#brick kentucky home

[cheapoldhousesunder50k]

Brick Kentucky Home For Sale With Views $195K

$195,000 Here is a Kentucky home for sale boasting five bedrooms, three full baths. High ceilings! Amazing original hardwood floors! Ornate wood work throughout first floor and Primary bath features penny tile floor. Realtor Comments Historic home located in the beautiful city of Maysville.  Sit outside and relax on the deck after work. So much old world charm, its must see!! Bring your…

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Kaylamoonbeam sent this 1877 Italianate Victorian in Vanceburg, KY and asked that I give my opinion of it in a post. It has 4bds, 2ba and is listed for $225K. I don't know what the prices of homes are in Kentucky, but even though it's a fixer-upper, it's a steal. Let's take a look inside.

I didn't think that the brick looked bad painted light gray, but now in this photo it looks completely different. Battleship gray. Hmmm.

The hall stairs are original and this is great. Someone's already stripped the wallpaper.

This is a lovely room. It may be a main floor primary bedroom. I noticed that all the rooms are filled with natural light- it's a very cheerful home. The walls are stripped, the fireplace is original, and there's a nice chandelier. The floors need redoing- they're lifted and chipping in places. I would leave them and just refinish them.

The sitting room is partially stripped down and has a wonderful fireplace. Looks like the original flooring was under a carpet and they finished around it. This room also has a usable chandelier.

Not sure what this room is, but 2 outer doors open directly into it. There's a lovely window bench, it gets lots of light, but I wish they hadn't tiled the floor.

Don't like the kitchen cabinets, but at least they left the original built-in. I think that it probably has the original footprint, so I would temporarily just paint the cabinets. If the wallpaper isn't peeling, I would just leave that for now, too.

Does it look like they painted over wallpaper? This is nice- beautiful stairs and wide halls.

Original linen closets.

Beautiful fireplace, but the room is much too dark.

This one has a beautiful insert. The walls and floor need work. If the new owner doesn't need all the bedrooms, just shut the door on this one for now.

This colorful room looks like it may have been a child's bedroom. The fireplace is beautiful. The thing I wonder about is why didn't they show any of the bathrooms? They may be total guts or ugly renos.

Oh, this is nice. Too bad the paper is peeling. I once bought glue for loose wallpaper seams, but it didn't work at all. What is happening w/the floor? Is it half painted? They also don't show the basement and the heater. I don't think it has central a/c, either. So, there's also that to consider.

It's a very picturesque property.

There's a small brick storage building, too.

The 1.29 acre property is on the banks of the Ohio River.

https://circaoldhouses.com/property/the-pugh-house-historic-riverfront-italianate-in-vanceburg-ky/

[tightjeansjavi]

Jail Bird | Joel Miller x smuggler/raider f! reader

A/N: I got inspired by listening to the song “Stay” by Rihanna when I was driving home from Kentucky, and this was the result of it 🫠 you’re either gonna love, or hate the reader in this one.

~word count: 5.9k~

Summary: your relationship with Joel has always been easy up until the point that you make the conscious decision to leave him, and the QZ behind. Years later and you meet again, under violent circumstances.

Warnings: angst, unrequited love, pining, stalking (if you squint) borderline possessive/obsessive behavior, smut (described but not as the main focal point of the story) conning, emotional manipulation, the reader is morally gray and you’ll either love them or hate them, actions on the base of survival, implied consent, unprotected p in v, oral (f receiving) violence (undescribed but marked) possessive! Joel, vulnerable! Joel, protective! Joel, dark! Joel (if you squint) Joel is a hopeless romantic, manhandling, threats, use of firearms, smoking, +18 minors dni!

Jail Bird: ‘a person who is or has been in prison’

Your relationship with Joel Miller, your partner in crime, was as easy as sliced pie. The syrupy sticky sweet warm filling with melted vanilla ice cream drooling down the crust. Joel Miller, however, was anything but sweet. He tasted of smoky bourbon and life-long indescribable grief. Fluttering ashes, tongues tied, teeth clashing. His hands; sculpted by Greek gods in a meticulous manner. Strong, veiny, calloused yet soft. Joel Miller was a perfectly wrapped package with an ash stained bow. A dangerous combination of brooding, pining, and lust. Your partnership consisted of smuggling, sharing rations, and fucking. Joel was a man who knew how to fuck. The first time he took you was in a back alley in the QZ. The air was balmy and ridden with suspense. He caught you sneaking through the shadows past curfew to make a few back door deals with some FEDRA soldiers. A blow job for a trade of a handsome stack of ration cards? No biggie. He never felt jealousy course through his veins till he saw you sink to your knees on command.

Even with the lack of lighting, sans the pale moonlight shimmering above, Joel saw the doe like innocence in your eyes as he peeked his head around the corner. It felt wrong to watch. It weighed heavy like cement around his bones. Filth and sin dripped through his grime stained pores. He had been watching you for a while. You were a new resident to the QZ, a pretty thing that knew her way around the rules like they never even existed to you. He liked that about you. He liked that you were brash, that you outsmarted every lonesome fuck that crossed your path. So he’d observe you from a distance, catching your keen eye every now and then. It turned into an obsession for him and now the last shroud of little morals he possessed, were completely shredded as he palmed himself through his painfully tight jeans. Cursing under his breath as he tried to provide any form of relief to his aching cock. His head tilted back against the brick wall, lower lip taken harshly between his teeth as he took another risky peek around the corner.

You knew Joel was watching you. You caught his familiar, ruggedly handsome features appear from around the corner. How long he had been watching you did not matter. Your cunt ached for him just as much as his cock weeped for you. You had been observing him the day you arrived at the QZ, and you found yourself yearning for his rough caress.

Your eyes stayed locked on the spot behind the wall where Joel was pressed against as you pleasured the FEDRA soldier who lasted all of 30 seconds before he was spilling his filth down your throat and tossing ration cards at your knees. The stray dribble of cum was wiped from your lips with the tip of your thumb as you gathered up the ration cards and shoved them into your pockets as you rose to your feet. You pulled out a freshly rolled cigarette, bringing the tip to your lips as you lit the other end with an old lighter. Your features were illuminated by the warm glow of the flame as you lit the death stick and deeply inhaled. “You can come out from your hiding spot, Joel Miller. I know it’s you behind the wall. Don’t be shy.” Your head tilted to the side as you took another long drag.

Joel sauntered from behind the wall. His tall frame was brooding under the soft glow of the moon. His boots crunched heavily under rubble as he approached. Thunder lowly rumbled in the far distance as a warm breeze kissed your skin. The comforting glow of the moon was casted over in darkness of thick moving clouds as cooling droplets of water began to free fall from the heavens. The pavement was stained in dampness as the sky grumbled above. Bleach-burn hot flashes of lightning illuminated the jet black sky and illuminated Joel’s features in a blink of an eye. The rain didn’t deter him as he stopped a foot from where you stood. His gaze on you burned as brightly as the lit end of your cigarette pursed between your lips.

“You know, you’re worth a hell of a lot more than a blowjob in a back alleyway. How long did the fucker even last? 30 whole fuckin’ seconds?” He was leaning over you now, forearm resting along your head and you could feel the electricity and heat radiating from his body.

“Do you always watch women give blow jobs to FEDRA soldiers in back alleys? Or is this just a new hobby that you have suddenly developed?” You were casual with your question, a smirk playing on your lips as you lightly blew the hazardous smoke off to the side.

“No. You’re the first, darlin.’ It’s filthy of me, I am aware. Bet you liked it though huh? Bet you liked the idea of some dirty old man watching you get down on your knees prettily like that. You don’t seem like the type of gal to beat around the bush. Storms rollin’ in..wanna see if we can give the thunder a run for its money, sugar?” Joel wasn’t one to beat around the bush either and you appreciated a man that knew exactly what he wanted. Joel Miller was exactly what you needed to satiate your desires.

“You want to fuck me Mr. Miller?” You purred, flicking what was left of your cigarette to the ground, listening to the light hiss the extinguished flame gave when a stray rain drop fell upon it.

You felt his lips dip down to the shell of your ear, teeth scraping along the sensitive skin as he whispered, “wanna destroy you in the best fuckin’ way possible. Wanna ruin your sweet cunt. Been s’long for me, n’you’re so fuckin’ pretty, it hurts. Let me take care of ya, and I promise you won’t have to get on your knees for another FEDRA fuck again.” He pressed an open mouth kiss against the spot where your ear met your jaw, licking a hot stripe down your throat with a heavy warm breath.

“Is that a promise you can keep?” You whispered through the steady rainfall, eyes fluttering shut, lips parting.

“I don’t do promises, baby.” He rasped as his strong hands found purchase around your waist, pulling you flush against his chest. “I only fuck. Ain’t gonna find any love from me. Don’t go and lookin’ for it.”

“I don’t do love either. It’s lost all significant meaning for me. I’m just looking for a good consistent fuck, and the means to survive.” You grasped the back of his neck in one swift movement, yanking his head up so you could crash your lips against his in a heated, tongue filled, teeth clashing kiss.

“Well, you’ve come to the right place, doll. You’re mine now.” He mumbled against your swollen lips as he popped the button along your jeans and shoved his hand between the tight fabric and your soaked through panties.

“Yours.” You gasped longingly as his broad fingers teased your sticky, slick folds, gathering up your pooling arousal that oozed just for him.

The pounding rain soaked through your clothes as your thighs were wrapped tightly around Joel Miller’s hips. He was buried to the hilt inside of you as he slammed into you in a rhythmic pattern. The wind howled wildly as thunder cracked dangerously above. His hips would snap forward into you each time the thunder cracked ferociously. You and Joel were like two feral animals, clawing, biting, and moaning through the ever-growing violent tempest.

Your need for one another had grown carnal. Your bodies were constantly drawn to one another, like moth to flame. You spent more time in his apartment on the other side of the QZ than your own. He fucked you into a peaceful slumber everytime. Sometimes he’d fall asleep inside of you when he’d grown exhausted. “G’nna keep you full of my cock all fuckin’ night.” He’d whispered against your sex stained skin as his arm wrapped firmly around your waist.

You’d slip out of his steel grip before the sun would kiss the budding horizon. Sleeping over at Joel’s felt too personal, and you did it for yours and his own good. Of course, it didn’t go unnoticed. He’d confront you about it each time you’d accompany him on a smuggling run. “Why’d you leave in’sucha hurrry? Think I’m ugly or somethin?’” He’d casually ask as he walked alongside you.

“We both agreed to do no sleepovers, Joel.” Was always your reply. It was like clockwork.

“Fuck our stupid rules. I want to wake up to that pretty little cunt squeezing my cock. You gonna deny me that? C’mon. One sleepover won’t kill ya. I like havin’ you in my bed darlin.’” He nudged you against a nearby tree as the early morning birds chirped along the swaying branches.

“Fine. One sleepover.” You grasped him firmly through the tight confines of his jeans as he hissed under his breath. “Just one, baby. I swear on my filthy, lust ridden heart.” He affirmed.

One sleepover turned into five, and five to a dozen, till neither of you could keep track. It’s as if Joel had made a home inside of your flesh where he refused to depart. He built a door between your sternum; strong and sturdy. On either side of your sumptuous breasts laid two crafted windows. Your heart is where his bed laid where he secretly wished he could inhabit there for the rest of his dying days.

You had grown accustomed to the old metal bed frame striking the crumbling wallpaper fiercely. The old creak and groan of the bed springs creating a rhythmic tune in sync with your sweat slick bodies colliding over, and over again. Joel took you in any position imaginable between those 4 cramped walls. He grew fond of the way you’d ride him slowly where he had the pleasure to watch the way your warm walls hugged his cock with each roll and rise of your hips. He reveled in the erotic sight of your cum mixing with his own, like your own personal watercolor painting between your connected bodies. He reveled in smearing your skin with his release, using his fingers as a paintbrush as he streaked your skin in his filth.

When he learned that you were incapable of having children, he’d press his cum back into your tight hole with glint in his darkened eyes as he used his tongue to push his cum further inside of you, humming at the taste. “Gotta keep all of that inside of ya, sweet girl. Love knowin’ I can fill ya up like this. Don’t want any drops to leak out of this cunt. Wanna keep you stained in my cum forever.” He’d kiss your clit lovingly, tenderly with a light flick of his wet muscle. His words were nothing short of filthy. Any existing priest in this shit-hole would proclaim that you and Joel were children of satan for the debauchery that you both willingly partook in.

You liked it that way.

On the evening you made the conscious decision to leave Joel, and the QZ forever. The weather was stormy, just like the night you had first officially met. The rain pounded furiously against the grime stained windows. The tattered curtains casted shadows along the peeling floral wallpaper. Bright hot flashes of lightning illuminated the room you inhabited for what felt like centuries in fluorescent white. Your thighs were deliciously squeezing either side of Joel’s head as his face was buried deeply into your ruined cunt for the fifth time that evening. His tongue worked you in practiced strokes. His hunger for you was that of a ravenous beast that hadn’t experienced the taste of a woman along his tongue in years. He lapped at you like a man starved as if your cunt was that of the holy grail, sweet and life-curing. His hands acted as anchors around your hips, holding you pliant with little strength needed, eyes blissfully closed as he drank and lapped every last drop you could possess for him. Always so willing, always so needy, always such a good, good, girl for him. Only for him.

When he finally detached his mouth from your swollen clit, he looked up at you, grinning like a devil. His beard and chin were freshly coated in your slick that glistened under the bright flashes of lightning. His lips were wet, and appeared like two dew kissed cherries, scarlet and kissable. He rested his cheek along the inside of your sweat thick thigh as he caught his breath, chest rising and falling as he gazed up at you through thick lashes. He pressed an open mouth kiss as his beard scratched your skin gently. He was in love, and yet you had no idea. Or, maybe you knew all along. Maybe you loved him too. Maybe, just maybe. “Do you think maybe we can just stay here forever?..I’ll greet ya with a kiss every mornin.’ We could just stay between these walls and no one would have to know.” He pressed a feather light kiss to your hip bone. “Just you and me, and this sweet cunt. Never have I tasted something so sweet.”

Your fingers found purchase through his sweaty tendrils, twisting them between your digits with a content sigh. “I’m leaving the QZ, Joel. I can’t stay here any longer.” The confession flitted past your lips with a heavy sigh to shortly follow.

He chuckled, the sound vibrated up his chest and through his throat that was coated in your taste like cough syrup. “What do you mean you’re leavin’ the QZ? Don’t be ridiculous, darlin.’ Everywhere behind these fuckin’ walls is a shithole. There ain’t anythin’ good out there. I can’t fuckin’ protect you past those gates.” Another kiss was left along your abdomen.

“I never asked for, nor needed your protection, Joel. I’m perfectly capable on my own. You have to let me go. This has gone on far too long, and it’s for our own good.”

He scoffed as his lips continued to kiss their way up your body. Stopping at every freckle, every scar, every blemish. He traced them gently. “Let you go? How the fuck do you expect me to do that when I’ve learned, and know every fuckin’ inch of ya. Is it really for our own good? Or just yours? Don’t lie to me.” He nipped at the spot just below your ribcage, and your immediate reaction was to arch up closer to his touch. You always felt magnetized to him.

“You and I both know that it’s better off this way. What we had was good, and I have no regrets, but we broke every fuckin’ rule we put in place, Joel. It’ll hurt for a while, but the pain will reside and you’ll forget all about me.”

He was on his knees now, yanking you down by your ankles so you were beneath him. “Don’t fuckin’ tell me how I’ll feel. You know how fuckin’ long it’s takin’ me to finally open myself to someone again? You think you can just leave and suddenly one day I’ll stop thinkin’ about you? You’re fuckin’ out of your goddamn mind if you think that to be true.” The tip of his cock was nudged against your entrance, dragging through your slick folds that parted open for him like a canyon. He pressed himself into your tight wet hole, groaning softly at the feeling of your cunt hugging him already. “Put your thighs up against your chest fo’me.” He gritted out between clenched teeth.

Your thighs moved on command as you brought them up to your chest, bending yourself in half like a folding table as the weight of his own broad chest pushed your back further into the old mattress. “Joel, please.” You mewled. “You have to let me go. You have to.”

“Stop. Tellin’. Me. What. I. Have. To. Do.” He enunciated each symbol in a borderline patronizing way. He sunk further, and further into your warm abyss. Your pussy hugged him tighter and tighter till he had bottomed out. Sweaty strands of curls draped across his forehead like curtains as he snapped his hips forward in an aggressive manner. “You wanna leave me so bad, baby? After everythin’ I have done for you? Everythin’ I have given you? Shelter, food in your belly and a cock that knows how to fuck you stupid? You ain’t goin’ anywhere. I’ll just have to follow you. Care about you too fuckin’ much to just let you leave me like that.”

The old springs in the mattress squeaked with each one of his heavy thrusts. Your eyes rolled back as his tip pressed firmly against your cervix, eliciting stars to be casted behind your eyes. He fucked into you at an impossibly deep angle, his heavy balls hung between his thighs and slapped against your skin with every snap of his hips. “Joel, please.” You pleaded with him between moans.

“Please what, baby? Please fuck you stupid till you forget all about wantin’ to leave me? You’re not the same until you’ve had a well deserved fuck. I’m the only fuckin’ man that can give it to ya. Take it like the good fuckin’ girl that you are fo’me. Your pretty ‘lil fuckin’ pussy is huggin’ my cock so perfectly. S’like she was made ‘jus fo’me.” He was kissing you now, all teeth and tongue to shut you up. You protested words that fell muffled against his addictive lips as he fucked you the way he knew best. Always making sure you felt filled, stretched to your limits, and on cloud nine by the end of it. He always took care of you afterwards. Gently wiping between your thighs, bathing you under a warm stream with the tenderest of touches. Joel Miller loved you, and that’s exactly why you had to leave him.

He kept you anchored against his naked chest all night. Notched together like two puzzle pieces. At the strike of morning, with the soft beams of light trickling in through the wispy curtains, prying yourself from his satiating grasp. If you stayed in his warm embrace any longer, your heart would cave and you’d never leave. Without even delivering a proper goodbye, you left his apartment without looking back. You kept pushing yourself further and further from Joel, from the QZ till it was just a mere speck in the distance.

