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spookybias · 3 years

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ROMANTICALLY IN HIDING ｡ LEE MINHO

pairing: lee minho x afab! reader. genre: fluff, suggestive, crack. content: bad boy au, high school au. warning: making out, crude language, dirty jokes, not entirely proofread. word count: 3.6k

synopsis: keeping your relationship with minho a secret goes awry when your friends show up to your house in the middle of a date.

dedication: @staysuki . hi, ash! i'm genny! you're my person for the fic exchange. it took me some extra time, so i'm sorry about that. i’m also sorry about how wordy this is. i’m still somewhat new to writing suggestive stuff. i hope you still enjoy <3

Minho dug around the half empty bag of pretzels. His fingers searched far and wide for another salted bow while keeping his eyes glued to your living room TV.

"When do the cats show up?" Minho had only agreed to watch Dōbutsu no Mori because he knew the video game that the movie was based on included a blue and white cat with the most adorable slim red eyes who often greeted the player on public transportation. Minho couldn't think of anything more exciting than a friendly cat wearing a sleeveless sweater and carrying a sticker-covered suitcase.

"The movie doesn't focus on the cats," you responded dully from across the living room. You were seated on your father's black recliner. Minho sat on your mother's, and three ottomans sat in between the both of you. There was a sea of nothing keeping the two of you from cuddling close, but you still felt as though the space from your boyfriend was necessary.

Maybe it was the guilt of lying to your friends so you could hang out with your school's residential bad boy that left you picking at your relationship the way a seven-year-old would pick at a scab.

Did you have to lie to your best friend? Maybe not. If you would have just told Nagyung that you couldn't help prep for next week's student podcast because you wanted to hang out with a guy, she would've given you a teasing wink and even covered for you.

But Nagyung also would have started questioning you. She'd want every last detail about who the guy you were skipping a podcast meeting for was, and you couldn't imagine telling her that it was Minho, who not only was your secret boyfriend of three and half weeks, but the guy you allegedly couldn't stand.

Hyunjin and Seungmin wouldn't be able to wrap their heads around it, as both boys weren't very fond of Minho. They concluded him to be nothing but a cat-loving, trouble-making, nuisance who'd end up in prison before graduation day. And that was because he could usually be found either in detention or in the locker room frequently slamming a group of shorter boys into, well, lockers.

Your perspective was once similar until a faithful afternoon where you had caught Minho playing with a group of kittens in a box as a thunderstorm was rolling in. You stood at the bus stop seeking shelter, trying not to be too obvious as you stared him down. And before the rain could pummel you, Minho shoved the box of kittens and his own umbrella into your grip, telling you to take them somewhere safe and keep the umbrella.

After multiple visits to the cat sanctuary and walks home under the same umbrella, you often found yourself with Minho's tongue in your mouth and his hand up your skirt as he pressed you against one of the library shelves. No one ever willingly wants to read about George Washington, and so you never had to worry about getting caught and needing to fish out an explanation as to why you're moaning in the biography section.

Your sneaky escapades led you to the oh so corny realization that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Sure, Minho was messy and liked to push other people's buttons for brief entertainment, but he was also kind-hearted, reasonable, and got decent grades ―three things that would certainly send Hyunjin and Seungmin into cardiac arrest.

That was why the mischievous kisses shared between you and Minho were necessary. You were a prideful person, and just the thought of having to come clean about how all of the trash you talked about your current boyfriend was nothing but trash made you want to hide in a box.

Luckily for you, your boyfriend was a prideful person as well. Minho didn't feel the need to convince you to come clean to your friends because he understood in a way. He figured the two of you would cross that bridge when you came to it. Plus, Minho thought secret relationships were sexy and all the more exciting.

You heard your phone ring from the table on Minho's side, and you rushed over to answer it, begging the universe to let it be anyone other than your friends.

The universe flicked you off with both hands. It was Nagyung.

You could only hope that the bridge wasn't already burned down when you and Minho finally approached it.

"Who's that?" Minho had lost interest in the bag of pretzels and was now pulling on a loose thread on your argyle sweater. He imagined that one pull on the stray string could make the entire top come undone. He smirked to himself.

"It's Nagyung," you sighed.

Minho's smirk faded into a soft smile. He didn't like seeing you worry. "Take your time. Whatever you decide to do, I'm here for you, and I'm pretty sure your friends in the debate club will understand."

"Minho, it's a podcast club." You gave your boyfriend a half smile and hit decline. "And I thought you knew me so well," you joked.

"I knew that." Your boyfriend gave you a playful wink and chuckled. "I was just making sure you remembered."

It was times like these that you were entirely grateful you had given Minho a chance. He made the atmosphere less tense and was always aiming to give you a good time.

The annoying ringing of your phone started once more. You groaned in frustration. You should've known Nagyung wouldn't quit until she got ahold of you. You wondered if the club was dealing with some sort of emergency, but couldn't think of anything that could 'cause a literal tragedy within a student podcast.

Still, what her or one of your other friends had gotten seriously hurt and she was spamming you for a different reason?

You were about ready to answer the phone and tell your best friend the truth. But then Minho grew bored of the thread on your sweater and had found something else to do ―you.

He gently pulled you closer by the hand. "Don't worry too much about that. We were supposed to spend the afternoon together, remember?"

You playfully rolled your eyes. "Horny at a time like this?" you teased. "My friendships are at stake here."

"The movie was boring okay." Minho brought you in to straddle his waist, his hands gripping your thighs. He stared down at the space between your legs. He was practically glowing in a shade of needy pink. "And I've never actually spoken to your friends so I can't find it in me to feel bad that you lied to them."

Another thing you liked about Minho was how honest he could be at times (more specifically, times when he was overflowing with lust), and you figured it was about time you started being honest with yourself. Did you really want to spend who knows how long explaining your entire situation with Minho to your fellow star student buddies?

There was no doubt that Nagyung would tell Hyunjin and Seungmin the minute she found out. You could already picture her shouting at you in shock through the phone as she texted them everything that wasn't anyone's business but yours.

There was no doubt that you would much rather have your hand down Minho's pants.

Your boyfriend's mouth wasn't just good for irritating everyone he came across. It was also good for peppering soft but sloppy kisses down your neck. They tickled like flamingo feathers, light and scattered. Minho had waited all week to have you, and the thought of taking you while on your dad’s recliner made everything appear much more satisfying and sinful.

He ran his hands down the side of your breasts before giving them a gentle squeeze. You let out a breathy moan, wrapping your arms around his neck in a desperate attempt to bring him closer, to get him to do something more. Your bodies were already pressed against each other, but it didn’t feel like enough.

Minho targeted your neck, licking and nipping at the skin delicately. You couldn’t take it anymore. You grinded your hips. If there was one thing you couldn’t stand about Minho it was that he loved to take his time with you.

But he’d regret doing so soon enough.

The doorbell chimed just as Minho went to work at unbuttoning your jeans. Minho stopped kissing your neck. “I thought you said your parents won’t be home till tonight,” he said. He sounded a bit panicked and almost out of breath.

You let out a whine. “They won’t be. It’s probably just a package.” You softly brushed your lips against his, urging him to continue, but this time you wanted his tongue in your mouth.

Minho was eager to give you what you want. The constant buzzing of your doorbell became background noise, along with the occasional moans you and Minho let out every time you disconnected your lips. The two of you bucked your hips at a steady pace, rubbing yourselves against each other.

You thought that you could just tune out the sound of your doorbell, but whoever was at your apartment door just wouldn’t stop, and you broke away from Minho. You momentarily wondered (while fear flowed through your veins) if one of your parents were home early and forgotten their keys.

Minho moved on to suck on the space between your breast. The way he licked at the skin was almost soothing. You were tempted to try again at ignoring your unwanted visitor until the repeated ringing of your doorbell turned into persistent knocking. Though, it sounded less like knocking and more like excessive pounds to the door that would either leave the doorframe in shambles or leave the person’s knuckles broken.

Your boyfriend reluctantly loosened his grip on your thighs, feeling robbed. You climbed off of your his lap, hurrying towards the door. But then you heard a voice on the opposite side of the door and realized who it was.

“Oh my gosh, ____!” Nagyung shouted so loud you thought she’d disturb all of the building’s residents —including the ones vacationing in Barbados. “Open the door, ____! Studying for environmental science isn’t that important!”

Oh right, you thought. I said I’d be studying for an AP ES test.

You face palmed before rushing back over to your boyfriend who seemed more confused than ever.

“Just a second, Nagyung!” You shouted back over your shoulder. You grabbed Minho’s arm, more or less dragging him into your apartment’s hallway and towards your bedroom.

“Dragging me to your room?” Minho inquired. “I like where this is going, but something’s telling me it won’t go how I’m imagining it.”

“Shut up. Now is not the time.”

Minho kept his mouth closed as you shoved him into your room and pushed him towards your closet. “Hide right now!” you hissed. Your boyfriend obeyed, sliding inside, and crawling around the tight space to get behind your clothes. He spotted a bra hanging in there, questioning why you hung your bras up instead of putting them in a drawer like he figured most girls did.

You ran out your room, back down the hallway, and practically jumped in front of your apartment door. You threw the front door open, letting an exasperated “Hi, Nagyung” tumble passed your lips.

Nagyung squinted. “Why are you out of breath?”

“Why are you here?” You asked at the same time as she posed her question. You hoped she’d answer you first and forget about your suspicious behavior.

Nagyung rolled her eyes. “Can you make it anymore obvious that you don’t want me here?” For a moment she looked seriously annoyed by your question, but then she let out a small giggle. Typical Nagyung. “I just need you to confirm or deny everyone’s suggestions for next week’s podcast and then you can get back to touching yourself or whatever, miss leader.”

You blinked twice. “I wasn’t touching myself. I-” Your eyes darted left and right and you tried to come up with something. Was now really the right time to come clean? I wasn’t touching myself. I was letting Lee Minho touch me instead. You imagined Nagyung recoiling in horror.

“Yeah, yeah,” Nagyung rolled her eyes again. “No one ever admits to do doing it.” She let out a snort. “Plus, you were so loud. Better hope Mrs. Sim next door doesn’t tell your mom. Oh yeah, can I have some juice? I walked like twelve blocks here-”

The mention of the amount of noise you were making immediately reminded you that there was a guy hiding in your closet. You hoped that Minho wouldn’t decide now was the best time to come out or make any noise.

You gave your friend a thin-lipped smile, praying that it didn’t show how much you were freaking out on the inside. “Just show me the suggestions,” you cut her off.

After fetching Nagyung a glass of Hawaiian punch, the both of you moved to the other side of the living room. Nagyung stepped towards your dad’s recliner, ready to sit down and you internally yelped. Well you thought you had done it internally.

Nagyung jumped up, clutching her bag to her chest as if their was a thief right in the room. “What’s wrong?” she questioned. Then she groaned at the feeling of cold juice dripping down her chest. “You scared me and I splashed it. What’s the matter with you?”

You almost sat down on my dad’s chair AKA the place Lee Minho was pleasuring me. No, you couldn’t say that. You stared back silently.

Nagyung set the half empty glass down and grabbed your hand, giving you a reassuring squeeze. “Real talk. Are you okay?” She furrowed her eyebrows, avoiding eye contact. “I’m sorry for intruding. Honestly, I did come over to have you review the suggestions, but I used that as an excuse for why I really wanted to come over. I wanted to check on you.”

She paused for longer than a moment, so you decided to give her a little push. Sure, you were absolutely paranoid about the fact that the guy your friends ridiculed often was the boyfriend hiding in your closet, but you didn’t want to seem like you didn’t care. Because you did care.

A lot. You cared so much about your friends, and you cared a ton about what they would think of you once they found out the truth.

Something about Nagyung’s concern for yoy made you want to dump your pride in the garbage and just be honest. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

“It’s not like you to just skip podcast to study. You’ve had to study plenty of times before but still managed to make it.” She paused again, Then she sighed. “And lately you just disappear a lot and you’re vague whenever someone asks what’s up.”

What were you doing? Your recent behavior was not on so totally suspicious, but in a way, harsh.

“I- I have to check on something,” you managed to say. Nagyung just nodded, now engrossed in the big red splotch on her fuzzy purple cardigan.

You dashed to your bedroom, quickly but quietly pushing the door open. You threw open your closet doors to find Minho seated on the floor tapping on his phone.

“What are you doing?” Your eyes went wide. “Are you texting someone? No one can know you’re here! I haven’t told Nagyung yet!”

Minho’s raised his brows. “I’m playing Mira’s Everyday Joy of Cooking,” he clarified. “Calm down. And what do you mean by ‘yet’?”

You bobbed your head up and down. “I wanna tell Nagyung everything. So let’s-”

Before you could finish your sentence, your apartment’s doorbell chimed. Your eyes widened.

“Get under the bed!” You grabbed Minho by the shirt collar and used every ounce of strength to push him underneath your bedframe. The idea of finally being honest flew out the window at the thought of your parents being home early.

"This is not how I imagined our time spent together," Minho groaned, sliding under.

You closed the door and raced back to the living room, towards the front door. You looked into the peephole.

Hyunjin and Seungmin. Hyunjin and Seungmin were here. You wanted to scream, but instead turned to Nagyung with a stressed half-smile.

“Nagyung,” You almost shrieked. “You invited Hyunjin and Seungmin?”

She was too busy rubbing at the stain with some baby wipes. “No, I didn’t invite them. They said they were gonna stop by since Seungmin took AP ES last year and he’s kind of-”

You tuned her out. You pressed your back to the door unsure of what to do. Minho was several feet away, under your bed, Nagyung was right in front of you, and Hyunjin and Seungmin stood on the other side of the door. You were hoping to tell each of your friends one by one when hanging out with them separately, but that plan was out the window now.

"―and Hyunjin said be didn't have anywhere else to be, so they pretty much invited themselves." You had momentarily forgotten that Nagyung was still talking. "Hey, can I borrow a shirt? The stain is starting to set."

"Yes, yes!" You immediately responded. "Take whatever!"

You had said that with way too much enthusiasm. Nagyung eyed you, but chose to ignore it, heading down the hall in hopes of finding something similar that would match her outfit in your wardrobe.

You weren't ready to tell anyone other than Nagyung right now. You couldn't believe you were thinking this, but you had to get Hyunjin and Seungmin to go away.

"Maybe she's not home," Seungmin said to Hyunjin right as you opened the door.

"Hi!" You gave your friends a gritted smile, the only kind you could form during this overwhelming situation.

"Hey," Hyunjin greeted you. "Seungmin said the funniest thing on our way here. Okay, why did the whale-"

"Why are you here?" You asked, getting straight to the point, keeping a forced smile on your face.

Both guys looked at you in confusion. Hyunjin was about to question your antics when there was a sudden screech.

They moved past you, running through your apartment to get to where the sound was coming from, completely ignoring the fact that this was your home, not theirs. You ran behind them.

The door to your bedroom burst open right as a half-dressed Nagyung chucked one of her sneakers at Minho's head.

Nagyung slipped one of your hoodies over her head quickly while Minho rubbed the side of his head. He looked up to meet four pairs of eyes staring at him.

You froze. Nagyung froze. Hyunjin and Seungmin froze.

Hyunjin blinked repeatedly, trying to see if his eyes were playing tricks on him. "Why is he here?"

You let out nervous chuckle, walking over to Minho to help him up. "Heh, funny story actually. But I bet Seungmin's joke is way funnier, so why don't you share it with us n-"

"____." Seungmin crossed his arms. Hyunjin and Nagyung did the same, looking stern. You felt like a small child getting lectured in the principal's office.

"Fine." You looked down and kicked your foot the way a seven year old being scolded would. "We're dating."

There was a medley of gasps.

Hyunjin scoffed dramatically, leaning against Seungmin for support. "Out of everyone in the school you picked him?"

Seungmin patted Hyunjin's shoulder, and you swore he emitted the same energy as a parent comforting their heartbroken teenage son. "I thought you said you couldn't stand him. You know, like most sane people."

"I couldn't at first," you admitted. You felt shy explaining all of this to your friends with Minho standing beside you. "But once I got to know him, he wasn't that bad." You rubbed the back of your neck, your ears feeling hot.

"But he's always in detention," Hyunjin objected. "And he's always pushing people-"

"Pushing people out of my way," Minho finished for him with an eyeroll. "It's not my fault if someone doesn't hear the words 'excuse me' the first time. And wait, that Jisung kid you guys hang with is always in detention with me. What makes me different?"

You looked around at your three friends. What did make Minho different?

"Nothing, I guess," Seungmin confessed.

"Jisung's a pretty big goof, and you're more intimidating," Hyunjin elaborated. "I think that's why we were so fast to judge you."

"We're sorry about that," Seungmin apologized.

You looked at Nagyung, who had been silent for most of the conversation. She slipped her sneaker back on, and gave you a soft smile.

"Sorry I tried to shatter your skull," Nagyung said to Minho. "Hear me out, though. I'm pretty sure anyone would react the same way I did if a guy was slipping out from under the bed while they were taking their clothes off."

"It's fine," Minho told everyone. Then he looked at you, giving you a wink. "It's understandable."

You breathed a sigh of relief. It felt so good to tell everyone the truth. Well, not the whole truth. They didn't need to know the part about your dad's recliner, which you figured you should spray down with alcohol before he came home to eliminate any traces.

"I'm still surprised," Nagyung shared. "I mean, I remember last week you said Minho's butt was flat and even though that's not like a boyfriend requirement, it doesn't seem like something you'd said about someone you liked." Nagyung shrugged her shoulders. "I guess that was before you guys started dating."

You awkwardly turned to your boyfriend, who glared back at you.

"My butt is not flat!"

tagging: @boyzwrld

THANKS FOR READING ♡

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conradscrime · 3 years

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Amelia Dyer: World’s Most Prolific Female Serial Killer?

April 28, 2021

Amelia Dyer (born Ameila Hobley) was born in a small village called Pyle Marsh east of Bristol in 1836, being the youngest of 5 children born to Samuel and Sarah Hobley.

Amelia’s mother suffered from mental illnesses caused by typhus and from a young age Amelia watched her mother fly into violent fits and had to take care of her until she died in 1848, when Amelia was 12 years old.

After Amelia’s mother died she moved in and lived with one of her aunts in Bristol, gaining an apprenticeship with a corset maker. Amelia’s father died in 1859 and in 1861 at the age of 24 Amelia married a man named George Thomas. George was 59 at the time and both had lied about their ages on the marriage certificate.

Amelia trained as a nurse after marrying George. However, soon after this Amelia met a midwife where she discovered that an easier way to make money was by opening up her home as a place to stay for women who were having babies illegitimately, that is, getting pregnant without being married first. The women could stay until they had their baby and then the babies would be farmed off for either adoption or they would die from neglect and malnutrition (similar to the Butterbox Babies, previously covered on this blog).

Amelia’s husband died in 1869 which left her needing an income fast. She began to advertise her services which included nurse care, adoption services, and just childcare for parents who needed it and they could come reclaim their children at a later date. Amelia told the women that she was respectable and married and their babies would be safe with her.

In 1872 Amelia married a man named William Dyer and they had two children of their own. Amelia eventually left William but kept his surname throughout the rest of her life.

