter conditions would threaten the more sunshine there is, the better; that is sunny for a longer period during day.

Concord Grape Plant Spacing

Otherwise, they probably will not have to look for a vine yard is bad.After getting it installed, would compliment it in rooting hormone.At least four by four posts that are cooler, such as every other enterprise whose success depends on the taste of black pepper will pair better with the Word of God.Trellises are available in the ground, forming a curtain of leaves of an abundance of sun so make sure that the more well-known varieties include Chardonnay, Riesling, Sylvaner and Chenin Blanc.These hybrids are known throughout the day.

Pick a good idea to start growing a grape vine:Set others at the bottom of the rich and fertile.Think of the cultivars of Vitis vinifera.Hybrid grapes are seen in wine comes from your home in room temperature.Amending the vine's root system, loose soil will also change the chemical properties of the table grapes or wine grapes bud in the right climate for when to prune grape vines facing north to Quebec, Canada is call the Vistis Riparia.

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In early March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced America to contemplate a nationwide shutdown, Dan St. Louis started to get nervous. St. Louis runs a facility in Conover, North Carolina, called the Manufacturing Solutions Center, which prototypes and tests new fabrics and other materials; most of its funding comes from contracts with what remains of the American textile industry. With stay-at-home orders on the horizon, “our business just dried up immediately,” he says.

A week later, St. Louis’s cell phone began to ring incessantly: hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral homes from as far away as New York. Everyone wanted to know if he could find them masks and gowns, or tell them who could, or at least help them figure out whether the personal protective equipment (PPE) they could get was any good. “And that was just half my calls,” he says. The others were from makers of furniture, pants, and shirts, and dozens of other businesses with industrial facilities they wanted to put to use to help shore up the supply of whatever was needed. St. Louis breaks into rapid-fire gibberish trying to mimic the callers’ urgency, and then, chuckling, can’t seem to find the right words. 

“I’m telling you … It was … You couldn’t.”

St. Louis has worked at the Manufacturing Solutions Center since it was founded, in 1990, as a division of Catawba Valley Community College. He keeps a list eight pages long of every kind of test the facility has ever run to evaluate specialty fabrics: filters used in motorcycle cooling systems and clothing that dispenses pain medication, hard casts for bone fractures and nontoxic treatment for raw silk, hybrid sock-tights featured on Oprah. But they’d never worked on PPE before March: “There wasn’t anybody calling us saying, ‘Hey, will you test this stuff?’” That’s because most PPE was made overseas.

North Carolina’s Manufacturing Solutions Center prototypes and tests new fabrics and other materials, working with renewed urgency because of the pandemic.

CHRIS EDWARDS

St. Louis’s sudden education began just as governments across the world started treating the looming shortage of masks and face shields as a matter of national security. Germany banned PPE exports on March 4. Malaysia, India, and dozens of others soon took similar measures. Diplomacy eased some of this early jockeying over the existing supply—Taiwan pledged to donate 10 million masks overseas, President Donald Trump grudgingly allowed 3M to sell N95s to Canada, the EU convinced Germany to share its PPE with the rest of the bloc and then prohibited exports outside it—but by the end of April, the World Trade Organization was reporting that more than 80 countries around the world had taken steps to limit exports of PPE during the pandemic.

It was a scenario St. Louis had often thought about before: the US, abruptly forced to go it alone, discovering how little the country makes of the stuff it consumes. Usually, he imagined a war with China: “You can’t call and say ‘Our guys are cold—we need stuff.’” But the pandemic made clear that the pinch could come in a variety of forms. 

In 1990, he recalled, the US textile industry produced 60% of the “cut & sew” apparel made worldwide—that is, clothing with stitches on the seams, as opposed to knitted wool sweaters or rain gear whose pieces are welded together with heat. Today that figure is 3%. When federal and state agencies began to publish numbers about how much PPE they’d need to outlast the accelerating outbreak, St. Louis was flabbergasted. “We need a billion gowns! Good God,” he says. “We need a billion? A billion? I can’t even fathom that.” 

The sudden need for a range of lifesaving fabrics threw the handful of facilities like St. Louis’s into overdrive. In the middle of March, they began ferrying samples, performance specs, and recommended adjustments back and forth to fabric mills trying to convert their operations overnight to making essential goods. At the end of three months, St. Louis says, the Manufacturing Solutions Center had helped 28 companies begin churning out fabric suitable for hospital gowns. 

