#New York would suddenly be beach front property

[yourheartinyourmouth]

I live in the Northeast USA. We’ve literally had ice storms that have knocked the power out for days or even weeks.

[agentroz]

Meditations on a Painting by Edward Hopper | Oneshot

VACATION’S ALL I EVER WANTED: Write a oneshot about your character going on vacation! (800 words)

Date: Sometime in 1973 Featuring: Rosalind Peterson, Richard Peterson Warnings: A brief reference to falling from a tall building, but only hypothetically

Rosalind Peterson, age thirteen, receives a cultural education.

The Petersons did not take vacations. Saving the world was more than a full-time job, and their daughter saw plenty of it anyway. There was no time and it would be a frivolous use of the Society’s money to book a trip to the beach or the mountains— and the Petersons knew they could hardly forget about their duties long enough for a vacation to be worth it. But they did travel. And quite often, their daughter traveled with them. And on this specific occasion, while his wife discussed top secret assignments not even he was privy to, Richard Peterson decided it necessary that said daughter receive a bit of a cultural education while the family briefly stopped in New York for a meeting with HQ.

At thirteen, Rosalind did not yet know about the Society. She only knew that her parents had very important international jobs that she should not ask questions about. So she didn’t. She watched the skyscrapers roll by the window of the taxi cab with her wide, bespeckled eyes and tried to imagine all of the people who worked in them, likely doing equally important, equally mysterious international jobs. 

She didn’t ask where they were going. By now, she had learned to deduce rather than ask, to find the puzzle pieces herself and fit them together. The cab was moving west, past lively neighborhoods with children playing in the streets over a bridge into a bustling, industrious downtown. And now it was headed north, the skyscrapers beginning to thin and the steel-gray office buildings fading into ivory apartment buildings that reminded Rosalind of London.

The building they stopped in front of couldn’t have been an apartment complex, though. It looked like a palace.

Rosalind stopped in her tracks on the steps into the museum, eyes wide as saucers, mouth hanging slightly open. It was difficult to impress a stoic, serious girl like Rosalind, but the Metropolitan Museum of Art had succeeded, and she hadn’t even walked in yet.

“Come along, there’s not much time,” Richard urged. Rosalind followed dutifully.

She inspected each painting, each statue carefully, with the serious nature of an estate agent appraising a property for value. She said nothing. Richard said nothing. Each stared at the art work in question, and then, as though on cue, moved onto the next after an appropriate period of time had passed.

Rosalind did not believe she had a cold relationship with her father, but they had never quite been the type to dance on tiptoes or exchange warm words of affection. She felt closest with him in moments like this: both of them standing side-by-side, doing very grown-up and very sophisticated things together, like they were old colleagues instead of a middle-aged man and his teenage daughter. They didn’t speak, save for the occasional thoughtful hum from Richard that made Rosalind pay extra attention.

“What do you think of this one?” Richard asked suddenly, as the pair stopped in front of a painting in the modern section of the museum

The young girl stared at the painting. Office in a Small City, by Edward Hopper. No, Rosalind didn’t like it at all.

Rosalind wanted to choose her words carefully, though. Her father was inviting her to a very grown-up conversation between two culturally-educated people. “This one is very boring,” she finally said after much consideration. Her eyebrows furrowed critically, her hands clasped behind her back. “And a bit unrealistic. It looks as though those windows don’t have any glass in them. And he’s got nobody else there. It’s got to be the middle of the morning, based on the placement of the shadows— are we supposed to believe he’s come into the office on a weekend? In that case, he must have quite a lot of important work to do, and yet his desk seems entirely empty.”

Richard just hummed maddeningly, inscrutably thoughtfully.

“Perhaps he has come into the office on the weekend. But can you be so sure? Remember what we say about jumping to conclusions, Lindy.”

Rosalind’s cheeks heated slightly. “We shouldn’t do it.”

“Yes, exactly. But those are some interesting observations.” He spoke slowly, carefully, and Rosalind hung on every word. “Perhaps Mr. Hopper intended that the windows not appear to have glass in them— do you see how the subject almost seems more connected to the world outside his window than the work in front of him? And perhaps it is intentional that he appear so solitary… Mr. Hopper’s work is often believed to be about deep, abject loneliness.”

Rosalind blinked, and she finally could put her finger on why she didn’t like the painting. It had awakened some strange, bewildering feeling in her that she couldn’t identify. There was too much space, too much light. The man was far too isolated, like he might fall out through one of the glassless windows into the vast city below and hardly anyone would notice. Perhaps it was a painting about loneliness.

Perhaps, Rosalind thought, she understood loneliness. 

That didn’t mean she liked to be confronted with it.

“Well, that is very sad for him,” she said finally, swallowing down a strange urge to cry despite being a whole thirteen years old and far, far too mature for that.

“Yes, it is.”

And with that, they moved onto the next painting, and the next, and the next, and afterward there was afternoon tea, and a trip to the top of the Empire State Building.

“I still don’t understand why there wasn’t any glass,” Rosalind said suddenly, looking out over the cityscape through her binoculars. 

“What’s that, Lindy?”

“In the painting. By Mr. Hopper. You said it was a painting about loneliness, but you also said perhaps Mr. Hopper wanted him to be more connected to the world outside his window than the work in front of him. That doesn’t make sense.”

Either Rosalind was seeing things, or an amused smile had crept up onto her father’s features. 

“Very astute,” he said, looking out onto the clusters of buildings that lay before them, all the tiny people moving in streams like minnows in a pond. “I didn’t realize you were still thinking about that. I suppose artists can be contradictory sometimes. Or perhaps Mr. Hopper had thought of a specific kind of loneliness. Like the feeling of being alone in a room full of people.”

“But there were no other people in that picture.”

“No other people that we could see. But there was a whole world in those buildings beyond, wasn’t there?”

Rosalind didn’t know what to make of that, so she just nodded and picked up her binoculars again. But it stuck in her mind the rest of the day. And the rest of that trip to New York. And for a very long time after that, peering out the window of her very small office in a small school in a very, very small city where she has come to spend the rest of her days.

[bella-caecilia]

Nr.17 Cobert- Modern. 😘💕❤️love your latest work dear 😘💕❤️

Thank you, dear! <3 If I remember correctly that refers to the prompt “peppering their face in kisses”, so I decided I let this new prompt be a continuation of that. The first part can be read here. I’m not quite sure how this one turned out but I hope you like it! 😊

17 – tugging on the bottom of someone’s shirt

Cora and Robert went to retrieve their luggage and made their way out of the airport building to hail a cab. They’d arrived at New York to visit Cora’s homeland together. In their three years of marriage and the years before when they were dating, they’d never done this. In fact, Robert had never been to the States. This summer, however, they were making up for that. Robert was about to get to know her parent’s home, the places of her childhood, but Cora was most looking forward to the last part of their trip, where they had rented a small house on the beach near Cincinnati. This particular place was one Cora herself didn’t know, and it was the best setting for making new memories together. But first of all, they were meeting with her parents. 

Cora sensed how Robert was fidgeting beside her on the backseat of the taxi. He must be more nervous than he let on. He probably didn’t mention anything because there was no apparent reason to be tense. He’d seen her parents several times, he wouldn’t have to prove himself. But the bobbing of his left knee spoke a clear language. Cora took his hand and gave him a warm smile. Robert composed himself a trifle and reached out to brush a strand of her pony to the side. It fell back to her forehead in a swift motion.

“You look good today, Mr Crawley”, Cora gushed with the intention to ease his nerves even more. He chuckled in response and took in her radiant smile. She spotted his adoring look and felt the press of his hands and knew it had worked.

“Well, you look radiantly in comparison, my dear”, he responded.

She laughed and shook her head, “Oh, stop it!”

“You started.”

“Well, just know, I won’t take any flirting in front of my parents”, she stated while staring out of the window.

“Oh, we’ll see about that…”, he teased and turned to glance out the window at his side.

“Robert Crawley…”, she warned without looking at him. Their hands were still clasped and they resumed to sit in silence for a while.

…

When they arrived at the New York house of Cora’s parents, they were in a relaxed mood. Cora’s plans had worked out and Robert had got rid of his nervous state. They pulled their luggage up the long driveway and Robert admired the grand mansion. He knew the large estate of his own parents, but he wasn’t aware of the fact that the Levinson’s property was this pompous.

“Wow, this is quite something,” he turned towards Cora and saw her scrunching her nose. She was no big fan of vastly display of luxury. Robert couldn’t suppress a smirk at the manner she scrunched her nose. It made him want to press light kisses there on her beautiful small nose. She turned towards the house and he observed her profile. Yes, he definitely wanted to kiss her nose. And when he was at it, he wanted to kiss her cheeks too, and her forehead, and her chin. To list this was actually redundant, for there was no part of Cora he didn’t want to kiss. He averted his gaze. This was not the time to think about that sort of things.

They went up the steps in front of the wide entrance and Cora rang the doorbell.

Martha Levinson opened the front door swiftly with a glowing grin on her face.

“My darlings! There you are! Cora, it really wasn’t necessary to hail a cab, but I’ve told you often enough,” Martha exclaimed and shook her head in lack of understanding. Yes, she told them many times in beforehand, and Cora kept insisting on not wanting to be picked up.

“But please, come in, you two!”

She stepped to the side and they clutched their luggage to enter the enormous building.

“I invited some friends and all of the family I could reach. You deserve a proper welcoming after all,” Martha said matter-of-factly and swished down the hall in front of them after shutting the door.

“What? But why didn’t you tell us,” Cora responded with slight confusion. She shot Robert a questioning look and he just shrugged his shoulders.

“Where would that leave the joy of surprise?”

“I don’t see why you prefer the joy of surprise over the joy of anticipation,” Cora shook her head. They followed Martha down the hall. After being allowed to park their suitcases in some random room, they immediately went to see their reception committee in the drawing room.

“No way we could freshen up for minute?” Cora asked although knowing the answer already.

“Cora dear, this is just family and friends! There is no need to make such a fuss!” and with that Martha opened the door to the drawing room, announcing them with her booming voice.

Before entering too, Cora tugged at the bottom of Robert’s shirt to make him look presentable in front of her family and friends. That had to do as substitute for retrieving an appropriately ironed shirt.

“I really don’t need that kind of social encounters right now,” Robert nodded his head in the direction of the opened door when he spoke in a low voice.

“Think about what we’ve planned for our last week,” Cora whispered in his ear as she leaned over to him, “There will be plenty of time for just us two. No social conventions.”

Robert’s lips twitched lightly. Suddenly, he was sure that the coming conversations might be a lot more bearable than he thought at the first. He had an enticing prospect to look forward to.

[freedformwriter]

Overdue end of the Lockdown Diary…

Day 55

I’ve taken to swimming in the bleached pool in hopes that the chlorine will substitute for a soap scrub under the cold-water tap. My frog-kicking feet strike the bottom in the shallows, so I make little doggie-paddling circles in the deep end. Still, there’s sun and sparkle and the natural mood lift that comes from being buoyant. It’s a nice break from spreadsheets. I sit my glum cluster down in front of my endlessly-updated google docs and review home repairs and car searches and trade recriminations about why we still don’t have hot water. We try to leave these pleasantries out of our virtual Sunday coffee with our missing member. It’s enough of a stretch as it is.

Day 56

Soon I’ll need to wear smart tops with my pyjamas like all the other WFHers, I tell my girlfriend. I’ve just had a meeting on Microsoft Teams. The topic: IKEA PAX closets.  It’s the type of unfunny joke designed to point out just how much damn work I’m doing to sort this house out. I check The Portugal Resident for the latest on beach protocol. Good news! No sign of policed beaches with surveillance drones swooping overhead. The worst limitation for some people is only being allowed a half-day sun lounger rentals. But I’m not cheered. Immediately on opening the article, two advertisement banners have appeared trying to sell me funeral insurance. Must have for expats 40+! Jesus Christ. What have I got myself into?

Day 57

We have hot water!

My longed-for bath is anticlimactic. It’s suddenly in the high 20s and I’m already plenty warm. And perhaps I’m not feeling so fragile anymore. It’s been a week since I unpacked anything, but now I bustle about listening to Radio 6 Music. Synth music recommendations are punctuated by hourly news flashes about soaring unemployment sign-ons, inadequate testing, and Trump’s latest mad cure claims. Lauren Lavern does her ‘House Music’ feature. Was ever a concept – to submit videos of your household appliances making music – better suited to our times?

Today we have an ear-and-nose clipper that sound like the opening to Gomez’s Get Miles, a squeaking garden gate that heralds Funkin’ for Jamaica by Tom Browne, and two hard-working dishwashers. Once unheard as they slogged away overnight, these machines are now part of the daytime soundscape. The one in York plays Waterloo Sunset as it starts, while the other’s mid-cycle interruption notification sounds like My Girl.

Hopeful dishwashers, declares Lauren.

Day 58

I fill my fountain pen with ‘Sargasso Sea’ blue ink for some fiction scribbling. My yoga and writing sessions are the one sacrosanct creative space in the week. But, last time, I used the hours to shop online for sheets. I guess I was desperate for tangible comfort. For something that would claim the bare bed and empty room upstairs as mine. Now, they’ve arrived.

I’ve gone full Byron Bay. Unbleached 100% linen. Ooooh, enthuses a friend, you could use the flat sheet as a tablecloth if you have a big dinner party in the garden. We clearly follow the same Instagram threads. I make a bedside light with an old tomato sauce bottle, removing the supermarket discount brand label – PorSi – with olive oil, then stuffing a length of fairy lights inside and finally knocking a jagged hole in the lid with a screwdriver.

