#even mentioning delany...

[cute-sucker]

note: thank you @.princessbrunette for creating boxer!rafe !!

extra note: this is an unofficial part 2 !! link

˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.˚❀༉‧₊˚.

you clutched the pregnancy test, clammy hands shaking as you felt more scared than ever. rafe was still in his match, and you- you were forbidden from coming to his matches. the last time you came his opponent had made a pass at you after rafe brutally beat him. 

the guy plummeted to the ground before he could utter another word, and rafe decided that enough was enough. so he sat you down, in your little cameo shorts and baby white tee. your thick lashes battered as he tried to come out the truth. the two of you were in the completely vacant locker room. 

"listen, kid, i don't think you should come to my matches anymore," he said gently, as you gripped his arm. you had a sweet expression on your face before you heard what he had said - quickly wilting as you frowned at him. before you could open your mouth he had already cupped your face as softly as he could.

his hands were rough and warm on your face, you could smell the brutality on them, yet you felt yourself at ease in his embrace. you could never admit it - but rafe had some control over you that you could never explain. 

"i know you're going to say it's your calling," he quipped, leaning in closer. his hot breath fanned your neck, as his mouth nipped at your cheek, "but baby i don't think this place is good for you." you felt yourself unwind and opened your mouth to blubber something. 

you finally gasped out, "but i wanna see you!" 

he groaned, steady hand moving down to your waist. there was an amused expression on his face, but he stayed firm. 

"rafe? please." 

"no."

that was it. so you got another job, and later on, rafe told you to stay at tanyhill with him. you were overjoyed that you would get to see him more and that he was being so gracious. all the girls in the ring had told you he was a playboy and nothing more than that. and you would never tell rafe but it was nice not being a ring girl. sure it was a way to get money fast, but your thighs ached from the amount of times you shined and plucked them.

but it wasn't just that. it was also the dark humid lights that dawned upon you, and trotting while people eyed you like a piece of meat. and now, you felt free, and while rafe would never understand why you chose it - you were a waitress. 

the owner, delany liked you, so she didn't give you a hard time about anything. it was a cafe where time seemed to slow and it was as if nothing could go wrong. you got up early in the morning, giving rafe a goodbye kiss while he was in bed as he groaned about you leaving so early. you took life at strides. things were great. 

but here it was. a sign that maybe everything was going to go to shit. be fine. your heartbeat quickened and you could barely breath - that was when you knew it was going to be bad. you could barely imagine yourself pregnant. 

how old were you? 25? yeah, that was too young and quite frankly did rafe even want a baby? sure he mentioned it sometimes, when you went to baby showers and cooed a baby clothes. but would he-? it was another mouth to feed and god you didn't know if you could support that. rafe, sure, but if he left you? and it was an actual human being to love.

finally, you found yourself rushing out of the bathroom. you had to tell him now, as your heart was on fire, and your hands were stinging. quickly you gathered your stuff and headed over to delany. 

"i have to go." 

˚❀༉‧₊˚.

the ring was the same as usual. the same musty smell, and that feeling of everything being possible. you weren't recognised - though you did see a couple of familiar faces in the crowd. but you weren't here to chit-chat. 

urgency drummed through your veins as you found rafe. 12:35. it was almost time for his first match, and you couldn't dump on him like that. no, you really could there was this feeling. this feeling that ran through you like wildfire as you stumbled to him. 

he looked good, better than good, but he looked alarmed as you twisted yourself around his body. 

"hey, hey kid," he laughed at you furiously hugging his middle, "i love that you're here but i told you about visiting me, didn't i? we had this conversation-" he was stopped right there as you kissed him, cupping his face. he was out of breath, pupils dilated when it finally set in. 

maybe he saw the way you sweet doe eyes were welling up with tears, or the way you swayed in his arms as if he let you go you could crumble, or the way you were trying to mouth words, but nothing was coming out of your mouth. he furiously swore under his breath, and pulled you along with him - you followed like a puppy. 

the dim lights of the corner he had pulled you in soothed your state. no longer did your skin ich, but your head still pounded. rafe looked down at you with a worried expression, as he rubbed your back. you were still holding on to him, wide-eyed. 

"hey?" he snapped his fingers, "can't be doing that here. not right now. what's wrong?" he asked harshly, and you shook your head, completely nonverbal. he raised a hand through his buzzed hair, concern evident in his eyes. whenever you got like this- which was never he had to remind himself to be gentle. 

finally, he dropped himself, voice quiet. he didn't care if people saw him like this- all vulnerable. "sweets are you okay?" he probed again. finally with trembling hands, you reached out into your bag to get the pregnancy test- and broke into tears. the two double lines spread fear throughout his heart. 

rafe had changed. that was a fact, he no longer was plagued by his fathers words as much as before. but could he be a father? suddenly he looked down at you, wispy lashes wet, and doe eyes pleading. suddenly, he felt something blossom in his heart. he imagined you running around in tannyhil, round with his kid. you would be wearing a pretty sun dress, as laughter rang through you. 

finally, he closed his eyes, "it's gonna be okay." 

you seemed to take that as a bad sign, gasping out muffled words, "no, rafe, i didn't know what was going to happen, please-" your hand reached out for his, hoping that things were going to be okay. 

rafe was still looking at the test, as he closed and opened his mouth before shaking his hand, "we're gonna get married, all right? yeah, and i want you to stay here with me. 'cause i need you here." he said tapping your head. there was a watery smile on your face, as you jumped into his arms. 

he held you tightly, and you sniffed. before letting go of him to look into his eyes. it was at that moment that you realised how much he loved you. when he's staring at you like you are his world, and his steel eyes are soft. when his eyes are welling up with tears. 

"just really happy and shit," he chuckled, "i can't believe this," he murmured out before pressing his lips on yours. finally, he pulled apart from you, still gazing into your eyes. 

 "you should go," you found yourself whispering out "it's time for your match." yet your hand found a deathly hold on him.

you saw him smile, and give you a peck on the lips, "want you to watch, 'kay? i'm fighting this match for you," and then his hands travelled down to your stomach, "you and baby." 

dazed you watched him step up into the ring and sighed. if this was love, you'd fight for it any day. 

[thirdity]

What it is necessary to remember, in order to make discourse a strong concept, is that it is the materialist side of reason and ratiocination, of understanding and history. It is all very well to explain that electric lights were simply not very common seventy or eighty years ago. [...] It is another thing, however, to explain to people today, whether they remember kerosene lamps or not, that, in a pre-electric light era, the creation of illumination always meant an expenditure of time and physical energy at least as great as that of lighting a match (which is already several times more than turning on a light switch) — and the vast majority of times meant an expenditure of physical energy far greater than that, an expenditure, which, to be efficient, was embedded in a social schema that involved getting candles, fuels, regularly trimming wicks and cleaning the glass chimneys, chopping wood and stoking fires, so that even the casual creation of light in such an age was an entirely different social operation from what it is today. [...] Thus, because of our vastly different relation to it, light itself was a different social object from what it is today. And thus, every mention of light, in any text from that period, whether it be in the deadest of hackneyed metaphors or in the most vibrant and vivid poetry, is referring to a different order of object. What we have begun to explore here, of course, is the discourse of light. It is the discourse that, explored in enough detail, can revivify the evil, distant, flickering lights that haunt American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Ambrose Bierce, even as they turn into clichés in the later writings of Lovecraft; we must remember that initially such lights usually meant fires in the distance — forest fires or homes caught from some light source (got out of control), which, at the time, was always a flame source too.

