#gull records

[plus-low-overthrow]

Isotope - Retracing My Steps (Gull)

1974.

[mymelodic-chapel]

Judas Priest- Rocka Rolla (Hard Rock) Released: September 6, 1974 [Gull Records] Producer(s): Rodger Bain

[liquidstar]

This is such a tangent btw but on the topic of guilt tripping and reblogs... I remember a few years back there were some terrible fires in Greece (and again this year, entire island villages are gone now) and at that time I had family who were caught in them. I can't describe the desperation I felt with these horrible things happening to my family and loved ones in my country. And I remember being frustrated and desperate with how no one around me in America really seemed to give a shit. I remember blogging asking people to PLEASE care please share something please reblog this link for mutual aid please think about the stories and fires etc etc etc. And the thing is I was very much in a state of grief myself, maybe not every word or action was perfectly reasonable, because I don't realistically expect everyone everywhere to care about every tragedy in the world. You can't. Emotionally it's just not possible, especially with all the stuff going on in the states rn too. Yeah it's a lot. It's not like I blog about every tragedy that ever happens either. I understand.

HOWEVER what I also remember was at this time there were a couple mutuals very clearly making vagueposts along the lines of "remember not everyone has the energy to care about everything in the world uwu" while I was posting about family who died and family who were drifting in the ocean for hours as their homes and loved ones burned. Listen. You have to understand sometimes that when a person in grief and frustration with things going on in their countries and communities impacts them very personally beg you to care... It's coming from a place of needing to see that care in the world in general. They're not holding a gun to your head Specifically saying you have to reblog the posts, if you don't have the energy just ignore it.

You don't have to go out of your way saying "um actually I can't care about the horrible stuff you and your family and your country are experiencing rn. I'm too busy focusing on my own stuff so can you be quiet or more reasonable with your grief thanks." Like. Just keep it to yourself then??? Have some fucking sympathy for other people and understand that maybe it's not always logical. The same way you don't have the emotional energy to think about every tragedy in the world, people who've been impacted by them often don't have the emotional energy to handle that alone and may seek somekinda community or solidarity. Idk. It's not about forcing shit on you sometimes it's not about you

[foundsoundsart]

Blackpool at 07:00

Blackpool

[heesmiles]

SEA FOAM N.RK

೨౿ ⠀  ׅ ⠀   ̇  21k ⸝⸝ . ‌ ׅ ⸺ word count.

pairings ✧⠀ ͚֯ ni-ki ៹ fem ! reader ᧁ;angst ˒ summer romance ˒ slice of life

warnings ◞ ⠀ ⭑⠀ ⠀ׂ angst summer romance ni-ki works at a record shop on the pier very insta lovey death

in which ࿐ With the smell of salt and seafoam in the air, you fell in love. In a quiet town, on a quiet hill, in a quiet home. The hum of the ac whirling and the feel of sand on your toes. Sea shells piled high on your front porch and a tan so golden you could thank the sun personally as it was clear the two of you were friends, and a boy, tall and lanky. Quiet but so very expressive shows up and ruins it all. Leaving the smell of the sea now bitter.

★ ! rain's mic is on ⋆ ͘ . god I live for heartbreaking summer romances like these. Also, I have little to no knowledge about record stores and records in general all of my research came from unverified google searches so beware I could be way off. Sorry if the ending is a little rushed. i kinda rushed this, so if there is any inconsistencies im sorry.

You’re sweating by the time you carry the third box up the porch steps, palms stinging from cardboard edges and sea salt already clinging to your skin like memory. The wind smells like brine and old wood, like stories left too long in the sun. Your mother follows behind you, arms full, her voice soft with nostalgia. "She kept the porch the same," she murmurs, half to herself. "Even the wind chime." 

You glance at it — a tangle of glass and driftwood — clinking above the door like it’s welcoming you in, or warning you away. Inside, the air is still. A little musty, but not unpleasant. You set the box down with a thud that echoes too loudly, like you’ve intruded. Like the house wasn’t ready for your arrival. “Is there any way I can come back early?” you ask, wiping your hands on your jeans. “Like after a month, maybe?” 

Your mother shakes her head, not unkindly. “Three months, sweetheart. That’s what we agreed. She’s your only grandmother. And she asked for you.” You nod, even if you don’t understand it — not fully. You never really knew her. She sent birthday cards with spidery handwriting and once mailed you a book about sea glass. But she was always a whisper at the edge of your life, a stranger with your mother’s eyes. “I just don’t want to waste the whole summer,” you mutter, mostly to yourself. 

Your mother smiles as she opens a window, letting in the sound of gulls and the slow hush of the tide. “You won’t. I loved growing up here. The sea — it was like a second home to me. I think, by the end of the summer, you’ll feel the same.” You don’t believe her. But you say, “Okay,” anyway. You don’t unpack all at once. There’s something about the act that feels too final, like admitting you’re really here, like committing to the idea that this house, this salt-worn cradle of creaks and shadows, is yours for the summer. So you leave the boxes half-full, your clothes draped across the bed like discarded thoughts, and drift from room to room instead, letting the space introduce itself to you in its own time. 

The house is old, but it breathes. You can feel it in the floorboards that groan under your steps, in the walls that carry echoes of laughter long since dissolved into dust. There are photographs faded to sepia on the mantel — a young woman in a sundress you’re told is your grandmother, all wind-blown hair and wild grin, holding a fishing pole like a sword. The sea is behind her, always behind her. Like a shadow or a promise. By the time twilight folds itself into the corners of the sky, your mother and grandmother are in the kitchen, their voices mingling with the clatter of cutlery and the hiss of something frying in butter. The scent of garlic and lemon curls through the hallway like a beckoning hand, but you slip out the back door before it can catch you. 

The backyard is a suggestion more than a space — a sloping strip of grass that quickly gives way to sand, and then to sea. The beach begins where the porch ends, and the ocean feels like it’s breathing just for you. You kick off your shoes at the edge of the deck and step onto the sand, warm and soft, like the sigh of something ancient and half-awake. It sinks between your toes, gentle and slow, like the earth is welcoming you home in a language older than speech. The wind tousles your hair with fingers made of sky, and you close your eyes, tipping your face toward the horizon. 

The sea is a mouth and a heartbeat, a secret keeper, a lullaby that never ends. It smells of rusted anchors and forgotten summers, of salt and sun and something that thrums just beneath the surface — longing, maybe. Or memory. You walk until the water reaches you, first your ankles, then your calves, cool and certain. It doesn’t ask questions. It just is. 

And you love it. You love the way it touches you without needing anything back. The way it roars and hushes, unbothered and infinite. The sea doesn’t care that you’re uncertain, or that this house still feels like a stranger. It accepts you the way the sky accepts stars — without hesitation. For a moment, you let yourself imagine staying like this forever — suspended between sand and surf, the wind combing secrets into your hair. You could vanish here, you think. And maybe the world wouldn’t notice. Or maybe it would, but forgive you. 

You're halfway to becoming driftwood when you hear your mother calling your name, her voice soft and sharp, carried just so by the wind. You turn back, slow and reluctant, the sea tugging at your ankles like it doesn’t want to let you go. “Coming,” you call, though your voice is quieter than hers, and maybe the sea swallows it whole. You walk back barefoot, your footprints already fading behind you, as though you were never there. And above you, the stars begin to wake — blinking one by one like they, too, have only just arrived. 

Dinner is eaten at a round table that creaks with age, its surface scratched and soft in places, as if it had been loved too hard by too many hands. The plates are mismatched, chipped at the edges like sea glass — not perfect, but shaped by time into something beautiful. Your mother and grandmother speak in the gentle rhythm of people who once knew each other well but have learned to be careful. Their conversation drifts like gulls on the wind — light, circling, sometimes dipping low into silence, sometimes carried away in bursts of laughter that feel too sudden, like they’re chasing something before it disappears. 

They talk about the town the way old sailors talk about the sea — with reverence and a touch of sorrow. Your mother leans back in her chair, her eyes half-lidded as she watches the twilight press against the window like a sleeping cat. “So much has changed,” she murmurs. “That café near the church is gone. The one with the lemon scones.” 

“Oh, that place turned into a surfboard rental years ago,” your grandmother says with a snort. “Lemon scones don’t do well in salt air. Surfboards, though? Those float.” They both laugh, and the sound is warm, like the golden spill of lamplight across the old wood floor. You stay quiet for the most part, listening. Watching. You’ve always been better at observing than participating, like a lighthouse — present but distant, lit from within but only ever shining outward. 

Your mother’s smile fades a little as she looks around the kitchen, her eyes lingering on the floral wallpaper peeling at the corners, the weathered cabinets, the window above the sink that frames the sea like a painting left unfinished. “I love your father,” she says softly, “and I love the city. But sometimes… I miss this. The quiet. The way the air smells like rain and salt. Seoul is so loud, so fast. It never lets you breathe.” Your grandmother reaches over, lays a hand over hers. “The sea’s always been patient. That’s why some people come back to it.” 