Day 59

A single construction worker has returned to the abandoned building site across the road. He’s placed a blue beach umbrella beside the new pool making it look as if he’s having a party for one.  In February, they drove a digger over the property wall, scooped out an Olympic amount of red earth and left. Outside the hotel on the corner I spot another lone worker lying full stretch on a second-floor wall and leaning out into space to wrestle a weed from a drainage spout. The hotel lobby is shrouded in white sheets like an aristocratic home shut-up for the off-season.

I show off my new haircut on Zoom at that night’s quiz. I booked the long-coveted cut on a facebook page filled with pictures of faceless women getting their roots retouched. The stylist wore her plastic apron medical style, while mine was tied up tight about my neck for the wash. She then slipped the neck ties through the ear loops of my mask, pulling it tight and low, before starting with the scissors. Ingenious.

No one’s even getting up at 8pm to clap the NHS anymore.

Day 60 - The End

I thought there would be more closure. More definite boundaries to the lockdown state. That I would know where it started and where it ended. I imagined concluding my lockdown journal when I was reunited with my girlfriend. A classic fade-to-black moment at the airport arrivals gate. My new beginning implied by a swirling shot of us embracing. We’re not together, but time is moving again. I’ve felt it ticking for this past week or more. I’m no longer in the state of suspension so evident in the UK.

The day is punctuated with delivery vans pulling up. Workmen tromping in. Renovating a house is an occupation focussed on tangible targets. Befores and Afters of predictably startling difference. There’s very little room for subtle observation. And, aside from flashes of existential crises when you realize that you’ve just spent an hour seriously discussing the pros and cons of detachable kitchen taps, your consciousness does not shift an inch.

Or maybe that’s just me. All I know is that I was a part of the lockdown masses in the UK. Now I’m a corona tourist. I do a final check-in with the live webcam of falcon chicks in Warsaw that’s proved a strange bond with my stranded girlfriend. The chicks are now enormous, unattractive mounds of mottled feathers and down. One stretches its wings. Testing. I swear it was just the other day that its stubby wings caused it to overbalance and topple over.

[choiceslife]

When Worlds Collide: Part Nine (Limited Series)

Disclaimer: Based upon characters in Choices - Endless Summer, It Lives in the Woods, The Royal Romance, #LoveHacks, Home for the Holidays, and The Elementalists series. All characters presented are the property of Pixelberry Studios. I claim no ownership. This story is purely the work of the poster as fanfiction.

Overall Series Rating: 18+

Warnings: Adult Language, Adult Content, Sexual Discussions. Future chapters may contain SMUT and Gratuitous Sexual Descriptions

Overall Series Summary: The sisters are together again and Ava Cunningham believes only they can help her.

Author’s Note: This Limited Series is a companion/sequel to Divided By Circumstance. I suggest you at least read that series in order to understand this one. As with most of my stories, this is a crossover and is part of my interconnected Chromatic AU. My MC’s are as follows: Carrissa Monroe (TRR), Abby Bennett (#LH), Scarlett Joy (HFTH), and Taylor Reed (ES). Previous Chapters can be found in my Master List located in my header.

Tag List: @cinnamonroll-duffy @darley1101 @debramcg1106 @brightpinkpeppercorn @regrettingnathan @katurrade @teamtomsato @luxurylives @akrenich @riseandshinelittleblossom @ladynonsense @jlouise88 @thehonorarybeaumont @ritachacha @eileendannie @marshmallow-ortega @littlecrookedheart @i-choose-liam @tmarie82 @bobasheebaby @boneandfur @europeanguy @walkerismychoice @pixieferry @sstee1 @endlessly-searching-for-you

***

La Huerta

The next morning, while everyone gathered in the restaurant for breakfast, Ava shared the good news. The room buzzed with excitement that the ritual would be performed this afternoon. “That’s not all though,” Ava continued, quelling the chatter. “Whether we pull this off or not, none of us can be allowed to remember exactly what happened here. In particular, we can’t be allowed to remember Carissa, Scarlett, and Abby’s true lineage.”

“So we’re all gonna forget about each other?” Craig asked, his words laced with sadness. He wasn’t an emotional guy to most people, but his friends knew better. These new people he got to spend time with this past week were his new friends and he didn’t want to let them go.

“I could never forget you and your ‘ch-yeah boi’ Craig,” Cade shouted from across the room. The large football player cracked a tiny grin at smaller guy.

Murmurs and speculations began to ripple amongst the group. Ava knew she had to reign everyone in and ease their fears. “None of us will forget anyone, Craig. All that will change for us is the reason why we came to La Huerta and that the sister’s are just normal women. That’s it.”

“Right,” Carissa concurred. “For those of us that met at the club in New York, it’ll be that we were a group that won a free trip to the pre-launch of the new Celestial Resort.”

“And for those of us that are friends with Malfoy, it’ll be that he wanted us to beta test the resort,” Jake added.

The fears amongst the group seemed to subside and all agreed to take the potion that would protect the sister’s secret. Ava smiled, happy that the plan was finally coming together. “So in a few hours, we will all meet on the beach for the ceremony. Aleister and Lucas will monitor everything from the lab.”

___

Carissa watched the beautiful blue waves crash against the white sands of the beach. La Huerta was truly a beautiful island and she thought it would be nice to bring Liam here sometime in the near future. For now though, she had to memorize the enchantment Ava had provided her, Abby, and Scarlett. The words were short and simple, but Carissa’s nerves kept messing her up.

“You look stressed,” Ava said as she stepped beside the queen. “Don’t be.”

“How can I not? How are you not stressed about all this?”

“Because no matter what happens, you both tried,” the familiar voice of the pilot said from behind Ava and Carissa.

The Queen turned to see Jake flash that killer smile of his and she immediately felt at ease. She took a hold of his hand once he was beside her and grabbed Ava’s hand as well. “You’re both strong and have faith. That helps a lot,” Carissa said as Ava gave her hand a reassuring squeeze providing the queen that extra confidence boost. “Let’s do this!”

___

The sun continued to shine brightly in the sky, but on the beach, bolts of electricity struck as Ava channeled her powers to finding Taylor so Carissa, Abby, and Scarlett could perform the spell. The remaining friends formed a semi-circle on the sands behind them, their hands interlocked and their minds focused on positive thoughts and prayers for the ceremony to be successful.

“Taylor hear my voice. Your friends are here. They love you and want you to come back home.” Ava repeated the summons over and over until a translucent blue figure appeared on the shore. “Hello Vaanu. We’re here for Taylor. We know he’s still a part of you.”

The skies above began to darken, as did Vaanu’s corporeal form. Flashes of Taylor flickered from within the alien’s body. For everyone on the beach, it appeared as if Taylor was struggling to make his presence known.

“Is that him?” Abby asked. “Is that Taylor?”

Ava nodded. “Yes. As soon as you three see him for more than a split second, begin reciting the spell.”

The sister’s acknowledge Ava’s instructions, paying close attention for Taylor to appear while Ava kept calling for him to come through. The power surges from the sky became more frequent, several bursts hitting near the group, yet the sister’s stayed firm in their determination.

Several more flickers occurred, each time Taylor appeared for just a little longer. Ava summoned more forcefully until finally Taylor appeared in the spot where Vaanu previously stood.

“Now!” Carissa shouted to Abby and Scarlett. The sister’s grabbed each other’s hands and immediately felt power course through their veins. The rush and intensity was much stronger than the first time they touched, way back when they first met in New York.

Through time and space, Taylor has roamed;

But friendship and love, beckon him home.

Come back to Jake, a love meant to be;

Vaanu we ask you, set Taylor free.

As the sister’s repeated the words, the skies continued to darken. And Taylor began to take on a form independent from Vaanu. The two beings weren’t necessarily struggling for dominance, but the process of them dividing from a single entity didn’t appear to be pain free.

“Boy Scout!” Jake cried out seeing the apparent hurt on his husband’s face. He wanted to run and hold him, but Sean gripped his hand tightly. Jake turned towards his taller, stronger friend with tears in his eyes. “He’s hurting Sean. He needs me.”

“He’s not fully with us yet Jake. We can’t break the bond.” Sean nodded back towards the shoreline. “Keep the focus on getting him here.”

Sean was right and Jake knew it, but that didn’t make it any easier. Taylor was only a few hundred feet away, closer than he had ever been for the past year. Jake just wanted to reach out, touch him, and help ground him to this plane of existence. He could see Taylor just beyond the sisters and from where he stood, his husband was struggling. “C’mon Taylor. You can fight through this. Come home to me.” Jake squeezed his eyes shut tightly and repeated the words under his breath. By no stretch of the imagination was Jake McKenzie a religious man, but today he prayed to any deity willing to listen.

___

Warning buzzers wailed and lights flashed in the laboratory causing Aleister and his younger assistant to dash back and forth between monitors to ensure the safety of the power core. Aleister had expected there to be some surges in the system, but not to the level the system was currently experiencing. “What’s the data on your screen Lucas?”

“The readings are off the charts. They need to wrap up the ritual quickly or the amulet and power core will explode.”

“By my calculations that should have happened already,” Aleister replied as he jammed a few commands into the computer keyboard in front of him. “I don’t know what this amulet is made of, but it seems to be strengthening with the sister’s powers.”

Lucas was surprised by Aleister’s assessment, but when he double checked the information on his own computer, the amulet’s density was indeed increasing. “You’re right,” Lucas said pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “What does that mean?”

Aleister shook his head. “I wish I knew, but we’re definitely going to have to let Ava know when all this is said and done.”

Suddenly, the power surge ceased. The alarms stopped sounding and the monitors resumed their normal state. Lucas and Aleister looked at each other without a word, both men shocked at the sudden development.

___

The group stood on the beach in stunned silence, all still holding hands. The grey skies dissipated and returned to the bright blue hue from before the start of the ritual.

“This...this can’t be real...” Jake let go of Sean’s and Grace’s hand, stumbling forward towards the sisters. He fell to his knees beside Carissa, but she wrapped her arms around him and helped bring him back to his feet. Tears welled in his eyes as he hugged Carissa and motioned for Ava, Abby, and Scarlett to join the embrace.

The gesture was quick with Carissa breaking first. She nodded towards the beach, “Someone else deserves you more.”

“Jake?” A familiar voice called faintly.

The pilot turned from the sisters and slowly made his way towards the shoreline - where Taylor was standing. Not a translucent version or a hallucination, but the full embodiment of an actual human being. “Oh Boy Scout. I’ve missed you!” Jake wrapped his arms around Taylor tightly. He missed this feeling so much and now that he had it back, he never wanted it to end.

Taylor slowly wrapped his own arms around Jake’s body and eventually melted into the embrace. He rested his head upon the pilot’s shoulder for a few moments before turning his head to where Vaanu had been, but the translucent form was gone. Taylor took in the sights all around him as he and Jake eventually untangled from one another. He saw the familiar faces of his friends a short distance away and many faces he didn’t recognize.

There was a lot to take in and as Taylor walked up the beach hand-in-hand with his long lost husband, he continued to look around. The familiar sight of The Celestial came into view. Back on La Huerta after all this time. Taylor stopped walking and turned back to look at the beach momentarily.

“Boy Scout?”

Taylor turned his gaze back towards the pilot with a soft smile. “Jake...” he began to say before collapsing onto the sand.

___

Somewhere

The magenta crystals flickered within the cave as the the blond-haired man frantically searched for his friend. “Taylor? Keep calling to me. I can’t find you.” He circled back to the same areas four and five times over to no avail. Just as he was about to slouch down against the wall and breakdown, a flash of light caught his eye. He looked up to see Vaanu standing before him. “Where is he? Where is Taylor?”

The translucent figure before him extended its hand and gave the man a quick vision.

“He can’t be gone Vaanu. I just heard him calling my name. He was right here saying ‘Jake.’”