Samuel R. Delany, "The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire"

[remnantglow]

Thank you so much for the old queer sci-fi database!!! It's so cool. I really appreciate how thorough it is, to the point of including multiple covers and precise tags and additional details for different queer identities being represented. I can't imagine how long this must have taken. I don't normally send asks to people that I follow but I just had to let you know how much this hard work is appreciated <3

Sincerely, a fellow Mar

woagh. [spiderman pointing meme]

on a more serious note, thank you!!! while i'm mostly tremendously excited to share and shine a spotlight on these books, i will selfishly admit that people appreciating the thought and effort that went into the database itself really means a lot to me :')

i, too, have no idea how long it took overall, but i CAN tell you it started with a notes app list sometime in 2021 and then just... slowly snowballed from there (Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany was specifically the book that inspired it all by making me ask myself "wait, how many OTHER older queer scifi books are out there that i've never even heard of?")

also, hah, you're the first person to mention the covers! it's possible the images might be slowing down the database, but as a graphic designer + enjoyer of charmingly bad covers i simply could Not bring myself to omit them <3

[autolabrum]

I've been reading Dhalgren, like every novel I read, through a Joycean lens, and it has really begun to stand out to me how much the Bloom-ian, postcolonial lens informs an understanding of the Kid. Enda Duffy, in The Subaltern Ulysses, argues that through Bloom, Joyce is experimenting with an early postcolonial subjectivity, and that his insider/outsider, subaltern, and flaneur status all create a particular but encompassing individuality and perspective specifically in contrast to the colonialist flaneur figures of literature at the time. The Kid is also a subaltern flaneur, but you can't really have an indigenous American postcolonial subject in a contemporary setting because America is still colonial, so Delany (ingeniously) locally annihilates the American state. The setting of Bellona then is a glimpse at a possible sense of postcolonial American (and specifically indigenous) subjectivity, and its interaction with anarchism, libertarianism, and theoretical statecraft explores what the post-America will look like in urban landscapes. The Kid's indigeneity even further alienates him, because he is a member of a group that has undergone genocide in part for the purpose of building the American state, and he is being shown a vision of the collapse of that state. Again, the passage I keep coming back to resonates: "The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen" (96).

I also think that his complicated relationship to indigineity and the few times it's mentioned in the novel so far align pretty closely with Bloom's experience of Jewishness, but that's a little harder to flesh out, I'll need to take another look at Reizbaum's James Joyce's Judaic Other.

[noah-luck-easterly]

So I've been rereading Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, and they're a fun time I haven't seen anyone mention on tumblr, so I thought I might as well.

They're detective stories, set in a alternate universe where the Plantagenet line has ruled a united England and France for over half a millennium. Aristocracy still rules, this is no constitutional monarchy. Magic has been studied as a science, with trained magicians licensed by the Church. Effects are understood and predictable, though only those with Talent have access to it. Some Talented members of the clergy are trained as Healers, able to treat physical and mental ailments, bringing the life expectancy up to 125. There are trains, but no motorcars, and belief in the healing powers of moldy bread is backwards superstition. It is the 1960s, and Lord Darcy is the chief investigator for the Duke of Normandy. He and his forensic sorceror, Sean O Lochlainn, are responsible for looking into every death among the nobility in his region. If you're willing to give 60-year-old speculative fiction a whirl, I recommend them. They're fun little locked-room mysteries.

If you keep your eyes open, you can spot some fun shout-outs in the text. My favorite is the Marquis de London and Lord Bontriomphe - obvious expys for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (Bon/Good + Triomphe/Win; I'm a sucker for a pun).

Garrett drops references to prior cases, but all the stories are stand-alones, so you can jump in anywhere you like.

Caveats: If you expect your speculative fiction to have a more critical eye for power structures like monarchy, aristocracy or colonialism, you won't find it here. The Anglo-French empire are presented as the good guys here (or at least the home team). They claim the Americas (New England = N. America, New France = S. America) and are at war with unspecified groups of indiginous peoples there; though they seem to have assimilated the Aztec Empire entire ("Mecchicoe") as a Duchy without warfare. There are a variety of female characters throughout, but not in high enough density to even pass the Bechdel test. Only one speaking character is explicitly described as being non-white. No evidence of any queer lifestyles, other than an offhand comment about a lord's taste in lovers not including men. ("It's 60 years old", yeah, well, Delany's Dahlgren turns 50 next year)

[multiplekittens]

booooooooooks 4, 12, 17

Books!!!

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

Definitely Samuel Delany, like I mentioned in the last post; also Seth Dickinson of Baru Cormorant fame! I also really loved When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb, although I've only ever read one of Lamb's books (unlike my other two listed authors)

12. Any books that disappointed you?

Out of my whole list of read books, I think there were only two that I went in thinking they would be better than they were, but I truly hate to say it for both of them 😭😭😭 they were The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (I found the character super wooden and uninteresting) and (I'm very sorry) Witch King by Martha Wells 😔😔😔 I really wanted to like that one for Reasons Of My Own but I think it revealed to me some things about Wells' writing style that really, really don't work for me; it's unfortunate, but it's even made me like the Murderbot series less (although I think Wells' writing style works better there)

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

I had heard someone say that Clariel was the worst of Garth Nix's Sabriel series (not its real name but I can't remember that rn), so I went into it with really low expectations, but it ended up being my favorite of the whole series, I think! Have the character be [redacted] really helped Nix get away from his more stereotypical plotlines, which meant the book felt really fresh. This only half counts, because I went into both Traitor and Monster Baru Cormorant expecting to like them, but both were great in ways I didn't expect; Traitor had such well-written lesbians that it made me mad a man wrote them, and Monster (which I had, again, been told was worse than its predecessor) had genuinely the best fat representation I've ever read in a book.

Sorry I wrote so much, I hope it's fun to read!!!

[masonhawthorne]

What I read in August

Don't Panic!

This looks like a super long list, but actually there are a lot of short stories on here!

The Henchmen of Zenda, KJ Charles ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Morning Star, Peter Atkins ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Subsidence (ss), Steve Rasnic Tem ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Man in the High Tower, Philip K Dick ⭐️⭐️⭐️

What the Dead Know (ss), Nghi Vo ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Maze Runner, James Dashner ⭐️

Unfit to Print, KJ Charles ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Chill, Elizabeth Bear ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Bryony and Roses, T Kingfisher ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Confessor (ss), Elizabeth Bear ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Grail, Elizabeth Bear ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Babylon (nf), Paul Kriwaczek ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Unquiet, E Saxey DNF

The Ritual of the Labyrinth (ss), Esmée de Heer ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Terminal World, ALastair Reynolds ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Essays of Flesh and Bone (ss), Victoria Audley ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Future of Work: Compulsory (ss), Martha Wells ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Lady or the Tiger (ss), Frank Stockton ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Falling Free, Lois McMaster Bujold ⭐️⭐️

Dreamsnake, Vonda N McIntyre ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The First Fossil Hunters (nf), Adrienne Mayor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Red Land, Black Land (nf), Barbara Mertz ⭐️⭐️⭐️

On Planetary Palliative Care (ss), Thomas Ha ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Nova, Samuel R Delany ⭐️⭐️⭐️

ss= short story nf= non fiction

stars awarded at my whim

I think the ones that really stick with me this month are Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder trilogy (Dust, Chill, and Grail, reissued as Pinion, Sanction, and Cleave).

