#get back home after the interstate funeral

[chronicillnesscaneffoffplease]

I’ve had a few “whoops this thing I stopped doing is actually helping me” moments recently.

I’ve felt wretched and like I was coming down with the flu recently. It felt more than my normal PEM symptoms, and I was really concerned. And then I realise it’s spring, a bunch of stuff is blooming, and it’s been sooooo windy. And I stopped taking antihistamines and my nasonex sometime last year (antihistamines bc we thought it might have been causing some side effects, nasonex bc I hate the sensation of nasal sprays and need motivation to use it). Pesky hayfever. Needless to say I’m feeling much better having restarted my regimen. I felt a bit silly that I could have avoided feeing miserable though.

I went out for an appointment yesterday in my “knock about the house” shoes that are podiatrist loathed (nil ankle support, nil arch support, worn down), rather than my lace up shoes with my orthotics. After that appointment, I thought I’d check out a new store that’s opened at the shops nearby. I ended up doing a LOT of walking at the shops and today my ankles are sooooo painful and my hips been acting up. I guess it’s good to know that my shoes and orthotics are doing good things in terms of symptom prevention (as well as better longer-term outcomes) but damn do I feel ouchie.

I’m framing it as “yay negative data also tells us important things” because I gotta remember it’s not my fault when these things happen but it is good to try learn from them. And frankly, when there’s so many things going on with your health and condition management as a disabled person, it’s okay when things fall through the cracks. It’s gonna happen. Especially when there’s lots of non-disability stuff going on too. It’s okay.

[the-name-is-z]

SKELETONS | ch. 55

daryl dixon x f!oc

masterlist

a03 link

Summary: After the events at Grady Memorial Hospital, the group turns back to the road, and revisits the struggles that come with it. Warnings/Information: AMC's The Walking Dead OC Insert | 18+ Advised | strangers to lovers; the slowest of slow burns; gore; angst; horror; humour; m/f; mourning; unhealthy coping mechanism; canon character death; starvation; dehydration; implications of eating dog meat

Chapter 55 - Days Gone Bye

It had been seventeen days. Seventeen days since Beth. None of them had really processed it, not yet. Noah was hanging on by a few threads, Maggie was in shambles. When they left the hospital a few of the group went on a supply run, returning with a truck they could use to transport all of them at once. 

Everything blurred together, and when she did sleep, she dreamt of blood and loss. She heard but did not listen. Looked, but did not see. The few of them that didn’t know Beth were affected less, keeping Rick and the rest of the group from spiralling completely. It was helpful. Iris liked Tara. She was goofy, honest. Lived fully, authentically. It was something to admire. Eugene, however, was quickly outed as a liar. 

On their way to Washington, he had admitted, in a life-threatening situation, that he lied about D.C.. He knew nothing about their situation, nothing about a cure, nothing about anything. He was good with words, smart enough to string something together, and cowardly enough to stick to it without any real integrity. It was clear how deep they were all affected by the events at the hospital when Iris didn’t even attempt to muster up an ‘I told you so.’

Daryl built a fire that they all sat around, quietly. Judith’s cries kept them from sleeping, even in the darkest hours of the night. Not that any of them really would have slept anyways. Noah told Rick about a place he and Beth had planned on going to, a safe place. It all seemed like a fever dream, and Iris could barely keep her head on straight.

The only moment where she felt she could start to have peace, was when Daryl pulled her head down onto his shoulder, resting his own chin on top of her head. 

-

“It was secure.” Rick explained, looking around to the group. “It has a wall, homes, twenty people. Beth wanted to go with him. She wanted to get him there. Its a long trip, but if it works out, it’s the last long trip we have to make.” Iris sighed quietly. Something told her that their long trips would never stop. But she’d always been a little glass-half-empty.

“And what if it isn’t around anymore?” Glenn asked as he stared down into the pavement. He looked exhausted. They all did. 

“Then we keep going.” Rick replied.

“Then we find a new place.” Michonne added. 

They took side roads near the interstate, planning to move through South Carolina, North Carolina, to Noah’s place near Virginia. Rick went with Michonne, Glenn, Tyreese and Noah, leaving the rest to wait where it was safe. 

- 

Rick’s group returned after a day, with grim, stony expressions and a body wrapped in a white sheet. Tyreese’s absence was noted by all, and they set to digging another grave. Noah explained while Rick dug that the place he knew was gone, as was his family. It had been overrun by walkers, and Tyreese got bit. Sasha was crushed, and she sat silently to the side, refusing to speak. 

When the grave was done, Gabriel recited a funeral rite from the Bible, each of them taking a shovel-full of dirt to bury Tyreese. Iris took a shuddering breath as she passed the shovel to Sasha, who barely brought herself to toss a few grains of soil into the grave before dropping the shovel and walking away. 

Rick finished the grave dutifully, Carl having crafted a cross from nearby tree branches and some spare twine. They carefully adorned the cross with Tyreese’s beanie, and stood around the grave, beneath a willow tree. 

-

Once more, the group spent days wandering. They used the van until it ran out, scavenged what they could. None of them had starved like this since the prison, even in the days in between. Daryl often wandered off by himself in search of food and solitude, but returned just as often with nothing to show for it. He himself had resorted to eating worms from the ground, which Iris decided she wasn’t ready for. She wasn’t that hungry… yet. 

Daryl, Maggie, Iris and Sasha divided into the woods, looking for something, anything. Water, even, but they were out of luck. They met up once more at the edge of the woods, beginning the short walk down a gravel road to where the truck, and the rest of the camp, waited.

“Oh shit.” Sasha murmured.

“It’s been a day and a half.” Maggie stated. She looked over the others, sitting on the ground around the truck. “They didn’t find any either.”

“How do you know?” Sasha asked.

“I know.” Maggie replied. Iris sighed, her knife belt hauled over her shoulder. “How much longer do we got?”

“Sixty miles.” Iris replied quietly.

“I wasn’t talking about that.” Maggie murmured, and Iris looked behind her to meet her gaze. “I know.” She replied.

-

“We’re out. Just like the other one.” Abraham grumbled, pulling the truck to a stop. This was the second car they’d gone through in as many days. 

“So we walk.” Rick replied. 

The sun bore down on them as they got out of the truck once again. They walked down the road, Rick holding Judith tightly and sticking to the shade. They looked like a group of walkers themselves, slowly and hopelessly meandering down the asphalt road. About ten yards behind them was an actual group of walkers, following them in hopes one of them collapsed and was left for dead. 

“We’re not at our strongest.” Rick pointed out, looking to Iris who walked beside him. She raised an eyebrow. “We’ll get them when it’s best. High ground, something like that. They’re not going anywhere.”

“We’re only gonna get weaker, Rick.” She murmured. “No one has the energy to go look for food, nevermind climb hills.” Judith cooed, grunting as she squirmed in her father's arms. 

“Would you?” Rick asked. Iris nodded, taking the baby from him. He fell back a few steps, in line with Daryl, who had been quietly brooding for the past week. “It’s been three weeks since Atlanta.” She heard Rick say. “I know you lost something back there.”

“She’s hungry.” Daryl grunted, jerking his chin toward the baby. Rick nodded.

“She’s okay.” He replied. He worried more than anyone about Judith’s wellbeing, and his words were more for convincing himself than speaking the truth. “She’s gonna be okay.”

“We need to find water, food.” Daryl muttered.

“We’ll hit something in the road.” Rick assured, nodding. He looked up, analyzing the cloud patterns. Eugene at one point had been lecturing them about the difference between clouds that rain and clouds that don’t. Iris was pretty sure those were the kind that didn’t. “It’s gonna rain sooner or later.”

“I’m gonna head out.” Daryl stated, shrugging off his rifle as he came to a stop. “See what I can find.”

“Hey. Don’t be too long.” Rick replied, pulling the rifle over his own shoulder. He walked over to Iris, jerking his chin after Daryl. She nodded, passing Judith back to him and following Daryl into the woods.

“I got it.” Daryl grunted after a few minutes of her following a few feet behind. 

“You gonna stop me?” Iris asked. He stopped, looking back at her with a knowing look as she caught up to him. 

After a few minutes of walking in comfortable silence, they came upon a field of tall grasses, Daryl looking down for any tracks or trails.

“Anything?” Iris asked.

“No, it’s too dry.” He replied, shaking his head. “Ain’t nothing here.”

“Do you wanna go back?” Iris asked, looking over at him.

“You go.” He grunted lowly, not meeting her gaze. Iris frowned at his stillness and took a long breath.

“She saved our lives.” She said quietly, her lip quivering as she let the tears line her eyes for the first time since the hospital. 

Daryl said nothing, and barely looked back as she stepped over to him. She pulled the knife from her belt, the one she’d given Beth to use, the one Beth still had on her when she hugged her tight at the hospital. Daryl took it, tracing the edge of the leather sheath. The sun suddenly felt hotter, the cicadas in the distance, louder. 

“It was hers.” Iris’ voice broke. “We’re not dead. That’s what you said. We’re not dead.” His lip quivered as he looked up at her. “I know you. I know you. We have to feel it.”

He stared at her, hard. He could hear Beth’s voice in his ears. You’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon. She was right. She was so goddamn right, and he hated it. Hated that she told him he’d be the last man standing. Even when the person across from him meant… so much more. Iris reached forward and he stiffened as she delicately brushed the hair out of his eyes. 

-

“Dad, look.” Carl murmured, pointing ahead. Iris and Daryl had returned some time ago, another fruitless search ended. There was a blockade of cars in front of them, three or four. Cars meant potential. Whether that potential was good or bad, that remained to be seen. 

“I’m gonna head into the woods, circle back.” Daryl announced. He looked to Iris and she nodded. She would let him be alone this time. 

They moved closer to the blockade and it carried on around the corner of the road, revealing more cars for them to search. Iris and Maggie ducked down toward a small car, wiping the windows to make sure it was clear before searching inside. The keys were in the ignition, but no gas. Nothing in the console or the glove box. Iris pulled the keys out and walked around to the back, unlocking the trunk.

“Jesus Christ!” She exclaimed, jumping back as a walker reached out to her. She put one hand to calm her racing heart, the other in the air to calm the others, who had looked up and stood at attention. Maggie leapt out of the car, looking back toward Iris. “Sorry, sorry, all good. It’s… nothing.”

The girl had been young, early teens at most. Her wrists and ankles were bound tightly, bare feet nicked with small cuts and scrapes. She’d been gagged, a green strip of fabric tied tight around her head. She’d been there long enough that it had started to separate her jaw bone from the rest of her skull. She was blonde, with blue eyes. The walker rasped, reaching out with both hands toward Iris, struggling to sit up. She looked like Beth.

Iris almost slammed the trunk closed, but she turned back, burying her knife into its skull quickly. She closed the trunk and locked it once more, chucking the keys into the ditch beside the road. Maggie didn’t see the body. That was for the better.

Finding the blockade of cars empty of all useful things, the group sat down on the side of the road in the shade, taking a break while they waited for Daryl. Carl had fallen asleep on Iris’ shoulder, his baby sister sleeping softly in his arms. Iris had one hand supporting her head as she slept, but it didn’t last long.

They all snapped awake, lurching upward as a branch snapped in the trees, Daryl’s silhouette appearing not long after. He looked to Rick, who shook his head discreetly. Daryl sighed, walking across the road. Iris looked up at the sound of liquid sloshing, noting Abraham opening a small bottle of bourbon. 

“So all we found was booze?” Tara asked quietly.

“Yeah.” Rosita replied. Iris frowned, knowing that was a recipe for disaster, but she let him drown his sorrows anyways.

“It’s not gonna help.” Tara pointed out.

“He knows that.” Rosita agreed.

“It’s gonna make it worse.”

“Yes it is.”

“He’s a grown man.” Eugene said, brushing it off. “And I truly do not know if things can get worse.”

“Don’t jinx it.” Iris hissed, scowling at him. “We’ve all faced worse. I’d rather this, any day, than sit and wait for fucking cannibals to hand-select those of us they think look tastiest.” She glanced to Carl, wincing at her own foul language. “Sorry.” He shrugged.

They all looked up again at the sound of more rustling, a pack of dogs running out of the trees. The one at the head of the group had blood staining the white fur at its chest, a chain with a small tag hanging from it’s neck. Though Iris assumed it had forgotten any command its owner might have tried to teach. Daryl shot up, unsheathing his knife as he sat in a crouch.

There were four dogs, a German shepherd that barked loudly at them, two growling dobermans, and the shaggy border collie at the front of the group. Rick got into a crouch, angling himself in front of his children. Iris did the same, pulling out her own knife as they barked.

The first one let out a yelp as the silenced bullet dug into its side. Sasha corrected her aim, using one more bullet for each of them. Iris’ eyes widened and she turned back to look at Sasha. Rick got up and grabbed a few long sticks, snapping the ends to sharpen them.

-

TAGLIST:

@heidiland05

@ryoujoking

@catlalice

@maxinehufflepuffprincess

@lowkeyhottho

@fadingpalacebonkpsychic

@hayley1998

@negansbestie

@lizey-thornberry

[ghostgothgeek]

Map of Amity Park

So I did a bunch of research and traced over the map the GIW had in DCMH and extended it to try and build a map of Amity Park. I also paid close attention to locations and places named in canon. I am by no means an artist, map maker, photoshop pro, or civil engineer; I just wanted a general reference map for the phandom to use. 

Here is where I place Amity Park. We know AP isn’t in Michigan or Wisconsin, but is most likely a day drive away from Madison (Bitter Reunions). AP is a decent sized city of itself, so I can see it being an outskirt of a large city like Chicago. Lancer mentions the Northwestern Testing, and Northwestern University is in Evanston, IL, which is why I placed it where it is.

LIST OF PLACES (in great detail): 

Every city needs it’s basic services: energy supply, water supply, sewage, and trash/recycling. These of course are located more on the edge of the city, as they need a large amount of space and are typically isolated.

I placed a local airport in the city as well. Typically you would fly out of one of Chicago’s airports anyway, but private planes (Vlad, Mansons, etc.) can take off and land here. 

University of Amity Park is located at the north side of the city, and is home to a Nasty Burger location, an LGBT Center, and is probably near a gas station. The blocks surrounding the campus are more student housing. 

Near the University, we have the Science Center, Axion Labs, a Mental Institute, and the Museum, as a lot of research from the University would go into those places. 

In the more isolated areas, we have the Penitentiary, the abandoned North Mercy Hospital, and the GIW Headquarters. 

The Zoo is located on the north side of the park and is also close to the University for research purposes.

The Observatory is also located in a more isolated area, so you can actually see the stars without a bunch of light pollution.

Going into the center of town, where most things are actually located:

A community college, which is near the internet cafe where Danny and Tucker play games, a gas station, a liquor store, a thrift shop, a Planned Parenthood, Java Jive (the coffee shop), a tech store, and a gym. 

We also have a shoe store, the hunting goods store and Guitar Palace that Skulker and Ember take over in Reign Storm, the U-Ship Box Store the Box Ghost takes over, a barber and a hardware store.

There is a hair salon, tanning salon, and nail salon, where Paulina frequents. There is also Elmer’s Pharmacy, a dentist office, a law office, the TV repair store, butcher shop, and pet store (which we see next to each other in an episode), a toy store, and a vet office.

Government buildings include City Hall, a public library, a court house, a DMV, a bus station (for all mass transit in the city), a community center (likely where town halls are located and other smaller events; Ida plays bingo here every week), and a retirement home. 

There is also the post office, Amity Park Fire Department, a bank, the 24K Jewelry shop, a nearby ice cream shop, and another Nasty Burger location (this is the one right by Casper High that the trio usually hangs at). Also an animal shelter, a grocery store, and a pizza joint.

Education: there is a preschool and daycare, the elementary school, a playground/park, the middle school (yes, a Beetlejuice reference), and Casper High. Casper High campus also has the track, a fieldhouse, and the football field. 

Moving towards Amity Park Mall:

Bucky’s Music Mega Store, an apartment complex, Amity Park Police Department, a bookstore, doctor clinic, gas station, a Denny’s (where Phight Club happens), Material Grill restaurant, the mini golf course and bowling alley, Freddy Fazbear’s (which is actually a horror video game, but here it’s a kids pizza place like Chuck E. Cheese), a furniture store, a party supply store, and the movie theater (which is Marmel’s Multiplex 22, Amity Park Multiplex, and Googolplex Cinemas...it seems that they go to the same movie theater throughout the series and the names just change, or these could also be other movie theaters in the area (like near the college campus). I just picked Multiplex 22 cause it sounded very mall-y).

Along the interstate, there’s a pawn shop, a publishing house (which somehow prints all 5 of Amity Park’s newspapers), a homeless shelter, the diner, Safe House Motel, a laundromat, the 89¢ Store (a nod to Fanning the Flames), and the car dealership.

Also near the mall is Amity Arena, which hosts concerts, sports events, and other large entertainment events. There is a hotel near both the arena and the hospital (the one that isn’t abandoned and haunted). Towards the outskirts of the hospital, there’s a trailer park; north a few blocks is the TV station, where News 4 is headquartered. There’s also a construction site near Amity Arena, but that kinda went out the window when Undergrowth hit. 

On the other side of town, we have:

A-Mart, a convenience store. I named it like this because it can be like an offshoot of KMart, but A for Amity! 

