#grand couron

[mapping-elysium]

Postcards

Le Jardin '21

This laminated post card offers a glimpse across the river. A little more than a decade after the war, the eastern bank is already fully renovated. The hillsides are lush with gardens and residences, someone's parked a small beige airship by the fountain. This postcard will sell for a pretty penny.

Grand Couron '37

This postcard depicts an ill-advised residential area overlooking the Jamrock Quarter. 13-story buildings line the hillside like sarcophagi, an ominous fog already rising from behind. These are the last boom years -- in '39 the project fails catastrophically, leaving behind an opiate and hepatitis B infested slum.

Martinaise '98

A faded picture postcard from the end of the last century shows Martinaise as was before the Revolution. It's the height of summer, Rue de Saint-Ghislaine is teeming with parasol-wielding bourgeoisie and Wild Pines flags buttress the walkway. Nothing is written on the back.

Couron '33

This one has 'HELL' written on its back. It could not be further from the truth. It's the boom years, and Couron, the nicest district in Revachol West, is enjoying a sun drenched day. Tall and handsome buildings rise from the riverside: steel, iron and yellow limestone, with cloud shadows sliding on the facades.

Boogie Street '46

This crumpled up postcard depicts an open air market in Boogie Street ~5 years ago. A vendor smiles as dead roosters line his stalls -- hung by their feet from canopy. Red blood flows onto the muddy street, blurry shadows of people pass

[vorakh]

personally a fan of vintage revachol postcards

in order from left to right: martinase ('98); le jardin ('21); coal city ('08); grand couron ('37) and couron ('33); boogie street ('46)

+ la delta ('51)

[disco-archetypes]

YOU - "Wait. Grand Couron? What's that?"

PLAISANCE - "It's a *proper* place to live -- one of the most peaceful neighbourhoods east of Jamrock. You may know it for its massive housing projects..."

SHIVERS - Your head feels light and dizzy... a cold breeze caresses your flesh.

YOU - What's going on?

SHIVERS - Monstrous buildings loom over Grand Couron. A cold wind howls in the empty halls of homes built upon delusions.

YOU - Why?

SHIVERS - There is no life in Grand Couron. No one can afford to live there.

[kaijukebox]

[kicks in door with flowers] okay so kim, who often thinks of himself as pretty jaded when it comes to romanticism, secretly likes getting flowers. I imagine flowers being such a luxury, difficult to grow and pointless to sell to the poor districts that have no use for such a thing. So when Harry stumbles in one day with a fist full of buttercups he uprooted from the lawn of some house in Grand Couron, gleefully showing off the darker orange ones (“they match your jacket!”), Kim immediately finds a mug to house the little flowers and places them where he can stare at them all day.

So, (not so) fun fact, I was not alerted to this message and I just happened upon it last night…please forgive me 🥺

YOU. I need you to know that you have a beautiful, brilliant mind, and I want to make a home in it and live there forever!!💕!!✨ This made my whole month, and I am declaring it as canon, no one can stop me…how SWEET! I had to draw something to go along the lines of this, I hope you don’t mind hrnghfhdfh

[may--hawk]

star me kitten [Disco Elysium]

Summary:

The first time the detective calls you kitten, you think it’s a mistake. The second time Harry calls you kitten, you’re not in any shape to address it. And the third time he calls you kitten -

Rating: T

Pairing: Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi

Word Count: 4,982

The first time the detective calls you kitten, you think it’s a mistake. A drunken slip of the tongue, a stumble. Because he is drunk - glassy-eyed and red-faced and nearly asleep. It’s two months into your transfer to the 41st precinct, and after your transfer had come through and he had been cleared for field work, you found yourself out on the streets of Central Jamrock, solving crimes. Real crimes. Murder, drug-smuggling, syndicated crime rings. Mostly murder, though. At least it was a relief not to be solving murders committed by - or on other - juveniles. For the most part.