The series is about a long-lost generation ship, which has been travelling so long that it has forgotten its destination (if it ever had one) and the people on board have developed incredible biotechnology, and some nasty internal politics.

The vibe of the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy is impeccable. It's Arthurian legends grafted onto military sci-fi. It's body mods, and body horror. It's talking plants. It's angels, and knights, and incest, and quests, and cannibalism, and wonder.

I don't quite know how to explain the way that these books fit exactly into the niche of things that appeal directly to me personally. So if you like the stuff I like, definitely read them.

The other standouts were Dreamsnake by Vonda N McIntyre, and Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer.

Dreamsnake is one of those incredible sci-fi's of the 1970s that does interesting things with gender, and familial relationships, and social structures, and concepts of childhood and responsibility and environmentalism. It also has a dreamy kind of wandering quality to it that made it really enjoyable.

Too Like the Lightning was not at all like I had expected, but in a great way. I think I had read a negative review about it some time ago, and put it to the bottom of my list, but a friend read it recently and told me I should read it. So I did. This is my jam. There's so much going on in this book I can't even start to break it down. Huge, elaborate political machinations, weird gender stuff, a narrator with an agenda. It's a lot of fun.

Honorary mention to Morning Star for being one of the strangest vampire novels I've come across.

And that's what I've got to say about that.

[grandhotelabyss]

I noticed you restructured the American syllabus for the IC, and after groaning at the extra cash I would have to lay down to buy the readings (and at there being only one week of Dickinson*), I rejoiced that I would finally get introduced to American modernism. Along those lines —

Would you consider postwar literature (through to the millenium) for a future IC? If not (or even if so!) I would love to hear how you’d structure this era/a syllabus on it, which you’ve talked about in glowing terms before. But I’m too young to have picked it up as it happened, and it’s too young to have been really canonised yet (or at least, the culture wars have stopped it from being canonised on its own terms rather than primarily political ones). Or maybe it has been but I don’t know where to look, although you said recently that criticism for that era hasn’t yet lived up to the books themselves.

But like, Morrison and DeLilo and Ellison and Bellow and Roth and Baldwin and Pynchon and McCarthy and Nabokov (kinda) and Wallace (apparently) and who else am I missing, and a handful of romancers like Dick and Le Guin — not to mention poets, playwrights, essayists, or Brits! And I don’t know how it all fits together, since we’ve (as Bloom predicted!) handed over the keys to the cultural narrative to the ‘cultural studies’ people who know only how to read films and magazines, and even then just barely.

*Also, do you think you might be able to include at the end of the syllabus a note on the works you’ve swapped out? The expanded guide would be useful, even though (indeed because!) it includes some of the more obvious picks, which I can return to later.

Thanks! I did address some of your questions about how exactly I changed the syllabus in my most recent Substack. I mainly just deleted a few Emerson essays (Nature, "The Divinity School Address," "Circles," "Experience"), Thoreau's Walden (in favor of two shorter pieces by him), and a handful of Whitman's Civil War poems.

I have the lectures for a course I taught on American Lit from 1945 to the present on YouTube here. I wouldn't do anything differently when it comes to poetry and drama than I did there. With fiction, I focused on the short story because it was an intro-level class; for that reason I omitted some writers mainly known for novels (Ellison, Bellow, McCarthy) but I didn't avoid anyone on strictly political grounds (Roth and Wallace are included, for instance, despite the controversy about them). I don't really think of Nabokov as an American writer! For the criticism of the era, big names include Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and then it becomes more strictly academic...I'm not sure I'd ever teach a course on that per se.

I would consider and have considered an IC course focused on the postwar American novel, though I'd probably cut it off at 2000. (As Roger Shattuck once said quixotically of the Visible College, "Students can read living authors on their own time." The few living authors below are over 80 and effectively beyond criticism.) The reading list would probably look like this:

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey [*]

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Toni Morrison, Paradise

With the postwar British novel, I don't have a list at my fingertips and would have to think about it—and probably read more widely myself. Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, J. G. Ballard, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, David Mitchell...who else? I'm probably missing obvious people! (I've never read Penelope Fitzgerald, for example. I want to read The Blue Flower but have to read that Novalis thing first and then it never happens, etc. Never read Kingsley Amis, don't care for Martin Amis...)

___________________________

[*] This one would be aspirational. It's long and ambitious, and I read and was fascinated by some of it while researching for the "U.S. Multicultural Literatures" class I used to teach. I never finished it, though, and keep meaning to get back to it.

[mystacoceti]

It’s too easy to reduce the problem of “the gay writer” to the split between those gay writers (like myself) who, on the one hand, feel that all art is political one way or the other and that all they write is from a gay position—and, in my case, from a black and a male position as well—and those writers who, on the other hand, feel that all they write is fundamentally apolitical, even if it involves gay topics; that they are just writers who happen to be gay, or, indeed, black, or female, or male, or Jewish or what-have-you. Whatever one’s knee-jerk reaction to either stance, the truth is that a tally of what writers from both groups actually write in their fictions, in their poetry, in their plays would show that, outside of direct statements on the matter, there’s no simple way to tell from their creative work—for certain—which ideological theme each espouses. Writers who believe that art is fundamentally apolitical often produce extraordinarily socially sensitive works. And it is an endless embarrassment to us who believe in the fundamentally political nature of all human productions that, simply from the plot reductions of their stories, or even from the expressed sentiments of their poems, measured against whatever notion of “political correctness” they believe in (and, like the rest of us, I believe in mine), writers who express the most “correct” political sentiments can produce the most politically appalling work.

If we are ever to solve our problems, I believe the opposition between the two—the belief in the fundamentally apolitical nature of the best art and the belief in the fundamentally political nature of all art—needs to be carefully undone. Personally I suspect that more important than which of these positions a particular writer adopts is whether that writer sees his or her own position as opposing the majority opinion around, or whether the writer sees his or her position as merely an extension of what most other intelligent people think. In the academy, for instance, there’s a tendency to see everything as politicized: Thus writers who have longstanding academic connections can assert their oppositional stance by upholding art to be fundamentally apolitical.

I’ve lived most of my life outside the academy, in a society and at a time where and when the notion that there might be any political aspect to any work not announcing itself as propaganda is hardly entertained or is wholly pooh-poohed. Thus my oppositional belief in total politicization. But, if I’m honest, when I read with great care, say, much of Harold Bloom, or even Paul de Man, not to mention Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel (three critics who uphold that art is fundamentally apolitical), it seems that much of what they mean by “apolitical” is precisely what I mean by “political.” I just don’t know if they’d give me as generous a reading as I give them. And, indeed, the generosity of their readings, one way or the other, would be controlled, I suspect, by their perception of what each saw as the major abuses of the position he polemicizes against.