They both look at you then, like maybe you’re a compass needle trying to decide where to point. “There’s a pier,” your grandmother says, her voice gentler now, lined with a kind of hope that makes your chest tighten. “A lovely one. It’s changed, too, of course, but it still smells like sugar cones and fish and the ocean. You might like it. You should walk it sometime.” 

“I want to find a summer job,” you say, surprising even yourself with how quickly the words spill out. “Something small. I don’t want to just sit around.” 

Your grandmother’s mouth draws into a line, her fingers twitching slightly where they rest against the table. “You don’t need to do that. This is your summer. You’re here to rest. To be with me.” 

“I know,” you say, gently. “But I want to. I need something to do. Something that’s mine.” There’s a pause, like the house itself is holding its breath. Then she nods, reluctantly, the corners of her eyes softening. “Well, then,” she says, “the pier’s the perfect place to look. If you’re determined.” And you are. After dinner, with your hair still scented faintly of lemon and smoke, you slip out into the violet hush of Anchor–Crest’s evening. The town is quieter now, blanketed in the kind of calm that only truly settles over places close to the sea — as if the tide takes the noise with it each time it pulls away from shore.

The streets are mostly empty, save for the flicker of moths dancing beneath the halo of streetlamps and the occasional rustle of a breeze slipping through half-cracked shutters. The buildings huddle close together like old friends, their wood-paneled sides faded from years of sun and salt, their neon signs dimmed or gone entirely dark. It’s closer to nine than eight, and the town seems to be tucking itself into bed. But the pier is still awake. It stretches out before you like a song just beginning — long and wide, its planks worn smooth by thousands of footsteps, millions of stories. The air here is different, charged somehow, like anything could happen if you just walked far enough into the dark. The sea murmurs beneath you, a low and constant lullaby, and above you the stars have gathered like curious onlookers, blinking down as if to say go on. 

You walk slowly, your fingers brushing the splintered railings, your breath syncing with the gentle slap of waves against the pylons below. Shops line the pier like shells scattered by a thoughtful tide — a taffy place with its windows shuttered tight, a bait shop closed early with a sign that reads Gone Fishin’, Try Tomorrow, a crêpe cart tucked beneath a striped awning that still smells faintly of sugar and butter. Then, you see it. Tucked between a surfboard rental place and a store that sells miniature ships in bottles — a record shop. Small, crooked, and slightly slouched, as if it’s been trying to lean into the wind for years and just gave up. Its windows are cloudy with age, soft amber light bleeding through like a secret it’s trying to keep to itself. There are faded posters in the glass — album covers yellowed by the sun, a handwritten list of band names in glitter gel pen, curling at the edges.

And there, taped just below the handle of the door, a sign: Help Wanted. Inquire Within. 

You pause, heartbeat quickening a little in that strange, familiar way it does when the universe seems to wink at you. The kind of feeling you get when you find a four-leaf clover or hear your favorite song at the exact moment you need it most. You reach for the door. It creaks when you push it open, the bell above it giving a tired little jingle, like it’s been doing this so long it can’t quite muster the enthusiasm. Inside, the air is warm and smells like dust and vinyl, the nostalgic musk of sound long stored and waiting to be played again. Rows of records line the narrow aisles like soldiers at ease — some alphabetized, some utterly chaotic.  The door gives a soft jingle as it swings shut behind you, muffling the sea’s lullaby. Inside, the air is thick with time — the kind of air that hums with memory, like it’s holding its breath between songs.

The lighting is soft, golden, as if someone filtered the world through a sepia photograph. Lamps with beaded shades stand in the corners like forgotten sentinels, casting halos across cracked linoleum and rows of leaning shelves. Dust floats lazily in the beams, turning the shop into a snow globe left in a summer window. You move slowly, reverently — a traveler stepping into an ancient temple. The records stretch before you in endless alphabetized aisles, their glossy sleeves worn and faded, spines like whispered names waiting to be called. Your fingers trace them lightly, one by one, a silent prayer to the gods of sound. Bowie. Simone. The Beatles. Unknown names scribbled in Sharpie over plastic sleeves. 

You’re halfway down an aisle when your hand settles on a Nirvana album — In Utero, the cover a strange ballet of beauty and grotesque, angel wings and anatomy. You pause, studying the art, the ache in its palette. “You like Nirvana?” a voice says, cracking the quiet like a dropped needle on a fresh vinyl. You jump slightly, turning toward the sound. He’s leaning against the end of the aisle, half-shadowed in lamplight. Tall. Lanky in the way that suggests his limbs have only just recently agreed to coexist. His hoodie hangs off him like it’s still deciding if it belongs. His hair is messy, wind-tossed even indoors, and his eyes — sharp, dark, and somehow curious all at once — flicker from your face to the record and back again. 

You blink. “Yeah. Who doesn’t?” 

He shrugs, shuffling a step closer. “Some people pretend to. For the aesthetic.” 

You raise an eyebrow, smirking. “Do I look like I’m pretending?” He smiles — a crooked, lopsided thing that seems surprised to be on his own face. “No. You look like someone who knows the difference between ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and ‘All Apologies.’” 

You laugh, and something in the air shifts — a soft vibration, like the low hum before a favorite song begins. He walks toward you, slipping his hands into the front pocket of his hoodie. “I’m Ni-ki,” he says.You offer your name in return, and the way he repeats it under his breath — testing the syllables like a lyric — makes your cheeks warm in a way the ocean wind never could. 

He leans against the shelf beside you, scanning the rows. “So what brings you into this little vinyl graveyard?” You glance at the Help Wanted sign in the window, still fluttering like a hopeful flag. “Looking for a summer job. Figured this place might be a good start.” 

He perks up, amused. “Really? You think you’re record store material?”

You cross your arms. “Depends. Is there a test?”

He grins. “There might be.”

And then he does quiz you — half-serious, half-mocking, fully intrigued. He asks which Beatles album came before Sgt. Pepper’s, who originally released Rumours, what the difference is between a 45 and an LP. You answer most of them with more confidence than you expected, and when you get one wrong, he pretends to gasp like you've committed treason, but you can see the approval tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“You know your stuff,” he says finally, tapping a record spine. “Or you fake it really well.”

“Thanks,” you say dryly. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me today.” 

He laughs, then bites his lip like he’s deciding something. “Alright. You’re in.” 

Your brows lift. “That’s it? I’m hired?” 

“I’m in charge right now,” he says, mock-grandly. “My cousin owns the place, but he’s in love or backpacking or both. Anyway, I basically run things. And you passed the vibe check.” You can’t help the way your smile slips out. “When do I start?”

“Saturday morning,” he replies. “Sharp. Don’t be late — unless you bring donuts. Then I might forgive you.” You nod, backing toward the door. “Duly noted.” He follows you a few steps, leaning against the frame as you open the door, the chime above it ringing again like applause. 

“Oh,” he adds as you step out into the salty hush of the pier. “And bring that Nirvana energy with you. The real kind.”

You shoot him a grin over your shoulder. “Only if you promise not to quiz me again.”

“No promises,” he calls after you.

The door closes behind you with a soft click, the light inside fading to amber through the glass. And as you walk back down the pier, the sea now a hush in your ears and your heart thudding to a rhythm you don’t quite recognize, you realize the summer has cracked open — just a little. And something new has started to bloom inside the quiet. 

Saturday, you’re up bright and early to get to the record store. You show up ten minutes early, clutching a canvas tote and the kind of nervous energy that hums just beneath your skin like a skipped heartbeat. You spent too long deciding what to wear — torn between comfort and the elusive cool that Ni-ki seems to wear like a second skin. You settle on a shirt that feels like you, jeans that have survived too many summers, and a necklace your mother gave you when you were thirteen, the one that always brings you a bit of luck. 

The record shop is already breathing by the time you arrive, its door slightly ajar, the bell above it giving a lazy chime as you slip inside. Morning light streams through the warped glass like golden syrup, catching on the dust motes that float in slow pirouettes through the air. The place smells like warm vinyl and old wood, a hint of incense lingering somewhere in the corners. Ni-ki is behind the counter, hunched over like a gargoyle with a mission, eating cereal out of a chipped coffee mug that reads World’s Okayest Employee. The sight of you standing there, ten minutes early and bright-eyed, seems to catch him off guard. 

“You actually came,” he says, cereal spoon paused mid-air. “You sound shocked,” you reply, stepping further in. “I did say I’d show up.” 

“Yeah, but people say all kinds of things at the end of the world,” he mutters dramatically, then grins. “Welcome to paradise.” The shop is a beautiful kind of chaos. Handwritten signs dangle from twine above each section: Garage Rock (Actual Garage Sound), Sad Bangers, Albums That Changed My Life But Maybe Not Yours. A crooked shelf labeled Jazz? leans against a wall like it’s had one too many drinks. There’s a cat curled up on a stack of Tame Impala reissues — soot-grey, one ear notched, its eyes opening slowly like it’s seen centuries and remains unimpressed. 

“Does the cat live here?” you ask. 

