#and this is why i block every single account who gets blazed on my dash ♥️

[natsudragneelgf]

Just got someone's softcore nudes BLAZED on my dash 🤔

[traegorn]

I posted 1,398 times in 2022

509 posts created (36%)

889 posts reblogged (64%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@traegorn

@gingerblivet

@hockpock

@libraford

@rose-in-a-fisted-glove

I tagged 234 of my posts in 2022

#witch - 99 posts

#witchblr - 98 posts

#witchcraft - 91 posts

#witchtok - 59 posts

#wicca - 14 posts

#nonbinary - 10 posts

#genderqueer - 10 posts

#the bs-free witchcraft podcast - 10 posts

#youtube - 8 posts

#crystals - 7 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#accidentally stabbing myself with a pencil while putting my hand in my pocket while running a training for 20 new contractors at my old job

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Ah yes, @llycaons has become today's volunteer.

One, Tumblr runs off of ad revenue. You have two choices on this site to support it -- be okay with seeing ads or pay for ad-free. Harassing advertisers actually helps no one, because it discourages folks from running ads.

Which means tumblr makes less money, and as the site is already losing money that could lead to its eventual shut down. You don't have to like the ads, but you literally signed up for this.

Two, according to your account you are an adult. You are capable of blocking blogs you don't like seeing, blocking tags you don't like, or even installing an ad blocker and circumventing the system that pays for the site you're actively using. Curate your own experiences my dude, and stop trying to force other people to do it for you.

Three, I like a lot of the stuff I've seen blazed to my dash -- so nah, you're just objectively wrong. Get a bigger sample size next time.

Now fuckle on off, Fuckalong Cassidy.

983 notes - Posted November 27, 2022

#4

The uselessness of Witchcraft Author "Blacklists"

Every once and a while I see a "Witchcraft Author Blacklist" either in the tags or getting passed around here on Tumblr, and never in my life have I thought it was a remotely useful thing.

Because every single time, they lack and semblance of nuance. Like yesterday I ran across one that literally equated Scott Cunningham with Stephen Flowers. Yes, Cunningham, a person who wrote some things that need to be read critically is, apparently, as bad as a literal fucking Nazi whose books help fund the AFA.

Like are there Cunningham books I wouldn't recommend? Absolutely. Should most of his works be read with a critical eye and take into account the state of the community and available information when he was writing them? Yes. But... like... there's a huge fucking difference between these two things.

Also, this list claimed because Cunningham wrote about Wicca his works were somehow homophobic. Have there been homophobic Wiccans? Of course - but Cunningham, an openly gay man, was not one of them.

Additionally, there are people who get included on these lists where I wouldn't recommend anyone read their books to learn witchcraft per se, but their works have important historical significance.

Like Gerald Gardner - should anyone learn from Gardner? Fuck no. His works are full of misinformation and outright bullshit. But it literally is where the modern witchcraft movement was birthed, so there is value in understanding where we came from.

Aleister Crowley falls into this category too - harder even. Crowley was gross as heck, but how can you understand what in the modern community is still descended from his works or propagating his gross ideas... if you're unfamiliar with his works?

Also, he's super dead, so it's not like he's benefiting from someone reading his stuff.

It's just so deeply frustrating that people make these lists to start with. Like, I have written or talked about how certain authors should be avoided -- but I always do my best to include context, reasons, and explanations why. I will specifically explain why I don't think they're valuable to read. Making a laundry list where you make unsourced or unexplained claims about a huge list of people doesn't help someone understand what might be wrong with them.

Also, my recommendations are usually about how a new witch shouldn't read their work, because it's about not having the experience to see what is and isn't bullshit in what they read yet. They don't have that baseline yet. That doesn't mean that some of these books might not be significant or worth reading at some point in their journey. Just not at the start of it.

It's just... a complete lack of nuance. Like I don't recommend Silver Ravenwolf because her books are, frankly, poorly researched and bad. I don't recommend Stephen Flowers because he's a fuckin' overt WHITE SUPREMACIST whose publications have been used to fund the AFA. These are not the same. When we pretend that they are, we are doing a massive disservice to all of us.