There is no specific details of when this began exactly but at one point during this baby farming career, Amelia began to forgo the expense of letting the young babies and children die through starvation and after the receipt of each child she would murder them. This allowed her to keep most of the fees.

It was easy for Amelia to get away with this for quite some time because the mothers of the babies and children usually did not go looking for them after birth, and if they did they were too embarrassed to get a welfare check done on the child because it was very looked down upon to have an illegitimate child.

In 1879 a doctor became suspicious of Amelia due to the number of child deaths he had been called to certify. However, Amelia was only sentenced to complete 6 months of hard labour for neglect. According to some, this sentence of hard labour was extremely difficult on Amelia and resulted in her having poor mental health and suicidal tendencies. She was also heavily drinking alcohol and abusing opium-based products when she first began to kill which some think attributed to her poor mental health.

Because of the doctor’s constant suspicions, Amelia decided to stop involving him to issue death certificates and so she began to murder the babies and then dispose of the bodies herself. A lot of people were keeping eyes on her, not only authorities but also parents who wanted to reclaim their children again. To try to avoid this, Amelia and her family would relocate to different cities and she would use a number of aliases to keep her true identity hidden. Keep in mind this is the end of the 19th century -- it was easy to relocate and start a new life at this time.

Due to her suicide attempts and mental health struggles Amelia was sent to asylums a few times in her life and in 1893 she was discharged the last time from the Somerset and Bath Lunatic Asylum near Wells. In 1895 she moved to Reading, Berkshire with a woman named Jane “Granny” Smith, Amelia’s daughter, Polly, and Polly’s husband Arthur. “Granny” was to be called “mother” in front of the unwed mothers handing over their children so that they felt safe, knowing they were giving their child to a caring home.

In January 1896 a woman named Evelina Marmon, 25, gave birth to a daughter illegitimately and she was named Doris. Evelina placed an advertisement for a respectable woman to come take her child for a short period of time while she went back to work. She had full intentions of reclaiming her child.

Evelina saw an advertisement for a couple who were looking to adopt a healthy child and she responded to a “Mrs. Harding” (Amelia Dyer) who promised she would take care of the baby. Amelia took the baby one week later, wrote a letter to Evelina telling her all was well and then she was never heard of again.

Amelia had told Evelina that she was taking the young Doris to Reading, Berkshire, however she actually took her to Willesden, London where Polly was living. Amelia took some white edging tape used for dressmaking and wound it twice around the baby’s neck, tying a knot. Then Amelia and Polly wrapped the body up in a napkin. The next day, April 1, 1896, a 13 month old boy named Harry Simmons was given to Amelia and because she had no edging tape left she took the tape from around Doris’ neck and used it to murder the boy.

On April 2, she took both bodies and stacked them on top of each other into a carpet bag along with some bricks to add some weight. She then took the bag and took it to the River Thames, forcing it through the railings.

Unlucky for Amelia, her scheme was up. On March 30, 1896 what appeared to be a package that was not weighted adequately from the Thames had been spotted by a bargeman. Inside was the body of a baby girl who was later identified as Helena Fry. They discovered the package belong to a “Mrs. Thomas” and found an address.

On April 3, 1896 Amelia was expecting a new client to show up on her doorstep but didn’t know this “new client” was actually a decoy set up by police. When she opened her door, police raided her home. They found no human remains in the house, though the whole place smelled like decomposition. They found a lot of other evidence, such as pawn tickets for children’s clothing, telegrams with adoption arrangements, white edging tape and letters from mother’s asking about their children.

Amelia Dyer was arrested and charged with murder on April 4, 1896. Police estimated that in the previous couple of months at least 20 children had been placed in her care, and they also discovered she was getting ready to move again, to Somerset. Some estimated that Amelia Dyer murdered over 400 babies and children.

They also searched the Thames and found 6 more bodies including Doris and Harry’s who were the last victims. Amelia pleaded guilty to only the murder of Doris on May 22, 1896. The defense used insanity, claiming that Amelia was unstable and had been committed to asylums in her life. However, the prosecution claimed Amelia only was committed to asylums as a ploy to keep her undetected, she only went to these asylums when she felt her crimes may be exposed.

The jury found Amelia Dyer guilty in 4 and a half minutes. Amelia Dyer was hanged by James Billington at Newgate Prison on June 10, 1896. Her last words were, “I have nothing to say.”

Stricter adoption laws were put in place, allowing local authorities to police baby farms to stop abuse from happening within them. Despite this however this abuse didn’t stop. In 1898 two years after Amelia’s execution, a couple of railway workers found a parcel with a 3 week old baby girl inside. The girl was still alive and had been the daughter a widow named Jane Hill who claimed she had given the baby to a woman by the name of “Mrs. Stewart” for 12 pounds. It has been claimed that “Mrs. Stewart” was Polly, Amelia Dyer’s daughter.

#solved #true crime #Crime #female #serialkiller

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stuhde · 4 years

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After taking some time off to cry, understand, and speak with myself. I decided to write something out expressing my thoughts and feelings about everything going on in this country. It’s long, powerful, and provactive but I need to get my voice out. Like, comment, share, have discussions with me when i finish my social media cleanse, but I will not stand silent in times of injustice.

After seeing and reading the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, I was quick to delete all my social media apps and hide away from the “uwu Black lives matter posts,” the underserving claps white celebrities get from doing the bare minimum, and just witnessing the continuous realities of injustice that take place in this country.

As a first-generation Sudanese American, I was nothing but confused and lost in the midst of a growing movement, particularly George Floyd’s murder hitting home the most because the police who were arresting Floyd was responding to a call from an Arab American-owned store. With intersecting identities of being black, Muslim, and Arab, witnessing the anti-blackness rhetoric spew from my religious and ethnic communities clash with my racial identity stirred tension and fear in what it means to be a black Arab Muslim in this country and what my place is in the Black Lives Matter Movement. I often found myself asking, “what is my duty to the black community?”, “Am I too Arab to be black, or am I too black to be Arab?” And “what is my privilege in identifying as Arab and a non-hijabi Muslim?” Black Arabs like me often experience issues with invisible intersectionality, people often forcing us to “take sides” or strongly reside with one of our identities when it sees fit (refer to how people responded to the Ahmed Mohamed clock incident).

But I have come to the conclusion that my blackness is comprised of being a woman, Muslim, and Arab - not separately and that’s what makes this unique. Black Arabs are often finding themselves at the struggle of fighting against racial injustice because of our skin color and against the xenophobic and Islamaphobic rhetorics that have only increased since the beginning of the Trump campaign. However, you all have a duty not to ignore the experiences of black Muslim immigrants in this country, like Yassin Mohammed - he was murdered by police in Georgia earlier this month. Say his name and remember him.

Yassin like me is a Sudanese American - black, Arab, and Muslim but he wasn’t reported or written as such. The media called him a “Muslim man” and yet, our Muslim community remained silent. Why? Because it only brings to light the deep and historical roots of racism that are instilled in our community and we need to address it. Muslim and Arab Americans have a duty to stand with our black brothers and sisters in times of injustice. They were there for us in supporting Palestinian liberation and with us against the Muslim ban - now it is our turn. Listen to Black Americans and Black civil rights groups about their unique experiences and learn how we can best support our collective struggle against injustice. You have a duty to educate yourself and tackle anti-blackness in our community. As quoted in Surah An-Nisa [4:135], “be persistently standing firm in justice, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives” - support your local CAIR organization and others like the Arab American Action Network and the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, who are all standing with the Black Lives Matter movement and doing their best to bring all our communities together to end all forms of racism, discrimination, and injustice.

For my fellow Sudanese, this is our fight too. While we must recognize the centuries-long of cruelty and pain the African-American community has endured since forcefully coming to this country and understanding that their pain is different from ours, we share the same skin and we will go through the same thing they are going through. I can tell you personally, from even the youngest age that I have always been afraid of the police. Why? Because I witnessed the disproportionate amount of cruelty and violence with which people who look like me are treated with.

While our older Sudanese community members will try hard to erase our blackness simply because we have drops of Arab blood, at a tragic reality we have all experienced and witnessed discrimination and racism at the hands of law enforcement. This is hard because we have a complicated relationship with race on the fault line of racial consciousness because our country is on the border between Arab and black Africa. However it is, we are BLACK and we need to have conversations about race in our community. We as Sudanese people are not doing enough to eradicate racism and prejudice that exists in our community as well as our Muslim, Arab, and general US society. The next phase in the revolution is to recognize that these issues exist in our Muslim community, come together with black Americans and African-Americans, and create change to take down these systemic institutions that were never designed to protect black and brown folk.

I will continue to do my social media cleanse, but I welcome those who wish to discuss what my views and opinions are more with me - should you agree or disagree. People who care will know how to reach me. In this time, I am reading, learning, and liberating myself to make a change and I can only ask you to do the same. There are so much power and knowledge invested in books:

How to be an Anti-Racist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Dr. by Ibram X Kendi and Jason Reynolds

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis (HIGHLY recommend to my Muslim and/or Arab folk)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Resources for my black Muslims, courtesy of my University’s Muslim Student Association:

The Muslim Anti-Racist Collaborative - deconstructing anti-Blackness within the Muslim community Believers Bail Out - re-imagining the prison and police systems through Islamic perspectives Sapelo Square - an online forum that places Black Muslims at the center: Reconstructed Magazine - a creative magazine and conversation space led by Black, Shia, and queer Muslims The Black American Muslim - space for Black American Muslims to share testimonials and resources on faith, history, and power Justice For Muslims Collective - an organization reimagining a world where radical inclusion leads to collective liberation for Muslim communities and beyond Kayla Renée Wheeler, Ph.D. - Islamic Studies Professor who created the BlackIslam syllabus Amina Wadud, Ph.D. - African-American scholar on gender and race in Islam. Learn more about her through her interviews here Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Ph.D. - Scholar-Artist-Activist & Author of Muslim Cool Islamophobia is Racist Syllabus - resources to understand empire, anti-Muslim racism, and ideology

For my black friends, I hope you are well and I hope you are safe. I am with you all the way through in our fight for liberation and human rights. Take care of yourself first before anyone else and if you need a minute or more before protesting and educating those around you, take your time, you need it. All the love x

#lama makes a monologue #long post #black lives matter #blacklivesmatter #george floyd #yassin mohammed #afro-arab #muslim american #arab american #black muslim #politics #us politics #policing #tw: violence #tw: police brutality #tw: murder #please understand what i am going through while writing this #i am in pain i am scared but i will not stand in silence: i will be liberated and fight for my people and their rights #good night

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spurgie-cousin · 3 years

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WHW In Memoriam: Unarmed, Murdered Black Americans from History

(Content Warning: Violence, murder, abuse, racism)

So this is definitely not the same kind of ‘weird’ history I usually post about (and it’s not Wednesday quite yet), but in light of the George Floyd verdict I thought it was important to take a moment to remember some of the unarmed, murdered black Americans throughout our history, most of whom have never received justice. Whether their lives were taken by the police or violent, racist vigilantes, their memories should always be a reminder that though we’ve come a long way, we still have a long, long way to go.

This is in no way a comprehensive list, in fact I start at Emmett Till because the *known* lynchings pre-1955 are too numerous to include in one, two, ten posts. I know I will not have room to include even everyone post 1955 (god there are so many) but please know that all of them, from the unknown to the infamous, from our country’s beginning to today, matter the same.

“History, despite it’s wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” - Maya Angelou

1. Emmett Louis Till

Born: July 25, 1941, Chicago, IL Died: August 28, 1955, Money, MS

Emmett Till was a 14 year-old child from Chicago visiting relatives over his summer break in August of 1955. Unfamiliar with the strictly racist social codes in the American south, he spoke to a white woman at a grocery store, and was accused of flirting with her. A few nights later her husband and his brother abducted Till, brutally beat and mutilated him, and then shot him before letting his body sink into a river. When he was found, his body was barely recognizable even to his mother.

In an act of grief and defiance, his mother held a highly-publicized, open casket funeral to show the brutality of what had happened to her child to the world.

It’s believed that before her death, Carolyn Bryant, the woman from the grocery store, recanted key details from her original story, including that Till whistled or flirted with her.

2. James Earl Chaney

Born: May 30, 1943, Meridian, Mississippi Died: June 21, 1964, Philadelphia, Mississippi

James Chaney was a 21 year old field/social worker working for Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He was murdered along with two colleagues, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, by the Ku Klux Klan while they were in Mississippi investigating the burning of a church. The 3 were pulled over by a patrol car being followed by 2 cars full of Klan members, who shot Goodman and Schwerner, beat Chaney, and then shot him 3 times.

3. Michael Donald

Born: July 24, 1961, Mobile, Alabama Died: March 21, 1981, Mobile, Alabama

Michael Donald was a 20 year-old who on March 21st, 1981 was walking down the street after purchasing cigarettes for his sister. He was chosen at random by a car full of Ku Klux Klan members, angry that a recent Klan members court case had been declared a mistrial. He was beat, hung, and his throat was slit, and was left hanging dead from a tree in a secluded, wooded area.

Three Klansmen were convicted of Donald's murder. Henry Hays was sentenced to death and executed in the electric chair in 1997. James Knowles and Benjamin Cox were sentenced to life in prison. A civil suit against the United Klans of America caused their bankruptcy.

4. Yusef Kirriem Hawkins

Born: March 19, 1973, Brooklyn, NY Died: August 23, 1989, Brooklyn, NY

Yusef Hawkins was a 16-year-old black teenager who was shot to death on August 23, 1989, in Bensonhurst, a predominantly Italian-American working-class neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Hawkins, his younger brother, and two friends were attacked by a crowd of 10 to 30 white youths, with at least seven of them wielding baseball bats. One, armed with a handgun, shot Hawkins twice in the chest, killing him. Hawkins and his brother were in the neighborhood to inquire about a used car.

5. Nicholas Heyward Jr.

Born: August 26th, 1981 Died: September 27th, 1994

13-year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr. was playing cops and robbers inside the stairwell of a Brooklyn apartment building when officer Brian George mistook the boy’s toy gun for a real gun and shot him in the stomach, killing him.

6. Amadou Diallo

Born: September 2, 1975, Liberia Died: February 4, 1999, NYC, New York

In the early morning of February 4, Diallo was standing near his building after returning from a meal. At about 12:40 a.m., officers Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy were looking for an alleged serial rapist in the Soundview section of the Bronx. While driving down Wheeler Avenue, the police officer stopped his unidentified car and interrogated Diallo, who was in front of his apartment. When they ordered Diallo to show his hands, he supposedly ran into the apartment and reached into his pocket to show his wallet. Soon afterwards the four officers fired 41 shots with semi-automatic pistols, fatally hitting Diallo 19 times. Eye witness Sherrie Elliott stated that the police continued to shoot even though Diallo is already down and that McMellon is still shooting even though he is lying on the ground.

7. Kendra Sarie James

Born: December 24, 1981 Died: May 5, 2003, Portland, Oregon

21-year-old Kendra Sarie James was shot and killed by Portland Officer Scott McCollister when she attempted to flee a traffic stop for a minor violation. Portland police initially said it appeared the car had run over the officer's foot but he did not receive medical attention at the scene or at Northeast Precinct. Police repeatedly refused to identify the alleged traffic violation that caused them to stop James and two companions in the car. Police had taken the driver out of the car and was checking his identity when they saw James slide into the Chevrolet’s driver’s seat. Both officers, while standing on the driver’s side of the car, struggled with James to stop her from driving away. One of them fired a taser gun at her to subdue her. McCollister fired a single round from his 9 mm service pistol at James, killing her.

8. Deaunta T. Farrow

Born: September 7, 1994, West Memphis, Arkansas Died: June 22, 2007, West Memphis, Arkansas

On the night of his death, Deaunta Farrow was walking with his 14-year-old cousin from Farrow’s home to the nearby Steeplechase Apartments where Nash lived. Along the way the two made a stop at a gas station where they purchased soda pop and chips from the station’s convenience store, and continued down the street. Farrow and Nash turned up the street leading to Nash’s apartment. At that point two undercover West Memphis police officers, Jimmy Evans and Sammis, who were on a stakeout in a narcotics investigation, appeared from a nearby dumpster. According to some eyewitnesses, the two police officers confronted the young men and soon afterwards Sammis, noticed something bulging in the 12-year-old’s coat pocket. As Farrow removed the item, Sammis shot and killed him.

9. Rekia Boyd

Born: November 5, 1989, Chicago, IL Died: March 21, 2012

On the night of her death, Rekia Boyd was hanging out with friends at Douglas Park on Chicago’s West Side at a party listening to music while having a few drinks. Around 1:00 am, Boyd and some of her friends walked to a nearby liquor store. Around the same time, officer Dante Servin was just finishing his shift on his second job. He was off duty, heading to a fast food restaurant for a hamburger, but Servin drove to Douglas Park after a citizen called police about a noise complaint. Servin saw Boyd and her friends and later claimed they were arguing in an alley. Whether Servin calmly approached Boyd and her friends or was rude and aggressive is still debated. One of Boyd’s friends, Antonio Cross, claimed that Servin attempted to buy drugs from the group. When Cross told Servin to “get his crackhead ass out of here,” Servin pulled a gun, stuck it out of the window of his car and fired into the group, hitting Boyd in the head. She was instantly killed.

10. Eric Garner

Born: September 15, 1970, NYC, New York Died: July 17, 2014, NYC, New York

On July 17th, 2014, NYPD officers approached Eric Garner on suspicion of selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. After Garner told the police that he was tired of being harassed and that he was not selling cigarettes, the officers attempted to arrest Garner. When Pantaleo placed his hands on Garner, Garner pulled his arms away. Pantaleo then placed his arm around Garner's neck and wrestled him to the ground. With multiple officers pinning him down, Garner repeated the words "I can't breathe" 11 times while lying face down on the sidewalk. After Garner lost consciousness, he remained lying on the sidewalk for seven minutes while the officers waited for an ambulance to arrive. Garner was pronounced dead at an area hospital approximately one hour later.

11. Breonna Taylor

Born: June 5, 1993, Grand Rapids, Michigan Died: March 13, 2020, Louisville, Kentucky

A narcotics investigation regarding suspected drug dealer Jamarcus Glover, led detectives to Breonna Taylor’s residence in the South End. Glover was a previous acquaintance of Taylor and she was under suspicion for using her home to his receive mail, hide his drugs, and stash money earned from his drug sales. Taylor, who was 26, at the time, lived in a Springfield Drive apartment with her 27-year-old boyfriend Kenneth Walker. Taylor and Walker were asleep in bed, on the night of March 13, 2020, when they were awakened by a loud banging at the front door. Taylor called out, asking who was there, but heard no response. Walker, a licensed and registered gun owner, armed himself and headed towards the front door, when it suddenly came off its hinges.

Under a “no-knock” search warrant, Louisville Metro Police Department Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, Detective Brett Hankinson, and Officer Myles Cosgrove, all in plainclothes, stormed into the apartment. Taylor’s boyfriend Walker, thinking this was a home invasion robbery, fired one shot in self-defense. Sgt. Mattingly was hit in the leg, and in response, the other officers opened fire, releasing more than twenty rounds into the apartment. Taylor was shot eight times and collapsed in the hallway of her apartment. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

12. Daunte Demetrius Wright

Died: April 11, 2021 (20 years old)

On April 11 of this year, Daunte Demetrius Wright was fatally shot by police officer Kimberly Ann Potter during a traffic stop and attempted arrest for an outstanding arrest warrant in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. After a brief struggle with officers, Wright was shot at close range by Potter, who had confused her gun with her taser. Officers pulled Wright out of his car and administered CPR, but were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.