Your new job has you learning a new part of your city, of Revachol, and Harry learns it with you, although you note that his body retains a physical memory of the city that his mind hasn’t. Like when you say you’re hungry, and his feet are already turning towards the Rue de Suresnes, where you find the best Samaran food you’ve ever had. “Oh my god, Kim,” the detective says around a mouthful of food, “do you think I’ve been here before?”

“It’s a safe bet,” you say, watching as he licks creamy sauce off his thumb.

Things are tense with your new precinct, at first. You gather that Harry had burned a lot of bridges that he had personally built. Everyone is wary around him, as if they are all a bunch of stray dogs afraid of getting kicked, and you are lumped in with the detective, at first. You and the lieutenant solve no fewer than ten cases in your first two months. It’s astounding. Captain Pryce congratulates you, although you get the sense from the other officers this is nothing new. “Dick Mullen, showing us all up again,” Officer McLaine mutters. The cases are nearly split - half of them are figured out based on his hunch, the others based on your careful notes, your ability to see and connect patterns.

You drive in every day from the GRIH - the 57th had let you keep the Kineema, after extensive arguing and a little push from your new Captain, Harry tells you later in his matter-of-fact way that he uses when he tells you things he can’t possibly know. Some nights, when you stay at the precinct late, hot on a case, you stay the night at Harry’s, on his couch, although it has seen better days.

You’ve slept worse places.

You call each other, sometimes, when you can’t sleep, although it’s usually Harry calling you, nights when you sit up staring at the phone because you can’t sleep because the moon’s too bright, and you’d like to talk to Harry, to hear his voice - hear him telling you about circus horses, or communism, or what’s going on in the Burnt-Out Quarter right now - but you can’t bring yourself to do it. And then he’ll call you. “Hey, Kim, you up?” he’ll rasp into the phone, and you’ll say, “It’s hard to sleep when your phone’s ringing,” and the little breath he lets out straight into the receiver, right into your ear, means he knows you were up anyway - that’s why he’s calling - but he’ll let you have that one.

You see each other, sometimes, on your days off. Harry will call you because he’s heard about a bazaar he wants to check out in Fauborg, or an old example of Franconigerian architecture in Grand Couron - “Do you know architecture can be art?” he says to you in a hushed tone as you walk the streets of Grand Couron, trying and failing not to feel self-consciousness in your well-maintained but old jacket and boots. Your shoulders and elbows bumping together as you walk, because his neck is craned back. “I think it’s true.”

“Just about anything can be art, if you make the argument well enough,” you say to him. Sometimes you’ll do things you want to do, although Harry typically has to badger it out of you. Usually it’s work on the Kineema, or search parts stores scattered across Revachol for parts for the Kineema. Once, you go to a coffee and motor carriage event outside of Grand Couron, where you buy each of you coffee - yours black, Harry’s with room for disgusting amounts of cream and sugar - and stroll in the hot sun, the sun blinding off metallic paint finishes. Harry holds both your coffees eagerly and well-away from the motor-carriages as you lean over engines and point things out to him, and sometimes he’ll parrot things back to you - “that’s a torque-converter, right, Kim? That’s an intake manifold?” And you say, “No, detective, that’s the washer fluid reservoir.” Or, “yes, detective, well-done.”

Continue reading on AO3.

[ignitingthesky]

The Previous World Mural — a dreamscape transposition of The Next World Mural to somewhere, somewhen else.

The gif compressed the images but I will also post them as a clearer image set, to be linked in a reblog.

Excerpt of accompanying ficlet below. Decided to just post the segment of it I've finalised since I won't have the time to work on it for a very long while.

artblog @chromacandescent

kofi | inprnt 🪻🌷🌹

Excerpt:

You stand on an unfamiliar street, across a familiar mural. The pavement is dimly lit, blue warring with orange between the shadow and light. The streets are populated with faceless shadows. The sky, indistinguishably and eerily hazy, holds the morning moon and the dawning sun distantly together. The world is fading… smearing at its edges.