It... it honestly feels like Christian purity culture repackaged. If you can't handle nuance, I don't think you can really handle that much witchcraft to start with. The world isn't black and white -- there are overt evils out there, but most everything else is a shade of gray and pretending otherwise is poisonous.

1,264 notes - Posted August 29, 2022

#3

So there's a thing that a lot of tumblr users don't know about -- older ones because it didn't used to be like this, and newer ones because... they're new?

Anyways -- one of the biggest pains of Tumblr is that finding old posts can be hard. The search is terrible, and is overall useless. The easiest solution to this has always been that you can go through your "archive" -- for example here's mine: https://traegorn.tumblr.com/archive

Notice how that URL starts with my username. Longtime users will be like "Of course it does. That's your Tumblr URL." But here's the thing -- a lot of new accounts don't have that. Like, if you type it in (minus the /archive part) it kinda works still -- but it redirects you from username.tumblr.com to tumblr.com/username. And from there, the archive function does not work.

You see, to make your "Tumblr Blog" an actual, well, blog you have to turn it on manually now.

To do that, on the web, go to your blog settings and find this one:

Turning on "custom theme" will enable your blog to function and give you all the features.

Now there are reasons some folks might not want to do this. First off, that does mean sites like Google will be able to spider your blog and things can end up on public searches. If you don't want your Tumblr activity public do not turn it on. That's a choice I leave up to you. But, like, also... I've seen Tumblr accounts ostensibly set up to promote people's works but not have this turned on making the audience they're trying to reach less likely to find them.

But this is a thing that used to always be on. I found out one of my old sideblogs had it turned off that I never wanted it to be set that way. The choice is yours, do what you want.

I'm not your mom.

4,288 notes - Posted November 14, 2022

#2

People who get mad at seeing any post blazed are so funny to me.

This site works because either someone pays for ads, or you pay to not see ads. That's what pays Tumblr's bills.

4,533 notes - Posted November 1, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I'm here.

I'm queer.

I'd like to go back to bed now.

11,183 notes - Posted July 18, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[phroyd]

On the 12th December, The Guardian published an article entitled ‘If you want to understand the Gilets Jaunes you have to leave Paris’. The article had little by way of analysis, devoting itself to a standard ‘look at me I live in France’ one up man-ship. The ostensible topic, the Gilets Jaunes and questions concerning why now, who and where – surely the key questions – were largely ignored or under-developed.

I too live in France, about 800 kilometres from Paris: in South West France. My department is one of the poorest in the country. Moreover, even within this department, the area where I reside is backward in a developmental and progressivist sense: there are no motorways, the towns are little more than villages, there is little by the way of hospitals, work or facilities and, despite its fantastic natural beauty in the shade of the Pyrenees, the towns display an obvious air of poverty, unemployment and civic decay.

Support for the Gilets Jaunes is everywhere. One in two cars displays some sort of yellow vest on their dash. In the conversations at local bars, in the anger and ferocity filling the language of placid individuals, in the complaints of small shop-keepers and finally, in the Christmas newsletter from the mayor of my village.

It’s an anger that’s has been building for a long time. The two-lane main road from Auch to Toulouse has been blocked by strikers, farmers or truckers, on a dozen occasions in the last two years. Two months before the initial protests in Paris, a worker at the local hardware store spent 10 minutes listing to me all the complaints which subsequently informed the protests.

But more evidence of the long-standing anger now exploding is contained in the prolonged, spontaneous, entirely local and informal guerrilla campaign targeting French radar speed cameras.

A campaign which means that, currently, it is estimated that nearly three-quarters of the radars across France are out of service.

In my department, only one out of twenty-seven is still intact and that remaining one has been wrapped in state plastic bags to avoid ‘citizen decommissioning’.

The figures are staggering nationwide: 18 radars are out of service in the Alpes-Maritimes, 18 in the Var (out of 21), 60% in the two departments of Eure and Seine-Maritime, 25 out of 34 in Tarn-et- Garonne, 14 out of 15 in Cantal, 20 out of 30 in Allier, half in Indre, Morbihan and Nièvre, 19 out of 34 in Eure-et-Loire, 25 out of 27 in Côtes-d’Armor , 10 out of 16 in the Cher, 16 out of 33 in the Yonne and 40 out of 57 in the Gard.