Joel drove himself mad on his search to find where you went. His anger shrouded his hurt as he scoured the QZ for any sign of your existence. He checked alleyways, the abandoned mall, your own apartment. He tore through your things in a fury, tears burning his vision as he ripped through your belongings like a predator rips apart its prey. No signs. No hidden clues for him to find where you ran off to. He inspected mutilated faces of the infected, praying that none of the once living would resemble you. None of them did. He gave up his search when he and Tess were forced to take a teenage girl across the country to the fireflies. Tess perished and soon it was just Joel and the kid. He never stopped thinking of you, of course. You haunted his dreams and sometimes he’d wake up to see your ghostly face laying beside him.

He thought he’d never see you again until one brutal winter in Jackson while he, Tommy, and a few other men were patrolling on horseback. Ellie was safely back in town, far from harm's way while Joel placed himself on death's doorstep every time he patrolled with his brother. His horses' hooves crunched heavily along the freshly fallen snow. The wind whipped and howled in an ominous tune as the bitter chill tore through his thick jacket and pierced his skin. “There ain’t nothin’ alive here for miles, Tommy. Let’s go back. That rumor we heard about a raiders camp is probably false. Besides, you said it yourself, ain’t no man is stupid enough to try and overthrow the town.” Joel rode up alongside Tommy’s horse.

“The cold botherin’ you or somethin’ brother? Thought you were tougher than that.” The younger Miller brother said with an amused grin as he lightly punched Joel in the shoulder.

The wholesome moment quickly turned to chaos as 3 shots rang through the snow covered evergreens. Your group had been closely stalking Joel and Tommy for hours in the shadow of the forest. It wasn’t your first choice to join a raider group. Why the men spared you that day was beyond you, but they had become your new family, and you’d take whatever protection you could get; good or bad. You were the mastermind behind ambushing the group from Jackson. Driven by greed and bloodlust, you convinced your men that they could take down the patrol group, and overthrow the town. A lack of poor judgment proved to be fatal as you were thrown from your horse and tumbled into the snow. Your gun was kicked violently from your grasp with a heavy boot as you let out a feral scream.

The same boot that disarmed you, kicked your body down into the snow with a heavy thud. Adrenaline coursing through your veins clouded your senses as you held your hands up in defense at your perpetrator. You could only see his eyes as the rest of his face was covered by a thick wool scarf. The barrel of his gun was pressed against your temple as the man’s knee pressed harshly down on your stomach, pinning you at his mercy. “Your men are dead, and now you’re about to fuckin’ join them. How stupid does one person have to be to try and pull off a stunt like that?” The man gruffly spoke, voice muffled through the thick wool disguising his features.

That voice. Could it be? No. You were just imagining things again.

“Go ahead and fucking shoot me then. Better you than the men back at my camp. They’ll do far worse than you can imagine.” You spat.

Joel grasped the back of your head, yanking you up as he kept the barrel of his gun steady against your trembling temple. “How many of ya are there? In your camp, how many? If you tell me where they are, I won’t kill you.” Joel Miller was always a man of his word.

“Twenty..or so. You’ll need more men.” You grinned your teeth together as he roughly yanked you up. Your face was also concealed with a thick scarf, but your eyes held a sense of familiarity that Joel hadn’t felt in years.

“Tommy! Round up what’s left of their horses, and we’ll take her back with us. She’s gonna tell us where the rest of her group is. Ain’t that right, darlin?’”

Tommy was weary of his brother's proposal but ultimately agreed. “Fine. We’ll put her in a cell and then interrogate her for information. Maria isn’t going to take lightly to this, just so you’re aware.” Tommy narrowed his eyes at you before turning on his heel to return to his own horse.

“So, I’m becoming your prisoner? You gonna put me in handcuffs or something, sir?” You couldn’t help but take a tone with this man, despite a literal gun being pressed against your forehead.

He yanked you up to your feet in one swift movement. “You’re going to be my jailbird for as long as I fuckin’ see fit. You wanna live another day? Better get to talkin’, and cut that smartass attitude out. The hell is wrong with you?” Joel shoved you towards your horse with the barrel of his gun now shoved at your back. “Get on.” He demanded.

“You injured my horse.” You flatly stated as you grabbed ahold of the reins and hoisted yourself back into the saddle, and your scarf fell down just the slightest before you quickly scrambled to re-secure it.

“That’s what happens when you ambush heavily armed people, darlin.’ A grazed bullet to the flank ain’t gonna kill your horse. He’ll live.” Joel hoisted himself back up into his own saddle.

“It’s a she, and fuck you.”

“Well, my apologies to her.” Joel held the reins in one hand while the other was firmly wrapped around your bicep, just in case you were going to be stupid enough to try and escape.

You were in fact thrown into Jackson’s makeshift jail like a rag doll. Joel was anything but gentle as he shoved you inside the cell and slammed the door shut with a heavy clank and locked it. “You outta go and make yourself comfortable, cus’ you’re gonna be here awhile.” He pulled up a chair to sit right outside the metal bars. It scraped painfully along the flooring as he sat down.

You sat down in the chair across from him, peering through the metal bars with your arms crossed against your chest. “So, even if I tell you where the rest of my group resides, you aren’t going to let me go?”

Joel mirrored your actions by crossing his broad shoulders over his chest in an intimidating manner. “I never said anythin’ about lettin’ you go. All I said was that I wouldn’t kill ya if you told me where the rest of your group is.”

“Ohh. So you were dead serious on the whole prisoner thing? I thought you were bluffing.” You pressed the weight of your back against the metal chair. “Well, if we’re gonna be here awhile, mind telling me who you are?”

“Those details are not necessary. You ain’t got a reason to know who the hell I am. You’re gonna sit there, and you’re gonna talk and I let you live. You think you get to call the shots, sweetheart? You got another thing comin’ for ya.” Joel stated with a raised brow.

“Alright, how about we make a deal. You seem like a reasonable man. How about we both take these scarves off and reveal our identities, and then I’ll talk. Let’s make this entire transaction personable, it’ll make it way more fun for me to kill you if I see your face.” Your threat was casual, yet all the more serious.

“Kill me? How are you gonna do that? I got you trapped behind these bars and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.” He scoffed at your threat, brushing it off like water off a ducks back.

“I have my ways.” You stood up from the chair and sauntered over to the bars, grasping them between your hands with your cheek pressed against the cold metal. “C’mon. Tell me your name, and then I’ll tell you where my camp is. It’s a fair deal.”

Joel let out an annoyed huff. He was sick of your games already and he briefly wondered how someone as incessant as you, survived this long. “Joel. My name is Joel.”

Joel is a common name, right? There’s plenty of Joel’s. There’s no way in fucking hell that this man was your Joel Miller. Not a chance.

The air felt heavy as you stared at him through the bars. Your gaze was heavy on his covered face as if you were trying to see through the wool that covered it.

“The fuck are you starin’ at? Y’know what? Maybe I should just kill you after all. You ain’t gonna tell me what I want to know. You think that you’re gonna fuckin’ weasel your way out of this. Well, guess what? You ain’t.” He stood up from the chair in a fury as he strode to the bars and grasped your chin in one swift movement. You clawed at his hand, but it was too late. Your scarf fell from where it was secured on your face and he stumbled back as if he had seen a ghost, his own scarf falling as his body collapsed into the chair.

“YOU?!” He yelled incredulously as he stared at your recognizable face in disbelief. “YOU TRIED TO FUCKIN’ KILL ME!” He tossed his scarf to the ground as he pulled himself back up from the chair. “All these years, and this is how we meet again?!” His voice echoed off the concrete walls, booming painfully against your eardrums as you cowered from the sound.

“Had I known it was you—”

He didn’t even give you a chance to finish your sentence as his hands slammed down around the bars. His face was flushed red with anger, his eyes narrowed into slits. “Bull fucking shit! You tried to kill me, and my brother! You fuckin’ ambushed us!”

“I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS YOU! I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS YOU, JOEL! I SWEAR!” You tried to plead with him.

“You tried to kill me.” His voice fell flat as he stepped back from the metal bars with a heavy shake of his head. “You fuckin’ bitch.” He whispered under his breath as he strode out of the makeshift jail without looking back.

Three days passed since you had last seen Joel Miller. You were convinced that he, and the people of Jackson would let you rot in here without a care in the world. In your solitude, your mind drifted off to the QZ and your time spent with Joel. Oh, how everything had changed.

A metal tray skidded to your feet below the metal bars along with a mug of coffee. Joel had returned and was once again sitting in the old metal chair as you scarfed down the food he provided you like a ravaged animal.

“Your men are dead. Cordyceps got to them before we could.” He was resting his hands on his knees as he leaned over, observing you.

“Good. I’m glad to hear it.” You spoke between mouthfuls of stew, not even looking up at him.

“Tommy wants to kill you. His wife is pretty fuckin’ pissed that you and your group ambushed us. I’ve convinced him for the time being to spare your life. You’re welcome.”

“I agree that they should kill me. I’m a traitorous killer. If you let me out of this cell, I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

“You can quit that whole tough girl act ‘round me. I know exactly who, and what you are, and you darlin’ are not a killer.” Joel retorted with a sigh.

“Stop fucking acting like you know who I am, Joel. You don’t know a goddamn thing about me anymore. You don’t know the people I have killed since I left you. You don’t know what I’m capable of, so stop pretending that you do.” You snapped.

“Oh? I don’t? Just because you went off and joined a group of murderous raiders, doesn’t mean I don’t know you anymore. Are you forgettin’ that I used to be one of them?”

“What exactly are you trying to get out of this, Joel? Are you looking for closure? Are you looking for revenge? What the hell is it that you want?” You kicked the empty tray back under the prison bars.

“I want some fuckin’ answers. I want to know why you just up and left me like that. Do you know how long I spent lookin’ for you? I was forced to give up because a teenage girl, who I now view as my own kid, was thrown into my life, quite literally, and we went on this journey together. I stopped looking for you in mutilated bodies, but I never stopped thinking about you, and where you were.”

“I already told you why I needed to leave. I gave you those answers, and you wouldn’t agree with me. Leaving you was the hardest thing I have ever fucking had to do. I told you it was for our own good.”

His boots were heavy along the floor as he stopped in front of the bars, grasping them tightly between clutched fists. “No. I want a real fuckin’ answer. I deserve that at the very least.”

You were in front of him now, hands grasping the bars just below his own with your eyes boring into his. “I left because I had to. If I stayed any longer, I would have never been able to leave. We would have never worked out, Joel. It was going to come to an end whether we wanted it to or not.”

“You didn’t fuckin’ have to do anythin.’ I provided you anythin’ you fuckin’ wanted. Anythin’ you needed. I let you ruin me, and you just get up and leave? Fuck you. I didn’t ask to feel this way. I didn’t ask to care about you. It just fuckin’ happened. So how dare you say that you had to do anythin.’” His tone dropped an octave as his eyes stayed locked on yours.

“What the fuck else do you want me to say, Joel? Do you want me to say that I hated you? That I never cared about you either? Do you want me to lie to your fucking face and tell you that you never fucking meant anything to me? Is that what you fucking want?!” You responded exasperatedly with your lips nearly touching his between the gaps in the bars. “I’ll lie to you if it means that you’ll finally let me go.”

“I loved you.” He whispered with a clenching heart. “I loved you, and would have done anythin’ to keep you. I’d lasso you the fuckin’ moon if it made you happy.” He confessed.

Your heart fell heavy between strained strings as your palms grew clammy. “No. Take it back. Don’t you dare fucking throw that word around with me, Joel Miller. You’re fucking lying.”

“Am I? Am I fucking lyin’ when I tell you that I searched every goddamn crevice in the QZ looking for you? Am I lyin’ when I tell you that I tore up your fuckin’ apartment to try and find any sign or clue as to where I could find you? Am I lyin’ when I spent sleepless nights cryin’ in my own filth because it felt like a piece of me was ripped away? Just like the way my fuckin’ daughter was ripped from me? I love you, you stupid, stupid girl.”

Suddenly, you were kissing. Magnets drawn together by an impossible force that not even prison bars could keep you apart. He grasped your face delicately between his hands as you kissed one another with desperation, as if you’d slip between one another’s hands like sand on a beach. He detached his lips from yours, a string of spit keeping you connected for a mere moment as he quickly unlocked the cell door with the key in his pocket. You were on each other in an instant, slamming his back into the door before kissing him fervently once more. Joel Miller should have never trusted a jailbird such as you. You felt the coolness of the key in your grasp, having him distracted at your mercy. You shoved him away, slipping through the door and slammed it shut before locking it. He barely had a chance to register that you were no longer in his proximity.

He shook the bars wildly, yelling fiercely as you slipped from his grasp once more. “DON’T LEAVE ME! DON’T LEAVE ME! I LOVE YOU, PLEASE! PLEASE DON’T GO! I LOVE YOU!” He slammed his fists into the bars over and over again, till his knuckles were raw and bleeding, and his throat ran dry.

Tagging people I think will enjoy! @chaotic-mystery @cavillscurls @morning-star-joy @sinsofsummers @cupofjoel @thetriumphantpanda @dinsdjrn @darkroastjoel @korynnekorynne @kirsteng42

Part Two

[zmediaoutlet]

fic: all we want is more (complete)

I hope people will give it a chance! Turns out I created the word doc on March 18 of this year; a very long stagger of musing to actually get done. But it's done.

title: all we want is more pairing: Sam/always-a-girl Deanna rating: explicit length: 18k (chapter 2; full fic is ~35k)

summary: Sam and Deanna have never been good at boundaries.

(read full fic on AO3)

(link directly to chapter 2)

Dad comes back to Louisville the following Wednesday, later than the first estimate but earlier than the second. The days between are—strange. Sam expected them to be but he didn't understand the scale.

Sam does his homework. Deanna works at the bar. She brings home food and Sam does another load of laundry, not making a big deal of it, and Deanna doesn't either, picking through her clean underwear without looking at him. He and Noelle work on their Shakespeare presentation in class and they're going to get an A and Noelle smiles at him big and warm and glad and asks if he wants to go bowling with her family on Saturday, kind of a party. Sam wants to bury himself under a mile of dirt and broken bricks and salt, where no one will ever see him again. He says no. Noelle's feelings seem hurt but she just says, "Okay, maybe next time," and for the first time maybe in his life Sam thinks that there won't be a next time with relief instead of resentment.

Kentucky feels like a sinkhole, a trap. He can't breathe, it's so humid. Deanna takes a shower when she comes home from the bar and Sam's awake, he's always awake now as soon as the front door opens, and he watches through slit eyes while she comes into the bedroom in her towel, walking on silent padding feet like slinking past a skinwalker. She crouches, and rummages for her clean pajamas, and glances at where Sam's silent and curled on his side on his bed, and then—goes back into the bathroom, changing quiet and out of sight. Comes back in the thin light from the kitchen, seeping through the cracks in the bedroom door, in the DARE shirt and the boxers and her forearms and thighs and hair shining, and crawls into her bed, and she doesn't throw a beer can at him and tell him about how gross the customers were tonight and she doesn't whack him with a pillow and demand he come watch Die Hard With A Vengeance and she doesn't talk to him at all, or at least not in a way that matters. In the morning she drives him to school and there's dark smudged under eyes like she slept bad, and Sam tells her to have a good day and she smiles, brief, and says, "Back atcha, kiddo," and Sam wants to scream.

They go for a run on Sunday morning. Ten miles. Deanna doesn't bitch the whole time and Sam wants her to, very badly. He sprints ahead after the first ten minutes, not willing to have her in his peripheral vision for the next hour, and because he's in the lead he sets the pace, and he runs fast, his heart pounding in his throat and his breath sawing his chest and his whole body absolutely drenched in sweat in the muggy air, but she doesn't call a halt once, keeping up behind him so he can hear her panting. When they get back to the car they both heave for air, hands on their knees, and Sam thinks he's going to puke but he doesn't. Deanna bends at the waist, arms folded on the Impala's hood and her forehead buried against them. Her thighs trembling, her shorts damp with sweat at the back, her shoulderblades popped up high, where Sam could lay his head between them, feel the way her lungs expanded, the way her heart beat, hard and heavy. How she'd smell.

She tells him she's going out, after she gets out of the shower. "Thought the bar was closed," Sam says, and Deanna shrugs, in her towel again, picking through the clothes Sam washed and dried and folded, says, "Hey, just because Marv's a square doesn't mean the whole town shuts down," and glances at him all gross and half-dried sweat on his bed and says, "Don't wait up, huh?" and he slams into the bathroom, smelling again the vanilla and the chemical peach and tugged in this awful war between terrified and pissed.

He jerks off in the shower. Not thinking until he, of course, thinks. Boobs spilling creamy-white and full out of a black bra but no longer just porn and magazines and Phoebe Cates getting out of the pool but real, texture, the tight wrinkled feel of a nipple under his tongue and the squishy-sweet warmth under his hand, in his mouth, tiny fine hair all velvety soft, a gasp when he sucks. And the smell—not here, not in the shower with the vanilla-peach and Irish Spring but—salt, sour, tang like—like nothing else. He creams the tile, face buried in the crook of his elbow, and then grips his balls and he's still hard and so he does it again, dragging his tongue over the roof of his mouth. Moans the second time, not meaning to, but when he finally gets out of the bathroom, the shower long-cold, the house is empty and maybe he wasn't overheard. Maybe.

Deanna's not home, Monday morning. Sam takes the bus to school. Noelle doesn't talk to him in English. At lunch he sits alone at the end of the same long table where Caleb King's talking to his acolytes about how he loves sex, how he totally got Mindy Earle to give it up to him over the weekend, and Garrett Robinson (always the biggest nerd in the group, clearly kept around because he thinks Caleb's the coolest person in the universe for reasons Sam will never fathom, even if he's only been at this school a month) says, "What's it feel like?", and Caleb leans in, says, "Oh, dude, it's so hot. Her pussy was so tight, like the best jerk-off ever," and Sam mutters, "Yeah, right," not meaning to, but it makes the four guys at the other end of the table turn on him, immediate. "What do you know about it, dorkass?" Caleb says, red in his cheeks, and Sam says, holding onto his plastic fork very tightly, "It's not like jerking off at all," and then, "Was she even wet? If she was into it she'd be wet, like—dripping. Unless you don't know what you're doing." Caleb says, "Shut up," and Sam says, queasy and acid in his throat, "Poor Mindy—guess she needs someone with a real dick, huh?" and that's how Sam ends up getting in a fight at lunch and also how gives a nosebleed to a kid who didn't really do much more than lie to his friends, although he holds back from breaking Caleb's arm even though for a second he kind of wants to, just to—to feel different—but instead he lets a teacher pull him off, panting, and it's Mr. Trainor from Stats who's shocked, saying, "What the hell got into you?" He gets sent to the office and the principal gives him an in-school suspension and tells him his parent or guardian has to sign the paperwork. Fat chance. When he goes home Deanna's there, and looks at his swollen lip and cut knuckles and says, "What the hell, Sammy?" and Sam can't say. In a hundred years he couldn't say. He's got a tangled hot barbed snarl in his chest and he wants to push her to the ground and—he goes to the bedroom, slams the door behind himself. They don't talk, for the rest of that day, and the next, and then when Sam comes home from school on Wednesday the truck's parked on the street behind the Impala and he thinks, finally, like somehow this will fix it.