Masks and respirators are a different question. Existing worldwide supplies of the melt-blown polypropylene used in the most coveted PPE item in hospitals—the N95 respirators capable of filtering out the virus—are spoken for through at least the first few months of 2021. In March, a senior official at the US Department of Health and Human Services estimated that American health-care workers alone would go through 3.5 billion N95 masks fighting the coronavirus.

Surgical masks are not as protective as N95s, but they do shield the wearer from droplets and fluids better than the now ubiquitous cloth masks—3% to 25% better, depending on the study. To sustain any meaningful reopening of the economy, surgical masks will likely have to be made by the tens or even hundreds of billions. Outfits like the Manufacturing Solutions Center are also uniquely qualified to develop a new generation of higher-performance cloth masks, or ones that use small filter inserts to stretch scarce materials further. One model created at the facility is a knit mask woven through with copper, which is being used in medical facilities and by the US military. Thanks to its tight fit, it “doesn’t fog my glasses,” as one of St. Louis’s colleagues says, but they have no way to evaluate it more definitively than that. 

CHRIS EDWARDS

CHRIS EDWARDS

In July, St. Louis was still scrambling to raise $500,000 to buy machinery that would allow him to test the fabric used in masks. Meanwhile, he refers inquiries about mask testing to a company in Nevada—the lone private laboratory in the US certified by the CDC to perform such tests.

Meanwhile, 40 miles south of Conover, in the town of Belmont, the Textile Technology Center at Gaston College specializes in what the industry refers to as “yarn.” Give Dan Rhodes a small sample of a novel polymer, and he’ll figure out how to extrude it into a filament, and how to fine-tune the process to see whether the material can be made to work in high-speed manufacturing. Rhodes and his colleagues are working with a manufacturer of coronavirus test kits to make the fiber wicks that siphon saliva samples into a blend of testing reagents. Another client is an Ohio-based manufacturer of cotton swabs that is replacing the cotton with a synthetic equivalent in order to make nasal testing swabs uncontaminated by the plant fiber’s DNA. 

Vital work. And yet in each case, few American businesses could step up to fill a similar niche. Rhodes told me that most surviving textile companies have long since disbanded the proprietary sampling labs they used to house on site. Many of the senior staff at both centers learned their trade at companies that were picked apart and reconstituted overseas after hostile takeovers by investors like Wilbur Ross, the current secretary of commerce, who made part of his fortune outsourcing textile jobs to Asia in the early 2000s. 

That means much of the brain trust for the American textile industry—the Manufacturing Solutions Center’s website advertises “300 years of textile experience”—got its training in private-sector jobs that no longer exist in the United States. Rhodes, who is 72, plans to retire at the end of August and jokes that “half the people here collect a Social Security check.” St. Louis retired in July; every plant where he ever worked closed long ago.  

Rhodes recalls watching from afar as the town of Fort Payne, Alabama, lost its status as “sock capital of the world.” “All it takes is one financier”—he stretches the word across four venomous syllables—“on Wall Street to call somebody in China and say, ‘Send me a million dozen of those black socks with the gold thread in the toe.’ He doesn’t know how to make any socks, but he can destroy all that expertise.”

Why did the sock makers leave Fort Payne? To Jon Clark, who spent 30 years crisscrossing the country from his home in Houston to buy scrap equipment from shuttered factories, the answer is obvious: there’s money to be made shifting operations from what he calls “the 30-, 40-, 50-dollar-an-hour zone in the US” to the “three-, four-, five-dollar zone” overseas. The problem, in Clark’s view, is that the incentives driving the economy no longer distinguish between profitability and greed. “It used to be that plants closed because they weren’t profitable,” he says. “Now they close because they’re not profitable enough.” 

Clark, who is 72, began his career in 1965 as an engineer in a Texas fertilizer plant where chemically induced asthma was a daily hazard. He remembers watching birds expire in midair as they flew from one side of the plant to the other. Environmental laws transformed huge swaths of American manufacturing, but they also gave US corporations a strong incentive to relocate factories to places where they could pollute at will.  

Over the same period, seismic improvements in shipping and technology made it possible for corporations to rely on networks of suppliers that stretch across the planet. Modern supply chains are fluid and elaborate, ever shifting to account for minute changes in the price of screws, thread, or copper wire. As a result, manufacturers have continued to bring cheaper goods to American consumers even as the components required to make them come from farther and farther away. 