Floody Waters, right off the interstate.

North of Floody Waters, East of Casper High, we have the main residences: the Foley household and only a couple blocks away is Fenton Works. 

There’s also another gas station and the Amity Park Radio Station nearby. There’s also a private school near ultra posh Polter Heights, but the A-Listers attend Casper High because the private school doesn’t have a football or cheerleading team.

Moving into Polter Heights and the surrounding area:

The Polter Heights Golf Course and Country Club are exclusive to those in the neighborhood, as well as their private neighborhood pool; members only. 

The Mayor’s Mansion (eventually Vlad’s) is located in here too.

All of the A-Listers’ houses are of course in this neighborhood, as well as Val’s previous residence and the Fenton’s temporary mansion from Living Large (which is of course right next door to Vlad, but with some distance, because the rich are always socially distancing with their big houses).

Polter Heights is adjacent to a bunch of farmland (this is the midwest, we like cows and stuff), and there is a church close by as well.

Just outside Polter Heights is the Manson Mansion (with Sam’s greenhouse). Lucky for Sam, the Skulk and Lurk Books and an occult shop are just down the street. The Manson residence is also near a funeral home and graveyard (how did Sam get so lucky? Oh, because I love her), a synagogue, Mario’s restaurant, and a dry cleaners. 

We get more spacious as we get away from the center of town! 

Along the shore of Lake Eerie, there are the docks which are home to many warehouses, including the mattress factory.

Also along the shoreline, there is a pier which doubles as an amusement park (think kinda like Navy Pier in Chicago in comparison) and alongside the pier is the public beach area. 

Camp Skull and Crossbones is located on the other side of Lake Eerie, and the fishing area is more on the north side of the lake. Lake Eerie is not one of the Great Lakes, it’s just its own thing in Amity Park. 

Back towards the park, we have event grounds space, which is where Circus Gothica is located, as well as the Meet Swap and flea market. Basically whatever rotating event hits town, it comes right here. Just next door is a theatre (for music, opera, Broadway, etc.). There is also the third and final Nasty Burger location in AP.

This is all surrounding the actual park Amity Park, which has a pond, a big fountain, and also hosts that really big hill that overlooks City Hall.

On the south side, across the bridge and over the interstate is Elmerton, where Val currently is resided. 

All the other blocks are filled with more office buildings, apartment complexes, houses, and businesses, but all of the main places are already listed and placed. 

Finally, yes, I did name some places for myself and my friends because they’re great and they deserve it. These include Steph’s (mine) Occult Shoppe, Nick’s Liquor Emporium (@ecto-american), Lexx R Us Toystore (@lexosaurus and appropriately named after the Lexxpocalypse), Laz’s Law Offices LLC (@kinglazrus), Dee’s Dentistry (@qlinq-qhost​), Lily’s Looks Thrift Store (@dannyphantomisameme​), Ceci’s Funeral Home (@ceciliaspen​), Vic’s Amusement Park (@babypop-phantom​), and Reverie Books (@wastefulreverie​). 

[seiya234]

and all the trees of the field will clap their hands 3/?

In which an important errand is taken care of, Multibear explains it all, and a special guest star is alluded to. Part 2 here.

----------

some things were important.

At first, as they left Newark, the car was lively with chatter and catching up, the simple act of speaking in person, in being each others presence.

The car began to go south along 95, and then turned off the interstate onto a state highway, going through the Pine Barrens.

“You know I’ve met the Jersey Devil?” Dipper said as they passed endless rows of scrubby pine trees.

“Really my boy? I’ve tried looking for them for ages!”

“Yeah, she’s pretty reclusive, even after the Transcendence. Also she prefers to be called Deborah.”

The longer they were in the Barrens, the quieter the car became. By the time they pulled off and began to drive through the swamp the car was completely quiet. 

Just off the causeway, on the outskirts of a mid-sized city, Grunkle Ford turned a sharp left, and down a dirt road into a cemetery.

The triplets looked at Dipper, their eyes asking “Did you know about this?”

He shook his head, fluffy brown hair swirling around him, for once as in the dark as they were. 

The gate wasn’t open, but before either old man could get out of the car, Dipper snapped his fingers and it opened. 

While the cemetery wasn’t overgrown, it had clearly seen better days. Outdated standing granite tombstone and flat metal plaques abounded, and if there wasn’t such a funereal hush in the car, Acacia would have asked if babyland meant what she thought it did. 

Finally, the car stopped, and the kids and Dipper got out without being asked. Ford and Stan bent their heads together for a second, murmuring, before setting off in a diagonal direction across a field. 

It became immediately clear where they were going, for it was the only grave with fresh flowers on it. The stone read “Sheila Marie Pines, Mother, Daughter, Full of Shit, Much Loved.”

“I can’t believe the cemetery let Shermie put that on the stone,” Ford finally said.

(this wasn’t Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford, this was Stan and Ford, just the two of them in the world, and everyone else fade to black behind them)

“Yeah, well, you know Shermie,” Stan replied.

Ford chuckled. “Yeah. Our sister.....she was-”

“Yup.” 

“Did... did you go to the funeral?”

Ford nodded. “Had to take a train from Gravity Falls to manage it, but I did.”

“Was it good?”

“Shermie made it good.”

Stan smiled slightly (and Willow was hit with the thought, the bone sure surety, that this was the first time Stan had ever gotten to see his mother’s grave.)

Ford’s brow furrowed. “Where did these flowers come from though?”

Stan didn’t say anything.

Ford looked at him.

Stan looked at Ford. 

They talked without talking for a second, (and Dipper knew that, and the triplets knew that) before Stan said aloud, “once a week.”

“For how long?”

“Since I moved into the Shack.” 

“Oh. That’s...that’s good.”

From his pocket, Stan took out a stone that Hank had seen him grab from the yard yesterday morning, and place it on the top of the grave. Ford did the same, albeit with a stone that was glowing a distressing brown color. 

“Show off.”

“Hey, I found this in the intricate ice caverns of Ios under Antarctica!”

Stan snorted. “Yeah, like I said, show off.”

Ford shoved Stan in the shoulder, and then they were both laughing, and maybe there were tears in their eyes but the moment had broken, and Dipper and the triplets were real again, and now Dipper was walking around in little circles noticing how many other Pineses were around in this section, and Acacia was sketching the scene out for Stan while Willow added her own pebble to the top, and Hank finally had the courage to ask “Who is Sheila Pines anyway?” which set Stan and Ford off telling stories until the sun went down and they went back to the car.

(ignored in all of this was a small piece of rectangular metal from the funeral home poked into the ground, the name Filbrick Elmer Pines no longer legible. In another eight months the lawnmower would finally forget to dodge it and it would become mangled under the blades, leaving no trace left.) 

---

Multibear finished talking, and Henry stared at him for a second.

“That... was quite the story,” he finally managed weakly.

“Why haven’t we heard about this before now?” Mabel asked quietly. 

Babies. Those were babies that came at them. They were babies forever, and that was the worse thing Mabel could possibly imagine.

(Logically, Mabel knew that the long arc of history was not usually kind to little bodies. It had never stopped hurting however.)

“How could we not know?” Mabel said again.

Multibear looked at her, piteously or condescendingly, she couldn’t quite tell. “The forest doesn’t owe you its secrets.”

Anger swelled in Mabel, but she bit her lip because, well, he was right.

“And, admittedly,” Multibear went on, throwing her a bone, “the Huntsman had slipped our minds as well. We have long known where and how to avoid him. How to surreptitiously pin him down on his nights of freedom. And then there was the threat of your brother...” He hung his many heads. “Our guard was let down.”

Mabel reached over and patted one of Multibear’s paws. “It’s okay. We know now. How can we help?”

Henry raised his head, and his voice, though quiet, rang out like a shot in the still air as he asked “Why us?”

“Henry!” 

He ignored her as he went on. “It just doesn’t make logical sense is all. Surely the inhabitants of the forest are numerous enough to overthrow this... Huntsman?”

Multibear nodded. ‘Yes, that is a very good point- please, Mabel, do not be upset.”

Darn it, she was upset! She looked at her husband, who met her gaze for gaze.

He was sheet white, and even the freckles on his skin looked less orangey-brown than normal. There were greys at his temple that she had noticed obviously, but not like this, never like this.

There were bags under his eyes. He looked tired.

He was tired. 

“Schmebulock, our finest legal scholar,” Multibear went on, “managed after an adventure of great length and infinite excitement to find a copy of the Huntsman’s deal in the Forbidden Library of the Ebon Plains- oh, it was a fantastic journey, a tale for the ages, would you like me to tell more?”

“Er, maybe another time Multibear,” Mabel said apologetically, looking at Henry and winking, rewarded with a wan smile in turn.”

“Very well, another day. Point being, he determined that the wording of Bill’s deal was vague enough to give the Huntsman magical dominion over not only the forest, but the peoples living within. We can mitigate the majority of the harm he does to us and others but-”

“You need us to finish the job,” Mabel finished.

For the first time Multibear looked uncomfortable. “Yes. And we would be in your debt-”

“No.”

Mabel looked at Henry, who had taken his glasses off to clean them. He breathed on the lenses, and then as he began to rub them down he said, “This is not about debt. Or owed and owing. You are our neighbors and our friends. And while I would not be so bold as to claim the forest as our home, we live on its boundaries, and are informed by it in our day to day life. Of course we will help you.” 

Henry put his glasses back on. “I just wanted to know what we were getting into, was all.” 

Mabel leaned over and bumped Henry’s arm with hers. She loved him, so goshdang much. A thought occurred to her.

“So....what is it we need to actually do?” Mabel asked.

“You need to find and burn his remains,” Multibear answered.

“Oh. That’s it?”

"Well-” If multibears could blush, Multibear would have been beet red. “We forgot where it is.”

---

"Here she is kids, the Stan-o-War!” 

“Two!” Ford added unhelpfully.

The triplets stared at their grunkles for a second.

“So.... we’re going to spend two weeks here?” Acacia asked.

The adults looked at each other. “Er, yes?” Dipper finally ventured. 

“On a boat?!” Hank was not usually prone to italics but this time they were definitely there.

“Why, yes my boy, on my boat, which does serve as my home in addition to being my research vessel.”

The kids looked at each other. 

Then they began to attempt to beat each other out of the car, which led to a mad scramble of limbs and red hair and seatbelts as each of them tried to be the first to get out of the car. 

Ford blew out a huge breath. “Oh, thank goodness, they’re excited.”

Dipper spied in the waves long, flowing, brunette hair. “Wait until they see who we invited.” 

[fdd700]

Grief

Themes: death, grief, hopeful ending Warnings: Death, grief, anger, pain, loss, car accidents, crying. Words: A fair amount (1245 words)

i. I am coping. I'll post something happier soon. Take care of yourselves and each other

Virgil realises that his thoughts tend to think in Before and After on a slightly damp day.

Before the event and After.

It's a steeling sort of realisation, like a dunk of cold water as he remembers there once was Before—a before the chest pain and the tears. There was a time when it was just a worst-case scenario and not his reality.

There was a time before Janus was dead.

And now he was in the after.

He still thinks about that before, more than any good grief counsellor would let him get away with. He still thinks about the night he went to bed, Virgil Storm, a 30-year-old with a husband who works night shifts. Not Virgil Storm, a widow. Not Virgil Storm, whose friends have to visit every day because they know there's no food in the house, and they don't want to plan another funeral.

It's an awful feeling, too, because no matter how much he closes his eyes and squeezes them shut to the point of pain, there's no going back to the before. There's no prayer, wish, spell, or nothing that will bring him back to the before. Or that will bring Janus to the after. There's no backwards, and the forwards seem unbearable to him, sitting here on a damp day, with the heating off but a blanket around him. Janus' cup from that morning Is still on the end table because Virgil hasn't been able to cope with the thought of there never being another cup there.

He cries a lot and is tired a lot. Patton tries his best to get him to sleep but doesn't understand why Virgil can't seem to. He thinks it would be an escape, but Virgil just can't do it. He can't bring himself to sleep when he knows he will only have to wake up again. And for a few minutes, Virgil knows he won't remember. He'll reach for that long-cold side of the bed because he won't remember, and he thinks that might be the cruellest thing he could ever do. A selfish part of him wants to forget, wants to forget this sadness and pain, but he can't, so he won't. Janus doesn't deserve that; Janus deserves more than to be t-boned on the interstate when coming home after making a pitstop because Virgil wanted doughnuts.

But Virgil can't think about that right now, so he doesn't. He just cries and huddles closer to the blanket.

Remus supposes they think he's heartless. Or if not heartless, then repressed. If he's frank, he's probably a little bit of both. And stupid, added in. Though he'd have to give a massive fuck you to the people who seem to think they get to decide how he copes.

It wasn't their best friend who was killed by a fucking idiot drunk driver at 4 am. No, it was his. His oldest friend was killed just like that, and Remus thinks he's allowed to cope however the fuck he sees fit. Whether it be drinking himself, angry and getting into a fight, or screaming so hard the cops are called at 2 am while at home, then he's coping, sue him.

It hits him in waves, the grief. In the mornings, he'll wake up and be sad, but he'll be able to breathe. And then he'll be at the store, and he'll see Janus' favourite chocolates on sale or smell his cologne or hear something, and it's like his finding out all over again, and he can't breathe again, and his eyes will water, and he'll have to go home and cry like a baby.

He knows one person in the world will understand his feelings, but how does he do that? Reach out to Virgil, Janus' widow, and say he's struggling? As if the man didn't lose his husband, his partner, the person he wanted and was willing to spend the rest of his life with. The person he wanted to travel with and host Christmas with. How does Remus go up to the man who lost his soulmate and look for comfort in him?

So he doesn't.

He didn't think Virgil would either until he did.

Remus finds himself at the front door of Virgil's house (it's a punch in his gut to no longer call it Virgil and Janus' house), and he's stalling on ringing the doorbell because then he'll come face to face with the widow of his best friend.

Once again, Virgil makes the first move. He opens the door, and red eyes meet watery ones.

"Come in," he says. And Remus does. He steps inside, and he stands in the hallway.

"how-"

"don't," Virgil says. "You know, so don't ask." And Remus nods because he does know. Of course, he does. If anyone would, it's him. "I didn't ask you here to help me through my grief; let's face it, neither of us is doing well. I asked you here because there's no point in both of us going through it alone." He takes a deep breath. "He wouldn't want us to, and since he isn't here to force us to talk to each other, I'm doing it." Remus has nothing to say in response, so he only nods. Virgil's right. Janus would hit them both on the head for isolating themselves. "So we're going to clean in silence. We're going to clean-" Virgil breaks off, a sob escaping before he takes a deep breath and continues, voice thick, "we're going to clean his cups and plates, and I've been too scared to. And his shirts." And Remus nods again, shoulders shaking.

"We will." And it's all he can manage to say, he realises. Because he has no other words to share, he realises that's okay.

So they clean. And when Virgil's sobs get too loud, or Remus' hands shake too much, they stop and drink a glass of water or watch some dumb sitcom episode. And when the sobs and shakes subside, they help each other and continue.

It takes three days and millions of breaks, but the next time Patton visits to restock the fridge, the plates and bowls are gone, and the sheets are clean. There are still shirts that need to be washed, but Remus puts them back on Janus' side of the bed, reminding Virgil this is a marathon, not a sprint. And there are still albums that need to be sorted, but Virgil took them from Remus' shaking hands and put them in a bag for Remus to take home to keep when he has the strength to return to his apartment.

The others come over for dinner - Logon and Roman coming in after work, Roman pulling his brother close the second he's in arms reach. Patton makes pasta, and the three of them - Logon, Roman and Patton - share stories and jokes about Janus. Virgil and Remus are quiet, but it's not a lousy quiet. They're just exhausting because grief is crippling, and this is the first time they've genuinely stopped in what feels like weeks, so they relish in it.

And in the morning, they both wake up on the couch, turn on the TV, and comfort each other when Janus' favourite documentary or an ad for his favourite movie comes on.

They'll live, they decide. They'll suffer, choke, cry, and get angry, but they'll live.

If for no reason other than Janus' wasn't able to, they'll live.

[besties-ice-cream]

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Besties Ice Cream!

Picture this: a family on a road trip home after a fun summer day in the sun, speeding down the interstate. As the minivan rolls up to the closest town, a green guide sign next to the approaching exit pops up off of the right shoulder, advertising ice cream available for tired travelers in need of a break. As if reading each other’s minds, the parents break into grins, reciting a chant together “I scream, you scream,”—the whole family joins in—” we all scream for ice cream!

It’s a familiar saying—one some of us have likely heard countless times growing up, and perhaps repeated obnoxiously with our friends when the ice cream truck rolled down the street—but just where did this peculiar saying come from?

It’s not hard to imagine some clever person or ice cream connoisseur saying the words when the topic of the scoopable treat came up—the delectable dessert we call ice cream is definitely something worth screaming over—but it’s a silly little saying, nonetheless.

Whether you deem the ten-word saying silly or a poetic work of literary genius, there is a bit of interesting history to the origin of the phrase, dating back to the first half of the twentieth century.