***

(To be continued)

[laceyjanewriting]

The Engineer’s Story

I was born in the 51st century, in New-New York. When I was born my mother sent me away to live with my grandparents. This is not so unusual. She thought I would be safe with them and have a happy life. What is unusual is my mother. You see her parents didn’t just live somewhere else. They lived some when else. At some point they had gotten trapped in New York in the early 20th century. My mother used a vortex manipulator to send me to my grandparents 31 centuries in the past, like a baby in a basket, with just a note to explain. She didn’t even tell my father about me. He found out later. That was another thing about me. My father wasn’t human, which makes me only half human, which makes me a bit of a anomaly. From my alien father I inherited an unusual intelligence and an intuition about time and space that no human had and I couldn’t even explain to a human. There are no words in any human language to explain it. Growing up I was a bit strange. Gifted, I went to MIT to study theoretical physics. I wanted to figure out everything about time travel. But I didn’t fit in in college.  My theories were too complex for the contemporary scientist. They thought anything that they couldn’t understand was made up. They laughed at me because I couldn’t explain. Words were not my gift. One professor actually told me that the only reason women go to college is to find smart husbands. I left and went back home to my parents, which they very much appreciated. My mum was a writer and my pop was a doctor. I worked in a repair shop. The owner was not too open to hiring me, but I proved myself by fixing anything he put in front of me. He had me dress like a boy when I was in the shop alone. Seems people didn’t trust a woman to fix their machines. Anyways I like working in the shop. Solving people’s problems. Plenty of time to work on my own problems. The vortex manipulator that brought me back in time had burned out making its way through the time distortions that trapped my parents there. I spent the better part of my life just living, meeting people and working to understand and fix the vortex manipulator (VM). I once met some people who had met my alien father. They said the Doctor had saved them and she gave me singing lessons. Finally I got the VM working but I could only go to the last place it had been, give or take a few minutes. I said good bye to my grandparents who were old now like grandparents are supposed to be. I pressed the button and suddenly I was in the middle of a hospital room in the 51st century where I found a woman sobbing. Of course as I appeared she stopped crying and asked me who I was and where I had gotten the VM. I think she was concerned something had gone wrong with her plan and I had taken the VM. “I’m Wendy Williams,  and I’m your daughter.” It took a while for her to comprehend who I was and believe me. But when she understood, she hugged me and held me. “I’m getting a taste of what happened at Demon’s Run to my parents, I guess,” she laughed. She took  me home with her. Introduced me to her crew and told me she was an archeologist, like Indiana Jones, she said, but I hadn’t heard of him. It was a bit weird that I had grown up in a time before my mother. I was a bit behind the times for once in my life. I enrolled in the university and finally found a challenging, satisfying world to live in. I loved living in the 51st century. Then the Doctor came. My actual father, I finally met him. He was wonderful and fun and brilliant. He taught me about Time Lords. About his people that were all gone now. I learned everything I ever wanted to know about time travel. He taught me his language which  was much better for talking about such things. It came naturally to me, like adding words to thoughts I could not express before. I thought I was living the most perfect life. In retrospect I know my mother worried when I was with him. She told me to be careful. She explained how she had met him and how he was wonderful, but also how he has been slowly forgetting her and how he has hurt her. “He is the most amazing man in the universe and I would die for him, but I want you to have your own life. I live for the days when I’m with him,” she told me. “I want you to live for yourself.” I didn’t understand but I remembered her warning. And then she went to the Library. She died for him, like she said she would. Her crew had been my best friends and they were gone too. It was less than a year after I had come back to the future. Before my first birthday. She was gone and she left me there, all alone. On my birthday, not long after the Library the Doctor showed up again. I was heartbroken and I blamed him. “You are supposed to save her! If you can’t do that, then what is the point of you!” I yelled at him and told him I never wanted to see him again. I told him this using his own language and I used a word for ‘never’ that had more finality than the word in English. Hurt, he had no reply, but  he complied and left my birthday present without saying anymore. At first I hid away the gift he left me. I didn’t want anything from him. I wanted my mother and friends back. I wanted revenge. I made plans to go to the Library and destroy the creatures called Vashdanarada that had killed my friends. I made plans to sneak past the quarantine. I invented a way to kill these creatures that hid in the dark. But before I could do it I finally looked in the birthday gift the Doctor had left.  It was the most amazing thing. It was a TARDIS matrix. It is hard to explain, but the heart of the TARDIS is living and this was like it’s offspring. The Doctor’s TARDIS has many amazing properties and powers, but none of it is possible without the TARDIS matrix. He had given me the key to building my own TARDIS. When I touched it I could feel all of time and space. I could see the future and the past. I could see what could be and what must not be. The Doctor once told me that a Time Lord (or Lady) chooses their name. Their name is a promise they make for all of time and in all of space. No matter where or when they go they would still be that person. I had a choice now. I could go on with my plan and become the Exterminator or I could forgive and become the Engineer. Seeing the two choices made it seem obvious which one was right. Like seeing yourself in the mirror when you are angry. You think, oh is that me, I look awful.  I wanted to be the person who builds things to help people not the person who builds thing to destroy. From that point on I was the Engineer. I left my old name behind. I got a job working on a ship in the Space Caribbean. I fixed my ship and made improvements and sat on beaches relaxing, like I was retired. I also worked on my own TARDIS. I was rather old compared to humans but I don’t age like humans. I looked to be in my thirties even though I had lived for closer to 80 years. I stayed there until something unexpected happened. The Doctor showed up, but he didn’t know me. A previous regeneration. It was the Doctor before he knew me or my mother. Somehow he managed to show up just in time for pirates to attack and destroy my ship. He helped me save the crew and I saved him. To save him I had to use my incomplete TARDIS. To avoid awkward explanations I knocked him out in order to save him. While he was out, I did have to do some explaining to Rose, his companion at the time. She reminded me of River. I told her I had a friend that died to save the Doctor once. Rose had been willing to die with the Doctor that day. She wouldn’t leave him even though she had no way to save him. She told me the Doctor was worth it. I dropped them back at their TARDIS and said goodbye. Then I met him again, with a new companion, Martha. I was afraid to ask what happened to Rose. They showed up at a construction site at which I was the supervising engineer. Again the Doctor showed up just in time for mayhem to break out. He saved the day again. This new companion was in love with him too, but he was not returning the feelings. I asked her before they left, why she stayed with him when he was not interested in her the same way. She told me he needs someone, and he is wonderful. “He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and can see the turn of the universe. and... he's wonderful.” She quoted to me. He save lives and he never asks to be thanked. The next time he found me while I was working undercover. We uncovered and stopped evil plans from powerful people and I met Donna Noble. She was funny and sassy and she was not in love with him. Maybe it was the red hair. Us ‘gingers’ need to stick together. I was glad that the Doctor had her. I realized that I cared about the Doctor. This younger version had grown on me. The next time I met the Doctor was at home. In New-New York in the 51st century. I was on my way home from class, when I saw an advertisement for an old Shakespeare play, Hamlet. The advertisement had a picture of Hamlet and it was none other than the Doctor. It was the last showing that night so I went and saw the play about a tormented son. It was good and he did a good job. I waited at the end and gave him roses. We went out after and then he told me how he had lost Donna and Rose and Martha. He told me he had gone a bit mad and changed a fixed point and messed everything up. How he was told he his song was coming to an end. He asked me what he should do… I told him we should run. So I travelled with the Doctor. He took me to see Queen Elizabeth the First. We ran into the other versions of him and I met Clara for the first time. We travelled a bit more but soon after that he dropped me off at home and said he needed to find out what the Ood wanted. I never saw that face again. I spent time building my TARDIS and I didn’t see the Doctor for a long time. I went to the Library, not to exterminate anything. Instead I made a shielding to protect me from them. I got River’s diary and I went to the data core. I linked the data core to my TARDIS so I could talk to River. I linked her consciousness with my TARDIS. Now she could use it to travel anywhere in time in space. Not her body but her consciousness could. She was like a ghost. She told me how the Doctor had saved her there forever. Never coming back to say goodbye. “He doesn’t like goodbyes,” she explained When next I saw the Doctor he had a new face but it was an old face to me. It had been so long since I had seen that face. It was that face that I had been so mad at. But he still didn’t know who I really was so it was before that time for him. I was willing to forgive him, though. It was also the face that had taught me all about time travel and time lords. Then he had to go and yell at me. He saw that I had the sonic screwdriver from the Library. The one that he had left with River’s journal and suddenly he had to know who I was. I had at one point mentioned that I had a friend at the University and he now surmised that River was that friend. This was the Doctor before he met me but not before he knew who River was and how she had died. This was the Doctor that had left River’s consciousness in the Library without saying goodbye. Now I was mad again. I told him he was correct, River was my friend, and if he wanted to know more he would have to go back in time and  ask her about it. He had no reply for that and I left him there, speechless. Finally the Doctor showed up at my apartment with Clara. It was my birthday again, this time I was happy to see him. I smiled and I invited them in for tea and I made an old family snack my old mum made when I was little.  We were family again.

[easyhairstylesbest]

When She Says Woman, She Doesn't Mean Me

When I was 19, I paid my way to San Francisco with pornography. I answered an ad for the cheapest room I could find, and when the girl who lived there asked me, I lied and said I was straight. I didn’t know anyone. Men or boys asked me to go places, and I went. At a party in the fall, I wore tight red pants and no bra. I drank what was handed to me. I fell asleep on a bed and woke up and this boy was fucking me. His smell and skin and my teeth grinding and I was drunk or high, I don’t know which, and I couldn’t move. I could not make him stop. I passed out again and woke up and his body was there on the bed and I inched away and it was so gray, San Francisco was always so gray, always so predawn, and I did not want to jostle anything, gathered my limbs, my fragile center, slipped out to the gray street and the shivering bus and stepped gently on the stairs up into my rented room and washed myself with hot water and drank hot coffee to burn the inside of me and began the work of pretending it had not happened.

That same year, my boss at the coffee shop left me five messages in three days:

“Hey, just wanted to see if you want to go to that show on Friday at Great American Music Hall.”

“Hey you haven’t called me back so just checking in again to see if you want to go, or maybe get a drink.”

“Hey you know it’s pretty rude of you to just smile at me like that and then not even call me back.”

“You can’t just be nice to people and then act like it doesn’t mean anything.”

“You think you’re so special but you’re not. You should be more careful.”

At work, he did not mention the phone calls. He watched me. He started scheduling me so that I only worked alone. As I wiped down counters, he stood close to me, holding a clipboard, not looking at me, just keeping his big body next to mine.

In Old Town and in Ocean Beach the cops were always watching us. Were always stopping us in the street. Were always making us empty our pockets and backpacks. We felt them coming and we stiffened, tried to duck around corners, tried to avert our faces. At night, they shone their flashlights into our eyes. Some nights they made us stand in a row. They held photos of missing children up beside our faces. We were not missing.

The boy who raped me had paid to see my naked pictures on the internet. He’d done this with his friends, the group of them together at the computer with someone’s brother’s credit card. I knew this because one of them told me. They told me he wanted to fuck me. This was intended as a compliment. I have tried to imagine what they said to each other in that room, hovered over the screen. I can’t hear them. I come up with nothing.

Sex workers, says Catharine MacKinnon, are “the property of men who buy and sell and rent them.” She says that to rape a sex worker means simply to not pay her.

When men ejaculated on me it did not feel like trauma, it felt like money. Like rent. It was not painful. It was not confusing. I did not hate them. I felt nothing about them. I knew what I was agreeing to. I knew what I would have when I walked away. I knew that I owned myself. That owning myself meant having a way to make my money and walk away. That the walking away, more than anything, was the thing that made this work different.

Sex work, tweeted Ashley Judd, is “body invasion.” It commodifies “girls and women’s orifices.” “Cash,” she says, “is the proof of coercion.”

On March 11, 2019, the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW-NYC) held a protest on the steps of City Hall, demanding the continued criminalization of sex work. Speakers at NOW’s protest called the decriminalization bill that a group of New York sex workers had been organizing toward the “Pimp Protection Act.”

NOW-NYC’s president said, “Yes, you’ve heard it right, the sex trade could be coming to a neighborhood near you.” New York City, she said, could become the “Las Vegas of the Northeast.” As though sex work were not also illegal in Las Vegas.

Owning myself meant having a way to make my money and walk away.

A small group of sex workers came to counterprotest. They held signs that said, “Sex Workers Against Sex Trafficking.”

The anti-decriminalization protestors stepped in front of them to cover their signs. Speakers said that the sex workers were “ignorant of their own oppression.”

I did not tell anyone that I had been raped. I did not tell anyone and still they said, “What is wrong with you that you allow men to pay to touch you.”

They said, “What happened to you that made you like this?”

I heard these things again and again.

I heard them so often that I feared that they were right, that I had only tricked myself into believing that there was a difference between the things I’d chosen and the things I hadn’t.

In my bed, not sleeping, Adam’s heavy arm over me, my body between him and the wall, I thought: I am broken.

I did not know what I was, and I did not know how to be anything else.

I knew that to become a person that men like Adam could love would mean making myself visibly weak. Would mean performing the kind of weakness that other people could find lovable. Would mean claiming ignorance so they could see me as worthy of being remade.

I knew that the weakness they wanted was nothing like the real weakness inside of me. The real weakness inside of me could only be healed if I trusted my own rules. If I did not give my pain away for other people’s stories.

It was in a porn studio that I first began to feel as though my body was a thing I could love. I did not take the job in order to feel this. I did not even understand it as it was happening. It happened slowly and also all at once. I showed up to shoot and the man that I would be working with asked me, “What are your limits?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

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“What do you not want to do?” he asked. And on that day, I could not tell him. No one had ever asked me that question before.

“We’ll try some things,” he said, “and you just say ‘red’ if you want to stop.”

So I tried things. Some of them I liked and some of them I didn’t and some of them I didn’t care about one way or another. Every day when I came to shoot, they asked me the same question: “What do you want to do today? What don’t you want to do?”

Eventually, I could answer. I could make a list. This is what I want. This is what I don’t want.

There was a day when I was tied up, suspended in rope in the middle of a warehouse in downtown San Francisco, and a man was hitting me all over my body with a deerskin flogger. I was in midair, ropes pressed into my hips and thighs and chest with measured tension, leather thudding rhythmically against my back and breasts and I felt a kind of elation, a swelling in my center. I felt strong. I felt myself getting stronger. The scene ended, and they lowered me to the ground and they untied the ropes and blood rushed back into my knees and elbows and I felt suddenly clean. I felt whole. More than whole, I felt unbreakable.

They handed me a check, and it did not feel like coercion, it felt like safety. It felt like I had taken something from them.

“It is impossible,” says Andrea Dworkin, “to use a human body in the way women’s bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. . . . And no woman gets whole again later, after.”

In Los Angeles, the days were all the same but also they were all different. I worked. All of us worked. We lived to work. We called it the “porn dorm” and we called it “porno boot camp” and we got up at 5 a.m. and worked until two the following morning. We worked two-a-days and we worked seven days a week and there was not a single day of the year when someone, somewhere, was not making pornography.

The good days and the bad days were overwhelmed by days when everything went as expected. Days when I showed up and laid out my clothes and we chose something and I put my makeup on and took the stills and waited for male talent or waited for the light or waited for the dialogue and did six positions and a pop and took my check and went home. I felt bored more often than I felt anything else. I felt bored and I felt as though the thing I was inside of was invisible to everyone who was not inside of it.

They handed me a check, and it did not feel like coercion, it felt like safety. It felt like I had taken something from them.