"The 'Gay Writer' / 'Gay Writing' . . . ?", Samuel R. Delany

[manybcdthings]

Nate made a hesitant laugh as they walked, somewhat exposed with Delanie's comment. He was a book snob and a literature snob, a little bit of everything snob and those were crucial conversations he had with her that cemented this rather long running...crush sounded childish. Admiration? That's better. "Yeah, basically most modern literature." he grinned at her quickly. "Which is a bad comparison for your thing, then? You dislike most modern art?" he clicked his fingers as a light bulb went off. "Classics girl, right? Renaissance and all that?" The more Nate learned about her the more he...admired. Laughing as they reached the line, he made a subtle step in front of her and offered a playful shrug. "Hey, don't even mention it. Most people think I'm a little bit of a dick already. I don't think anyone would think you were rude, though. Probably wished they could escape as smoothly as you did it."

"It's not, not my thing." Delanie shrugged, walking towards the closest truck and feeling thankful for the familiar face. "I mean, it's probably obvious what I think. The whole art is about perception thing. There's probably plenty of books people like that you think are awful." she smirked slightly, choosing to word it that way around instead of the opposite to appeal to Nate's pessimism. Lanie then waved a hand over her shoulder to the show, or not show, behind them. "But that is er...I don't know. I think managing expectations comes to mind?" she laughed, coming to a stop in the line and smiling up at him. "So thanks for being my scapegoat. I know nobody would have cared if I just walked away but it made me feel better making you look rude at the same time."

[recreationalprozac]

any-e-ways here's what i've been reading these past few months:

earthsea cycle by ursula k. le guin (seriously SO GOOD i'm just a big le guin fan in general altho my poetry prof told me he couldn't get past her prose, which i don't get. wizard of earthsea, no joke, saved my LIFE. i fucking love earthsea and wizards and don't care who knows it. plus the narrator i got (harlan ellison) fucking ate up every single line. 10/10 don't care that it's children's fiction.)

kindred by octavia butler (it's interesting how pessimistic butler can be but all-in-all really incredible look at ancestry esp. white ancestry and gen. trauma.)

the left hand of darkness by ursula k. le guin (also loved bc of course i did. how could i not love. a genderless society. required reading for cis. also they were absolutely kemmering on that ice idc)

one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez (it is a classic for a reason truly deeply something that stays in your soul. so so glad i finished it even though it's long and winding because it's some of the most impactful imagry probably ever)

orlando by virginia woolf (the version i borrowed had like. classical music interspersed throughout it. woolf always kills it with the prose like even when i read the voyage out which was slogging and went literally nowhere-- fascinating and beautiful. also... the inherent relatability of being a suffering transgender poet. also best t4t vibes of that time period probably)

dhalgren by samuel r. delany (ngl this is a bit of a slog. apparently the plot goes nowhere but i would be curious to see how the world develops i guess. but it's literally 35 hours. interesting concepts and place. incredibly hot homosexual scene in the first few chapters for a book written in the 70s that made me want to keep reading but no one will tell me if it gets gay again or not)

annihilation and authority by jeff vandermeer (currently reading the later and again the world is so good! i love how you can tell it's florida/the south without it ever being mentioned that it's florida/the south. the premise itself could have been handled SO cheesily and like fandomified (iykyk) but it's enshrined in pure mystery it's gorgeous. love the biologist's autistic behavoir)

plz drop reccs if you have any!!! bc now i can meaningfully update my reading list and get to them :)

[rviner]

Laughing as the cards were tossed to the table, Delanie quickly tried to plead with her younger sister but for some reason, the rules of any game just scrambled into nonsense where it almost physically pained her to listen to them. "No, please! I'm not a lost cause. I've only had one glass of wine so this won't be like Christmas." she promised, remembering Ivy and Mel passionately explaining Uno to her and that wasn't even the first time either. She shrugged about the fundraiser, looking between her sisters for a moment. "Mom might want to? But, I was kind of not feeling it." she mentioned and then gestured to both of them. "I'll go if either of you want to?" Lanie offered, idly lifting a game card and glancing to it. What the hell were all those arrows for? She flashed it to Mel quickly with a curious glance. "Switch? Is that it?"

+ DELANIE & IVY / MEL'S APARTMENT, DOWNTOWN

"How have you never played uno, Del?" she tosses the card in a pile after an unsuccessful attempt at explaining to their older sister how to play. Taking a sip of her beer, she nods at them, "are you both going to the DuPont's Fundraiser?" she asks after a beat, their family invited annually, though it depended on the year if they went or not. Even if Mel typically never went. "Or do you think mom and dad will just donate this year? Mom mentioned dress shopping...I said she should ask you," she nods at Ivy. @blackheartatl & @dxrkenedheights

[yrmixedfeelings-blog]

tiny portions

January 31, 2022

· Audio: Tiny Portions

Image: Interior of St. Marks Bath after the closure. 1993. Photo by Ira Tattelman. Via. 

In Motion of Light in Water Sam Delany describes seeing a mass of gay men for the first time. It was in the 1970s on his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse. He walked into a “gym-size room” drenched in blue light, where he made out 16 rows of beds and about 125 men — “an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall-to-wall.” What astonished him was something he labored carefully to describe. 

“Let me see if I can explain,” Delany writes. In the fifties the image of homosexuality was one of “solitary perversion. It isolated you.” But “what this experience said was that there was a population — not of individual homosexuals, some of whom now and then encountered — not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather millions of gay men...” 

Image: St. Marks baths illuminated sign, New York City, c. 1917. Via NY-Historical Society.

He felt a similar fear when the police raided the trucks parked at the docks beside the West Side Highway. The cops might drag a handful into the wagon but what you’d see is what they didn’t catch: hundreds of men fleeing through the cargo and down the street. It was this image of gay masses that produced in Delany a kind of frightened awe, a major difference from the monadic perverts populating the public imaginary.

“Institutions such as subway johns or the trucks, while they accomodated sex, cut it, visibly, into tiny portions. It was like Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. No one ever got to see its whole.” 

The piece he mentions, Eighteen Happenings, is the 1959 Allan Kaprow performance that “engaged the audience” (in 2022 I might as well be reading an Ikea brochure) by giving them postcard cues that told them how to participate. There were 6 sections with 3 “happenings” that occurred simultaneously. Like a silent rave. Is there a better image of neoliberalism, or whatever nominal hellscape we’re living in, than a silent rave? A dance party without common music, where everybody moves to sound that may or may not be what everybody else hears, and music delivered individually rather than carried by vibration, tactility, interference by other bodies? This is what I hate about substack but I digress.