In Nord-pas-de-Calais, the Voix du Nord counted at the beginning of December 5 intact radar out of 70, in the Puy-de-Dôme only one remains from 22, in Dordogne 3 out of 24. In the Alpes de Haute-Provence they are all out of order, 18 out of 28 are in Haute-Loire, 14 out of 27 in the Landes, 19 out of 23 in Dordogne, 10 out of 21 in Mayenne, 33 out of 44 in Oise, 22 out of 24 in the Channel, 10 out of 27 in Haute-Saône – one of the least affected departments with Corrèze (5 out of 21). Most of these have been destroyed with a combination of metal grinders and tyres filled with petrol.

The Gilets Jaunes’ demands are based in part around driving. In a lot of ways their struggle is a struggle for movement, basic movement, entry level requirement movement like getting to work; the movement required to live in the most immediate sense. This is the social world of practices and everyday actions. It is not the world of globalist abstractions.

These demands for movement concern police speed practices lowering the speed limit for revenue raising, and of course the price of diesel. The war against the speed cameras informal, spontaneous, uncoordinated, is the fight of the social world against the state noose, a desperate desire to breathe. Yet the demands of my very local group (composed of the small local town and surrounding villages) include the following as well: ‘No to the carbon tax for individuals, yes for polluters. Really force manufacturers to provide us with products that are not overwrapped, more ecological, more intelligent. Coherent and efficient public transport in our countryside’.

Yet they are also demanding reversion to 75% minimum inflation indexation of wages allowance for disability pensioners; revision of retirement and taxation brackets. True increase in purchasing power without help from the SS. Political will to cancel tax evasion. Suppression of privileges for the elected and their home. Tax transparency. Possibility of visibility of expenditures of all state agencies by taxpayers.

In other words, these are the demands of an impoverished populace in rural locations, currently reliant on cars and with little income. As the local mayor put it in his strongly worded Christmas newsletter, an abandonment of rural areas in the service of the profit from excessive re-centralization and the ideologically led development of metropolitan centres.

Now the Gilet Jaune have emerged into public view via Television and the abstract world of global news; now, for the last ten weeks, there have gathered on a unprepossessing roundabout down the road, a tiny group of somewhere between 10 and 16 people waving Gilets Jaune banners and wearing yellow vests.

The two local gendarmes stand quietly watching these people hand out flyers, barbecue their lunch on an overturned oil drum and encourage motorists honking their support. It’s freezing cold across the bare landscape of clay fields. For the most part the Gilets Jaunes on this roundabout are middle aged men, though there is a regular stream of both women and some younger men. All of them are dressed in multiple layers of cheap clothing and every time a car passes, (this is not a heavily trafficked road), they leap and run to them calling and yelling for support, not in an aggressive manner but with enthusiasm and energy. And this is the same throughout the region.

On a recent trip of forty five minutes I encountered 7 of these roundabout protests. All were bigger, some have set up tents, many decorated with the French tricolor; all of them have BBq’s blazing, all of them exhibit a friendly fervour as if they have suddenly discovered they are not alone. They offer passing motorists demands clearly printed locally, some of which mirror wider demands, some which are particular to the area. Many of these roundabout groups have strong female contingents and youth presence. Evidence for this wider support is everywhere: the local farmer who lent them his field adjacent to a roundabout so the Gilets could erect a cabin for cups of tea. Trucks honk continually, cars too, three quarters of the cars have yellow vests on their dashboard or trailing behind. In every village houses are decked with yellow vests dangling from windows or nailed to doors and this is repeated all over France as even a cursory glance at Gilets Jaunes Facebook sites confirms. Motorways are being blocked, not continually but steadily, all over the country, either by groups of protestors or truck drivers or farmers.