Only—

Deanna's cheeks are flaming red. At the table she's stripped a shotgun and she's oiling the inside of the barrels, moving quick and jerky and obviously pissed off, and she doesn't look at him but shakes her head, and when he comes around the partition he sees why: Dad, laid out on the couch, boots kicked off onto the carpet. Muddy. Mixes with the beer, maybe, Sam thinks, and then flushes because that couch and the spill and everything are just—not something that should be thought about, with Dad in the room. In the state.

A thunk, Deanna slamming the barrel down on the towel, but Dad doesn't twitch over on the couch. The TV's on, showing the news—car crash on the highway, probably no ghosts involved—and the weapon bag's on the floor next to the table and Dad's duffle next to it, sprawled open, the t-shirt on top stained dark. Sam puts his backpack on the other chair and chews the inside of his cheek. "He okay?" Sam says, quietly.

Deanna's hands slow. A deep breath. "Far as I can tell," she says, quiet too, and jerks her thumb at the bags. "Used pretty much everything. Guess it was nasty. Whatever it was."

Bitter, there. Sam's used to Dad leaving him out of the loop and doesn't know why she cares so much. A hunt's a hunt's a hunt, with the possibility of getting beheaded whether it's the dumbest old-lady ghost or a vicious pack of ghouls or anything else. Dad came back in one apparent piece; that's got to be enough, for today at least.

He opens up the weapon bag and finds Dad's preferred machete, which got a cursory cleaning at some point but is still stained black. When he sits down with the oilcloth and sharpening stone Deanna looks up at him, surprised. He doesn't know why. There's work to do. He knows how to do it, and it's better than anything else he could be doing.

*

Dad's back and it feels normal. More or less normal. Normal for—three hours, maybe. Dad sleeps like a coma through that whole first night, snoring that weird back-of-the-throat snore, and Sam and Dee clean up the weapons and Sam counts up the ammo and Dee makes a dinner, of a kind, ramen with ketchup and more green beans, which isn't half bad, but they can't sit on the couch and the table's covered with guns and so they sit out on the step in front of the house, in the muggy humid night, and it should be normal. Deanna's heel keeps bouncing on the trodden-brown grass and it can't be. Sam's food sticks in his throat kind of but he gets it down. Deanna washes the dishes and Sam goes to sit in the bedroom, with his homework that he doesn't give a shit about doing. He's holding his history textbook and hasn't even opened it when she appears in the doorway to the bedroom and when he looks up they meet each other's eyes for a weird strange second until she goes to her bed, sits and tugs her boots on with no socks, says, "Going out," and Sam sits up and says, "What?", and her cheek sucks in on one side and she shakes her head and doesn't answer, just hops up in a tank top with a gun-oil stain at the waist and short-shorts and boots, no makeup and her hair a sloppy ponytail, but by the time Sam musters the courage to ask where she's already got her keys in her hand and her wallet stuffed in her back pocket and she's out the front door, the screen banging behind her.

In the morning Sam wakes to the smell of coffee, and Deanna's bed empty. In the kitchen: Dad, in bloodstained jeans and a surprisingly clean t-shirt, testing the edge on the machete. He nods, and puts it back in its sheath, and only then looks up and says, "Morning, son," and Sam gets that weird mix dumped over his head, like always—frustration, relief. Gladder than words. Wanting to punch him, a little.

"Hey, Dad," he says. He pours a cup of coffee, and while his back's turned Dad says, "So," and Sam closes his eyes, and Dad says then, "Where's your sister?" and the thing is that that is a very, very good question.

Dad doesn't have any immediate leads on a hunt and he's clearly worn out after the last month. He goes in to take a shower after Sam fumbles a muttered fake guess about Deanna going shopping, or something, and then it's time for Sam to leave for school, more or less, but what's the point? Sitting in the library on suspension and doing homework that doesn't matter. He dresses and picks up his backpack and leaves, with a note on the table next to Dad's empty mug that says school, but he walks the opposite direction. Toward the library, and then past the library toward the river, miles with his feet aching until he can sit in the wet-thick air under the trees, the water rushing and everything around an incredible suffocating green. Quiet.

He makes it back to the rental at four o'clock and the Impala's there. Thank god. He walks into the house and an argument.

"I've been making a hundred bucks a shift," Deanna's saying—saying, not yelling, but it's a thin difference. Pink-cheeked like she was when Dad first came home. "It's the best job I could get."

"Who told you to do that?" Dad says. He's at the table, holding a beer—Deanna with her arms folded in the hallway to the bedroom. "That's what the cards are for."

"Fake credit limits don't last forever, Dad!" Raised voice, definitely, that time, and Sam holds back in the doorway, frozen. "If we were going to not starve in this dump we needed cash. I got cash! What's the big deal?"

If Sam were yelling like that Dad would be yelling right back; with Deanna he sits back in his chair, looks at her straight-on, and then turns his head, not bothering to respond. "Sam," he says, "we're heading out in the morning. Got a line on a few things in Wisconsin."

Sam nods, says, "Yessir," but Deanna interrupts with, "The school year's not over."

Dad takes a deep breath.

"It's not," Deanna says. She's gripping her upper arms very tightly, Sam sees—still in the same clothes she was wearing when she left last night, but a new bruise—why?—on her thigh. "He's got a presentation, been working on it all month. When is it?" she says, swinging her attention to Sam, who says without a better option, "Monday," and she raises her eyebrows at Dad and says, "Monday," like throwing down an ace in a game of poker. Only, the game's never worked that way, not any time Sam's ever tried that once in his whole life.

Dad stands up from the table, the chair scraping loud on the linoleum. "We're leaving in the morning," he says, not hard but just a statement of fact. "Time to pack up. You can get the laundry done tonight."

This last to Dee, whose nostrils immediately flare. "I can do it," Sam says, stepping forward. "I, uh, I've been to that laundromat a couple of times."

"Your sister will do it," Dad says, this time with an actual hard edge, and Sam shuts up and Deanna's jaw clenches and then she turns on her heel and disappears into the hallway. Dad looks after her for a second and then shakes his head, and then says, "Sam, come on," and so Sam rides with Dad in the truck to hit a pawn shop for silver and a vet clinic where Sam picks the lock and then stands guard while Dad replenishes their first aid kit and then a liquor store, and he doesn't ask Sam about school but does ask about their training, and Sam can say honestly that they ran and they practiced shooting and they sparred, and he won.

"She let you win?" Dad asks, looking straight ahead at the dark streets.

"No," Sam says, and clears his throat and says it again, more clearly. He tucks his hands between his knees so he won't bite his nails. "Maybe we shouldn't fight anymore. I'm bigger, now. It's not fair."

"No, it's not," Dad says, and it's rare enough to be agreed with that Sam looks at him. "Fair's not in the cards. Anyway, she's still faster, right?" He looks at Sam, who nods, and Dad nods back and then changes lanes, on the way back to the house. "So. Just be grateful she doesn't hit you in the balls, dude."

Dad's teeth gleam in the dark. Sam's too sick inside to laugh but he snorts.

The Impala's parked in front of the laundromat as they pass. Back at the house, Dad calls in a pizza order and then writes in his journal while Sam packs the battered tin first aid kit back together. Food arrives; Dad closes the journal and Sam musters up, "So, what's in Wisconsin?", but Dad only says, "Pattern I'm checking on," so that's a bust. He wants Dee back but then again he doesn't. They watch the news while Dad reads the local paper. Car crash killed four. Sam's biting his thumbnail again and forces himself to stop.

Deanna slams in the front door and drops Dad's duffle on the kitchen floor as she blows through to the hallway. Sam jumps up to follow and in the bedroom she practically hurls the laundry bag at the wall over her bed. There was hardly anything of theirs to wash but enough to make a thump that makes Sam wince. "Want me to fold your dainties?" she says, acid.

"Deanna," Dad says, behind Sam.

"What," Deanna says. She rips open the cord on the bag, dumps everything out onto her mattress on the ground. "I'm doing the fucking laundry."

Sam flinches, folds his arms over his stomach. What the hell.

She rolls a pair of jeans in the silence. Her ears bright red, her hands jerky. Dad steps into the doorway and Sam shifts his weight, wanting to sink below the earth's crust. "Sam can finish that," Dad says. Gravelly, low, like he gets when he's pissed. "Pack up. You're driving to Jim's place in Blue Earth."

Deanna's picking up a shirt; she stands slowly, and actually looks at Dad, frowning. Eyes bright, lips bitten red. Sam curls his toes in his sneakers so tight they hurt. "We're going to Wisconsin," Deanna says.

"Sam and I are going to Wisconsin," Dad says, flat. "You're going to get that attitude sorted out."

Her mouth parts, her eyes get big. Sam's stomach turns an entire somersault.

Dad shakes his head, and glances around the room at their piles of clothes, the mostly-made beds on the floor. "Could've kept this place in shape while I was gone," he says, and disappears again down the hallway.

They stand in silence. The TV noise trickling down the hall; the fridge door opening and then slamming closed, and the aluminum crack of another beer opening. Sam's air feels like it's coming through a straw. "Dee," he whispers. Her eyes shift from the empty doorway to meet his, and then drop to his mouth, and then her chest heaves on a deep breath and she drops down to her knees, packing her duffle again, shoving things in sloppy and haphazard. "Dee," Sam tries, again, and she says, "Shut up, Sammy," half-whispered and fierce.

Sam goes back out to the living room and Dad's writing in his journal again at the table, his back to the hall. Sam wants, again, to punch him—the heat of that rising up in his gut and in his throat and behind his eyes, so that he curls his hands into fists and has to fold them across his chest, tucking them into his armpits not to. He leans against the back of the couch and looks at the TV unseeing—no longer car crashes but weather, saying it'll storm this week—no shit, Sam thinks—and it's not long at all before Deanna comes out of the bedroom with her bag packed and slung over her shoulder.

She says, to the room, "Drive safe."

Dad nods, says, "You, too." Keeps writing.

Deanna looks at the back of his head. Then she licks her lips, and looks at Sam, and says, "Try not to turn into a total dork while I'm gone," and then before he can say anything she raises her eyebrows and says, "Crap, too late," and Sam wants to drag her in and put his nose in the curve of her neck where she smells like all things good but he can't, of course, for more reasons than he can handle, and anyway she just flicks two fingers at him in a half-assed salute and is out the front door, not slamming it, but Sam wishes she had. The Impala's engine roars on, a few seconds later, and then purrs away, and—that's it. She's gone.

Dad turns a page in his journal. "If you're going to hit the showers do it tonight," he says. "We're leaving at six tomorrow morning."

Sam showers. Deanna left her girly shampoo behind. He comes out into the bedroom and climbs into pajamas and then packs up the rest of his clothes, figuring they'll leave the sheets and crap for the landlady. Most of it's still folded in the piles he made; the rest, the fresh-washed stuff, dumped still over Deanna's bed and the floor. One of her socks still stuck in one of his shirts. His blue shirt missing. His jeans in a puddle up against the wall, and he picks them up to shove them into his duffle and—below them—the bag, with the clamshell box. That telltale pink. He picks it up immediately and rolls it into the jeans and then looks behind himself to see—but no, he's alone. A breath and he licks his lips, and unfolds the jeans and looks at it bright, obvious. Seven inches of body-safe silicone, according to the flirty pink text. A heart over the i. Kind of thing Deanna makes fun of, with other girls.

He wraps the box in in his oldest rattiest shirt, and packs it deep among the clean underwear and socks, and when he crawls into bed he stares across at the empty half of the room and doesn't sleep.

*

Dad drives almost as fast as Deanna does. Sam doesn't ride in the truck often and it's weird. Looking down at other cars, seeing out further on the highway. The radio's tuned the same, though, and even if he doesn't mean to he misses almost a whole state, curled against the passenger door, exhausted. Dad wakes him up at a gas station for a piss break and gives him twenty to get food, which ends up being jerky and coffee. If Dee were here he'd get a Payday and a Snickers and let her pretend like it was a hard decision before she snagged half of both, and be left in the backseat with his halves, watching her suck chocolate off her thumb, grinning at him. Dad doesn't eat candy. Sam gets a kind of gross looking turkey sandwich from the deli case instead and ends up regretting when Dad splits it with him. Mealy tomatoes and limp lettuce. Yuck.

Illinois out the window. At one point on I-74 Dad turns down the radio a few notches and Sam stiffens without meaning to. "Tell me about this bar," Dad says.

"Marv's?" Sam says, and then feels stupid. Like any other bar would matter. He sits up straighter, shrugs. Doesn't look around. They're passing a SWIFT truck. Dee always says, yeah, Sure Wish I Finished Training. "I don't know. It's like—a bar. Not open on Sundays."

"Safe?"

How is that measured? "They didn't have any bar fights, at least from what Dee told me." Then, because he can't help it, "Manager seemed like a jerk."

"How?" Dad says, deeper.

His dumb pudding face looking at Dee like she was Cindy Crawford. Sam thinks of the bathroom—the sink at waist height—and shakes his head, sick. "Just, I don't know. A jerk. She said he was on her ass about being late but it's not like—I mean, I don't think the place was haunted or anything. Except maybe by the pee smell in the alley."

Dad snorts. Sam's shoulders have a tire iron in them somehow, his muscles taut and tense. This isn't his secret and there's no point in him keeping it—and is there a secret, even? What does he know? This: when he was putting on his other pair of sneakers this morning there was two hundred bucks in mixed bills tucked into the toe of the right one, and he didn't put it there and neither did Dad. He hid it in the pocket of the jeans at the very bottom of his bag and didn't say anything, and he doesn't say anything now. Dad's questions seem to be over, anyway, so maybe that's it. No ghosts and the manager not apparently evil and Dee sent away to Minnesota and that's safe enough, or at least not enough trouble to think about anymore, since the rest of the ride up through Illinois is more or less quiet, miles eaten away under the truck's huge tires and Sam drifting between feeling sick and napping and waking up hungry and then feeling sick, again. Dad stops when the truck needs gas and that's all. They eat several bad sandwiches.

*

It's snowing in Wisconsin, even if it's almost May. Sam hates this part of the country this time of year and they always seem to end up here. Deanna isn't here to complain about freezing and that's literally the only benefit to her absence; with her gone, he and Dad have plenty of time to get on each other's nerves, even if Dad seems like he'd rather be anywhere else but around Sam. What else is new.

A motel, not a rental house. It has a cheesy bear theme and sticky not-cleaned-enough carpet and Sam gets the bed closer to the bathroom. Dad's gone for most of the first three days and so Sam bums around, bored. Finds out how long it takes to walk to the closest convenience store, to the Dairy Queen a few blocks over. Dad left him with forty bucks, which isn't bad, but he doesn't want to dip into what Dee left him and so he eats light, doesn't waste it. There's a library, a few blocks past the DQ, and he spends a lot of his time there, reading curled up in an armchair in the kids' area, the librarian doing him the favor of not asking too many questions beyond why aren't you in school?, and he can say more-or-less-honest my family just moved here from out of state, school's already out in Arizona. It is; he checked. She nods and leaves him alone. He crushes the first five David Eddings books, waiting. His stomach still doing an impression of a tilt-a-whirl.

There's literally no one in the world he could talk to even if he wanted to talk about it. He could say he had a crush but that's not the whole story. He could say he had a fight with his sister and doesn't know what to do, but that's not right either, and what people would say wouldn't be helpful. He reads books, he watches movies. It'd be, you should talk to her, or have you tried apologizing, or do something nice for her, show her you still care. Still caring's not the issue. Apologizing—god, no. Talking…

She has her cell phone and he has his. He could call. Although she could call, too, and she doesn't, even if Sam makes sure his battery's all charged and checks to ensure that's so, ten times a day.

*

It's an accident when Sam finds a job. He's reading the paper at the library, on the fourth day more-or-less alone beyond him and Dad arguing about pizza orders at night, and he doesn’t want it to be a hunt but he's been reading the paper with a certain kind of eye for half his life. There's a dead man a few counties over, and it turns out a dead woman the month before that, and a dead man a month before that. Sam swallows and his first instinct is to ask Dee what she thinks, but she's in Blue Earth and he's in Chippewa Falls and he's meant to be growing up, right? Grown-up Sammy, he hears, like behind his shoulder, and he spreads his hands over the newsprint and takes a deep breath and then stands up, to ask the librarian if he can use the microfiche.

Dad's kind of annoyed, kind of pleased. Sam recognizes the emotion very clearly. A ghost, though they have to put in some work to find out exactly who it is. Whatever Dad was working on gets put on hold, because the most recent dead lady has two kids, one of whom fits the pattern: oldest child, in this case a girl, who had a baby out of wedlock. The baby's name is Marie and she holds Sam's finger in her little chubby fist very tightly while Dad's asking questions, pretending to be an old friend of Marie's grandma. Sam doesn't know what to do with babies but he lets Marie keep his finger. Knows Dee would be cooing. Knows she'd say something like: "What a pretty dress," he tries, even if Marie's got what looks like sweet potato stained down her chest, and gets a weird look from Dad on the other side of the room. What, he thinks. He didn't know he was signing up for babysitting duty when he opened up the paper yesterday morning. Another reason to wish Deanna were here. He and Dad could push the baby onto her and she'd roll her eyes but be babbling babytalk in, like, point-two seconds.