“No idea,” Ni-ki replies, peering over the counter. “He came with the store. Or maybe he’s a ghost. Either way, he answers to ‘Captain.’ Or doesn’t.” Your first task? Alphabetizing the used vinyl bin — which, as it turns out, is less bin and more bottomless abyss. A tangled jungle of warped records, bootleg mixtapes, and deeply cursed homemade covers — one of which features a Sharpie drawing of two clowns kissing beneath a blood moon. Someone has scribbled THIS IS THE WORST SONG EVER across a CD sleeve, then stuffed it back in like a warning. 

Ni-ki watches you with vague amusement as you crouch beside the bin, sleeves rolled up like you’re preparing for surgery. “Welcome to the hellscape,” he says, sipping his cereal. 

“Any actual system here?” you ask. He shrugs, pointing lazily. “That pile’s classics. That one’s vibes. And that one’s cursed. Do not listen to anything from the cursed pile unless you want your day to feel like a mid-2000s Tumblr breakup.” You sort, sift, dig. You laugh out loud more than once. Ni-ki drifts around the store like a song in human form, starting tasks and abandoning them halfway through — stacking CD cases only to knock them over, setting a record on the player and forgetting about it until it spins endlessly on static. He trips over a crate of cassette tapes and says, without missing a beat, “That was intentional. I’m stress-testing the floor.” 

You learn more by watching him than from anything he says. He knows where everything is — not by order, but by instinct. He talks to the records like they’re old friends, mutters to himself about which artists have Mercury in retrograde energy, and once, mid-sentence, gasps and runs to swap out a display because “no offense to the Beach Boys, but this is not their season.” At some point, a customer comes in and asks for something obscure — a Japanese city pop album from 1982. Ni-ki lights up like a struck match. You watch him slip into a rhythm, voice smooth and animated, leading the man to a dusty crate near the back, pulling out exactly what he needs. You catch yourself smiling. 

By the end of the day, the cursed pile has doubled in size, Captain has chosen your lap for a fifteen-minute nap, and you feel pleasantly exhausted — not the kind that drags you down, but the kind that fills your limbs like warmth after a swim. As you wipe your hands on your jeans and start to gather your things, Ni-ki reaches behind the counter and pulls out a record, slipping it into a sleeve that crackles like old paper. “Your initiation gift,” he says, sliding it toward you. 

You take it gently, examining the cover — it’s scratched, its corners soft with age, the title half-faded. “This is… unplayable,” you say, half-laughing. 

“It’s magic,” he insists, eyes gleaming. “Look at it too long and you’ll cry. Or get a vision. Or find a penny from your childhood. Who knows.” You clutch it to your chest as you leave, the shop’s bell ringing soft behind you, the sky outside slowly beginning to melt into gold. You walk home with salt on your skin and the feeling that something precious has been tucked into your day — a moment, a memory, a record full of invisible music. You don’t know what the song is yet. But you’ll be back to hear it. 

The sun has softened by the time you reach the house, folding itself gently behind the horizon like it’s tucking in for the night. The wind is quieter now, brushing against your skin with the hush of an old lullaby. And as you climb the porch steps, your eyes catch something you hadn’t noticed before. The garden. 

It sprawls across the front lawn like a living tapestry, riotous and delicate all at once — blooms of every shape and hue swaying together in a secret kind of harmony. It’s not a neat garden, not the kind trimmed to suburban symmetry or captured in glossy magazines. No, this garden is wild and purposeful, like it was planted by someone who speaks in symbols and lets the earth answer back. Ivy curls along the baseboards, and golden marigolds lean into the late light, their petals catching like embers. Lavender grows in thick bundles by the porch steps, and tucked just behind them, you spot foxglove and forget-me-nots and clusters of pink cosmos nodding like old souls. You pause, drawn to it — the hush, the poetry of it. Something in the arrangement feels like a letter, like a coded message meant only for someone who knows how to read the heart. 

Inside, the house is warm with the soft clatter of dishes and the gentle hum of a radio tuned low to a station that plays old love songs. The scent of dinner winds through the hallway — lemon and rosemary, something simmering slow on the stove. You wash your hands and sit at the table where your grandmother is already waiting, her silhouette lit by the glow of the kitchen window, her hair gathered loosely at the nape like a whisper of the girl she once was. She smiles at you — that quiet, knowing kind of smile that only grandmothers have, like she can already read your thoughts before they form. 

“So,” she says, placing a bowl of soup in front of you, “how was your first day at the record shop?” You tell her everything — the chaos, the charm, the cursed pile, the cat who may or may not be a spirit. You mention Ni-ki, his mismatched energy and cereal breakfasts, the way he spoke to the records like they were old flames. Her eyes twinkle at the name. “Ah,” she says softly, “Nishimura Riki. I know his parents. Nice people. Quiet. His father used to play cello in the church ensemble. Barely spoke more than two words but when he played, you’d think the cello had a soul of its own.” 

You nod slowly. “Makes sense,” you say. “Ni-ki’s got that… same kind of quiet. Like he’s speaking through other things.” 

She stirs her tea, thoughtful. “Some people carry their stories in their eyes. Others in music. Or gardens.” Your gaze drifts to the window, where the garden sways in the moonlight like a secret still being whispered. 

“Speaking of,” you say, “I noticed the flowers. They’re beautiful. Are they just… for show?” She chuckles — a soft, melodic sound that feels like the memory of spring. “Oh, child. Every flower means something. I never plant anything without a reason.” You tilt your head, curious. 

She points to the lavender first. “Peace. I plant it near the door to welcome calm.”

Then to the marigolds. “Grief. For the people I’ve lost. But also resilience — they bloom through everything.” The cosmos, pink and wide-eyed in the dark. “Balance. For the days when I forget how to find my center.” You sit quietly, drinking in her words like they’re poetry spoken between bites. 

“And the foxglove?” you ask, your voice low. She pauses, then smiles softly. “Insincerity, mostly. But also creativity. It’s tricky. Like people. Like life.” You imagine her kneeling in the soil, planting grief and peace and creativity like offerings to the universe, letting the earth hold what her heart couldn’t say aloud. The conversation fades into silence, but it’s a golden kind — the kind that wraps around the kitchen like a shawl. After dinner, she kisses your forehead and tells you to sleep well, and you climb the stairs with your head still full of flowers and Ni-ki’s strange magic and the scratch of the record you now keep on your nightstand like a charm.

That night, you lie in bed with the window cracked open, the salt breeze curling in like a dream. You think of the meanings woven into every bloom outside your window, a whole language spelled out in petals and stems. You wonder what kind of flower you are — what root is taking hold in you this summer, and what will bloom when you’re not looking. You fall asleep to the sound of the sea whispering just beyond the porch. And in your dream, the garden is singing. 

You wake to the soft hush of the sea breathing against the shore, a rhythm as steady as a lullaby half-remembered. The sky outside your window is the color of sleep still fading — a pale wash of lavender and rose, with streaks of gold beginning to stretch like limbs in the waking light. You dress slowly, quietly, the house still holding onto its dreams. When you step outside, the garden greets you like an old friend who’s been waiting. Dew clings to the petals like whispered secrets, and the air smells green and alive — a mixture of earth and salt and something faintly sweet, like memory distilled into fragrance. Your grandmother is already there, kneeling in the soil with a wide-brimmed straw hat shading her face and gloves dusted with the morning’s work. She doesn’t look up at first, too caught in the careful tending of roots and stems, but she knows you’re there. 

“Early riser,” she murmurs, brushing her hands on her apron. “Just like your grandfather used to be.” You sit on the porch steps, letting the sun pour over your skin like warm tea. She settles back onto her heels, her gaze soft as the morning. “He used to get up before the gulls started crying,” she says. “Said the world belonged to those who saw it first.” A small laugh slips from her lips. “He was full of sayings like that. Half of them are nonsense, but he made them sound like scripture.” 

She points to a patch of white daisies climbing along the fence. “We met right here, on this beach. I was just a girl then. My mother brought me for a summer away from the city. I thought I’d be bored out of my mind.” Her eyes glitter with the recollection, like tidepools catching sun. “Then I met a boy who loved the sea so much he could name all the tides and knew when the wind would turn. He taught me to listen to the waves like they were speaking.” You glance toward the ocean. It's still murmuring to itself, the tide curling in and out like the hem of a dress being tried on again and again. 

“I fell in love with him and the sea all at once,” she says. “And I never left. My mother was furious at first — she thought I’d thrown my life away for a boy and a beach. But I found something here that felt like mine. Something quiet. Something deep-rooted.” She brushes her hand over a bloom of violets. 

“My mother liked flowers. She used to say they were stories you planted in the ground. That if you paid attention, the garden would always tell you how someone was feeling. I didn’t believe her until I found myself planting daisies after he passed. Daisies mean loyalty. And innocence.” She pauses. “Hope, too.” You watch her in the golden haze of morning, hands moving over soil like she’s sewing love into the earth itself. 

She turns to you then, her eyes as bright as the morning sea. “Maybe you’ll pick it up, too,” she says. “The garden. The sea. Whatever calls to you.” You don’t say anything, but you think maybe something already has. You lose track of time there, listening to her stories, letting the warmth of the sun and her voice wrap around you like a well-worn quilt. The sea hums in the distance, and the flowers seem to lean in closer, like they’re listening too.