Nor is this support simply confined to what could be loosely termed working class people. Support, at least in my area, covers everyone, working and middle class people alike. It includes for instance the woman PA for a managing director of quite a big company; a woman who, despite having worked at the company for 16 years, is still being paid what is colloquially referred to as the ‘smic’, the minimum wage.

Indeed almost all the people around here are paid the bare ‘smic’ no matter what their qualifications, something true of 80% of provincial France. Another woman described as basically running a large storage facility, performing all admin, doing the accounts is, despite her university degree, similarly only earning ‘smic’. For this middle class social capital she travels almost two hours a day.

All complain constantly about taxes; uniformly they claim to have nothing left at month’s end. These are all real examples and along with that there exist other more pernicious impositions draining their income. The common practice concerning Public holidays for instance; many of which in France fall on Tuesdays or Thursdays. In such circumstances, companies will commonly announce a compulsory closure on the intervening Monday or Friday; in the process making what is termed in France a ‘jour de pont’: a week end bridge. Of course, workers don’t get paid for this compulsory bridge. If they want to be paid they take it as part of their annual leave.

In this area, the Gilets Jaunes ARE the social world, all the people and all the world. And because they are so diverse their protests didn’t begin with the certainty of ideology, or a traditional political affiliation or indeed any wild ideas concerning ‘the correct organisation of the working class’ or the purity of the race. Things are far too serious for that.

The people protesting at the local roundabout are, in effect protesting on behalf of the being-ness of their entire social world. Further, as proved by the endless YouTube/Facebook posts, the spontaneous actions of these people are simultaneously mirroring actions, ideas and perspectives appearing all over the entire rural world of France, everywhere outside Paris.

The Gilets Jaunes is the revolt of France Profonde – the social world of Deep France, defined as:

an expression used originally by Parisians to designate the provinces in opposition to Paris. More generally, it refers to the most remote regions of France, without urbanization and rooted in tradition. It can have a pejorative connotation depending on the context.’

The hint of class prejudice in the final line is crucial. Paris, even before it was the nominated as the single globalist city for France, for long before that, Paris has sneered at and despised Deep France.

Simply by its existing, Deep France is in revolt against globalization and therefore against Paris and the French state. But it is something else that really terrifies and disgusts Parisians of all political persuasions, left and right, concerning France Profonde. France Profonde is also a revolt in the name of something positive, a vision of France as a place of equality, a place of valued parts, not one single globalized whole no matter how pure.

What’s more, Paris knows that, whether it be the industrialized North or the rurality of the south, it is this ragged positive vision, shared at the level of personal and communal being-ness which unites the Gilets against the state.

Deep France is more a feeling and a meaning in common than an ideology. Which is why it is ragged and uneven and hybrid and diverse. As it should be.

This is the vision contained in the dirty flags that strew the country roundabouts or the dirty scraps of yellow vest, poking from an upstairs window.

And if this positive vision were encapsulated in abstraction, then it is through their vision of equality, fraternity, equality and liberty, the three words that best reflect the contradictions and truths within their own lives. A slogan which encapsulates for them what they are, what their world is and why it needs to be protected. It is a demand both from them and in the protection of their lived experience. And this is why it is not xenophobic nationalism, indeed not nationalism at all. It is far too particular, far too local far too concrete.

This is why the term ‘those left behind’ is yet another silly liberal metropolitan designation. If the Gilet on my roundabout wanted to be in Paris they’d have been there a long time ago. Lots of people they know already are. What these people are doing instead is standing up for their culture, their own place and their own understanding both of what it means, and of their place in it. They are here because they want to be…who they are.

Read On

Phroyd

[sending-the-message]

My Roommate Got Sick After Returning from Africa by CageVenom

“Are you absolutely positive you locked the door when you left?” Denise’s voice was too desperate for her words to be an accusation. More like a plea.

I adjusted the phone in my hand and the collar of my shirt.

“Yes. Absolutely. I went back up and checked.” The latter was a lie, but I was quite sure I’d locked the apartment when I left on Friday. No answer for a few long seconds.

“We think someone might have broken in…” her voice was rife with dread.

The thought didn’t fully register and I was too surprised to speak. The line was quiet for a minute, then she spoke again.