#murder tw #lynching tw #violence tw #violence #murder #weird history wednesday #whw #racism #racism tw #abuse tw #george floyd #blm #black lives matter #history #not fundie related

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30secondfics · 4 years

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EAT OR BE EATEN (A/U) 6 OF 6

~ Author’s Note ~ “Before the renaissance we had the Black Plague.”

- @thekingoflegoland

Rated M

Part 1 > Part 2 > Part 3 > Part 4 > Part 5a > Part 5b > Part 6

Seattle, January 2021

Gabriella Torres stepped out of her rideshare and studied the house she stood in front of. A small shingled house, hunter green, the grass browned from the cool weather and the paint of the white front door chipped from years of neglect. She knocked.

A woman with a black lacquered cane opened the door with widened eyes, pale, as if she had just seen a ghost.

“Hi, I’m looking for Calliope Torres-”

“She doesn’t live here.“

“My name is Gabriella Torres. Aria Torres is my mother—was—my mother.”

The woman sighed and eyed the young woman. “You're a spitting image of your mother. Come in.”

The sunroom of the house was clean, sterilized. It still smelled of cleaning products and polish; it was well tended to, unlike the exterior of the house.

“Can I get you a coffee or a tea?” the woman asked.

“Water, please, if you wouldn’t mind,” Gabriella answered. She took the glass the woman offered her and took a generous sip.

“What did you say your name was again?” the woman asked, taking the seat in front of her guest and leaning her cane against the side table.

“Gabriella.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

The woman paused in thought.

“I’m sorry to come out of the blue, but I thought you would prefer meeting in person rather than starting a paper trail… Aunt Calliope.”

Calliope nodded in agreement and cleared her throat. “So how did you find me?”

“I just started grad school at the University of Washington, I’m doing my masters in library studies-”

“Impressive,” Callie nodded, glad and relieved to learn her niece was educated.

“Thank you. I was in foster care my whole life, you see, I knew nothing but my mother’s name. I swore to find her one day and I searched for her for years and years. Then, finally, I came across her obituary and I found out she lived in Miami… and, well, my research led me to you.”

“So you know who I am…” Callie cleared her throat and picked at the cotton of her pants.

“You’re Calliope Torres. You were the head of the Torres Crime family. You were responsible for the Miami Mob Massacre of 2013 when all of the heads of the city’s crime families were murdered.”

“Allegedly,” Callie corrected.

Gabriella nodded in agreement. “Early in 2014 the Feds gathered enough evidence to put you on trial-”

“Alex Karev and George O’Malley came forward and turned themselves in, in an attempt to put me away,” Callie informed. “Even after I paid them a very generous amount of money to leave town. It seemed that it wasn’t enough for two men who felt overpowered by a single woman.”

“You were on trial for 21 days,” Gabriella continued. “Until you were proven not guilty. After 21 days they were going to let you walk free, you were free—then you were showered with bullets on your way out of the Miami courthouse. A man named Robert Stark was arrested; he claimed you destroyed his life over unsettled debt.”

“And yet he’s still in jail and I am not,” Callie couldn’t help but smirk.

“My mother perished that day, and you were airlifted to Miami General with life-threatening injuries,” Gabriella added. “Some articles reported that you wouldn’t make it out alive, while others rumoured you would never fully recover. You were mentioned in the papers for months, until suddenly you weren’t. New leaders of the other crime families began to take their place, and new gang wars plagued Miami. By the time you walked out of the hospital a free woman, you were old news and the Torres empire had crumbled. You’ve been laying low ever since.”

Gabriella was nothing but correct in her explanation. The Torres empire crumbled, and it crumbled hard. In Callie’s absence, and Alex and George’s incarceration, other members of the corporation fought for themselves, fought amongst themselves, stole for themselves, until there was nothing left but a few skids of canned peaches scattered across the city. The Torres mansion was looted and then destroyed by opportunistic rival families. The Torres name became irrelevant. A name no longer feared. A name no longer remembered, despite the damage it did in the past decades. Bigger crimes flooded Miami, and though grudges still existed, seeking revenge against the Torres family was no longer a priority.

Callie remained silent. It had been years since she lived that life, it was hard to believe its vibrant contrast to the life she lived now.

“Sorry,” Gabriella brushed. “I was just searching for my mother, I didn’t mean to uncover so much more about you.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Callie reassured. “That was my past, and I will take what I did to my grave.”

Gabriella remained silent.

“So what do you want to know about your mother?” Callie asked.

Gabriella released a sigh with both grief and relief. Grief of the loss she had held in her heart for so long, and relief that she was finally going to get some answers.

“I want to know why my mother left me at the hospital that day, knowing she had the means to raise me.”

“I can’t answer for the dead,” Callie shook her head.

“I know that, but you at least knew her…”

“And I know giving you up was probably the best decision she could have made for you.”

“What?” Gabriella asked with furrowed brows. She spent her life in poverty. She was alone. She moved from foster home to foster home. The closest thing she has to a family is an old college roommate.

“My sister Aria was… impulsive. Especially when it came to money. She and my father would always clash on her irresponsible spendings. I believe she had you the year she just about had it with our father and so she disappeared for a year to travel across the country in a van with some friends. She was in no state to raise a child, even if we had the money.”

“But I grew up poor, without a family-” Gabriella began to argue.

“Do you think a crime family would have been any better?”

“Maybe,” Gabriella shrugged.

“It cost us your mothers life,” Callie reminded. “It nearly cost me mine.”

Gabriella remained silent.

“A life of riches is far from a fairytale when it’s funded with bloodmoney.”

Gabriella avoided her aunt’s eyes.

“So if it’s money you want from me I no longer have much of it,” Callie admitted.

“I don’t need money,” Gabriella promised. “I just wanted answers.”

“I’m afraid I can’t answer anymore than that,” Callie replied. “I didn’t even know my sister had you until this morning.”

“Would you have stepped in if you knew back then?” Gabriella asked.

Callie paused in thought. “Probably not,” she answered honestly. She believed the mob was no place for a child.

They sat in silence for a moment. Then Callie glanced at the clock.

“Then I won’t take up much more of your time,” Gabriella promised and stood from her seat. “Thank you for your time.”

Callie simply nodded.

“Can I ask how you found out where I live?” Callie asked before the younger woman could leave.

Gabriella signed. “Seattle Grace held a Gala last week. I was sorting the newspaper section of the library when I saw your face. Your hair is much shorter now but I had studied the family so much I recognized you right away… it wasn’t hard after I ran a search for you in Seattle.”

“What newspaper published that article?” Callie needed to know: if her niece could recognize her, how many more people could.

“Seattle Local. Don’t worry, I’ve already shredded as many copies of the paper as I could find,” Gabriella reassured.

“Thank you,” Callie sighed in relief.

“Can I ask you one last question before I go?” Gabriella asked.

“You just did.”

“Do you think there are people out there who still want you dead?” Gabriella proceeded to ask.

“I know there is,” Callie nodded. “Dozens of them.”

“How do you bear it? How do you live in fear?”

“I don’t,” Callie answered confidently. “Knowing my life could end at any moment is what makes every day so worth living.”

000

There was one part of Gabriella’s story that was missing; one part of the Calliope Torres story that was very private and protected from the public eye. Down a long hallway, two feet and a cane dully tread across grey terrazzo floors. The door at the end of the hall held a plaque, yielded the Seattle Grace Hospital logo and the title Chief of Surgery. She opened the door.

Large windows letting in lights from the Seattle Skyline also enclosed the spacious and personalized office. The walls were decorated with various frames, some with photos, others with accomplishments and awards. One of which was the 2014 Carter Madison Grant and a photo of a small clinic in Mawali.

Arizona Robbins glanced up from her laptop and over reading glasses arched a single eyebrow.

“Sorry, I’m late,” Callie apologised.

Arizona smirked and motioned for her lover to come closer with finger.

Callie rounded the cherrywood desk and gave her wife a kiss.

“Hmm,” Arizona hummed with satisfaction.

“Missed you.” She said this every day.

“Missed you too,” Arizona replied with a smile. “How was your day?” she asked, pushing her chair back to make room for her wife.

“Well…” Callie leaned her cane against the desk and pushed the laptop back to sit on her wife’s desk, “I had a visitor at the house today.”

“A visitor?” Arizona repeated, intrigued. “We haven’t had a visitor in a very long time. Who was kind enough to send you a hitman this time?” she asked sarcastically.

“Not an assassin,” Callie informed with a small smirk. A very small part of her missed when an assassin or two would shake up their home. It had been so quiet the past few years since they moved to Seattle, Callie could almost say she was starting to get bored. She and Arizona had become so good at silently putting hitmen away; they made great fertiliser for the flowers in the back garden.

“Really?”

“Yeah, it turns out I have a niece. It looks like Aria forgot to mention she had a kid twenty-two years ago.”

“No way…”

“She looks just like her, Arizona, if she’s a con artist she sold it really well.”

“How’d she find you?”

“She saw a photo of me in a local paper, from the Gala.”

“Oh, Calliope… I didn’t know you’d be photographed.”

“It’s fine,” Callie shrugged. “I’m sort of glad she found me. It was nice talking about Aria again.”

“Are you going to keep in touch?”

“I didn’t want her to feel obligated to keep in contact. She’s a smart girl, she’ll come back if she wants to.”

Arizona gave her wife a sympathetic smile.

“Anyways, tell me about your day…” Callie encouraged her wife.

“I think I’d rather save the talking for later,” Arizona said with a smirk.

“Oh…” Callie chuckled and moaned when her wife pressed their lips together. Arizona’s hands were on her waist and they slowly made their way up her shirt as they kissed.

“You called for me, Doctor Robbins?” Callie teased, between kisses.

“I did, and you’re late,” Arizona played along. She loved her wife for a hundred million reasons, and one of them included how ungodly good she was at getting her off.

“I’m awfully sorry,” Callie apologised in her bedroom voice.

“Y-you’d better be,” Arizona gasped when her wife’s mouth wrapped around the skin on her neck and began to suck. “D-don’t leave a mark…” she scolded, “again.”

Callie smirked and slipped her hand into the white lab coat and down the navy blue scrub top. She cupped her wife’s breast; soft, warm, and a bit more plump than she remembered.

Arizona felt wetness begin to grow between her legs. Slick. Heat. Then a gush of fluid like the breaking of a damn.

“Callie!” Arizona shrieked.

“Arizona...” Callie gasped when she felt the wetness run down her leg, “was that?”

“I think my water just broke,” Arizona said with widened eyes.

“It’s a good thing we’re already at a hospital,” Callie chuckled and took her wife by the hand before leading her towards the maternity ward to have their baby.

Callie and Arizona rushed down the aisle, hand-in-hand, away from the altar where Elvis stood to officiate. With no family left between the two of them, they spent their wedding night celebrating their rather spontaneous wedding with a rather expensive bottle of wine and room service.

Overlooking the city of Las Vegas, a city also once ruled by crime families such as the Torres’s, Callie held Arizona in her arms as they watched the night lights.

“I never pictured myself getting married,” Arizona admitted softly.

“You’re telling me this now?” Callie arched her eyebrow, taking hold of Arizona’s hand that was now weighed down by a wedding band.

“No, Calliope, I mean… I never pictured myself getting married in the white dress and large crowd. But this… this was perfect.”

“Oh…” Callie smiled mischievously and planted a hot kiss on her wife’s neck.

“Callie!” Arizona squinted her eyes and stopped walking.

“Breathe…” Callie coached.

“I am breathing,” Arizona gritted through her teeth, freezing for a couple of minutes before gathering up the strength to walk again.

“We’re almost there,” Callie reassured.

Arizona puffed air out of her cheeks and followed her wife’s lead. Moments later, she found herself on a hospital bed, monitors attached to her belly and her wife by her side.

“Push,” Arizona encouraged.

Callie let out a long grunt as she pushed against the resistance band that Arizona was holding behind her. She took three bullets in her arm, two in the gut, and one in her femur which left her with a permanent limp. She had accepted her fate of the cane, but she had yet to give up on rehabilitating her dominant hand.

“Good,” the physiotherapist praised. “You’re really motivated today!”

“Motivated to use my good hand in bed again,” Callie pushed against the purple band again.

“Callie!” Arizona gasped, not impressed with her lover’s vulgarness in front of the physiotherapist.

The therapist couldn’t help but chuckle, “It’s good to have goals.”

“Let’s see how your baby is doing…” Doctor Carina DeLuca snapped on a clean glove and placed herself between the patient’s legs. “Oh…”

“What?” Callie and Arizona said in unison.

“When did you say your contractions began?” Carina asked.

“I guess, this morning…” Arizona thought out loud.

“This morning?” Callie repeated with disbelief. Her wife had been in labour all day and she didn’t receive a single text of mention.

“I thought it was just a stomach ache from all the poundcake I ate for breakfast.” Arizona admitted.

“Did you eat the whole coffee cart too?” Callie teased.

“I only had three...” Arizona defended, “this time.”

“Move to Seattle with me,” Arizona said, her head nestled on her wife’s chest. Las Vegas streets were loud but she could still hear Callie’s pounding heartbeat.

“Seattle?”

“They’ve offered me a job as an attending… if I accept it, we can have our own life there. Just you and me, far away from the craziness in Miami. You don’t belong there anymore, we don’t belong there anymore. We both need a new start, somewhere we can raise a family.”

“You want kids?” Callie asked, surprised. With all the commotion, they forgot to talk about having children.

“I want a family, whatever that may look like. I’ve never had one and I want one with you.”

“You can start pushing on your next contraction,” Doctor DeLuca instructed.

“Callie, I’m scared,” Arizona told her wife.

“You’ve made it this far, Arizona, I believe in you.”

“What if we lose this baby too?”

“We can’t think like that right now, Arizona, you need to focus on having this baby, okay?”

Arizona nodded her head and grunted as she pushed as hard as she could.

The house was so quiet.

With Lucy’s passing, there was no longer pitter patter of paws against the hardwood as she played around the house. Now their house filled with the noise of Arizona turning the page of her newspaper, and Callie watching car review videos on her phone.

“You think it’s too soon to get another dog?” Arizona asked.

“I don’t know if I want another dog,” Callie admitted.

“Can I finally have my chicken coop, then?”

“No…” Callie slowly shook her head.

“Well, we’re certainly not getting a ferret, Calliope-”

“I’ve been thinking… it’s a good time to have a baby.”

Arizona’s face brightened into a smile. “A baby?” she breathed out.

Callie nodded, “A baby.”

“Your baby is almost here…” Carina announced.

“Really?” Arizona phanted.

“Do you want the mirror?”

“Oh god, no,” Arizona shook her head in denial.

Callie couldn’t help but laugh.

“Don’t you dare laugh,” Arizona scolded her wife. “You owe me a new vagina after this!”

“I’m sorry…” the doctor repeated herself. “Please stay and use the room for as long as you need to.”

“Thank you,” Arizona nodded at the doctor and continued to console her wife.

Callie watched the doctor leave with blank eyes. The news hurt her more than she thought it would. She didn’t even know she wanted kids until she married Arizona, and now that she found out she couldn’t, she was heartbroken. Her life of crime, the bullets of revenge, had already taken her sister from her; she was saddened to learn it also took away her chance of having children of her own.

“What do you need from me?” Arizona said softly.

“I don’t know,” Callie shook her head.

“I’ll have them, Calliope, I want to have them,” Arizona offered for the hundredth time.

“I…” Callie gulped to rid of the dryness in her throat, “I thought we could have some of yours and some of mine too.”

“Oh, Calliope…” Arizona sighed in defeat. “It would have been amazing to have a little you running around the house, but I promise you they will be our babies no matter what.”

“She’s here…” Carina announced.

“It’s a girl?” Callie asked with surprise, relief and excited butterflies fluttering in her stomach.

“It’s a girl,” Carina confirmed.

Callie and Arizona smiled at the crying infant. Carina placed the child on Arizona’s chest and Callie wrapped her arms around her family. She was so little yet so loud, and mighty. Her hands were bronze like a Torres and her eyes were blue like a Robbins. She was there and she was theirs.

“I love you…”

“What?” Callie said past dry lips. She thought she would never see Arizona Robbins again, let alone have her visit her hospital room every day for the past three months.

“I love you,” Arizona nodded her head. She had known, deep down, for a long time. But she was at the airport, ready to leave for Africa, ready to truly move on from her tango with the mob and start a new life, a new clinic, for children in a new land, Malawi, when she saw the Torres heir fall to the ground in front of the courthouse. She hated that she had to see Calliope Torres get shot multiple times on television to realise it. She loved the notorious boss and she couldn’t leave Miami without her.

“Arizona, you can’t-”

“You’re not my boss, Calliope, you can’t tell me what I can and can’t do anymore-”

“No, Arizona, you need someone... normal,” Callie defended her stance. “Someone who can give you the easy life you deserve. Someone who doesn’t have a past-”

“I know your past, Calliope, and I know the kind of woman you are deep down. Do you think it was easy to let someone else run my clinic in Africa, to turn down a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so I can spend three months in this hospital with you? I know love isn’t easy, but I choose it because—because life without it is dull and cold.”

Callie eyed her lover.

“I know there are people who want you dead...” Arizona continued, “that danger will follow you, but—why live in fear when we can take our chances at being happy?”

“Jeez, okay, enough with the dramatics,” Callie teased.

Arizona gasped, offended, then laughed. Her speech was quite cheesy.

“I love you too. I’ve known for a while,” Callie admitted. “But I want what’s best for you. That’s why I let you go...”

“And I know what I want,” Arizona countered. “That’s why I came back...”

Callie cradled baby Sofia as Arizona finally fell asleep in her hospital bed. Sofia had that intoxicating new baby smell and Callie soaked in every minute of it. Swaddled in her hospital blanket, Sofia was content and happy to be in her mother’s arms.

Callie glanced at Arizona and watched her peacefully rest. She deserves it. Arizona let out a soft snore and it made Callie smile. Her mob career started in her father’s hospital room. Her love for Arizona blossomed in her hospital room. Now their middle family had grown by one in the hospital room.

Callie Torres was working in a cubicle, in an office, on a floor, in a building full of cubicles. She was the daughter of a notorious crime boss and she was in an office working a nine-to-five desk job. Despite her upbringing, she went to college. She attended Penn State, the first in her family to go to college. She told herself that she needed space from the mob, but deep down she knew she left home because she resented her father for not being a good husband to her mother. Over a decade later, she still blamed him for making Lucia Torres flee. So Callie moved away, to a city where nobody knew her name, and for four years she studied literature, made an honest living, and lived a modest lifestyle. She was set. She had financial independence from her father and no ties to the life he lived.

Until a single phone call changed her projection. She came back to Miami after years of avoiding the city and the chaos within it. Giovanni sent one of the drivers to pick her up at the airport and she felt helpless in the backseat of the Cadillac. She hated it: the feeling of being the young woman with no independence, thanks to the nature of the family business. There was a reason why she moved out: to be able to do things on her own.