It isn’t until the light shifts just so and the air sharpens with mid-morning urgency that you remember the time. “I have to go,” you say, standing abruptly. “The shop…” She waves you off with a knowing smile. “Go on, then. Don’t keep the records waiting.” You dash inside, grabbing your bag, brushing dirt off your knees, heart still full of wildflowers and tide-songs. As you head toward town, the scent of the garden clings to you — lavender and daisies and something unnamed. You don’t look back, but you feel it — the house behind you, the garden blooming like a spell, your grandmother already humming to her flowers. The world feels quieter and bigger all at once. And your day is just beginning. 

The record shop is quiet when you arrive, half-asleep like the town itself, sunlight pooling through the front windows in slow-moving gold. Ni-ki’s already there, lounging behind the counter with a half-eaten peach in one hand and a book in the other, looking like he’s been plucked from another era, half-boy, half-daydream. 

But by afternoon, the sky begins to darken — not gradually, not politely, but all at once, like someone pulled a great gray sheet over the sun. You look up from the bin you’ve been organizing (“vibes, not in a cursed way,” as per Ni-ki’s instructions), and the world outside the window has turned the color of bruised plums. Thunder rumbles low in the distance — not yet angry, just clearing its throat. “You hear that?” Ni-ki says, peeking out from the back room with a pretzel stick hanging from his mouth. “Storm’s coming.” 

You nod, and moments later, the storm arrives like it’s been waiting just beyond the town’s edge, eager to stretch its legs. Rain crashes down in sheets, the kind of summer downpour that feels almost theatrical in its urgency. The windows fog over instantly, blurred with condensation and streaked with silver lines. The roof trembles under the weight of water, the gutter outside singing in rivulets and overflows. “Well,” Ni-ki says, stepping around a tower of cassette tapes and kicking off his shoes, “looks like we’re stuck.” 

He moves toward the record player in the corner like it’s a ritual, flipping through sleeves until he finds one — a faded, fraying LP with no label. He places the needle down with the kind of reverence usually reserved for prayers. The first notes float out, low and longing — jazz, smooth and syrupy, the kind that spills like honey and hangs in the air long after it’s gone. A saxophone sighs like a tired poet. The bass hums like a heartbeat underwater. 

You find yourselves lying on the floor soon after — not on purpose, not in a storybook way, but like you both quietly understood that the storm had pressed pause on the world, and this was the only way to breathe through it. The floor is cool against your back. The ceiling fan spins in lazy circles above you, casting shadows that dance like ghosts across the walls. Ni-ki talks, voice soft and winding, half-ramble, half-reverie. He tells you about his favorite album like it’s someone he used to love. The way the harmonies feel like home. The way the final track always makes him cry, though he never admits it out loud. He speaks in metaphors — calling guitars “bones with breath,” and lyrics “little spells disguised as mistakes.” 

You close your eyes, letting his voice wrap around you like the jazz, like the rain — steady, soft, unknowable. Thunder rolls again, not far now, and you imagine the shop floating at sea, untethered and drifting, safe in its island of sound. He says something then — something about how storms always made him feel like the world was wiping itself clean — and you smile, not because of what he said, but how he said it. Like he wasn’t afraid to say things that sounded a little foolish. Like he trusted the moment to hold him. Time slows. The ceiling fan turns. 

You don’t remember falling asleep, but somewhere between the thunder and the saxophone and the soft cadence of Ni-ki’s voice, you slip under like a pebble sinking into a tidepool. Not deeply. Not forever. Just enough. the rain has quieted, reduced to a hush against the windows. The storm has passed, or is passing, and the light outside is strange and soft — that post-rain glow that makes the world feel new. Ni-ki is still lying beside you, arms folded beneath his head, eyes on the ceiling like he’s watching stars no one else can see. 

“Hey,” he says, voice barely more than a whisper. 

“Hey,” you reply, voice still tangled in sleep. 

Neither of you moves to get up. The world can wait. 

You wake to the scent of petrichor and the sighing hush of a town still half-asleep. The world feels washed clean — the sky a milky blue canvas with clouds like lace unraveling at the edges, and the air still heavy with the ghost of last night’s storm. For a moment, you don’t remember where you are — only that there is warmth beside you, and a jazz record still spinning in its final loop, the needle clicking gently like a heartbeat that doesn’t want to stop. You blink yourself into focus and turn. 

Ni-ki is asleep next to you, curled slightly, one arm flung over his eyes like he’s trying to hold onto whatever dream he drifted into. His hoodie has slipped off one shoulder, and his hair’s a little mussed — the kind of morning mess that makes him look younger, more boy than mystery. There’s a dried smudge of ink on his knuckle. His mouth is slightly parted. You think, absurdly, that he looks like someone drawn in charcoal — smudged at the edges, all softness and sketch lines. The ceiling fan hums its sleepy circles above you. Outside, the gutters still drip, and the occasional car rolls past with a wet hiss against the street. The record player finally falls silent. Even the shop seems to exhale — every shelf and bin and poster a little quieter than usual, as if the music and storm had exhausted them, too.

Ni-ki stirs, stretches like a cat, and opens one eye. “You drool in your sleep,” he says, voice thick with morning. 

You blink. “I do not.” He grins — not teasing, not cruel, just lazy and amused. “Maybe it was me,” he admits. “I’m a very mysterious sleeper.” There’s a pause — not uncomfortable, just suspended — and for a moment, neither of you moves. The storm feels like it happened in another lifetime. You’re just two kids on a shop floor, heads full of music and dreams too soft to speak aloud. 

Eventually, Ni-ki props himself up on one elbow and squints out the window. “Looks like we’re not opening today,” he says. “Storm knocked out half the power lines on Main.” You sit up slowly, rubbing the back of your neck. “So… rain day?” 

“Rain day,” he confirms. “Wanna bail?” You nod. The agreement is unspoken and immediate. No need to tidy up, no need to explain. The day has already been claimed by the aftermath — by the soft quiet that follows when nature has had its say. You both gather your things in the kind of silence that only exists between people who’ve shared a strange closeness — not lovers, not strangers, but something fragile and in-between. Ni-ki hands you your jacket without meeting your eyes. You murmur thanks. He nods. 

Outside, the pavement glistens like wet stone under a watercolor sky. The air is rich with sea-salt and wet leaves. A few gulls wheel overhead, their cries sharp and laughing. Anchor–Crest is slower today, subdued, as if the town itself is still wringing the water from its bones. You and Ni-ki walk together for a while before parting ways — no destination in mind, just a mutual understanding that the day is meant for wandering, for letting the storm’s echo fade on its own time. 

“See you tomorrow?” he asks, voice light. “Yeah,” you say, the word carried on a breeze that smells like roses and rust and rain. You don’t look back as you walk away. But you feel him behind you — not watching, just existing in your orbit — a constant, quiet presence like the sea against the shore. And somewhere inside you, something soft begins to grow. 

By the time you reach your grandmother’s house, the sky has cleared into a gentle hush of gold and gray — the kind of color that only exists after a storm, as if the world has exhaled and is now resting. The air smells like old earth and wild rosemary, sea-laced and clean. Your shoes squish faintly as you step up the wooden path, the garden glistening on either side — every flower bowing under the weight of raindrops like dancers catching their breath after the final chord.

You expect damage. Branches. Broken things. But the house stands untouched, like it had been wrapped in some invisible spell while the storm passed overhead. The wind chime still sways lazily by the porch. The hydrangeas have leaned, not fallen. The paint is damp but not peeling, and the seashells your grandmother keeps lined along the windowsill shine like tiny moons.

When you open the door, you barely have time to step inside before your grandmother is there, arms around you in an embrace that catches you completely off guard. She's smaller than you remember — smaller than she seemed yesterday — and warmer, too, like a quilt pulled fresh from the sun. Her voice is thick with relief, caught somewhere between a scolding and a prayer.

“Where were you?” she breathes, her words muffled against your shoulder. “I was so worried—when the storm came I thought—” You freeze, then soften, arms coming up slowly to return the hug. You hadn’t been held like this in a long time — not since before time started moving faster than you could follow. Her embrace smells like lavender and the sea, like bread in the oven and old books, like home you didn’t know you were missing.

“I stayed at the shop,” you murmur. “I didn’t want to walk back in the rain.” She pulls back and cups your face in her hands, brushing your damp hair behind your ear with a tenderness that makes your throat ache. “Well,” she says, smiling now, though her eyes are still wet. “I’m just glad you’re alright. Come, I’ve made food. Something warm.”

The house smells like rosemary and lemon, like sautéed garlic and something bubbling slow on the stove. The table is already set with mismatched plates and two flickering candles in jam jars. You sit across from her, still carrying the scent of rain, and she pours you a cup of tea that tastes like honey and memory. Over your meal the conversation meanders, quiet and soft, like a river turning through an old valley.