Like usual, Sam's kicked to the curb for research while Dad does the majority of the canvassing. This time Sam doesn't argue, which gets him another brief frown from Dad before he says, "See what you can dig up on church," and so, well. Sam digs up what he can find on the church. If Deanna were here, she'd get crammed into what she calls her Nice Girl Outfit of sweater and skirt and the little fake-pearl earrings they got at a Claire's, bitching at Sam the whole time about how it was so lame and churchy girls are the worst, but she's got some weird superpower about talking to old guys. Sam doesn't even think they're being pervy, necessarily. She smiles at them and then—bam. Whole story of the parish from founding to today, and by the way would she be interested in attending their Sunday school? She gags, when she comes back from one of those, and plays the Black Album about as loud as the Impala's speakers can possibly go. Sam's never really gotten why. He's gone to Sunday school. In Blue Earth four or five times, but sometimes with someone he meets at school, if they're in a town long enough that he can meet someone at school, and—those people, he doesn't know if they're right about the whole thing, but they're nice. The Winchesters don't get much nice. Plus, there's cookies. He doesn't know if Deanna ever heard about that part.

The church angle turns out to be the right one. It takes practically the whole week but between them Sam and Dad figure it out. Not before they have to save Marie's mom from almost-dying, and stash her in their motel room with the baby in a circle of rock salt that Dad pours so deep it's like snow. Sam wonders how much faster would it have been if they'd had a third set of hands. Maybe it wouldn't have come to this, with the woman crying, jogging her baby in her arms, trying to keep her from being scared.

The graveyard, then—a priest, from like a hundred years ago, bitter and cruel—and Sam's got the gas-can full of salt and he's throwing it furiously whenever the ghost rears up to try to attack Dad—and when Dad finally gets the grave broken open and the gas poured he tosses Dad a lighter to get the bones to burn—and when Dad crawls over to him, exhausted and sweating, Dad says, "Okay?" in that weird way he always does even if Sam didn't even get close to getting touched, and Sam says, "Yeah, Dad, I'm okay," and Dad nods, and flops onto his back on the thick-grown grass for a minute, catching his breath and sweating—and that's when Sam realizes that it's past midnight, and that means it's his birthday.

No one notices the grave desecration or the fire—this town and sleepy go hand in hand—so they wait while the fire burns out, and then Sam helps shovel the dirt back on top of the charred bones. Marie's mom is fine. Sam's the one who calls, and she's crying and confused but relieved, too, and she says to him, choked and thick, thank you, and again, five times, thank you thank you thank… Dad grips his shoulder when Sam hangs up and he swallows, but nods, and Dad nods back and then leads the way out of the graveyard, shovel over his shoulder, the flashlight skimming the grass ahead of them and his shoulders big and black against the deeper shadows, something for Sam to follow. He sniffs hard, dashes his wrist over his cheeks.

The motel room's empty when they get back. Dad drops the key in the slot on the office door, leaving the salt and torn curtains and slashed comforters behind, and they drive to the other side of town to another motel. Not bears but moose. Dad showers, and then Sam, and when he comes out it's like three in the morning and he's that horrible combination of wired to the gills and exhausted, so tired it feels like his bones are lead, dragging weight he has to move from grimy-yellowed tub to pajamas to the bed, his eyes wide open and his muscles all begging for sleep.

Figures, that's when Dad says, "So," and Sam drops onto his back on his bed, wet hair immediately sogging the pillow, wanting to be anywhere but here. "What's going on with your sister?"

Cleaning his gun, on the other bed. Usually Dee's job but she's not here to do it. Sam looks from Dad's steadily working hands to his downturned face, frowning kind of from concentration but not like he—like he thinks—or knows—and Sam crosses his arms over his eyes, shrugs sort of, says, "Why?"

Which is a stupid thing to say. Sam bites his lip, hidden behind his forearms. The steady swishing of the rag on the gun barrel pauses for a second. "Most times when one of my kids is trying to bite my head off, it's not Deanna," Dad says, but not mad and more dry as dirt. "She really love that bar job, or something?"

"Don’t think so," Sam says. He folds his fingers around either elbow and concentrates very hard on not gripping tight, obvious. Those tells Dad always taught them to watch for when liars lie. "I guess we had a routine going okay. Long enough to get used to, you know?"

Silence. The clip slides back into the gun. "She have a boyfriend?"

"What?" Sam says, dropping his arms, and then, "No!" and then, when Dad raises his eyebrows, he screws up his face and says, "Ew."

Dad lays the gun on the bedside table, mouth curved up on one side. "I'm not going to go after some kid with a shotgun," he says, entertained. Sam's heart is pounding so sickly up his throat he feels like he's going to puke. "Trust me, I don't want details, but she's twenty, son. It's a possibility."

"I guess," Sam says, knowing his face is turning red from how his cheeks prickle, and Dad glances at him and then chuckles. "I don't think she—I don't think so."

Dad shakes his head and rolls up the cleaning kit. "Maybe not. Could always be hormones." He pauses, and gives Sam a look over his shoulder. "Word of advice, Sammy—never say that where a woman can hear it."

Whatever smile Sam dredges up must be good enough. Dad snorts, and flicks the switch by the door, and the sudden dark's a relief in which Sam can't tell if he's just damp from the shower or drenched in sweat, his pulse pounding all over. "I'll call Pastor Jim," Dad says, getting into bed. "He'll send her back our way if she's cooled off. Night, Sam."

"Night, Dad," Sam says, cracked, and listens to the way Dad flops over and punches his pillow into submission the way he always does. Hormones. God.

*

Only two hundred or so miles between Blue Earth and Chippewa Falls. Sam worked it out, on the atlas. Maybe three hours to drive, and that’s only if it's a normal person behind the wheel. Sam's sixteenth birthday falls on a Sunday and he wakes up late after fitful confused dreams to find Dad gone, and a note in his place that says out checking a lead, back soon. Soon can mean a lot of things. He checks his cell phone and has no messages. He reads his book—stolen, at this point, from the Louisville public library system, which is not the first time and probably won't be the last—and he walks to the Dairy Queen through the melted-slush snow and with a twenty pulled out of the stash Dee gave him he gets a chili-cheese dog and fries and the biggest Blizzard they've got, and he eats outside on the cold metal picnic tables meant for when it's actually summer, his breath fogging the air and his brain kind of—empty, somehow. Like everything's stuffed into the closet and under the couch cushions, pretending to be clean in case someone comes to check.

That night Dad comes back to the motel after midnight. Sam wakes up to the key sloppy in the lock and knows immediately that Dad's drunk. He turns over, back to the door, and watches the wall while the rectangle of parking-lot light slashes across the room, while Dad's shadow fills it, big and blurry. Swaying against the lintel, and then the blobby shape of his head touching the wood, before he steps in on a burst of cold air and the door closes, surprisingly quiet. His heavy thick breath, churning. His coat thumping to the floor. The boxspring squeaks when he drops to the other bed and Sam concentrates on his lungs, on his shoulders, his eyes stinging from how he's still fixedly watching the wall. There's a groan, when Dad finally drops to his back, and he sighs out after that, with some sound like a word caught in there where Sam can't understand it, and he wants his sister very badly then for no reason other than that she's his sister, and she knows what to do. When Sam just gets scared and then very angry at having been made scared. Dad starts snoring, after hardly any time at all—those thick sawing drunk-snores that have kept Sam awake half his life—and if Deanna were here she'd get up soft and careful from the bed they might be sharing if they hadn't bothered to get a rollaway cot, would step quiet around the room picking up Dad's coat and putting his keys and phone and wallet and gun all together on the table, would pour a glass of water and leave four aspirin next to it, would just—make it better. Every single thing, she makes better. Sam asked her once, after she'd unlaced Dad's boots and undid his belt and then, when he jerked awake and cussed at her, soothed him back to sleep—Sam whispered, mad and bitter and embarrassed, why do you even bother? Not like he even remembers. Dee had sighed, and said, We're family, Sammy, and then, when Sam was rolling his eyes in the dark even if she couldn't see it, she said, when you love someone, you're supposed to take care of them.

Sam's kept awake by his dad's snoring for a long time, that night. When he drifts off he dreams about putting a glass of water on a nightstand, beside a bed in which his sister sleeps, and then he sits on the edge of the bed and puts his hand on her hair, and she opens her eyes, and looks at him, and Sam doesn't know what he's forgotten but he feels like he's disappointed her, and his chest hurts so much at the thought, even if she isn't accusing him or angry or doing anything but looking at him, that when he wakes up his face is mushed against the pillow and the blanket's balled in his fists and he's crying, in this steady seeping way, and he turns over fast but the room's empty other than Dad, still snoring, his boots still on.

*

Deanna comes back on Wednesday. Dad's actually home, reading some book he got from one of his contacts, and Sam's been put to work too, checking a bunch of scattered notes someone put together on coffee-stained paper in smudged ink for any references to salt—god knows why, because Dad certainly doesn't tell him. At two o'clock there's a knock on the door, two soft raps and then a pause and then three, and Sam jerks in his chair but Dad holds out a hand for Sam to stay seated. It's Dad who opens the door, on the chain at first even though it's obviously, it has to be—and he looks through the crack for a second, two, before he closes it and undoes the chain and then swings it wide, and Deanna's there in a too-big jacket and her bag over her shoulder and her cheek sucked in on one side. Her eyes dart to Sam and then go back to Dad, and she doesn't shrug or smile or do anything but stand there, waiting, until Dad sighs and says, "Hey, sweetheart," and then her face does this terrible trembling thing. She steps forward and Dad gets an arm around her shoulders, lets her tuck her head down against his chest, and Sam's eyes get hot and he gets this nasty acid flood in his gut that he doesn't want to pick apart, and so he just turns back to the notepads, his vision swimming, a weird buzzy ringing in his ears.

To say she's cooled off is an understatement. On the first day she's quiet, and hardly speaks except when spoken to, but it's not sullen or pouting or anything. "Deanna, go pick up some fuel," Dad says, absent because he's deep in whatever research he's doing, and Deanna's standing up and grabbing her keys before Dad's turned the next page. Brings back kung pao beef, extra spicy like Dad likes it, and she watches his face when he forks in the first big bite and waits for him to grunt, pleased, before she even opens her own carton. Sam's trying to learn to use chopsticks with his lo mein, and also trying to avoid the vague gross pulse in his gut, while Dee's on the bed with her feet tucked under her, reading a girl magazine, not looking at Sam and taking up no space at all.

Dad wants them out of the room the next day. "Need to make some calls, don't need you two horsing around in the background," he says, which is the dumbest thing ever, it's not like they're five—but Sam's still too freaked to argue and Deanna, of course, just stands right back up again, finds her sneakers and coat and says yessir.

Out in the sunlight. The snow melting at least. Lunchtime. Sam kicks a driven-over grey pile of slush. Only one other car in the lot, besides the truck and the Impala. He zips up his sweater and feels his face getting red, dumb and embarrassing and stupid, but Dee's not looking at him, anyway. Her arms are folded over her chest, her face tipped up to the light. Pink at the tip of her nose and the tips of her ears and on her lips, when she stops biting them and blows out this long slow breath, like she's letting something go.

"Hungry?" she says, finally. Sam shrugs but she wasn't looking; she tips her head toward her shoulder and then her eyes slide his way, sidelong. This thought in them he doesn't understand but she seems to be—asking.

"There's a Dairy Queen," Sam says. It comes out croaky, weird, and he clears his throat. "It's okay."

"DQ, huh," she says, soft. He lifts a shoulder and she sucks her lower lip into her mouth again, and lets it go, wet, and then lifts her shoulder, too, and smiles at him in this crooked tiny way. "Could go for a dilly bar."

Warmer outside, on the picnic tables. Dee gets chili cheese fries and eats them with a fork, weirdly polite. Sam sucks at his Blizzard and doesn't know what to say. He's been talking to his sister more than anyone else in the world his whole life and he doesn't know what to say. In movies, in books, this is what happens to the awkward kid when he somehow finds himself on a date with the cutest girl in school, but—that's not—

"How was Pastor Jim?" he blurts out.

Deanna scrapes her fork around the cardboard boat, making lines in the cheese sauce. "Churchy," she says, and then gives Sam a quick look, with a little smile like it was a joke. Not very funny but Sam tries to smile back. "Okay, I guess. I cleaned up the house some. Fixed his truck. Not exactly a vacation." Her cheek sucks in on one side and she sits up straighter, folds her arms on the table, actually looks at Sam. Higher-voiced when she says, "No, it was fine. He's cool, you know? Still has that TV from like 1945 where you have to get up to twist the knobs. And get this, he had some Sunday school thing going on and he had me make cookies. Cookies, dude."

"What kind?" Sam says. Her eyes are wide and her cheeks are flushed but she's looking at him, talking. He wants to hear every single freaking detail about the cookies.

They finish lunch and Dee seems—okay, happy maybe a stretch but she seems—not like she's going to jump into traffic or run away from home, at least. The walk back to the motel's warm, easy. Sam unzips his sweater and Dee takes off her coat, ties it around her waist, and she's wearing an Iron Maiden shirt and no bra and there's a bruise on her arm, just under the sleeve of the t-shirt, purplish but starting to fade. "Cookie accident?" Sam says.

She blinks at him and follows his eyes, and then snorts. Wraps her arms around herself and covers the bruise with her hand. "Yeah, the snickerdoodles totally fought back," she says, light and easy.

Sam wants to take her hand off that spot and hold it and tell her that he'd—that she could say—whatever. Anything. "Guess you need to train more," he says, instead, and she blows a raspberry and shoves him one handed, light as light, but he staggers into the melted-slush verge, clutching his shoulder like she punched him, and she actually laughs, then, soft and short but—real. "I'm gonna have a bruise now," he says, and she says, "Earned it, bitch," looking down at the sidewalk but smiling as she steps over a puddle.

When they get back Dad announces they're moving because he's got a lead on something in Duluth, and so they pack up what little there is to pack up and then Sam stands on the sidewalk with his bags on his shoulder, between the Impala and the truck, not sure. "You and Sam can take your time but I want you at the Bay Star by nightfall," Dad says to Dee, and that decides that.

State route through the afternoon. Not much traffic. Sam sits in his spot and doesn't mess with the radio and feels every inch of the bench seat like it's some physical extension of his body, the vinyl heating under his jeans and creeping over the space between his thigh and her thigh in a completely awful way. Deanna drives slouched back with her wrist on the bottom of the steering wheel, quiet. Near Sarona the radio fuzzes and she says, "Hey, pick a tape, huh?" and Sam fishes around under the seat and finds the cardboard box plastered with all the Lisa Frank stickers she used to collect and hangs frozen for a few seconds, the engine humming and the radio crackling static of some deejay trying to be funny, because it matters, right? What he picks. It says something. "Dude," Dee says, thin, and Sam shakes his head and picks a jewel case at random. Who's he kidding.

Jethro Tull. Deanna hums while the first guitar riff fills the car. Then takes an exit, sudden, the car lurching when Sam wasn't expecting it, and he holds tight to the door handle while she aims them off the highway and past the gas station and to—oh, the turnoff for one of the million lakes. Thursday, school not even out yet, and there's a guy on a fishing boat way out but the little dock's empty and no one's around. Dee parks in the dirt and gets out quick, and Sam chews on his lip for a while before he follows, and it's humid and warm and the air smells like the gross algae lake-edge, things growing, Wisconsin caught in that weird space between spring and summer.

Dee sits on a concrete bench by the lakeshore. It has a plaque on it that says in memory of Pete S. She changed before they left, and she's in the grey henley, buttoned up higher than she'd wear it for work, and jeans, and her bootheel's drumming on the woodchips under the bench, crushing a little weed that's trying to grow up there. Sam sits on the other end, looking out at the lake instead of at her. Sweat curls his hair against his neck.

"I don't know how to say it so I'm just gonna say it." Sam's stomach feels like it's on a ferris wheel, rising up his throat and then swooping so low he wants to cry. Even if his peripheral vision he can tell Deanna isn't looking at him while she talks. "I'm—crap. Sammy, I'm really sorry."

The ferris wheel jars to a halt with his guts tangled somewhere around his heart. "Sorry," he says.

"We—I—look," she says, except she doesn't say anything for a handful of seconds after that and so Sam doesn't know what he's meant to be looking at. She leans forward over her thighs, a weird huddle, and takes a quick deep breath. "Shit. It's—weird, huh?"

"Pretty weird," Sam says, and she huffs, and puts her chin against her bicep, and actually looks at him. Rueful or maybe sad. Sam fists his hands between his knees and tries to figure out how to—talk. "Are you mad at me?"

Her eyes get big and then close, scrunched tight. She's all washed clean of makeup, not even a trace of eyeliner. Like he hasn't seen her in years.

A van pulls up, a hundred feet down from the Impala. A mom and a dad and a little kid, with a picnic basket, the little kid squealing some happy thing too high to hear. The mom waves and Sam lifts his hand back because it's important not to be a freak, and when he turns back around Dee's standing, her hands in her back pockets, looking out at the lake. Taking deep breaths, deep enough that her shoulders are lifting.

"I'm not mad," Deanna says, finally. "God. Sammy, I—" She shakes her head, and chews her lip, and when her face tips toward his—there's a shining line, from the inner corner of her eye past her nose, folded under when she bites at her mouth. "And I missed your frickin' birthday."

"It's okay," Sam says, fast. He stands up too, alarmed, because Dee doesn't—she hardly ever—"Deedee," he says, sore, and she sniffs and closes her eyes and says, "Don't call me that," and Sam touches her elbow, soft, and she shakes her head again and then turns in toward him and he hugs her, careful at first because she's stiff and miserable and then when she sags, her arms going around his middle, he hugs her harder, holding her close and letting her put snot and tears and whatever else all over the shoulder of his hoodie. Her back shudders and he runs a hand down it, and then up into the heavy fall of her hair, cupping her head, soft. Like he saw Dad do, the only time he can remember Dee crying in his arms. Dee makes a weird whimpery kind of sound and turns her face, her nose against his throat, and Sam—oh—god—

He tips his hips back but it's too late. Deanna sniffs again, wet, and her fingers are tangled into sides of his sweater, and she doesn't let him get away. "It's okay," she says, muffled, and Sam knows that it's not even remotely a little bit even one atom okay, his face flooding hot. She tilts her head back and this close he can see every clumped-wet eyelash, her eyes shocking green. A small tilted smile. "Happens."

"Sorry," Sam whispers, humiliated.