The deconstructed rave reminds me of Matthew Crawford’s description of working out at the YMCA across from Berkeley High. It was 1979, the weight benches were red sparkly vinyl and the room seemed mostly neglected, save the die-hard dudes loading the squat racks every day. The common music came from a cassette player in the corner and people would either vibe to it or complain, but it was linked to somebody. Decades later Crawford stared at a floating speaker in the ceiling at a university gym wondering who the fuck was in charge. When he asked about the music, the student desk clerk said he “didn’t want to impose his choice on others.” We’re all suffering from the absence of a certain kind of imposition. 

When Delany saw these masses of gay men he felt fused with an overarching whole. “Whether male, female, working or middle class, the first direct sense of political power comes from the apprehension of massed bodies.” 

I can’t stop thinking about Delany’s careful scene because it’s the closest I can get to a description of the present. Except the lubricated seventies are the past and the austere, lonely fifties are right now. 

Images: Top, St. Marks locker room after closure of the baths. 1993. Photo by Ira Tattleman. Bottom, official court order, 1985. Photo by Rene Perez.

I don’t want to acclimate to the loss we’ve suffered since the onset of covid. In pandemic time a totality has been pared down — to individual nuclear units, to a rotating few people, to the actual interior of your house. Even the zoom screen delineates the property lines of the liberal self; we can only rub outer dimensions of identical geometries. In person, interactions are cut up into tiny portions. One-on-one hangouts because risk is low. Everything has become so dyadic, and for me, this means more risky. I want a dyad to be enhanced by its social lubrication. I wanna see you free associate with your object world, and not in a judgmental way, just for the feeling of lubrication. 

I’ve tried to describe the grief I feel from this degree of social loss. The best I’ve done is to say I miss feeling hot in circulation. Or to recall the demonic feeling of walking into a sea of dykes at Ships in the Night, where everybody’s fine and mean. (I was heartened to hear daemonum x mourning in a similar way here.) The only sea I’m seeing right now is a heterosexual one at the university gym, or traffic, which is just a scaled-up zoom room. US social life was stripped down before Covid, and without this virus it would’ve been right for someone to complain about the meagre collective sense on offer. Liberalism’s isolating effects have only been enhanced. Someone recently asked “How are things in your world?” with an air of utter separation. We live in the same town. But we also live in the world and the world is shared. I want connection without property lines, which is not the same as bad boundaries. 

Some of Jack Halberstam’s recent work (on Alvin Baltrop’s photos of the NY piers) is premised on the idea that we don’t live in the same world, or moment, as Sedgwick and Muñoz were living in when they wrote about “worldmaking.” He studies Baltrop’s photos of queer people and “collapsed architectures.” I think queerness and dereliction have always been intertwined. Fucking in abandoned places. Outerspace and post-apocalyptic vistas. Finding the interstices of capital or whatever’s the opposite of spectacle. As long as we live in this version of a world it’s fine for architectures to be collapsed. But I don’t want my social world to resemble this aesthetics of collapse, settling with the drywall dust or razed for a new Costco. So I’m gonna keep remembering what it was like before, resisting the presentist amnesia that the before was where it was at, and knowing that every encounter has the potential be more rich than the circumstances would have it.

-lazz

[bagofbonesmp3]

do you think theres like, any way to move forward in fantasy/scifi where different cultures are represented with composites without it being wildly offensive, or is just that a lot (in particular white gentile) writers dont do it in good faith/have sensitivity readers at all lol. it's honestly exhausting that a lot of big works from these genres are so bad with this

the thing about "the pillars of modern sci fi" (ie, star wars, star trek and dune) is that a) they were written 50+ years ago b) it was at the hand of white gentiles who had never thought that their appropriation was wrong. it was the norm to see something pretty, understand it superficially and make it yours. sci fi by nonwhite authors have always existed (not to go far, lots of early anime/live action japanese shows and movies were science fiction, astroboy, ultraman, the whole Kaiju genre.) black sci fi authors like octavia butler, samuel r delany are also great pillars of modern sci fii

if you want to find sci fi from and by the cultures the big names have appropriated from, you can easily look for them. it's just that their work rarely gets picked up, and when it does, audiences fail to show up. in the cases of these big franchises mentioned before, the solution would be to give creators from these cultures significant creative power (the new star wars ronin novel, written by a japanese american author is a good example) and not just in optics, but also in the writers room and directing matters (also ehem. monetary compensation from the multimillionaire companies would be nice)

that's the easy solution, i guess, but if the new dune adaptation tells me anything is that storytellers don't care even in 2021, as much as they cast actors of color in their modeen stuff, they're happy to continue using these cultures as settings and profiting off of it. i can just say support sci fi storytellers from the cultures star wars, star trek and dune have ripped from, and more importantly, give them your money

[shapeshiftersandfire]

The Woman at 29 Wilson (pt 2)

@whumpinggrounds​ @sie-werden-nie-vergessen​

cw: murder

The copper-haired woman rests her hand on Verna’s shoulder, and makes a face like she’s going to say something but doesn’t. Verna responds accordingly, reassuring her with one gentle hand gesture but no words, and the woman walks away with a quick, hard-eyed glance that the kids.

And then they’re alone.

Still, Stella stares. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what she should say. What’s there to say to a woman who everyone said was dead but isn’t? What’s there to say to a woman who evidently hasn’t aged?

Verna is the one to break the silence, looking over them passively with cloudy eyes. “You’re here about Sarah.” Her voice is low and hoarse, tapering off into a whisper, as though she can’t bear to speak the name.

Stella nods.

Verna responds likewise, then turns and leads them into the living room. She sits down on the couch, and waits patiently for them to join her.

The trio sits down on the soft carpet. Stella crosses her legs, slipping her back off her shoulder but keeping it close to her side. The book feels warm under her hand.

Verna closes her eyes a moment, takes a breath, and opens them. “I haven’t…” She swallows thickly. “I haven’t heard the Bellows name in…a very long time.” She takes another breath. “Verna Russell,” is all she says, as though managing any more is too difficult.

Verna Russell. Because Verna Bellows was never truly a Bellows. Her last name is Russell.

“Um…” Stella shuffles awkwardly where she sits. “I’m Stella. This is Ramon, Chuck.” She motions to each boy in turn. Verna simply nods.

“You’re alive.” The words spill out before Stella can stop them. Chuck punches her in the arm.

“Yes.” Verna doesn’t elaborate. Underneath the dull glaze in her eyes something shines, something that doesn’t feel entirely human, but Stella can’t place what it is.

She chews at her bottom lip. “Did Sarah—”

“I was alive before Sarah was born,” Verna says evenly. Unspoken is the obvious—she’s alive now, long after Sarah has been dead.

Stella pulls her sleeves down over her hands. She doesn’t look at Verna.

A moment passes before anyone says anything. When they do, it’s Verna.

“You want to know about my niece.”

This time Stella looks up at her. The woman’s face is unreadable, even, while her eyes are cloudy and on the verge of brewing with tears. She gives a tiny nod. “Everyone says you’re dead. You left one night and never came back.”

Verna leans forward, resting her forearms on her legs, sucking at her bottom lip. “I couldn’t,” she whispers, shaking her head. “After Sarah, I…I couldn’t.”

“So then you…don’t know?” Chuck asks.