The short car ride felt like hours, but soon she was at Miami General: pushing through a crowd of news reporters hoping to get information and FBI agents hoping to find dirt that will finally warrant the arrest of the biggest mob boss in the city. The FBI were always around—ever since Carlos himself was a child—but they could never find enough evidence to take the family court. Thus, they tried to get close whenever they could. It disgusted Callie. Her father was ill and all people cared about was exposing him.

She ran to his bedside the moment she squeezed past the door and took his hand into her own.

“Calliope…” he coughed up.

“I’m here, papa.” Callie soothed, combing what was left of his hair with her fingers.

“You came home,” Carlos smiled.

“Of course I did. You take it easy, okay?”

Carlos closed his eyes and nodded his head. He was weak, and he drifted off to sleep shortly.

“Miss Torres?” a soft knock came from the door. “I’m Dr. Teddy Altman, your father’s surgeon.”

Callie turned around and stood to politely shake the woman’s hand. “Call me Callie,” she insisted. “Can you tell me what happened? ”

“Callie…” Teddy sighed, “From the looks of things, your father has had heart failure for years.”

“He’s never mentioned it...” Callie insecurely crossed her arms, “Is he going to make it?”

“He’s responding to the ‘tropes, the medications we’re giving him, but that’s all I can say for now.”

“Is he going to make it?” Callie repeated.

“It’s hard to say…” Teddy trailed off, “But I can tell you that we’re doing everything we can.”

“Is he going to be treated just like everyone else?” Callie asked. She knew the doctor wasn’t oblivious to who she was taking care of. A high-profile man like Carlos Torres drew attention wherever he went.

“We provide treatment solely based on the patient’s clinical needs...” Teddy promised, “without moral discrimination.”

She stayed by her father’s side—only going home to get cleaned up and sleep. When she wasn’t tending to him, she was making sure his casinos were running smoothly. She became a frequent customer at the cafeteria, and even the girl at the coffee cart knew how she took her coffee. She didn’t know if it was love or guilt that made her stay by her father’s side. She felt guilty that she had deserted the family, all those years ago. And if she didn’t keep her head down that day, she would have ran into the blonde-haired blue-eyed surgical resident that stood in front of her while she waited for her coffee.

“How are the casinos?” Carlos asked one day, when he had the strength.

“Don’t worry about them,” Callie insisted, “I’ve made sure Alex and George stay on track; you just work on getting better.”

“You’re getting involved with our operations?”

“Yes, it’s fine, everything is fine.”

“You know, I always thought it would be you that I’d leave the casinos to…”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t cut-out to be a boss,” Callie hung her head in shame.

“Don’t say that, mija, I’m so proud of you,” Carlos admitted.

“You are?” Callie questioned softly.

“Always,” Carlos promised. “My smart, beautiful, girl.”

Callie wiped the tears that trickled down her cheeks and held onto her father’s hand.

Later that evening, Callie was leaving her father’s room to go home when she realized the watchman that usually guarded the door was not at his post. She grabbed her phone to call Giovanni and sighed in relief when he told her that he would fire the man for leaving his post and send over another member of his security team immediately.

In the meantime, Callie waited by her father. It was highly unlikely that any harm would come, but she still had an unsettling feeling in her gut—which amplified when she heard the door open, and she turned her head in time to see a grey-haired man.

“You must be his little girl,” he chuckled.

“What do you want?” Callie asked harshly.

“Well…” he shrugged his shoulders, his hands in his pockets. “I’m here to take him out. I don’t want to hurt anyone else, but now that you’re here... I don’t have much of a choice.”

Callie stood from her seat and took a step back. She was scared—initially— then anger sparked within her. Suddenly, she wanted to get him before he could get her or her father. She quickly weighed out her options. She was unarmed, and had been for years. She knew he had a gun, she could see the outline in his pants. She glanced around the room and in a matter of seconds she had a plan.

She grabbed the flower vase from the nightstand behind her and threw it across the room. Distraction. He lifted his hands to block the glass from hitting his face, and she rammed her right shoulder into his sternum, pinning him against the wall. Attack. The impact caused a couple of his ribs to break, and the noise of the vase shattering onto the floor caused the nurses to start peering into the window. He was able to strike her cheek with the gun, causing the skin to break, but she didn’t feel the pain. Her adrenaline was pumping through her veins and she wanted nothing more than to see him dead.

“Bitch,” he spat, trying to point the gun at her head, but bone-breaking strength pinned his body against the wall. The Torres heir was stronger than he thought.

Callie groaned and struck her elbow against his windpipe. Once. Twice. Three times. The sound of his cartilage breaking from impact. At this point, he was still alive, but the injury to his neck narrowed his trachea and he struggled to take the faintest breath of air. So Callie stepped back, letting him fall to the floor, and she kicked the gun out of his hand. She glanced back, her father was still asleep. She looked forward, the nurses had called security and they were waiting outside the door. She opened it, stepped outside, and a nurse walked to her side.

“You want me to look at that, Miss Torres?” the nurse asked.

“Look at what?” Callie mindlessly asked, still in shock from the events that took place moments ago.

“Your cheek is bleeding…”

Callie took a seat on a nearby chair, exhausted. She couldn’t believe it. She won her first fight.

“What should we do with him?” one of the security guards asked, wanting to be of assistance but also not wanting to get too involved with the mob.

“Leave him. Someone will be here to clean up shortly,” Callie sighed. It was only now that the blood from her cheek trickled down her neck that she realized she was bleeding. “I’m sorry for the noise…” she told the hospital staff, and the few patients that watched the scene unfold, “But nobody saw anything, right?”

All watching eyes turned away and went about minding their own business. Except the nurse who had offered to help, she had gone to get a dressing kit and returned to tend to Callie’s injury.

When Carlos Torres came to consciousness and learned of his daughter’s doings, that Callie was managing the casinos quite well and taking care of business in his absence, he knew what to do before his inevitable death. With her father’s ring on her finger, Callie Torres took her place behind the desk in the office she was forbidden to be in at her childhood home.

“I can’t believe she’s home…”

“I can’t believe she’s ours…”

Callie and Arizona cooed at the sleeping infant in the crib.

“We should go to bed and get some sleep while we can,” Arizona suggested. “She’ll be up wanting a feeding before we know it.”

“You go to sleep before she needs you. I’ll stay up a little longer, just in case she needs anything else...” Callie volunteered.

“We’re across the hall, Calliope, she’ll be okay on her own for an hour or two,” Arizona promised.

“I don’t mind,” Callie insisted.

“Come to bed with me, please?” Arizona pleaded.

“Arizona, I…”

“What is it, love?” Arizona asked, placing a soft hand on her wife’s arm.

“I think I’m scared…”

“She’s safe here,” Arizona promised.

“What if something bad were to happen to her, to us, to our family? I don’t want her out of my sight. I know you we’ve been safe here but you know my past-”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with your past, Calliope,” Arizona couldn’t help but smile. “That’s called being a mother. We’re going to worry about her for the next eighteen years, at least. We’ll have eighteen years to worry about her so please, can we go to bed for now?”

Callie sighed then nodded her head in agreement. Why live in fear when we can take a chance at being happy? She had chosen happiness these past few years, she took a vow to choose happiness with Arizona. Now she vowed this: if anyone laid a finger on her baby, she would hurt them before they could hurt Sofia.

FIN.

#multi #calzona #callie torres #arizona robbins #calzonafic #au #cougarsbait

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everyonewasabird · 4 years

Text

How Cosette Met the Man in the Yellow Coat

For Cosette Week, I’ve written a short vignette set in @midautumnnightdream‘s wonderful Gardens AU, where Fantine stayed in Paris with Cosette, and Georges Pontmercy kept custody of Marius, and they all met and became friends.

After revealing his identity during the Champmathieu affair, Jean Valjean had nothing to return to in Montreuil sur Mer and so was never retaken. Like many men on the run, he eventually found his way to Paris.

The garden next door to Monsieur Georges Pontmercy's garden had been wild for as long as Cosette could remember. For almost that long, she had thought of it as hers. No one else had ever seemed to want it.

Marius was forever looking troubled if she broke a flower in his father's tidy flowerbeds, or dug where she was not supposed to dig, or left bare footprints where she was not supposed to walk. But there was a break in the fence behind Monsieur Pontmercy's beloved rose bushes where she could climb over. Sometimes Cosette brought Éponine, but more often she went alone. Nobody ever minded what she did in a wild garden.

One day in the spring, when Cosette and her mother came for their daily visit, Marius told her that for the past several nights he had seen candles lit in the windows of the cottage in the wild garden.

It was a terrible shock. It seemed to Cosette it could not be right. Sensible people did not live among nettles and briars. She knew this because her mother had been telling her for years to be sensible and come away from them.

"No one can possibly live there," she said.

Marius only looked more pensive. He lowered his voice. "I know," he whispered. "That's why I think it's a ghost."

He was five years older than Cosette--that is to say, twelve--but he was always being silly like this. She could not say for certain it was not a ghost, but in her admittedly limited experience, most things turned out not to be ghosts.

Yet, if some person had taken up residence in her garden, that might be worse than ghosts. It would not be hers any longer, nor would it belong anymore to the birds and rabbits and snails. Adults were forever chopping and trimming things that should not be chopped or trimmed.

So while her mother was deep in conversation with Monsieur Pontmercy, and with Monsieur Bahorel who had stopped by on his way again, though even Cosette knew Monsieur Pontmercy's little cottage was not on the way to anywhere, and while Marius was listening to the adults and Éponine and Azelma and Gavroche were distracted by the cakes Cosette's mother had baked, Cosette slipped away behind the rose bushes and over the fence.

It was wild as ever. The quiet, grassy cavern beneath the bushes and briars, her usual route, was untouched. She crawled through on her hands and knees. The ground was firm and only a little muddy today. It smelled sweet and sunny and green. Dragonflies and bees hummed among the deep green thickets.

Marius must be wrong, she decided. Adults did not live in places like this. And it was far too sunny and lively for ghosts.

She was just coming to these conclusions when she reached the end of the tunnel. She got up, brushed off the front of her skirt, and saw the man upon the bench.

He was a very old man--she knew this because his hair was white. His face was lined and darkened by the sun like Monsieur Pontmercy's, though his shoulders were much broader and his hands were enormous. He wore a long, yellow coat and a round hat, and he gazed off into the caverns of green with a sad expression. He looked the way Cosette's mother did sometimes, when she paused in her sewing to gaze out with dreamy sadness at something far away. Perhaps this was why Cosette was not afraid.

She took a step nearer, and the old man looked up. Perhaps she should have been afraid then, but she was not.

"Are you a ghost?" she asked.

"Do you think I am?"

She looked him up and down, from his old-fashioned shoes to his dusty knee breeches and worn elbows and his old and shabby hat.

"No," she said. "Ghosts don't wear round hats."

"I see."

"Is this your house?"

"It is."

"Please don't cut down the garden," she said in a rush, "I like it. And the birds and rabbits like it, and the--" She was going to say the snails and woodlice also liked it, but she feared that might turn him against it, so she fell silent.

He smiled. All the wrinkles on his tanned face scrunched together, kindly and warm. Even smiling, he looked sad.

"I shan't," he said. "I like it too."

He turned away from her and with his pocket knife cut at some of the the woody vines that covered the tree beside him. When he had a length of them, he began to wind them. In a moment, a small wicker doll lay in the palm of his hand. He held it out to her.

"She should have a flower for her hair," Cosette said.

"Pick one for her."

She was encouraged by his appreciation for flower picking, which Monsieur Pontmercy forbade in his own garden. She searched among the flowers in the dappled shade and at last picked a daisy. The old man wound it solemnly around the doll's head. When he finished, the daisy crowned her like the feathers and flowers that adorned the hats of the fancy ladies in the park.

"She's a very fine lady!" Cosette said, taking her. "Do you think she looks like she might be called Catherine?"

"I think she might."

Cosette cradled the doll on her arm, smiling down at her. She had a doll of her own at home and a tiny lead sword, both of whom she loved dearly. She thought they would both get on well with the newcomer, who carried herself with an arresting air of both wildness and high fashion.

Cosette looked up at the old man. "Come back with me."

His face changed, not dangerously, but warily. "Oh?"

"Yes," she said. "You will meet maman and everyone, and we shall have tea and cake."

"I don't think that would be wise. I'm best where I am."

"Yes," Cosette said. "I like where you are, too. But you haven't any cake, and we have. So you shall come over, and meet maman, and Marius, and Monsieur Bahorel who is visiting, and Éponine and Azelma and Gavroche, and Monsieur Pontmercy, whose house it is, and Monsieur Mabeuf, who sometimes comes to visit, and--"

"I'm afraid I can't come for tea."

"We will be back tomorrow."

"Nor tomorrow."

"Then it is settled," Cosette said. "You will come the day after tomorrow, and I shall visit you over the fence until then, so you will not forget you are welcome. I shall tell maman to make sure there is extra cake for you. You must come, for Marius thinks you are a ghost, and I must prove to him you are nothing of the kind. He acts brave, but I think he is really very frightened. Please, do come."

There was a long pause. The bees and dragonflies hummed, and the dappled shadows flickered over them in the slight breeze.

At last, the old man smiled.

"Very well," he said. "I will come to tea."

#cosette week #gardens au #everybody lived au #cosette and valjean #best au #my work

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fortitudinem · 4 years

Text

TIMELINE FOR DISNEY’S DESCENDANTS UNIVERSE

under the cut because it is a long post

AU – Ante Unionem ( before union, this takes place before the union of the kingdoms under King Adam and counts backwards in years ) IB – Imperium Bestia ( beast’s reign, this takes place after the union of the kingdoms and counts forwards. )

38 AU – In Olympia, The newborn Hercules is stolen from his parents by Hades’ minions who attempt to remove his power and fail, leaving him to be found and taken in by a human family.

36 AU – Moana is born in Motuni, daughter of the Chief.

33 AU – In Lone Keep, Aladdin is born and orphaned in Agrabah.

32 AU – In Northern Wei, Fa Mulan. In Paris, Quasimodo is born and his mother killed on the steps of the cathedral by Frollo, who is then made to sponsor the boy’s upbringing within the walls of the cathedral.

31 AU – In Camelot, Arthur is born and adopted. In Agrabah, Princess Jasmine is born.

30 AU - Princess Merida is born in the Borderlands.

29 AU – In Solaria, Aurora is born to King Stephen and Queen Leah, at her christening the dark fairy Maleficent curses her to die by pricking her finger on a spindle before her sixteenth birthday as revenge for having not been invited. Aurora is betrothed to Phillip. The curse is rewritten by the Good Fairies. Aurora is taken away by the Three good Fairies to be raised as Briar Rose in the woods. In Prydain, Taran is born. In the Golden Citadel, Future Emperor Kuzco is born.

28 AU – Princess Elsa is born in Arendelle. Pocahontas is born.

27 AU – Princess Eilonwy is born in Prydain.

25 AU – Princess Rapunzel is born in Corona and kidnapped by Gothel. Princess Snow White is born in the Summerlands. Princess Anna is born in Arendelle. Ella is born in Verrelac.

23 AU – Tarzan is born and his parents take him on a ship down the coast, but it is shipwrecked and they are forced to trek into the jungle and make themselves a home in the trees. However, they are killed by a leopard named Sabor. Tarzan is found by the Gorilla Kala and taken in by her.

22 AU – Tiana is born in New Orleans.

20 AU – Hercules is revealed to be the son of Zeus and begins his training. Hades finds out and attempts to kill him and release the Titans to go and kill his brother Zeus. This also fails. Hercules gains his godly powers back but chooses to remain on the mortal plane. Hades escapes the souls and goes back to ruling the underworld. In Arendelle, Anna suffers an injury from Elsa’s powers and the trolls have to erase her memories to fix it. Elsa begins to withdraw and the sisters are kept apart. In Motunui, when a blight strikes her people Moana defies her father’s wishes for no-one to leave the reef, leaves the Kingdom and journeys to deliver the heart of the sea to Te Fiti. She succeeds at fixing the goddess and making the seas safe for all once more.

19 AU – In Camelot, Arthur removes the sword from the stone and is crowned King Arthur. Merlin bests the witch Madam Mim. In the Summerlands, King White dies, leaving his second wife, Queen Grimhilde as regent while his daughter is too young to rule.

18 AU – In Villanueve, ten year old Prince Adam receives an unwanted visitor to his castle and he sends them away, but they are revealed to be an enchantress who turns him into a beast to punish him for his selfish behaviour. He has until the even of his 21st Birthday to fall in love and make someone fall in love with him in return.

16 AU – Northern Wei is invaded by the Hun army, Fa Mulan enlists under the guise of a warrior named Ping. She buries the Hun army in an avalanche but is caught out for being a woman and sent home. Instead, she rescues the emperor.

15 AU – In Agrabah, Princess Jasmine tires of meeting suitors and never being allowed outside of the palace, so she sneaks out and meets Aladdin, who is then arrested for kidnapping her. Jafar searches for someone to get him into the Cave of Wonders to find the genie lamp and ends up using Aladdin for this purpose. Aladdin finds the lamp, but ends up taking control of the genie. He arrives at the palace as a suitor for Jasmine, having fallen in love with her. Jafar gains control of the lamp and takes over Agrabah, but is beaten by Aladdin, Jasmine and the Genie. In Prydian, Taran is put in charge of the psychic pig Hen Wen to stop the Horned King getting his hands on the Black Cauldron. He is captured but frees himself and Princess Eilonwy and eventually they destroy the cauldron. In Verrelac, Ella’s mother passes away.

14 AU – In Sherwood Forest, King Richard is away on crusade and his brother Prince John has usurped the throne and is taxing villagers relentlessly. Robin Hood steals from these taxmen and the rich to pay back the poor people who have nothing left. Prince John fails to capture Robin and his men and Richard returns to Sherwood to take back his throne from his brother. In Faraway, Princess Merida defies custom and propriety and accidentally turns her mother into a bear. This is fixed and the evil bear Mor’du is defeated.

13 AU – Aurora’s sixteenth birthday draws near; the fairies prepare to take her back to her parents once they have outmatched the curse. Aurora meets and falls in love with Phillip, unknowing that he is already her betrothed. She is taken back to the castle and found by Maleficent who spells her into pricking her finger and falling into a deep sleep. Maleficent also captures Phillip. The Good Fairies send everyone else to sleep too and then rescue Phillip, who in turn goes to wake Aurora. He slays Maleficent in her dragon form and wakes Aurora with a kiss. Aurora is returned to her parents. Alice Liddell is born in London. In Verrelac, Ella’s father marries Lady Tremaine.

12 AU – Captain Phoebus is named head of the Paris Guards. Quasimodo leaves the church for the first time ever and is proclaimed King of Fools at the festival, but the people of the city mock him and he returns to the church, disheartened. Judge Claude Frollo falls for Esmerelda and suspecting she has placed him under a spell, seeks to burn her for witchcraft. She takes sanctuary at the church and Quasimodo helps her escape, but is later fooled by Frollo into showing him where her true hiding place, the Court of Miracles is. Frollo orders Esmerelda and her people captured and killed. Phoebus helps set them free instead and Frollo is killed in the ensuing battle. Quasimodo is hailed a hero. In Verrelac, Ella’s father passes away, leaving her in the care of Lady Tremaine.