PERCEPTION — The mural is the only thing you recognise here, depicting featureless silhouettes: one in white paint, engulfed by one in black. They are lovers leaning together, heads meeting in a kiss. A circle of red paint forms a halo around their heads, enclosing that moment of tenderness.

CONCEPTUALIZATION — Despite being close enough to melt into one, the lovers remain distinct, separate, impossibly apart.

REACTION SPEED [Medium: Success] — Like The Next World Mural, from your ledger.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT — Wasn't that one about a man and a woman?

Is *this* Grand Couron?

Is this... the next world?

YOU — Is this... the next world?

INLAND EMPIRE — No. A previous world…

PREVIOUS WORLD MURAL — True love remains impossible. We are not new people.

PAIN THRESHOLD — There is no escape.

VOLITION — But you can, and you have started anew.

PERCEPTION — Either way, the silhouettes *are* too ambiguously rendered to belong to the Next World Mural, so…

YOU — "I've never seen you before… have I?"

PREVIOUS WORLD MURAL — Of course you haven't. Look around you... Where were you, and where are you now?

ENCYCLOPEDIA — You have no idea. 

BLOCK ??? — Before you is a towering, utilitarian structure, built to shelve a massive population. This building is one of many, its sequential sign obscured by the mural.

There are 11– no, 12 floors in total, including the ground floor, which has been obscured behind sheet metal barriers.

PERCEPTION — The scent in the air is unfamiliar. Despite the fumes of traffic and paint, the distant cigarette smoke, the wet pavement, the damp grass…

INLAND EMPIRE [Formidable: Success] — There is nothing haunting in the air. No ghosts between the molecules — not for you. The wind is silent of her sighs.

(tbc)

[volivolition]

Your tags in my notes give me life every time 🙏🙏thank you so much!

I would love to hear your thoughts on what might happen to Esprit post-RCM!! And yeah poor electrochem... I think it was meant for the little daily dopamine highs of life, the good food and new experiences and cute cats, but it's been hijacked by addiction into something best ignored :((

!! YESS omg of course, you make such good art AND writing i have gotta pay my respects!! hgkjh delighted to see your DE fanworks always :3 <33

!! HELL YES I WOULD LOVE TO SHARE, and its so cool to have that echem mention because it's a really good parallel: YES!! Electrochemistry is made to take care of general mesolimbic system reports and for lil everyday happy dopamine moments, little treats and smiles from kim hkjhg but it gets fucked up by addiction because HOLY SHIT life is AWFUL and DEPRESSING and surely drugs and alcohol will save us!! :')

AND SIMILARLY!! i think Esprit De Corps (literally Group Spirit or team spirit) is originally meant to be a skill of Community and Belonging, but gets fucked up by the RCM!! more under cut because this is LONG hgkjh

in my headcanons, Esprit is the youngest skill to form, but it wasn't as late as the RCM. Originally, I think that Esprit was made for the kinship Harry felt for the The Fifteenth Indotribe. Harry and seven other kids, running together as a group of friends causing trouble, this was Harry's first sense of belonging somewhere. Pretty low level and not as psychically linked, just happy to feel connected to people. When the indotribe eventually fell apart, Esprit was left fractured and dormant for a while as Harry drifted from having a sense of community. Esprit for real, at this point in time, Esprit is a ghost of a fury, low level and barely tangible.

(The thing holding them together was their attachment to the other skills, because at least they're still part of a group that way, even if Harry wasn't. Friends with Empathy, a part of the psyches, one of the 24 skills. If Esprit lacked those bonds with the other furies, its likely they would have faded entirely.)

Then Harry became a gym teacher, and Esprit returns as Esprit L'école (School Spirit :3) which helps him communicate with school staff, faculty and students. And Harry cares about this new community dearly. Deeply tender at heart, Harry loves the kids in his classes and finds camaraderie with his coworkers and wants the best for this school. Not just the best gym teacher, he's one of the best teachers in general. He puts his everything into this school, and Esprit L'école thrives in this new environment for several years.