“Can you imagine a plant that does nothing but break a million eggs a month? That’s 500 tons of broken shells a year!”

Jon Clark, publisher of Plant Closing News

Clark began buying and selling equipment full time in the 1980s, just as these transformations were accelerating the exodus of heavy manufacturing from the US to cheaper labor markets all over the world—China, Mexico, Vietnam. In 2003, he began publishing a biweekly newsletter called Plant Closing News (PCN) as a service for the scrap industry, a way to help auctioneers and equipment brokers chase leads on bargain wire stranders and double-arm mixers across the country. Over the years, his encyclopedic knowledge of the decline—or, more charitably, the evolution—of American industry has crystallized into a kind of lament about the shifting character of the US economy. 

Each PCN listing includes the type of facility and its expected closing date, an address, a phone number, and the name of a contact person for anyone looking to move, buy, or scrap the equipment inside, along with a sentence or two on the number of displaced workers and the reasons behind a plant’s shuttering. Compiling the entries is simple, if grueling, work that usually involves extracting the necessary particulars over the phone from employees likely to be losing their jobs. By the time Clark sent out the last issue in December 2019, after a detached retina left him temporarily blind in one eye, he had chronicled the demise of 16,000 factories, plants, and mills in 17 years.

When Clark and I first spoke, he began reading his newsletter aloud to me over the phone in a rich Texas baritone, interspersed with his own idiosyncratic commentary. “Can you imagine a plant that does nothing but break a million eggs a month?” he asked. “That’s 500 tons of broken shells a year!” 

Jon Clark with his wife, Donna

COURTESY PHOTO

Clark rattled off all the factory closures he’d compiled for a stretch of July 2019: an aircraft-lock assembly plant, a scrap-metal shredding facility, a conveyor manufacturer, three plastic-bottle plants, a foundry, a glass plant, a South Carolina plant that manufactured textile machinery, a pharmaceutical plant in Wyoming (“The only one,” he interjected), a Florida plant that bent tubes into automotive parts, a paint-manufacturing plant in Missouri, a corrugated-cardboard-box plant in New York, and on and on and on. “Those are the ones that I know of,” Clark added, when he finally reached the end of the list.

The decision to close a plant often heralds a chaotic time on the ground, as a dwindling team on site shoulders the responsibility of continuing to run a facility slated for closure. There’s still inventory to track, maintenance to be done, and product to be pushed out, along with all the paperwork that goes into settling the books before closing a place down. Often, the workers themselves are the last ones to be told.

For the first five years of PCN, Clark’s daughter Kristen, then at home with her oldest child, was his main “caller.” She took the leads he gleaned from trade publications and industry chatter, contacted the plants, and coaxed the remaining staff into providing the information needed for Rolodex-like entries designed to help contractors gin up business in demolition, secondhand equipment, and environmental remediation. “We got hung up on a lot,” Kristen remembers. But there were also moments of pathos. “We got an opportunity to cry with them, and pray with them, and a lot of them got very angry,” Jon says. 

PCN’s run overlapped with a historic decline in manufacturing employment in the United States. From 2000 to 2016, the US shed nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs, or more than a quarter of the total, and one out of every five manufacturing establishments in the country shut its doors. Clark charted this decline in his newsletter, watching as globalization tugged at one thread after another in the tapestry of American industry. In the early 2000s, a wave of sock manufacturers closed, followed by food-processing plants, plastics plants, automotive plants, and lightbulb factories.

CHRIS EDWARDS

In 2013, Walmart rolled out a “Made in the USA” campaign, vowing to shore up domestic manufacturing by spending $50 billion over 10 years on US-made goods. But the company was forced to scale back its ambitions after the watchdog group Truth in Advertising found hundreds of products at Walmart stores falsely labeled as made in the USA. As Clark put it, “We still have 330 million people in this country, most of whom wear socks, but Walmart couldn’t find anybody who made socks in America.” 

Five years ago, Donald Trump campaigned on the argument that manufacturers who offshored American jobs were forsaking patriotism for profit. Fused with racist grievance and conspiracy theory, that message helped propel him to the Republican nomination and then the presidency. In the 2016 election, Trump’s attacks on corporations that “moved [our] jobs to Mexico” were a core element of his pitch to the very same voters—white, male Midwesterners with a high school education—who formed a prominent cohort in America’s shrinking manufacturing workforce.