The I-Scream Bar

Unsurprisingly, the origins of one of our favorite ice-cream-related sayings come from an old advertising slogan. The ad industry of the early twentieth century was on a roll with the advent of so many new inventions in need of advertising, and the story goes that the saying “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” was originally a slogan for the treat now known as Edy’s Pie. The ice cream treat itself was originally coined the “I-Scream bar,” and, well...you can probably figure out why the origin story of the saying has ties to this particular ice cream bar based solely off of the name 

The inventor of the I-Scream bar, Christian Kent Nelson, is said to have come up with a catchy advertising slogan for his bar that went something along the lines of “I-scream, you scream, we all scream for the I-scream bar!” While definitely not as catchy as our modernized saying, it gets the job done. 

The I-Scream bar itself is actually a rather significant dessert as far as the history of ice cream is concerned. Up until Christian Kent Nelson created the I-Scream bar, there was no such ice cream bar in existence! The inspiration for creating the ice cream bar reportedly came to Nelson when he was manning his confectionary store in 1920. It was during a particularly sweltering day that a young boy came in to buy ice cream, but then changed his mind and decided to buy a chocolate bar. Nelson reportedly asked the boy why he changed his mind, and he said he wanted both but only had money for one treat.

From there, Nelson worked to create a one-of-a-kind ice cream bar that was coated in chocolate. After finally perfecting the recipe, Nelson began to give out his treats, and they were a smashing success. Nelson eventually partnered with Russell C. Stover, the famed chocolatier, to make the ice cream treat. They renamed the I-Scream bar the Eskimo Pie, and the name was then changed to Edy’s Pie in 2020.

Not Just a Saying—A Song

The next evolution of this catchy slogan came in the form of a jazz song written by Billy Moll, Robert King, and Howard Johnson called “I scream – You scream – We All Scream For Ice Cream.” The song was reportedly a hit in influential jazz clubs across the country, played by such important jazz groups as The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2006.

The song is complete with several verses and a chorus, and lots of “Rahs!” for good measure. Here is the chorus of the well-known song:

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

Rah! Rah! Rah!

Tuesdays, Mondays, we all scream for sundaes,

Sis-boom-bah!

Boola-boola, sarsaparoolla,

If you got chocolate, we’ll take vanoola!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

Rah! Rah! Rah!”

“I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream” continued to rise in popularity through the 1950s and 1960s, becoming even more well known when it was featured in the 1973 movie, Sleeper. The Woody Allen film stars Diane Keaton and is set in a dystopian future—a plot that contrasts quite drastically with the upbeat jazz song. Nevertheless, Allen included the song on the movie’s soundtrack and performed it himself on clarinet with the aforementioned Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra.

Well, there you have it—a complete and quirky history of the saying we’ve all heard as kids concerning our favorite summertime treat. Maybe this means we all need to start singing “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” when the Besties Ice Cream truck rolls through the neighborhood. Or maybe it just means that we now know a little more about the origins of the silly little saying that has been commonplace vernacular for years and years. Either way, all this talk about ice cream has undoubtedly conjured up nostalgic memories of licking a scoop of sweet, creamy ice cream balanced on a sugary cone.

If that’s what you’re craving, you better reserve Besties Ice Cream Truck for your next party or event, or track us down if you’re in Denver. After all, I scream, you scream, we all scream for Besties Ice Cream!

[leuiesroom]

      The most important part of leaving the cooler was the ride home. It was about 4 hours from the Oklahoma State Reformatory out in Granite back to Tulsa, Curly didn’t know why they didn’t send him somewhere closer to home, but he didn’t complain. The rides home after Tim picked him up were always the best. See, Tim wouldn’t say he missed Curly, that ain’t tough speakin like that, but he does miss his kid brother when he ain’t around, so the 8 hour drive is worth it to him, sure gas costs a shit ton, but he always takes Curly out to lunch after picking him up, get some real food in that boys system, not that cooler crap they served in slop dishes. And he gets to talk to him- that’s Curly’s favorite part, gettin caught up on all’t happened without him. (Gossip might be a chick thing, but it’s important to know who whipped who and who’s going with who and who got arrested for what in his absence.)

     It was real crushing being told he wouldn’t be picked up right away, “gotta wait another day kid”, the guard had said. A whole nother day...Tim was never late, not for him, or Angela neither, that isn’t how it is, you don’t just leave your guys in jail any longer than you gotta. It straight ain’t fair to ‘em. 

     Curly was waiting in the lobby, bag packed with his personal clothes on waiting for Tim when he arrived to sign him out. He was broody, walking Curly out to the car, didn’t say hello or nothing when he arrived. Tipping Curly off something was wrong.      “You didn’t come.” It was point blank, accusatory, he’d better have had a real good reason for abandoning curly like that. Tim’s knuckled were white on the steering wheel, he hadn’t even turned the key yet, they just sat in the parking lot. He wouldn’t look at Curly, he just stared straight ahead, like he was driving or somethin, only he wasn’t.      “You hungry?” Tims voice was summat quieter than Curly could remember, not soft exactly, but it was almost gentle. Tim Shepard was never gentle, and his voice wasn’t gentle unless something was really wrong. None of the Shepard’s voices were- you could hear them a mile away with their nasally yells and high, barking laughter, like a hyena.      “Why didn’t you come?” Curly was scared. Last time he’d heard Tim like this was after the fight with the Tiber Street Tigers. It should have been just chains, nothing rough, but someone cracked a bottle over one of Tim’s guys head and he dropped. It was real sudden and bloody. This was the voice Tim used to comfort his guys when something went wrong, when they were dying.      “Tim, why weren’t you here yesterday?”      “There was a funeral.” A funeral.      “Who’s?” Curly’s voice cracked, if Tim missed his release it had to be someone important, “..-Angel-” “No!” Tim barked, “Don’t even talk like that Curly.” He was serious too.

     “It’s a long story.” Tim said as he started the engine and pulled out onto the street, Curly was quiet.      “You know that Curtis kid you hang out with?” Curly nodded     “Ponyboy, yeah?” Was it him? Fuck he was young... Tim blew through a red light, pulling onto I-40 E. (Curly knew the roads home by heart now. He knew the interstate system real well too, only thing he was good at in school was geography. He could tell you the capital of every state real well- but that was besides the point right then.)     Tim’s silence was scary, and looking at him Curly noticed what he hadn’t before: He looked like hell. bags under his eyes, he looked older too, with greasy hair, and not the tuff slicked back kind neither, real greasy- like he hadn’t showered.     “Tim what happened?”     “He and his friend killed a soc.”     Curly paused, confused. Why was Tim making such a big deal about some bourgeoisie asshole in training from the other side of town?     “That’s it?” He was incredulous,     “No...” Tim swallowed, his eyes looked glassy. Tough as nails Tim was on the verge of tears. “It ain’t really my story to tell, but after he and Cade killed him they ran away. They hid out in one of Dallas’s old spots.” Tim and Curly were the only people who got to call him Dallas, it was somethin’ special. Dal and Tim had been friends longer’n anyone. Even the Curtis’s. “I guess the hole they had burned down, something about little kids, I don’t fucking know.” He took a deep breath, “Those dumbasses ran right in y’know. I don’t know what it is with those boys and always having to be a hero. You know if you’re ever in a situation you don’t go in- you let someone else do it, or let those kids burn. They got themselves into it anyway, it ain’t your problem. What is your problem is keeping your fool self alive,” The for me was unspoken. Tim had been through more than he should have been, tough streets aren’t any place for a child, it was an unspoken fact in the Shepard household that Curly and Angela were his lifeline. He provided them a place to live, and food, and they provided him a purpose. “They died? That’s what your torn up about?” “No, well. yes. Its more complicated than that. The Cade kid died,” Tim didn’t need to say why he upset for that. Everyone knew Johnny, it’s an unspoken rule in a lot of greaser gangs, but you just don’t hurt a kid like that. He gone through to much, much to young, he was burdened with pain when he should be having fun.      “What about Pony?” Curly was surprised how scared he was for the youngest Curtis, sure’d been friends, but he felt his heart pounding with panic, “What about Ponyboy?!” He yelled after Tim didn’t answer. “What about him-” Tim spat, bitterness lacing his voice, “It’s his fucking fault. Too damn immature to take a hit when he deserves it- gotta run away and get Johnny and Dally into this mess.” Tim was shouting, he was speeding too- a danger of being passionate while you drive, but neither of the boys noticed. (Nor would they have cared.)       “Dallas...?” Tim swerved onto the side of the road, stopping and just slammed on the horn and yelled a little bit. “Tim stop it!” Curly had never seen him so broken up about anything before, “Tim!” He calmed down as quickly as he’d sparked up, and when he wasn’t angry he just looked dead...and sad. He had tear tracks on his face.       “Dallas is dead, Curly.” Three words, four if you count his name, and the world just stopped. Tim pounded his palms against the steering window for a moment, agony obvious,  “He-” His voice broke and he just stopped, quiet and scary as he ever was. Cool as day, if it weren’t for the redness of his eyes, and wetness of his cheeks. But Curly didn’t hear him, his blood was pounding in his ears, so loud he could feel it, and his ribs were breaking.

     ‘Oh god,’ He though, ‘I can’t breathe.’ He pushed the car door open and slid out onto the side of the road, on his hands and knees. (He was almost glad, after, that the reformatory was so far from home, so no one saw him break down.) Bile rose, hot, in his throat, and he just threw up. Right there, underneath some fucking billboard advertisement, good old Dallas was gone.     Tim waited silently in the car, letting Curly sit there until he could breathe again, or think, or move, or whatever it was he wasn’t doing. When Curly stood up finally Tim gave him a hand, pulling him into his seat. It was a little slimy, a combo of the shoulders dirt, and Curly’s upchuck. He just wiped it on his jeans, he’d almost thrown up when he heard too.      It wasn’t like this wasn’t expected, everyone knew Dallas would die young, but Tim guessed they’d all assumed he’d make it out of his teens. At the very least. That boy had been like a brother to him. He appreciated Dal more than he ever let on, he knew when he went out on benders it was Dallas who dropped food off on the porch to keep Curly and Angela fed. Not that they couldn’t fend for themselves, but the two of them, tough as they were, didn’t think kids should have too. Or at least Tim didn’t, and Dal didn’t argue with Tim. 

     “How’d it happen?” He was broken out of his reminicence by Curly, his voice sounded so childish in that moment, broken and young.      “How do you figure it happened kid? Same way we all knew it would.” It was so violent...Tim didn’t want to even say it, but he had to tell Curly summat and better he hear from him than someone else. “Shot.” He said, “Cops,” He could barely manage full sentences, “suicide.” Curly nodded, he got the picture, he still looked sick, “If you’re gonna puke again roll down the window,” Tim said. Curly rolled down the window, but he didn’t puke or anything, he just stared.

     “How many times?” Tim had asked that too,      “14.”      “Holy shit....” Curly rubbed the side of his neck, just under his jaw. He had a hand drawn tattoo there, from Dally actually. 1312, in his handwriting. How fitting, “Bastards.” He murmured and Tim agreed.      “All of ‘em. Bloody fucking bastards.”

[bountyofbeads]

Rural Montana Had Already Lost Too Many Native Women. Then Selena Disappeared. https://nyti.ms/37h2SjG

Rural Montana Had Already Lost Too Many Native Women. Then Selena Disappeared.

For decades, with little public notice, Native women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered. The disappearance of Selena Not Afraid is showing how much things are changing.

By Jack Healy, Photographs by Cristina Baussan | Published Jan. 20, 2020, 3:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 20, 2020 |

BIG HORN COUNTY, Mont. — Jackie Big Hair slept in her car again, waking every few hours to fire up the engine and gaze at the frozen highway rest stop where her 16-year-old daughter had been reported missing.

“I just have to be here,” Ms. Big Hair, 50, said, watching semis lumber across the plains. “I don’t know where else to go.”

This was her vigil now, along with searches in Billings about 30 miles away, three weeks after her youngest child, Selena Not Afraid, was reported missing from a barren stretch of Interstate 90 in a southern Montana county where 65 percent of the population is Native American. Law enforcement officials said a van carrying Selena home the day after a New Year’s party in Billings had pulled into the rest stop after breaking down, and then reportedly started up again and driven away without her. Nobody had heard from her since.

A national outcry over the killings and disappearances of Indigenous women has reached a boiling point here in Big Horn County, a rural stretch of rolling mountains and ranch lands that contains the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations and has the highest rate of missing and murdered Native Americans in Montana, and among the highest nationwide.

Local activists had an incomplete count of 27 Native women who had gone missing in recent memory in Big Horn County alone. Now, there are 28. The difference here and in many parts of the West is that for decades the disappearance of mothers and children, cousins and friends almost invariably played out in utter obscurity, with modest law enforcement investigations that almost invariably languished unsolved.

Activists and researchers say the crisis burned unheeded for generations until a few years ago, when families’ stories of how their loved ones were sex trafficked, murdered with impunity or dismissed as chronic runaways gained traction through grass-roots organizing and social media, forcing politicians and law enforcement to take notice.

Last year, 5,590 Indigenous women were reported missing to the F.B.I.’s National Crime Information Center, but advocates say the staggeringly high rates of violence suffered by Indigenous people is still not fully reflected in official accounting. Some of the victims are misclassified as Asian or Hispanic, or are overlooked if they live in urban areas instead of reservations, or their cases are lost in a jurisdictional maze over which state, federal or tribal law enforcement agency bears responsibility for investigating.

Law enforcement officials said these can be extremely difficult cases to investigate, sometimes ranging over vast expanses of territory, but that they are committed to solving them. The families say the problem is more a matter of will and resources than of difficulty.

“Native women have been dehumanized from the very beginning,” said Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, a demographer who grew up in Big Horn County and is on the board of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, which has created its own database of cases. “The law has failed us time and time again. We’re tired of it. We’re tired of our people dying, of our kids going to jail.”

Now, families like Selena’s are taking an urgent public stand to pressure politicians and law enforcement to provide more aggressive responses to these cases. They are raising alarms through social media and even bracing themselves against Montana blizzards to keep their loved ones from being forgotten. They are organizing candlelit vigils, rallying at courthouses and sheriff’s offices and marching for days along prairie highways, reservation roads and to the steps of state capitols.

“We’re here demanding it,” Selena’s aunt Cheryl Horn said one afternoon, warming her hands with a bowl of chili as volunteers returned from another fruitless search of the nearby hills. “We’re not being quiet. We’re not leaving.”

In recent months, a flurry of federal and state agencies across the country and here in Montana have raced to respond with task forces and law-enforcement resources, including a new Justice Department effort to coordinate federal and local responses to disappearances and murders in Indian Country.

Law-enforcement authorities say that Selena, a member of the Crow tribe, went missing at about 2 p.m. on New Year’s Day. A New Year’s Eve party in Billings had spilled over into the following afternoon, and she was riding back toward her home in Hardin, about 50 miles east.

According to local and federal law-enforcement alerts, the van broke down and pulled over at the rest stop, where Selena was last seen walking into a field. Her family believes she was taken, possibly by a passing car.

When her relatives heard the news, they began pouring into the rest stop, circling their cars and campers and horse trailers into a makeshift windbreak and transforming a frozen spit of asphalt and concrete into a scene of prayer and protest.

They lit a campfire, searched through ranchers’ fields and garlanded the fences and sign poles with red ribbons and posters of Selena. They saturated social media with calls for help. “Internet warriors,” one of Selena’s aunts called the response.

At 16, Selena already knew the toll of violence too well.

She had buried three siblings — a brother who had been fatally shot by Billings police officers; a sister who was struck and killed by a car; and her twin sister, who died by suicide when she was just 11 years old.

“I’ve always felt like there’s a bad presence against us,” Selena’s older brother, R.J., said. “I’ve expected the worst.”

After Selena was reported missing, police officers from South Dakota and Wyoming joined Big Horn County sheriff’s deputies, Bureau of Indian Affairs officers and volunteers to search the nearby hills. Federal and local law-enforcement officers set up a command center in the basement of the county courthouse. Thermal drones and helicopters buzzed overhead.

The F.B.I. issued an alert for Selena and sent in a search team, but agents and sheriff’s investigators have said little more about her disappearance, or whether they are investigating the older acquaintances who had been riding in the van with her. .

The swift response has surprised some activists. “Nothing moves that fast,” said BethYana Pease, a Crow community organizer.

Families and activists say they have been sounding these alarms for years. They say the crisis flows from generations of discriminatory government policies and racism in reservation border towns like Hardin that devalue Native women’s lives and deaths.

Jay Harris, the county prosecutor, who is a member of the Crow tribe, said the proliferation of meth use and a scarcity of federal law enforcement had exacerbated the problem. Last November, the Crow chairman declared a state of emergency over what he called ineffective investigations and unanswered police calls on the 2.3 million-acre reservation, and said the tribe would move to form its own police force.

Some victims’ families wondered why the deaths and disappearances of their own mothers, sisters and nieces had not sparked a similar outcry. Ms. Pease ticked off names she said had never received justice: 14-year-old Henny Scott, who was found dead two weeks after she went missing in December 2018. Bonnie Three Irons, a mother of six, whose body was found in the mountains in April 2017.

Or 18-year-old Kaysera Stops Pretty Places. It was late August when Kaysera went out with friends in her hometown, Hardin, the county seat. Four days later, a jogger found her body in a suburban backyard next to the house where she had been that evening, just steps away from a busy road.