Deanna glances down and Sam could literally die. He feels like a complete tool and somehow he's just getting harder. "It happens," Deanna repeats, and then lets go of his side with one hand, dashes her fingers over her eyes. Smiles wider but not mean, just—warm. Teasing. Her cheeks pink under the freckles. "Kinda reassuring, I guess. My weirdo kid brother's a normal dude. What a relief."

"Shut up," Sam says, and Deanna laughs, watery.

She curls her fingers into one of the dangling hood strings on his sweater. Pulls it out straight, and then smooths it down his chest, flat alongside the zipper. Sniffs again, and presses her lips together, and then looks up at him, flushed and damp, but washed clean somehow. Not thinking of something he can't touch or silently going with the motions but—here with him, looking at him. "Gotta get back on the road," she says, soft and easy, and when he just stands there like an idiot and nods, she raises her eyebrows and looks down again and only then does he put together that he's got to let her go, for that to happen. He jerks, steps back. Before he can get too far she grips the pocket of his sweater, and she looks at that and not his face when she says, "You're a good guy, Sam," and Sam doesn't know what to do with that even a little. Which is okay, because her eyes sweep up to his face and then she rolls them, pushes at his stomach, says, "—even if you are an absolute dork," and turns on her heel and walks back up the dirt slope to the car.

Sam follows. Maybe more turned upside-down than he was that morning. In the car Deanna sits there with the key in the ignition, looking out the windshield, for five seconds that Sam counts off in his head before he says, "So?", and Dee blinks, and turns the engine over, and says, "Bet we can get to Duluth in an hour," and she ejects the Jethro Tull tape and slots in The Runaways instead, and Sam groans and drops his head back to the seat. Feels the way the car revs in his whole body.

*

The room at the Bay Star is various shades of not-quite-matching greens, two queens and a rollaway cot. Dad assigns Sam to the cot and to scouring the foot-deep stack of newspapers he's somehow accumulated in half a day, and then tells Dee they're hitting a bar, which means she does her makeup and does something with her hair so it's kinda screwed up but like from a magazine shoot and she does undo the last buttons on her henley, so her bra peeks when she moves, which Dad frowns at but then looks away, and she says to Sam, "Don't wait up," smiling at him while she sticks her favorite knife in her boot, and then they're gone, both in the Impala. Sam stands in the motel room with his ears ringing, almost, nerves as jangly as in the middle of a deep-forest shootout fight, even if he's completely and entirely alone.

Two hours of cross-referencing obits and mysterious circumstances don't help. Sam calls up pizza delivery and eats half of it but his stomach's still all in knots. He cuts out the articles Dad'll find relevant and tidies up the mess of the papers, thinking of the house in Louisville, and then he really thinks of the house in Louisville and that heat sinks through past his gut and he just—wishes he were a eunuch, or something. It'd be easier.

In the shower he tries not to think of it but of course he does. He keeps his eyes closed, the water pounding hot against the top of his head, and while he takes himself in hand it's the soft sweetness of her tits and her smell and the curve of her mouth, when she smiled at him, not there on the couch but at the lake that day, her fingers dragging pressure down his chest. When he comes his legs almost give out and he stands there, panting, some wobbly part of his brain still holding his arms around her waist and the rest of it draining cold, saying what are you doing, and the thing is he doesn't know but he doesn't know what else he could do, either. What other option is there?

He's curled awkward on the cot so he'll fit, not sleeping, when the Impala pulls up. Two in the morning. He closes his eyes and listens to the key in the lock and then the door opening—"Oh," Deanna says, and then Dad says behind her, "Kid needs to learn to pull late nights," but he says it quiet.

Sam's got his back to the room and the one lamp that turns on seeps only the smallest amount of gold past his eyelashes. "Got your take?" Dad says, and Dee makes a little noise, and there's then the riffle of paper and bills getting counted out onto the table. Cardboard shifting—"Oh, yuck," Dee says, and when Dad makes his own sound she says, "Mushrooms," like she's extremely disappointed, and Dad says, "Gotta let the boy make his own mistakes," and it's like any other night, when they're back from a job or from what the job requires. Sam imagines, mostly from TV, some other life, where maybe Dad's a cop, and Deanna's going to nursing school, and maybe they'd get home from late shifts and they'd worry about Sam getting good grades and they'd make sure they didn't wake him up and they weren't counting the cash they'd made from hustling idiots and maybe they—Sam doesn't know. They'd be normal. He knows what the shape of that looks like but has no idea how it would feel.

*

It's two ghosts, in Duluth. Sam and Deanna take one and Dad takes the other. They spend a long Saturday finding the right burial spots, because the murderer wasn't nice enough to leave them neat in the cemetery, and it's sunset before Sam's pushing the shovel into the ground under a tree, breaking ground on a long night.

Deanna gets off the phone with Dad. "He's got his too—about two miles north. Said to finish up and head back to the motel."

Sam grunts. The ground's soft with spring but this is going to take a while. Dee sits on a nearby stump, waiting her turn. Braiding her hair, Sam sees, when he pauses to wipe his forehead. "You've got to be kidding," he says.

"Hey, if you can't hack it, I'll take a turn anytime," she says, raising her eyebrows.

"That hasn't worked on me since I was, like, twelve," Sam says, and steps out of the shallow ditch he's made and hands her the shovel right away.

The night's actually kind of nice. Cool but no longer cold—Minnesota may have gotten the memo that it's meant to be May, unlike Wisconsin—and Dee strips off her flannel shirt and throws it in his face, makes him splutter. Leaves her in a black tank top, and her arms white in the lantern light while she works, other than that bruise. He looks at it and then away, but the only thing to look at out here other than the dark trees and the dirt between his sneakers is his sister, and—well, there's not much better view than his sister.

"Should charge for this," Deanna says, a little breathless. She punches the shovel deeper into the dirt with her bootheel and glances at him, half-smiling. "I bet it's like. Special interest stuff."

For all the dirty talk she does it still takes Sam a minute to make the leap from landscaping to—"Gross," he says, but it comes out weak.

She pauses after another shovelful. Looking at the dirt. "Hey," she says, and stops again. She tucks a loose wisp that didn't get into the braid behind her ear and then rubs her hands on her hips, rasping denim. Punch of the shovel into the ground and another heave, adding to the pile, and keeps working while she says, "You want to make like everything's cool then—that's cool with me, too. Or we can just—clean slate. Or—Pastor Jim had a bunch of ideas about how a girl ought to act. Could do that, too." She drags the back of her wrist over her forehead, gets a better grip on the shovel, doesn't look at him. "You just say the word, Sammy."

Sam's got his hands folded between his knees, so tight the bones are aching. There's what feels like an entire baseball bat lodged in his throat where the air should be. He manages to drag in a breath through his nose and he looks at his sister. A line between her eyebrows and her mouth set, her braid swinging over her shoulder. The most annoying person in the world and also the only one he can think of where if he lost her somehow—not even if one of them were dead, which is something he has lain awake and considered, but even just if they were separated—if the world split and he never saw her again—he doesn't know who he'd be. How he'd do it. What would it mean, if he couldn't pick up the phone and hit the first and only real contact, if he couldn't hear her in a second say hey, squirt, you want me to pick you up some moon pies or something?

"I want you to be my sister," Sam says, "and I don't want a clean slate, and I don't want it to be cool." Deanna's eyes big and dark in the lantern-light, shining. Sam shrugs and feels like things are bruising, his hands and his ribs and everything else besides. "Since when are you cool, anyway."

"Hey, pal, I'm the coolest person you know," Deanna says. Searching his face across the dozen feet.

"Keep telling yourself that," Sam says, and stands up, and peels off his hoodie, and walks across to her and holds out his hand for the shovel. She passes it to him, slowly. Frowning up at him. He smiles, can't help it—she looks like she's doing math problems—and her face does this thing, like—a stone had dropped in a lake and now a ripple's smoothed across the surface, leaving it clear. "How does Pastor Jim think a girl should act, anyway?"

She's just standing and looking up into his face. Sam pushes soft at the low part of her back, just barely damp with sweat, and she blinks and goes where he points her. "The cookies weren't bad enough?" she says, sitting on the stump with her arms around her knees. Watching him now, as much as he was watching her before. He sets his shoulders to digging, some warm thing flaring up in all of his muscles. "Get this—he warned me to watch out for guys." Sam snorts, and when he glances at her she's smiling. "Yeah, I guess some of them may not have totally pure intentions. You believe that?"

"Can't imagine," Sam says, and she laughs, and he thinks—he can't pin down what he thinks. That it's all layered together, like in fourth grade in Bakersfield when they learned about metamorphic rock and how the different pieces fused, irrevocably, into some new substance. Too hard to pick apart, so it got a new name. He doesn't have a name for this. He doesn't think anyone on the planet does.

*

In the morning Dad's bed is empty and his bag is gone and there's a note, propped against the coffeemaker.

"Seattle?" Deanna makes a face, leaning against the counter. "Could've taken us with."

"How long?" Sam says. Seems more relevant.

Deanna licks her lips and flips the notepad around like Sam can see it from where he's half-propped on the cot. "Week, he says. At least." She turns the pad back over, looks down at it. "Says I should look for a hunt," she says, but she doesn't sound all that enthusiastic.

A week with nothing to fill it. They're sore from gravedigging and Deanna doesn't suggest a run or sparring but—"Target practice?" she says, diffident like she'd give it up if Sam says no, but Sam doesn't know what to do either. They end up in the same woods, a crate of recycling Dee stole set up on the mossy spine of a fallen tree. Sam sights careful along the barrel and even if Deanna throws sticks at him and dumps leaves on his hair to distract he still gets eight of ten on the first shot. "Not bad, squirt," she says, while Sam scrubs mulch out of his bangs, and this weird warm golden thing slides down Sam's spine.

She has Sam throw bottles, when it's her turn. He's never been much of a football player but he can throw an empty Bud a decent distance, and Deanna doesn't miss one, even when he tries to mess her up by throwing one straight overhead. "Bitch!" she says, but tilts up smooth and pulls the trigger, and when it shatters they both throw their arms over their heads, laughing, the splinters of glass going all over.

"That was so dumb," Sam says, ears ringing, but he can't stop grinning.

"Just mad I pulled it off with my rad skills," Dee says, waggling her eyebrows. She reaches up and pulls a brown shard out of Sam's hair, flicks it away into the mulch. "Shouldn't start what you can't finish, Sammy-boy."

"I'll keep that in mind," Sam says. She tips her head back, the tip of her tongue touching the back of her teeth. While she's watching him he brushes another sliver of glass off her shoulder, and then pushes his thumb over the spot it had clung to. Making sure.

Sam moves to Dad's bed that night, since the cot's cramped and there's a better option. Deanna kind of frowns, when she comes out of the shower to see him swapping the pillows, but Sam doesn't say anything and so she doesn't either. In her pajamas she munches on a slice of cold pizza, picking the mushrooms off bite by bite and dropping the discards back into the box, and flips through the channels, and she's—his sister. She's his sister. Her thighs soft and strong and pretty enough that he's getting the strange urge to set his teeth in the bottom curve of the one nearest him, to slide his hand up and in and—"Ooh, Top Gun," she says, dropping the remote, and then, "Ooh, yes," because it's the stupid volleyball scene, and Sam groans, dropping back onto the bed, looking at the pale green ceiling, and he can feel it, almost. Between his teeth.

*

Morning swims up slow. Sam stretches out to his full length and his toes fall off the end of the bed but it feels good. Warm but not too warm, no dreams that he remembers. Fingers through his hair. He hums, sleepy, and there's a kiss against his temple, and Deanna whispers close and soft, "Back soon." Sam turns his face and gets her fingers down the back of his neck, warm, and he's soothed right back down to sleep, like being a little kid, and that's dreamless too but when he wakes up again it's with some warm certainty that feels like it's coming from his bone marrow. Deanna's unloading bags on the kitchenette counter and she looks back at him when he sits up. "Thought you were gonna sleep all day," she says, and grins. "Nice bedhead."

"Ha," he says, and takes a shower, and that feeling stays with him while he's cleaning up. Like—things aren't bad. Which is stupid because he knows they are, but. That feeling's there, anyway.

Puts a weird cast on the morning, which feels weirder when he comes out in his towel to get clean shorts and jeans and shirt and Deanna's sitting crosslegged on his bed, holding a single pink balloon that she bounces straight at him so he has to bat it away from his face. "Happy birthday, bitch," she says.

The balloon bobs confusedly across the green carpet. "Really?" Sam folds his fist around the towel, wet hair dripping down his back. Deanna's eyes skitter down his body and then back up to his face while she shrugs. "I mean, it's—"

"Better late than never," she says, firmly. "And they don't have a song for, like, happy birthday plus eight days, so. We're going with this one."

"Are you gonna sing?" Sam says, horrified and stepping back, and she rolls her eyes and then rolls up to her knees, too, says, "You wish, my tones are friggin' dulcet," but then she says, "C'mere," and Sam comes closer, grinning but wary, because even if he can't see any pranks he knows better than to put anything past her—but she just raises up high on her knees and hugs him, around the ribs where she can reach.

Sam puts his arms around her shoulders on automatic. Confused at first—and then briefly flaring hot in his stomach, because she smells like herself and her boobs squish pleasantly against him and his wires are all kinds of crossed—but it's nice. Her cheek lays against his collarbone and she sighs. "Sorry I missed it," she says, quiet, and Sam shakes his head even if she can't see, moves his hand up to the bare back of her neck, wants to say—how this is as good as anything—but then Dee's arm tightens over his ribs and she lays a slap on his ass that stings, even through the terrycloth. He yelps but she holds him close, crowing, "Law of the land, Sammy!", and so he has to squirm and grab his towel so it doesn't drop and take it, sixteen spanks while she presses up against him, fake-trapping him, laughing. "And one to grow on!" comes harder than the rest and she leaves her hand there, pressing back from his chest, grinning into his face.

"You're the worst person I know," Sam says. He knows his face is red and his ass is too, probably. It actually stings.

"Yeah, I know I am," Deanna says, and squeezes his ass-cheek—ow, but—but also—and then she lifts up and kisses him on the jaw, a big smacking muah, and bounces off the bed. Sam sits down, still barely holding the towel in place. His butt throbs and his dick's—not uninterested, put it that way. Dee doesn't seem to notice, given that she's delighted with herself, and she flits over to the kitchenette counter where coffee's made and she presents Sam with a mug, milky and sweet already, and something sharp when he takes a sip. He raises his eyebrows. "A little Irish," she says, and shrugs. "Hey, you only turn sixteen once, right?"

It's hot and his stomach blooms warm. Booze for breakfast. He wonders if it's an indication of how the rest of the day's going to go, but all she says is, "Put some clothes on, huh? Jeez, it's like a free show around here—" and so he gulps the coffee down and finds some clothes, and her back's turned, doing something else at the kitchenette, and so he—drops the towel and changes there. Daring and embarrassed all at once.

When he turns around she's leaning back against the counter, sipping her own coffee. "I should get Bailey's more often," she says. Sam feels red from his ass to his hairline, but her cheeks are flushed pink, too.

Deanna takes him to a diner for what ends up being a greasy gross brunch and then a matinee at a movie theater that looks like it last got cleaned in 1972. "Is that nacho cheese on the wall?" she whispers, and honestly Sam hopes it's that and not some kind of freaky monster blood stain, but even if his sneakers are sticking to the floor it's not going to ruin this day. She let him pick the movie, and let him stare at the poster of Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment—he's got some weirdness going on in his life, but he's not dead—and they sit in the back of the theater that's nearly empty but for some old guy, and Dee folds her legs up underneath her and pulls a flask out of her jacket, and Idle Hands is really dumb but it's much funnier with rum in Sam's Coke, and Dee snorting soda out her nose when Pnub says this ain't Dominos, you lazy bitch. They come out in the sunlight with Sam a little tipsy, just enough to keep grinning when Dee won't stop doing her Seth Green impression, and when they get back to the motel it's just—it's a good day. Sam wasn't sure how many more of those he was going to get.

From the fridge appears a six-pack of beer and a surprise little chocolate cake, one of the ones from the grocery store with generic pre-done decorations. This one was clearly designed for a little kid and has a baseball done on the top in white-and-red gel frosting. "Want me to light a candle, do the whole make a wish thing?" Deanna says, eyes crinkled at the corners.

"Just don't sing," Sam says, and Deanna flips him off, and cuts the cake with the knife she keeps in her boot—"No monster guts on there, promise," she says—and it's…

The last time Sam remembers this much fuss over his birthday was… maybe never. If it's guilt he doesn't want to know, but he doesn't think it is. What did they do when Deanna turned sixteen? "Got this," Dee says, wiping frosting off her knife with her thumb, "and I took you paintballing, remember?" Sam does, now—Dad taking them both to the pawnshop and finding the blade, silver with the pretty mother-of-pearl handle that Deanna practically cooed over when she got it in hand—and then Dad had given them fifty bucks and told them not to get the cops called on them, and they'd gone for pizza and then to paintball and completely crushed the team of college kids who they'd been paired against. "Think they thought we were freaks," Deanna says, grinning about it, and Sam hates it when she says that but—yeah, those guys definitely did. Even if he now also remembers that two of them gave her their numbers.

"Think I like this more," Sam says.

Deanna sucks her thumb clean, grin smaller. "Yeah, I bet," she says.

Sam shrugs. "No beer at paintball," he says, and holds out his bottle.

They clink and drink at the same time, finishing the round. Sam's stomach is warm but he's not drunk. Learned that lesson the hard way. Deanna takes his empty and brings back another two beers, and then reaches into the rear pocket on her shorts and slaps a card on the table in front of him. "Don't say I never did anything for you."

It's a Minnesota driver's license. His picture and not even a terrible one, although he doesn't know where Dee got it. The info's mostly real—the height says 5'11 and the weight says 175 and eye color is HZL—but the birthday's listed as May 2, 1978. "No one's going to believe I'm 21," Sam says.

"Sure they will, you're tall as hell," Deanna says. Her eyebrows pop high while she lifts the new beer to her mouth. "Maybe I can send you on the liquor runs sometimes now, huh?"

"That mean you're going to let me drive?" Sam says, and Dee blows a raspberry while still kind of taking a sip—the result is frothy—and while she's mopping up she says, "Damn, good point—okay, you can use it when you walk to the store, drunkie," and she's just—smiling at him, and she set up this whole day for him, and Sam wants—he wants. He's not dumb enough to think that just because he wants something he should get it, but.