When I was not working, I was exhausted. I was more exhausted than I had ever been. Some mornings, when it was time to get up to go to work, I cried.

“You cry now, but you’ll cry when you have no money,” my agent said.

I cried and then I went to work.

The day would be good or it would be bad or it would be neither and I would collect my check and my agent would come and pick us up and take us to Jerry’s Deli and we would eat chicken soup and black and white cookies, and I loved him. I loved these women around me, each of them with their bodies like weapons. I felt as though I did not belong anywhere but there.

I’ve rarely talked about my rape and I’ve rarely talked about violence I’ve experienced while doing sex work. I have not talked about these things because I am afraid. Because I know how stories like mine get told. Because I know exactly how good anti–sex work “feminists” are at carving out the pieces of our stories to make them mean something else, something less complicated and more easily sold. I know how good they are at flattening us, at excavating our experiences to make stories that are only an imitation of the things we’ve lived. I know how good they are at making us no longer human but symbols of this thing they call womanhood. This thing they’ve made that I do not see myself in.

I’m afraid, but also I’m angry. I’m angry that I could not talk about violence without fueling descriptions of me as an object, written by women claiming to be my allies. I have survived violence in sex work and also I have chosen again and again to do this work. I have performed sex and femininity and also I am not a symbol of anyone else’s womanhood. I have been poor enough that sex work seemed like a gift, poor enough that sex work changed my power in the world by giving me the safety that money gives. To say that I needed the money is not the same as saying I could not choose, and to say that I chose is not the same as saying it was always good. I have been harmed in sex work and I have been healed in sex work and I should not have to explain either of those experiences in order to talk about my work as work.

“Women must be heard,” says Ashley Judd. And I know that when she says women, she does not mean me.

Excerpted from the book We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, edited by Natalie West, with Tina Horn. The essay “When She Says Woman, She Does Not Mean Me” Copyright © 2021 by Lorelei Lee. The collection, published by the Feminist Press, is out now.

Lorelei Lee Lorelei Lee (they/she) is a writer, sex worker activist, organizer, juris doctor, Justice Catalyst Fellow, co-founder of the Disabled Sex Workers Coalition, researcher with Hacking//Hustling, and founding member of the Upstate New York Sex Worker Coalition.

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When She Says Woman, She Doesn't Mean Me

[curtolson]

Liberty University needs full leadership change, not just Jerry Falwell Jr.

About the author: Curt W. Olson is a 1991 graduate of Liberty University, with a degree in communications that launched me into journalism. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at LU and the friendships I developed there remain people with whom I have close contact. I do not live in Lynchburg, VA and have no “inside information.” As a journalist, I have been a reporter and served as Religion Editor, copy editor, Editorial Page Editor, and investigative reporter. I spent about 20 years in journalism. More recently, I have been teaching English at a Christian school in Upstate New York. I am married and have two children.

An Open Letter to the Liberty University family by Curt W. Olson of the LU Class of 1991,

Everyone in the Liberty University family should desire a humble leader in Jerry Falwell Jr. after a certain period of time for his “indefinite leave of absence” that was announced August 7. If he continues being the President and Chancellor, he needs our prayers and Galatians 6:1-5 provides the biblical footprint for restoring someone.

Why wasn't restoring Falwell Jr. identified in the news releases from LU? It’s a glaring omission. The AP reported needing “time with family,” not having someone who will work with him to restore him to being a humble leader and past the issues that  have surfaced over the past decade. The short statements from the Trustees on August 7 leave far more questions than answers and that is unfortunate. That’s a common chorus with this cast. A lack of clarity and transparency will do that.

It is a separate issue whether Jerry Falwell Jr. could emerge as a different leader and those on campus he has made enemies of would suddenly call him “a new man.” Has Falwell Jr. done way too much damage? This is the question that looms over LU as the new academic year begins. 

For many in the LU family, this question has already been asked and answered: There’s too much water that has gone under the proverbial bridge. After all, we now have signs of failure. David French reported in a column on Aug. 9 something is beginning to impact LU’s freshmen applications and transfer students. If you can’t see the obvious correlation, you don’t want to to see it.

Poor judgment

Two events occurred the past three months that created problems. In June, Falwell Jr. said he would wear a face mask only if it looked like the “blackface” that caused problems for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. Falwell Jr.’s  effort to mock the governor drove a couple football players to transfer from LU and got him in hot water with African-American LU alumni. What did Falwell Jr. think was going to happen? Then on August 3, an Instagram photo emerged, which was deleted, of Jerry Jr. pictured with a female who was not his wife and his pants were unzipped. The “costume party” was a parody of the Trailer Park Boys. Falwell Jr. explained the beverage in his hand was not alcohol. That did not help Falwell  when he was on a Lynchburg radio show later in the week explaining what happened and sounding as if he was drunk during the interview. This led to the “indefinite leave of absence.” The deleted Instagram photo and the “blackface” face mask displayed a shocking level of poor judgment for a man leading any Christian ministry, let alone the largest Christian university in the world.

Pleasant image

As an alum from the Class of 1991, I understand the emotions we have for our alma mater. “Liberty is training Young Champions for Christ” and “if it is Christian it should be better” are two of the common statements we heard from LU’s founder, Jerry Falwell.  We have this pleasant image of our time there, our friendships we developed, our spiritual growth, and we want a Christian college faithful to biblical teaching and a top-level NCAA sports program. The idea of controversy, chaos, confusion, and lack of certainty is not what we envision for LU.

Harsh reality

It is time, however, to face some harsh facts. Jerry Falwell Jr.’s current leadership is toxic,  with a culture of fear and intimidation that has been felt by multiple faculty members, staff, and students. That just begins the list of grievances that have arisen dating back to around 2012. Aside from the bad judgment from the June and August incidents, we also have the following issues that could serve as the catalyst for Jerry Falwell Jr.’s dismissal as President and Chancellor. 

They include:

Self-dealing on some real estate transactions;

Self-dealing on some of the construction projects to benefit friends;

Harming the reputation of Liberty University through real estate ventures and other incidents;

Displaying a lack of justice and mercy with many faculty and editors of The Liberty Champion; 

Having a faculty member who had a muddied position on homosexuality; and 

Neglecting his role in setting the spiritual direction of the campus. 

While these would be the key indictments to compel LU Trustees to terminate Falwell Jr., in addition to the outrageous poor judgment that harms the reputation of Liberty University, these may not be a complete list of the issues. These are the known issues through prominent reporting by various entities.

‘Fake news’

I want to address the reporting by POLITICO’s Brandon Ambrosino, Reuters, a column by Will Young in the Washington Post, and others because we live at a time of the common refrain of “fake news.” It puts folks in the position of screaming “fake news,” that while perhaps the information is true, people refuse to accept anything regarded as “bad” to their tribe. Every sentence of reporting by the sources above that resembles the truth opens up a series of brand new questions for Jerry Falwell Jr., and in some cases, the LU Board of Trustees. Perhaps both of those scenarios are long overdue, and the LU family should be demanding answers to those new questions.

Additionally, Ambrosino has admitted to being a homosexual and was one at LU. His sex life has no bearing on his ability to report truth. Anyone who uses that as an excuse to distrust the information he reports has a “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil” mindset when there’s a five-alarm fire unfolding at Liberty University. 

There are many good things happening at LU, but they are happening in spite of Jerry Jr., not because of him. 

Real estate deals 

Reuters reported in August 2019 on a real estate transaction with a gym owner in Lynchburg, VA

It reported: “In 2016, Falwell signed a real estate deal transferring the sports facility, complete with tennis courts and a fitness center owned by Liberty, to Crosswhite. Under the terms, Crosswhite wasn’t required to put any of his own money down toward the purchase price, a confidential sales contract obtained by Reuters shows.

“Liberty committed nearly $650,000 up front to lease back tennis courts from Crosswhite at the site for nine years. The school also offered Crosswhite financing, at a low 3% interest rate, to cover the rest of the $1.2 million transaction, the contract shows.” 

A real mess

Less than two weeks later, Ambrosino wrote a damaging piece in POLITICO that detailed the self-dealing, building contracts going to friends, his autocratic leadership of fear and intimidation, and activities that would only harm the reputation of LU. Those activities include:  Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen dealing with racy personal photos, a Falwell appearance at a Miami nightclub, with photos he wanted to keep from becoming public, and the notorious Miami South Beach hostel with a seedy reputation that was owned by Trey Falwell, Jerry Jr.’s son. There are numerous things to be outraged by in Ambrosino’s lengthy report (the full article being the second comment in this FB post). When I read it for the first time a year ago some things surprised and shocked, and other things just confirmed things that I had been hearing. I know people--they will not be named--who work or had worked at LU in various capacities. They grew increasingly alarmed by Jerry Jr.’s autocratic leadership style, which I challenge anyone to make the case is condoned in Scripture. I had read Ambrosino’s previous report on the Miami area hostel, so nothing would shock me about things that Jerry Falwell Jr. did. As an alum, I was more hurt about what his actions were doing to the reputation of LU. Jerry settled a lawsuit in Miami related to that property.

The revelation that bothered me the most from Ambrosino’s September 2019 POLITICO report was the apparent lack of any, or at least sufficient, oversight of major construction on the campus. What follows is an excerpt of Ambtrosino’s reporting:

 “At the outset, some in Falwell’s inner circle were not so confident in the arrangement with (Robert) Moon. Before his CMA Inc. (Construction Management Associates Inc.) became Liberty’s go-to contractor, the school bid out its construction work through an office on campus. (‘Free enterprise tends to do pretty well,’ one high-ranking university official said.) The prospect of changing that—giving CMA control over campus construction and its associated costs—rankled some senior university officials.

“Early on in the CMA partnership, before CMA became the university’s single-largest contractor, Charles Spence, the school’s then-vice president of planning and construction, expressed unease about the high costs Moon was quoting for certain school projects. ‘Jerry I am very concerned about cost control on all the projects,’ he wrote to Falwell in a November 2014 email. ‘[Over the last couple of weeks we have had a lot of meetings and conversations on cost and cost overruns. We are just seeing the information begin to trickle in and there really don’t seem to be good answers just a response that the cost we are seeing are fair, and being handled appropriately.’ ‘I hope that I am over reacting,’ Spence continued, ‘but I assure you I am concerned.’

“ ‘I am fine with going back to bidding every project out if CMA can’t run with the big dogs!’ Falwell replied. ‘Let’s hold their feet to the fire!’

“In each of the two years that followed, Liberty paid CMA more than $62 million, part of at least $138 million in contracts from Liberty since the company was formed, according to publicly available tax documents.

“Senior Liberty officials might whisper about the propriety of these business deals, but they told me that Falwell’s decisions on campus are rarely ever challenged by the school’s board of trustees. ‘There’s no accountability,’ a former high-ranking university officer said. ‘Jerry’s got pretty free reign to wheel and deal professionally and personally. The board will approve an annual budget, but beyond that … he doesn’t go to the board to get approval. … It simply doesn’t happen.’ “

Trustees a problem too

You read that right. Jerry Falwell Jr. not only has a family friend as the assigned contractor of capital projects, but few, if any, of them have gone to the LU Board of Trustees for review. The Trustees pass an annual budget and that’s about it. These revelations open up a litany of questions for both Jerry Falwell Jr. and the Trustees on their financial stewardship of Liberty University. 

It also creates the issue of whether LU’s leadership needs wholesale change--at President/Chancellor and Board of Trustees. Consider the following for the Trustees: Isn’t it the responsibility of the Board of Trustees to make sure the President is doing the right thing for and by the university?  If Trustees were doing their job, this should never have come this far.  Since they have now done something, why did they do it now? Are they too embarrassed by repeated Falwell Jr. revelations? What took them so long to come to their collective senses?

In November 2019, Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni chastised LU Trustees in Forbes.  He wrote the following: “And Liberty University has serious problems that could benefit from more board oversight. Although Liberty has increased its endowment exponentially under Falwell and has built a massive online degree program, this expansion has come at a cost: According to HowCollegesSpendMoney.com, Liberty spends 86 cents on administration for every dollar it spends on instruction, roughly three times as much as its self-selected peer institutions. Has the board demanded a thorough audit and review?”

Issues stemming from the Trustees are simply added to the overall picture of Liberty University’s leadership. If you can’t see that something’s amiss, you have to be blind.

‘Culture of fear’

Meanwhile in July 2019, former Liberty Champion editor Will Young wrote a lengthy column in the Washington Post titled, “Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear.’ ” Young’s column outlined numerous stories that gained scrutiny upon Jerry Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016.  He explained multiple events over a couple of years where the editors were constantly second-guessed and looking over their shoulder of what would offend Falwell’s political sensitivities. After Champion coverage of the Red Letter Christians event in Lynchburg, the student-led, directed, and written newspaper since 1983 had two editors fired from their positions in a complete reorganization of The Liberty Champion. It was a shocking turn of events.

This has always been a tension with The Liberty Champion. In my three years writing or serving in an editorial capacity, two years as the News Editor in 1989-90 and 1990-91, invariably, the faculty adviser, and for us it was Ann Wharton, would use a teachable moment to talk about boundaries that can’t be crossed. But we never, ever had a pattern of being second guessed or looking over our shoulder that Young outlined in his column.

The culture of fear that has developed under Falwell Jr.’s leadership “is a thing” as kids like to say. At some point, folks must draw the conclusion where there’s smoke there’s fire. 