“Where the hell were these big shots when my granddaughter was missing?” asked Carmelia Brown, a relative who said she loved Kaysera as a granddaughter.

Kaysera’s family believes she was murdered, but her cause of death has lingered undetermined for four months, her autopsy still unfinished. Her family says it has never been told a certain time of death. The case is classified as “Suspicious” and still being investigated, said Mr. Harris, the county attorney.

Kaysera’s family members wondered how she could have lain in someone’s lawn for days without being seen. They were troubled that her body had been shuttled back and forth between the funeral home and state crime lab before being cremated by the county coroner, who is also the funeral director. They were disturbed that one of the lead investigators into Kaysera’s death had also been involved in an incident in which her younger brother was beaten and forcibly restrained.

“Why does nobody care about this?” asked Grace Bulltail, one of Kaysera’s aunts and an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’re not being given any information.”

Family members were uncertain whether Kaysera and Selena knew each other, but their stories have become intertwined. When Kaysera’s family led marches to the county courthouse seeking answers into her death, Selena attended, her aunt Cheryl Horn said. She posted Facebook tributes to Big Horn County’s missing and murdered Indigenous women.

One morning at Selena’s roadside vigil, as one of her great-aunts lit the day’s fire, her overcoat swung open to show a red sweatshirt bearing Kaysera’s face.

“This is the justice that Kaysera didn’t get,” Ms. Horn, Selena’s aunt, said.

*********

[01010010-posts]

— for a night of wine i'll pay one hundred days of vinegar.

it’s more noticeable when gavin’s shaved the day before. it’s a lot smaller, now. but it was kinda of a big deal at 15, though. one is next to his cupid’s bow, on the right. rather minuscole, gavin would say, as his hand guides the chin up and down in front of the oblong mirror. the other is under his lips, on the left side, a bit bigger than the first but yes, smaller than what he’d remember nevertheless. it’s somewhat still vivid in his memory. the earliest time he tasted violence and blood (and could never get enough after that). in his gums the tinge of rust and metal. the same that teased his skin sufficiently to left cuts. it was because he ran his mouth too much, too hazardous; and they decided to let his tongue fall out, right there, on the ground, but he wasn’t about the same idea and shoved a kick in the stomach to whoever was pinning him down. returning home, shirt stained blackish-red, gavin thought his mother made a much bigger fuss regarding the whole ordeal than his ‘opponents’. his dad, raising glasses off the newspaper for a moment, concluded with a joke that, if they’d really got his tongue he’d never drown and it ain’t all bad.

the car ride to work is not so terrible. at 6AM there aren’t many people yet. it’s quiet. just him, the toxic smokes in the sky inhaling from the rolled down window and ‘heaven knows i’m miserable now’ by the smiths on the radio. too bad the DPD is what actually makes gavin irritable. those stupid androids receptionists, nothing more than expensive assembled people-pleasers, always full of forged smiles and phony lines. he immediately goes straight to the break room to grab a coffee. good morning my ass. he’s much more at ease with rotten bodies on a freezing afternoon. they don’t speak, don’t ask and, above everything, don’t bother him. unlike that thing he’s been assigned a crime scene with, which has been talking reed’s ear off for minutes at this point. of course, as that thing explains the case’s details he probably rolls his eyes a hundred times. for fuck’s sake, he knows how to do his job, don’t need the opinions of a machine ‘are your eyes okay, detective?’ it inquires. the question is laced with bare curiosity and a dash of innocence. but gavin resents it. and interprets the phrase as a joke. about him. not with him. and that’s not okay “they rolled away down the interstate” he scoffs and takes a cig out of his breast pocket, putting it between his head and his right ear.

it’s 2024. gavin’s 22 now. and his father is dead. cancer. he didn’t know. his parents keeping it a secret so he could continue living a year more without worry. and while that was probably the best decision for everyone.... he can’t help but think about how much he took for granted, thinking this would last forever. about all the time he wasted away from him, not talking to him, not travelling with him, all the birthdays and the holidays. he regrets. and he’ll regret much more as he continues to grow. as his stubble continues itching. as his scars keep forming. he knows he’ll regret for the rest of his life. he hopes his mum can forgive him. but he can’t cry today. he won’t. the tears at the end of his throat creating a painful knot. one he’s not able to force out of his mouth by pinching with his indexes the end of the thread. they’ll stay there for a long time. he’s (not) ok. tomorrow’s the funeral and gavin has been staring at the ceiling for a whole day. back on his bed, hands on top of each other over his chest. fixating on spiders making their webs, waiting for bugs to fly towards them and getting entangled in sticky wires, only to end up bite-poisoned. just that. just waiting. how he envies them. because god’s not going to throw a bone at this lonely dog.

he comes home at an unreasonable hour. opens his door and tosses the few things on his persona to the cluttered couch. gavin doesn’t have a table, nor a dining room. he never has guests, and doesn’t plan to. because of this (and his inflated pay) the tiny apartment consist of only a cozy living space, a bathroom and a bedroom. his fridge is rather empty and his dinner will most likely consist of an ashtray, leftover pizza and the last canned beer.  while comfortably supine the detective can review the cases’ files. he doesn’t mind working more. he never minds work. it’s what kept him sane and busy for years. and he loves it. maybe not the part in which he should visit the deceased victim’s family, not the part about writing reports, not the part where he has to socialize, sure, but the idea, the idea of doing something he’s exceptionally good at, something that will give him the chance to rise above this heap of trash who only want to be a simple gear in a mechanism. he loves it. absentmindedly chewing, ochre and white paper scattered on every crevice available, he touches the middle of his nose. a habit he doesn’t realize he got. developed after the biggest gash on his face healed. from there to the lobe of his left ear.

it was in his first years as an officer, or maybe it was before that? nobody except gavin ever knew the truth to that story. one day he just woke up in a hospital bed, face half covered in bandages, body barely fitting a washed green gown. cursing everything in himself, in the world, cursing whatever left him in an alley, alive, bloody, alone. he could have died and everyone would have remembered him fondly. instead, as that day, he was back on the cold ground, looking up at the cerulean sky. instead, as that other day, his shirt was dirty and red; his mother will probably make a fuss this time too. in those moments he thought were the last of his life, he was strangely happy; selfish until the last moment, selfish as a necessity, necessity of living he never asked for. instead, like a cat, he got another life up his sleeve. and if he survived he owed almost all of it to the people he hated. androids, after all. in what he thought was the rest of his life, he wanted to scream that he didn’t need anybody’s permission to set himself on fire.

in the future, there’s a tauntingly soft ‘here’ before RK900 hands gavin a cloth cold pack. the detective refuses it with an indolent movement of his bruised knuckles and the androids can’t help but uncomfortably sit on the police car hood next to him, pack of shiny ice in his palm; since there’s no blood in him, it won’t melt, since he’s not warm, he’s not living “what doesn’t kill you....” a pause of few seconds, as if the android is actually searching for the perfect words. no need to say, they both know he already has them and is only mocking him “makes you ugly?” a grin showing his handmade speckless teeth. gavin still resents it. so absurdly flawless, it almost resembles the grimace of a nocturnal animal about to devour a carcass more than a simple smile. it hurts to look at it. reed can’t stand it. and his gaze returns to the ground “eh, jealous because bar chicks go crazy for a wounded cop?” the tone is ironic, as a couple drops of blood flow from his features and become pulp onto the tarmac “i thought these so-called ‘bar chicks’ loved cops with their nose still on.” a muffled fist of cough. maybe, starting to smoke while still dizzy, is not his best thought “so if i break my face and i don’t look so great? my face is just my face.” another impeccable faint chuckle, it seems unreal, ethereal, from above “i see.” silence, longer this time “mhh, how does that saying go? life gives you lemons....” gavin unceremoniously props his head on RK900’s shoulder, staining his white jacket a weak burgundy “shut up. at least it gave you something.” and like this, in the future, gavin reed has a new scar.

[solacekames]

Royce Reeves, Sr., has been driving a limousine borrowed from a funeral parlor to take poor or unmotivated residents of Cordele, Georgia, to the polls to vote early.

Are Police Targeting Get-Out-the-Vote Efforts in Georgia? 

By Charles Bethea November 1, 2018

On October 24th, Takeyla Singleton, a housekeeper at a Best Western hotel in Cordele, Georgia, posted a two-minute video to her Facebook account. Earlier that day, Singleton, who is African-American, like the majority of the town’s residents, had filmed Royce Reeves, Sr.—a forty-six-year-old barber and an elected city commissioner—receiving a ticket for illegally parking a limousine on Highway 19. Reeves, who is also black, had recently borrowed the vehicle to take poor or unmotivated residents to the polls to vote early. (I wrote about one such ride for this week’s issue of The New Yorker.) He twice voted for Barack Obama, then Donald Trump, and is now an outspoken supporter of Stacey Abrams, the African-American Democrat running for governor of Georgia; by November 6th, Reeves expected to assist as many as four hundred Abrams voters. Along the way, he often shouted out the window of the limo at passersby, which was out of the ordinary in a quiet town otherwise best known for its watermelons.

Moments after one state patroller engaged Reeves on the side of the highway, more law-enforcement vehicles began to show up. “It’s stupid. Look at them,” Singleton tells another observer in the video. “They called all that backup.” She went on, counting law-enforcement vehicles surrounding the white limo, which was on loan from the J. W. Williams funeral home. “One, two, three, four.” Someone else said, “Six cars!” Singleton went on, “Seven. . . . That’s a crying shame. On one little person. And the man driving the funeral-home car.”

Reeves told me he’d driven past the first patroller, who was ticketing someone else, then made a left and went a few blocks farther—beyond the view of the patroller—to talk to a man about his commissioner work. “They turned the lights on me,” he told me. ”And the guy, one of the troopers, when he got out of the car he spoke to me ugly. I said, ‘I’m not a criminal. If you’re gonna give me a ticket for being improperly parked, give me a ticket.’ They called in a bunch more troopers.” Reeves added, “They knew that that limousine was being used to haul people to the polls. They knew that. How many other people riding around town in a limousine?”

Serious claims of voter suppression have been made against Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor. As secretary of state, Kemp is in charge of elections and voter registration, which puts him in a position to referee his own contest. (For this reason, the former President Jimmy Carter, among others, has called on Kemp to resign from the position.) Kemp cancelled nearly one and a half million Georgia voter registrations, for various reasons, between the 2012 and 2016 elections, and more than half a million more in 2017. In August, an elections consultant linked to Kemp recommended the closure of seven of nine polling locations—many of them used by African-American voters—in a poor southwestern Georgia county. (The plan was voted down.) In another poor Georgia county, during Kemp’s tenure as secretary of state, an African-American grandmother, attempting to help a new voter use an electronic voting machine, was charged with the unusual crime of “improper assistance in casting a ballot.” Six years later, after two trials, the elderly poll worker was finally acquitted.

On Monday, a federal judge ruled against Kemp’s attempt to prohibit certain absentee ballots from being counted, writing, “The Court finds that the public interest is best served by allowing qualified absentee voters to vote and have their votes counted.” Perhaps the most significant suppression claim against Kemp, though, has focussed on a reported fifty-three thousand voters—some seventy per cent of them African-American—whose registration is “on hold” due to an “exact match” voter-I.D. law, which creates problems for voters who’ve changed their address or their name. A few weeks ago, Debra Roberts, a clerk at a warehousing company who moved to Georgia nearly two decades ago, told me, “When I moved here I changed my last name and they said everything went through. But every time I go to vote, they say, ‘No, your name isn’t right.’ This time it’s supposed to be changed, but I just don’t know if my vote is being counted.” (People like Roberts can still vote, with sufficient identification.)

But there is also concern that voters, particularly minorities, are being intimidated in other ways, at the local level—a few weeks ago, for instance, a bus full of black seniors was pulled over on the way to the polls in a rural Georgia county. The same is true of the Reeves incident, Seth Bringman, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia, argues. “Brian Kemp has hardly tried to hide his desire to see fewer people of color voting in Georgia,” Bringman told me, “and the culture of fear, intimidation, and confusion he has created statewide is pervasive at a local level as well,” as when “a black councilman is stopped while simply trying to provide members of his community with rides to the polls.”

I asked the Cordele Police Department about the incident. “Traffic stops are inheritably dangerous,” Andrew Roufs, an administrative lieutenant, wrote in an e-mail on Wednesday, “as the officer(s) conducting these stops have no prior knowledge of what may happen or what the stop may lead to. Typically, when multiple officers respond to any call for service, the officer(s) only intention is to ensure everyone’s safety and, in this case, this would include the driver, officer, and any bystanders.” He went on, “It is the policy of the Cordele Police Department to provide assistance, when requested, to an agency or officer as in this case.” Roufs, who wouldn’t say why the Cordele officers were called in the first place, referred me to the Georgia State Patrol.

On Wednesday, I received a response from Mark Perry, a public-information officer with the State Patrol. “One trooper conducted the traffic stop for illegally parking,” Perry wrote in an e-mail. “The driver was out of the vehicle with a small crowd,” he went on. “The trooper asked for a backup unit due to the number of people. One local trooper responded. Three other troopers assigned to I-75”—a nearby interstate—“from another region overheard the radio traffic and responded on their own. I have no knowledge as to why local police went to the scene. The driver was cited and released.” I asked Perry whether it was typical for five or more troopers to respond to a parking incident involving an unarmed individual. Perry explained, “It’s not unusual when a trooper is outnumbered by bystanders approaching a traffic stop.” (Asked to comment about the incident, Kemp’s press secretary did not immediately respond.)

As it happens, I was in the funeral limo earlier that day with Reeves. Hours before the illegal parking incident, Reeves took a phone call. “I’ve had the cops called on me twice today,” Reeves told the caller.“They say I’m campaigning too close to the polls, soliciting votes. I told the Sheriff, ‘We did no more in this campaign than we did for you.’ ” When he spotted a young black friend being pulled over in town by a white trooper (the young man hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt), Reeves angled the limo into a parking lot directly across the street. We got out and watched the stop unfold over a period of ten minutes. At one point, Reeves took out his smartphone and held it up as if he were filming the incident. (I did the same.) No additional troopers showed up to back up the ticketing officer in this instance, despite a small crowd of young black men close by. Reeves later told me that this same patroller was among those who showed up when he was pulled over later that day.

[noradarhkpalmer]

Rider, Massachusetts

Title: Rider, Massachusetts

Rating: PG

Pairing: Nora Darhk/Ray Palmer aka Darhkatom

Warnings: Minor swearing

Summary/Notes: AU Based on an ask prompt: only two people in this hotel/inn and sitting in my room alone wasn’t fun so I’m invading yours.

Nora Darhk checks into the Storybrooke Inn after getting lost in the storm, pausing her road trip to be anywhere but Star City after the death of her parents. Ray Palmer's GPS stops working on his way home from a business trip in New York and that brings him to the small picturesque inn. They're the only two guests checked in and decide to be lonely together.

This started out as an ask prompt thanks to @jakelovesamy and now it turned into all of this. I am so please and so stoked about this. I've always wanted to write an ooey gooey holiday fic like this but never had the right idea. 

SO THANK YOU SO MUCH EL REALLY YOU HAVE MADE MY DAY. Enjoy everyone! El I hope you love it! PS there will be a bit of an epilogue type chapter after this just so Maude can gloat.

She hadn’t planned to be here. Neither had he. When the snow got bad somehow, kismet, serendipity, fate, maybe even God, led them to both pull into the Storybrooke Inn. Coincidence or not, the Inn looked something straight out of a storybook. It was still covered in Christmas lights and decorations as was the small quaint town of Rider, Massachusetts. Ray was in New York for a business meeting when his GPS suddenly stopped working and he got lost. Nora was trying to be anywhere but Star City. She was a long way from home, across the country to be precise, she’d been taking the cross country trip ever since her parents were killed in a car crash just before Christmas.

Nora had arrived first. She walked into the just as equally decorate foyer of the inn and then walked up to the front desk, ringing the bell. She glanced around to the adjoining living room, seeing presumably locals since there was only one other car than hers in the parking lot, probably the owner’s, playing cards, chess, reading, just sitting somewhere to get warm and be a little less lonely on New Years Eve.

An older woman came from another adjoining room that she couldn’t tell what it was and smiled warmly at her.

“Can I help you?” Nora looked the woman over and the warmth didn’t seem to fade, she was embodiment of the holidays and everything Nora never had growing up.

Nora nodded. “Yes, I got a bit lost and the storm is making it pretty impossible to get anywhere so I’ll be needing a room for the night.”

“Well we’re happy fate brought you to Rider either way. I’m Maude Mills, I own the inn.” She extended her hand to Nora and Nora shook it.

“I’m Nora… Sorry, my hands are still a bit chilly from the storm outside.” Nora quickly retracted her hand and watched as the woman reached behind her for keys off the very full key rack behind her.

“That’s alright, dear, just sign in here.” Maude pointed to a pad in front of her on the desk and Nora filled out her basic information. “You’ll be our only guest, if you get too lonely up there, a lot of the locals like to stick around late into the evening to ring in the new year. You’re welcome to join us.”

Nora smiled sadly, not quite in the New Years Eve mood and nodded. “Thank you, but the warm bed in the room will probably just put me right to sleep.”