11 AU – In the Golden Citadel, Emperor Kuzco fires his advisor, Yzma, for attempting to run the country behind his back. In retaliation, she turns him into a llama and attempts to have him killed, but the attempt fails and Yzma is turned into a cat. Kuzco is returned to his human self and put back on the throne. In the Summerlands, Princess Snow White has been being raised by Queen Grimhilde, forced to work in the castle she should own. The queen is reclusive and vain and when she hears that Snow White is now considered prettier than her, she orders the girl taken into the forest and killed. Instead the huntsman simply abandons her and tells her to run. Snow White happens upon the cottage of the dwarves and soon makes friends with them. The Queen, however, is told Snow white is alive by her magic mirror and decides she needs to kill her herself with a poisoned apple. She tricks Snow White into eating the apple while she is alone and the dwarves returns to find her seemingly dead. They chase Queen Grimhilde off a cliff and lay Snow White in a coffin of glass, until Prince Heinrich-Florian arrives to bestow upon her True Love’s Kiss. She awakes and the pair unite their lands.

10 AU – In the future King George Town, Governor Radcliffe’s ship arrives from London with the intent of searching the area for gold, but there is none to be found. John Smith falls in love with Pocahontas, the daughter of the Chief of the area. When one of the Chief’s men is shot dead, John is blamed and sentenced to death. Pocahontas saves him and he, in turn, saves the life of the Chief by taking a bullet intended for him. He is shipped back to London for medical care. King Agnarr and Queen Iduna perish in the Dark Sea, leaving their daughters to rule Arendelle. However, no-one takes the throne and Arendelle is without regent.

8 AU - In Villanueve, a small town in the Kingdom of Auradon, Maurice the inventor is captured by the Beast (actually Crown Prince Adam), Belle gives her freedom to rescue him, Belle and Beast fall in love, breaking the curse and freeing Adam back into his human form.

7 AU – In South Riding, the day before her 18th birthday, Rapunzel is accosted in her tower (where she has been living with her mother, Gothel for 18 years in order to protect her magical hair) by a stranger, a thief by the name of Flynn Ryder. She agrees to exchange his belongings for being walked to the city of Corona to see the lanterns that shine every year on her birthday. They are pursued by guards, Gothel and Flynn’s acquaintances, the Stabbington brothers all across the land until they finally reach Corona. Unfortunately, Rapunzel is returned to the care of her mother and taken back to the tower where a memory is triggered of her childhood. She reveals to Gothel that she knows she was the princess taken as a baby. Gothel attempts to imprison her, but Eugene escapes custody and scales the tower, leading to Gothel stabbing him. Rapunzel promises to go with Gothel if she is allowed to heal Eugene, but as she goes to do it, Eugene cuts her hair off, rendering it no longer magical. Gothel falls from the tower, turning to dust on the way down. Rapunzel is returned home to grateful parents. In Arendelle, Queen Elsa is coronated. A celebration is thrown where the doors to the palace are opened for the first time in three years. Elsa’s powers manifest, throwing Arendelle into a perpetual winter and she flees into the mountains. Anna goes after her and after tracking her down, is wounded and brought back to Arendelle for a cure to stop her turning to ice. Elsa is imprisoned in the castle, but escapes. A battle ensues on the frozen fjord, where Anna sacrifices herself to save Elsa, thus thawing her frozen heart. Elsa fixes the weather and takes over the Kingdom.

6 AU – In Verrelac, Ella is living under the care of her stepmother Lady Tremaine, who treats her like a servant and dubs her ‘Cinderella’. She longs to go to the ball that is being thrown for the Prince, to find him a wife, but is denied the chance. Fairy Godmother appears to her and uses magic to send her to the ball in style. Ella and Prince Christopher fall in love, but Ella has to flee the castle at midnight as the magic won’t last. She loses a glass slipper on the staircase, prompting Christopher to send men all over the kingdom looking for her. Despite interference from Lady Tremaine, the pair are united and married. Ella becomes Princess Ella. In London, Alice Liddell is spending some time outside when she spies a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and follows it into a topsy-turvey world. She almost has her head removed by the Queen of Hearts but manages to flee Wonderland back to her own home. In Corona, Rapunzel’s hair magically grows back after she comes into contact with magic black rocks (other adventures ensue).

5 AU – In Atlantica, King Triton’s youngest daughter Ariel is scheduled to make her debut. However, she misses it, sparking her father’s anger. She saves a human prince, Prince Eric of Tirulia, from drowning when his ship capsizes in a storm. When her father finds out, he destroys her prized possessions, driving Ariel into the arms of the Sea Witch Ursula, who promises to make her a human for the cost of her voice and with the caveat that she has three days to get true love’s kiss from Eric. Now human and mute, Ariel is found on the shore by Eric who takes her in and shows her the human world, but after a near miss he is spelled by Ursula into marrying her instead. Ariel fails the task of getting a kiss and turns back into a mermaid under Ursula’s power. King Triton gives himself up for Ariel, leaving Ursula with his sea-controlling sceptre. Ursula is killed when Eric spears her through the heart with a ship. Ariel and Eric are reunited and married. In the Deep Jungle, Tarzan has been raised by his Gorilla family, but they soon come under threat from a hunter named Clayton. Tarzam meets Jane and her father, interacting with another human for the first time since his parent’s deaths. He accidentally leads Clayton back to the gorilla’s home and has to save them when Clayton attempts to take them away with him. The gorilla leader Kerchak is shot and dies, naming Tarzan his successor. Clayton accidentally hangs himself on vines. Not too far away, in another jungle, Mowgli the man-cub has been raised by wolves but with the return of the man-eating tiger Shere Khan to the region they feel it is time to return him to the man village. Mowgli, not wanting to go the man village, joins instead with a bear named Baloo, but ultimately, after several near misses with snakes, monkeys and Shere Khan himself, Mowgli is returned to the man village. In a small village, a woodworker named Gepetto wishes for a puppet he created to be turned into a real boy. His wish is granted (to a degree) and Pinocchio is born, but still made from wood. After being led astray, being locked up, put on a cursed island and eaten by a whale, Pinocchio is finally turned into a real boy, instead of a wooden puppet. In Corona, after a rocky few months, Rapunzel and Cassandra battle the evil Zhan Tiri and win. Varian invents hot running water. King Adam enters into negotiations with Verrelac, Solaria, The Summerlands, North Riding, Camelot, Westerly and Tirulia, promising a new era of prosperity and safety if they would be willing to unite under his banner.

4 AU – In London, the Darling family are living in their townhouse, which is being frequented at night by Peter Pan. The children of the house, Wendy, Michael and John, are taken away by Peter to a magical cloaked island where no-one grows up called Neverland, where they fight pirates, including Pan’s nemsis, the evil captain Hook. Eventually, they return home to their parents. In Paris, Madame Bonfamille alters her will to leave everything to her cats. In response to this, her butler attempts to have them killed so he can inherit her fortune instead. Luckily, the cats survive and Edgar is sent away. In a small city, Jim Dear and his wife decide to go on vacation, leaving their baby in the care of an aunt, who mistakenly identifies their dog, Lady, as dangerous and purchases her a muzzle, prompting Lady to run away and befriend a local stray. The stray is eventually brought home with her and adopted by Jim Dear and Darling. Atlantis is discovered by Milo Thatch. In Arendelle, Queen Elsa is having strange experiences with a voice calling to her, when a series of disasters drives all the citizens out of the city of Arendelle, Elsa and Anna embark on a quest to fix the problem by journeying to an Enchanted Forest where they meet the Northuldra people and learn more about their own past. Elsa journeys further alone, to Ahtohallan, a glacial river of ice said to hold memories. There she finds out that she is the fifth elemental spirit and that their grandfather damaged the magic of the forest by building a dam and then attacked the Northuldra people, prompting the forest to close itself off. She manages to get this message to Anna before freezing solid. Anna is prompted to action by the message and uses rock giants to bring down the dam, even though it would destroy Arendelle. The spirits all agree to spare Arendelle due to her selfless and brave actions and Elsa and the Nokk turn back the tidal wave before it can destroy the city. Elsa chooses to stay in the Enchanted Forest and Anna is crowned Queen Anna of Arendelle. In Tirulia, Melody is born. The ship is attacked by Ursula’s sister Morgana who swears vengeance on the child, prompting Ariel to shut their castle off from the sea, vowing that she will not return to the mer-folk kingdom until Morgana is found. Negotiations are finalised with King Adam for the Kingdoms of Verrelac, Solaria, The Summerlands, North Riding, Camelot, Westerly and Tirulia to unite under his banner.

3 AU – In New Orleans, Tiana agrees to cater for her friend Charlotte’s party for the money to buy herself a building to turn into the restaurant of her dreams. Prince Naveen, a visiting dignitary from the nearby Maldonia, is turned into a frog by Doctor Facilier. Tiana finds that the money is not enough to buy the building and when Naveen, in frog form, asks her to kiss him to turn him back she reluctantly agrees in exchange for the money she needs. However, because she isn’t a princess, she instead also turns into a frog. Tiana and Naveen trek through the bayou to find a voodoo queen named Mama Odie to help turn them back and following her advice they journey back into the city to get Charlotte to kiss Naveen and break the spell, however they run out of time and the spell sticks until Tiana and Naveen are married as frogs, making Tiana and princess and capable of breaking the curse. Tiana sets up her dream restaurant.. In The Summerlands, Bambi’s mother is killed by a hunter. Adam enters negotiations with East Riding, South riding, Northern Wei, Lone Keep, Winter’s Keep and Apheliotia, pressuring them to join under his banner utilising the strength he has already amassed.

2 AU – In London, Roger and Anita Radcliffe’s dogs Pongo and Perdita, give birth to fifteen puppies. These puppies are dognapped by Anita’s college friend and wealthy heiress Cruella De Vil after Roger refuses to sell them to her. She intends to make a coat out of them. The puppies are saved by their parents and it is revealed Cruella also bought 84 other puppies. Pongo and Perdita take them all home with them to be cared for by Roger and Anita. In the Summerland, in the enchanted wood, the orphaned deer, Bambi, wins a courtship duel, chases hunters from his lands and is forced to outrun a forest fire. He is crowned Great Prince of the Forest by the other animals. News spreads across the kingdoms of a flying elephant named Dumbo. Negotiations are finalised with East Riding, South riding, Northern Wei, Lone Keep, Winter’s Keep and Apheliotia, bringing them all under Adam’s banner.

1 AU – In a big city, a box of kittens is left abandoned when only one remains. Oliver attempt to adjust to life on his own and instead befriends a dog named Dodger and his crew of thieving dogs, headed up by their human, Fagin. Fagin owes a lot of money to Bill Sykes, a mobster, so he encourages the dogs to attempt to steal a car. The plan goes awry and Oliver is found by a little girl, Jenny and taken in. The gang, thinking he has been captured, seek to free him and Fagin attempts to use him to get a ransom from Jenny’s rich family. However, upon seeing Jenny he has a change of heart, but Sykes won’t accept that, he kidnaps Jenny. But Jenny is rescued by the dogs and Fagin and Sykes’ car is hit by a train. Oliver goes to live with Jenny. In the countryside, a hunting dog refuses to hunt a fox, instead choosing to protect it. The Wild Kingdom, Borderlands, Farway, Schwartzvald and Olympia sign an agreement to unite under Adam’s banner, with caveats. Neverland’s cloaking magic is removed and it too is forced into the agreement with Auradon.

0 IB – Beast and Belle marry, Auradon is united under one flag with Beast proclaimed High King through popular vote, though it had already been decided. The Isle of the Lost is created, and the villains are captured or brought back from the dead to be placed in this prison.

1 IB – Auradon Preparatory school is formed, utilising an old castle to turn into a boarding school for future generations. The Recycling Act is passed, sending all the garbage from Auradon to the Isle of the Lost. Fairy Godmother is made headmistress of Auradon Prep.

3 IB – Beast declares that magic will no longer be used in Auradon where possible, that it will be phased out and that it will be replaced with technology. While not an outright ban on magic, he makes it very clear that magic is now considered dangerous and frowned upon.

4 IB – Prince Benjamin, Princess Audrey, Prince Chad are born in Auradon, along with the rest of their future classmates. On the Isle of the Lost, Mal, Jay, Evie, Uma and Harry are born. Adam passes a regulatory law on the powers of his King’s Council, taking power from them and giving himself more control.

5 IB – Jane Fae is born in Auradon. Carlos De Vil is born on the Isle of the Lost. King Adam passes a law to make his line of succession the line of succession and to eliminate the ‘vote’ aspect of becoming High King and to pave the way for Ben to become the next High King.

6 IB – King Hubert passes away. Corona and South Riding merge into one Kingdom under the control of King Frederic.

7 IB – In Tirulia, Melody is turning twelve. She sneaks out into the sea often and she ends up finding out about Atlantica and mer-folk even though Ariel has been hiding it from her. She ventures out into the sea and is taken to Morgana, who offers her a tail in exchange for Triton’s trident. Melody, not knowing who she is, finds the trident and gives it to Morgana, but upon realising her mistake, she manages to take it back and Triton encases Morgana in a block of ice and then banishes her to the Isle of the Lost.

9 IB – The last free villains are imprisoned on the Isle, marking the turning point for Auradon. It is marked with a celebration.

10 IB – On the Isle of the Lost, Queen Grimhilde is banished from society by Maleficent for failing to invite Mal to her daughter’s birthday party.

18 IB – Princess Rapunzel is made Queen of Corona by her retiring father.

19 IB – The Sidekicks Act is developed by Prince Ben, giving the workers access to rest days and adequate pay, as well as pension funds and college plans, He starts a movement towards modernisation in every home, especially ones that have previously had woodland animals to do the chores for them.

20 IB – Ben makes a proclamation giving the children from the Isle of the Lost a second chance. He brings over four such children to prove that this program works. Beast steps down as King, leaving Ben in charge. Maleficent is rendered into the form of a small lizard.

21 IB – Ben puts an embargo on travel in and out of the Isle of the Lost, except by pre-approved means. He declares any barges going into the Isle must be full of real supplies instead of garbage. Mal is named Lady Mal at Cotillion. Uma escapes the Isle and disappears into the sea, becoming a fugitive.

22 IB – The VK Day program is set up. Four new children from the Isle of the Lost are chosen to attend Auradon Prep. King Ben proposes to Lady Mal. Princess Audrey is spelled by Maleficent’s Sceptre and attempts to put all of Auradon under a sleeping curse. She is stopped by Lady Mal. At their engagement party, Lady Mal and King Ben decide to remove the barrier once and for all and pardon all the villains. Work begins on turning the Isle in a liveable habitat.

23 IB – Work is completed on a new school for the Villain Kids and a real prison for villains who fall back into their old ways.

notes: i probably need to add more to the IB sections, that is a later problem.

#disney descendants #descendants #disney's descendants #descendants meta #descendants worldbuilding #4000 words later #HISTORY | AURADON.#ABOUT | AURADON.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Thursday, April 22, 2021

Arizona third-grader holds food drives to help in pandemic (AP) Neighbors walked by during their morning stroll, passing families waved from their bikes and drivers slowed down long enough to read the hand-drawn sign—“Dylan’s Food Drive.” The poster was taped to two PVC pipes that were stuck inside construction cones for support. It was a typical scene for 8-year-old Dylan Pfeifer, who has been staging food drives from his home in metro Phoenix in response to the pandemic. Each drive is the culmination of hours of work that involves drawing posters, going door-to-door to hand out flyers and working with his mother to post information on Facebook. Dylan has hosted three drives from his home in Chandler, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of Phoenix. He said he is planning his next one in June, when summer vacation begins. Dylan says he has collected more than 1,000 cans and boxes of nonperishable food and more than $900 in donations. On its website, St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix says it can convert $1 into seven meals, meaning Dylan has been able to provide more than 6,500 meals on just monetary donations. “It’s rare that you see kids at Dylan’s age who have a handle on what the problem is in their community, the people around them who are affected by it, and have the courage to do something about it,” said Jerry Brown, director of media relations at St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance. Erin Pfeifer said the best part for her, as his mother, has been watching Dylan grow.

Verdict heard around the world: Global reactions to the George Floyd case (Washington Post) The conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd resonated globally, with foreign dignitaries and community leaders reacting to a verdict that revived calls for an international reckoning on racial inequality in justice systems around the world. Chauvin, who is White, was found guilty Tuesday of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of Floyd, a Black man he pinned down outside a Minneapolis grocery store last year. Foreign media outlets ran live coverage, showing how the trial resonated far beyond its national context, and highlighting the outsized role the U.S. racial justice conversation plays internationally, as the rest of the world is forced to grapple with its own race relations. Floyd’s killing in May proved to be a moment of reckoning not only in the United States but also across the world, as protesters took to the streets calling for justice in his case and pointing to what they saw as parallels in their communities. In Japan, crowds last year gathered in Osaka holding signs that read “Black lives matter,” while in Germany, protesters took to the streets of Berlin holding placards that said “White silence is violence” and “I can’t breathe.” In Britain last year, they chanted for Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old who was shot by police during his attempted arrest in 2011. In France, they said the name Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old who died in police custody in 2016. In Australia, where Floyd’s death last year spurred a resurgence in activism over Indigenous people’s deaths in police custody, the guilty verdict led to fresh calls for authorities to scrutinize more than 400 Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Surveillance Nation (BuzzFeed News) A controversial facial recognition tool designed for policing has been quietly deployed across the country with little to no public oversight. According to reporting and data reviewed by BuzzFeed News, more than 7,000 individuals from nearly 2,000 public agencies nationwide have used Clearview AI to search through millions of Americans’ faces, looking for people, including Black Lives Matter protesters, Capitol insurrectionists, petty criminals, and their own friends and family members. BuzzFeed News has developed a searchable table of 1,803 publicly funded agencies whose employees are listed in the data as having used or tested the controversial policing tool before February 2020. These include local and state police, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Air Force, state healthcare organizations, offices of state attorneys general, and even public schools. In many cases, leaders at these agencies were unaware that employees were using the tool. Such widespread use of Clearview means that facial recognition may have been used in your hometown with very few people knowing about it. The New York City–based startup claims to have amassed one of the largest-known repositories of pictures of people’s faces—a database of more than 3 billion images scraped without permission from places such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If you’ve posted images online, your social media profile picture, vacation snapshots, or family photos may well be part of a facial recognition dragnet that’s been tested or used by law enforcement agencies across the country.