Then they meet Dora, and shit gets fucked!! Dora convinces Harry to join the RCM, and Esprit fractures further. Unlike the Fifteenth Indotribe or the Grand Couron High School, this isn't something he finds community in. I mean, they think they do at first. The RCM is meant to help the community, right? Surely working here will bolster Esprit? But y'know how it goes, RCM culture is harsh and immoral and corrupted at its heart, for the scarce good they can do, there is so, so much bad for the community and god Esprit is hurting.

...but this is for Dora, and trying to put a bandage on a dying relationship, so Esprit De Corps forces it. Forces themselves to lean hard into the kinship with cops and to fit into police culture and conform to RCM standards, forces himself to be The Cop Skill. All of the skills at this point are going into overdrive as well, Volition tries to focus on hard work in hopes that it will pay off in the long run, Empathy tries to make himself smaller so he's not in the way, Echem is RUNNING OUT OF DOPAMINE and oh hey, this speed shit makes us a better cop, I'll take it!! dear god, the RCM is fucking over ALL THE SKILLS, everyone is struggling at this point.

And Dora leaves. Harry suffers, and so do the skills, and trying to distract from it, they just launch themselves HARDER into the RCM shit. nothing else to live for, to do, throw all reluctance to the wind, work yourself to the brink of death. 18 total years of service, 216 cases, above 90% of officers in the entire RCM, a Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor. Renowned and accomplished; this is not the community Esprit De Corps loves, but it is the one he's entrenched in, and nothing, not even amnesia, can detach him from this.

Until they quit.

honestly ive seen like! a few fics where harry quits the RCM, and always thought, "oh hey nice acab :] ...HEY WAIT WHAT'S ESPRIT DOING." so i made a fic, because a LOT of my fics are focused on the skills side of things. the humans are no longer my priority, i am a skills lover and my fucking god i gotta make my own food around here [gestures at several in-progress pasta bakes and cake batters and salad ingredients because EVERYTHING IS WIPS]

there was a first concept that was just like "DOES ESPRIT JUST DISAPPEAR???" which would have been TRAGIC and i could've made a whole cool thing about it but im alrEADY WORKING ON SEVERAL MULTI-CHAPTERS HKJHG and that's not how skills work in my canon <3

so my fic is a oneshot called "Who Are You, If Not..." because when you've made your whole life one thing and that thing gets taken away from you, who do you become? and its not very plot heavy, it's just a late-night conversation between the psyche skills.

here's a snippet from while i was working on the coding hkgjh

(since i write a lot of skills, i have this style where i put all skill actions in the [check] color and leave dialogue in white, which is a little restrictive to work with but i like how it turns out <33)

to lose a group you attached yourself to, even if they were bad for you, even if everything about it sucked. but you keep checking in, you keep instinctively going back because at least it was something. ough... i think it's scary for them, yknow? he's losing touch with what he based his existence around, and he knows its for the better, but it's... complicated hkjgh

ANYWAY THOSE ARE MY ESPRIT THOUGHTS HKJHG <33 thank you for reading if you did!! i LOVE the concept of esprit being more than just the cop skill, he's the skill of community to me!! hkjhg yay :]

[o-wyrmlight]

A Toast To The Pigs: A Disco Elysium fanfic wherein Harry Du Bois fails to lose his memory and has to solve the Martinaise case anyway.

Chapter 3: Juvenile Delinquency: In which Harry Du Bois and Kim Kitsuragi approach the body, meet two uncooperative brats, and talk about Contact Mike.