Maude nodded. “Okay, well, we’ll be here if we change your mind. Let me walk you up to your room.”

xxxx

Ray pulled up to an inn that he hoped was open. He saw just a few cars and was even surprised to see the Washington plates on the car next to his. Of all the gin joints. He walked inside with his bags, seeing an older woman at the front desk as he strolled up, glad that the inn was in fact open.

“Hi there!” He greeted.

“Well hello there! What a treat, I get two guests in the span of an hour. I’m Maude, who you might you be?”

“I’m Ray… I got a bit lost in the storm and need a room for the night, please tell me you’re not all booked up for the holidays?” He asked and going off the full key rack, save for one set of keys missing, it probably wasn’t.

Maude waved him off and laughed at his joke. “Nope, you’ll be my one of two guests. Just sign in here and I’ll get you all set up.”

Ray obliged and noticed the only other name on the guestbook. Nora Darhk. He’d heard that name before but he couldn’t place where. He finished and took the keys from Maude and let her lead him to his room.

xxxx

Nora looked up from her book when she heard shuffling and voices move past her door. Maude? Another guest? She heard a deeper, charming, male voice chatting with Maude. She heard a door open near her and shut a few moments later. Nora shivered slightly and stared at the unlit fireplace across from her bed. She really didn’t want to start a fire and possibly set something else on fire in the process so she resolved to sitting on her bed in her thickest sweater and coziest socks.

Another few hours passed and Nora, despite moving under the covers now, was almost completely freezing. She looking at the time 10:13pm. Less than two hours to midnight. To a new year. To the first full year ahead of her without her parents. She swallowed thickly, trying to not let herself be sad about it. She let herself grieve and mourn up to the funeral and the wake after but quickly locked that part of herself away after that.

Nora was brought out of her thoughts when she heard a loud noise from the room next to hers. The clunking of logs and a satisfied sigh. Whoever was next door had started their fireplace. She sighed. Who was she? Sitting in here all pathetic by herself on New Years Eve. She couldn’t even be bothered to start her own fireplace. Nora, now in her pajamas, grabbed her robe and slipped on her houseshoes and padded out of the room. Wait what was she doing?

Not being alone. That’s what she was doing.

Knocking on a complete stranger’s door two hours to midnight? They could be a serial killer? Or they could just make her feel a little less lonely.

Nora gently rapped on the door next to hers and she sucked in a breath as a very tall, handsome, and shirtless man answered the door. She was so stunned her hand was still raised as if she were still knocking.

“Hey, can I help you?” The man greeted with a smile.

Words stuck in Nora’s throat as she tried so hard not to stare at the man’s muscular chest and arms. “Umm… I just heard you starting your fire and I really don’t want to set my room on fire so I was wondering if I umm wow this sounds so stupid now that I am saying it out loud but… I was wondering if I could hang out in here?”

The man looked down after Nora was noticeably staring and realized he was still shirtless. He fetched his shirt from the bed and slid on the plain black tee. He leaned against the doorframe and listened to her request. Something inside him told him to let her in.

“Sure. Come on in, get warm, you look cold.”

Nora smiled in thanks and walked inside, wrapping her arms around herself, not sure what to do but thankful for the good 10 degree difference between his room and hers.

“I’m Ray by the way, Ray Palmer.” Ray held out his hand to Nora.

Nora shook it. “I’m Nora, Nora Darhk.” She smiled and then puzzle pieces clicked in her brain. “Like as in Ray Palmer of Palmer Technologies?”

“That’s me.” He grinned.

Nora guffawed. “What in the world are you doing at this tiny little Inn in Massachusetts?”

“I was on a business trip in New York and got a bit lost.” He shrugged. “Guess you can’t always count on GPS’s huh?” Ray offered her a seat on his bed and she gingerly sat down, pulling her legs up to her chest. “It seems we’re the only two guests so… what brought you to Rider?”

“Same as you… I mean… I got lost because of the storm. I’ve been on a cross country road trip since Christmas Eve.”

“Are you the one with the Washington state plates? Are you driving across the country to see different family members?”

Nora nodded. “Yeah… that’s me, why? And no… I don’t have any family, kinda why I took the roadtrip. To get away from that small fact.”

Ray had a sudden flash. An obituary in the paper for a Ruve Adams and a Damien Darhk, killed in a car crash, survived by their daughter… Nora. “You live in Star City, don’t you?”

Nora furrowed her brow, now suspecting this man was either a stalker, serial killer, or too good to be true. “Yeah… why do you know this much about me?”

Ray realized how all of his questions sounded and waved her off. “No it’s not like that… I saw your parents’ obituary in the paper a couple weeks ago… I’m sorry for your loss. That must be so hard losing them so close to the holidays.”

“Yeah well… that’s just how fate likes to treat me.” She shrugged. “I lost my job back in September and then this… I basically emptied my savings and found myself on the interstate on Christmas Eve, which is a bitch to dive in by the way, I’ve just been trying to be anywhere but Star City or any place that reminds me of my parents. I was on my way to Boston when I got lost and ended up here.”

Ray reached out and took her hand. “I’m sorry. I really am. Four years ago… I lost my fiancee, we got mugged at gunpoint and… he shot us both I somehow survived. I don’t know why or how… it doesn’t seem fair. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why she died and I got to live. I spent a lot of time with that pain, I wish I had the agency you did to just take off and deal with it in whatever way you pleased. If you want to talk about it more, I’m here, I know we just met but maybe opening up to a complete stranger you’ll never see again might be easier.”

Nora wiped away a stray tear that she was pissed she let fall and shook her head. “You never know, you might bump into me on the streets of Star City. But, I know what you mean. I’m sorry you lost her, but maybe you’re still here because of a greater purpose. I read the papers, your tech company is not only successful but gives back and really makes an effort to change things at a grassroots level, that’s revolutionary. None of that would be possible if you weren’t still here.”

Ray hadn’t thought of it that way. It didn’t make the pain of losing Anna any less worse four years down the line but it did make him breathe a little easier thinking about it. She was right. He had found purpose in those four years even though some of it was because he had thrown himself a little too much into his work but, he was still proud of all that he had accomplished.

“So, what’s this job that was stupid enough to let you go?” He asked, trying to move onto a lighter tone to the evening.

Nora tried to hide her smile. “I didn’t technically lose it, it’s just over for the season. Don’t judge… but I work at a Renaissance Fair. I’m considering not going back next season because my boss is a jerk so I kind of decided to lose my job.”

Ray tried to hold in his laugh. “Of all the things I thought you would say, that was definitely not it.”

Nora rolled her eyes. “You can laugh, go ahead. It wasn’t my first choice in jobs either. I have a teaching degree but no one wants to hire a drama teacher in the age of STEM.” She sarcastically airquoted ‘STEM’ and realized she was talking to a man with probably multiple degrees all in STEM fields. “Sorry.” She blushed and looked away.

Ray shrugged. “No, it’s okay. I love the arts. I have a lot of paintings in my apartment I commission from local artists and I love musicals. The arts are still important no matter what other science fuddy-duddies say.”

Nora smiled and realized they were still holding hands, she tried to retract, realizing he probably hadn’t meant to hold her hand this long but he simply put his other hand on the other side of hers and smiled, so she kept it there.

“So you like musicals?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Do I? Singin in the Rain is my favorite movie of all time.”

Nora grinned. “I’m more of a Grease girl myself, but I can appreciate Debbie Reynolds in her prime.”

“What else do you like to do other than watch musicals and what exactly is it that you do at the Ren fair?”

“I’m a witch. I tell fortunes and pretend to cast loves spells or curse enemies. All very Morgana Le Fey type stuff.” She found herself now playing with his fingers as he let off one of his hands off and she tangled their fingers together. It felt almost instinctual to do this. And she wasn’t sure why.

“You continue to surprise me, Nora Darhk.” He shook his head and gazed at her longingly, he really truly hoped he’d bump into her one day in Star City.

Nora moved their hands so they were in a position to thumb wrestle and gave him a smirk. They absently started thumb wrestling as they continued to talk.

“And to answer your other question, I like to draw, paint, I dabble a little bit in photography, I sort of do a little bit of everything since I don’t exactly have the most stable job in the world.”

“Paint anything I might have seen in a gallery or coffee shop?”

She shook her head. “I’m not that good, I’d love to start a photography series called Faces in the City where I just capture Star City for what it is, the good and the bad. Maybe it’ll help bring change, I’d love to donate and proceeds I make off of selling prints to homeless shelters around town.”

His heart swelled. This woman had had the worst few months of her life and there was still room in her heart for people less fortunate than her. She was a marvel.

“I could help you with that,” he offered.

Nora realized he meant financially and she waved him off. “No… you don’t have to do that.”

“No, come on I think it’s a great idea, maybe if not with that but with the drama teacher gig. I give a lot to STEM camps but I also give a lot to art programs. Summer programs that teach kids how to write, draw, paint, do theatre, music, dance. They’re always looking for qualified instructors.”

“I had one real year of teaching before they cut the funding at my school so I’m not exactly what you would call ‘qualified’,” she said.

“I think you’re plenty amazing and any school would be lucky to have you shaping and encouraging the future minds of this country. Teachers don’t get enough credit. If you ever need a recommendation while you’re job hunting, don’t hesitate to ask.”

Nora choked out a laugh. “You’ve known me for an hour, why would you want to do that?”

“Because I see that there is something incredibly special about you, Nora, and I’m really glad whatever it was that brought us here together tonight did. I don’t know how we ended up being the only two residents of this inn but I’m thankful it meant we got to meet.”

Nora face flushed. What exactly did he mean by all of that? Was it romantic interest? Plantonic interest? Was she even ready for romantic interest? She’d known this man an hour. She glanced at the clock 11:15pm. Forty-five minutes until 2019. She looked into his eyes and smiled. “Me too.”

They spent the next forty minutes talking about life, laughing at how rowdy the locals downstairs were getting, Ray showed her some of his personal invention ideas that he just had to get on paper somewhere, he wasn’t sure if they’d ever come to be, but they all revolved around making the world a safer and better place and Nora’s heart swelled at his heart for humanity. It was now five minutes to midnight and they had moved to sit in front of the fire. Ray had snuck downstairs and nabbed a bottle of sparkling grape juice and two glasses. He poured them each a glass and settled down next to her in front of the fire.

Nora had shed her robe, it was too hot to have it on and sit in front of the fire but now it was almost like she was just still a smidge too cold to be comfortable.

Ray noticed her shivering and fetched a blanket, he sat back down across from her and draped the blanket over the both of them, their legs brushed together. Nora looked absolutely beautiful next to the fire. An absolute angel if he were honest. Maybe one day she would be his angel.

The minutes ticked by and they sat in a comfortable silence, two minutes to midnight now.

“Hey, Ray?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever kissed anyone at midnight?” She asked, looking a little apprehensive to even broach the subject of the New Years Eve tradition.

Ray nodded. “Anna and I did every New Years we were together. What about you?”

Nora shook her head. “If my dad was awake he’d kiss my cheek and say ‘Happy New Year, Nora-doll’ but other than that, no.”

“Why do you ask?” He couldn’t help himself now, he reached for her free hand and tangled their fingers together.

“Will you kiss me at midnight?” Any boldness she had left her body the minute she asked and immediately tore her hand away to cover her mouth. “I’m sorry… that was really forward wow are you sure this is non-alcoholic?”

Ray chuckled. “Yes.”

Nora looked up at him. “Yes to what?”

Ray heard cheering from below and a clock tower chiming in the distance. Midnight. He smiled and pulled her in for a soft, sweet kiss and then pulled back. “What do you think?”

Nora smiled in return and pulled him back in for another kiss. “I’m really happy we decided to be lonely together.”

“Happy New Year, Nora.” If she hadn’t just met him tonight, she’d consider the look in his eyes to be of complete adoration and love.

“Happy New Year, Ray.” She knew now that 2019 would be her absolute best year yet.

[healveterans]

Bob and Didi, on Sunday, heading to California, almost home from their journey to The Wall. Wishing you continued safe travels:

"We noticed smoke coming from Flagstaff area. Turns out it is from a fire in Sedona, been burning several days. To me it smells sweet, not like the California fires. Must be the type of trees burning. Tomorrow is the longest day...the desert into Barstow, then home trip after that. We will probably leave early to beat the heat (90 plus in Barstow). No relief with the hurricane rains into California.

"Didi is napping now. We went to Pet Smart to get more food and treats, so he is a happy camper! We ate at Coco's restaurant, next to the hotel...finally going to get some prime rib after not having it available in so many restaurants on weekends! Yum! Didi is just too darn cute/popular with the girls. We'll be in trouble when he gets home and his girlfriend, Gretchen, sees him! Gretchen is a 3 year old Rottweiler and they have a great time with each other because they’re about the same size.

"The smoke from the Sedona fire has subsided so we went out for some play and potty time. It was cooler out and quite pleasant. I've been listening to some 'old' blues, Paul Butterfield, Jack Bruce, John Mayall, and such. Also listened to some Navy Band playing Bugler Holiday (they do something I find difficult, triple tonguing with the horns. You'll know right away if you hear it). Other than Stars and Stripes Forever, it is my favorite trumpet/coronet music. My Dad played coronet as did I. I am trying to get my lips back so I can get on the team for Bugles Across America, where you can call an 800 number and request a bugler for Taps for a Veteran's funeral. Free of charge.

"If this weather keeps steady I won't run into too much sun until mid-morning, when I cross the desert. It is only 8 pm or so. Guess Didi tired out after his chewing session. We'll take a late night walk later. I've checked off my bucket list the number one thing...visit the Wall and say goodbye. It was hard, again thankful for the rain...right afer I broke down and was there with Didi on my lap, this elderly lady came over and hugged me. She said she lost her son in Quang Tri Province in 1968. She says she comes here almost every week, at night rather than the day because she knows how hard it was for her, and she sees more Vets at night. She was very sweet and comforting. Speaking of weird coincidences, as we were leaving Albuquerque and outside the town of Grant is a bridge with the official name, Khe San Bridge. It was dedicated in 2010 to the 10 New Mexico servicemen who lost their lives in Khe Sahn. At Interstate I-40, offramp, 107..there is a monument. Time for our last sentry of the night."

Photos by Vicki Topaz at Operation Freedom Paws

[homeless-kath]

INTRODUTION

I always said by the time I am 60 years of age I would write a book. I don't know why but ever since I was 7 years old felt that way. Perhaps it was after a hell life at that stage but either way my whole life I knew I would. Now at this age I have to write about it. Perhaps a relief for me to get it all out but it is painful to remember my past and hurts to write about it. Either way I will do it. I was going to write this as fiction as a character renaming the people but thought no I'm writing it as non fiction and always wanted to write a children's book after seeing and talking to the creatures on this planet. I remember when I was managing a marine artist was at her place and this whole writing bug got me and wrote like a Nemo page. She said wow you should write a book and now it's coming back to me. It's like after all my medical conditions and bad relationships it sort of just disappeared out of my head. But soon after had my hit and run and lost it but now it's coming back. Yahoo. When I was homeless living in my car birds and dogs that I could at least pat and my friendly birds that some would take a while but would eat out of hand. Glory.Some people would pull there dogs away and those beautiful animals would look at me sad saying I am sorry.

So here I sit always looking at the water which I just can't do without writing finally.

I hope all enjoy my writings as they come from my heart. There's no lies just the truth of my life. Many people have said to me you must write which is an inspiration. So here I go finally. Yahooooooo.

I plan to write another book as fiction from my experiences but as a character writing about my love life etc.

Hope all that read enjoy reading what I've written.

THE CRY OF THE INNOCENT.

CHAPTER 1

I was born not hatched to Dutch strict parents with 3 older brothers. My father brought us up to be rough tough and ready with many survival tactics. You would think I would have been spoilt but no.

CHAPTER 2

My eldest brother I never really knew him as he went to Vietnam got the cruel useless war that screwed most of the troops into PTSD and suicidal these days.

When he came back just wasn't the same but got married and disappeared out of out lives as we moved interstate. Only ever saw him once when I went to Europe and he was abusive as.

My next older brother was jealous of me and treated me badly. See story on I was just a little girl. The vicious circle of abuse. Even until this day he's my mother's favourite even though covered in tattoos and sexually abused me. When I told her she called me a liar and threw me out. After having 3 boys she so wanted a daughter but 3 brothers I became a tomboy. Wasn't into girl things and even now we don't get on. See story on this on this on my page.

My next brother treated me like gold constantly paying me attention. Unfortunately he had a bad accident got set up for a crime he didn't do and ended up in jail for many years which now he has been compensated for but money won't help his mind set. While he was in jail his wife passed away and he wasn't allowed to go to her funeral. His son was put into a foster home but ended up committing suicide and all of this got to my brother bad. He's not the same I don't see him much as he mixes with the wrong crowd and is constantly moving house. Anytime I do see him he's my brother the other ones just people in my life.

CHAPTER 3

When I was about 2 years old after my father got a job as a electricity pole builder. We lived in a country pine forest town where they made redhead matches. We would go into the pine forest every day to gather pine cones for the combustion stove and the heater for the bath. On those days me and my older brothers would share a bath. My nice brother got out and left me with my mean brother. He pushed me under the running water which hurt. One day picking up the pine cones my nice brother would carry me on his shoulders on the way home.My mean brother would hide behind the trees and put his leg and my brother would trip over. I would hit the ground hard. He and my brothers would fight but he would go back to his mummy and say we punched him. Of course we both got in trouble. I was 2 years old for ffs. What I could I do hit him? I would just stand back and say stop it. I don't understand even to this day why he was always the favorite. I screamed for mum during the bath. She came in and he said I slipped. Mum said you have to be more careful. Again he was believed over me.