You tell her about the record shop, about the way it holds sunlight and shadows and cats that may or may not be real. You tell her about Ni-ki — carefully, without meaning to smile as much as you do. You mention the jazz, the ceiling fan, the storm, the way he talks about albums like they’re alive. You skip over the part where you fell asleep beside him, but you think she hears it anyway, between the words. She listens with a faraway look, like she’s watching a memory unfold behind your eyes.Then you glance toward the window, where the garden hums in the damp light, petals dripping like soft tears, stems bowed and reverent. It’s beautiful. It makes life seem beautiful. 

She watches you, like she knows what you’re thinking. She frowns, but her eyes are bright. “They help me remember who I am. Who I’ve been. Who I’ve loved. I suppose now they’re yours, too.” And later, when the candles have melted low and the tea has gone cold, you lie in bed with the window cracked open, letting in the scent of salt and blossoms. You listen to the garden breathe. You think of Ni-ki’s voice layered over saxophones, and of your grandmother’s hands in the soil. You think of flowers that mean love, and others that mean goodbye. You fall asleep with petals blooming behind your eyes. 

The morning unfolds like a page turned gently — soft light spilling through gauzy curtains, the scent of something sweet wafting from the kitchen. You’re still rubbing the sleep from your eyes when the doorbell chimes, a sound like the beginning of something. Your grandmother beats you to the door, humming as she goes, the hem of her housecoat trailing behind her like a comet’s tail. You follow a step behind, only half-awake, expecting mail or a neighbor or perhaps a wayward gull in need of rescue. 

Instead, it’s Ni-ki. 

He stands awkwardly on the porch, hands jammed into the pockets of his hoodie, hair tousled like the storm reached down and ruffled it personally. There’s a flash of surprise in his eyes when he sees your grandmother — like he didn’t expect anyone to answer, let alone the guardian of the flower kingdom herself. “Morning,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. “I—uh, just wanted to check in. After the storm and all. Make sure everything was okay.” 

Your grandmother arches one perfectly skeptical brow, but her lips tug upward in a knowing smirk. “Well, aren’t you sweet,” she says, and then, without turning, she calls over her shoulder, “Your boyfriend’s here!” You nearly choke on air. “He’s not—! Grandma!” 

She only hums, stepping aside to let him in, her smugness trailing behind her like perfume. You shoot Ni-ki a mortified look, but he’s grinning, trying not to laugh as he toes off his shoes. “She does this to everyone,” you mutter. Before you can launch into a full defense, your grandmother reappears with a handwritten list clutched in her hand, like a scroll of ancient quests. She presses it into your palm with a look of deliberate innocence. 

“I was just about to send you out,” she says. “We’re out of a few things. Only you’ll do.” You scan the list. It reads more like a riddle than a grocery run: a very particular brand of marmalade (with orange peel but not too much), a sea-salt soap from a shop that doesn’t advertise, and a jar of rosehip jam sold only at a café that might not even be open today. 

“You’re joking,” you say.

 She shrugs, entirely unrepentant. “Consider it a scavenger hunt.” Ni-ki leans over your shoulder to read the list and whistles low. “Either she’s sending you on a magical errand,” he says, “or she really wants that soap.” 

“She’s definitely plotting something,” you reply, but there’s a thread of affection wound through your voice like ribbon. “I’ll come with,” he offers, casual and offhand, but you can see the hope stitched behind it like gold thread in a patchwork quilt. 

You pretend to consider. “Only if you’re okay with bickering over jam.”

He grins. “Wouldn’t dream of anything else.” 

The walk into town becomes a meandering pilgrimage. The streets of Anchor–Crest are still drying from the storm, puddles shining like forgotten silver, shopfronts flinging open their shutters as if shaking off a long sleep. 

You and Ni-ki wander from store to store like characters in an old fable — a place with handmade soaps tucked behind bookshelves, another where the marmalade comes wrapped in wax paper and twine. He insists on sniffing every candle in one shop, rating them dramatically: “Smells like a haunted bakery.” , “Smells like regret and pine.”,  “Smells like my childhood dog, but in a good way.” You roll your eyes, but your laughter dances between you like light on water. 

At a tiny grocer tucked behind the old post office, you find the jam — rosehip, exactly as described, its label handwritten and slightly smudged. You hold it up like a trophy and Ni-ki bows low, one hand over his heart. “To the jam champion,” he declares.

Victory tastes like strawberry ice cream, which you split outside the town pharmacy, passing the single cup between you while the sun warms your backs. You bicker over who gets the last bite until he smears a little on your nose, and you swat at him, both of you laughing like you’ve known each other since you were children. A breeze flutters by, salt-touched and warm. Around you, the town hums its soft lullaby of waves and wind chimes and distant conversation. For a moment, you let yourself imagine this is what everyday could be — errands with no urgency, ice cream before noon, a boy who talks in metaphors and knows how to make you smile even when you don’t mean to. 

You look over at Ni-ki. He’s looking at you. You don’t say anything. You don’t have to. The wind rustles the list in your pocket like a secret. 

Over the next week The rhythm of the shop begins to seep into your bones. It’s a strange music, this little record store by the sea — part jazz, part chaos, part quiet moments that unfurl like ribbon when no one’s looking. You start to learn its tempo: the sigh of the door when it swings open with the afternoon breeze, the soft clack of records as you flip through them, the low hum of the ancient fridge in the back that Ni-ki insists is haunted by the ghost of bad taste in music. 

Your fingers begin to recognize labels by touch alone. Your hands memorize the layout of the bins before your eyes do. You know which shelf leans ever so slightly to the left and which stack of cassettes will fall like dominoes if you so much as breathe wrong near it. You learn the faces, too the steady parade of locals who become less like customers and more like recurring characters in the play you're now part of. There’s Orchestra Boy, a wiry teen with oversized headphones perpetually slung around his neck, who only ever buys movie scores and always pays in coins. Ni-ki swears the kid once tried to pay in seashells, but you suspect he’s embellishing. 

Then there’s Captain Cash, the silver-haired gentleman who comes in three times a week to flirt, quite unabashedly, with the register. “Lookin’ handsome today,” he’ll say, running a finger along the counter like he’s tracing the jawline of a lover. “Treat me right and maybe I’ll buy a little something sweet.” He never buys anything, and yet you’ve started setting aside a Sinatra album for him anyway. And of course—Mac Witch. The woman who always arrives just after three, with a sunhat too large for her head and a gaze that could unravel your secrets like yarn. She leans on the counter and asks, “Fleetwood Mac?” like it’s a password, or a spell. You’ve taken to answering her with “always,” which seems to satisfy her every time. 

Ni-ki gives them all names like he’s collecting stories, and in a way, he is. He scrawls little notes about them on sticky pads that cling to the back of the register. “Orchestra Boy cried once to The Social Network soundtrack. Don’t ask.” “Captain Cash winked today. Bold.” “Mac Witch might actually be a witch. Hexed the jazz section, I swear.” At first, you roll your eyes at him, but then you find yourself playing along, adding your own observations, your own musings. The shop becomes your shared language, your growing constellation of inside jokes and secret categories. 

One sticky note simply reads: “You laughed when I tripped. Rude.” 

Another: “You looked pretty alphabetizing the punk section.” You pretend not to notice those. Sometimes you two dance when no one's around — slow, ridiculous spins to old soul songs playing scratchy on the turntable. Sometimes you argue over what counts as a summer album. Sometimes you sit behind the counter doing nothing at all, your arms brushing accidentally-on-purpose, your knees touching beneath the stool like a whisper neither of you is brave enough to say aloud. And still, nothing is spoken. The possibility hangs between you like a question left on pause. A held breath. 

One afternoon, with the sunlight slanting golden through the dusty windows and the warmth pressing against your back like a comforting palm, you’re manning the counter while Ni-ki attempts to wrestle a shelf into standing upright. It’s a losing battle. You watch him anyway. The shop is quiet, the air thick with the scent of old vinyl and vanilla, someone must’ve spilled incense in the back again. You’ve just rung up a man with three copies of the same ABBA album (you don’t ask questions anymore) when a woman steps up next, placing a worn Cat Stevens record on the counter. 

She looks at you, then glances toward Ni-ki, currently muttering expletives at a stack of ska CDs that just collapsed in protest, and back to you again. “He yours?” she asks, her voice low and curious, the way someone asks about a puppy or a garden they’ve seen from afar. 

You blink. “Who?” She raises a single brow, like you’re being deliberately dense.

You laugh, a little too quickly. “Oh—no. We’re just…” You trail off, unsure how to finish that sentence. Just coworkers? Just friends? Just two people orbiting the same chaotic star, waiting for gravity to decide? She nods slowly, unconvinced. “Mm,” she says, like she’s seen enough young love bloom and wilt to recognize the exact shape of denial. 

You hand her the record and she leaves with a knowing smile. Ni-ki wanders over a few minutes later, hair rumpled, hands smudged with dust. “What’d I miss?” 

You shrug. “Just another wise woman trying to ruin my carefully curated narrative of denial.” He chuckles, nudging your shoulder. “Story of your life.” 