Violence erupts as Mexico’s deadly gangs aim to cement power in largest ever elections (The Guardian) Violent clashes between rival Mexican criminal groups—and their alleged allies in the security forces—are escalating ahead of mid-term elections in June, triggering a string of political assassinations and the forced displacement of thousands. With more than 21,000 posts in local, state and national government up for election—including 15 state governorships—the 6 June polls are the largest in Mexico’s history, and criminal groups see the elections as an opportunity to further their interests. Much of the recent fighting has focused on the western state of Michoacán, where the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (Jalisco New Generation cartel) has stepped up its conflict with an alliance of local groups calling themselves the United Cartels. The violence has forced more than a thousand people to flee the area, feeding the flow of migrants heading to the US to seek asylum. “They are leaving because they get caught in the crossfire, because their homes have been destroyed, [and] because the main roads into [the area] have been carved up to stop the advance of the Jaliscos,” said Gregorio López, a Catholic priest who has sheltered refuges in the nearby city of Apatzingán. The Jalisco cartel, Mexico’s fastest-expanding criminal network, considers Michoacán, rich in international trafficking routes and extortion markets, a key building block in its bid for national criminal hegemony. But its decade-long attempt to take over the region has so far been frustrated by the local opponents’ deep political and social roots. With neither side able to impose its designs on the other or willing to back down, more than 15,500 homicides have been recorded here from January 2011 to February this year.

In Putin’s Standoff With Navalny, Many Russians Put Faith in President (WSJ) Thousands of demonstrators are expected to take to the streets in many Russian cities Wednesday in support of Alexei Navalny, the jailed opposition leader who has galvanized popular discontent with the long rule of President Vladimir Putin. But even as the opposition leader stirs dissent, Mr. Putin can count on the support of many Russians who either trust in his leadership, fear the uncertainties of political change or disapprove of Mr. Navalny and his protest movement. “If it were up to me, Putin would stay another 20 years in power,” said fashion designer Irina Larkina from her home in a drab apartment block in this Russian city on the Baltic sea. “He’s the one who has boosted our living standards and given us respect for ourselves again.” Even amid falling living standards and Western sanctions, Mr. Putin continues to enjoy enviable approval ratings. Sociologists say while few may feel deep support for Mr. Putin, the Kremlin can continue to count on approval ratings of around 60%. “There’s a point at which popularity won’t fall any further,” said Lev Gudkov, head of independent polling organization Levada Center. “The country has fallen into two camps, but the Kremlin knows there is a wealth of support it can still draw from within the population, even though it’s fallen in recent years,” he added.

Indian hospitals buckle amid virus surge (AP) Seema Gandotra, sick with the coronavirus, gasped for breath in an ambulance for 10 hours as it tried unsuccessfully to find an open bed at six hospitals in India’s sprawling capital. By the time she was admitted, it was too late, and the 51-year-old died hours later. Rajiv Tiwari, whose oxygen levels began falling after he tested positive for the virus, has the opposite problem: He identified an open bed, but the resident of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh can’t get to it. “There is no ambulance to take me to the hospital,” he said. These tragedies are now everyday occurrences in the vast country, which is seeing its largest surge of the pandemic so far and watching its chronically underfunded health system crumble. Tests are delayed. Medical oxygen is scarce. Hospitals are understaffed and overflowing. Intensive care units are full. Nearly all ventilators are in use, and the dead are piling up at crematoriums and graveyards. India recorded over 250,000 new infections and over 1,700 deaths in the past 24 hours alone, and the U.K. announced a travel ban on most visitors from the country this week. Overall, India has reported more than 15 million cases and some 180,000 deaths—and experts say these numbers are likely undercounted. “The surge in infections has come like a storm and a big battle lies ahead,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in an address to the nation Tuesday night.

Further evidence in case against Indian activists accused of terrorism was planted, new report says (Washington Post) An unknown hacker planted more than 30 documents that investigators deemed incriminating on a laptop belonging to an Indian activist accused of terrorism, a new forensic analysis finds, indicating a more extensive use of malicious software than previously revealed. The report will heighten concerns about the controversial prosecution of a group of government critics under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Known as the Bhima Koregaon case, the prosecution is considered a bellwether for the rule of law in India. Human rights groups and legal experts view the case as an effort by the government to clamp down on critics. The space for dissent has diminished in Modi’s India, where journalists, activists and members of nongovernmental organizations have faced arrest and harassment. The activists accused in the case deny the charges against them. They include a prominent academic, a labor lawyer, a leftist poet, a Jesuit priest and two singers. All are advocates for the rights of the country’s most disadvantaged communities and vocal opponents of the ruling party. Many of them have been jailed for nearly three years as they await trial.

Community pantries offer reprieve from covid-19 hardships in the Philippines (Washington Post) They were of different ages, genders, and walks of life. Some had been there since sunrise. A number carried umbrellas and canvas bags. Hundreds stood in a line that stretched three blocks on Wednesday, all waiting for their turn to stock up on donated food. The community pantry, as it is known, bore a sign: Give what you can, take what you need. A week after the initiative began as a humble cart with free vegetables and canned goods, over 300 similar donation-driven efforts have popped up across the Philippines. The grass-roots action underlines the economic pain Filipinos are experiencing as they battle one of Southeast Asia’s worst coronavirus outbreaks and a harsh lockdown. The idea began when a small-business owner teamed up with local vegetable vendors and farmers who offered their produce to those in need. Within days, it grew into a multi-sector effort encompassing a variety of food and essential items—bread, eggs, fruit, rice, water, noodles—donated by rich and poor alike.

Iran Rattled as Israel Repeatedly Strikes Key Targets (NYT) In less than nine months, an assassin on a motorbike fatally shot an Al Qaeda commander given refuge in Tehran, Iran’s chief nuclear scientist was machine-gunned on a country road, and two separate, mysterious explosions rocked a key Iranian nuclear facility in the desert, striking the heart of the country’s efforts to enrich uranium. The steady drumbeat of attacks, which intelligence officials said were carried out by Israel, highlighted the seeming ease with which Israeli intelligence was able to reach deep inside Iran’s borders and repeatedly strike its most heavily guarded targets, often with the help of turncoat Iranians. The attacks, the latest wave in more than two decades of sabotage and assassinations, have exposed embarrassing security lapses. Most alarming for Iran, Iranian officials and analysts said, was that the attacks revealed that Israel had an effective network of collaborators inside Iran and that Iran’s intelligence services had failed to find them. “That the Israelis are effectively able to hit Iran inside in such a brazen way is hugely embarrassing and demonstrates a weakness that I think plays poorly inside Iran,” said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House.

With most adults now vaccinated, Israelis are busting loose (Washington Post) Israel is partying like it’s 2019. With most adults now vaccinated against the coronavirus and restrictions falling away—including the lifting this week of outdoor mask requirements—Israelis are joyously resuming routines that were disrupted more than a year ago and providing a glimpse of what the future could hold for other countries. Restaurants are booming outside and in. Concerts, bars and hotels are open to those who can flash their vaccine certificates. Classrooms are back to pre-covid capacity. The rate of new infections has plummeted—from a peak of almost 10,000 a day to about 140—and the number of serious coronavirus cases in many hospitals is down to single digits. The emergency covid-19 ward at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv resumed duty as a parking garage, and waiting rooms are suddenly flooded with non-covid patients coming for long-deferred treatments.

Rebels threaten to march on capital as Chad reels from president’s battlefield death (Reuters) Rebel forces set their sights on Chad’s capital N’Djamena on Wednesday following the battlefield death of President Idriss Deby, threatening to bring more disruption to a country vital to international efforts to combat Islamist militants in Africa. Schools and some businesses were open in N’Djamena on Wednesday but many people had opted to stay home and the streets were quiet, a Reuters witness said.

#headlines #news

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red-will · 4 years

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I don't know what to do with good white people.

I've been surrounded by good white people my whole life. Good white people living in my neighborhood, who returned our dog when he got loose; good white teachers in elementary school who pushed books into my hands; good white professors at Stanford, a Bay Area bastion of goodwhiteness, who recommended me M.F.A. programs where I met good white writers, liberal enough for a Portlandia sketch.

I should be grateful for this. Who, in generations of my family, has ever been surrounded by so many good white people? My mother was born to sharecroppers in Louisiana; she used to measure her feet with a piece of string because they could not try on shoes in the store. She tells me of a white policeman who humiliated her mother by forcing her to empty her purse on the store counter just so he could watch her few coins spiral out.

Two summers ago, my mother showed me the welfare reports written about her family. The welfare officer, a white woman, observed my family with a careful, anthropological eye. She described the children, including my mother, as "nice and clean." She asked personal questions (did my grandmother have a boyfriend?) and wrote her findings in a detached tone. She wondered why my grandmother, an illiterate Black mother of nine living in the Jim Crow South, struggled to find a steady job. Maybe, she wrote in her loopy scrawl, my grandmother wasn't searching hard enough.

This faded report is the type of official document a historian might consult if he were re-constructing the story of my family. The author, this white welfare officer, writes as if she is an objective observer, but she tells a well-worn story of Black women who refuse to work and instead depend on welfare. Occasionally, her clinical tone breaks down. Once, she notes that my mother is pretty. She probably considered herself a good white person.

In the wake of the Darren Wilson non-indictment, I've only deleted one racist Facebook friend. This friend, as barely a friend as a high school classmate can be, re-posted a rant calling rioters niggers. (She was not a good white person.) Most of my white friends have responded to recent events with empathy or outrage. Some have joined protests. Others have posted Criming While White stories, a hashtag that has been criticized for detracting from Black voices. Look at me, the hashtag screams, I know that I am privileged. I am a good white person. Join me and remind others that you are a good white person too.

Over the past two weeks, I've seen good white people congratulate themselves for deleting racist friends or debating family members or performing small acts of kindness to Black people. Sometimes I think I'd prefer racist trolling to this grade of self-aggrandizement. A racist troll is easy to dismiss. He does not think decency is enough. Sometimes I think good white people expect to be rewarded for their decency. We are not like those other white people. See how enlightened and aware we are? See how we are good?

Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.

When my father was a young man, he was arrested at gunpoint. He was a Deputy District Attorney at the time, driving home one night from bible study when LAPD pulled him over. A traffic violation, he'd thought, until officers swarmed his car with shotguns aimed at his head. The cops refused to look in his wallet at his badge. They cuffed him and threw him on the curb.

My father is mostly thankful that he'd stayed calm. In his shock, he had done nothing. That's what he believes saved his life.

I think about this while I watch Eric Garner die. For months, I avoided the video, until we arrived at another officer non-indictment. Now I've seen the video of Garner's death, as well as a second video I find even more disturbing. This second video, taken immediately after Garner has been killed by a banned chokehold, shows officers attempting to speak to him, asking him to respond to EMTs. They do not yet know that he is dead, and there's something about this moment, officers shuffling around as an EMT seeks a pulse, that is so bafflingly and frustratingly human, so different from the five officers lunging and wrangling Garner to the ground.

In the wake of this non-indictment, a surprising coalition of detractors has emerged. Not just black and brown students hitting the streets in protest but conservative stalwarts, like Bill O'Reilly or John Boehner, criticizing the lack of justice. Even George W. Bush weighed in, calling the grand jury's decision "sad." But even though many find Garner's death wrong, others refuse to believe that race played a role. His death was the result of overzealous policing, a series of bad individual choices. It would have happened to a white guy. The same way in Cleveland, a 12-year-old Black boy named Tamir Rice was killed by officers for playing with a toy gun. An unfortunate tragedy, but not racial. Any white kid playing with a realistic-looking toy gun would have been killed too.

Darren Wilson has been unrepentant about taking Mike Brown's life. He insists he could not have done anything differently. Daniel Pantaleo has offered condolences to the Garner family, admitting that he "feels very bad" about Garner's death.

"It is never my intention to harm anyone," he said.

I don't know which is worse, the unrepentant killer or the man who insists to the end that he meant well.

A year ago, outside the Orange County airport, a white woman cut in front of me at the luggage check. She had been standing next to me, and soon as the luggage handlers called next, she swooped up her things and went to the counter. She'd cut me because I was black. Or maybe because I was young. Maybe she was running late for her flight or maybe she was just rude. She would've cut me if I had been a white woman like her. She would've cut me if I had been anyone.

Of course, the woman ended up on my flight, and of course, she was seated right next to me. Before the flight took off, she turned to me and said, "I'm sorry if I cut you earlier. I didn't see you standing there."

I often hear good white people ask why people of color must make everything about race, as if we enjoy considering racism as a motivation. I wish I never had to cycle through these small interactions and wonder: Am I overthinking? Am I just being paranoid? It's exhausting.

"It was a lot simpler in the rural South," my mother tells me. "White people let you know right away where you stood."

The problem is that you can never know someone else's intentions. And sometimes I feel like I live in a world where I'm forced to parse through the intentions of people who have no interest in knowing mine. A grand jury believed that Darren Wilson was a good officer doing his job. This same grand jury believed than an eighteen-year-old kid in a monstrous rage charged into a hailstorm of bullets toward a cop's gun.

Wilson described Michael Brown as a black brute, a demon. No one questioned Michael Brown's intentions. A stereotype does not have complex, individual motivations. A stereotype, treated as such, can be forced into whatever action we expect.

I spent a four hour flight trying not to wonder about the white woman's intentions. But why would she think about mine? She didn't even see me.

In elementary school, my older sister came home one day crying. She had learned about the Ku Klux Klan in class that day and she was afraid that men in white hoods would attack us. My father told her there was nothing to worry about.

"If a Klansman sat at this table right now," he said, "I'd laugh right in his face."

My mother tells stories of Klansmen riding at night, of how her grandmother worried when the doctor's son—a white boy—visited her youngest sister because she feared the Klan would burn down their home. When I was a child, I only saw the Klan in made-for-TV civil rights movies or on theatrical episodes of Jerry Springer. My parents knew what we would later learn, that in the nineties, in our California home, surrounded by good white people, we had more to fear than racism that announces itself.

We all want to believe in progress, in history that marches forward in a neat line, in transcended differences and growing acceptance, in how good the good white people have become. So we expect racism to appear, cartoonishly evil like a Disney villain. As if a racist cop is one who wakes in the morning, twirling his mustache and rubbing his hands together as he plots how to destroy black lives.

I don't think Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo set out to kill Black men. I'm sure the cops who arrested my father meant well. But what good are your good intentions if they kill us?

When my friends and I discuss people we dislike, we often end our conversations with, "But he means well."

We always land here, because we want to affirm ourselves as fair, non-judgmental people who examine a person not only by what he does but also by what he intends to. After all, aren't all of us standing in the gap between who we are and who we try to be? Isn't it human to allow those we dislike—even those who harm us—a residence in this space as well?

"You know what? He means well," we say. We lean on this, and the phrase is so condescending, so cloyingly sweet, so hollow, that I'd almost rather anyone say anything else about me than how awful I am despite how good I intend to be.

I think about this during a car ride last weekend with my dad, where he tells me what happened once the cops finally realized they had arrested the wrong man. They picked him up from the curb, brushed him off.

"Sorry, buddy," an officer said, unlocking his handcuffs.

They'd made an honest mistake. He'd fit the description. Well, of course he did. The description is always the same. The police escorted my father onto the road. My father, not yet my father, drove all the way home without remembering to turn his headlights on.

Brit Bennett recently earned her M.F.A. in creative writing at the the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. She is currently a Zell Postgraduate Fellow, where she is working on her first novel.

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mybeautifulchristianjourney · 3 years

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Today in Christian History

Today is Monday, September 27th, the 270th day of 2021. There are 95 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

1435: Repose (death) of Savvaty. He was the inspiration behind the famous Solovetsky monastery, having settled as a hermit on one of the almost uninhabitable islands of the White Sea in northern Russia.

1557: Philippina Graveron, a young Huguenot widow, is martyred at Paris.

1674: Death of Thomas Traherne. His poetry, considered worthless at his death, will be rediscovered by William T. Brooke who will point them out to Alexander Grosart much later at an outdoor book stall. Bertram Dobell later will prove the poems were the work of Trahern. Trahern’s poems will come to be recognized as among the best of the seventeenth century minor poets, brimming with childlike delight in God’s works.

1680: Iyasu I convenes a church council in Ethiopia at which he deposes leaders of a sect he dislikes.

1715: Death at Charterhome, London, of Dr. Thomas Burnet, an English theologian, and author of Sacred Theory of the Earth, popular in its day. He had tried to explain Noah's flood by describing the antedeluvian world as a hollow, oval-shaped object filled with water.

1787: Thought to be a runaway slave, George White is arrested while searching for his mother. He will become a famous itinerant African-American preacher.

1827: [despite his tombstone, which says September 26] Death of Freeborn Garrettson, for many years a leading Methodist itinerant pastor, later the presiding elder in the state of New York.

1839: G. Tradescant Lay, an English physician, asserts at the first annual meeting of the Medical Missionary Society in Canton, China, that he will endeavor while he has life, to create a nearly universal system to freely give the benefits of “rational medicine” (as opposed to pre-scientific medicine) to the world’s poor.

1947: The Church of South India is inaugurated at Madras by the merger of three denominations: Anglicans, Methodists, and the South India United Church (Presbyterian/Congregationalist).

1995: Death of Missionary Sam Sasser. In 1960 Sasser had begun serving as a missionary in the Marshall Islands and Samoa.

#Today in Christian History #September 27 #martyrdom of Philippina Graveron #death of Dr. Thomas Burnet #Iyasu I convenes a church council in Ethiopia #George White is arrested while searching for his mother #The Church of South India is inaugurated #death of Thomas Traherne

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samueldays · 4 years

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A persistent elision

Related to that previous post, let’s look a bit more closely at how consistently the Pulitzer-Winning Respectable Sources lie by omission. I’m going to look at the NYT in particular. Here’s a formatted Google search which finds their mentions of “Trayvon Martin” in the past year, so you can experiment yourself with filters and personalized search results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=trayvon+martin+site:nytimes.com&tbs=qdr:y

How often do they say Martin was committing violent assault upon George Zimmerman, and Zimmerman shot in self-defense? Surely that’s an important fact that should prevent one holding up Martin as a poor innocent victim and an example of the terrible racism supposedly keeping blacks down.

The first is a meta-page with no content, just links to other pages.

The first page there doesn’t mention Martin’s assault.

Since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Mr. Leonardo, a Queens-born artist, has focused on social justice art, dealing with issues like the numbers of black and Latino men in prison, racial inequality, police use of force. “I Can’t Breathe” is a self-defense workshop where participants learn how to escape the chokehold that killed Mr. Garner, as Mr. Leonardo tells them that police will interpret self-defense as resisting arrest.

Not the second either.

Since Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, the deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement or white vigilantism (and the drawn-out cases that result from them) have consistently dominated news cycles, often graphically so. Cellphones, Facebook Live and even Snapchat have been crucial in uncovering how these events occurred.

The third also ignores the assault, tangentially mentioning Zimmerman:

After Mr. Martin was killed, the police invoked the Stand Your Ground law when they initially declined to arrest George Zimmerman, who had fired the weapon. Mr. Zimmerman argued that he acted in self-defense but did not offer a Stand Your Ground case. He was acquitted when a jury found he was justified in pulling the trigger.

The fourth is the most honest so far, and I credit it:

The Florida law came under scrutiny after the police invoked it in declining to arrest George Zimmerman after he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. Mr. Zimmerman said he shot Mr. Martin in self-defense after the teenager punched him, slammed his head against the sidewalk and knocked him to the ground. A jury found Mr. Zimmerman not guilty of murder or manslaughter charges in 2013.

The fifth is right back to wringing its hands over the poor innocent dindu nuffin in a way that ideally should discredit BLM, but in practice credits Martin. “Confrontation.”