Spiritual issues

Lastly, we have a couple of spiritual issues. Karen Swallow Prior was a long-time English professor at Liberty University before recently joining Southeastern Baptist Seminary. I read an interview Prior had with Julie Roys. Prior talks about her affirmation of the biblical definition of marriage. However, she has had some connections with a couple of conferences, including Revoice, that could lead one to draw a different conclusion. The Revoice conference has advocated that same-sex attraction is alright as long as the folks involved remain celibate. All one can do is take Prior at her word, even though that leads to some muddy water. If LU allowed her to remain as a professor for numerous years, one can’t help but wonder how many other professors snuck in under poor vetting that do not hold biblical views on any number of issues. Folks would say the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. The slippery slopes in American culture we were told to not be concerned about, are now issues we are concerned about.

Then, one pairs that with Falwell Jr.’s own tweet where he underscored that his responsibility is not the spiritual direction of the campus. Yet, if one goes to the Leadership page at liberty.edu there are Doctrinal and Mission/Purpose statements that have clear spiritual focus, and a photo of Jerry Falwell Jr. is there with those tabbed links on the left side of the page. So which is it? Does he have any responsibility for spiritual direction of the university, or does he not have that responsibility?

Dr. John Maxwell has said, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.” With certain aspects of enrollment trending downward, it would appear that some parents are voting with their wallets. How much longer are Trustees willing to go with Falwell Jr.? There’s much at stake in the answer to that question. It’s a question that demands answers and full transparency with the entire Liberty University family.

The best-case scenario is Jerry Falwell Jr. resigns on his own and most, if not all, of the Trustees follow him. It would be the right thing to do. And for heaven’s sake, bring Mark DeMoss back.

[rulystuff]

https://servicemeltdown.com/remembering-the-infamy-of-mr-obamas-visit-to-havana/

New Post has been published on https://servicemeltdown.com/remembering-the-infamy-of-mr-obamas-visit-to-havana/

REMEMBERING THE INFAMY OF MR. OBAMA'S VISIT TO HAVANA

Remembering the Infamy of Mr. Obama‘s Visit to Havana

Editor’s note: If a government’s mission is to be of service to its citizens, President Obama’s less than transparent visit to Cuba in 2016 betrayed the citizens of the United States. Mr. Obama’s visit was stagecraft meant to signal to the unquestioning that only he has a grasp of right and wrong. To his American audience he left the impression that a little fence-mending would make the Castro regime more amenable to democratic reforms. Simply book a cruise on Royal Caribbean or a flight on JetBlue to Havana and voila Cuba’s ills will wither. Left unsaid is that the Cuban government pockets the hard currency from such transactions and in turn pays its workers in worthless pesos – in contrast, in 1958 the Cuban peso and the U.S. dollar traded on a par. Meanwhile, a near-universal economic deprivation continues to grip the nation.

President Obama’s Keynote speech was delivered at the Gran Teatro, a storied music hall confiscated by Fidel Castro. Mr. Obama’s performance was a classic example of dramatic irony ancient Greek theatergoers would have been proud of as the audience knew exactly what was going on even if the main character did not. The gentlest rebuke of Cuba’s sixty-year dictatorship would have served to remind the world that the island nation is in a ramshackle state courtesy of the Castro brothers. 

Cuba’s economy was one whose productivity and services rivaled those of Germany and Japan. Cuba, pre-Castro, had a large middle class, low infant mortality (lower than France or Germany), and high literacy rates. Havana, especially, enjoyed amenities, conveniences, and luxuries more in keeping with a major American city. In 1958, for instance, Havana had more movie theatres than any other city in the world. Cuba ranked fifth in the Western hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, and second in per capita ownership of automobiles, telephones, and television sets. Cuba’s income distribution was hardly that of a banana republic but of a progressive modern nation. Healthcare was widely available to the underprivileged. Today, the propaganda that all citizens have access to free healthcare is meaningless when one considers that the government mandates who will receive medical care and when, that pharmaceuticals are in short supply, medical equipment is decrepit, and hospitals and clinics are rickety. Physicians, on slave wages (about $65 a month), somehow manage to keep the system lumbering along. Furthermore, it is widely acknowledged that the government manipulates medical outcomes data, especially on infant mortality, to give the appearance of its being a modern developed nation. Physicians, for example, aggressively misrepresent neo-natal deaths as late fetal deaths, and engage in coercive abortions all intended to conceal the true rate of infant mortality while boosting life expectancy numbers.

As to education, Cuba had near-universal public education and outspent every European country and the United States on education as a percent of GDP. Pre-Castro, and as a first in Latin America, Cuba introduced the minimum wage, and the eight-hour work day.

In sum, before Castro’s repressive regime came along, Cuban citizens were educated, had decent healthcare, were entrepreneurial, and most importantly were free to come and to go. The Cuban economy, based largely on tourism and services was thriving, before suddenly imploding at the hands of the Castro regime. Mr. Obama did a great disservice to the citizens of both the United States and Cuba by remaining mum on the nation’s violent and retrograde slide over sixty years.

THE CUBAN MARXIST SYSTEM IS IMPERVIOUS TO OLIVE BRANCHES

The group of Cuban-American businessmen who accompanied Mr. Obama to Cuba – a tiny and hardly representative group of Cuban-American entrepreneurs – was obsequious and self-serving despite their denials. Their travel to Cuba betrays the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who have perished in gulags, against the paredón, and at sea. Their visit was an embarrassing spectacle only surpassed by the President of the United States joking and palling around with a Cuban communist comic or by doing the wave at a baseball game.

On the eve of Mr. Obama’s landing in Cuba on Palm Sunday – with full family in tow at U. S. taxpayer expense – nine migrants drowned seeking their freedom. A more tragic metaphor for Barack Obama’s feckless policy of “letting bygones be bygones” and of making nice with Fidel and Raul Castro could scarcely have been better scripted. A question Mr. Obama was never asked by the trailing New York Times reporters in the wake of his visit was: “Mr. President, how did it feel to shake hands with a cold-blooded killer?”

Communism in Cuba is nothing new and it certainly was not the brainchild of Fidel Castro. Cuban communism has a long history on the island going back to the nation’s independence from the United States in 1902 (Cuba had gained its nominal independence in 1898 after a three-year struggle with Spain but remained under the military suzerainty of the United States). My father recalled that in his hometown of Santa Clara, roughly the geographic mid-point of the island and where disgustingly a statue of the maniac Che Guevara now stands, there were communist agitators in the 1940’s. Castro’s contribution in this context was to cement Marxism for good.

WHY CUBA IS A FAILED STATE

The dismal failure that is the Cuban economy is not the result of the U.S. embargo despite the mythology that claims it is so. Why? Because every other country in the world – at last count 190 countries – trades with Cuba. Cuba is bankrupt because its leaders took to heart Karl Marx’s dictum “to abolish all private property” and to further abolish the individual (the individual, Marx admonished, must “be swept out of the way, and made impossible”). Marx’s injunctions apparently did not apply to El Lίder Máximo, however, as the regime rewarded the communist strongman with multiple beach-front estates, women, whiskey and song.

Today, the average Cuban must do with ration books while many, even in the nation’s capital, need to haul their own drinking water, and deal with mountains of uncollected trash overrun by rats and swarms of flies. The 43,000 Cubans who escaped the communist nation for the U.S. in 2015, and the 56,000 who did so in 2016, many risking a crossing of the shark-infested Florida Straits on a raft, is emblematic of the hellhole that is Cuba.

Former Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, was arrested and turned over to the United Nations to face a war crimes tribunal at The Hague. He died in jail. Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was deposed and brought to the United States to stand trial for drug trafficking and languished in jail in Panama City before passing away in May of 2017. In contrast, the narco-trafficking, and contraband smuggling Castro regime which has slaughtered many more thousands of its own citizens and who has bled the country white for sixty years is rewarded for its debauchery with an American Embassy fawningly re-opened by Secretary of State John Kerry.

Castro, it must be remembered, gave safe haven to the Basque separatist organization ETA known to have been responsible for the murder of hundreds of innocents. The ETA terrorists were given political asylum in Cuba as part of an agreement with Spain that the separatists would no longer cause tumult in their home country. In the process, of course, the ETA henchmen trained the Cubans in the fine art of exploding homemade bombs via remote control; a technology which they subsequently exported throughout South America. Adding further ignominy – if that were necessary – to Castro’s trail of depravity is the fact that for years he ran what can only be described as a “university” campus for terrorists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America including the Ortega brothers in their Sandinista inspired revolution of Nicaragua.

RESTORE FULL DEMOCRACY AND END THE EMBARGO

As to ending the embargo – the utterly naive, and smiling U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, told Cuban authorities that Barack Obama’s goal was to end the embargo – there should be no such plan without reciprocal actions by the Cubans. For starters, there needs to be verifiable evidence of democratic reforms, including freedom of the press, and the conduct of free elections. None of that is likely to happen, however, as the Cuban “constitution”, such as it is, sanctions only the political activities of the Cuban Communist party. A move toward democratic freedoms is not the only condition the United States should seek if the two nations are indeed to play “nice” with each other. The release of political dissidents, and the return of thugs like the Puerto Rican, Victor Manuel Gerena sought by the FBI for bank robbery, and the Black Panther assassin Asata Shakur who is wanted by the FBI for the murder of a State Trooper in New Jersey should also be part of any final resolution.

Moreover, the Cubans need to indemnify those Americans as well as Cubans whose property was confiscated by the Castro regime to the tune of approximately $8 billion. My mother’s house in Old Havana was confiscated without any due process. She died with a broken heart and without any recompense like so many other thousands who fell prey to the depredations of the Castro regime. Habaneros now anxiously await the 500th anniversary of the founding of the city in 1519 while the government scrambles to paint the facades of decrepit and dilapidated structures for the benefit of naïve tourists.

The average American remains ignorant of the continuing mischief caused by the Castro regime including the recent deployment of Cuban soldiers to help prop up the murderous thugs of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Again, Mr. Obama’s visit was nothing more than an ostentatious grandstand which only served to hoodwink the people he was elected to serve. It is embarrassing to our nation that Mr. Obama would deign to set foot on a nation with the most malevolent dictatorship on the continent without any conditions. On the other hand, the visit was a public relations coup for Fidel Castro who showed the world that he had finally cowered El Imperialismo Yanqui as he had long promised.

[gillespialfredoe01806ld]

My 10-Year Odyssey Through America’s Housing Crisis

Meggan Haller for The Wall Street Journal

After looking at several houses along Alabama’s Gulf Coast, we decided the sunny cottage on Audubon Drive in Foley was the one—so long as the seller came down a little on the price.

It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an attached garage, a tidy shed that was painted picnic-table red and a pair of towering longleaf pines. It sat in an oval subdivision of cookie-cutter homes on a lot roughly the size of a basketball court. There was just enough room for the dog to run in the backyard without trampling the vegetable garden we envisioned.

It was convenient to my newspaper office in Foley and to the school in Gulf Shores where my wife taught kindergarten. The beaches along the Gulf of Mexico were a short drive away, but far enough to pardon us from flood insurance. The Realtor walked us over to see the neighborhood playground.

A week before Thanksgiving in 2005, we signed the papers to buy the house for $137,500. We painted the walls and hung blinds in time to have friends over for the holiday.

Twelve years later, little about my life remained the same. I’d left Alabama to take a job at The Wall Street Journal. I was no longer married. Pierre, the dog, had died of old age. But I was still sending mortgage payments each month to a bank in Alabama.

I would have sold the house long ago, and in fact I tried. But when the U.S. housing market collapsed in 2007, the property’s value fell far below the amount I borrowed to buy it.

Walking away was never an option. I’d signed papers promising to pay the money back and I intended to do so one way or another. In case my moral compass ever needed a shake, laws in Alabama, as in many states, allow lenders to pursue the difference between the mortgage debt on a property and what it fetches in a foreclosure sale.

For much of the past decade that number kept growing. At one point, it would have been nearly $70,000.

The house in Foley, Ala., was purchased in November 2005 for $137,500. The value dropped below the mortgage debt when the housing crisis hit in 2007, putting Mr. Dezember underwater for a decade, at one point by nearly $70,000.

Meggan Haller for The Wall Street Journal

Housing collapse

When I bought the house, I was a newlywed three years out of college, believing I had achieved a signature goal of most young Americans. Instead, I set myself up to pursue an inverted version of the American dream. Most young people aspire to buy their first home. I spent a decade trying to get rid of mine.

Ten years ago, the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression roared to life. The collapse of the U.S. housing market wiped out some $11 trillion in household wealth.

Almost eight million people would lose their homes to foreclosure. At its depths, more than 12 million Americans were “underwater,” meaning their homes were worth less than the balances remaining on their mortgages.

The collapse was particularly brutal on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, which was in the midst of an anything-goes building boom when prices crashed. The region fell into a deep funk prolonged by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the opioid epidemic. In Audubon Place, my subdivision of starter homes, close to a third of its 109 houses were foreclosed. One of them twice.

Among underwater homeowners, I was fortunate. The house, and the mortgage, were modest. I was in the early stages of my career, with greater earnings potential ahead. And I was single again, not yet 30 and had no children to support.

Millions of homeowners moored to underwater properties had it worse, suffering in ways more subtle than those who lost houses. Many of these homeowners couldn’t relocate for better jobs, move growing families into bigger houses or enroll their children in better schools—or at least do so without draining savings. They probably couldn’t refinance their homes to take advantage of interest rates that were kept historically low in response to the collapse.

Then, early last year, my situation began to brighten. For years I had been renting the house at a loss to help cover expenses while waiting for the market to rebound. Every so often I’d scan local listings and sales data to see how far I had to climb. Performing this routine one day last February, I saw a rental ad for a nearly identical house down the street listed for much less than what I was charging.

My tenants saw the ad, too. They asked the company that managed both rentals if they could break their lease with me to move to the cheaper place.

To most landlords this would have been a bad break. But in my upside-down situation, it was great news.