“Yeah,” you say, and try not to let your heart show its teeth. 

That evening, when the shop has emptied and the sky turns the color of spilled ink, Ni-ki pulls out a dusty record from beneath the counter.

“Want to hear something weird?” he asks.

“Always.”

He places the vinyl on the player and the room fills with music, something soft and wordless, a melody that sounds like rain falling on piano keys, like memories you can’t quite place. You lean against the counter, eyes closed, the moment swelling around you like a wave, threatening to pull you under. When you open your eyes, he’s already watching you. Neither of you speak. The music speaks enough. And still, you don’t answer the question that floats quietly between you. Not yet. 

Yours and Ni-ki’s relationship was growing, evolving. But it was not the only sprouting relationship in your life. You and your grandmother spoke all night, getting to know more and more about each other everyday. Some nights even when Ni-ki joins, itt becomes a ritual. One you’d cherish forever.  It begins slowly like tidewater creeping in unnoticed. Your grandmother, once more quiet than not, begins to speak in stories. Not just the kinds you expect from the elderly weather-worn anecdotes about bus fares and distant cousins but tales that drift between the ordinary and the eerie, between the seen and the half-remembered. They come at night, usually after dinner, when the cicadas outside are humming lullabies through the window screens and the kitchen smells faintly of sea salt and jasmine tea. Sometimes Ni-ki is there too, legs folded on the floor like he’s twelve again, a bowl of popcorn resting between you both as if it were a sacred offering.

“There’s a ship,” she tells you one night, her voice as thin as moonlight. “They say it sails only in fog, sails without a crew. No name on the hull, no light in the mast. It passes by when the air turns cold in summer and the gulls go quiet. Just slips through the gray like a knife through silk.” You glance at Ni-ki, who’s already listening, eyebrows tilted like a question he’ll never ask aloud. He always listens to her like this, like he’s afraid of missing something essential, something not quite real but true all the same. Your grandmother sips from her chipped porcelain mug and continues, “I saw it once. I was sixteen. It was early morning, and I was up on the cliffs behind the lighthouse. There was fog so thick you could cut it with a spoon. And then there came no sound, no wake in the water. Just drifting by, like it had nowhere to be, like it had all the time in the world.”  

You ask her what it looked like. She just smiles, wistful, eyes reflecting something that lives outside time. “Like memory. Something that shouldn’t still be floating but is.” 

Another night, when the air hangs heavy with humidity and the storm scent of far-off lightning, she tells you about a boy. She picks at the lint from her cardigan, not quite looking at either of you. “He played guitar with the kind of hands that could undo a girl’s whole world. Sang like he didn’t need to be heard — just wanted the notes to know he loved them.” 

“Did he live here?” you ask, and her smile flattens, becoming something smaller and sadder. 

“For a time. He worked odd jobs. Lived in a shack not far from the dunes. I’d meet him by the pier every Tuesday, like it was church. Barefoot, always. Said shoes made him feel too far from the earth. Played for anyone who’d listen. Or no one at all.” 

“What happened to him?” Ni-ki asks softly, and you’re glad he did, because you didn’t want to. She looks at you both for a long moment, like she's trying to decide if you're old enough to know. “He left. He was always meant to leave. He told me once that some people are born to drift, and trying to anchor them only sinks them faster.” She pauses, glancing out the window, as though expecting to see him, even now, barefoot and grinning, guitar case in hand.  

Then she adds, almost to herself, “There’s always someone you leave, but never really forget.” The words settle in the room like dust. You feel their weight, their truth. You look at Ni-ki then, only for a second, and he doesn’t look away. 

She tells you other stories too, over the next few days. Not always so sad. One is about a storm that knocked a whale into the harbor. Another about a fisherman who swore he caught a mermaid and married her ; until she vanished, leaving only a salt-stained dress behind. Some stories make you laugh. Some stories make Ni-ki quietly raise his eyebrows, like he's filing them away in the same place he keeps the shop’s strange regulars. 

But there are nights where her stories trail off halfway through. Where she pauses too long, searching for a word, or a name, or the shape of something just beyond the edge of recall. You notice it first in the way she forgets her mug of tea on the stove until it whistles itself hoarse. Then in the way she repeats questions she’s already asked, softly, apologetically. “Did you see the gulls this morning?” she asks you twice in the same hour, smiling like it’s the first time. You don’t think much of it at first. Maybe she’s just tired. The days have been long and warm. The sea hums constantly outside, and the scent of her garden thickens the air like perfume. You don’t want to believe anything’s wrong. Not yet. 

But that night, as you’re brushing your teeth, you hear her in the hallway, talking to someone who isn’t there. Her voice is gentle, like she’s telling a bedtime story to a child that no longer exists. You tell yourself it’s just a dream. Just the house settling. Just the ghosts she’s been holding in her throat too long finally slipping free. You fall asleep that night thinking about the boy with bare feet, and the ship with no name. About the way her stories settle inside you like salt in the lungs, painful and necessary. 

Ni-ki texts you at midnight.

Him: she okay?

You stare at the message a long time before answering.

    You: I don’t know. I hope so. She’s kind of magic.

 He responds

          Him: like you.

You don’t answer. But you press the phone to your chest and fall asleep smiling, anyway. 

The idea is his, but it lives in you instantly. You're lounging behind the shop one lazy Tuesday, the kind where time melts like ice cream on pavement and the air feels like it's been steeped in heat and honeysuckle. Ni-ki says it so offhandedly you almost miss it, something about buying cameras, cheap ones, the kind your parents used to use before the world went digital and the future started spinning faster than memory could keep up. 

“Let’s fill them,” he says, biting into a peach so ripe it drips down his wrist, “with things that matter.” You squint at him from behind your sunglasses, sprawled across the concrete like a sun-drowsed cat. “Like what?” 

He shrugs, juice glinting on his skin like liquid gold. “I dunno. Whatever feels real. Important. Even if it’s dumb.” 

That’s how it starts; two disposable cameras, bought from the dusty corner of the Anchor–Crest pharmacy, the kind that come in plastic and promise only twenty-four chances to catch lightning in a bottle. The kind with no preview, no delete button. Just the click and whirl of commitment. A trust fall into the moment. You begin carrying yours like a talisman, tucked into your bag or looped around your wrist with a shoelace. Every click feels like whispering a secret to the future. 

The first shot you take is of the sky is the exact shade of blue you’ve only ever seen in dreams, streaked with clouds that look like ships sailing somewhere unseen. The second is of your grandmother’s hands as she weeds her garden, knotted with time, gentle as tide foam. The third is Ni-ki laughing, blurry and beautiful, caught mid-bite into a slice of watermelon that stains his lips pink like some kind of love song. 

He captures you, too, more often than you expect. You don’t always notice until after the shutter flinches. Once, he snaps you with your head tilted back on the pier, arms flung open to the wind like you’re trying to hug the sky. Another time, he catches you inside the shop, framed by the window, haloed in sunlight and dust. You’re mid-laugh, holding a cracked Bowie record like it’s the crown jewels.

He doesn’t say it, but you can feel it in the way his gaze lingers like the warm aftertaste of a secret shared: You are becoming one of his “things that matter.” You walk more. Talk more. Drift like jellyfish from one end of town to the other, floating through pockets of joy and shade. The shop becomes a home, the town a kind of soft-spoken symphony, all stitched together by his presence, awkward, poetic, a little off-beat like the B-side of a favorite song. 

He starts telling you things he hasn’t told anyone, like how he used to think time was something you could hold in your hands. Like a record. Like something you could flip to the good part again. He talks about wanting to leave Anchor–Crest once, but never quite finding the edge of the map. “I think I’m scared I’ll dissolve out there,” he says one night, lying on the roof of the shop with your legs barely brushing. “Like maybe I only exist here. Where I know the sound the sea makes when it’s trying to say something.” 

You want to tell him you understand. That you’ve felt more like yourself here than in any apartment or campus or hallway lined with lockers. That you’re starting to feel like your heart might be made of salt and driftwood and polaroid colors. That you’re falling for him in a way that’s quiet and steady and terrifying; like waves lapping at the same rock for years until finally, it gives in. But you don’t.

Instead, you nudge your shoulder against his and say, “That’s dramatic, Nishimura.” He laughs and turns his face to yours. “You like it.” You do. 

You fill the cameras slowly, deliberately, like savoring the last bites of a favorite meal. A shot of Ni-ki balancing on a railing, arms out like a scarecrow trying to take flight. One of your sandals abandoned in the sand. A crumpled napkin with a doodle he drew of you, big sunglasses, messy hair, heart for a smile. You find joy in the mundane, beauty in the unposed. You take one of his fingers grazing a record sleeve like it’s an artifact. One of his shadow dancing against the wall of the shop as the sun sets low. 

At the end of the week, your camera is full. Your heart, too, in ways you haven’t yet begun to name. When he hands you his roll, it’s tied with a ribbon the color of rust and dusk. His fingers linger too long against yours when he passes it over. “In case you forget,” he says, and doesn’t explain further. You don’t ask him to. 