Verna’s eyes clear as she fixes him with a sharp stare. Stella shuffles uncomfortably beside him, thumping him on the leg before he goes too far. Verna doesn’t need to know about the myth surrounding Sarah, not yet, not like this, not when even the mere mention of Sarah’s name practically brings her to tears. But Verna isn’t deterred; she grinds her teeth and asks, “Know what?”

Stella holds her hand out to Chuck in a let-me-handle-this gesture; he throws his hands up in surrender. She turns back to Verna, shivering at the sharpness of her gaze. “There was a…myth,” she says slowly, watching Verna’s face for a change, “that went around about Sarah.”

With that, Verna’s face falls. Her eyes cloud again, brimming with tears. “What?” It barely comes out as a whisper.

“Um…” There’s no good way to do this, no way to keep Verna from breaking down. Ripping off the band-aid is too cruel. Dancing around the bush is even worse. Stella can’t seem to find any happy-medium to deliver the news in a way that won’t upset the poor woman even further. “About, um, some of the, uh, children…in the town…that Sarah—”

“No,” Verna whines. “No. Sarah wouldn’t—she wasn’t—no…No, not my Sarah.” She drops her head, resting her forehead on her hands, muttering something that doesn’t sound like English. She sniffs heavily, her shoulders shaking with a sob. Sella catches her own eyes tear up; she reaches under her glasses to wipe her tears away. Verna has never stopped mourning Sarah. Seventy years couldn’t make her niece’s loss hurt any less.

The book feels heavier in Stella’s bag.

Verna leans back, wiping her eyes, and pulls something out of her pocket, a large black rectangle. She fiddles with it, only glancing up at Stella as she goes. Finally, she says, “What that town says Sarah is, is not who she was.” And she hands Stella the box.

On the surface—the screen, Stella discovers as she takes it—is a shot of a window in the Bellows house—long before it was run down and decaying. Behind the window, the sky is blank and pale gray, and that’s about all Stella can see. Nothing to do with Sarah.

“I don’t—”

“Hit  play.”

Stella does, a little blue right-pointing triangle at the bottom of the screen, and watches the video play out before her eyes.

Verna’s face comes into frame, smiling, with bright eyes and a face clear of exhaustion.

“It snowed last night,” she whispers. “Sarah hasn’t seen snow in years.” She turns the camera around to face out the window, revealing a landscape covered in a fresh layer of snow. The property surrounding the Bellows house is nothing like it is now, overgrown and running rampant with brush and ivy. It’s wide opened, clear, and filled every which way with snow.

Then the camera turns again, this time to a dark wood bed with a thick, dark golden comforter, underneath which Stella can see someone sleeping. She can’t see the person’s—Sarah’s—face, only a lock of…white hair?

Verna’s arm appears and gently shakes the sleeping feature. “Sarah,” she whispers. “Hey, Sarah, wake up.”

Sarah groans and curls tighter. “’M too t’red, Aun’ Verna,” she mutters.

None of the group can hold back a short gasp of surprise. Sarah Bellows, the local myth and boogieman, has a voice. It’s low and raspy with sleep, but sweet. Nothing like someone who would hurt children. But then, what is a child murderer supposed to sound like?

“I know, honey,” Verna says. “But come on, come look at this. It snowed last night.”

This time, instead of burrowing deeper, Sarah Bellows rolls over. “It wha?” And before she can say more, Stella has to pause the video. Sarah Bellows has a face. For the first time ever, someone in Mill Valley, outside the walls of the Bellows house, sees Sarah’s face.

Sarah is tiny, first and foremost, hardly taller than Stella herself, she thinks, and with a messy head of white hair. Her skin is pale and tinged with pink around her cheeks and her nose—the house must be cold, given the way she’s snuggled into the blankets. Even with a sleepy frown on her face, Stella can see the color of her eyes: pale blue.

“Albino,” Stella whispers. “Sarah was albino.” She looks up as Verna nods, wiping away tears.

“That’s why they locked her away,” Verna says softly. “Because she was different.”

Stella looks away from Verna, into the sleep face of Sarah Bellows. Everything she thought she knew about the myth, about Sarah, is unraveling. Sarah was locked away because she had albinism. Verna was alive and well and mourning the girl the town said was a monster.

How much of the legend is true?

She lets the video play.

“It snowed,” video-Verna says. “Here, come on, come look.”

Sarah grumbles and rolls back over, pushing her face into the pillow. Then, after a moment, she sighs and throws the blankets off and rolls back over, then gets out of bed and goes to hug her aunt. The camera turns to show Sarah tucking her head under Verna’s chin and closing her eyes with a sigh of contentment. “Can I go back to sleep after?” she asks.

Verna kisses her niece’s forehead. “Course you can, sweetheart. Can I show you this first?”

“Sure, Aunt Verna,” Sarah says, but she snuggles closer to Verna, having no intention of letting go any time soon, and Verna welcomes it.

Stella pauses the video again, staring at the image of Sarah with her head tucked into Verna’s shoulder and Verna hugging her with one arm. She’d always known Verna had loved Sarah, that was always part of the myth. But the part no one ever mentioned, or considered, was how much Sarah loved her aunt in return.

Sarah never killed Verna. Sarah was never capable of killing Verna. Whatever happened that night in the Bellows house…it was something else entirely.

She plays it again.

Verna guides Sarah to the window, urging her gently, “Go on, take a look,” all while Sarah looks at her with a questioning smile on her face. She looks so young, Sarah, not much older than Stella in this video, maybe a couple years younger.

The camera stays trained on Sarah, as she steps a little closer to the window and finally looks out. The smile on her face fades to a gasp as she look out over the snowy landscape. For a moment, she says nothing, standing at the window staring

“Aunt Verna,” she whispers, “it’s beautiful.” She turns from the window and looks at Verna with something else in her eyes; Stella can almost see the gears turning in her head. She reaches up and curls a strand of white hair around her finger.

“It sure is,” Verna agrees, and Sarah smiles. She turns back to the window, hair still curled around her finger, and and rests her free hand on the glass.

“Wanna go play in it?”

Sarah turns from the window and blinks. “What?”

“Play in it,” Verna repeats. “I took my kids out in the snow all the time when they were your age—” And Stella realizes then that the copper-haired woman at the door must have been Verna’s daughter— “I can teach you how to make snowballs. We can bean Delanie in the face.”

Sarah laughs. “You can bean Delanie in the face. I’m happy to watch.”

A moment passes where they say nothing. Stella can’t see the look on Verna’s face, but Sarah is staring at her, smiling still, and her eyes are bright. Finally she concedes and says, “I’ll make more.”

And Verna cackles and pats her on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!” She pats Sarah again, turning away from the window. “Come on, let’s get ready.”

The video ends there. Stella hands the phone back to Verna.

[sie-werden-nie-vergessen]

“Ruth and Ephraim as a couple” headcanons/AU, ft “Sarah in Boston”

@shapeshiftersandfire, so here it is. I finished way earlier than I anticipated, but I just started typing and here it is!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muFFeiBUffQ (this song is required listening when reading these headcanons. It IS Ephraim and Ruth’s theme song. I recommend starting it at 3:14 because that point of the song is the section that really gives me Ruth and Ephraim vibes) 

First off, there is SO much covert flirting. SO, SO MUCH FLIRTING.