“We… Gale and I… like, there were footprints… his stuff was messed up, Gale’s, that is.”

“We’ll figure it out when I get there.”

Put simply, in the end, we didn’t really. I got there about two hours later, it was a bit before eleven in the evening. Gale and Denise looked alright, though a bit tired. The worry over what happened had somewhat dissipated by then, but they were still quieter than usual. I briefly tried to lift the mood, unsuccessfully.

Nothing seemed to come of the whole thing in the following days. We hadn’t found anything missing and no other concrete evidence of an actual break-in. One might think we’d live in fear after that, but without a constant reminder, we didn’t get the chance to really commit the whole ordeal to memory. Sure, I was even more careful about locking the door whenever I left, but that was mostly to ensure neither of them would be given a reason to doubt me.

The thing finally up and vanished from our minds when Gale collapsed one day while cooking himself some lunch. Hearing the loud crash, I dashed to the kitchen and found him lying on the floor.

Rushing to Gale’s side took me two, maybe three seconds, but my mind still seemed to have time to tumble through half a dozen thoughts. I’d never seen a person collapse like this before and though I’d been taught what to do in these situations, I didn’t feel in control, not by a long shot. It was my own voice, shouting Gale’s name, which blew back the fog machine’s work on my mind.

“Gale!”

I sounded calmer than I’d anticipated.

“Gale! What’s wrong?”

I was about to gently smack his face when he blinked and looked at me.

“Did I collapse?” he asks. I nod.

“Are you okay, man? You scared the shit outta me.”

“I don’t know, I don’t feel anything weird or anything…” he re-checks his explanation by pondering for a short while, considering whether or not he really is okay.

I offer him my hand and pick him up. I’m relieved to see he can still stand. It takes him a good long second to start laughing. Gale had a weird and what I think is kind of childish tendency to find serious stuff that somehow ended alright, funny. His unwavering optimism would come, sometimes, dangerously close to naivety, but in the moment, it was infectious. I laughed nervously.

“Man, the exams aren’t even starting and you’re already passing out on me.”

Then I added, the weight of the concern dropping my voice about half an octave:

“You really should head to bed and kick back…”

I was preaching to the choir, though. He was already in his half of our room, climbing into bed. He chuckled slightly and said yes, apparently feeling the need to belay my fears. His success was limited. He’d forgotten to stop the water, which ran through the leaves of a head of lettuce. I closed the tap and stared at the few brown roots, stretched like veins, reaching for the sinkhole. I started to worry about Gale.

“People don’t just collapse, right?”

This question was the seed, and growing from it was a stem of possible reasons. Gale had just returned from a trip to Africa, where he’d spent a whole month working part-time at a laboratory.

He got the relevant shots before going down there, but what if it was something else? A couple of years ago, in high school, we were privy to a slideshow of downright nightmarish afflictions one could pick up in Africa. I remember one called river blindness most vividly; a parasite worm that lives, feeds and breeds inside your eyes.

Apart from that wonderful nugget, my knowledge of diseases indigenous to Africa was very limited. My ignorance was anything but bliss, rather, it was simply negative space to fill with terrifying possibilities.

Gale woke up a couple of hours later with eyes as glassy as marbles. He was sick. I brought him a glass of water and pelted him with questions about what could’ve caused it. He didn’t mind me asking, but he didn’t seem to have any idea about the origin of his sudden illness either.

On Friday, I decided to stay with him over the weekend to make sure he’s alright - we usually went back home at the end of the week, since it was a two-hour’s drive home. That was the day his fever peaked.

“Man, I could feed you brownie batter and it’d cook by the time it got to your stomach…” was my answer when he announced his temperature.

That night, I stayed up late doing homework, when Gale decided it was time to scare my very soul straight out of me by talking in his sleep. He did that sometimes, and it’s usually most akin to listening to Gale’s side of a telephone conversation with his mother. Without exception, I’d forgotten everything he’d ever said in his sleep up to that point.

After endangering the cleanliness of my underwear, he took a pause, drawing air slowly and calmly again. I chuckled to myself and rolled my eyes slightly. He and Denise would surely find the story hilarious in the morning.