This child reminds you of yourself. He’s throwing rocks at a body in a tree, landing the vast majority of them. The child behind him on the other side of the fence isn’t from Revachol—you can tell by her accent and the strange words that she uses—but they could almost be siblings. You’ve never had siblings, but a part of your childhood feels a kinship nonetheless. He has wild eyes with pupils blown out the size of the moon. You’ve seen children like him before—both in the brief few months you worked as a juvie patrol officer when you first joined the RCM eighteen years ago and in the classes that you taught in Grand Couron before then. Children like Cuno often came from bad families infested with drugs and alcohol. You didn’t come from a bad family. You grew up poor, but your mother loved you. You wonder if anybody ever loved Cuno. Children like Cuno need to be handled carefully. You know this from experience. You’ve always thought, in the back of your mind, that you might someday be a good father. You might quit drinking and taking speed if that happened. You’d try to, at least. Try hard. But Dora disagreed. She didn’t want a family with you. It’s hard not to feel resentful about it.

“Cuno’s gonna throw a rock so hard it’ll melt your brains out, pig! Burn a hole through your skull! Brain’s gonna drip out like a fucking faucet! Maximum fucking velocity!”

Harrier left the child behind him, ambling over toward Kim, the painkiller helping to steady his gait but still keeping it uneven with that ridiculous (stylish) heel his shoe had. He came up to Kim and stood next to him, turning to face the yard at large, arms folded over his chest.

“I wouldn’t worry about them,” Harrier said, whispering indiscreetly. His voice was quiet, low. The whisper of tequila. “They seem relatively harmless.”

[disco-elysium-quotes]

Elsewhere yet, an obese female sits in a wicker chair, her silhouette ball-like against the window. Outside: Grand Couron. The day is turning dim for Sergeant Mack Torson. Hand extended, he approaches.

[boogiestreetshakes]

Fuck, marry, kill; Kim, Jean, Titus

I know you asked me this because you thought it would be hard. Because you think I'd be like 'Ohhhh the choice is too difficult I just want to fuck them all' but you're WRONG the answer is obviously to kill Jean because *he's* the one always giving us shit for drinking, always on the 'shitkid's at it again' thing and its SUCH a buzzkill. He knows we used to party together back in the day and he's just a hater because he got kicked out of the squad.

The next answer, also obvious, is Fuck Titus. You've seen his muscles? You seen the way his toned thighs strain against the worn denim of his work pants? His dick bulge the size of Grand Couron? There's just no question. We would climb him like a tree and let him spit in our face. I'd personally floss my teeth on his pubes.

And that leaves marry for Kim, and you knew this would be the outcome but you still asked anyways because you thought I'd struggle because I wanna fuck him so bad, but what you don't get is that if you *marry* someone, you get to fuck them more than one time. You get to fuck them crazy so many times, it's like the hottest part of being married to someone. Of course we'd marry Kim because that's a man worth riding like a horse for the rest of forever.

And also if we marry Kim then we get to sniff his undies when its our turn to do laundry and you just don't get that from a man like Titus or Jean

[mapping-elysium]

Map Wall: Map of Revachol

Revachol:

North Coast of La Caillou

“Shattered by the delta” of the Esperance

Series of river islands and distributaries

EAST REVACHOL

Le  Jardin

Stella Maris

Saint-Batiste (made up of suburbs, home of Saint-Batiste pharmaceutical company)

WEST REVACHOL

Couron

not Grand-Couron [district in jamrock] The Lower Middle Class (Possibly the district the GRIH/57th is in?)

Jamrock

Burnt out Quarter in the heart of jamrock

Faubourg

“Almost as bad” and much bigger than Jamrock 

Coal City

Poverty district

Martinaise

North of Jamrock Strip of coast next to the GRIH 1200m distance between bookstore and church

NOTES: Finding the factoid about the distance between the bookstore and the church is HUGE! It gives us more of a scale to the map. I need to track down the conversation sources but i still want to note that Couron and Grand-Couron are separate locations.

Map Wall - Several maps have been attached to a bulletin board hidden inside the alcove. They're held up by small pins. The board has come loose from one corner.

Map Wall - The maps look old and faded. Your eye catches a map of Insulinde, a map of Revachol, and a map of Martinaise.

You - Look at the map of Revachol.