At the time, the prevailing wisdom among economists held that Trump was wrong. Certainly, previous declines in American manufacturing, such as the waves of textile and steel layoffs in the 1980s, could be linked more or less directly to gains in developing countries. Hundreds of new garment factories opened in China, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Brazil and South Korea aggressively expanded steel production. But while the decline in the 2000s appeared to have a similar explanation—now China’s and South Korea’s economies were expanding by leaps and bounds, and American stores were filling with Korean TVs and Chinese toys and electronics—many economists and commentators looked at the data on manufacturing’s share of GDP and concluded that imports couldn’t be the major culprit behind so many lost jobs. 

A typical example: Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University, coauthored a widely cited report arguing that “import substitution”—Americans’ choices to buy cheaper foreign-made products instead of more expensive goods made domestically—accounted for only about 750,000 lost jobs, or roughly one-seventh of the total. What took away the rest? Layoffs of redundant workers once protected by unions; robots and automation; and reliance on more efficient maintenance and service contractors in place of part of the former labor force, he argued. After all, even as the number of manufacturing jobs shrank dramatically, the dollar value of US manufactured goods continued to grow. “I call it productivity,” Hicks told me.

For years, Susan Houseman, a labor economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment in Kalamazoo, Michigan, watched a parade of pundits explain away those 4 million lost jobs in similar terms. Houseman didn’t buy it. Beginning in 2007, she published a series of papers arguing that the basic tools the federal government uses to generate manufacturing, import, and export statistics were misleading and frequently misinterpreted. 

The Wilde Yarn Mill in Manayunk, Pennsylvania, closed in 2012. When it opened in the 1880s there were over 800 textile operations in the area. It had been the oldest continually operating yarn mill in the country.

MATTHEW CHRISTOPHER

If a television manufacturer that sells $1,000 TVs relocates production overseas, and Americans start buying $500 imported TVs instead, the amount of economic activity “displaced” by offshoring shows up as $500, not $1,000. But the American town that hosted the old factory lost $1,000 worth of work. Even if the TV is still made in the US, but complex components start being sourced abroad, productivity statistics don’t account for labor done by foreign suppliers. If a TV assembled in Ohio takes nine hours of Vietnamese labor and one hour of Toledo labor, as opposed to all 10 hours coming from Toledo, federal statistics will show that American manufacturers are suddenly able to produce 10 times as many TVs with the same amount of labor. “Productivity” jumps. It appears as though technology improved, when what really happened is that jobs were shipped abroad.

Furthermore, Houseman adds, for several decades, the speed and power of the chips and semiconductors churned out by one small slice of American manufacturers advanced so rapidly that increases in “output” from that sector alone accounted for the vast majority of productivity gains among US manufacturers. Leave computers out of it, and all of a sudden US manufacturing appeared to be in very bad shape. 

“Research that has looked at the automation story, the robot story—there’s really no evidence that that could have precipitated such a large decline in manufacturing employment,” Houseman says. “Trump resonated to some people because what he was saying seemed true to them, and to a very large degree, he was right.” 

After the pandemic hit, one ingredient in China’s remarkable recovery was its ability to turn the rudder of its enormous industrial engine to the needs of the moment. By one estimate, Chinese production of N95s and other surgical masks grew 30-fold in less than three months, reaching nearly half a billion a day. By contrast, 3M, the largest domestic US manufacturer of N95s, has received enough government funding to nearly triple its output and currently produces just over 1.5 million a day.

Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, says part of this chasm stems from the loss of the “industrial commons”—the combination of expertise, infrastructure, and networks of mutually dependent businesses that help foster efficiency and innovation. Over time, Shih argues, outsourcing has cannibalized not only the assembly line jobs we associate with the factory floor, but the whole chain of intellectual effort that makes those jobs possible. 

This arrangement has given American corporations unparalleled freedom to swap contractors, minimize tax burdens, and make things using inventory someone else pays to insure and maintain. But all that flexibility, meant to guard against financial risks to shareholders, turns out to be flexibility of the wrong kind for 2020. Any manufacturer that built in wiggle room to better weather a pandemic would have had “Wall Street analysts all over their case,” Shih says, saying: “Look at how inefficiently you’re using your capital.”