Then, he spoke up again. The pitch of his voice was higher and he mumbled quickly. He sounded like he was resisting something. Hearing it made me uneasy. It was like watching a typical bullying scene from a movie, the sound lagging behind or staying just ahead of the picture. In that tender state of mind which seems to result from staying awake past one’s bedtime, I felt disturbed.

To my utter relief, his fever fell a bit the following day. This was reason enough for me to convince him to let me take him to the doctor. Our best bet was the hospital, but neither of us had a car, so we had to take the bus.

After an hour of being crammed in a sweaty bus, whose driver had decided that the summer had ended and air conditioning was no longer needed in spite of the blazing heat outside, we had to wait another thirty minutes before he could go in.

The trip back was even less fun, especially because of the dissatisfying “it’s probably nothing” Gale had gotten as his diagnosis. His fever was back, eyes bloodshot and glossy and he even had to lean on me for support as we returned home.

I felt tired, walking back from the station. That was the first time I saw a certain white van parked outside of our apartment block.

That same van, recognizable by a red eye logo of some sort, found a different parking spot in our street every single day from then on. Whenever I walked past it, on my way to college or to the store, I would see the driver shamelessly staring at me. From what I could see, he was a man in his forties, possibly fifties, with dark, round eyes set deep into his face. They followed me like two black camera lenses.

A TV company, no doubt scamming grandmothers and installing satellite dishes to spite the digital age and turn a short-term investment, or so I thought. I took it up with Denise, who said at first that she hadn’t noticed. She came back to me, totally creeped out later that same day, saying she had seen the van and the guy.

In the middle of the week, I found one of Gale’s potted plants had been completely destroyed, only a few green bits poking out of the dirt. He avoided the question when I asked him.

Then, something else happened. It must’ve been Friday, or at least Thursday, because Denise was already gone for the weekend. I decided to stay with Gale, again. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of the front door being unlocked.

I checked the time on my phone. Half past two. Was Denise coming back this late? Why? And why was she struggling with the lock so much? I decided to let her in and ask her why she’d come back and why she was so late.

“Denise? Hang on, I’ll get it for you.” I said. The clicking noise stopped immediately, and was followed by a short silence. Then, footsteps, at least two sets, rapidly receding away from the door. I unlocked the door, threw it open and looked outside, but I had taken too long.

The culprits were already behind the corner and stomping down the stairs full speed. I considered giving chase, but decided against it - there were at least two after all, and I was in my underwear.

Instead, I immediately took my phone and called the police. Another first for me. All of these things were happening within two weeks. What the hell was going on?

With that taken into account, I think I did a decent job keeping my calm on the phone. They told me that they’d send someone over and I thanked them, before setting the phone down.

“What’s going on?” came Gale’s weak voice from beyond the door.

I poked my head into our room and slowly told him that I thought someone was trying to break in and that I’d called the cops. In what little light the crack in the door offered, I could see his shocked expression.

“What?” he asked.

“I… someone was fiddling with the lock, I think. They ran away before I could open up to see them. I called the police, they’ll come soon. You should stay in bed, though.”

Gale seemed to disagree but was unable to get out of bed anyway. He looked terrible, as pale as a snowman, wrapped in blankets to stop his shivering. He was sweating like a snowman too, by the looks of it. Hair clung to his forehead in wet ribbons and I could even see the occasional sparkle of droplets of perspiration on his face.

The policeman took about thirty minutes, all of which I spent pacing between the hallway and kitchen, checking the entrance and the window. By the time he arrived, much of my energy supplemented by the adrenaline rush was gone. I got worried that I’d just dreamed the whole thing up. The embarrassing thought crept into my mind just as I was explaining what happened.

When I finished, he asked me a few things, then we went through it again. The conversation took over half an hour, and by the time it ended, I felt like I’d just been to an oral exam and failed miserably.

I worked up the courage and asked him about what would happen now. He took a second before answering, choosing his words, I think, to put my mind at ease.