Home prices in the subdivision had not fully recovered from the crash, but they had crept higher. Meanwhile, years of mortgage payments had worn down the balance of my debt.

Now that it was empty, a Realtor in Alabama with whom I had been consulting for several months said that if I fixed up the house and listed it in the spring, when buyers were out and the yard was in bloom, I might be able to get $115,000 for it. That was $22,500 less than I’d paid, but it would be enough to wipe out the mortgage debt and cover most of the sale expenses.

In late March I took a week off work, packed a rental car with tools and a sleeping bag and headed south.

Speculation

When I was looking for my first home, many Americans were thinking about houses in a new way—less as shelter and more as investments.

This prompted huge price increases, speculation and harried construction. Few places embraced the frenzy as enthusiastically as the Gulf Coast, a region known both derisively and romantically as the Redneck Riviera.

Hurricane Ivan’s direct hit in 2004 had cleared land along the shore for new development. Insurance money poured in and zoning laws were rewritten. The next year, Hurricane Katrina kicked up demand for housing when it wiped out entire towns in neighboring Mississippi and Louisiana.

Oceanfront condominium projects that were little more than watercolor renderings and building permits sold out in minutes. Investors got their hands on paper condos for as little as a letter of credit from their bank, and flipped the units to others while the glassy towers went up. A local real-estate agency ran late-night commercials touting riches to be made flipping.

Hurricane Ivan in 2004 cleared land along the Gulf of Mexico shore, including in Orange Beach, Ala., above, that was snapped up in a building boom.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Everyone made money in the condo game—the developer, the lenders, the brokers and as many as a half-dozen flippers on a single unit, who could trade with almost no money down before the building was finished and the sale had to be closed. The only requirement was the existence of someone else willing to pay a higher price.

One group of developers proposed a residential building overlooking a swim-with-the-dolphins attraction that would be the centerpiece of a giant go-kart facility. Another group hired a band and set up a dance floor in a furniture store parking lot to pitch $450,000 lots in the woods along a man-made shipping channel.

Construction created plenty of overtime for anyone with a strong back. Clerks quit jobs at the outlet mall to become real-estate agents and mortgage brokers. Monthly house payments were suddenly within reach for many low-wage workers.

My job at the Mobile Register, where I covered the boom, could not have been going better. My 1,000-square-foot cottage was shaping up nicely, too. I installed French doors that swung open to a backyard planted with azaleas and several saplings. I spruced up the front with oleander and ferns in a bed lined with decorative stones.

The marriage was another story. After two years, in the summer of 2007, my college sweetheart and I split up and agreed to sell the house as part of our divorce.

Unfortunately, the market had unraveled before our marriage.

New worries

Housing had turned from a source of profits and jubilation on Wall Street to one of worry.

That June in New York, as home prices began to fall and mortgage delinquencies rose, about a dozen anxious creditors gathered at a Park Avenue office tower to meet with executives from Bear Stearns. Of particular concern was the faltering performance of two of the bank’s hedge funds, which had bet more than $20 billion on mortgages granted to home buyers with poor credit.

For decades, the steady growth of U.S. home prices had attracted investors from all over the world to securities known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, which pooled large numbers of individual mortgages into single securities. If borrowers paid their bills, investors made money.

As demand surged during the housing boom of the 2000s, mortgage underwriters began to cut corners. Borrowers with sketchy, or subprime, credit were lured with low teaser rates that ballooned over time. Some were approved without anyone verifying their income. These loans were folded into securities that were given ratings on par with those assigned to U.S. government bonds.

Investment firms also sold credit default swaps, which were essentially insurance against losses in CDOs, as well as synthetic CDOs used to bet on the performance of actual CDOs. As a result, a single ill-advised mortgage might play a role in the performance of dozens of securities. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner once said sorting it out was as tough as untangling “cooked spaghetti.”

In all, the trillions of dollars invested in securities backed by subprime mortgages represented a bet on U.S. housing that was considerably higher than the value of the actual property involved.

A timeline of the crisis prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis points to Feb. 27, 2007, as an early sign of the brewing calamity, when the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. announced it would no longer buy the riskiest type of subprime mortgages.

For me, the first hint was the smell of hot garbage wafting over the hedge. It was coming from the house next door. The young couple who owned it were gone. They paid $153,000 for their house around the same time we’d bought ours, setting a new high-water mark in Audubon Place. Now it was as if they had vanished. There was no note, no for-sale sign. They hadn’t even bothered to take out the trash. Inside, a half-eaten pizza festered on a countertop.

As the abandoned pool in their backyard filled with roof shingles and palm fronds, I prepared to sell our house. To cover sales commissions and other expenses, we’d have to sell it for more than we’d paid for it.

The Realtor who had sold it to us didn’t think it was even worth the trouble to try. Instead, I turned to a co-worker’s wife who had just become a real-estate agent and was eager for a listing. On Nov. 19, 2007, we listed the house for $149,000 with the understanding we’d accept much less.

She hosted open houses, pounded arrows into the subdivision’s entrance to point the way and tied balloons to the yard sign. She baked cookies and wrote her mother’s name in a guest book so that it would not be empty for the first arrival.

Her foray into real estate was as ill-timed as ours. Not even the cookies got a nibble. After a few fruitless months she moved on. I stuck a for-sale-by-owner sign in the yard, hoping for a quick rebound.

‘Perfect storm’

As 2008 began, a full-blown crisis was unfolding in New York. Big banks rang in the New Year by reporting tens of billions of dollars in mortgage-related losses.

Bear Stearns, near bankruptcy, fell into the arms of JPMorgan Chase & Co. in March. Five months later, the U.S. Treasury took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the more than $5 trillion in mortgages they held or had guaranteed. Lehman Brothers Holdings, the country’s oldest investment bank, filed for bankruptcy protection a week later, and Merrill Lynch was forced to sell itself to Bank of America Corp.

The U.S. government bailed outAmerican International Group ,which had sold about $79 billion of protection against losses from mortgage-related securities without putting nearly enough cash aside to cover the obligations. Citigroup Inc.had to be bailed out later.

The Federal Reserve chopped interest rates to try to slow the bleeding, but it was no use. Foreclosures swelled as droves of underwater homeowners walked away.

In April 2009, early in his first term, President Barack Obama said a “perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor decision-making that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street” had brought a “day of reckoning.”

On the Gulf Coast, condo buyers balked and home prices plummeted. Subdivision developers disappeared and cranes idled at surfside towers. Jobs vanished. It was a bonanza for bankruptcy lawyers.

A pivot from go-karts to water park couldn’t save the swim-with-the-dolphins condo project, and the men who wanted to build a town center along the Intracoastal Waterway were bankrupted by their own misadventures in condo flipping. The woman who promised flipping riches on TV was convicted of fraud in federal court and sent to prison.

Developers of Bama Bayou in Orange Beach, which was to include a residential building overlooking a swim-with-the-dolphins attraction, defaulted in 2009.

Jeff and Meggan Haller/Keyhole P for The Wall Street Journal

In my neighborhood, luxury cars were repossessed, foreclosures piled up and opioids moved in.

To save money, my newspaper, the Mobile Register, shuttered the small office I’d been assigned to and told me to work from home. The front bedroom of my house, where I set up shop, offered a prime view of the neighborhood going to seed.

Some mornings when I fetched the newspaper from the driveway, I was greeted by neighbors who were already drinking beer. A young woman who was renting next door lost custody of her children and began shuffling in her pajamas to a party house down the street. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for days. I tossed wadded-up slices of bread over the fence for the dog she left tied up in a dusty corner of the yard.

She came home once when I was spraying a hose over the fence to fill the dog’s empty bowl. She said nothing and walked inside.

Another neighbor died from a drug overdose. Her corpse was wheeled out of the house as the afternoon school bus pulled up. On another occasion, the police arrived at a suspected drug den down the street to investigate the death of an 11-month-old boy.

One afternoon, I had to interrupt a phone interview that I was conducting to chase two fighting men from my front yard. They were flinging decorative stones from the flower bed at each other while they argued over a soured sale of pain pills.

After I shooed them away, one of the combatants slunk back and rang my doorbell to beg for a ride home. His buddy had peeled away after an old woman who lived at the house where the fracas began shot out the truck’s windshield.

On a Friday morning in early June 2010, I walked outside to grab the newspaper and noticed an acrid smell. I looked over the hedge, hoping to find someone tarring the roof on the abandoned house next door. Nobody was there.

The odor, I soon learned, was emanating from the Gulf of Mexico, 6 miles to the south, where huge rafts of toxic goop from BP PLC’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill weeks earlier had begun to splash ashore.

By July, all 32 miles of beach between Mobile Bay and the Florida Panhandle had been fouled, and tourism ground to a halt.

Oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster washed ashore in Orange Beach in the summer of 2010.

Kari Goodnough/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Waiters, hotel clerks and beach attendants lost their jobs. The for-hire fishing crews who normally chased cobia and red snapper resorted to scouting for crude as part of the cleanup effort. Shrimp boats dragged oil-absorbent boom through the water instead of nets.

The Register, already battling competition from online advertising, suffered, too. As it laid off co-workers and slashed salaries, I started looking for a new job. Home prices continued to fall.

Distressed sales

Selling the house wasn’t an option.

Though Washington policy makers had bailed out banks to keep them lending, pushed interest rates to historic lows and initiated programs for borrowers in danger of losing their homes, there weren’t many options for someone in my situation, which was getting worse with each new foreclosure on Audubon Drive.

By the summer of 2010, there had been 17, including the one that had been abandoned next door. A unit of Citigroup held the mortgage when it soured, and the New York bank bought the property from itself on the courthouse steps in February for $80,100. By October, the home had become the possession of Freddie Mac, which unloaded it to an Indiana woman for $44,900.

Distressed sales, such as courthouse auctions, don’t factor into appraisals. I wish they did. Instead, it was the second, even lower sales, that set the value of my home.

A September appraisal of my house came back at $76,000, down about a third from two years earlier.

When I landed a job with the Journal in Houston, my only option was to rent the house until the market improved.

Determined to lower the payments, I drove to the bank where I had taken out the mortgage five years earlier and asked for the banker who had made my loan. I was told he no longer worked there and was handed a 1-800 number. I spoke to one call-center worker after another, spending hours on hold, restarting the conversation with each transfer or disconnection. There was a comical amount of faxed correspondence.

The lawyers, real-estate agents and mortgage brokers I consulted shook their heads. A few bank employees told me, candidly, to skip a payment or two and feign distress to draw the bank to the negotiating table. I tried that once. Almost immediately, I was inundated with threatening calls.

Renting the house presented another obstacle. Though my ex-wife hadn’t been involved with the property for years, her name remained on the deed. To enroll it in a rental program with a local property manager, I needed her signature, which she declined to give, for a variety of reasons.

In order to move on with my life, I had to do something absurd. To rent out my house, I had to buy it from us, repaying the existing mortgage to sever her ties to the property.

I drained my recession-battered 401(k) to pay closing costs and make up the difference between what I owed and the $122,500 that the bank was willing to lend me anew. Because the new price was still higher than the property’s appraised value, part of the loan was at 10.05%, closer to a credit-card rate. That made the prospect of breaking even more unlikely, but I had no choice if I wanted to move on in my career. Plus, I’d already moved to Texas.

So began my turn as a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord.

Problem renters

My first tenant was a single mother with a young son. She paid $650 a month, which covered about half my monthly expenses. She agreed to keep up the yard with the mower I left behind.

Before long, the rent checks stopped coming. She invited relatives to move in, and they refused to leave. I hesitated to evict them around the holidays, hoping that her ability—or perhaps willingness—to pay rent might change in the New Year. It did not.

On a lark, I checked the county jail’s booking website. There I saw my tenant, in a fresh mug shot. She and her family left only after I filed eviction paperwork and they learned that sheriff’s deputies would be by to see them out.

Another renter asked permission to break her lease to take a better job out of state. Knowing what it was like to be trapped, I agreed to let her go. When she moved out, she took the microwave, washer and dryer and just about everything else that wasn’t nailed down. She even swiped the smoke detectors, which were hard-wired to the house and out-of-reach without the ladder. She took that, too.

But I was able to nudge the rent higher with each new tenant. Over time, a respite from major hurricanes reduced my insurance premium, and the property tax bill dwindled with the value of the property, which county assessor’s appraised in 2011 at less than $60,000. In good months, my losses could be less than $300. When rent went unpaid or costly repairs popped up, my losses could have a comma.

From afar I could only imagine what was going on in Alabama. The few clues I received painted a grim picture.

There was the jail mug shot. A curious line item on a repair invoice following that first tenant’s particularly destructive tenure read: “pressure washed garage floor due to fish odor.” Citations from the neighborhood homeowners association alerted me to mysterious piles of vegetation piled out front and a big boat that had been parked in the driveway.

In one letter to homeowners, the association threatened to close the communal playground because of the used condoms, lighters and graffiti turning up. Another called for volunteers to help repair a breach in the perimeter fence that residents of a nearby trailer park were using as a shortcut to the dollar store.

“What trailer park?” I wondered. “What dollar store?”

Investors pounce

The housing collapse wasn’t bad for everyone. Several of my friends bought their first homes on the cheap.

In 2011, when the national inventory of foreclosures swelled to nearly 1.6 million, Wall Street investors pounced, snapping up tens of thousands of homes at rock-bottom prices. Some paid banks a pittance to acquire..