When I was about 5 years of age my dad got a job in the RAAF and we went to a thriving migrant town with a house being supplied which was a relief for my mother bringing up 4 children. God knows how she fed and clothed us in younger years but we never did without. Even though we don't get on always had respect for the way we she clothed and fed us. My mother was quite a seamstress and would make many of our clothes. I remember when I went to high school and it was compulsory uniforms not not like primary school these days. Those days it was just like the convict time letting people move here to populate as Australia was a new country in a way. Full of mainly English Scottish people. After going to England and speaking to the English in later years was surprised how many had the attitude of only the desperate or convicts went to Australia. Oh well their loss as they sit in their cold no blue skies or sun England ha ha.

I couldn't wait to start school. I knew the alphabet how to read and count. As my birthday was in the start of the year and my mother insisted with them to let me start at nearly 5 years of age and know what I knew they allowed me to do so. Their was no kindergarten than. So straight to grade 1.

I remember when I was 7 years of age after being sexually abused always hiding away and wanting to run away. I would go to the park and hide behind bushes watching people and hoping no one would find me. A girl that lived next door and me would plan our escape. Funny my main concern was to have a sewing kit with us in case our minimal clothes fell apart and how we go out to the country and find a farm to work in and hide. Silly hey but that was our plan. Her family moved away so that was that. We would sit in the alley and dig a hole and put things in it. I often think if I ever went there would love to find it. A time capsule in a way

CHAPTER 4

So when I was 12 years old finally made it. I ran away with a circus and loved it. The people didn't question me and treated me as part of their family. Yet unfortunately I was found by the police as written in a previous story. See my circus life story.

So back to parents and abuse. Occasionally I would wag school as loved education but wasn't part of the bitch club girls so would cop crap from them. I just didn't fit into the club and they would bash me in the toilets as they didn't like me and thought i would dob them in as if. They would put my head in the toilet flush it and try to drown me. I got a bad cut in my left eyebrow and even now have the scar. My eyebrow has never grown back and I wear a fringe to cover it . I went back to class and it was bleeding. The teacher sent me to the headmaster and asked what happened I said I just fell. They sent me to hospital and 6 stiches later my mum picked me up. I started wagging school and would go to country towns for the day. I met a man that noticed I would be there asked me what's going on with you? I told him and let me stay with him and his mother. They bought me some clothes. She never questioned me as I looked older and would look after me. Once again the police found me so back to hell I went. I just couldn't stand it and would sleep in the park. I met a police officer and told him and he let me stay at his place but he got in trouble so had to go. He arranged for me to go to a girls hostel and spoke to my parents. I lived in many hostels and worked after school at a petrol station. Remember when you got fuel how your tank was done windows washed tyres checked and oil and radiator done. I loved it would get dirty hands and learnt the hard way to check the radiator without loosening the cap by the hot water exploding on me. Ouch that hurt.

When I finished school with the highest grade in Business Principles,Typing, Shorthand, Math I wanted to be an Accountant but was impossible as I couldn't afford University. Back in those days most didn't do grades 11 and 12 that was for the rich. Most parents were glad when we got to grade 10 as no more school costs and could get a job. I met a lady that said I could move in with her. I always wanted to be a hairdresser and was accepted by Stefan's to be an apprentice. After finding out the pay was $70 per week I couldn't do it as would have to travel to the city everyday by train and pay for rent which wasn't viable. All the other girls of course lived with their parents but I was supporting myself. I would have to go to Centrelink every week sit their all day to get my rent. Ended up coming home and the furniture was gone. The real estate came around and told me the rent had not been paid for weeks and the furniture wasn't her's. I had to move back to the hostel.

I met a girl that worked at the meat works and had a car and took me there. I had to stand at the gate after enrolling at 6sm You had to be 16 but once again as I looked older and was quite stocky I was called in. I was put into the pet room where offal went like livers tripe bible which is the smelly inner stomach to pack. It was hard hot work no air conditioner. It's like the test room to see if you could handle it. I did and went every morning to the gate and got chosen. We would get paid daily by going to the pay station. My first day was $72.50. I thought they made a mistake and paid me for a week. I said excuse me but I've only worked a day not a week. She said no darling that's a days pay. I said wow I will be back tomorrow. She smiled that was nice. I was in my glory could buy something for dinner rather than sausages and eggs. Yahoo. The next step after a week was transferred to the offal room which was air conditioned and mainly sent to Japan for humans to eat offal liver kidneys brains oxtails and cheek meat. It was hard work and those bits were coming fast. The heads would come down and offal so quick from upstairs from the kill floor. The worst part was when the calves for veal offal came down and would hear them screaming as there throat's were cut and as they were zapped to move up the ramp. Hated it would wear earmuffs. I ended up on compensation after injuring my back from lifting the boxes onto the forklift. We had to weigh the boxes and write on them the weight. Livers which are heavy the boxes would be between 60 and 70 pounds much to heavy for a 15 year old girl. I did my back in and had 6 weeks off but was allowed back in as am a hard worker to the cold room which is where the bodies of the cows went after inners their skin and blood and head were removed. I was promoted to becoming a slicer which is slicing the meat after the boners cutting the meat in whole like rump's fillet etc. There would be a packer at each table so no lifting and better pay than the kill floor rooms. The best part of the meat works was how much they would strike and we would sit down and play card games and became a good 500 player. Even though we didn't get paid but the strikes were usually about more pay. We would always win if not we would walk out which would have been chaotic for the meat works.

After s few months I met a man and we would talk through smoko lunch and meet at the pub. A lot of the workers would go to the pub lunchtime and have a few beers. In those days your age wasn't asked and besides that I looked at age. He was made a supervisor and got transferred to another meat works in Townsville and asked me to move up with him. So I did. I was employed in the butcher shop which is making up packages of meat for the workers. In those days it had changed from pounds to kilos so had to learn that. I loved processing the orders and getting to sit in a office to do the invoices. Always loved math and office work and did it well. He than became violent and would hit me leaving black eyed so couldn't go to work. I would cry myself to sleep look in the mirror and think why. I looked after him was faithful and forgiving.

I think he was just scared I would meet someone as I was attractive and a lot of guys would chat me up. So I lost that job he had me totally reliant on him and not going anywhere. I remember my 16th birthday looking at myself and crying at black eyed. When I was 17 joined the army for an escape. Became the Colonials secretary and loved it. Doing wages and recruitment. No computers than all paperwork and filing. I have written a story on My stint in the Army on this page. Eventually I showed up with a black eye and the Army arranged a truck with 3 fellas to get me out of his space. They told him if you go near her there will be trouble for you so he backed right off. It's funny I bumped into him much later in life and he walked past me and said hello. He was married had 3 daughters and apologized for what he did to me. My reaction was I hope you don't hit your wife and daughters his answer was no never. I left it at that and left.

I left the Army as couldn't stand the hot linen dresses and having to wear stockings with only a ceiling fan so I resigned and was allowed to leave. I than got a job at the pub. Moved in with a friend and met a man I should have married sold all my stuff and we moved away. He was a fitter and turner gained employment and I worked pubs which I loved. Got myself a horse and would go riding most days. Eventually the dry hot heat got to us and we moved back to Qld. Oh the joy of crossing the border seeing palm trees and the beaches. We settled and he got a job and I with a partner opened a riding school. I posted a story on this.

I did this for years and would go to the country to the horse sale suctions to buy horses. Loved it as I love travelling. It was just so sad to see the farmers doing it tight. The horses weren't in the best conditions due to lack of food therefore they had to sell them. It was heart breaking seeing them forced to sell their mate. Many would cry and say goodbye. I would always offer them some money for food if they wanted to keep them but as many from draught stricken areas would say it won't last and hated seeing their horses suffer. I would always promise to look after them slip them dollars to cover their fuel and get some supplies for themselves

I would transport them on a doggers truck that I had arranged for the sales get them back to the school feed them up put them out to pasture until they had picked up. When they had I would see how they handled being ridden and their nature. Most were great and I would sell them to people to have. Most kept them at the school and would ride them on the weekends. A quiet one would be sold to children mainly or kept for riding lessons and the trail rides and unbroken ones trained. If they were mean they would be sold to the doggers. We would try to break them in but some were impossible to do. The doggers would always try to buy all horses at sales and I would outbid them for the farmers trained good horses. I wrote a story already on my riding school explaining Misty my gather them up horse and the school. Eventually I got sick of it and went back to pub work.

My boyfriend got boring to me always reading and never wanted to go out so I would go out by myself so moved out staying at the pub I worked in. Thinking back he was kind adored me but I was young and a bit of a party animal and frustrated to feel like their was no fun in life. I shouldn't have probably would have got married and have children but than again be bored. Oh well we learn from our younger years mistakes

I met a man double my age but extremely ruggedly handsome that would come to the pub and on my 21st birthday gave me flowers and said to me he really liked me. My 21st I worked everyone was partying for it grrrr. Soon he said he was moving to Mackay and if I wanted to come. He was a pool builder had won awards for them also a tiler concreter painter. He said he would teach me all and put me through apprenticeship so I did. We worked hard and I learnt a lot for the construction industry which later on in life helped greatly but he would go to the pub with the crew while I went home to prepare dinner and come home drunk and would get violent towards me and punch me up. I didn't understand why but once again blamed myself for doing something wrong. He would accuse me of chatting up the boys at work which I never did was just talking to them. Him and his work partner gained a painting contract out the mines way and put it under my name on ABN. Stupid me. We would go out there and stay in a camp. I would cook dinners make smoko on site using an electric frypan making bacon eggs toasted sandwiches as well as painting. Long hours with not too many breaks. He left the day before we finished the contract and one of the boys drove me home. When I got home all his clothes were gone and my car. We had a joint bank account and he had emptied that. Before mobile phones so managed to call a taxi from my home phone and went to go in town to see his friend to ask him if he knew what was going on my car passed. I got the taxi to follow it and managed to pull her up. The lady who was our partners girlfriend said he had given it to her

I said no and if she didn't get out and into the cab I would call the police. She got out. I drove back and and started packing up as couldn't afford the rent. With little money I had moved up the coast to start a new life

Come tax time got a letter from the tax dept about no tax being paid had to go to court to sort it out. The judge was kind and understood my situation and put a warrant out for their arrest. Don't know what happened after that with the scammers.

When I moved I went straight to the pub and asked for a job luckily one of the barmaids was leaving the next day as was pregnant so was asked if I could start straight away while she teaches me the routine. I said sure can and did it. I had nowhere to stay and told him so he offered me a room for my days pay. I was in my glory start of a new life. The next day I went to real estates and first question was are you working. An incredible unit overlooking the beach ocean was available for $110 per week was unfurnished but I didn't care. Had to ask my mum for help with bond and rent which she did so moved in. That day at work the locals all asked me where I was living I told them but said it was unfurnished. Well amazing one of the guys said give me your keys and I will fix it. That night he returned my keys and he said fixed. Got home a fridge with food in it lounge chairs on the balcony a table and a mattress. I cried how I was being helped. It was so nice. I was like wowee. I'm home. I bought them a carton of beer and a bottle of rum next pay. They were geatefull.

A few months later my ex came into the pub with another young girl .She had sunglasses on and I thought why because you've probably got a black eye. Anyway I moved on until one day one of the local day yacht trips rips offered me a job. I said sure it would be different to go go sailing everyday and it was beautiful. Sailing meeting people and seeing the beautiful islands dolphins and the water. We would sail to one of the islands go ashore make a bbq lunch which was brilliant. Fresh Queen salmon with garlic sour cream whole grain mustard lemon and a touch of oil wrapped in foil and cooked on the bbq and a fresh salad. Yum. Didn't meet anyone who didn't say the same. The owner decided to sell the boat and me the skipper and deckhand were out of work. The skipper got a job straight away same as the deckhand who was incredibly handsome and we went out got a while. I managed to find a job cleaning the charter yachts so kept myself going.

At the pub of course which where you find the jobs I was approached by a restaurant owner that asked me if I would like to work there as his promotions manager. I said sure and learnt a lot about it. I arranged many bands on a Sunday to perform and it went down well. All the locals were coming and we boomed. One of the bands were impressed and asked me whether I would like to be their tour manager and being a bit naive asked what that was. They explained it and it involved travelling a lot which I missed so I said sure that sounds like me. Soon I was on the road going to the gigs setting up with the roadies and arranging meals riders which is the drinks thet they receive it was long hours. I would usually drive the band in a bus check them into the motel and go help and meet the manager and set up the seating. My usual day was get up at 6am organize breakfast and than drive to the gig. Sometimes it was many hours of driving as Australia is a big country. Book the guys in to motels than go to the venue and help the roadies set up. Back to the motel maybe have a sleep while the band would iron their clothes have showers and a rest. It amazes me now how I managed to do it but I was young. I would have a nap shower get dressed and drive the band to the gig for dinner while arranging everything. Than the band would start and I would play security stand at the door to make sure everyone had tickets and applaud first or get up and dance people would follow. I loved it. Learnt a lot. Our sound guy got sick and I got to do lighting. As I knew each song by heart did a brilliant job. The band were impressed and I thought about doing it but it didn't happen. So we travelled Australia and I loved it even tho it was tiring. Didn't get paid much but got food a bed in motels and got to travel seeing all of this glorious country. It was pretty full on not many days off.

[dunkalfredo]

Mirage Springs (Home Sweet Home)

The protagonist: a young Gadget the Wolf.

The setting: a time when things were... simpler.

(Infidget, except it's that shared Old Friends AU I have with @theashemarie)

AO3 | FFN

yo yo yo what up im back at it again. I think I've only posted during- and post-war so far???? Yeah I think so. this should be somethin new for yall

warnings warn brief animal violence and also implied/referenced character death

anyways heres wonderwall be sure to like comment and subscribe to my youtube c

Gadget doesn’t dream about his father per say, but a few months out from the accident and the funeral and the beginning of it all his dreams get… unpleasant.

Always traumatic. Disaster, tragedy, bodily harm, his mother, trapped, his own self, broken and immobile. He wakes up with a prancing heart and pains in his neck, like his head was moving but there was resistance, a pillow in the way. Advil never really helps. He pretends it does.

One night, he spends all of two hours asleep, the second dreaming of a feral dog tearing a cat into two with its teeth. He hears the procession of the cat’s screeches so vividly, struggles with the molasses around his bones as he looks around at the others in the room, wondering if he should look outside, out the window at the sources of the screeches and the dying. Eventually, he does, and finds Finn, his best friend, one he hasn’t seen in person for years and only in grainy jpegs on his monitor, wrestling the wrangled parts of the cat from the bared fangs of the dog, horror pulling at his features in strange, uncomfortable shapes.

Gadget wakes up ten minutes before his alarm. He doesn’t shut it off.

It rings a few times, the peaceful, lighthearted marimbas that normally fill Gadget with destructive intent only reminding him of the hours ahead of him, hours undoubtedly to be filled with migraines and a putrid sickness in his stomach.

He stumbles down the stairs with Frankenstein feet, legs that don’t really fit him and feel short and stubby and long and gangly at the same time, legs that stick out from his body at odd angles, bones that grew too fast and in the wrong places. He sees his mom, Helen, in the kitchen, still and focused on the kitchen counter (empty) and he decides to tell her.

“We need to move.”

It’s the rain outside that sets him off. He sees it in the window behind his mother, feels it in his bones like little hammers against his marrow, chipping away bits and pieces with every impact until there’s nothing left to support his innards and his flesh. Rain, obscuring, blinding, slippery. Too wet and too slick for city tires. Too obtrusive to the eyes of a crowded interstate. Too enticing for accidents, for metal cars with disgustingly fragile bodies inside of them.

Gadget wants to get as far from the rain as possible.

Helen maintains that obsessive, hollow gaze at the counter tile, and only nods, mechanical and noncomprehensive. Gadget hums, accepting it for now and deciding that, maybe later, he’ll ask again, when she’s had food and a good night’s rest. He knows she didn’t sleep last night. Her pacing kept him up. He wanted to join her.

He didn’t, continuing to stare at his wall and eventually dreaming of rabid dogs and festering cat corpses.

-

Ultimately, it’s a matter of waiting for the house market to open and for Gadget to finish eighth grade, though perhaps not quite in that order. The where isn’t an issue, because there’s only one place that holds the familiarity they desperately need while also giving them needed, necessary space, and the “how” of the matter is settled with his father’s now liquidated assets.

So, July.

There’s the sad, forlorn, empty husk of Gadget that feels close to nothing about this, but then there’s this small, hopeful spark, created and fueled by a face he hasn’t seen properly since a distant, warm but entirely too fuzzy childhood, connected now only to a username tattooed to the back of his brain. Moving has one big, tangible perk, one that’s not centered on recovery, on death, on rain, and he didn’t realize it was there until he was halfway through listening to his mother speak with the realter on the phone.

A familiar face. A friend.

The revelation only reminds him of the loneliness, but. But. That spark shines a little brighter.