“From what I can gather, this was probably a one-time deal. Break-ins are quite rare around here.”

He seemed to cut away a bit of the formality at that point, and I remember appreciating it greatly.

“Look, most of the times we get called in for attempted burglaries, we’re not called again. What I mean is, someone who got caught in the act is really unlikely to do it at the same spot.” he said.

This managed to calm me down. I thanked the officer kindly, and he told me not to hesitate to call again.

A day of being a zombie awaited me, so I quickly checked on Gale before hitting the hay. After that, we only got three or so full nights of sleep and even there I should speak for myself because my roommate was still very ill. I cooked him a few meals, but he mostly got by on salt sticks, his appetite was abysmal.

As if that wasn’t enough, I found another one of his plants had been vandalized and a piece of leaf was missing from a third. Denise returned on Sunday.

That night I was awakened by the sound of Gale coughing and choking on something. I jumped up and immediately ran to him, slapping on the light, asking what was wrong. He was holding his throat and thrashing around in bed. He freed himself from the blanket and fell to the floor.

“Gale! Shit. What’s going on?”

No answer, and the coughing noises stopped. I pull him up by the waist using both of my arms. He doesn’t resist, but he’s not helping either. I manage to get him to stand, bent over. I hit him on the back five times. Nothing.

“DENISE! HELP!” I cry at the top of my lungs.

I started with the abdominal thrusts. There was a small noise in his throat each time I pushed. Denise came rushing into the room.

“Oh my go-!” she cried, but I cut her off.

“Call 911! He’s choking!”

Denise stood there in a daze for a second, hand over her mouth. She stared at Gale, hanging limply from my arms.

“NOW, DENISE!” I shouted again, shocking her out of her trance. Denise scurried to her room and I could hear her talking into the phone. Gale started to shake and convulse, freeing himself from my grip and falling to the floor.

The floor stayed still, but the walls spun around a little when I saw Gale, lying on the floor on his side. A vine hung out of his mouth. Wet leaves, covered with vomit, were piled next to his face, the sour smelling liquid pooling out from underneath him.

Darkness advanced from the corners of my vision, threatening to make me faint any second. I bent down to Gale, my chin stuck to my chest, looking up at him sideways. Strong nausea gripped my stomach and the back of my tongue.

I pulled on the vine, but it was slippery, forcing me to spool it around my hand to get a better grip. I pulled on it again, moving it a good ten centimeters. Gale gagged and more thick fluid came out of his mouth. There were undigested bits of leaves, not attached to the vine, too. I grit my teeth harder, wondering how much longer I could do this for.

That’s when the paramedics stormed in. Denise led them into the room, they shoved me out of the way. I immediately ran to the toilet and emptied my stomach. I then got up, washed my hands and my face thoroughly, feeling incredibly light-headed. Gale was already on the stretcher and the men were carrying him outside.

A weird thought occurred to me then. In my dizziness, one of the paramedics seemed familiar for some reason, but I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. I thought I almost had it, but couldn’t remember at all.

Ten minutes later, a loud siren announced an ambulance pulling into the street. Every blare it made sent a chill down my spine.

I dashed to the window. The ambulance stopped in the middle of the road and two people jumped out of the back. I watched in horror as the figures went through the entrance of our apartment block.

The paramedic I’d recognized carrying Gale away earlier, was the one from the van that had been watching us. Denise held a confused conversation with the real paramedics while I dialled the police, sitting on the floor under the window.

Denise and I spent the rest of the night at the police station, sleeping on the waiting chairs after answering god knows how many questions.

There have been no news of Gale’s whereabouts since. Denise and I were told to move out of the apartment, and neither of us complained one bit. Things have gone quiet. It’s been a year.

It seems like a terrible dream, looking at it now. The only thing maintaining my faith is the fact that Denise saw it too, I know, because I don’t know how many times I’ve asked her. Out of fear of what might happen, I’ve kept quiet about this up to this point and while I’d like to say I’ve finally overcome this fear, that’d be a lie.

In fact, fear is the main reason why I’m writing this. You have to understand. There’s been a white van with a red eye parked outside of my place for the past three days.