Map Wall - The north coast of a verdant island is shattered by the delta of a river. It is the River Esperance. Countless bridges put the shards back together, connecting city blocks to river islands. *La Delta*, says a great, artificial heart in the centre, teeming with lifeforms and construction.

Map Wall - To the east, rolling hillsides: Le Jardin, Stella Maris, the suburbs of Saint-Batiste, swallowed up into the megacity. They sound *rich* to you. This is Revachol East.

You - And west of the river?

Map Wall - Couron. It's somewhere to live. Not bad. Then there's Jamrock -- it's *bad*. People shouldn't live there, but they do. Then Faubourg -- it's almost *as* bad and much larger. Then Coal City. It's the worst.

You - And Martinaise?

Map Wall - It's so small you can't even see it on the map. No... wait. There it is! North of Jamrock, the strip of coast next to the Greater Revachol Industrial Harbour. It looks downright despondent. It's almost Coal City, to be honest.

Shivers - No. Coal City is worse. A charred limb. Rain falls on its slick black streets. And then there's the Burnt-Out Quarter in the heart of Jamrock... is it cold in this bookstore, or is it just *you*?

Volition - No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.

Inland Empire - You feel you're *just* west of Coal City. Somewhere above Jamrock and close to Coal City.

[disco-elysium-via-polls]

3. Read a case file.

LOGIC - It takes about half an hour to piece one together, using the system you've devised. Which one do you want?

THE NEXT WORLD MURAL

THE UNSOLVABLE CASE

THE SQUARE BULLET HOLE MURDERS

THE COUCH IN AN UNEXPECTED LOCATION

MURDER AT THE HOOKAH PARLOUR

I can revisit this. (Put the case files away.)

DAMAGED LEDGER - This one is relatively easy to reconstruct. Overnight on 12/02. a graffito -- nay, a mural! -- appears on an eight story tenement overlooking Central Jamrock. The building is a sparsely inhabited ghost tower, part of a failed real estate development called Grand Couron.

The mural is enormous. Two silhouettes -- a man and a woman -- are kissing. The text cut into their forms reads:

TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD -- FOR NEW PEOPLE IT IS TOO LATE FOR US WREAK HAVOC ON THE MIDDLE CLASS

People call it *that thing* and *that fucking thing*. It’s visible for miles. In two days the station's complaints desk gets clogged with requests to remove *The Bummer*. You and your partner are assigned to the case.

The graffito crew is easy to track down. Only the Belles Lettres have the *literage* of industrial paint to cover the surface. (One of the graffito artists is rumoured to be *rich*.) They take responsibility for the execution, but not the design. The ideologue of the *Next World Mural* -- as the crew calls it -- remains an unknown.

Wait, do I ever find out who came up with it?

Read on.

DAMAGED LEDGER - The case files do not show you finding the author of the design.

Read on.

DAMAGED LEDGER - The crew agrees to clean up after themselves. However, your partner -- JV -- is against the removal, citing public support for conservation. This leads to a debate in Precinct 41, which then spreads to the streets of Jamrock. Ending in a rare plebiscite -- organized by you and the rest of Row III.

The nine thousand people subjected to the mural’s message -- all of Lakeside (Central Jamrock) and Villalobos, plus half of the Eminent Domain -- participate in the vote. Although the case begins with what appears to be a lot of rumbling on the streets as to how juvenile and stupid the mural is, given a choice between two options...

A) REMOVE THE MURAL, IT IS WRONG

B) KEEP THE MURAL, IT IS RIGHT

DAMAGED LEDGER - A staggering seventy-eight percent of voters choose to keep it. Turns out the opposition were a loud minority. And that love truly is possible in the next world -- for new people. And it is too late for us.

[visual-calc]

Do you remember the wheel of pleasure and light? There’s a fair in Grand Couron this week that will have one. You should bring the lieutenant— maybe then he will understand what you saw that night in Martinaise.