Ephraim is definitely having an identity crisis on the way home after the card game.

He gets home and Deodat asks him how the party went and he just kind of stands there like an oaf.

“It went fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“No Yes”

“...okay”

Deodat doesn’t believe him but he assumes that maybe Ephraim was just rejected by a date or something. Little does he know…..

“Fire Meet Gasoline” is a very good analogy to their relationship.

Because not only would it be passionate

But their relationship would probably also develop very quickly

They wouldn’t rush things, per se, but the “crush” phase is definitely very short for them

They’re both very outspoken and confident, so they very quickly open up about their feelings rather than beating around the bush.

They’re both very passionate people in terms of personality, and even when Ephraim is open-minded enough to fall for Ruth, they still inevitably clash with their opinions

They don’t fight but they definitely debate.

But in a healthy way. The debates can get heated but not in a hostile way. They’re just both very opinionated and they get very passionate about their opinions and their different thought processes.

 “I know I’m right!” “Yeah well I know that I”M right!” “Well I think I’m right because xyz” “Well my reasons are abc” “...that’s a good point. But I’m still right ;)”

So it probably looks like arguing to some people, but they both know that it’s all in good humor so neither Ephraim or Ruth are actually hurt by it or anything

They actually think it’s a good source of entertainment.

They once got into a heated debate about the correct color of socks in the middle of the new Mill Valley department store just to see the reactions of the cashiers

The aforementioned cashiers were horrified

Ephraim was arguing in favor of brown socks, and Ruth in favor of gray.

They ended up buying both colors.

Ruth now buys him brown and gray socks for a gag gift every Christmas (were gag gifts a thing in 1898? No clue, but I like the idea so I’m running with it and not researching something for once).

Ephraim keeps her a secret for a long time, for obvious reasons.

Ruth doesn’t mind this because she understands his reasoning behind it. 

She takes it as an opportunity to introduce him to her family and friends.

Ephraim gets along great with her brother Charles, and almost immediately the “future brother in law” jokes start.

Ruth is surprisingly embarrassed by this.

Ephraim teases her for days about that fact.

“Finally! I finally found something that embarrasses you!”

Ephraim goes to her performances and cheers her on (he always brings a bouquet too)

He sits in the front row right at the bottom of the stage and claps the loudest when she comes on stage.

Ruth is big into theatrics and has an entire setup of smoke cannons and mood lighting that announce her entrance.

She steps into this cloud of smoke and raises her arms dramatically and announces herself

Ruth loves to wear the color red because it looks so striking against her pale skin, but she secretly loves lighter shades of blue even more (they just don’t give off very strong “mystical” vibes, so she sticks to dark reds when she’s in the spotlight)

She works as a fortune teller and does card tricks as well

She loves to hear the ridiculous rumors and urban legends surrounding the “mystical powers” of albinos and then she incorporates that into her routine

“ALBINOS CAN READ MINDS” okay, well now she does mind reading as a new trick

In reality she’s just a very analytical person so it’s easy for her to pick up on small body language or vocal cues

Ephraim always asks her to tell him her fortune and it inevitably turns into some sappy “well I think you’ll end up marrying an amazing circus performer who just so happens to also be the most beautiful woman in Pennsylvania” thing

Ephraim definitely agrees with her “fortune”

He tells her about Sarah pretty early on in the relationship. He doesn’t want to hide anything from her.

He isn’t sure how she’ll take it, especially considering the fact that he was complacent in Sarah’s abuse for years until he really got out into the world and realized that everything he “knew” about albinism was wrong.

Ruth is definitely shocked but she assures him that he’s not some sort of monster, because he realized that what his parents trained him to think was wrong and he was able to grow from that.

One day when the rest of the family is out, Ephraim sneaks Ruth into the mansion (with the help of Sylvie and Lou Lou, of course) and she goes down to the cellar to meet Sarah.

Sarah is absolutely floored that there are others like her.

Of course she knew, because Ephraim told her when he returned from college and made amends, but when she sees it infront of her eyes it’s still a shock.

Ruth and Sarah hit it off instantly, of course.

Ruth promises to take Sarah to see a circus someday

Sarah can’t wait to see the elephants.

A few days after the secret meeting, Ephraim decides to tell his family about Ruth.

He tells Harold, thinking that maybe Harold would understand

But Harold just rats him out to Deodat and Delanie

They’re furious, of course

They don’t tell Gertrude because they claim that it would give her a heart attack

And tbh, it might

Gertrude figures it out anyways from the deranged yelling that comes from downstairs

“After all we’ve done to hide Sarah, and now you do THIS?!!”

“Mother, there’s nothing wrong with her.”

“She’s a circus freak!”

“By choice. She enjoys working in sideshows. That doesn’t make her a bad person.”

“Are you sure she isn’t just trying to mooch off of OUR money?!”

“She’s very wealthy, Mother. She works because she enjoys it.”

Deodat has more or less the same reaction.

Harold just can’t believe that Ephraim would “betray” the family in that way.

Ephraim tells Ruth the next day, and they decide to take Sarah away and leave for Boston.

Charles helps with the legal side of things, and pulls a few strings with his lawyer friends in Pennsylvania to have Sarah legally emancipated from her parents.

The trio moves to Boston and temporarily lives with Charles and his wife Louisa.

Louisa is smitten with Sarah from the start and insists on baking her ridiculous amounts of gingerbread.

(For no reason, really, but Louisa just has a thing for gingerbread. Sarah doesn’t complain)

Sarah gains quite a lot of weight in those first few months, and for the first time in her life she weighs a healthy amount. 

Ruth takes her clothes shopping often, and she insists on buying Sarah the nicest and newest fashions (even though she grows out of them so quickly now. It’s as if 18 years of growing have finally caught up with her at once).

Sarah hugs Ephraim for the first time after she and Ruth return from their first major shopping trip. Ephraim almost cries, and Ruth grins so hard that her face hurts. 

Ephraim wasn’t sure if Sarah could ever forgive him, but that was proof enough for him.

Ruth gives Sarah her first diamond necklace. It’s the one that Ruth wore the day she met Sarah. Sarah had said that it was the prettiest thing that she had ever seen, and Ruth saved it for her until they reached Boston. It was an informal adoption gift, really.

Ephraim and Ruth eventually buy a nice brownstone in Boston. It’s a few streets away from Charles and Louisa’s home, and there’s a large park across the street.

Sarah loves to sit in the park and watch the swans and ducks on the pond.

Sometimes Ruth and Ephraim go with her, but a lot of the time they let her go alone. They know that she’s been through a lot, and that sometimes she needs time alone to process everything. 

Sometimes she comes back with tears in her eyes, but no one mentions it. Ruth brings her a cup of tea or a piece of gingerbread (Louisa is always sending over fresh gingerbread) and offers her a shoulder to cry on, if she needs it.

Ruth takes Sarah to meet her fellow albino circus performers. For once in her life, Sarah feels truly accepted and understood when she stands in a room surrounded by people like her.