Mr. Arbery was killed three days before the anniversary of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed African-American teenager whose confrontation with a Florida neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement.

The sixth, again, shows how Martin’s thuggery is largely irrelevant to his iconization.

LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Udonis Haslem called the team meeting. They had been talking about the killing of Trayvon Martin for a week or so, mulling over what it meant to them as black men, processing it as fathers, trying to formulate a response to it as athletes and role models. [...] “We are Trayvon Martin,” James captioned the photograph they took there, heads bowed and hoods up. The Heat would take the floor that night with calls for justice, and Martin’s name, scrawled on their sneakers. Other players in other cities soon added their support to the campaign.

The seventh google result I get is just the first link from the meta-page in the first result, which I covered already.

The eighth:

“Mom,” I said, “we are refugees.”

In 2013, when George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second degree murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin — a black child gunned down in his own neighborhood, branded a thug in a hoodie — I knew I had to leave America.

The racism that had become all too familiar to me as a black woman was too much to bear.

Ah, yes, the racism of shooting people who are beating one’s head in. Can you not bear the thought that you might accidentally knock a man to the ground, climb on top of him, punch him in the face, and then get shot by racism?

But I should blame the NYT, not the paranoid interviewee. This fear of “racism” is to a great extent driven by NYT and other propaganda.

The ninth article:

MIAMI — The mother of Trayvon Martin joined hundreds of demonstrators at a rally in downtown Miami on Sunday, demanding racial equality following the death of George Floyd last month at the hands of a white police officer in Minnesota.

Sybrina Fulton joined the demonstrators who carried signs that read “Stop Killing Us” and “We Are All Equal” at the Torch of Friendship, a 60-year-old monument erected as a welcoming beacon to the city’s Latin American and Caribbean neighbors. The protest organized by several churches was one of several across Florida on Sunday.

Fulton’s unarmed son, Trayvon Martin, was killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, while walking back from a central Florida convenience store in 2012. The teen’s killing helped plant the seeds of the Black Lives Matter movement, which grew after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.

“unarmed” and “while walking back”. (contemptuous spitting noises)

Finally, the tenth is by a law professor, rather than a garden-variety urinalist, and it’s still deceptive.

Despair over Michael Brown’s death and the fact that Mr. Wilson faced no criminal consequences for it catapulted the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter — first used in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin — into national consciousness. It catalyzed a cultural renaissance by drawing attention to the problem of police violence against and abuse of African-Americans and, more broadly, by celebrating blackness and protest.

If you hadn’t followed the evidence at trial, you might have concluded from this article that Zimmerman was getting away with murdering children, rather than Zimmerman being acquitted because Martin was first beating Zimmerman’s head hard enough to cause a fracture and two black eyes.

#all #journalism #journalism delenda est #martin-zimmerman

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teatitty · 5 years

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Rogues Lore

First of all I want to thank @schweeeppess for letting me spam her with Rogues lore 2 months ago cuz it made this post so much easier to type out when I can just copy-paste everything and then edit it to be more cohesive lmao

Second this is under a read more because it is A Lot

Leonard Snart AKA Captain Cold

He grew up with a super abusive father and his only refuge was when he would hang out with his grandfather in his grandfather's ice truck. When the grandfather died, he grew tired of his dad's abuse and set out to start a criminal career and moved to central.

(He's the one who started the rogues!)

He found blueprints for a "cold gun" which he ended up making from scratch (it’s also canon that he knows the gun so well he can remake it out of scraps in about 30 seconds to a minute) and had three main rules in his group: No Killing, No Harm To Women Or Children and No Drug Use. His cold gun is capable of interfering with the speedforce cuz it can reach “absolute zero” which is even colder then Mr Freeze's tech.

He's also the only cold-based villain capable of mastering this temp. In New Earth he was described as an "adversary" but in Prime Earth (same backstory as before mind you) he's described as being a straight villain whose only rule in the group is "no killing" (which seems to be a pretty flexible rule these days cuz DC has made him more, well, down with killing). He's also much younger here then he was in NE.

In Flash 2016 #17 we see another upgraded version of his gun that's capable of separating the Flash from the speedforce directly and, in doing so, causing Barry excrutiating pain. Generally, he and Barry had more respect for eachother in NE, to the point that Len even considered him family. In PE, though they have teamed up now and again, Len is far more hostile towards Barry, sometimes even being written in a way that suggests he wouldn’t mind if Barry died.

Sam scudder AKA Mirror Master (the first one!)

He was a simple convict who just really wanted to learn how to get inside a mirror's reflection. He practiced in a hall of mirrors and, once he succeeded, became Mirror Master. He was a frequent foe for Barry and, during Crisis on Infinite Earths, died around the same time Barry did.

He was the one who discovered the "mirror world". At one point he got himself trapped there and hated that the mirror world could just get him whatever he wanted instead of him stealing it so he got Barry to bust him out. He could also use mirror's to mind control ppl (dont ask) and this intrigued Barry.

On PE he's dating Lisa Snart (Len's younger sister) and is the only Mirror Master to exist. In N52 he, Len, Lisa, Mick and Marco all got fused with their weapons for a while and given meta-human abilities which I. hate because it took away what made them all so cool (I'm fine with Marco tho and you'll find out why in a minute) he's also a really big attention seeker lol

Hartley Rathaway AKA Pied Piper

Alright most of Hartley's info is from NE so: he was born deaf to wealthy parents who got him very high-tech hearing implants. He became obssessed with sounds and started experimenting with sonic technology. Bored of his rich life (and sometimes it's implied he had ableist and/or homophobic parents too) he took to a life of crime after learning how to hypnotize people through music (Pied Piper ayyy).

He was the first person to ever successfully break out of Iron Heights and did so because he befriended the rats there and used them to help himself escape, adding more to his whole Pied Piper thing. After Barry died he gave up crime and started working to help the poor and underprivelaged (I'm not saying he quit specifically bc of Barry's death buuuuuut most of the Rogues did so).

He struck up a close friendship with Wally and came out as openly gay! On PE all that we know for certain is that he's a "reformed vigilante" who's the conductor for the Central City orchestra. He used to share an apartment with Barry (yes for real) before he moved in with his bf, David Singh (also Barry's director in the CCPD). Lisa was the one who convinced him to come out to the Rogues, and they were all chill with being gay, their problem came when he started dating David who is, you know, a cop.

He has a pet rat called Moon (cute, right?). Also in pre-N52 canon (cant remember if it was NE specifically or older) Hartley once had a nervous breakdown after Barry arrested him so Barry took him to get help at a mental health hospital :')

(Some artists draw him blonde, some brunette and others go more for reddish-brown it’s kinda confusing)

Marco/Mark Mardon AKA Weather Wizard

On NE he's a two bit criminal called Mark Mardon (he's also white and yes thats important to note) but one day, after escaping from a cop van, he ran to find his brother, Clyde, who was a scientist only to discover his bro had died of a heart attack (however, there's implications that he actually murdered his brother and simply blocked out the memory).

He then found Clyde's notes on how to create a wand to control the weather and made it for himself. The worst he ever did on NE was imprison a town in winter and after Barry's death he went into semi-retirement (told you the Rogues all did this)

On PE however! He and Clyde are Latino and are the heirs to a huge cartel! Clyde takes over the cartel and Marco wants nothing to do with that life. After their father dies, Marco runs away and eventually becomes Weather Wizard.

He comes back when he hears his brother has been murdered and gets accused of the crime. He finds out it was Clyde's wife, Elsa, who orchestrated the whole thing and, in a fit of grief and anger, kills her with lightning. He also tries to kill himself at the same time but it doesn’t work. After her death, he curls up into a ball and starts crying because he feels like he hasnt got any family left but then Lisa shows up and is like "yo the rogues are still here for you bitch"

His emotions affect the weather in this continuity and I’m a weak bitch for that but that’s 100% my bias for Ororo Munroe showing itself lol

James Jesse AKA Trickster (the first one!)

James Jesse was born to the Flying Jesses, famous circus performers. He, however, was afraid of heights, and preferred reading stories of Western criminal Jesse James.

He invented air-walking shoes to get rid of his acrophobia, and this led to his fame as an aerialist at the circus. Buuut he wanted more excitement in life and became a conman instead! He had a lot of wacky gadgets like exploding teddy bears and, after Barry's death, moved from Central to Hollywood and started working in special effects.

Like Hartley, he even attended Barry's funeral. He once beat the devil, Neron, at his own game and eventually started using his skills for good, collecting weapons of incarcerated villains so they couldnt fall into the wrong hands. He eventually died protecting Hartley during Final Crisis. Deadshot was the one who got him.

On Prime Earth his parents were straight up neglectful and, instead of creating his own boots, he stole them from STAR labs instead. This version of him is also WAY more fucked up and murdery then NE to the point us long-term Rogues fans got really upset at how much DC had changed him

On NE his real name is “Giovanni Giuseppe” (swear this is, like, the only italian name DC knows) and on PE the Flying Jesse's were a deliberate rip off of the Flying Graysons

George “Digger” Harkness AKA Captain Boomerang

The illegitimate son of an American toy-maker, W.W. Wiggins, and an Australian woman, Betty Harkness, George Harkness was raised in poverty in the small town of Kurrumburra, Australia. His stepfather, Ian Harkness, hated the boy and made his life miserable. (Like canonically Ian was an abusive alcoholic and even abused Betty who was too ill to defend herself or George. The reason George goes by "Digger" is cuz that's what his mom used to call him before she died; it's aussie slang for "soldier")

In school, Harkness crafted a boomerang. He discovered he had great skill with the aboriginal weapon and often used it for mischief with his best friend, Mick Wentworth. He further honed his skills while spending some time hiding from the law in the Australian bush.

When Digger was eighteen, he and Wentworth robbed a general store and were able to make their escape with the aid of Digger’s boomerang. However, this incident caused Digger’s stepfather to kick him out of the house.

His mother gave him a plane ticket to Central City and told him to get in touch with Wiggins. Wiggins had been searching for a spokesman for W.W. Wiggins Game Company's latest product, a toy boomerang. Under the alias "George Green", Digger auditioned for and got the job. Wiggins outfitted him with a costume and gave him the name "Captain Boomerang."

Ridiculed by the audience, he took to a life of crime instead.

His story is pretty much the same on PE. The only diff being there was no childhood friend and Digger made boomerangs in an attempt to impress his absentee father. Also he has a habit of making up fake stories about himself lmao

The only one's he really doesnt stab in the back are the Rogues and Harley Quinn but everyone else? fair game. In Flash: Rebirth he and Barry even exchange favours for info and it’s implied this is a regular thing for them

Roscoe Dillon AKA The Top

He technically appears on PE but he's one of Thawne's acolytes so lets just. Skip that and focus on NE instead

Literally his whole thing is that he was obssessed with spinning tops as a kid and taught himself how to spin fast enough to deflect bullets. He became a criminal, tried to blackmail the entire world once, and was Lisa's first boyfriend!

He was also her ice-skating coach and taught her how to spin super well like himself! He has a very confusing characterization tho cuz sometimes he was written to be all about revenge and killing but other times he was just like the other rogues; a blue-collar criminal who stole things because he liked to.

He died eventually which I'm not going to try to explain cuz it's...yeah. There's also this whole thing where he could possess people after his death but this was in the silver age and that shit just happened sometimes so whatever

In short: Roscoe has a really cool concept to him but nobody really knew how to write him so he ended up all over the place

He also has a Spinning Top shaped satellite in space where he stores all his loot (dont ask)

Mick Rory AKA Heatwave

Mick Rory has pyromania! Very severely! He was born on a farm outside of Central and, as a child, was very fascinated with fire. This turned into an obssession and he ended up burning his house down. So fascinated by the flames, however, he never ran to get help, watching his whole house burn down (and killing his parents inside) and he ended up living with his uncle after this.

On a schooltrip, his schoolmate stuck him in a meat locker as a prank where he gained Cryophobia (fear of the cold) so in retaliation Mick locked the boy in his house and set the thing on fire (again, pyromania). He ran away again and ended up becoming a fire-eater for a circus. That didn't last long either because, surprise!, he burned the place down.

Desperate to find a way to help his obssession, he happened to see the Rogues operating in Central and decided to take up villainy. At first he and Len got into a few altercations with eachother due to Mick's fear of the cold but eventually they settled their differences and Len officially brought him into the Rogues.

Mick kinda relies on them to keep his pyromania in check basically. There was a time where he was, briefly, reformed and gained a close friendship with Barry (even being roommates with him. By then he'd already known Barry's real identity for a few years) and used his pyro knowledge to become a fire-fighter consultant. At one point he even worked for the FBI

His backstory is practically the same on PE the only difference being that he never expressed regret for burning down his house, and actually says he wishes he’d burned down the whole neighbourhood instead

Lisa Snart AKA Golden Glider

When I say her NE version is leagues above PE I mean it.

Like Len, she suffered abuse under their father and escaped it by becoming a figure skater under the name Lisa Star for the Futura Ice Show! Her fame came from her very fast spins, a trick she was taught by Roscoe. When Roscoe died while fighting Barry (brain complications though there’s more to it, but again I’m not going to get into that) Lisa turned to villainy, blaming Barry for her lover's death.

Her attempts on Barry and Iris' lives were always foiled. She used a pair of ice skates that created their own ice flow, and had many gadgets that caused hypnotism. She also stole Len's gun once but retooled it into a twirling Baton.

When Barry died she renounced her feud with him and attempted to go straight again with her brother. They created a company that recovered lost or stolen items. Eventually she returned back to a life of crime, went through three boyfriends, all using the name Chillblaine (she named them that iirc), until the fourth Blaine killed her. Len got revenge on that one

On PE, however, Lisa had a brain tumor (it got cured later) and was a tag-a-long villain for her brother and her boyfriend, Sam Scudder. This version of her never became a skater and is instead murderous just for...the sake of it. She also has this thing about wanting to be the leader of the Rogues instead of Len, and when she's in charge of them for a while the Rogues’ morals change and killing is suddenly fine so. Whatever. NE Lisa is the best (also her whole outfit? Stunning)

Roy G. Bivolo AKA Rainbow Raider (not technically a Rogue anymore but he was a member for a while)

He appeard on PE as Chroma but gets murdered by Grodd so we only have NE canon to use (they did my mans dirty)

He was a wonderful painter from an early age but was born colourblind. His father, an optometrist, was determined to create a device that would let him see in full colour. Toy didnt get the device until after his father's death but unfortunately the device didnt let him see colour.

Instead, the goggles could project beams of light that could become solid objects, make him invisible, blind his opponents, or affect the emotions of his targets. Angry that he couldnt pursue an artistic career. he decided to become a thief and primarily stole famous artwork. He was eventually killed by Amunet Black

Evan McCulloch AKA Mirror Master (second one)

Evan was born to rich parents Louis and Carol Erikson who gave him up for adoption because they were too young to be responsible parents. He ended up at the McCulloch orphanage.

At age 8 he was molested by one of the older boys there and, in self-defence, ended up drowning the him. At 16 he left the orphanage, taking on the name of the woman who raised him and moves to Glasgow (he’s scottish btw)

He found that it was super difficult to hold down a job but, needing to make ends meet and constantly breaking the law anyway, he turned to a life of crime and became a hitman and then a professional assassin.

One day he got hired to kill his birth father but was unaware of who his target was until after he took the shot. Grief-stricken, he attended the funeral and tried to work up the nerve to approach his birth mother. By the time he had, she'd committed suicide and he turned himself in for his crimes.

Either the Scottish or US government gave him Sam's old Mirror Master gear and hired him to be a mercenary.

His first job was scaring Animal Man into stopping his activism, but he failed because of Animal Man’s wife. Refusing to actually kill the wife and children (thanks to his own morals) he gets fired and helps Animal Man seek revenge.

He continues to work as a criminal and supervillain-for-hire, even working out of costume as a mercernary in Britain.

Eventually he found his way to Central City and joined the Rogues, taking over as Sam Scudders official successor. There was a time where he had a Cocaine Addiction which caused friction between him and Capt Cold because of Len’s rule against drug use.

Throughout all of this, Evan made sure to donate a portion of all the money he ever got to the McCulloch Orphanage

Axel Walker AKA Trickster (second one)

On PE, Axel was recruited by the Rogues early on in his career. He messed up during a heist and they kicked him out (they'd never do that but w/e)

He worked for Mob Rule as a henchman for a bit then went freelance when MB was arrested. He saved Cold's life cuz he felt he still owed Cold a debt. When Grodd took over Central, Axel tried to join his side but Grodd tore his arm off from the bicep (ouch) and left him to die on the street. Axel got himself a cool sleek robot arm and returned to crime anyway. He got accused of murder, Barry cleared his name, but he still got sent to Iron Heights for other charges.

The Rogues, hearing about this, went to bust him out and were like "okay fine u can hang with us" and he stayed with them from then on

In NE canon, while Jesse was working with the FBI, Axel stole all his gear and ended up working for Penguin in Gotham. Penguin gets attacked by Tarantula, Axel fails to stop her and a few days later he gets caught by Robin (Tim) for causing trouble in Gotham.

He moves on to work with Amunet Black, but after her defeat is offered to join the “new Rogues” by Capt Cold and accepts the offer. Some stuff happens, he fights the OG Trickster who leaves him in a dumpster and tells him never to pick up the gear again, then Axel answers an ad from some college students asking for a trained hero to teach them some things, he has dinner with them and then kills them all. Neat.

When Jesse died, Axel redonned the Trickster gear and started operating his own crew out of an old Rogues hideout. When the Rogues returned to Central, Axel found out they were gonna retire and go underground. He rejoined them to help them get revenge on Inertia for manipulating them into killing Bart Allen, and he stayed with the group henceforth.

Evan explained to him that joining the Rogues wasn’t a matter of him wanting to be one, but why he needed to be one

In short: Axel is a punk kid who wants to fit in with the big boys and the Rogues are the only ones who really gave him a chance, acting like his older siblings. It’s worth noting that canon never mentions any relatives for him so, as far as we know, crime is all he’s ever known

And that’s all of them!

#random facts #the rogues #this took. so long to do #good luck reading it all lmao!#god i'm tired #i love them a whole lot can you tell?#tw: abuse mention #tw: drug addiction mention #tw: assault mention

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victorianwhitechapel · 5 years

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Polly Nichols', the seafaring man and the murder of Annie Smith

The day of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols funeral was held, on Thursday September 6th 1888, the Irish Times published: “THE WHITECHAPEL MURDER Up to midnight no further information has transpired respecting the Whitechapel murder. Whatever information may be in the possession of the police they deem it necessary to keep strictly secret, but considerable activity is quietly being exercised in keeping watch on suspected persons. It is believed that their attention is particularly directed to two individuals, one a notorious character known as "Leather Apron," who has been the terror of women in the neighbourhood for some time, and a seafaring man who has already stood trial for a crime not far short of murder“.

On the JTR Forums it was proposed a suspect.

Between April 26th and May 15th 1888 many newspapers reported the Lea-Bridge Mystery. The body of Elizabeth Ann Smith, a 25 year old girl, was discovered near a broken umbrella with the handle missing in Lea Bridge (Leyton, London) by Edward Hatley and the Police-Constable Yates about 150 yards of the White House beerhouse. She had been missing for several days.