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The Daily Thistle

The Daily Thistle – News From Scotland

Friday 3rd November 2017

"Madainn Mhath” …Fellow Scot, I hope the day brings joy to you…. No Matter where you are on this little blue planet as we spin endlessly through the universe … This is an opening that I have used several times while writing The Daily Thistle over the past year or so and I realized today exactly how appropriate it is for us, We are all on a journey no matter who we are, none of us is in control, we are merely passengers along for the trip.. and as we progress through life on the little blue planet, some of us arrive at our stops and depart, just like people on the train that sat opposite you, you exchanged smiles, maybe even gave the newspaper to them but when the train pulled into the station they got off, their journey through.. and you never will see them again.. well life is exactly like that, to us three score and ten as it says in the bible (70 years) is a long time but age and time are relative to the person or thing we are discussing, but 70 years is nothing but a blink of the eye to the Giant Redwood or the Diamond sparkling in the girls engagement ring, so my advice to you all is to treat each day as a very special day, because you never know if it’s going to be your station our train arrives at, So treat others with respect, as the bible says, “Do unto others as you would be done unto” in other words you have to give it to get it… So my philosophical moment over, let’s have some coffee and talk about the news…    

ROYAL MAIL STOPPED TO REMOTE HIGHLANDS PROPERTIES FOR SAFETY REASONS…. Royal Mail has suspended deliveries to four remote properties in part Highlands over safety fears for workers. Postal staff are said to have faced an hour round trip on private roads to the addresses in Altnabreac, Caithness. Concerns for safety are linked to the fact the area has no phone signal, meaning no call for help could be made in difficulty. A Royal Mail spokeswoman said: “We are sorry for the inconvenience this causes customers. Suspension of delivery is not something we do lightly, but we need to ensure that all our people are working in a safe environment. “Ofcom’s own regulations state that postmen and women should not spend more than 15 minutes in a single trip on private roads to deliver mail. “This step has been taken after a detailed assessment as we believe that there is a risk of safety to our postmen and women, who are delivering on private tracks off the public highway. “Our people are spending an hour round trip to deliver the mail. There is also no mobile phone signal to call for help if there is an issue and the condition of the track is poor.” Those staying at the properties can now either have their mail delivered to somewhere with the same postcode or make a round trip of about 36 miles to Halkirk. The spokeswoman added none of those affected are housebound and have been collecting post from the delivery office in the village.

MARINES SPOTTED TRAINING ON LOCAL HERO BEACH…. A Scottish man got a big surprise while taking his dog out for an early morning walk on a usually deserted beach in the west Highlands. Brad Cain, a 52-year-old who lives in Mallaig, was out on Camusdarach beach with his dog Onyx before sunrise on Thursday when he heard a strange noise above the sound of the sea crashing on the shore. It was only as he ventured closer that he realised he had stumbled into the middle of a major military training exercise, with hovercrafts, lorries, boats, landing craft and more than 100 armed troops from the Royal Marines. “It was dark, and I had a flashlight,” Mr Cain said. “As I walked along the beach, I became aware of a noise that wasn’t the normal sound of the waves on the rocks. “The closer I got, the louder the noise became, until I recognised it as a heavy diesel engine. “Neither of the hovercraft had a single light on them, and I was becoming more tense as I approached. “I eventually made out the shape of what I saw to be some kind of boat, half in the water and half on the beach. I could only see the outline. I still didn’t know what it was. It was quite unsettling. “The noise was quite deafening. As I approached, it suddenly became clear I was looking at not one but two hovercraft. I recognised the billowed skirt on the front of the hull. Two soldiers stood by a machine gun mounted on the front.” Later, he returned to take photographs of the dramatic operation in daylight. The commandos arrived at Camusdarach last Wednesday evening and began an assault exercise on the beach later that night. According to Mr Cain, nobody in the area had been warned about the drill and flares released during their manoeuvres were misinterpreted by the coastguard as a ship in distress. Prior to the operation at Camusdarach, they had been on exercises around the Applecross peninsula. The picturesque sandy beach, which lies between Mallaig and Arisaig, was famously used as a location for the film Local Hero. The troops are staying at a campsite behind the beach until Wednesday, when they are due to return to their home base in Dorset. The Ministry of Defence was unable to provide any information about the exercise.

NEW SCULPTURE BY CREATOR OF THE KELPIES UNVEILED IN ABERDEEN…. A new sculpture by the creator of The Kelpies has been unveiled in Aberdeen. The Leopard, by Andy Scott, will form the centrepiece of Marischal Square, a new shopping, hotel, and office space in the city centre. The Leopard reflects the symbols on Aberdeen’s coat of arms with legend claiming that two of the big cats were gifted to the city by James I. It is hoped that the popularity of Scott’s sculptures will now attract people into the Granite City. Scott, who now has 80 pieces across the world from the Falkirk Wheel to the M8 motorway to New York, Sydney and Chicago, said of the Leopard: “I’ve worked on this sculpture for over a year in the studio and it’s been very demanding. There are literally thousands of steel fragments, all individually welded to create the form of the artwork. “It now stands five metres tall, weighs just over two tons, and will sit proudly atop a ten metre high steel column. I hope it brings a real presence and sense of drama to the atrium space of Marischal Square.” The Leopard will go on show to the public next Friday with some areas of the £107m development now open.

DUNDEE PARKING FINE WOMAN DECLARED BANKRUPT WITH £37,000 DEBTS…. A woman who was ordered to pay £24,500 in unpaid fines after ignoring hundreds of parking tickets has been declared bankrupt with debts totalling more than £37,000. In a landmark ruling at Dundee Sheriff Court earlier this year, Carly Mackie was told she had to pay the unpaid charges to a private parking company. The 29-year-old had taken to parking her car in the city’s Waterfront without a permit. She claimed she had a right to park in the area as she was living there at the time. Ms Mackie, from the city, also believed the charge notices could not be enforced under Scottish law. However, Sheriff George Way said the charges served against her by the firm, Vehicle Control Services (VCS), were from a “valid contract” and she was liable for them. The parking tickets were left almost daily on the windscreen of Ms Mackie’s Mini, which was parked in front of her parent’s garage, near their West Victoria Dock Road home. There were eight signs in the vicinity, advising motorists that they could only park in designated areas, and would require a permit to do so lawfully. Those found parking without a permit were liable to be fined £100 a day. VCS took Ms Mackie to court last year when she racked up an £18,500 bill for ignoring more than 200 penalties.

SCOTLAND COULD WELCOME BACK TRAIN BUILDING FOR FIRST TIME IN DECADES…. Train building could return to Scotland for the first time in decades with Spanish firm Talgo looking at possible sites for a factory. Officials were meeting the Scottish Government’s Transport Scotland agency and Scottish Enterprise last night to discuss the plans. At least 600 jobs are expected to be created, with the factory scheduled to open around 2020. Talgo said possible sites include at Hunterston on the Ayrshire coast or the former Longannet Power Station site on the Forth in Fife. They are adjacent to or near deep water ports for the import of materials and export of completed trains. ScotRail is about to introduce two new fleets, so any built by Talgo are likely to be for other parts of the UK, or Europe, at least initially. The Spanish company is also looking at possible locations south of the Border for its first UK factory.

On that note I will say that I hope you have enjoyed the news from Scotland today,

Our look at Scotland today is of the Steam Engines that they no longer build today… such a shame..

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Friday 3rd November 2017 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus

[troop2017]

This is a final mop-up of our time, so far, in Yorkshire (we’re heading back via York next week..), and it will cover a 2nd visit to Scarborough – to the North Bay area and the castle, a flying visit to Burton Agnes & the Rudston Monolith, the Muston scarecrow festival and Boggle Hole (visited on the way home from Whitby).

So let’s start with Boggle Hole (where the main picture was taken).  We just saw the sign on the way home and thought it was a good name and we’d have a look!  We took the lane, which turned out to be long and narrow, until we came to a small parking area – keep going, says Calv.  Only we couldn’t as there was a sign up advising against it!  The lane that we walked down was steep and led to a YHA hostel and the Quarterdeck café.  These were nestled at the top of a rocky cove where fossil hunts are regularly held – and it was pretty busy still when we arrived.  There were some steps leading up the hillside which we decided to explore – there were a lot more than we were expecting (from memory I think it was 134…) and they were the usual mix of different sizes and steepness!

It was a steep climb back to the car, but no worse than anything else we’d done that day!

As we made our way back up to the main road Calv suddenly screamed at me to stop.  He’d spotted an owl just sitting on a post.  Of course, by the time he’d got the camera ready the owl flew away 😦

Boggle Hole steps

Clifftop walk from Boggle Hole

Next up, Burton Agnes.  We went here because we had driven past the village a couple of times and it looked really pretty, and there is also an English Heritage property here to visit (and it was raining…)

Be aware though – it is the Norman Manor House that is English Heritage not the main hall.  To visit the main hall you will need to pay £10.50 each (it’s privately owned).  If you opt to just visit the English Heritage part you are given about 15 mins to do so!  We also visited the church.

Burton Agnes – Norman Manor House on the left

The vaulted basement of Burton Agnes Norman Manor House

The main hall of the norman manor houes

We could see signs for a monolith, the Rudston Monolith, so continued up the B road in that direction.  Let me save you some time here….  It’s in the churchyard!!  We spent ages driving round and round looking for it…  It is the tallest prehistoric standing stone in Britain, and some say that there is a dinosaur paw imprint on it….

  View from Rudston Church

As we had more of the day left than originally anticipated we decided that now would be a good time to visit Scarborough.  I have already written about our 1st visit to Scarborough, but not about driving through the little village of Muston on the way.

We drove through Muston during their annual (since 1999) scarecrow festival!  It was an absolute delight, with almost every household displaying a scarecrow – or so it seemed anyway.  There were an awful lot of people in the village to see the scarecrows.  The last two we saw before leaving the village were of Kim Yong Un and Donald Trump…

We took no pictures I’m afraid as we didn’t actually stop, but you can get more information here.

On our final day in Yorkshire we decided to re-visit Scarborough to take in the castle.  We tried to park as close to the castle as possible (there is a car park in front of St Marys Church), but didn’t have any coins (I gave all my spare to a French family in Robin Hood’s Bay), and none of the machines took cards yet (including those along the Marine Drive).  So we ended up driving through the North Bay area and finding some free parking alongside the pitch and putt of Peasholm Park – bonus 🙂

Our first stop was onto the beach for a quick photo of the beach huts and to watch the waves crashing in as the tide swept in.  We then had a pitstop in the Peaches n’ Cream café, which is next to a crazy gold course (very nice too), before heading up to the castle itself.  This was quite a walk and all of it uphill!

Beach huts at Scarborough North Bay

The waves crashing in as the tide comes in at Scarborough North Bay

On the way we passed 3 bowling greens (open to the public) hidden away in a park on the cliff, before finding the castle itself.  This is another English Heritage property and was fairly busy, as the rain had stopped for a while – although it was very windy up there!

View over North Bay from Scarborough Castle

The remains of the keep at Scarborough Castle

The castle sits on the promontory that separates the South & North Bays of Scarborough and affords amazing views, particularly from the top of the keep.

View over South Bay, Scarborough from the castle

On leaving the castle we descended by a different route and walked along the seafront promenade where we found this  sculpture of Freddie Gilroy.  He was a soldier who was one of the first to enter Belsen Concentration Camp on it’s liberation.  The statue is huge and was originally loaned to the town for 1 month, until it was bought by a local resident, meaning it could now remain there.

Our last stop was to Peasholm Park where the boating lake is situated.  And what a boating lake!  There are swan pedalos, rowing boats, an island reached by a bridge, a pagoda, a café and a bandstand in the middle of the lake!  There was somebody playing in there as well!  There’s also a pitch and putt course as previously mentioned.

Peasholm Park, Scarborough

Peasholm Park, Scarborough

We had seen signs for an historic water chute but didn’t actually manage to find it,(although we do know where it is, beside the north bay railway  and we did find the remains of the workings of one of the defunct tramways 🙂 ).  If we return we will definitely seek this out as one of the 1st things we do 🙂

The old workings for the North Bay Railway, Scarborough

All in all this was a wonderful last day in the area and we fell in love with Scarborough all the more as a result of our new discoveries 🙂

    Discovering more delights in Scarborough – North Bay and the Castle This is a final mop-up of our time, so far, in Yorkshire (we're heading back via York next week..), and it will cover a 2nd visit to Scarborough - to the North Bay area and the castle, a flying visit to Burton Agnes & the Rudston Monolith, the Muston scarecrow festival and Boggle Hole (visited on the way home from Whitby).

[readingfordummies]

Witches of East End - Chapter One

Cat Scratch Fever

Freya Beauchamp swirled the champagne in her glass so that the bubbles at the top of the lip burst one by one until there were none left. This was supposed to be the happiest day of her life - but all she felt was agitated.

This was a problem, because whenever Freya became anxious things happened - like a waiter suddenly tripping on the Aubusson rug and plastering the front of Constance Bigelow's dress with hors d'oeuvres. Or the normally gloomy dog's nonstop barking and howling drowning out the violin quartet. Or the hundred-year-old Bordeaux discovered from the Gardiner family cellar tasting like Three Buck Chuck - sour and cheap.

"What's the matter?" her older sister, Ingrid, asked, coming up by Freya's elbow. With her stiff modeling-school posture and prim, impeccable clothes, Ingrid did not rattle easily, but she looked uncharacteristically nervous that evening and picked at a lock of hair that had escaped her tight bun. She took a sip from her wineglass and grimaced. "This wine has a witch's curse all over it," she whispered, as she placed it on a nearby table.

"It's not me! I swear!" Freya protested. It was the truth, sort of. She couldn't help it if her magic was accidentally seeping out, but she had done nothing to encourage it. She knew the consequences and would never risk something so important. Freya could feel Ingrid attempting to explore through the underlayer, to peer into her future for an answer to her present distress, but it was useless. Freya knew how to keep her lifeline protected. The last thing she needed was an older sister who could predict the consequences of her impulsive actions.