Because you’re starting to feel the shape of the truth forming inside you like a storm on the horizon. The way you catch yourself watching his mouth when he talks, or memorizing the lines of his hands without meaning to. The way your pulse has started to keep time with his laugh. 

You’re falling in love with him. 

And suddenly, terrifyingly; it’s hitting you that summer doesn’t last forever. That there are only so many mornings left. That the sea will keep breathing after you go, but it won’t sound the same. That you might have to leave this boy with the sunbeam smile and storm-colored eyes, and everything you’ve become in this town that knows your name like a song. But for now, for this fragile moment pinned between now and next you tuck the roll into your drawer like it’s made of glass and carry the ache like a melody only you can hear. 

The next day your grandma wakes you up bright and early, It begins with your grandmother standing on the porch, squinting out into the distance as if searching for something in the middle distance, an answer in the horizon’s quiet language. She’s dressed in her usual soft, sea-worn layers, apron dusted with flour from breakfast, her hand resting thoughtfully on the banister. When she turns to you, her eyes have the mischief of someone younger than her bones would suggest. “This porch is peeling like a sunburn,” she says. “We should do something about that.” 

You don’t argue. Instead, you nod, and later that afternoon, Ni-ki appears like the tide, carrying a can of pale blue paint and an old brush that looks like it’s lived through more lives than either of you. You both kick off your sandals and join your grandmother on the porch, sun curling over your shoulders like a cat. The air smells of lemon and seaweed and something else, something sweet and nostalgic, like the ghosts of summers past settling into the woodgrain. You begin with intention. Ni-ki dips his brush carefully, dabbing the edge of the banister like it’s a sleeping creature he doesn’t want to wake. You crouch near the step, tongue between your teeth in concentration. But intention doesn't last long. Within minutes, the air is full of laughter and the sound of dripping paint, the brush strokes getting sloppier, more playful. Ni-ki flicks a stripe of blue across your forearm. You retaliate with a swipe across his cheek. He gasps like it’s a mortal wound and collapses dramatically onto the porch, hand over his heart. 

Your grandmother watches from her rocking chair, a lemonade in one hand and a knowing smile curling at the corners of her mouth. She says nothing, just hums something old and lilting under her breath, a lullaby she might’ve sung to your mother once, when the world was quieter and time didn’t feel like it was running out. By the time the sun starts to dip into the ocean’s mouth, the porch is streaked with uneven patches of blue, like clouds smeared across a shy sky. Your arms are speckled with paint, your hair carries streaks of war, and Ni-ki’s shirt looks like it’s been through a Monet thunderstorm. 

It’s then, with hands sticky and hearts swollen with too much something, that Ni-ki kneels by the bottom step and, with his smallest brush, draws a crooked heart. It’s lopsided and imperfect, like something sketched half-seriously in the corner of a math notebook, but he leans back and nods at it with grave satisfaction. “Bad luck to paint over that,” he says, voice soft but certain. His eyes flick to yours, unreadable and vast. 

You laugh, but the sound feels like it’s been dipped in gold. “Says who?” 

“Me,” he replies. “Just made it up. Feels true, though.” 

Your grandmother pretends not to notice. She doesn’t say a word as you and Ni-ki rinse off in the garden hose like children, shrieking at the cold, chasing each other in wet circles until the sun disappears completely and the sky is scattered with stars like freckles on the night’s skin. But the next morning, when you come outside with a slice of toast and a glass of orange juice, you see it. Next to Ni-ki’s crooked heart, drawn in delicate chalk lines, is a tiny sea star. Its limbs are uneven, barely more than a gesture, but it glows faintly in the early light. A secret signature. A blessing. You smile. You don’t need to ask who did it.

The porch creaks under your feet as you sit down on the steps, brush resting in your lap. The paint tin is still open, catching the light like a puddle of sky. You feel something tug inside you, gentle, aching. Like the knowledge that things are beautiful precisely because they don’t last forever. You trace your thumb over the heart and the sea star, and for a second, you imagine the three of you years from now, weathered, changed, scattered perhaps, but still tied to this porch, this summer, this stretch of sky and sea. For now, it is enough.

Over the weeks it was pattern, work at the shop, come home and tend to the garden or listen to Grandma’s stories. Most insistences Ni-ki was there, soaking in the anonymity your grandmother gave. Truly a puzzle that wasn’t solvable. 

The town was buzzing long before the first firework ever met the sky. Anchor–Crest didn’t often burst at the seams like this, but on the night of the festival, it became something radiant, lantern-lit and humming, awash in sea breeze and the scent of something frying in paper boats. Children ran with sparklers like they were holding lightning in their fists. Couples drifted toward the beach, hand-in-hand, their laughter caught in the hush between waves. Music poured from open windows and front porches. And over it all, the ocean whispered, steady and soft, a heartbeat beneath the noise. You didn’t go to the beach. 

Instead, you and Ni-ki found yourselves behind the record shop, where the alley opened just enough to see the sky stretch wide over the water. You sat on old milk crates, your legs brushing now and then as you passed a bottle of cherry soda back and forth, its fizz long gone but its sweetness lingering. The two of you were tucked away from the crowds, like a secret folded into the night. You felt the air change just before the first firework bloomed. 

It was a silence made of anticipation, as though the stars themselves were holding their breath. Then—pop—a streak of red, unraveling like a ribbon across the sky. It hung there, suspended for a moment before shattering into glitter, reflected in the shimmer of Ni-ki’s eyes when he turned to look at it. Another followed. Then another. Soon the sky was aflame, colors peeling across it like brushstrokes on canvas, every burst a soft gasp in the lungs of the world. 

You leaned back on your palms and tilted your head skyward, watching the night perform. Beside you, Ni-ki didn’t move much. His shoulder brushed yours, barely there, but he didn’t pull away. Instead, he let it linger, like a question he was afraid to ask but didn’t want to take back. The moment was quiet in the way only certain moments can be, when the world is too loud and yet somehow, you still find the stillness in each other. 

Then he said it, almost too softly for the fireworks to permit. “I was going to say something cool. Or poetic. But I can’t think when you’re this close.” You turned to him, heart clenching in the most inexplicable, irreparable way. You smiled, gentle and sure, like you’d been waiting for that very sentence, for that very kind of honesty. “You don’t have to say anything,” you said. 

And so, he didn’t. He kissed you. It was brief at first, unsure like a skipped heartbeat, like the inhale before a song begins. A feather of contact, like he was asking permission with the press of his lips. But when you leaned in, answered without hesitation, something in him steadied. His hand came up, cupping your jaw, thumb brushing along your cheekbone with the reverence of someone dusting off a cherished record. You tasted cherry soda and the memory of something sweeter. He tasted like courage and salt, like midnight and red confetti skies. 

Around you, the fireworks kept bursting shapes and sparks and flowers of light unfurling one after another but none of them quite compared to what bloomed between you. The real fire was here. Flickering low and soft in your chest, stoked by the touch of his hand and the warmth of his breath. A match struck in the ribcage. A slow ignition of something you hadn’t dared to name. 

When you pulled away, neither of you said anything for a long moment. You sat there, eyes still closed, foreheads just brushing, breathing in tandem while the sky kept celebrating. The fireworks painted your skin in glimmers of gold and green and a little bit of silver and Ni-ki looked at you like you were something miraculous. Not loud. Not grand. Just… true. You opened your eyes, and there he was. Awkward, unsure, a little breathless but so wholly there. And in his gaze, you saw everything he hadn’t said: the nights spent listening to records he’d never play for anyone else, the softness hidden behind the sarcasm, the way he was learning slowly, beautifully to let you see him. 

You were falling. Not suddenly, but steadily. Like a tide, like a drift. Not in a crash, but a surrender. You leaned your head on his shoulder, and the two of you watched the rest of the sky unfold color after color, heartbeat after heartbeat, until the final spark faded and left the stars to take back the night. Ni-ki’s hand found yours, fingers tangled like the spines of books too well-read to close properly. 

In the distance, the crowd cheered. The festival would go on for hours. But here, behind the record store, time had folded in on itself. The world felt small and infinite all at once. Just two souls, on crates, under the sky. Half-drunk on cherry soda. And the kind of love that sneaks up on you,  soft, bright, and blazing. 

Later, when you’re home you decide to go through the house, looking through the many many things your grandmother hoarded. The sea is restless today, wind tugging at the edges of the house like a child asking to play, and inside, sunlight drips through the curtains in puddles. You’re leafing through the drawer of a weathered side table in the living room, looking for a pencil or maybe nothing in particular. That’s when you find it. 

A photograph. 

Curled at the edges, dust like a fine lace veiling the surface, the picture feels delicate in your hands as if it’s aged not just in years, but in sorrow. Your fingers brush it clean, and there she is. A girl, maybe ten, barefoot on the pier. Her dress is stitched with sunlight, her hair caught mid-tangle in the wind, and her smile — oh, her smile — is the kind that only belongs to someone who hasn’t yet known heartbreak. She looks like she’s in love with the very idea of the world. Or maybe with the boy just outside the frame. You sit there, staring, struck still. 