-

In May, they finalize the lease for the new homeowners and work on packing (there’s not much, and Helen has a distressing vastness to her knowledge on quick moving shortcuts; Gadget knows why and has never asked for details. Helen never gave them. It’s better that way).

Gadget’s quick to hop on his laptop as soon as he gets off packing duty, perched on the fat windowsill he used to furnish with pillows and blankets to make a makeshift couch (there’s a word for this sort of window-couch, he knows, but he can’t quite reach back in the recesses of his brain to find it, nor can he find the will or energy to care).

AIM is open and chippering happily when he opens the lid. As soon as the window pops up, he sees Finn’s gargantuan mix of x’s and numerals waiting eagerly for his return.

Gadget’s fingers fly over the keyboard. Mmmmmmmhenlo!!!! finally got the lease signed. were packing right now

He receives immediate whiplash as Finn spams a long, dark block of capital A’s.

Gadget types back, quick and a bit snippy: please don’t break ur a key ull give ur mom a scare

Finn, after hesitation and a guilt that seeps straight into the texts and out of Gadget’s monitor, responds with a single, solemn, h.

thank u, Gadget types.

They launch into quick, idle chatter after that, slowly morphing into something more thoughtful as the hours wear on until Finn sends, after a brief pause: u think ull recognize me?

Gadget’s chest collapses slightly, not quite a sigh but a hefty release of breath regardless. I mean. ive seen pictures but. I dunno

When a quiet, hesitant ‘we’ll see’ flashes across the screen, Gadget flinches, only to force his eyes closed and away from the affronting text. He breathes, in, out, shallow but to a slow count of ten.

It’s just Finn, unsure and insecure and afraid. He’s always worried, Gadget tells himself. He’s paranoid.

But there’s a brief image in his mind of himself looking out at the swarm of bodies in the airport, lugging a suitcase of clothes behind him and a ticket, punched, in his hand, with no one there to greet him.

He doesn’t know if he could handle that.

He doesn’t want to find out.

-

July. Humid in the north, but bone-dry in the south. That should’ve made it better. It didn’t.

Gadget forgot just how heavy the sun felt in Mirage Springs, and in that brief stretch between plane cabin and port entrance, he’s reminded with vivid, visceral clarity just how much he loathes the heat, even if it doesn’t stick to his neck like it did back home. At least, at home, he didn’t worry about blistered feet and heat stroke.

He tries not to take it as a bad omen, as a sign that this was a bad idea, but it sits in the pit of his stomach and grows fetid.

It doesn’t help that he aches, that his knees creak after stuck in artificial, harsh angles for so long, that his ears pop every now and then without warning because the plane was high but the mountains and trees up north were even higher.

He’s hurt, and tired, and nervous, and overall in a sour, worn mood (not helped by the long minutes spent in one security check after another), and there’s little pomp and circumstance when he’s finally out in the open with his meagre luggage behind him and plane ticket crinkled between his fingers.

Then, he sees Finn.

Or, rather, his mother Helen sees Finn, and he only sees Finn after she puts a knowing hand on Gadget’s shoulder and says, “I’ll go back for the rest of the luggage.”

And she leaves, and it’s just him, and Finn (and an entire airport, but that’s unimportant).

Gadget doesn’t know why he ever worried; Finn sticks out like a sore thumb. Not in stature, the shrinking violet he was, but definitely in the black everything and the thick, sturdy, too-hot boots and the long, long, chaos it was so long hair and really, even without all of that, his scar made him look like some rogue mercenary lost in a swarm of unfittingly normal people, loose from the trail of his target and aimless in his search for a way back on.

There’s no warning before Gadget is, in every sense of the word, swept off his feet.

“You’re back!” Finn booms with every ounce of air in his lungs, voice cracking like an egg on a floor but pitch reaching an unnerving deepness for a teen his age. Gadget’s overwhelmed, with all the earth-shaking timber of Finn’s voice roaring right next to his ear and the room spinning around him and the lack of ground under his feet and, wait, no ground, wait…

Gadget’s placed firmly on his feet mere seconds after the hug-and-spin that was needlessly thrust upon him (though he’d later reflect that, perhaps in other circumstances, maybe he would actually enjoy it, just a little), and his first words are not heartfelt, or gentle, but just as booming as Finn and with alarming distress: “You’re tall!”

This is just about shouted into Finn’s chest (Gadget is still being hugged (and is hugging back, undeniably)) and Finn only knows he said anything over the rumble of the surrounding airport because of the vibrations Gadget’s creaking tenor voice leaves in his chest (proximity, not power).

Finn pulls back, troubled by the tone and not sure what to make of it, simply responding with a dazed, panicked, “Yeah?” that cracks at the end.

His panic is furthered, if only for a moment, by Gadget’s subsequent movements of hand comparison, that funny maneuver where the hand, palm down, is dragged from the top of one’s head straight across to the other person, and Gadget lets out a distraught squeak when his hand bumps against the center of Finn’s sternum.

“What?!” This is Gadget speaking, or rather borderline hollering, as he stares exasperated at Finn. Then, just like that, he deflates. His head hangs. It’s a pity party for one.

Finn stands there, completely dumbfounded, watching his friend stew in his own misery, then walking forward to pat his back with the finesse expected from a young, awkward teenage boy. “There, there,” Finn soothes.

He receives a small, saddened whimper in response.

Later, when Gadget’s home and nestled in a neat corner of his bare room, it dawns on him that Finn’s boots had heels. His ears pop again.

B L E A S E reblog i beg of u my crops are dying

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American Sniper DVD (Jan 01, 2015)

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Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2017

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My daughter and God

FOUR YEARS AGO, driving home from picking up our twelve-year-old daughter from summer camp, my wife reached into her purse for a tissue and lost control of the car. This occurred on a stretch of Interstate 10 between Houston and San Antonio, near the town of Gonzales. The accident occurred as many do: a moment of distraction, a small mistake, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. My wife and daughter were in the midst of a minor argument over my daughter’s need to blow her nose. During high-pollen season, she is a perennial sniffer, and the sound drives my wife crazy. Get a Kleenex, Leslie said, for God’s sake, and when Iris, out of laziness or exhaustion or the mild day-to-day defiance of all teenagers, refused to do so, my wife reached for her purse, inadvertently turning the wheel to the left.

In the case of some vehicles, the mistake might have been rectified, but not in the case of my wife’s—a top-heavy SUV with jacked-up suspension. When she realized her error, she overcorrected to the right, then again to the left, the car swerving violently. They were on a bridge that passed above a gully: on either side, nothing but gravity and forty vertical feet of air. That they would hit the guardrail was now inevitable. In moments of acute stress, time seems to slow. The name for this is tachypsychia, from the Greek tach, meaning “speed,” and psych, meaning “mind.” Thus, despite the chaos and panic of these moments, my wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

This didn’t happen, although the accident was far from over. The car did not break through the guardrail but ricocheted back onto the highway, spinning in a one-eighty before flopping onto its side in a powdery explosion of airbags. It struck another vehicle, driven by a pastor and his wife on their way home from Sunday lunch, though my wife has no memory of this. For what seemed like hours the car traveled in this manner, then gravity took hold once more. Like a whale breaching the surface, it lifted off the roadway, turned belly-up, and crashed down onto its roof. The back half of the car compacted like an accordion: steel crushing, glass bursting, my daughter’s belongings—clothes, shoes, books, an expensive violin—exploding onto the highway. Other cars whizzed past, narrowly missing them. A final jolt, the car rolled again, and it came to a halt, facing forward, resting on its wheels.

As my wife tells it, the next moment was very nearly comic. She and my daughter looked at each other. The car had been utterly obliterated, but there was no blood, no pain, no evidence of bodily injury to either of them. “We’ve been in an accident,” my wife robotically observed.

My daughter looked down at her hand. “I am holding my phone,” she said— as, indeed, she somehow still was. “Do you want me to call 911?”

There was no need. Though in the midst of things the two of them had felt alone in the universe, the accident had occurred in the presence of a dozen other vehicles, all of which had now stopped and disgorged their occupants, who were racing to the scene. A semi moved in behind them to block the highway. By this time my wife’s understanding of events had widened only to the extent that she was aware that she had created a great deal of inconvenience for other people.

She was apologizing to everyone, mistaking their amazement for anger. Everybody had expected them to be dead, not sitting upright in their destroyed vehicle, neither one of them with so much as a hair out of place. Some began to weep; others had the urge to touch them. The cops arrived, a fire truck, an ambulance. While my wife and daughter were checked out by an EMT, onlookers organized a posse to prowl the highway for my daughter’s belongings. Because my wife and daughter no longer had a car to put them into, a woman offered to bring the items to our house; she was headed for Houston to visit her son and was pulling a trailer of furniture. The EMT was as baffled as everybody else. “Nobody walks away from something like this,” he said.

I was to learn of these events several hours later, when my wife phoned me. I was in the grocery store with our six-year-old son, and when I saw my wife’s number my first thought was that she was calling to tell me she was running late, because she always is.

“Okay,” I said, not bothering to say hello, “where are you?”

Thus her first tender steps into explaining what had occurred. An accident, she said. A kind of a big fender-bender, really. Nobody hurt, but the car was out of commission; I’d need to come get them.

I wasn’t nice about this. Part of the dynamic in our marriage is the unstated fact that I am a better driver than my wife. I have never been in an accident; my one and only speeding ticket was issued when the first George Bush was president. About every two years my wife does something careless in a parking lot that costs a lot of money, and she has received so many tickets that she has been forced to retake driver’s education—and those are just the tickets I know about. The rules of modern marriage do not include confiscating your wife’s car keys, but more than once I have considered doing this.

“A fender-bender,” I repeated. Christ almighty, this again.“How bad is it?”

“Everybody’s fine. You don’t have to worry.”

“I get that. You said that already.” I was in the cereal aisle; my son was bugging me to buy a box of something much too sweet. I tossed it into the cart.

“What about the car?”

“Um, it kind of . . . rolled.”

I imagined a Labrador retriever lazily rotating onto his back in front of the fireplace. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me.” “It’s okay, really,” my wife said.

“Do you mean it rolled over?”

“It happened kind of fast. Totally no big deal, though.”

It sounded like a huge deal. “Let me see if I have this right. You were driving and the car rolled over.”

“Iris wouldn’t blow her nose. I was getting her a Kleenex. You know how she is. The doctors say she’s absolutely fine.”

“What doctors?” It was becoming clear that she was in a state of shock.

“Where are you?”

“At the hospital. It’s very small. I’m not even sure you’d call it a hospital.

Everybody’s been so nice.”

And so on. By the time the call ended, I had some idea of the seriousness, though not completely. Gonzales was three hours away. I abandoned my grocery cart, raced home, got on the phone, found somebody to look after our son, and got in my car. Several more calls followed, each adding a piece to the puzzle, until I was able to conclude that my wife and daughter were alive but should be dead. I knew this, but I didn’t feel it. For the moment I was locked into the project of retrieving them from the small town where they’d been stranded. It was after ten o’clock when I pulled into the driveway of Gonzales Memorial Hospital, a modern building the size of a suburban dental office. I did not see my wife, who was standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out over the empty fields behind it. I raced inside, and there was Iris. She was slender and tan from a month in the Texas sunshine, and wearing a yellow T-shirt dress. She had never looked more beautiful, and it was this beauty that brought home the magnitude of events. I threw my arms around her, tears rising in my throat; I had never been so happy to see anybody in my life. When I asked her where her mother was, she said she didn’t know; one of the nurses directed us outside. I found myself unable to take a hand off my daughter; some part of me needed constant reassurance of her existence. I saw my wife standing at the edge of the lot, facing away. I called her name, she turned, and the two of us headed toward her.

As my wife tells the story, this was the moment when, as the saying goes, she got God. Once the two of them had been discharged, my wife had stepped outside to call me with this news. But the signal quality was poor, and she abandoned the attempt. I’d be along soon enough.

She found herself, then, standing alone in the Texas night. I do not recall if the weather was clear, but I’d like to think it was, all those fat stars shining down. My wife had been raised Missouri Synod Lutheran, but a series of intertribal squabbles had soured her parents on the whole thing, and apart from weddings and funerals, she hadn’t set foot in a church for years. Yet the outdoor cathedral of a starry Texas night is as good a place as any to communicate with the Almighty, which she commenced to do. In the hours since the accident, as the adrenaline cleared, her recollection of events had led her to a calculus that rewrote everything she thought she knew about the world. Until that night, her vision of a universal deity had been basically impersonal. God, in her mind, was simply too busy to take an interest in individual human affairs. The universe possessed a moral shape, but events were haphazard, unguided by providence. Now, as she contemplated the accident, mentally listing the many ways that she and our daughter should have died and yet did not, she decided this was wrong. Of course God paid attention. Only the intercession of a divine hand could explain such a colossal streak of luck. Likewise did the accident become in her mind a product of celestial design. It was a message; it meant something. She had been placed in a circumstance in which a mother’s greatest fear was about to be realized, then yanked from the brink. Her future emerged in her mind as something given back to her—it was as if she and our daughter had been killed on the highway and then restored to life—and like all supplicants in the wilderness, she asked God what her purpose was, why he’d returned her to the world.

That was the moment when Iris and I emerged from the building and called her name, giving her the answer.

Until that night we were a family that had lived an entirely secular existence. This wasn’t planned; things simply happened that way. My religious background was different from my wife’s, but only by degree. I was raised in the Catholic Church, but its messages were delivered to me in a lethargic and off-key manner that failed to gain much traction. My father did not attend mass—I was led to believe this had something to do with the trauma of his attending Catholic grade school—and my mother, who dutifully took my sister and me to church every Sunday, did not receive communion. Why this should be so I never thought to ask. Always she met us at the rear of the church so that we could make a quick exit “to avoid the traffic.” (There was no traffic.) We never attended a church picnic or drank coffee in the basement after mass or went to Bible study; we socialized with no other families in the parish. Religion was never discussed over the dinner table or anyplace else. I went to just enough Sunday school to meet the minimum requirements for first communion, but because I went to a private school with afternoon activities, I could not attend confirmation class. My mother struck a deal with the priest. If I met with him for a couple of hours to discuss religious matters, I could be confirmed. I had no idea why I was doing any of this or what it meant, only that I needed to select a new name, taken from the saints. I chose Cornelius, not because I knew who he was but because that was the name of my favorite character in Planet of the Apes.

Within a couple of years I was off to boarding school, and my life as a Roman Catholic, nominal as it was, came to an end. During a difficult period in my midtwenties, I briefly flirted with church attendance, thinking it might offer me some comfort and direction, but I found it just as stultifying and embarrassing as I always had, full of weird sexual obsessions, exclusionary politics, and a deep love of hocus-pocus, overlaid with a doctrine of obedience that was complete anathema to my newly independent self. If asked, I would have said that I believed in God—one never really loses those mental contours once they’re established—but that organized religious practice struck me as completely infantile. When my wife and I were married, a set of odd circumstances led us to choose an Anglican priest to officiate, but this was a decision we regretted, and when our daughter was born, the subject of baptism never came up. Essentially, we viewed ourselves as too smart for religion. I’ll put it another way. Religion was for people who wanted to stay children all their lives. We didn’t. We were the grown-ups.

In the aftermath of the accident, and the event that I now think of as “the revelation of the parking lot,” all this went out the window. I was not half as sure as my wife that God had interceded; I’m a skeptic and always will be. But it was also the case that I was due for a course correction. In my midforties, I had yet to have anything truly bad happen to me. The opposite was true: I’d done tremendously well. At the university where I taught, I’d just been promoted to full professor. A trilogy of novels I had begun writing on a lark had been purchased for scads of money. We’d just bought a new house we loved, and my daughter had been admitted to a terrific school, where she’d be starting in the fall. My children were happy and healthy, and my newfound financial success had allowed my wife to quit her stressful job as a high school teacher to look after our family and pursue her interests. It had been a long, hard climb, but we’d made it—more than made it—and I spent a great deal of time patting myself on the back for this success. I’d gone out hunting and brought back a mammoth.

Everything was right as rain.

In hindsight, this self-congratulatory belief in my ability to chart my own destiny was patently ridiculous. Worldly things are worldly things; two bad seconds on the highway can take them all away, and sooner or later something’s going to come along that does just that.

Once you have it, this information is unignorable, and it seems to me that you can do one of two things with it. You can decide that life doesn’t make sense, or you can decide that it does. In version one, the universe is a stone-cold place. Life is a series of accumulations—friends, lovers, children, memories, the contents of your 401(k)—followed by a rapid casting off (i.e., you die). Your wife is just somebody you met at a party; your children are biological accretions of yourself; your affection for them is nothing more than a bit of well-engineered firmware to guarantee the perpetuation of the species. All pleasures are sensory, since nothing goes deeper than the senses, and pain, whether psychological or physical, is meaningless bad news you can only endure till it’s over.

Version two assumes that life, with all its vicissitudes, possesses an organized pattern of meaning. Grief means something, joy means something, love means something. This meaning isn’t always obvious and is sometimes maddeningly elusive; had my wife and daughter been killed that afternoon on the highway, I would have been hard-pressed to take solace in religion’s customary clichés. (It is likely that the only thing that would have prevented me from committing suicide, apart from my own physical cowardice, would have been my son, into whom I would have poured all my love and sorrow.) But it’s there if you look for it, and the willingness to search—whether this search finds expression in religious ritual or attentive care for one’s children or a long run through falling autumn leaves—is what is meant, I think, by faith.