"Got something for you too, you know," Sam says. She frowns at him. He goes to the beds, kicks the pink balloon back toward her, and hauls his duffle up onto the mattress. She follows, idly keeping the balloon in the air with one hand while keeping hold of her beer with the other, and the little thumps of her fingertips against the latex feel oddly loud while Sam digs under his clothes, and finds that rolled pair of jeans, and lets them unfurl so that the clamshell box with her dildo dumps out onto her bed.

The balloon floats down to the carpet again, uncaught. She stares. Sam can feel himself getting red—god, his stupid face—but he makes himself shrug, and sits down next to the box. "It was in the laundry," Sam says. "Figured better to take it with than leave it for old lady Franken." He swallows down beer. He expected to feel jittery and strange and doesn't know why he's not.

Deanna leans her thigh against the bed, tip of her tongue between her teeth. She looks at the box and sets her fingertips against the plastic, and then looks up at him.

"Guess it's just as well," Sam says, his face feeling hotter and hotter. "Pastor Jim's place probably isn't where you want to use it."

"Nah, that's the best spot," Deanna says. Not joking and still just watching him. "Can't exactly sneak a guy back to the house behind the church."

"Too bad," Sam says, leaning back on the bed. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. "Could've been hot."

"Sam," Deanna says, and presses her lips together. She rakes her hand back through her hair so it falls mostly to one side over her shoulder and then holds onto the back of her neck. "You know I'm not Noelle, right?"

Sam sits up straight, spills his beer a little on the bed. "What?"

"Like, I get that I got this rockin' bod," she says. Smile brief as a photo flash while Sam's guts shrivel in on themselves. "But it's not—this isn't making it with a hot chick on your birthday."

"I know." Sam's voice comes out weird. He takes a deep breath and looks at his knees. Holds the beer bottle clenched in both hands. "Duh. I'm not like—dumb."

"Sometimes," Dee says, but softer.

It's a bad idea and it's not. It's the only thing that makes sense. It's the worst thing and yet—and yet—"Why'd you shoot that bottle when I threw it above our heads?" Sam says, strained and thin, and Deanna doesn't answer, but she pushes the dildo box off to the side and sits down next to him instead, her knee folded up between them, and she takes hold of one of his wrists, her thumb carefully sliding over the knob where the bone stands out, and he says, "I'm not dumb," and Dee says, "I know, Sammy," and tips forward, leaning over her knee, and kisses him on the cheek, soft and sweet.

Sam takes a deep breath and Deanna lets her nose brush against his cheekbone. He turns his face and her lips push against him again, just accident, but then she firms them and it's another kiss, by his nose kind of, and then her hand slides over the back of his where he's still stupidly holding his beer and he lifts his chin up and then her lips are on his, plush. He sucks in air through his nose and she breathes against him and then she's—she's kissing him, the wet inside of her lip catching against his, and the world seems to stutter somehow, juddering abruptly into motion, and he turns in toward her and grabs her shoulder, his mouth opening, saying—

Nothing. She pulls back and he blinks at her. She looks back and forth between each of his eyes, and tucks his bangs back from his forehead and rolls forward, her hand cupped behind his ear, holding him, kissing him again.

For a second it's just comforting. His big sister, making him feel better. Then he drags his hand from her shoulder to her neck, keeping her close because—because the worst thing he can imagine in the universe is her pulling back—and that comforting warm wave bubbles hot and his balls lurch and—fuck, fuck. Nothing at all like kissing Jamie Lewis after math club, which was mostly nerve-wracking and wet and he got a thin spark of why people liked it before she yanked back big-eyed and squeaked that her mom was picking her up, and maybe she'd see him after school the next day, and then didn't. Deanna makes a small sound in the back of her throat and her fingers slide into Sam's hair and she kisses him again, and again, and her breath puffs hot against Sam's lips and he fumbles his beer bottle over to the bedside table and gets his hand on her cheek, can't not be touching her, and then she makes another one of those little noises, a thin whining edge of air, and Sam clutches at her, groans.

"God—" she says, bursting against his mouth, and tips her head back, breathes at the ceiling. Her throat, flushing, and Sam kisses her there too like he's seen in porn but now he gets why it seems like such a good idea. She cups his head, pets down his back through his shirt, and he kisses against her throat and then at the curve of her shoulder, pulling at the collar of her tank top, sucking there where the skin's fair, the freckles faint.

"Don't you dare give me a hickey," she says, breathy, and Sam thinks what? muzzily through the humid fog, and lifts up confused, and she looks down into his face and says, "Didn't mean you should stop," but Sam only bites his lip, feels—stupid. Deanna rubs her thumb over his mouth and looks at him, closer. "Sammy," she says, and then bites her lips between her teeth, makes this small weird sound through her nose. Her eyes are big, dark. "Okay," she says, after a second, but it's like it's to herself, and then she puts both hands firmly on his shoulders and says, "Stay," like he's a dog or something, and honestly at the moment Sam feels about that smart, his dick heavy and almost painful in his jeans, his breath coming heavy like he just went on a run.

Deanna rolls to the end of the bed and dives into her duffle bag, a gaping spill on the floor. Sam watches her ass, how her denim shorts pull across her hips—how she's craned over her shoulder in the mirror and said does my ass look fat?, and the answer is—yes—but it's so pretty, and Sam knows he's supposed to stay put but that doesn't even make sense, with her sprawled there, and he gets his hand on the back of her thigh first where it's so smooth and creamy-gold and feels so soft, and drags up over the frayed cut-off edge of the shorts up to the pocket and thinks of how she showed him, she showed him—and squeezes, a big whole-handed grip, and Deanna—perched on one elbow, rummaging—sinks down, groans, her ass lifting into it. "Sammy," she says, like scolding almost, but her ass lifted and some instinctual part of Sam knows that's a good thing, and he squeezes again and then—sure somehow—slides back and then pushes up under the edge of the frayed-white denim and finds the elastic edge of her panties and digs his fingers under that too and squeezes again on the bare hot skin and god she's so soft, giving, like sinking into the best-ever pillow, like—heaven, probably, although not the kind Pastor Jim talks about.

"Little horndog," Deanna says. She looks over her shoulder, lips parted, and lets him squeeze there again, and then lifts up and turns over all in one motion, so his hand's knocked away as she swings a knee over his thighs and crawls into his lap, and then she grips his shoulders and kisses him again and this time it's not soft, her mouth shoving against his and her chin pressing his down somehow and her tongue—god!—her tongue, slicking against his, hot and immediate, and Sam grabs her back and waist and ass, gripping, dizzy. Beer. Chocolate frosting. Pulling away, too soon, but all she does is lean back from him and tear her black tank off over her head, and then it's—her grey bra, plain but for the little pink bow on the connector between the cups—and her hands going to the button on her shorts, and then the zip, and the waist's loose then and Sam shoves his hands down the back, grips her ass, pulls her closer, his mouth on her throat, on her breastbone, taking the amulet cord between his teeth.

"Goddamn," she murmurs, both hands in his hair. She rises up on her knees, still straddling his lap. "You an ass-man, Sammy?"

Not worth answering. He wants—her skin, how close she is. Her soft parts and where she throbs. One hand leaves his head, and he's found the body-warm metal of the god-head and taken it in his mouth, sucking, wanting—but then her bra disappears somehow, shucked down her arms, and there are—oh, her tits—creamy soft and rising up and he abandons the amulet for a hard sweet nipple and sucks so hard she cries out, squirms, pressing against him. He traces the crinkled tight skin with his tongue, drags his teeth against the squishy soft, pressing hard enough against her he has to gasp for air when he gets light-headed, and even as he does his lips brush that rigid point. He wants to crush his dick against it, feel how soft, wet from his mouth, how he'd look so dark-red and thick against where she's smooth—

She pulls him back by the hair, her chest heaving. Her hands between them then and—his belt, open, and he jerks hard at any amount of pressure over his crotch but—oh, then it makes sense, yes yes yes and he takes over, leaning back and undoing belt and zip and pushing, getting the tangle of jeans and shorts down, and she backs off, shoving her own shorts down, her panties—oh, those purple bikini briefs, Sam's mouth waters and he wants to fucking bite—but then Sam's dick has sprung free and he's so blindingly terribly hard and she kicks out of her clothes and presses him back on the bed, kissing him, her tongue shoved against his and her body soft-hot-immediate, so much of her there that his head goes completely blank other than wanting her. He rolls her onto her back and something plastic crinkles and she says—wait, wait—but Sam doesn't want to wait, only her hand's on his face, gripping his jaw, forcing him to look at her. Her cheeks flushed dark. She fishes over to the side and—oh—foil packet. Condom.

Sam's brain comes slightly closer to this solar system. Deanna tears at the foil with her teeth and there's the rubbery weird edge, the circle. She glances at his face and takes it out herself, and Sam re-arrives in his body, mind actually here and not just the shocked tense impulse of what his balls want, in time to have his sister reach down between them, and for Sam to kneel up, dizzy, and for her to touch his dick bare for the first time, fingertips brushing him from base to tip and making this fine strange shudder take hold of his bones while she sets the rubber on the head and slicks it down in a smooth practiced move, jerking up in one pull. Sam's hips fuck into it, helpless, and he wants to—god. Cry. Fuck her. God, he wants to fuck her, and she shifts on her back, spreads her thighs wide, and for the first time he sees—the trimmed-short reddish-brown of her pubes but then shaved smooth below, and flushed-pink lips, and this—this shine, between, and he drags his thumb over the crackly hair and then the split and gets her to shudder, gripping his arms, her hips squirming. "Yeah," Deanna says, breathless, and Sam—he's seen porn, he knows what to do, but he's frozen there for a few seconds, rubbing stupid with his thumb, up and down the plush seam of her lips, spreading wet.

Deanna slides one hand down his chest and stomach and then up again, this soothing sweet pet, and then she gets his dick in her hand. Sam jerks. "Shh," she says, and draws him closer—he props himself on both hands on either side of her shoulders, not sure—not wanting to lean into her, or hurt her—and then he's closer and she glances up into his face, and smiles at him, and leans up and kisses him, smoochy-soft right on his lips, and below—his cockhead touches her, right up at the top part of her pussy. Warm. Then she drags him down between the lips, hot-wet—and then she sets him at the center and lifts and he pushes forward and—oh, that's—what every good thing should be, hot and gripping and slick and he grinds in deep, shocked, his whole hindbrain and bones and gut-instinct telling him—go there, go now, shove in as deep as he possibly can.

Dee makes this sharp thin high sound. Sam hangs there, his hair falling in his face, hips pushing on a dumb instinct, staring down between them. Like he could get deeper. "God," Dee says, half-bitten—her face turning away, her bottom lip going white from how hard it's pulled between her teeth. Clutching inside. Sam's elbow goes out and then he's laying down over her practically, his dick pulling out a few inches but that's not—he crams back in and Dee's breath shudders out, and her hands go down to his ass, pulling him close, and so he—he does it again, and grips her tit with one hand, barely propped up, their stomachs hot together and sweat starting, his face down by the curve of her throat and breathing his own puffed-back air, gasping. Feels like nothing else. This gripping fist but better and softer and hotter and wet, letting him in, and more than that the smell of her, and her hair thick over her shoulder for him to tangle his fingers into, bracing better with his elbow by her head. Her hips curving up, her thighs around him and then lifting and dragging him in and this little hiccupped sound she makes and how she whispers there and Sam doesn't—he doesn't know what that means but—she clutches his back, and her nails dig in on either side of his spine, and it's so much, so—too much—and he knows he's making this dumb sound but he doesn't know how to stop making it because every time his hips jerk up into her it's like he's dying until he can get in there again, and—and that's—he goes faster, chasing, his knees scrabbling for grip on the slick coverlet and abandoning her tit to force her hips to stay still, where he wants them, his brain going to some other hot tense place and she groans and says yeah, yeah—you got it—c'mon—and out of nowhere his balls clutch and it punches out of him like a rocket, unloading, pushing deep and deeper and leaning his whole weight there, pouring the marrow out of his bones, his lips open and shocked against her throat.

"Fuck," Deanna says, rich and breathy. Sam's gonna suffocate. He lifts his head and keeps his eyes closed and there's—his nose against her jaw, her cheek. Her hands dragging up and down the muscles in his back. His balls pulse and he pushes in again, can't not, and Dee makes a choked little sound and then reaches between them, her knuckles skimming down Sam's belly and then—oh—"Don't," he says, oversensitive instinct, her fingers at the base of his dick, but she whispers, "Shh," again, like he's a little kid, and then, "Gotta keep the rubber from spilling," and his brain flows slowly back from whatever distant cave it had fled to and he thinks, right, and manages to lift off of her a few inches—her body rosy-flushed, gleaming, and he grips himself and keeps the condom in place and pulls slowly out even if out is not at all where he ever wants to be for the rest of his life—and Dee makes another weird noise when he's free, her knees closing tight around his hips for a hot second—and then Sam's got this—gross—"Like this," Deanna says, closing her hand around and pulling it down—ripple from the base of Sam's spine to his fingertips, his dick's so—but then she's got the wrinkled limp shiny thing full of—he shudders again, a crash of embarrassment over his head like an avalanche—his jizz—but she only ties it up like a nasty balloon and then tosses it somewhere off the bed like that's a universe they won't have to deal with, entirely separate from what's happening on this mattress, and then she says, "Sammy," and he sucks in gaspy air, and she says, "Sam," and he looks up and meets her eyes and she's…

She kisses him, soft, pulling him back down. Knuckles against his cheekbone and one hand on the back of his neck, pulling at the sweaty hair there. He learns how to push his tongue against hers and how it makes the most incredible little noises burst in her chest, like she wishes she weren't making them and yet can't help it. Her nipples hard points against his skin, and still so fascinating to play with, and to lick when he ducks down to do that, and to set his teeth against careful and drag and to see her eyes heavy and her lips wet and her hand in his hair, tucking it back so she can see him better.

"Good?" she says, when she's pulled him back up. He nods. Can't really manage more than that. She smiles at him, kisses the corner of his mouth. "Feels kinda—weird, right?"

"Understatement," Sam says, and Deanna snorts. So close, still. Eyes totally clear, really watching him, listening and not making fun, not at all. "Didn't realize…"

What? He can't articulate it. The total wild craziness in the moment and then how it's gone the next. How he doesn't feel any different and yet feels like he could climb K2 and yet he wants to nap and yet wants—wants—

He lays a hand on her hip, where she's curved in against him. Her eyelids dip. "Was it—okay?" he says. Tries not to feel entirely embarrassed for asking and fails, but.

She touches his chin with her thumb, eyes crinkling. "You know, just asking that puts you in the, like, top one percent of guys? Like, worldwide." He rolls his eyes and she leans forward for another plush wet kiss. "Yeah, it was good."

"So, you—" Sam swallows. Trails his fingers over her belly, to her navel, down. She twists, hips flattening on the bed, and he touches the soft patch of hair, damply curling. "Did you—"

Deanna's lips part and she takes a breath and then doesn't say anything. Sam feels the shape of bone there, the ridge. How it swells into the lips. "Nah," Deanna says.

Oh, no. He looks up, sorry, but then finds her looking back kind of—surprised. "What?"

She drags her hair back from her face, sweeping it all over to one side so it spills over her shoulder, the pillow. "Usually I'd lie," she says, and gives this one-sided smile, her eyes shifting away.

Sam sits up, an abrupt certainty clutching his gut. "Show me," he says, and Dee blinks, looks back at him. They're weirdly slanted at a diagonal on the bed and it's hot and gross and uncomfortable and he doesn't want it to end. "C'mon, that's not—fair, right? That I can—but you—" His cheeks start to prickle and he shakes his head. Turns, and—at the foot of the bed, a few inches from tumbling off to that other universe—

He cracks the clamshell box. Deanna laughs, in this high breathy way. "Dude," she says, and Sam pulls the dildo out. Weirdly velvety-smooth, fake, not at all like a real dick but this smooth curving pole, fatter at where the head ought to be, with a circle base. Just really stupidly pink. Sam knows his face is darker but so what. He rubs his thumb over the tip and Deanna groans, says, "Dude, seriously, give it here."

Sam puts it in her reaching hand but closes his fist over hers. She raises her eyebrows at him and he shrugs, riding what confidence he's got. "You should feel good," he says, and she says, "I do," and Sam leans forward and kisses her while she's protesting, and her tongue pushes soft against his, and he lowers their joined hands down low to her belly, and when she's making those little noises again he lifts up just enough so he can meet her eyes without his crossing and says, really meaning it, "I want you to," and she's pink across her cheekbones to her ears and she nods, look at his eyes and then his lips, and then tips her head back against the bed, and she says, "Can't believe," but what exactly she doesn't say.

Tucked in close against her side. "Don't look," she says, which—is there any way in the world his sister could be shy?—and of course Sam's going to but he says, "Okay," soft, and kisses her cheek and her jaw, and cups her tits one at a time, playing like she showed him. She wets the dildo by sucking it into her mouth down to the base, quick, leaving the weird silicone skin gleaming, and Sam squeezes his eyes shut and pulses, it's so hot. Imagines—if they'd— But then—she makes this punched little noise and oh—Sam puts his forehead against her temple, looking down her body, and she's already pushed it in, her forearm flexing. "Jeez," she whispers, and Sam says what puffed against her shoulder, and she laughs kinda thin and says, "It's not as big as you," and a hot strange flare opens up in Sam's chest, fills him from breastbone to throat.