[flhoarder]

Spring, ‘32, Grand Couron, Revachol

Harry du bois, gym teacher and substitute coach for regional high school games: Calling off a match between two schools when a pox-scarred kid was pushed to the ground and trampled by both teams in the middle of the game.

Later in the week he got a phone call from the kid, clearly forced by his parents to call and grumpily thanked Harry for saving him from breaking all 4 limbs. Dora jokingly commented that Harry upheld justice- he’d make a good RCM officer.

Spring ‘48, Jamrock, Revachol

Harry du bois, RCM officer, customarily drunk, pausing at his new partner’s self introduction: “I uh- recognise your voice from somewhere.”

His new partner, dryly: “You don’t say?”

Harry du bois, trying to stifle a hiccup and see straight at the same time: “There was this- From- *hiccup* Uh. *tapping forehead* No, it’s gone. Bad memory- 2 bottles of whisky.”

His new partner, nodding stiffly. “Probably a coincidence. People sound alike.”

Harry du bois, bleary-eyed: “huh. What-“

His new partner, whose name Harry already forgot: “The voice thing. It’s just a coincidence. You are drunk. You should run along.”

[harry-du-barry]

Anon from yesterday here, i'm not even gonna try to pretend I know the Ins and Outs of your situation, I don't, so feel free to ignore this

You, honest to Dei, do not write like a man who's 'only good at drowning'

And 'not being the man you were before' doesn't sound like just treading water, may absolutely not feel like it but the fact you know it's bad - is a huge thing

I don't know about people listening, at least my colleagues are mostly Larger Than Life bastards, fully agreeing on your opinion on the RCM btw, I personally think the problem starts much higher but there's nothing I can do i guess

Anyhow, if people have it in them to listen, and most people do, they will over time. Humans are so incredibly bad at not caring long term. So if that's what you want, it's gonna happen at some point

I got dumped, anon. Like six or seven or eight or so years ago. She swam away from me to Mirova and left me to suffer with a job that's slowly killing me and a government that doesn't care about us. It's pathetic. I know. I should be over it. I shouldn't love her as much as I hate her, and I shouldn't hate her as much as I do. I've never really been that good at managing my emotions.

I used to have more practice at pretending like I do, but over the years, that's kind of been shot down to shit. It gets harder and harder to keep myself together and not take it out on the people that surround me. Violently. The man I am is an animal that lurks in the deep sea, waiting to drown anybody who dares to come within arm's reach.

My lungs hurt, my body hurts, and I will never be that gym teacher in Grand Couron ever again. He's just another man for me to grieve. That chance left me with booze and drugs. Lot of medicine you can't take with booze and drugs. Lot of shit that might help me if I stopped taking booze and drugs, but it's so fucking hard and it feels so nice in the short term.

I... people do care about me. I know people care about me. I just get so angry sometimes that I don't want to believe it. I know I hurt them and I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to be that kind of animal. I don't want to be the creature that drags people down into my leviathan teeth.

But it's inevitable. I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you.

It doesn't change what you've done.

I know. I'm sorry.

[ask-the-furies]

How are things today Shivers?

SHIVERS— The air is balmy and the sun is high. Noon.

SHIVERS— In Boogie Street, smoke pours from the mouth of a person sitting on the patio of a hookah lounge. They speak, animated, holding court with a small group of strangers, calling them elle and Grande folles.

SHIVERS— A family of four holds hands while they cross a street in Grand Couron. The youngest girl steps in dog poop and cries.

SHIVERS— Heavy industrial beams lay like a stripped skeleton in a fenced-off Villalobos block. The remains of the building are scheduled for demolition in a week. A small homeless contingent huddles in the shade, noses shielded by scarves and handkerchiefs.

SHIVERS— Small waves crest the Martinese coast. A red-haired boy throws rocks into the water aimlessly.

SHIVERS— The Jamrock Public Library is almost empty. A balding man sits behind the front desk, taking apart a pen, bored. A book falls into the book drop— Poems Of The New Century, published in ‘01. Pages are still dog-eared in it.