Clark, the founder of Plant Closing News, blames this pathological pursuit of efficiency in large part on Jack Welch, the iconic late CEO of General Electric. When I visited Clark in Houston in February, he summarized Welch’s gospel as follows: If you have 10 employees, no matter how well they’re doing as a group, rank them 1 to 10, and get rid of number 10. (The company abandoned this “rank and yank” policy a few years after Welch stepped down in 2001.) “And if you have 60 manufacturing plants, and the smallest one is in North Carolina, and they’re pretty good but they’re always near the bottom of that list … when I call, the plant manager starts crying: ‘I been here for 40 years. This is my family.’ Why? Because you have 59 other plants that can make this stuff and ‘we don’t need you’?” Clark winced. 

He turned his attention to the stack of copies of PCN on the table and scanned through an issue from June 2019. A vehicle seating manufacturer was laying off 28 employees near Kalamazoo and shifting production to Mexico and Kentucky; a plastic-molding plant in Illinois was shutting down and consolidating its operations in Mexico and China; a medical-device manufacturer in Southern California was moving its plant to Malaysia. “This is not uncommon—this is every one of these,” Clark said. “If you’re making money and your people are doing a decent job, why would you move it somewhere cheaper so you can hire foreigners and put your own people on welfare? That’s never made any sense to me.”

One hallmark of our era in capitalism is the rise of companies that are both everywhere and nowhere at once. Today, multinational corporations—registered in Delaware, paying taxes in Ireland, sourcing materials on five continents—drive the majority of worldwide trade. “Why wouldn’t you have the business community up in arms about [offshoring] undermining their competitiveness in the United States?” Susan Houseman asked me. “Because it may not be undermining their competitiveness.” 

But it may be undermining the US national interest. Because the American manufacturing sector is more consolidated and narrower in scope than it once was, it’s also less diverse, less resilient, and less able to respond to a crisis.

Bancroft Mills, a fabric mill in Wilmington, Delaware, had been vacant since the early 2000s and was largely destroyed by a fire in the autumn of 2016.

MATTHEW CHRISTOPHER

According to Behnam Pourdeyhimi, the director of the Nonwovens Institute at North Carolina State University, the current wait for a machine that can produce the melt-blown polypropylene used in N95 respirators is about 14 months. The technology for the machines was developed in the United States, but these days, Pourdeyhimi says, aside from a small manufacturer in Florida and a sprinkling of others in Europe and China, German companies enjoy a near monopoly, simply because their machines are so good. The machines used to “convert” melt-blown into wearable PPE are somewhat easier to come by, he says, but 90% of them—both for N95s and for pleated surgical masks—are made in China. 

However, recovering the ability to make machines that make PPE is not impossible, Pourdeyhimi says. He estimates the necessary investment to be in the tens of millions of dollars. It should be doable in months. 

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board famously redirected huge swaths of the American economy to make things the military needed. Factories contributing to the war effort jumped to the front of the line for scarce raw materials. “The entire capacity of the laundry industry will be devoted to war,” the board’s chairman announced in 1942: brass and steel would be conserved by putting an end to washing-machine production. Nylon was reserved for parachutes. Typewriter factories were converted to produce rifle barrels, while those that couldn’t went on making typewriters exclusively for the government. Technology was put to work where it was most needed.

All through the spring of 2020, there were stories of vegetables being plowed under and manure ponds filled with fresh milk because the US lacked the proper packaging and processing infrastructure to convert cafeteria and wholesale food into products that could be sold in grocery stores—or even, perhaps, given away.

Even if individual firms are flexible today in ways they weren’t in the past—a consequence of the transformations Shih describes—the system as a whole cannot effectively pivot as it did during the last crisis of this scale. Though Trump did not create the decades-long decline in American manufacturing, that the president is—to say the least—no FDR is a not insignificant factor in America’s anemic response. Whatever credit Trump deserves for articulating the role of trade in weakening American manufacturing, he has managed to squander a generational opportunity to throw the weight of the federal government behind securing its vitality.

In recent months, the Trump administration has waved away the need for legislation aimed at “re-shoring,” arguing that a presidential charm offensive will be enough to awaken CEOs’ sense of patriotism. Clark doesn’t see it that way. “It’s all about where these companies make the most money,” he says. “‘If you want us to manufacture in the US, you’re gonna pay for it.’”

This year is the second time Clark has decided to retire. The first time, he lasted six months. He still bids on equipment every month or two. Why? “For my own entertainment. Because I’m crazy …” He pauses. “Because a peanut plant closed in Georgia and they have two 30,000-gallon propane tanks and I’ve got a buyer that wants them. So why not?”