Sam kisses the upper curve of one boob, tweaking the nipple back and forth, watching fascinated. Her one knee pulls up and out, making room. Shallow in-and-out he can hardly see but he can see her wrist working, her chest rising heavy. "What about—" he says, and reaches down—not totally sure what he's looking for but in porn and stuff they always talk about it—and Deanna makes a hitched sound and says, "No, just—just this is—" and Sam reaches down further, feeling, and there's—oh, the silicone's warmed right up, slick from her, punching in and in and in, and when he pushes his fingers down past he can feel the thin warm wet skin, opening up, letting the thing in—letting him in—

He's hard again, his toes freezing and his lips almost numb. He kneels up and Deanna grips one of his thighs, breathing heavy. Her arm piston-steady. Below he touches the insides of her thighs where they're wet, slick from what's getting shoved out of her, and then the spot just below where it's shoving in, creamed up almost, and then the hard ridge of—his whole body flushes hot—her asshole, which he might've found gross any other time but he's seen those videos too, and—her thighs clench and her breath stops and the thin stretch of skin he's touching flexes and clenches and she crams the dildo in deep, knuckles white around the base. Her breath coming then so hard that her belly's sucking in with the effort. His mouth's dry. She lets the dildo push out of her and it comes with wet stringing to it, and her pussy's red, slick, and Sam touches there and his fingers just—slide in—open, and the muscle strange inside, smooth-but-not, flexing—and he goes up to his knuckles and then pulls them out gleaming and then he sticks them in his mouth and it's—sour almost, tangy, but this little sweet edge that has him sucking his fingers clean—and Deanna grabs his wrist and he opens his eyes and she's staring at him with her pupils huge and black, her chest still heaving, and she pulls him down to her and lifts her knees high and it's easy, easy, to push his dick into that warm slick open, enveloped immediate and shocking-hot and wild. She pulls her knees up almost by her shoulders and he braces there on the back of her thighs and goes all the way deep so she makes this wounded grunt, her eyes wide-startled, but it must not hurt because she nods helpless and fast and so Sam does it again, and again, and that second time lasts longer, the edge sated, their foreheads together, lips brushing, his heart thudding up thick in his guts.

Takes longer to peel apart, that second time. She's shuddering, tense and fine, and Sam can't face pulling out. Her amulet's crushed between them, hard points digging into Sam's chest, but it just feels right in the same way that the lack of solidity in his bones does. Metasomatism, he remembers, the detail floating in from some distant world. The change irrevocable.

*

The bed's wrecked. Sweat and—and fluids, and beer where it turns out it did spill after all. Sam stands in his boxers, biting his thumbnail, eyes on it but really not in this room at all. The shower's running, the bathroom door closed, and he should do something. Something.

They lay against each other in bed for a while. The right way around, finally, heads on pillows side by side. When did you, she whispered, like someone could hear, and he honestly didn't know. When it was something that breathed through his whole life. Like asking when he decided to have brown hair. When did you, he asked back, and she turned her head and looked at him with her eyes heavy, and said, still don't, stank-ass, and then she turned onto her side and pressed her lips against his shoulder, and he tucked her hair back from her ear and watched how she watched some other thing in the distance. The way she sighed but stayed close, her skin against his.

When she comes out of the shower Sam's had the wherewithal to wash his face in the sink and put on a t-shirt and set things a little bit to rights. The old pizza box and the trashed grocery bag and the condom wrapper and rubber and the balloon and the empty beers all gone to the motel's dumpster. The leftover cake in the mini-fridge. He's stripped the gross blanket off the bed and bundled it into the corner—some hazy idea that maybe he can bust into the laundry room and get a fresh one in the morning—and he's putting the blanket from his cot onto her bed when he looks up, and she's standing there in her towel, hair curving a wet darkened ribbon down her shoulder, her teeth in her lip.

"Butler baby bro," she says. Arms wrapped around her middle.

"Ha," he says, but she didn't smile and neither does he.

She cupped between her legs when she sat up and took a deep breath. What, he said, and then realized. It's okay, she said, only Sam wasn't sure that it was. He sat up too and put his fingertips on her waist, and she said, dude, relax, like—like who cared—but then she swallowed and took his hand and squeezed it, her fingers small in his, and she said, it's okay, really, soft, and Sam didn't know how she managed it. How she managed to make everything fine when it absolutely wasn't.

Her bag's still at the bottom of the bed. He washed the stickiness off the dildo and snapped it back into its plastic case and stowed it there among her socks and bras. She crouches there and picks out—the DARE shirt—and doesn't glance at Sam when she stands back up, and drops the towel—her body cream-and-pink-and-pretty—and then drops the shirt over her head, and lifts the weight of her hair out from under the neck and shakes it out to dry.

She sits on the end of the bed, on the fuzzy weird beige blanket, one leg tucked in under the other. No panties, Sam can't help but notice, and he swallows and sits on Dad's bed. His. Then she gets up in a huff and says, "This is freakin' stupid," and goes to the fridge and gets two beers, and cracks the caps off on the edge of the counter, and comes back and hands him one and sits right next to him, leaning back and sticking her bare legs across the gap between the beds, her toes on the edge of the other mattress. No longer blue but a deep glimmery emerald. He doesn't know when that changed.

"You know this makes us like, grade A USDA-certified freaks, right?" Deanna sips her beer, wriggles her toes. Sounds unconcerned. "Like. People would like, study us. In a lab, probably."

Sam picks at the beer label with one thumbnail. Dee's watching her toes, a line between her eyebrows. "I think they'd arrest me first," he says.

She lets her feet drop, her heels thudding into the carpet, and she leans forward so she's a sharp right angle, beer bottle held between her knees. "Me first," she says, quieter.

Orangey slices of light across the back of the DARE shirt; the sun hasn't even gone down, although sunset's starting to split through the blinds. Her wet hair's soaked part of the shirt to see-through and he lays a hand there, between her shoulderblades, covering up the hint of pink. Her head droops lower, her back lifting under his hand.

She put on the shirt in front of him, after she came out of the bathroom almost-naked, after she stood up from the bed and flinched at the wet that rolled down her thigh, after she leaned over his chest and didn't meet his eyes but kissed him anyway, soft and lingering and tender enough that his eyes smarted, overwhelmed, his fingertips against her breastbone where the amulet horns had sunk in a divot that hadn't yet gone away. It might bruise.

He touches his own chest where there's a matching, tiny ache. "What are we going to do," he says.

Deanna sniffs, and her fingers go up to her eyes. When she turns at looks at him her eyelashes are damp but she's steady. "I'm gonna look for a hunt," she says. He frowns at her and she shrugs. "Tomorrow. That's what we do. I'm gonna look for a hunt, and you're gonna—I don't know, read a whole book and then do algebra problems, because that's the kind of crap you do—and if I find a job I'm gonna call Dad and tell him and he's gonna say whether we go for it or if we wait for him to get back, and we're gonna—be Sam and Deanna Winchester. Who we've always been."

"Like it's that simple," Sam says.

"It is that simple," Deanna says, firm. She swivels on the bed, tucking her leg up, looking him in the face. "I don't know if it's easy. That part—I don't know, Sammy. But it's simple. It's just us."

"Us," Sam echoes. All the science metaphors and Shakespearian language and math can't solve that. Us. Whatever that means.

Deanna touches his wrist, on the hand that's holding his beer. Soft, careful. Her thumb sliding over the back of his hand. He meets her eyes and she's watching him, and after a few seconds her mouth lifts into that crooked little smile. The one that's his.

His stupid heart lifts like it's been filled with helium. "Do I still have to do your laundry?" Sam says.

"Once a week," Deanna says, and pulls him in closer. When their lips meet their beer bottles clink together, like they’re promising something, too.

[aggiepython]

a piece i did for a class on native american history, inspired by Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon (more info under cut)

“She bounded down two concrete stairs and stepped out on to the green grass of the campus mall, surrounded on either side by thick stately oaks. She could tell each one had been strategically planted along the winding sidewalks between the red brick buildings. Even with groups of students sitting on the grass, leaning against their trunks, the trees seemed lonely. Nothing like the oaks along the river that grew where they wanted to grow and leaned in and touched each other with their middle branches, whose voices sang through their leaves like the hum of electric wires running alongside the country roads.” From Murder on the Red River

This piece is inspired by Murder on the Red River, a mystery novel by Marcie Rendon. It’s about Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman who investigates the murder of a Native man. Cash was taken from her mother and siblings as a young child and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which were abusive. About a third of Native American children were taken from their parents and placed in foster homes, even when they could have been placed with relatives instead of being separated from their community members and culture. Native American boarding schools, which also separated children from their families and culture, had mostly all been shut down by the 1970s (Katherine Beane), when Murder on the Red River takes place. But the removal of children to foster homes was just another way that the government tried to force Native Americans to assimilate into white culture. The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978. It set requirements to keep Native children with relatives when safe and possible, and to work with the tribe and family of children. This act has made progress, though Native children are still adopted or placed in foster care at a higher rate than non-Native children (NICWA). In my illustration, there are four trees, representing Cash, her mother, and her two siblings. In the image on the right, the trees are growing as they do in their natural forest habitat, winding together. In the image on the left, the trees have been planted on the neat lawn of the college campus, a place where white culture is dominant. The trees are apart from each other, separated as Cash’s family were torn apart. They were forced to assimilate as many Native Americans were. The trees are bur oaks, aka Quercus macrocarpa, a species native to North Dakota where the book takes place. Their range encompasses much of the U.S. and parts of Canada (Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center). The grass on the right image is Kentucky Bluegrass, aka Poa pratensis. It is invasive to North America. It was introduced in the 17th century from Europe, and is now found all over North America. It is commonly used for lawns and pasture, and can outcompete native prairie plants (North Dakota State Library). The Red River borders North Dakota and Minnesota. The Ojibwe have lived in Minnesota since before the 17th century, after migrating from Northeastern North America over hundreds of years (Minnesota Historical Society). The shape of the Red River traces through the image, weaving and intermingling through the branches of the trees, showing Cash’s deep connection with the land she is from.

Works Cited “About IWCA” National Indian Child Welfare Association, https://www.nicwa.org/about-icwa/ Beane, Katherine, American Indians in Minnesota, 12 March 2024, Nicholson Hall, Minneapolis, MN. Lecture. “Kentucky Bluegrass”, North Dakota State Library. https://www.library.nd.gov/statedocs/AgDept/Kentuckybluegrass20070703.pdf Rendon, Marcie. Murder on the Red River. Soho Crime, 2017. “The Ojibwe People”, Minnesota Historical Society, https://www.mnhs.org/fortsnelling/learn/native-americans/ojibwe-people “Quercus macrocarpa”, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=QUMA2

[forthosebefore]

Lincoln Home, social services for Black Americans in early 20th century Pueblo, Colorado

In 1905 The Colored Orphanage and Old Folks Home was known as, "the only home for colored children in an area of seven states." The Lincoln Home was started by the Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs in the city of Pueblo and became the only known Black orphanage in Colorado. Built in 1906, the home moved in 1914 to two small red-brick houses that were built closely together on 2714 North Grand Avenue, where it remained until the city’s segregated orphanage system ended in 1963. In 1997 the Lincoln Home building on North Grand Avenue was listed on the State Register of Historic Properties, and in the early 2000s the building housed the Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center. Currently the building serves as a museum which is open to the public and can be toured. Which was a huge honor for Pueblo, Colorado.

Pueblo’s Black community traces its roots to the diverse residents of El Pueblo, the early trading post that was built near the present city in the 1840s. According to the Colorado Encyclopedia, after the Colorado Gold Rush and the Civil War, new Black residents arrived from border states such as Kentucky and Missouri. Between 1870 and 1880 Pueblo County’s Black population grew from 27 to 141. The area’s Black population continued to grow over the next two decades. By the early 1900s, Pueblo’s Black community was developing its own institutions, including the city’s first black newspaper.

Ray Brown and Emily Wilson, Pueblo Heritage Museum Museum Curator and Executive Director, hope to find a home for artifacts from from the Lincoln Home that were collected by Pueblo civil rights icon and Brown’s mentor Ruth Steele. Read the detailed article on their efforts in The Gazette here.

Source: Pueblo Orphanages: Transformation, Pueblo County Historical Society Facebook, The Gazette

Visit www.attawellsummer.com/forthosebefore to learn more about Black history and read new blog posts first.

Need a freelance graphic designer or illustrator? Send me an email.

[vintageviewmaster]

Caption: “MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME” NEAR BARDSTOWN

Booklet Description: 3. "MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME" This is the manor house of the plantation of John Rowan, Jr., near Bardstown. A brick Georgian Colonial mansion completed in 1818, it is preserved as a Kentucky State Shrine because Rowan's cousin, Stephen C. Foster, probably wrote his famous "My Old Kentucky Home" here. The pride of the home is the spinnet piano at which Foster worked.

Brand: View-Master Packet Title: Kentucky Reel Title: Kentucky Reel Subtitle: The Bluegrass State - II U.S.A. Reel Number: KY-2 Reel Edition: N/A Image Number: 3 Date: 1955

[littlefella69]

DUCK WHO?????

It was always me versus the world Until I found it's me versus me Why, why, why, why? Why, why, why, why? Just remember, what happens on Earth stays on Earth! We gon' put it in reverse

Darling, I told you many times And I am telling you once again Just to remind you, sweetheart That my-

Oh, Lamar, Hail Mary and marijuana, times is hard Pray with the hooligans, shadows all in the dark Fellowship with demons and relatives, I'm a star Life is one funny mo'fucker A true comedian, you gotta love him, you gotta trust him I might be buggin', infomercials and no sleep Introverted by my thoughts; children, listen, it gets deep

See, once upon a time inside the Nickerson Garden projects The object was to process and digest poverty's dialect Adaptation inevitable, gun violence, crack spot Federal policies raid buildings and drug professionals Anthony was the oldest of seven Well-respected, calm and collected Laughin' and jokin' made life easier, hard times, Momma on crack A four-year-old tellin' his nanny he needed her

His family history, pimpin' and bangin' He was meant to be dangerous Clocked him a grip and start slangin' 15, scrapin' up his jeans with quarter pieces Even got some head from a smoker last weekend Dodged a policeman, workin' for his big homie Small-time hustler, graduated to a brick on him 10, 000 dollars out of a project housing, that's on the daily Seen his first mill' 20 years old, had a couple of babies

Had a couple of shooters Caught a murder case, fingerprints on the gun they assumin' But witnesses couldn't prove it That was back when he turned his back and they killed his cousin He beat the case and went back to hustlin' Bird-shufflin', Anthony rang The first in the projects with the two-tone Mustang That 5.0 thing, they say 5-0 came Circlin' parking lots and parking spots And hoppin' out while harrassin' the corner blocks

Crooked cops told Anthony he should kick it He brushed 'em off and walked back to the Kentucky Fried Chicken See, at this chicken spot There was a light-skinned nigga that talked a lot With a curly top and a gap in his teeth He worked the window, his name was Ducky He came from the streets, the Robert Taylor Homes Southside Projects, Chiraq, the Terror Dome Drove to California with a woman on him and 500 dollars

They had a son, hopin' that he'd see college Hustlin' on the side with a nine-to-five to freak it Cadillac Seville, he'd ride his son around on weekends Three-piece special with his name on the shirt pocket 'Cross the street from the projects, Anthony planned to rob it Stuck up the place before, back in '84 That's when affiliation was really eight gears of war So many relatives tellin' us, sellin' us devilish works Killin' us, crime, intelligent, felonious Prevalent proposition with 9's

Ducky was well-aware They robbed the manager and shot a customer last year He figured he'd get on these niggas' good sides Free chicken every time Anthony posted in line Two extra biscuits, Anthony liked him and then let him slide They didn't kill him, in fact, it look like they're the last to survive Pay attention, that one decision changed both of they lives One curse at a time

Reverse the manifest and good karma, and I'll tell you why You take two strangers and put 'em in random predicaments Give 'em a soul so they can make their own choices and live with it 20 years later, them same strangers, you make 'em meet again Inside recording studios where they reapin' their benefits Then you start remindin' them about that chicken incident Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence? Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin' life While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight

crikey

[kailahayden]

what is siding and why does your Kentucky home need

When it comes to maintaining your home’s beauty and protecting it from the elements, siding plays a crucial role. But what exactly is siding? In simple terms, siding is the material that covers the exterior of your home. It's the first line of defense against weather, moisture, and insects, while also playing a major part in your home’s curb appeal.

Whether you’re building a new home or looking to replace worn-out siding, understanding its importance is key. In Kentucky, with our unique weather conditions — from humid summers to cold, snowy winters — having the right siding is essential to ensuring your home stays safe, comfortable, and energy-efficient.

Types of Siding

There are several types of siding materials, each offering different benefits. Some of the most common types of siding include:

Vinyl Siding: One of the most popular choices due to its durability and low maintenance. Vinyl siding is resistant to cracking, warping, and fading, making it an excellent option for Kentucky's unpredictable climate.

Wood Siding: A timeless classic, wood siding adds warmth and natural beauty to any home. However, it does require more maintenance than other options, as it can be vulnerable to moisture, rot, and pests, which is something to consider given Kentucky's humid summers.

Fiber Cement Siding: Made from a mixture of wood fibers, cement, and sand, fiber cement siding is highly durable and fire-resistant. It can mimic the look of wood without the hassle of constant maintenance.

Aluminum Siding: While not as popular as it once was, aluminum siding is still a good choice for homeowners looking for a low-maintenance, affordable option. It's lightweight, resistant to rust, and can last a long time when properly maintained.

Stone or Brick Veneer: If you're looking to make a statement with your home’s exterior, stone or brick veneer siding is a beautiful, durable option. It can withstand harsh weather and offers excellent insulation properties, making it ideal for Kentucky’s cold winters.

Why Your Home Needs Siding

Protection from the Elements

The primary function of siding is to protect your home from the weather. With Kentucky's unpredictable climate, from hot, humid summers to frigid winters, your home needs a reliable shield against rain, snow, and wind. Siding acts as a barrier, preventing moisture from getting into your walls and causing damage to your home’s structure. Without siding, your home could be exposed to rot, mold, or mildew.

Energy Efficiency

Siding doesn’t just protect your home; it can also help keep your home energy-efficient. Properly installed siding can improve insulation, reducing your heating and cooling costs. This is especially important in Kentucky, where you experience all four seasons and need a siding material that can help maintain a comfortable indoor temperature year-round.

Curb Appeal and Value

Siding can significantly impact the appearance of your home. Whether you prefer a rustic wood look, sleek modern vinyl, or stately brick, siding is a key factor in determining your home’s curb appeal. A well-maintained exterior boosts the overall value of your home, which is especially important if you're looking to sell in the future. The right siding material can even attract potential buyers by giving your home an updated, stylish appearance.

Durability and Low Maintenance

Kentucky homeowners need a siding material that can handle the elements while minimizing maintenance. Vinyl siding, for example, is low-maintenance compared to wood siding, which requires regular painting and sealing. Investing in durable siding means less time spent on upkeep and more time enjoying the comfort of your home.

Weather Resistance

Kentucky experiences a variety of weather conditions, including heavy rainfall, snowstorms, and strong winds. The right siding material can withstand these challenges and keep your home safe. Whether it's protecting against water penetration or preventing damage from flying debris, siding ensures your home remains intact no matter what nature throws its way.