But herein lies the problem: we don’t generally come to these things on our own. Somebody has to lay the groundwork, and the best way to accomplish this is with a story, since that’s how children learn most things. My Catholic upbringing was halfhearted and unfocused, but it made an impression. At any time during my thirty-year exile from organized religion, I could have stepped into a Sunday mass and recited the entire liturgy by heart. For better or worse, my God was a Catholic God, the God of smells and bells and the BVM and the saints and all the rest, and I didn’t have to build this symbolic narrative on my own. My wife is much the same; I have no doubt that the image of the merciful deity she addressed in the parking lot came straight off a stained-glass window, circa 1975. Yet out of arrogance or laziness or the shallow notion that modern, freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide these things for freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide these things for themselves, we’d given our daughter none of it. We’d left her in the dark forest of her own mind, and what she’d concluded was that there was no God at all.

This came about in the aftermath of our move to Texas—a very churchy place. My daughter was entering the first grade; my son was still being hauled around in a basket. Houston is a sophisticated and diverse city, with great food, interesting architecture, and a vivid cultural life, but the suburbs are the suburbs, and the neighborhood where we settled was straight out of Betty Friedan’s famous complaint: horseshoe streets of more or less identical one-story, 2,500square-foot houses, built on reclaimed ranchland in the 1960s. A neighborhood of 2.4 children per household, fathers who raced off to work each morning before the dew had dried, moms who pushed their kids around in strollers and passed out snacks at soccer games and volunteered at the local elementary school. We were, after ten years living in a dicey urban neighborhood in Philadelphia, eager for something a little calmer, more controlled, and we’d chosen the house in a hurry, not realizing what we were getting into. Among our first visitors was an older woman from down the block. She presented us with a plate of brownies and proceeded to list the denominational affiliations of each of our neighbors. I was, to put it mildly, pretty weirded-out. I counted about a dozen churches within just a few miles of my house—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ—and all of them were huge. People talked about Jesus as if he were sitting in their living room, flipping through a magazine; nearly every day I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read, Warning: In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned. Stapled to the local religious culture was a socially conservative brand of politics I found abhorrent. To hear homosexuality described as an “abomination” felt like I’d parachuted into the Middle Ages. I couldn’t argue with my neighbors’ devotion to their offspring—the neighborhood revolved around children—but it seemed to me that Jesus Christ, whoever he was, had been pretty clear on the subject of loving everybody.

This was the current my daughter swam in every day at school. Not many months had passed before one of her friends, the daughter of evangelicals, expressed concern that Iris was going to hell. Those were the words she used: “I don’t want you to go to hell, Iris.” The girl in question was adorable, with ringlets of dark hair, perfect manners, and lovely, doting parents. No doubt she thought she was doing Iris a kindness when she urged her to attend church with her family to avoid this awful fate. But that wasn’t how I saw the situation. I dropped to a defensive crouch and came out swinging. “Tell her that hell’s a fairy tale,” I said. “Tell her to leave you alone.”

The better choice would have been to offer her a more positive, less punishing The better choice would have been to offer her a more positive, less punishing view of creation—less hell, more heaven—and over time my wife and I tried to do just that. But when you’re seven years old, “love your neighbor as yourself” sounds a lot like “don’t forget to brush your teeth”—words to live by but hardly a description of humanity’s place in the cosmos. As the playground evangelism continued, so did my daughter’s contempt, and why wouldn’t it? She’d learned it from me. I don’t recall when she announced she was an atheist. All I remember was that she did this from the back seat of the car, sitting in a booster chair.

After the accident, my daughter spent the better part of a week in her closet.

From time to time I’d stop by and say, “Are you still in there?” Or “Hey, it’s

Daddy, how’s it going?” Or “Let me know if you need anything.”

“All good!” she said. “Thanks!”

There were things to sort out: an insurance claim to file, a replacement vehicle to acquire, arrangements to make for our summer vacation, for which we’d be leaving in two weeks. My wife and I were badly shaken. We had entered a new state: we were a family that had been nearly annihilated. Every few hours one of us would burst into tears. Genesis 2:24 speaks of spouses “cleaving” to each other, and that was what we did: we cleaved. We badly wanted to comfort our daughter, but she had made herself completely unreachable. Of course she’d be confused and angry; in a careless moment, her mother had nearly killed her. But when we probed her on the matter, she insisted this wasn’t so. Everything was peachy, she said. She just liked it in the closet. No worries, she’d be along soon.

A day later we received a phone call from the pastor whose car my wife’s had struck. At first I thought he was calling to get my insurance information, which I apologetically offered. He explained that the damage was minor, nothing even worth fixing, and that he had called to see if my wife and daughter were all right. Perfectly, I said, omitting my daughter’s temporary residence among her shirts and pants, and thanked him profusely.

“It’s a miracle,” he said. “I saw the whole thing. Nobody should have survived.”

He wasn’t the first to say this. The M-word was bandied about freely by virtually everyone we knew. The following afternoon we were visited by the woman who had collected Iris’s belongings: two cardboard boxes of books and clothes covered with highway grime and shards of glass, a suitcase that looked like it had been run over, and her violin, which had escaped its launch into the gulley unharmed. We chatted in the living room, replaying events. Like the pastor, she seemed a little dazed. When the conversation reached a resting place, she explained that she couldn’t leave until she’d seen Iris.

“Give me just a sec,” my wife said.

“Give me just a sec,” my wife said.

A minute later she appeared with our daughter. The woman rose from her chair, stepped toward Iris, and wrapped her in a hug. This display made my daughter visibly uncomfortable, as it would anyone. Why was this stranger hugging her? The woman’s face was full of inexpressible emotion; her eyes filmed with tears. My daughter endured her embrace as long as she could, then backed away.

“God protected you. You know that, don’t you?”

My daughter’s eyes darted around warily. “I guess.”

“You’re going to have a wonderful life. I just know it.”

We exchanged email addresses, knowing we would never use them, and said our goodbyes in the yard. When we returned to the house, Iris was still standing at the base of the stairs. I had never seen her look so freaked-out.

“God had nothing to do with it,” she said. “So don’t ask me to say he did.” And with that she headed back upstairs to her closet.

The psychologist, whom Iris nicknamed “Dr. Cuckoo,” told us not to worry. Iris was a levelheaded girl; hiding in the closet was a perfectly natural response to such a trauma. The best thing, she said, was to give our daughter space. She’d talk about it when the time was right.

I doubted this. Levelheaded, yes, but that was the problem. Doing a double gainer with a twist at 70 miles an hour, without so much as dropping your iPhone, was nothing that the rational mind could parse on its own. The psychologist also didn’t know my daughter like I did. Iris can be the most stubborn person on earth. This is one of her cardinal virtues when, for instance, she has a test and two papers due on the same day. She’ll stay up till 3:00 A.M. no matter how many times we tell her to go to bed, and get A’s on all three, proving herself right in the end. But she can also hold a grudge like nobody I’ve ever met, and a grudge with the cosmos is no simple matter. How do you forgive the world for being godless? When she declared her atheism from the booster seat, I’d thought two things. First, How cute! The world’s only atheist who eats from the kids’ menu! I couldn’t have been more charmed if she’d said she’d been reading Schopenhauer. The second thing was, This can’t last. How could a girl who still believed in the tooth fairy fail to come around to the idea of a cosmic protector? And yet she didn’t. Her atheism had hardened to such a degree that any mention of spiritual matters made her snort milk out her nose. By inserting nothing in its stead, we had inadvertently given her the belief that she was the author of her own fate, and my wife’s newfound faith in a God-watched universe was as much a betrayal as crashing their car into the guardrail over a minor argument. It was a philosophical reversal my daughter couldn’t process, and it left her feeling utterly alone.

My wife and I felt perfectly awful. In due course our daughter emerged, with one condition: she didn’t want to discuss the accident. Not then, not ever. This seemed unhealthy, but you can’t make a twelve-year-old girl talk about something she doesn’t want to. We left for Cape Cod, where we’d rented a house for the month of July. I’d just turned in a manuscript to my editor and under ordinary circumstances would have been looking forward to the time away, but the trip seemed like too much data. Everyone was antsy and out of sorts, and the weather was horrible. The only person who enjoyed himself was our son, who was too young to comprehend the scope of events and was happy drawing pictures all day.

The school year resumed, and with it life’s ordinary rhythms. My wife began looking around for a church to attend. To say this was a sore spot with Iris would be a gross understatement. She hated the idea and said so. “Fine with me,” she said, “if you want to get all Jesus-y. Just leave me out of it.”

It didn’t happen right away. God may have shown his face to my wife in the parking lot, but he’d failed to share his address. We were stymied by the things we always had been: our jaundiced view of organized religion, the conservative social politics of most mainline denominations, the discomfiting business of praying aloud in the presence of people we didn’t know. And what, exactly, did we believe? Faith asks for a belief in God, which we had; religion asks for more, a great deal of it literal. Christian ritual was the most familiar, but neither of us believed that the Bible was the word of God or that Jesus Christ was a supernatural being who walked on water when he wasn’t turning it into wine. Certainly somebody by that name had existed; he’d gotten a lot of ink. He’d done and said some remarkable stuff, scared the living shit out of an imperial authority, and given humanity two thousand years’ worth of things to think about. But the son of God? Really? That Jesus was no more or less divine than the rest of us seemed to me the core of his message.

We wanted something, but we didn’t know what. Something with a little grace, a bit of wonder, the feeling of taking a few minutes out of each week to acknowledge how fortunate we were. We decided to give Unitarianism a shot. From the website, it seemed safe enough. Over loud objections, we made Iris come with us. The service was overseen by two ministers, a married couple, who took turns speaking from the altar, which seemed about as holy as the podium in a college classroom. After the hokey business of lighting the lamp, they droned on for half an hour about the importance of friendship. There were almost no kids in the congregation, or even anybody close to our age. It was a sea of whitehaired heads. After the service, everyone lingered in the lobby over coffee and stale cookies, but we beat a hasty retreat.

“Well, that was awkward,” Iris said.

It was. It had felt like sitting in the audience at a talk show. We tried a few more times, but our interest flagged. When, on the fourth Sunday, Iris found me making French toast in the kitchen in my bathrobe and asked why we weren’t going, I told her that I guessed church wasn’t for us after all. “Thank God,” she said, and laughed.

In the end, as in the scriptures, it was a child who led us. To our surprise, our son, Tuck, had become a secret Episcopalian. His school is affiliated with an Episcopal parish, and students attend chapel once a week. We’d always assumed this was the sort of wishy-washy, nondenominational fare most places dish out, but we were wrong. One day, apropos of nothing, as I was driving him home from school, he announced that he believed in Jesus.

“Really?” I said. “When did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged. “It just makes sense to me. Pastor

Lisa’s nice. We should go sometime.”

“To church, you mean?”

“Sure,” he said. “I think that would be great.”

Just like that, the matter was settled. We now go every week—the three of us. St. Stephen’s is located in a diverse neighborhood in Houston, and much of the congregation is gay or lesbian. There are protocols, but very loose ones, and the church has open communion and a terrific choir. Pastor Lisa is a woman in her fifties with a gray pageboy who wears blue jeans and Birkenstocks under her robe and gives a hug that feels like falling into bed. She knows I was raised Catholic, and she laughed when I told her that I didn’t mind that she “got some of the words wrong.” I have my doubts, as always, but it seems like a fine church to have them in. My son finds some of the service boring, as all children do, but he likes communion, which he calls his “force field for the week.” He has asked to be baptized next fall.

Will Iris be there? I hope so. But it’s her choice. She has yet to go with us. I know this makes her sad, and it makes me sad, too. It’s the first thing the three of us have ever done without her.

Three years after the accident, in spring 2012, I failed a blood test at my annual physical, then failed a biopsy and found myself, two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, facing a surgery that would tell me if I was going to see my children grow up. Two of my doctors assured me this would happen; a third said maybe grow up. Two of my doctors assured me this would happen; a third said maybe not. We were spending the summer on Cape Cod, where we’d bought a house, and in late July my wife and I flew back to Texas for my operation. When I awoke in the recovery room, my wife was standing over me, smiling. I was so dopey with painkillers that focusing on her face felt like trying to carry a piano up the stairs. “It’s over,” she said. “The margins were clear. You’re going to be okay.”

Two days after my surgery, I was instructed to walk. This sounded impossible, but I was determined. With my wife holding my arm, I shuffled up and down the hall of the ward, gritting my teeth against the discomfort of the catheter, which was the weirdest thing I’d ever felt. The last two months had pummeled me to psychological pieces, but the worst was over. Once again the car had rolled and we had walked away.

From the far end of the hall, a woman was approaching. Like a pair of ocean liners, we headed toward each other in slow motion. She was very thin and wearing a silk robe; like me, she was pulling an IV stand. Some greeting was called for, and she was the first to speak.

“May I give you something?”

We were within just a few feet of each other, and I saw what the situation was. Her body was leaving her; death was in her face.

“Of course.”

She gestured downward, indicating the pockets of her robe. “Pick one.”

I chose the left. With an uncertain hand she withdrew a wad of white cotton, tied with a bow. She placed it in my hand. It was an angel, made from a dish towel. To this she’d affixed a heart-shaped piece of laminated paper printed with these words from the Book of Numbers:

The Lord bless and keep you;

The Lord make his face shine upon you,

And be gracious to you;

May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you; And give you peace.

When I first learned about my illness, a very smart man told me that I should select an object. It could be anything, he said. A piece of jewelry. A spoon. A rock. Since I was a writer, maybe something to do with writing, such as a pen. It didn’t matter what it was. When I was afraid, he said, and thinking that I was going to die, I should take that object in my hand and put my fear inside it.

Wise as his counsel was, I’d never managed to do this. I’d tried one thing and then another. Nothing had felt right. This did. Not just right: miraculous.

then another. Nothing had felt right. This did. Not just right: miraculous.

“Bless you,” I said.

Two weeks later I returned to the Cape to complete my recovery. There wasn’t much I could do, but I was glad to be there. A few days before my diagnosis, I had bought a ten-year-old Audi convertible and shipped it north. Iris had just gotten her learner’s permit, and after a week of lounging around the house, I asked her if she’d take me for a drive. The day was sunny and hot. We put the top down and sped north, bisecting the peninsula on a rolling, two-lane road. From the passenger seat, I watched my daughter drive. In the past year a startling change had occurred. Iris wasn’t a kid anymore. She was taller than my wife, with a full, womanly shape. Her facial features had organized into mature proportions. Her hair, a honeyed red, swept away from her face in a stylish arc. She could have been mistaken for a college student, and often was. But the difference was more than physical; to look at my daughter was to know that she was somebody with a private, inner existence. She was standing at the edge of life; everything was ahead of her. All she had to do was let it come.

“How’s it feel?” I asked. She had perfect motorist’s manners: hands at ten and two, shoulders pressed back, eyes on the road. She was wearing large tortoiseshell sunglasses that would have been perfectly at home on Audrey Hepburn’s face. “Okay.”

“Not scary?”

She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

Our destination was a beach on the Cape’s north side, called Sandy Neck. From there, on the clearest days, you can see all the way from Plymouth to Provincetown. We parked and got out of the car and walked to the little platform built to take in the view. I knew we couldn’t stay long; even standing was an effort.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” I said.

Iris was looking away. “You didn’t. Not really.”

“Well, I was scared. I’m glad you weren’t.”

She thought a moment. “That’s the thing. I knew I should have been. But I wasn’t. I actually feel kind of guilty about that.”

“There’s no reason you should.”

“It’s just . . .” She hunted for the words. “I don’t know. You’re you. I just can’t imagine you not being okay.”

She was wrong. Someday I wouldn’t be. Time and chance would do its work, as it does for all of us. But she didn’t need to hear that from me on a sunny summer day.

“Do you remember the accident?” I asked.

She laughed, a little nervously. “Well, duh.”

“I’ve always wondered. What were you doing in the closet?”

“Not much. Mostly watching Project Runway on my laptop.”

“And being mad at us.”

She shrugged. “That whole God thing really pissed me off. I mean, you guys can believe whatever you want. I just wanted Mom to feel the same way I did.”

“How did you feel?”

She didn’t answer right away. Boats were creeping across the horizon.

“Abandoned.”

We were silent for a time. I had a sudden vision of myself as old—an old man, being taken to the beach by his grown daughter. The dunes, the ocean, the rocky margin where they met—all would be the same, unchanged since I was boy. It was a sad thought, but it also made me happy in a way that seemed new. These things were years away, and with any luck, I would be around to see them.

“Are you doing all right? Do you need to go back?”

I nodded. “Probably I should get off my feet.”

We returned to the car. Three steps ahead of me, Iris moved to the passenger side, opened the door, and got in.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She looked around. “Oh, right,” she said, and laughed. “I’m the driver, aren’t I?”

She was sixteen years old. I hoped someday she’d remember how it felt, how invincible, how alive. I’d heard it said that one tenth of parenting is making mistakes; the other nine are prayer and letting go. “Yes,” I said. “You are.”

MEGHAN DAUM