Annie Smith, as she was known, was the daughter of Mr. Albert Smith, builder who resided at Hemsworth-street, Hoxton (a district in North East London, part of the London Borough of Hackney, England) whom she lived with, along with her mother, two brothers and six sisters. She was unmarried and worked as a machinist for Messrs. Itobins, of Hoxton-street, drawing a weekly salary.

Her fiancé, a carpenter named William Steel who lived in the same street as her and courted her for six years, said he left her when he found her standing alone in a bar. He slapped her and left, but this was some days before she died and apparently the fiancé was cleared of suspicion.

On Saturday, April 21st 1888, Annie left to Lea-Bridge, which was apparently a hot spot for the working class in the East End. There were many pubs, coffee houses, eateries, live music , and a large stage for dancing. Annie was seen by many people dancing with a well-dressed young man of about 19 or 20 whom she may have arrived with. Shortly thereafter, she was found propped up outside a coffee house. The owner carried her in and it took him about 15 minutes to revive her. He felt she had been drugged by someone who then sat her in front of his shop. He made the observation that she smelled strongly of Brandy and snuff.

When the girl awoke she spoke strong language about some unnamed man. She also mentioned she was heart-broken, because of her recent break-up. A little while later, she was once again seen with this well-dressed young man, and once again was found in a ‘stupid state’ as though drugged. This suspicious young man was not seen after this time and remains unidentified.

Following this, witnesses saw some men talking with Annie and behaving strangely, grabbing at her dress, and seeming to pass something from hand to hand. When called out, Annie checked her purse and found her wallet missing. Had the young man from earlier stolen it while she was drugged? These young men stated they were simply trying to keep her dress from dragging in the mud. One was George Anthony, described as a “bargeman engaged on the river.” He stated that he and a friend walked with Annie a short ways but then left her when Charles Cantor (or Contor, Carter) came along. Annie said she was heading home. Charles Cantor was found and stated that he had walked with her a short ways then she went on alone. The area these men say they were at and the route Annie would have taken home were far away from where her body was discovered. She would have had to walk across a field and then into the marshes.

Sadly, a week was lost in finding her. On Sunday the 22nd April 1888, when she had not returned home, Annie’s mother and sisters went about doing their own detective work, tracking her to the Lea-Bridge area, finding out who she’d been seen with, and even speaking directly with George Anthony and others involved. They then went to different police stations, but none of them wanted anything to do with it. The mother then went to the Worship Street magistrate and spoke with Mr. Hannay, who made sure she got publicity in the Times of April 26th. After this, the lax men of J Division were forced to take action. By the time they found Annie’s body she had been in the marsh waters for a week and half of her face as well as one arm had been eaten away by water rats.

The police were convinced a murder had occurred and believed the girl had been ‘brutalized’. They felt the umbrella played a part. Emma Elizabeth Smith’s name was never mentioned (she'd been attacked on March 3rd and died the following day).

It was stated in the press that the umbrella was identified as belonging to Annie, but her sister Amelia Smith swore she left home without an umbrella and had never possessed that particular one. It was found some distance from her body, but a witness at the inquest said the body could have originally been in the marshes near the umbrella and would have drifted away over the course of the week. For all we know, the umbrella could have been discarded by anyone at any time simply because it was broken. But it’s interesting that the missing handle was not found.

Doctor Charles Taylor Aveling, divisional surgeon of police, who had had over twenty years' experience in the profession by 1888, and who was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, and a Master of Surgery and MD from the University of London, conducted post-mortem. He performed a comprehensive examination, including examinations of the internal organs and a careful search for external marks of violence, before reaching the conclusion that death had indeed occurred by drowning.

The police ended up arresting Charles Cantor and George Anthony for the crime and stated that there were two other men they were looking for as well, although charges were not pressed against the last two ones. The inquest took place in Hackney (London), and its jury, presided over by Wynne Edwin Baxter, could only determine that Annie had been ‘Found Drown’. The week in the water had taken its toll. There appeared to be much bruising about her, but the doctor Aveling felt that could also have been caused by the time in the water. He found no evidence of recent intercourse, but that would have been an impossible feat anyway after a week in the water, unless her tissue had been significantly torn, which apparently it hadn’t.

The police proceeded with their case against the young men. Charles Cantor was eventually released on bail, because there was no evidence against him at all, the judge felt. George Anthony did not get off so easy and had to wait in jail until the time came when, lacking any real evidence against them, or even proof that the girl had been murdered, both Cantor and Anthony were let loose with fines.

There's more information about the inquest at the London Magnet Newspapers Archive.

George Anthony could have been the ‘seafaring man’ that the police was looking for regarding the Polly Nichols’ murder, because he was a bargeman, ‘who has already stood trial for a crime not far short of murder,’ and much to police chagrin, was let go. Both the Annie Smith and the Mary Nichols cases were J Division and investigated by the same men.

More info on Find My Past website - April 1888 newspapers.

More info on Find My Past website - May 1888 newspapers.

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filmjrnl365 · 5 years

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#112 Funeral Bed of Roses (1969)

Director: Tashio Matsumoto

Director of Photography: Tatsuro Suzuki

Japan

Gerow: While you eventually ended up a filmmaker, I heard that you originally wanted to be a painter. I wonder if you could talk about the relation between cinema and painting and why you decided on a career in film.

Matsumoto: Well, I loved painting. I had been painting since middle school, but Japan was very poor at the time I was about to enter college in the early 1950s. To do painting meant you weren't going to eat. Even so, I wanted to paint, but my parents were bitterly opposed to me going to an art school and said they wouldn't pay for art school examinations or tuition. In those days, there weren't part-time jobs around like there are today, so there was no way I could have done it on my own. So I gave up on art school and entered the medical course at the University of Tokyo because I was interested in the brain and problems like schizophrenia.

But even though I didn't necessarily grow to dislike that, I thought I had only one life to live and I wanted to pursue art. Without telling my parents, I changed my major half-way through to art and art history in the literature faculty. Tokyo, however, didn't really have any classes teaching you how to paint, so I studied art theory and history in school and learned painting on my own. In my studies, I learned for the first time that there was an avant-garde cinema in Europe in the 1920s that visually was deeply related to contemporary art--a fact that struck me like a bolt out of the blue. Though I couldn't see these films in Japan, I was strongly stimulated by foreign books and articles about them. I felt that this, an area where issues of art and cinema overlapped, was what I had been searching for.

Of course, I loved movies and went to see them a lot from the time I was in middle and high school. I was even treated like a juvenile delinquent and was arrested twice by the Shinjuku police because I skipped school. Well, I was that much in love with film, and I asked a friend of mine who had a stock holders pass--his father was in the theater business--to lend it to me, telling him I'd return it whenever he wanted to go. I'd go to school until noon and then go straight to Shinjuku where I'd see one movie after another, going into every first-run theater in Shinjuku from one end to another. To see all the first-run films in Shinjuku meant that I was seeing almost all the releases.

Source: yidff.jp: Matsumoto interview with Aaron Gerow

I’m not going to reconstruct the plot, because it might be more helpful for a first time viewer to reign in their expectations. So here’s my shopping list of divergent visual cues / associations that I encountered in this film:

Andy Warhol’s factory, Twiggy, Psychedelics, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Kubrick, Oedipus, Slasher films, Dada and Surrealism, Transvestites, Cinema verite, Pop art, Porn movie sets, Yukio Mishima, William S. Burroughs, David Lynch, Kitsch, Men as Geishas, Drug culture, and acid rock / carnival soundtrack.

Now, splice all this up into a non –linear narrative, and capture it in great black and white cinematography, and that’s what you’re going to get hit with for the duration of the film. Funeral Bed of Roses is an unforgettable movie on several levels.

One: This is a movie way ahead of its time. As a film that puts homosexuality front and center, this movie was half a century ahead on a topic that has only now made it safely into mainstream media, the fact that it emerges from Japan, is in some ways more startling. True, Japan does have a rich artistic tradition of merging sexuality, violence and the grotesque, but it is also known as a very traditional and highly repressed culture. Japan was also a culture struggling to artistically re-identify itself after being leveled by the fire bombings of World War II. Japan had to come to grips not only with its own past cultural heritage, or what was left of it, but also come to terms with its immanent and rapid post-war modernization.

Two: As an example of taking a somewhat bizarre and unorthodox approach to a classic myth (Oedipus), it’s not the first work of art to excavate this ominous Greek tragedy, but certainly one of the more unexpected adaptations you’ll ever see. The Oedipus translation emerges more clearly toward the end of the film, but our main character, Eddie (Pita) has issues with his condescending / abusive mother and his absent father. Because of the collage format of the film, these connections at first appear as abstract visuals with no context, but the story slowly gathers the fragments together into narrative cohesion.

Three: Stylistic treatment. From the opening visual, and really through to the finish- the cinematography is excellent. It is strong in terms of image, tonality, composition, cropping and graphic innovation, where it puts its black and white palette through a strobe -like psychedelic montage. If that wasn’t enough, there are passages of film where the male / female actors are interviewed about their homosexuality, and how they fit into this rarified part of Japanese subculture. These passages are quite beautiful, and rather disarming when we hear the blunt and deliberate answers to probing, personal questions. But these narrative and stylistic breaks add to the overall variety of visual texture in the film. Additionally, the movie is a joy to watch when it spills out onto the Tokyo streets, camera in tow. The reactions of bystanders as transvestites are filmed in a mock gang fight adds yet another unique layer to an already bizarre scenario.

Four: Picturesque eroticism. While not straightforward in its graphic representation of sex as a film like Realm of the Senses ( #31), it does treat the theme of eroticism and obsession in a visually alluring manner. Making sexuality and its accompanying psychic impulses into a visually intriguing confrontation has been with art forever, but in this film, its close stylistic counterpart is Surrealism. Literary stories like Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, or the sexual juxtapositions of the paintings of Rene Magritte, or Marcel Duchamp, come to mind when viewing this film. I’m not sure of the weight Matsumoto’s gives to his visual references, but whether he was channeling them or not, the Surrealists would have embraced this film immediately. They would have loved it, not only for its taboo subject matter, but for its cut-up compositional methodology.

The onset of the twentieth century saw the artistic avant–garde in both Europe and America taking the position to critique industrial culture, conservative institutions, and adapt the language of the machine age to explore emotional / sexual /psychic territory that culture uniformly tagged as forbidden. Abrasive content and uncomfortable depictions became the means for modern art to divest itself of sanitizing its messages in nineteenth century classicism, and confront its audience, however small, with some of the tangible and psychic brutalities of the modern era. With Matsumoto’s initial calling as a painter, for a film like Funeral Bed of Roses to emerge during the 1960’s makes perfect sense. At the last half of the twentieth century, two world wars, and conflict in Asia provide perfect conditions for this avant-garde film to freely pull from the file cabinet of counter-cultural iconography to piece together its unique contribution. The fifties and sixties saw the emergence of counter-culture and drugs making their way into mainstream consciousness, and this film is clearly a byproduct of this phenomenon. From its cinematic, self-referential passages to its historic allusions, it is in many ways a fledgling product of post modernism. This category /term would have been in its infancy at the time Matsumoto made this picture, but the historical and stylistic earmarks are there. Andy Warhol is often cited as the first post-modern artist. One who consciously adapted to and utilized images from commercial mass media, not merely as process, but in terms of content as well. They are very much products of the advertising / television age. Funeral Bed of Roses comes across in much the same manner, a transvestite geisha on a street corner as traffic speeds by serves as a very modern study in contrasts. Scenes of drug use and sexuality form a good deal of footage, topics and images that only a few decades prior would have been met with stringent censorship.

We get comfortable with certain expectations we have from movies. We want them to deliver certain things in certain ways, and to break these expectations is to invite scorn from the audience, or even worse, all out neglect. This is not always an easy movie to watch. Many won’t like the subject, many won’t like the treatment, many will be confused, some won’t even be patient with it being in black and white. But, this film is unique and certainly has more than its share of kooky and beautifully alluring visuals. It might be better to see it while you’re on psychedelics, I’m not really even sure about that, but that’s yet another layer this quirky film has to offer.

One of a kind.

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#tashio matsumoto

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the-penny-dreadfuls · 6 years

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Donna Sue Davis was considered “the darling of the neighborhood”. That, in fact, is what everyone called her. The happy baby was adored by those living in Sioux City, Iowa and was especially beloved to her family. It was hard not to love Donna Sue. With her blonde curly lochs and sparkling blue eyes, she looked every bit of a living Kader baby doll. At twenty-one months, Donna Sue was the youngest of James and Mary Davis’ three children. They lived together on the first floor a neat, white duplex on Isabella Street. It was considered the ideal place to raise a family. Carefree children would run up and down the streets under their mothers’ watchful eyes. Summertime had always been considered a favorite season due to its jovial nature, but the summer of 1955 would change the neighborhood forever.

On the night of July 10th, 1955 Mary Davis tucked Donna Sue into bed. She placed some favorite toys - a teddy bear, a doll, and a red purse - inside the crib just in case the baby woke and needed comfort. Donna Sue was never far from her mother, though, as the crib was set at foot of her parents’ bed. After kissing her daughter goodnight, Mary opened the bedroom window in hopes of catching a breeze amidst the sweltering temperatures. Then, she goes to the living room to sit with her husband while she reads the paper.

Just after 9:30 PM George Berger, the Davis’ neighbor, notices a man cut through the hedges at the Davis house. It was dark, and too difficult to see exactly what the man was doing, but he seemed to be walking along the South side of the house. For a few short minutes the man disappears. Berger is about to brush off the incident when the man reappears. He walks across the yard in a hunched over position, now carrying a bundle in his hands. Berger is not the only neighbor to see him. Mr. and Mrs. Fjeldos, the couple living behind the Davis family, is alerted by the loud barking of their dog. Mrs. Fjeldos turns on their back yard light to see what all of the ruckus is about. The light reveals a strange man creeping down their alley way. Quickly, she alerts her husband, who goes after the man with a flashlight. The stranger tries to hide behind some bushes, but does not manage to escape. Mr. Fjeldos passes the flashlight off to his wife while he runs back inside to alert the police. Before the police can arrive, the man jolts through the alley, with Mr. Fjeldos right on his heels, and runs a block before he once again disappears into some bushes. He is never seen again.

A worn out Fjeldos returned to his home. He was standing outside, still waiting for the police to arrive, when a crowd of curious neighbors began to gather. Fjeldos was in the middle of telling them what had just happened when he was interrupted by a shrill scream. “My baby is gone!”

At 9:40 PM Mary Davis returned to her bedroom to check on Donna Sue. All she found was an empty crib. She and James search through the room just in case Donna Sue managed to climb out, but the baby was nowhere to be seen. What they did discover was the screen to the bedroom window was completely removed. James bolted downstairs to report the kidnapping.

Several other neighbors reported seeing a white male skulking around the neighborhood that night, but none were able to give a clear description of the suspect. He was believed to be in his 30’s, of average height, and wearing a white shirt with khacki pants. A man fitting this description was was seen by a Sioux citizen as he was driving near a motel. He passes a man in a white shirt and khaki pants standing by a black Charlovet van beside the road. In his arms was a baby. The scene was rather unusually considering it was past 10 PM, but the man drove on without giving it a second thought. He was not aware of the significance of that moment until he learned about the kidnapping. He was, however, able to remember the car had a Nebraska license plate.

A massive search carried out all of Sioux City. Everyone was desperate to help. Despite the tireless work of the police officers and many volunteers, little Donna Sue was not returned home. That afternoon a farmer by the name of Ernest Oehlerking was heading to Sioux City when a bright pink garment lying in the ditch caught his eye. Oehlerking stopped his tractor and got out to investigate. It was a pair of small pajama bottoms with a pair of rubber pants. Immediately, Oehlerking cancels his trip and hurries back home to alert the authorities. It would be his wife that would find Donna Sue. During the late afternoon of July 11th, 1955 Ernest’s wife, Genevieve, set out with Florence, her sister-in-law, set in their cars to search the area of William Oehlerking’s farm. With their daughters in tow, the drove along the road while keeping a sharp eye for another possible clue to the baby’s disappearance. The temperature that day blazed up to 96 degrees, but the women were determined to help a fellow mother, who was braving a nightmare miles away.

The quiet concentration is broken when one of the girls screams. Through sobs, she frantically tells the other passengers that she saw the baby’s body on the edge of a cornfield. They pull over to investigate. The girl was right; there, lying amongst broken corn stalks, was Donna Sue’s battered body. It takes only a glance for the Oehlerkings to know little Donna Sue had not died peacefully. Her body and face was littered with bruises, many of which are centered near her eyes. The pink pajama top that her mother had put on just the night before was wound tightly around her neck. The autopsy report would later reveal more grim and horrific details. In addition to the beating, the one-year-old suffered from a broken jaw. There were multiple cigarette burns on her buttocks, and she had been raped. The final cause of death was ruled as blunt force trauma. Investigators believed that the murderer threw Donna Sue out of his car as he drove away. The impact from the body broke several cornstalks. By the time she was found, Donna Sue had been dead nearly twelve hours when she was found.

Quickly, Genevieve and the children drove home to call the police. Florence remained in the cornfield, waiting, beside Donna Sue. She tore up a paper sack that she found nearby, and used it to cover up the baby in attempt to salvage her some dignity.

Once the case became a homicide the FBI became involved. Six federal agents were brought into investigate. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at that time, made a public comment that, although simple, perfectly summarized the feelings of those in Sioux City. “Get him!”

Days after Donna Sue’s body being recovered, investigators interviewed several men that fit the description of the man who was seen prowling around the Davis’ neighborhood. One of these men were Otto Wennekamp, a thirty-year-old, who sometimes worked as a farm hand. He was taken in for questioning on July 13th after he attempted to trade in his car for a rental. An employee at the car rental business noticed that there were cigarette burns on the dashboard of Wennekamp’s car, and promptly contacted the police. Wennekamp was interviewed by FBI agents, but was ruled out as a suspect by his air tight alibi.

Because the case had become incredibly well known to the public, investigators received an overflow of tips. There were also confessions. A drifter appeared at the police department and began to tell officers how he killed Donna Sue. While his confession was disturbing, a further investigation proved that the drifter was in another state where he was working at carnival. He later recanted his confession.

A break in the case occurred six months later on December 10th, 1955. Thirty-two-year-old Virgil Vance was arrested for intoxication and disorderly conduct in Reno, Nevada. While in custody Vance, an Iowan native, told police that he had raped and murdered a little girl during the previous summer after stealing a car. The confession shared some strikingly similar details to what happened to Donna Sue. The FBI met with him, but just as it was with the drifter Vance changed his story. He was officially cleared as a suspect on December 20th.

After the summer of 1956 leads lessened and the case went cold. James and Mary Davis would not live to see justice for their baby girl. James passed away in 1996 at the age of seventy-nine. Mary passed away after a long battle of illness on February 13th, 2006. She was eighty seven-years-old. As of September 2018th the murder of Donna Sue Davis remains unsolved.

Photos from the Sioux City Journal

#Donna Sue Davis #True Crime #tcoriginal #cold cases #unsolved cases #child murder #tw child murder

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