There are so many children in the room, and they’re all so loved by their family members, regardless of their albinism. It makes Sarah sad at first, but she’s also happy to see that they were raised in loving households instead of abusive and hateful ones.

For their first Christmas together in Boston, Ephraim buys Sarah a Kodak No. 2 Bullseye Camera. When the first Kodak Brownie camera is released a few years later in 1900, he buys her one of those as well.

He tells her that she can use it to document her new life in Boston.

The first picture she takes is a picture of a sleeping Ephraim.

He’s sitting in an armchair next to the Christmas tree, surrounded by wrapping paper and plates of half finished cookies.

Once the picture is developed, she puts it in her new photo album that Charles and Louisa gave to her.

When Ephraim woke up, Sarah asked to take a picture with him. 

Of course he obliged.

She keeps that one in a frame by her bedside.

Sarah has a whole pile of her “treasures” that she keeps beside her bed, but that picture is at the center of it all. 

Ephraim notices it one time when he’s helping Ruth collect the laundry, and it touches him more than he can say.

For her gift, Ruth arranges for Sarah to take some writing classes at the local women’s college.

Sarah is thrilled. She starts to write stories other than horror.

She still loves scary stories, but she finds a new love for children’s stories and romance novels.

Little Women is her favorite (Ruth is delighted! It was her favorite book too!)

In 1900 Ruth and Ephraim have a son. They name him Eli, in reference to Sarah’s middle name (Elizabeth).

Sarah is the proudest aunt you’ve ever seen. 

Ephraim and Ruth go on to have more children, but Sarah has a special bond with little Eli. He is the first baby that she ever held.

The odd little family on Pearl Street is probably the happiest family you’ll ever see.

Sarah eventually marries the son of one of Ruth’s circus colleagues. 

His name is Thomas, and he’s a quiet man.

He loves birds too, just like Sarah. 

He and Sarah go bird watching often.

They go on to have a large family. 2 out of the 5 children have albinism, but they love all of their children the same.

They live a long life.

Neither Ephraim, Ruth, or Sarah ever return to Mill Valley. They’re more than happy to let the past remain in the past.

Bonus: Harold In Boston Headcanons/AU

Once Ephraim does reach out to Harold, and he’s surprised to learn that Harold has also distanced himself from their parents.

Gertrude died in 1899, and shortly after that Harold’s fiancée Violet died of tuberculosis. With his ties to Mill Valley significantly loosened, Harold took an extended business trip to Philadelphia where he eventually opened his own publishing company. After the mercury scandal at the mill, Deodat and Delanie are essentially ruined and Harold is free to pursue his own interests independent of the mill.

He goes to visit Ephraim in 1900 to congratulate him on the birth of his son. 

It’s tense at first, when he see’s Sarah. He isn’t sure how she’ll react to him.

She’s wearing a white lace dress with small puffs at the sleeves, and pale blue ribbons at the cuffs and waist of the skirt.

Her hair is in a soft gibson girl-esque style, and Harold realizes that it’s the first time he’s ever seen her in anything other than the old gown she always wore back in Pennsylvania.

“Hello Sarah”

“Hello Harold”

He isn’t sure what to do at first, but Ruth quickly introduces herself to abate the awkward silence.

He’s never met Ruth, but he quickly understands why Ephraim likes her so much.

After he meets the baby and pleasantries are exchanged, he wanders off into one of the upstairs rooms of the home.

(Sarah left the room once Ruth brought out the baby. She loves Eli, but she feels awkward being everyone all at once, as if she’s intruding on something she isn’t, of course).

He accidentally goes into Sarah’s room, only to find her at her desk writing.

Her room is nothing like the dark basement she used to call home, and Harold is thankful for that.

“So, you still write?”

Sarah jumps in her chair a little, before suddenly whipping around. She’s still not good with loud or sudden noises, even after 3 years of safety.

Harold cringes when she jumps. He hates that he still scares her.

When she composes herself, she smiles a small smile. “Yes, I still write.”

Harold asks what she writes about these days, and she tells him that she writes children’s stories.

It’s a sad irony, considering the mercury scandal, but Harold doesn’t tell her about that yet.

She had left Mill Valley before the worst of it, and he knows how much she loved those children.

After they talk for a while, Sarah eventually invites him to sit with her.

They sit side by side on her bed and she shows him her notebooks.

He’s surprised by how much she’s grown since he last saw her. She’s a little taller now, and she’s gained a lot of weight. Her face isn’t hollow anymore, and her eyes are bright now. Her hair is shiny and thick, and she truly looks happy.

She only shakes a little when he’s so close to her. Harold still scares her a little, but Ephraim promised her that no one would ever hurt her again.

Sarah trusts Ephraim immensely, so she’s willing to trust Harold too

Still, it’s a little hard for her to have him in such close proximity.

Harold notices her discomfort and moves a few inches away (still close enough to see her notebooks, but far enough that it gives Sarah a safe buffer). Her nerves calm down once she has a “safe zone.”

Harold finally works up the nerve to say something.

“Sarah, I-”

“I know. Ephraim told me.”

“He did?”

“He did”

“Well...that’s...that’s good.”

The next thing that Sarah does shocks Harold to his core.

She reaches out, her hands shaking, and grabs his hand.

“I know that you didn’t mean it - what you did to me -...not really, anyways. I know you’re different now.”

Harold squeezes her hand in return, and she stops shaking.

“Thank you”

Sarah smiles

“Of course”

Ephraim happens to pass Sarah’s bedroom on his way upstairs and nearly dies of shock at the site of them. Harold doesn’t notice Ephraim, but Sarah does.

She bursts out laughing, because Ephraim genuinely looks horrified, shocked, and immensely confused.

“He said that he was sorry!,” she explained in a half yell in Ephraim’s direction.

Ephraim is still in shock, so he doesn’t say anything.

Harold is also in shock, but because of Sarah’s laugh.

The man genuinely didn’t think that it was possible, and yet here she was laughing.

When everyone recovers from their respective shocks, Harold is invited to stay for dinner.

This dinner invitation turns into a long term stay, and eventually Harold moves his business to Boston.

He buys the brownstone next to Ephraim and Ruth’s home.

He remains a bachelor all his life, never having truly recovered from Violet’s death.

Harold definitely earns the title of “World’s Greatest Uncle” in regards to Sarah and Thomas’ children.

By 1980 the neighborhood block is so full of Bellows descendants that it’s unofficially renamed Bellows Square

Ruth and Ephraim’s house becomes a local historic landmark, considering the fact that Ephraim went on to become one of the country’s early geneticists who (humanely) studied genetic disorders and medical conditions.

The house later becomes a museum in the early 90s, having been restored to the same state that it was when they once resided in it.

Sarah’s Kodak No. 2 Bullseye is put on display, but the crowning achievement is her collection of photo albums and notebooks. She went on to become a children’s writer and illustrator, basing many of her books on her experiences in Boston. 

The old Bellows Paper Mill is torn down in 1948 to make room for new housing following the G.I. Bill and the post-war Baby Boom.

None of the surviving Bellows are sad to see it go.