Choosing the Right Siding Installation Service

Choosing the right siding material is important, but proper installation is just as essential. That's where professional siding installers come in. With years of experience and expertise, professionals like Humberto Maradiaga are experts in providing top-notch siding installation services in Louisville, KY. They can help you choose the best material for your home and ensure it’s installed correctly, giving you peace of mind and long-lasting protection for your home.

Why Humberto Maradiaga?

When it comes to siding installation, you need someone who understands the local climate and knows how to ensure your home is properly protected. Humberto Maradiaga has earned a reputation for providing excellent service, with a focus on quality, reliability, and customer satisfaction. Whether you're installing new siding or replacing your existing one, Humberto Maradiaga offers expert guidance and professional installation that will enhance your home’s appearance and longevity.

In conclusion, siding is an essential part of protecting and beautifying your Kentucky home. From ensuring weather resistance to improving energy efficiency and boosting curb appeal, siding offers numerous benefits. If you're looking for reliable and professional siding installation in Louisville, KY, look no further than Humberto Maradiaga. His expertise will provide you with peace of mind and a beautiful, durable exterior for your home.

[storiesamongthestones]

Edward Julius Berwind

(June 17, 1848 – August 18, 1936)

Business magnate. He was appointed to the United States Naval Academy by Abraham Lincoln, and worked as a naval aide in the Grant administration. He organized the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company with his brother Charles F. and Judge Allison White. Acquiring coal mines, he worked with J.P. Morgan in the consolidation and expansion of coal operations.

Berwind joined fellow Philadelphian Peter A.B. Widener in establishing the New York subway system. With Widener, Berwind was also a director of International Mercantile Marine Company which owned the White Star Line and, subsequently, the Titanic. He controlled the steamship business in New York and Philadelphia and supplied much of the coal used by the ships of the US Navy. After Charles's death, Edward became sole manager of the company.

He acquired coal companies in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Colorado. Company towns like Windber (the transposition of the syllables in "Berwind"), Pennsylvania, and Berwind, West Virginia, were built to mine the coal. Subsidiaries of Berwind-White also often bore the "Berwind" stamp. The Berwind operation in Kentucky was the Kyber Coal Company. He was the world's largest individual owner of coal mining properties. The firm built brick houses for its management and frame houses for the miners and their families.

Berwind was a inflexible businessman, refusing to bargain with employees and maintaining a closed shop in the coal fields. This contributed to the view of Berwind as a "robber baron." In the 1922 coal strike, Berwind Coal made wage reductions of from 32 to 54 percent. Workers who went on strike were given five days to vacate company houses, and tent towns sprang up around the mining towns.

The Berwind Company is still a family owned business which manages the vast real estate holdings of its former mining operations. Though no longer actively engaged in mining, the company still retains extensive surface and mineral rights. His summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, "The Elms," designed by Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer is an elegant survivor of America's Gilded Age.

Berwind is entombed in the Berwind Mausoleum modeled after the Tower of the Winds in Athens, was designed by gilded age architect Horace Trumbauer is located in Franconia Section, Lot 260 in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, USA

[cheapoldhousesunder50k]

c.1910 Kentucky Foursquare For Sale $125K

$125,000 Four-bedroom, two-bath Kentucky foursquare for sale with gorgeous rich, dark woodwork, built-ins, and multiple fireplaces. The brick beauty has a formal dining room, central air, and public water and sewer. Realtor Comments 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom craftsman home, perfectly situated within the city limits. This property has a fully fenced backyard along with a play set, providing a safe…

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Reasonably priced 1900 home in Louisville, Kentucky has 3bds, 2ba, $315K. What do you think of the reno- too modern, or just right? Cute little fence around the front yard.

Original front door painted gray and given new modern house numbers that are easily visible.

The color scheme of the house is white with black trim. In the entrance hall they left the exposed brick and sealed it. Should it be shiny or should they have done it in a flat finish for more authenticity?

I like the little lamp over the door by the stairs.

They left the phone cubby.

Very modern light fixture adaptation. Looks like the fireplace was given a new modern surround and painted black. Lots of exposed brick.

This is nice, the fireplace is a little more original. Modern chandelier.

New white cabinets and modern light in the pantry.

Completely remodeled modern white kitchen.

Interesting- they carpeted the floor in here and left the brick natural. The carpet though, in a room w/a door to the outside.

2nd floor. The spindles looks original, but it they're not, it was a good choice.

Primary bedroom has an original fireplace.

They made a nice closet.

The bath is totally modern. Well, that's cheap- they gave you one bulb.

Shower with penny tile floor and white subway tile with dark grout. I get the shelves, but I wonder what that box is on top.

Separate toilet.

Nice secondary bedroom. The simpler ceiling light looks good.

Modern bath with the currently popular design in floor tiles.

Double size shower.

Laundry room hookup.

Fenced-in yard is a nice size. 5,227 sq. ft. lot

[pegasusconstruction24]

Basement Remodeling Chicago: Turn Your Unfinished Space into a Dream Living Area

There's no denying that your basement has the potential to be so much more than just a dark, damp space used for storage. With a little creativity and the right expertise, you can transform it into a beautiful and functional living area that adds value and comfort to your home. As you consider remodeling your basement, you're probably thinking about the endless possibilities - from a cozy family room to a state-of-the-art home theater, the options are limitless in Chicago.

Concerning popular basement remodeling ideas in Chicago, you're likely to find inspiration in the city's vibrant culture and architectural style. You might consider turning your basement into a sleek and modern entertainment space, complete with a wet bar, large screen TV, and comfortable seating. Alternatively, you could opt for a more rustic, industrial-chic look, featuring exposed brick, metal beams, and reclaimed wood accents. Whatever your vision, a professional basement remodeling company can help you bring it to life. You'll be able to choose from a variety of flooring options, such as hardwood, tile, or carpet, and select the perfect lighting fixtures to create a warm and inviting atmosphere.

As you launch on your basement remodeling journey, you'll want to understand the key steps involved in the process. First, you'll need to assess your basement's current condition, identifying any potential issues with water damage, structural integrity, or electrical and plumbing systems. Next, you'll work with a designer to create a custom plan that meets your needs and budget. From there, the remodeling process will involve demolition, construction, and installation of new materials and fixtures. You'll be able to choose from a range of materials and finishes, allowing you to put your personal stamp on the project. Throughout the process, a reliable and experienced contractor will be able to guide you, ensuring that your project stays on track and is completed to the highest standards.

Concerning finding the right partner for your basement remodeling project in Chicago, you'll want to choose a company with a proven track record of success. That's where Pegasus Construction comes in - with years of experience and a commitment to quality, they're the perfect choice for your basement remodeling needs. You'll be able to trust their expertise and rely on their professionalism, from the initial consultation to the final walk-through. By choosing Pegasus Construction, you'll be able to create a beautiful and functional living space that you'll enjoy for years to come.

Ready to turn your unfinished basement into a dream living area? Click here to learn more about Basement Remodeling Chicago and schedule a consultation with Pegasus Construction. With their expertise and your vision, you'll be able to create a space that's truly one-of-a-kind.

Pegasus Construction 1103 Chestnut St, Murray, Kentucky. Visit https://pegasusbuilds.com/ to book an appointment.

[whitesinhistory]

On September 25, 1913, the Baltimore City Council passed an ordinance requiring Black and white residents to live on separate blocks. Titled “an ordinance to prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in Baltimore City,” the law was one of a number of segregation ordinances passed that decade—and was part of the first city-wide effort in the country to create legally segregated neighborhoods.

According to newspaper reports, only one Black family lived on the Mosher Street Block in Baltimore at the time. On September 25, the same day the segregation ordinance was passed, a group of white men and boys “bombarded” the Black family’s home with stones and bricks for several hours.

The passage of the 1913 law formalized decades of de facto segregation enforced by violent attacks by white mobs on Black families in “white” neighborhoods, and helped Baltimore earn the reputation of the “national leader in residential segregation.” The racially discriminatory restrictions were later also applied to Jewish residents, many of whom lived in the Roland Park neighborhood in Baltimore.

In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Buchanan v. Warley that a Kentucky ordinance prohibiting Black and white people from buying homes in neighborhoods where they were racial minorities violated the Fourteenth Amendment's protections for freedom of contract. Baltimore Mayor James H. Preston soon instructed city officials to charge anyone who rented or sold to Black people in predominantly white neighborhoods with code violations.

To learn more about the legislation passed throughout the U.S. that required and codified racial separation for decades, read EJI’s report, Segregation in America.

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Shiloh Baptist Church

5500 Scovill Ave.

Cleveland, OH

A view of the Shiloh Baptist Church is a historic church at 5500 Scoville Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Shiloh Baptist Church building was originally used as a synagogue and was known as Temple B'nai Jeshurun. Shiloh Baptist Church is the oldest congregation of black Baptists in Cleveland and second only to ST. John’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church as Cleveland's oldest black church. The nucleus of the early membership consisted of a group of recent African American migrants from the South who worshipped at the First Baptist Church and regularly gathered at a small grocery store owned by Michael Gregory at 245 Erie (East 9th) Street. Alarmed by the growing number of black worshippers, some of the white members of the First Baptist Church sought to prevent any more blacks from joining the congregation. Their proposal was contested by John Malvin, leader of Cleveland's black community, and some of the white members, leading to a compromise for the formation of a Mission church for black Baptists.

In August 1849, the First Baptist Church formed the mission in a converted storage barn on Brownell (East 14th) Street and appointed J. Weeks to serve as a pro-tem minister. The membership initially consisted of the Gregory group along with other black members of the First Baptist. The mission gained official recognition as a Baptist denominational church, Shiloh Baptist Church, in August 1850. William Pennington Brown, a native of West Virginia ordained by the First Baptist Church, was appointed the first minister of Shiloh in August 1851. Under his leadership, the membership surpassed fifty and the church moved to larger quarters on Central Avenue near Perry (East 22nd) Street. L. E. White succeeded Brown, serving at Shiloh from 1863 to 1865. He oversaw the organization of the church's first Sunday School and Baptist Young People's Union. During the term of I. V. Bryant (1867-85), Shiloh acquired property on Sterling (East 30th) Street near Scovill Avenue, which the congregation fashioned into a commodious church.

Riley Wilson, who succeeded Bryant in 1885, organized the church's first Board of Deacons and Trustees, but internal differences resulted in his resignation in 1893. Over half of the congregation left Shiloh at Wilson's urging, forming the nucleus of the Antioch Baptist Church. Under the leadership of Rev. D. E. Dandridge (1895-1903), the Shiloh church secured a loan from John D. Rockefeller to erect a brick and stone edifice in place of its frame building. The new church building contained a large auditorium, a lecture room, and a water-powered pipe organ. Dandridge, however, followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, leaving Shiloh to form the Mt. Haven Baptist Church after internal dissension arose. Unable to pay the mortgage on its building, Shiloh closed its doors in 1903 and the congregation temporarily gathered at the home of Deacon Watson on East 31st Street.

Boston J. Prince of Texas was dispatched to Cleveland in late 1903 by the Ohio State Baptist Convention to reconstitute Shiloh and, after two years of litigation, the church regained its property. Following the departure of Prince in 1907, Edward H. Smith of Kentucky came to Shiloh. He secured the cancellation of a $3,000 mortgage owed by the church and modernized the physical plant of the church by installing heating and electrical systems. Smith, however, resigned in 1916 following the resurgence of internal discord in the congregation. Charles Fishback of Kansas led a growing church of some 1,500 members during World War I and inaugurated a fundraising campaign for a new church building, raising $29,000 before his untimely death in 1921. Prince returned to lead the congregation in 1921. He continued the fundraising drive and purchased the former B’nai Jeshurun synagogue at East 55th Street and Scovill Avenue for $110,000 in 1923. The Temple B'nai Jeshurun structure had been built in 1905-1906 and was designed by Harry Cone, architect.

Shiloh relocated to its new quarters in 1925 following the Grand March to the synagogue from the old church building. Internal disagreements led Rev. Prince to resign his post at Shiloh in 1926 and establish the Messiah Baptist Church with his followers. Alexander L. Boone of Texas came to Shiloh in 1927. He proceeded to pay off the mortgage on its large building, expanded the church services and facilities, and acquired a pipe organ for $12,000. Alas, Boone passed away in 1947 after serving the congregation for twenty years. A. Henson Jarmon, who served as the interim minister for a year, was selected to lead Shiloh in 1948. He founded the Shiloh Herald, a quarterly magazine for and about the church, organized the Shiloh Credit Union in 1960, and initiated major renovations, including the construction of a new baptistery. Like many of his predecessors, however, Jarmon resigned from Shiloh due to internal conflicts and formed the Fellowship Baptist Church in 1962.

In 1963, Alfred M. Waller, Sr. became the minister of Shiloh Baptist Church and he served the congregation for 27 years. During his tenure, Waller renovated and upgraded the physical plant of the church sanctuary, rearranged the choir stands, and installed murals. In addition to encouraging students to pursue higher education, the church formed a food bank, launched fellowship groups, and welcomed more than a thousand new members to the congregation. During the Hough Riots of 1966, the church even purchased a home for a displaced family. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 17, 1982. William F. Crockett, the church's youth preacher, served as the interim pastor for a year following the retirement of Rev. Waller in 1991.

Jewell D. Jones, Sr., who served as minister from 1992 to 2005, initiated the Educational Enhancement Initiative in partnership with the neighboring East Technical High School that drastically improved the school's attendance rate. He also organized basketball and drill teams, resurrected the Boy Scout Ministry, and launched new outreach programs, such as the Health Ministry and Young Men on the Move Ministry. In an effort to attract younger worshippers to Shiloh, church members took to the streets, canvassing Central Avenue and talking with young people. The church also sponsored the Walk Thru the Bible seminar for adults and children. The church building has been designated a Cleveland Landmark by the City of Cleveland Landmarks Commission. In 2004, the church underwent a $1.2 million renovation under the direction of architect Michael Benjamin. The Cleveland Chapter of the American Institute of Architects honored the renovation of Shiloh Baptist Church with a historic preservation award in 2006.

In 2009, Cory C. Jenkins became minister, at which point the congregation numbered about 300 members. He served through 2016. Andrew Edwards served as Interim minister from 2017 through 2018, and Thomas Gilmore served as Interim minister from 2019 through May 2020. In August 2020, Shiloh called the Lisa M Goods to serve as its Senior minister, thereby making her the first woman to serve in that capacity. Continuing practices that it established in the 20th century, the outreach activities of Shiloh Baptist Church by the early decades of the 21st century included partnering with the American Red Cross, the National Marrow Donor Program, and others to sponsor a health fair and working with Greater Cleveland Congregations, Youth for Christ, the Ohio State University Gardening Program, and the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

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Transform Your Outdoors with Landscaping and Aggregates, Concrete Products in Winnipeg

When it comes to enhancing your outdoor space in Winnipeg, the key elements often boil down to effective landscaping and the right choice of materials. Among these, landscaping and aggregates and concrete products play crucial roles. They not only add aesthetic appeal but also ensure functionality and durability. Let's explore how you can utilize these elements to create a beautiful and practical outdoor environment, all while being thrifty and wise with your budget.

The Importance of Landscaping in Winnipeg

Landscaping in Winnipeg presents unique challenges due to the region’s climate. However, with careful planning and the right materials, you can create a stunning and resilient outdoor space.

1. Planning Your Landscape: Begin with a comprehensive plan. Identify the areas where you want to incorporate greenery, water features, walkways, and patios. Consider factors like sunlight, shade, and drainage. A well-thought-out plan helps you allocate resources efficiently, saving time and money.

2. Choosing the Right Plants: Opt for native plants that are well-suited to Winnipeg’s climate. These plants require less maintenance and are more resilient to local weather conditions. Incorporating perennials can also be a cost-effective choice, as they return year after year, reducing the need for replanting.

Aggregates: The Backbone of Landscaping

Aggregates are essential in landscaping projects. They provide a foundation for various features and enhance the overall aesthetic.

1. Types of Aggregates: There are various types of aggregates to choose from, including gravel, crushed stone, and sand. Each type has its specific uses, such as forming the base for walkways, driveways, and patios, or for decorative purposes in garden beds.

2. Benefits of Using Aggregates:

Cost-Effective: Aggregates are relatively inexpensive and available in bulk, making them a budget-friendly option for large projects.

Low Maintenance: Once installed, aggregates require minimal upkeep, saving both time and money.

Durability: Aggregates are long-lasting and can withstand harsh weather conditions, ensuring your landscape remains beautiful year-round.

Concrete Products: Versatility and Strength

Concrete products are incredibly versatile and provide a sturdy solution for various landscaping needs.

1. Concrete Pavers and Slabs: Concrete pavers and slabs are ideal for creating patios, walkways, and driveways. They come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, allowing you to customize the look to match your aesthetic preferences.

2. Decorative Concrete: Stamped and colored concrete can mimic the appearance of more expensive materials like brick or stone. This technique provides a high-end look without the associated costs, making it a smart choice for thrifty homeowners.

3. Concrete Retaining Walls: For properties with varying elevations, concrete retaining walls can help manage soil erosion and create terraced garden beds. These walls are not only functional but also add a sophisticated look to your landscape.

Tips for Thrifty Landscaping in Winnipeg

DIY Projects: Consider taking on some of the landscaping tasks yourself. Simple projects like laying gravel paths or planting native shrubs can be done with minimal tools and experience.

Recycling Materials: Use recycled materials whenever possible. For example, repurpose old bricks or concrete pieces as edging for garden beds.

Bulk Purchases: Buying materials like aggregates and concrete products in bulk can significantly reduce costs. Coordinate with neighbors on large purchases to take advantage of bulk discounts.

Seasonal Sales: Keep an eye out for seasonal sales at local garden centers and home improvement stores. Late summer and fall often bring discounts on plants and materials.

Conclusion

Landscaping with aggregates and concrete products offers a blend of beauty, functionality, and affordability. By planning carefully, choosing the right materials, and leveraging cost-saving strategies, you can transform your outdoor space into a stunning oasis without breaking the bank. Whether you’re creating a cozy patio, a winding pathway, or a lush garden, the right approach to landscaping in Winnipeg can make all the difference. Embrace the possibilities and watch your vision come to life.