"Are you sure you don't want to talk?" Ingrid asked gently. "I mean, everything's happened so fast, after all."

For a moment Freya considered spilling all, but decided against it. It was too difficult to explain. And even if dark warnings were in the air - the dog's howling, the "accidents," the smell of burnt flowers inexplicably filling the room - nothing was going to happen. She loved Bran. She truly did. It wasn't a lie, not at all like one of those lies she told herself all the time, like ‘this is the last drink of the evening’, or ‘I'm not going to set the bitch's house on fire’. Her love for Bran was something she felt in the core of her bones; there was something about him that felt exactly like home, like sinking into a down comforter into sleep: safe and secure.

No. She couldn't tell Ingrid what was bothering her. Not this time. The two of them were close. They were not only sisters and occasional rivals but the best of friends. Yet Ingrid would not understand. Ingrid would be outraged, and Freya did not need her older sister's disapproval right now. "Go away, Ingrid, you're scaring away my new friends," she said, as she accepted the insincere congratulations from another group of female well-wishers.

The women had come to celebrate the engagement, but mostly they were there to gawk, and to judge and to giggle. All the eligible ladies of North Hampton, who not too long ago had harbored not-so-subtle dreams of becoming Mrs. Gardiner themselves. They had all come to the grand, refurbished mansion to pay grudging homage to the woman who had won the prize, the woman who had snatched it away before the game had even begun, before some of the contestants were aware that the starting pistol had been shot.

When had Bran Gardiner moved into town? Not so long ago and yet already everyone in North Hampton knew who he was; the handsome philanthropist was the subject of rumor and gossip at horse shows, preservation society gatherings, and weekend regattas that were the staples of country life. The history of the Gardiner family was all everyone talked about, how the family had disappeared many years ago, although no one was sure exactly when. No one knew where they had gone or what happened to them, only that they were back now, their fortune more impressive than ever.

Freya didn't need to be able to read minds to know what the North Hampton hens were thinking. Of course the minute Bran Gardiner arrived in town he would choose to marry a teenage barmaid. He seemed different, but he's just like the whole lot of them. Men. Thinking with their little heads as usual. What on earth does he see in her other than the obvious? Bartender, Freya wanted to correct them. Barmaid was a serving wench with heaving breasts carrying jugs of beer to peasants seated at unbalanced wooden tables. She worked at the North Inn, and their gourmet brew came only in pints and had hints of prune, vanilla, and oak from the Spanish casks in which it was stored, thank you very much.

She was indeed all of nineteen (although the driver's license that allowed her to pour drinks said she was twenty-two). She was possessed of an eye-catching, lively beauty rare in a time when thin mannequins were the peak of female beauty. Freya did not look like she was starving, or could use a good meal; on the contrary, Freya looked like she got everything in the world she ever wanted, and then some. She looked, for lack of a better word, ripe. Sex seemed to ooze from every pore, to slither from every inch of her glorious curves. Small and petite, she had unruly strawberry blond hair the exact shade of a golden peach, cheekbones that models would kill for, a tiny little nose, large, catlike green eyes that slanted just a little at the tip, the smallest waist made for wearing the tightest corsets, and, yes, breasts. No one would ever forget her breasts - in fact, they were all the male population looked at when they looked at Freya.

Her face might well be unrecognizable to them, but not so the twins, as Freya liked to call them - they were not too big, they did not display that heavy voluptuousness that ex-boyfriends called "fun bags," which sounded to Freya too much like "fat bags"; no, hers were exquisite: perfectly round with a natural lift and a creamy lusciousness. She never wore a bra either. Which, come to think of it, was what had gotten her into trouble in the first place.

She had met Bran at the Museum Benefit. The fundraiser for the local art institution was a springtime tradition. Freya had made quite an entrance. When she arrived, there was a problem with a strap on her dress, it had snapped, and the sudden exposure had caused her to trip on her heels - and right into the arms of the nearest seersucker-wearing gentleman. Bran had gotten what amounted to a free show, and on their first meeting, had copped a feel - accidentally, of course, but still. It happened. She had fallen - literally - out of her dress and into his arms. On cue, he had fallen in love. What man could resist?

It was Bran's serious embarrassment that had endeared him to her immediately. He had turned as red as the chrysanthemum on his lapel. "Oh god, sorry. Are you all right . . . do you need a . . . ?" And then he was just silent and staring, and it was then that Freya realized the entire front part of her spaghetti-strap dress had fallen almost to her waist, and was in danger of slipping off entirely - which was another problem, as Freya also did not wear any underwear.

"Let me - " And then he tried to step away but still keep her covered, which is when the hand-on-boob happened, as he had tried to pull up the slippery fabric, but instead his warm hand rested on her pale skin. "Oh god . . ." he gasped. Jesus, Freya thought, you'd think he'd never even gotten to first base with the way he was acting! And quick as a wink - because really, this whole experience just seemed to torture the poor guy - Freya's dress was back in its rightful place, safety pin secured, cleavage appropriately covered (if barely - nudity seemed a natural development given the deep cut of the neckline), and Freya said, in that natural, off-the-cuff way of hers, "I'm Freya. And you are . . . ?"

Branford Lyon Gardiner, of Fair Haven and Gardiners Island. A prosperous and generous philanthropist, he had made the largest contribution to the museum that summer, and his name was highly featured on the program. Freya had lived in North Hampton long enough to understand that the Gardiners were special even among the old and wealthy families in this very northern and easternmost part of Long Island, which wasn't Long Island at all (definitely not Long-guy-land, origin of big hair and bigger malls and more New Jersey than New York), but a place of another dimension entirely.

This little village wobbling at the edge of the sea was not only the last bastion of the old guard, it was a throwback to a different time, a previous era. It might have all the stuff of a classic East End area, with its perfect golf clubs and boxy hedgerows, but it was more than a summer playground, as most of its townsfolk lived in town year-round. Its charming tree-lined streets were dotted with mom-and-pop grocery stores, its Fourth of July parade featured wagon-pulled firetrucks, and its neighbors were far from strangers, they were friends who came to visit and sip tea on the porch. And if there was something just a bit odd about North Hampton - if, for instance, Route 27, which connected the moneyed villages along the coast, did not appear to have an exit into town, or if no one outside of the place had ever heard of it ("North Hampton? Surely you mean East Hampton, no?") - no one seemed to mind or notice very much. Residents were used to the back country roads, and the fewer tourists to clog the beaches the better.

That Bran Gardiner had been long absent from the social scene did not distract from his popularity. Any accidents displayed were quickly excused or forgotten. During the rebirth of his house, for instance, Fair Haven would be dark for days, but one bright morning the colonnade would appear completely restored, or else overnight the house would suddenly have new windows or a new roof. It was all a mystery since no one could remember seeing a construction crew anywhere near the property. It was as if the house were coming alive on its own, shaking its eaves, shining with new paint, all by itself.

Now it was the Sunday of the Memorial Day holiday, and what better way to kick off another calm summer in the Hamptons than with a celebration at the newly restored mansion? The tennis courts shined in the distance, the view of the whitecaps was unparalleled, the buffet tables heaved under the weight of the extravagant spread: chilled lobsters as big and heavy as bowling balls, platters of fresh, sweet corn, pounds and pounds of caviar served in individual tiny crystal bowls with mother-of-pearl spoons (no accoutrements, no blini, no creme fraiche to dilute the flavor). The unexpected rainstorm that morning had put a little obstacle on the plans and the party had been moved to the ballroom and out of the crisp white tents that stood empty and abandoned by the cliffside.

That Bran was thirty years old, smart, accomplished, unmarried, and rich beyond imagination made him the perfect catch, the biggest fish in the bridal pond. But what most people did not know, or care to know, was that most of all, he was kind. When Freya met him, she thought he was the kindest man she had ever met. She felt it - kindness seemed to emanate from him, like a glow around a firefly. The way he had been so concerned about her, his embarrassment, his stammer - and when he had recovered enough, he had brought her a drink and never quite left her side all evening, hovering protectively.

There he was now, tall and dark-haired, wearing an ill-fitting blazer, shuffling through the party and accepting the well wishes of his friends with his customary shy smile. Bran Gardiner was not at all charming or knowledgeable or witty or worldly like the men from his background, who enjoyed zooming about the unpaved streets in their latest Italian sports cars. In fact, for an heir, he was awkward and self-conscious and Talented Mr. Ripley-ish - as if he were an outsider to an elite circle and not the very center of the circle itself.

"There you are." He smiled as Freya reached to straighten his bow tie. She noticed the sleeves of his shirt were worn, and when he put an arm around her she smelled just the slightest hint of body odor. Poor boy, she knew he had been dreading this party a little. He wasn't good with crowds.

"I thought I'd lost you," he said. "Are you all right? Can I get you anything?"

"I'm perfect," she said, smiling at him and feeling the butterflies in her stomach begin to calm.

"Good." He kissed her forehead and his lips were soft and warm on her skin. "I'm going to miss you." He fiddled nervously with the monogram ring he wore on his right hand. It was one of his little tics, and Freya gave his hand a squeeze. Bran was traveling to Copenhagen tomorrow on behalf of the Gardiner Foundation, the family's nonprofit project dedicated to promoting humanitarian charities around the globe. He would be gone almost the entire summer. Maybe that was why she was feeling so jittery. She didn't want to be without him now that they had found each other.

The first night they met, he hadn't even asked her out, which annoyed Freya at first until she realized it was because he was simply too modest to think she would be interested in him. Instead he showed up the next night during her shift at the Inn, and the next night, and every night after that, just staring at her with those big brown eyes of his, with a kind of yearning, until finally, she had to ask him out - she could see that if she left it up to him, they would never get anywhere. And that was that. They were engaged four weeks later, and this was the happiest day of her life.

Or was it?

There he was again. The problem. Not Bran, not the sweet man she had vowed to love forever - he had been stolen away by the crowd and was now in the middle of chatting up her mother. His dark head was bent over Joanna's white one, the two of them looking like the best of friends.

No. He was not the problem at all.

The problem was the boy staring at her from across the room and from all the way down the length of the great hall. Freya could feel his eyes on her, like a physical caress. Killian Gardiner. Bran's younger brother, twenty-four years old, and looking at her as if she were on sale to the highest bidder and he was more than willing to pay the price.

Killian was home after a long holiday abroad. Bran had told Freya he hadn't seen his brother in many years, as he moved around a lot and traveled the globe. She wasn't sure where he had just come from - Australia, was it? Or Alaska? The only thing that mattered was that when they were introduced, he had looked at her with those startling blue-green eyes of his, and she had felt her entire body tingle. He was, for lack of a better word, beautiful, with long dark lashes framing those piercing eyes, sharp-featured with a hooked nose and a square jaw. He looked like he was always ready to be photographed: brooding, sucking on a cigarette, like a show idol in a French New Wave film.

He had been perfectly kind, well-mannered, and had embraced her as a sister, and to her credit, Freya's face had betrayed none of the chaos she felt. She had accepted his kiss on her cheek with a modest smile, had even been able to engage him in the usual cocktail conversation. The soggy weather, the proposed wedding date, how he found North Hampton (she couldn't remember, she might not have been listening: she had been too mesmerized by the sound of his voice - a low rumble like a late-night disk jockey). Then finally someone else had wanted his attention and she was free to be alone - and that was when all the small but awful things at the party began to happen.

Cat scratch fever. That was all it was, wasn't it? Like an itch you couldn't quite reach, couldn't soothe, couldn't satisfy. Freya felt as if she were on fire - that at any moment she would spontaneously combust and there would be nothing left of her but ashes and diamonds. Stop looking at him, she told herself. This is insane, just another of your bad ideas. Even worse than the time you brought the gerbil back to life (she'd gotten an earful from her mother for that one, lest someone on the Council found out, not to mention that zombie pets were never a good idea). Go outside. Get some fresh air. Return to the party. She glided over to the vase of pink cabbage roses, trying to rid her whirling emotions by inhaling their scent. It didn't work. She could still feel him wanting her.

God damnit, did he have to be so good-looking? She thought she was immune to that kind of thing. Such a cliche: tall, dark, and handsome. She hated cocky, arrogant boys who thought women lived to service their uncontrollable sexual appetites. He was the worst offender of the type - screeching up in his Harley, and that ridiculous hair of his - that messy, shaggy, bangs-in-your-eyes kind of thing, with that sexy, flirtatious smolder: but there was something else. An intelligence. A knowingness in his eyes. It was as if, when he looked at her, he knew exactly what she was and what she was like. A witch. A goddess. Someone not of this earth but not apart from it either. A woman to be loved and feared and adored.

She looked up from the vase and found him still staring directly at her. It was as if he were waiting the whole time, for just this moment. He nodded his head, motioning to a nearby door. Truly? Right here? Right now? In the powder room? Was that not just another cliche that went with the motorcycle and the bad-boy attitude? Was she really going to go into the bathroom with another man - her fiancé’s brother, for god's sake - at her engagement party?

She was. Freya walked, as if in a daze, toward the said meeting. She closed the door behind her and waited. The face that stared at her from the mirror was excited and radiant. She was so happy she was delirious, so excited she didn't know what to do with herself. Where was he? Making her wait. Killian Gardiner knew what to do with lustful women, it seemed.

The doorknob turned, and he walked in, smooth as a knife, locking the door behind him. His lips curled into a smile, a panther with his prey. He had won.

"Come here," she whispered. She had made her choice. She didn't want to wait a moment longer.

Outside the door, in the middle of the party, the cabbage roses burst into flame.