Because it’s the same pier you’ve grown to haunt. The same wooden slats that sing under your feet when you walk them. The same stretch of ocean behind her, endless and waiting. Somehow, the years haven’t changed it. And now the photo feels like a message across time, a memory passed down not through stories but through image — a mirror between past and present. Your grandmother walks in then, quiet as always, with a book cradled to her chest and her slippers whispering against the tile. You hold up the photo like you’ve discovered a treasure, your voice soft when you ask, “Who took this?” 

She pauses. And something flickers in her eyes not surprise, exactly, but the soft ache of recollection. She sets the book down and joins you on the couch, folding her legs beneath her like a girl again. Her gaze drifts to the photo, and for a long moment, she just looks. As if she’s remembering not just the day, but the warmth of it. The scent of salt and sand. The sound of his voice. 

“Someone I never got to say goodbye to,” she finally says, and her voice carries the weight of unfinished poems and open-ended summers. You don’t ask more. You could. You could ask who he was, what he meant, why she never said goodbye. But there’s something sacred in the way she speaks, something fragile and private, like sea glass smoothed by decades. She’s not telling you the whole story, not in words. But she is telling you something. A secret in a bottle, set adrift with hope that one day, someone would find it. 

You look at her then not just the woman who grows flowers with meaning and paints porches barefoot, but the girl she once was. The one in the photo. And you realize she’s been weaving the past into your present like a thread of golden embroidery, soft, invisible, binding. She’s letting you know what she never said aloud: that love is worth it, even if it ends. That memory is a kind of farewell, even when you can’t speak one. That sometimes, the only way to hold on is to pass the story forward. 

Later that night, after she’s gone to bed, you slip the photograph into your notebook. You don’t say anything. You don’t need to. The picture folds neatly between pages of inked thoughts and half-written poems, a ghost pressed in like a petal. It stays there, a keepsake. A key. A quiet inheritance of things too full of feeling for words.

And though you don’t say it aloud, you understand. She’s trying to tell you something. Not with warnings. Not with regrets. But with a look, a story, a smile captured in sun and salt and paper. She’s trying to teach you how to love without fear. And how to let go without losing everything. 

She’s trying to tell you: This is how memory blooms. Even when the heart breaks. Even when the goodbye never comes.

The next day, you find yourself barefoot in the garden again, the soil warm beneath your feet like it remembers every step your grandmother has ever taken. The morning has broken gently, pale and lilac-toned, and there’s a softness to everything as though the sky itself is holding its breath, not wanting to disturb the quiet magic blooming among the flowers.

Your grandmother is already out there, humming something tuneless but tender, her hands buried wrist-deep in the earth. She’s planting white things today. Moonflowers with their secrets folded tight until the dusk opens them. Angel’s trumpets, hanging like delicate bells, both beautiful and a little dangerous like memories you’re not sure you’re ready to touch. “These,” she says, gesturing to the blossoms with a small, reverent nod, “are for remembering.” 

You kneel beside her, the scent of earth and petals curling into the air around you like incense. She doesn’t explain more, and you don’t press her. You just reach for the trowel, dirt crusting under your fingernails as you help her dig small homes for each stem, like you’re planting stories instead of flowers. You understand, in that wordless way you’ve come to know her, that this garden isn’t just for beauty. It’s a language. A diary written in blooms. A secret kept in root and stem and scent. And now it’s your secret too. 

In the evenings, when the sky spills into shades of orange and violet, you water the garden together. She teaches you which ones need talking to and which need silence. You learn to cradle the delicate necks of lilies, to hum to the hydrangeas when they look lonely. You learn that gardens, like people, sometimes need more light than you think, and sometimes just need someone to be near. Then one night, Ni-ki comes by. 

He arrives with that usual shuffle of his feet and a flashlight clutched like a relic. Your grandmother raises a curious brow, and he lifts the light under his chin, casting shadows across his face like a cartoon ghost. “Beware,” he intones in a voice two octaves deeper than usual. “The garden spirits are awake.” 

Your grandmother laughs at a real one, the kind that feels round and full and rare, like a pearl hidden in a shell. The moonflowers have just begun to open behind her, slow and secretive, their petals unfurling like parchment. The air smells faintly of something magical and damp night-blooming jasmine and freshly turned soil and the hush of waves beyond the dune. 

You and Ni-ki settle on the grass as your grandmother tends to her flowers, your legs brushing his occasionally, not quite on purpose. The flashlight sits between you now, casting soft golden light on your hands, on the moon-silvered dirt, on the flowers who listen more than they speak. You watch her from the corner of your eye as she moves among the plants, small, sure, slow. Her silhouette sways in and out of the night like a prayer being whispered. And every now and then, she glances back at you and Ni-ki. Not intruding. Just watching. Like she’s seeing something she’s waited her whole life to witness. 

Like maybe, she planted this moment years ago, and now, it’s blooming. Later, after she’s gone inside, Ni-ki helps you gather the watering cans, careful not to spill the leftover drops. You notice the way he looks at the flowers now not just as decorations or background, but as something alive and essential, something holy. 

“She’s cool,” he murmurs. “Your grandma.” 

“She is,” you say. And it feels bigger than the words. 

You sit for a while longer under the stars, your knees pressed close, the garden humming with the soft sounds of crickets and the ocean’s far-off lullaby. You don’t talk much, and you don’t need to. Because something is growing not just among the petals and the leaves, but inside you. Something that roots deeper every time he shows up, every time your grandmother smiles like that, every time the wind carries her laughter like a spell. This garden, this boy, this summer, it’s all becoming a chapter you never planned to write. But you’re writing it anyway, petal by petal. And deep down, you think you’ll remember it forever. 

In due time, you notice even stranger things about your grandma. Things that were more concerning then they were interesting. You start to notice the pauses. They bloom in your grandmother’s sentences like bruises on fruit, small at first, but impossible to ignore once you’ve seen them. She’ll be telling you about the best way to root foxglove or the old wives’ tale about planting basil by moonlight, and then she’ll stop. Blink like she’s trying to remember what story she meant to tell. Her hands, once so deft in the garden, tremble slightly when she pours tea. The flowers bloom just as wildly as before, but now it’s as if they’re doing it in defiance of something sprouting brighter, more desperate, as though they’re trying to shout down time itself. 

One afternoon, you catch her sitting on the porch steps, her shoulders slumped like the weight of summer has finally caught up to her. You sit beside her quietly, the wood warm beneath you, the sea humming its endless hymn just beyond the dunes. A breeze stirs the hem of her dress, and you notice how pale she’s become, how the blue of her veins shines like rivers beneath paper-thin skin. “Are you feeling okay?” you ask gently, voice barely louder than the waves. 

She smiles without looking at you. “I’m just tired, sweetheart. Don’t worry about me.” But worry curls its fingers around your ribs and holds tight. You want to believe her. You want to pretend that it’s just age, just the heat, just too many mornings spent stooped over flowerbeds. But something inside you whispers otherwise, a deeper truth that smells like wilted petals and sea fog. So you nod, because she wants you to, but your heart folds the moment away like a letter you’re too afraid to read. 

That night, Ni-ki stays over again. The two of you sit in your room, a record spinning low in the background, something melancholy and soft, a saxophone tracing circles in the air. He’s lying on your floor with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling like it might crack open and reveal something celestial. You’re perched by the window, looking out at the garden cloaked in moonlight, the white flowers glowing like ghosts. “She’s not okay,” you say suddenly, the words thick in your throat. “My grandma.” 

Ni-ki doesn’t move, but he listens. He always does. He’s good at letting silence have a seat at the table. “She forgets things. She’s been… slower. And I think—I think she’s hiding something from me.” 

You turn to look at him. He’s propped up on one elbow now, eyes softer than you’ve ever seen them, the kind of soft that only comes out at night, like owls or lullabies. “She told me not to worry,” you add, voice brittle, “but that just makes me worry more.” 

Ni-ki sits up slowly, crossing his legs and resting his elbows on his knees. “Sometimes people say ‘don’t worry’ because they don’t want to say goodbye yet,” he says quietly. “Or maybe because they know you’ll remember even if they don’t say the words.” You look down, heart aching in that dull, thunder-before-rain kind of way. “I just don’t want this to end. Any of it.” Outside, the garden breathes in the dark, each bloom a small lantern, each leaf a soft, whispered prayer. 

Ni-ki reaches out, brushing his pinky against yours where your hands rest between you. It’s not a kiss, not a grand gesture, but it holds more than either of you can say aloud. “Then we remember it,” he says. “We keep it. All of it.” 

You lean your head on his shoulder, and together you sit there in the hush of midnight, the record’s final notes fading like fireflies. The air is heavy with jasmine and something unsayable. You don’t know what’s coming. But you know this moment, and that it matters. Outside the window, the moonflowers nod, as if they agree.

For your next shift Ni-ki gives you the ever so daunting task of organizing the backroom of the shop. The sun is high when you find the box. Dust-streaked and nearly caving in at the corners, it sits crooked on a shelf in the cluttered back room of the record shop, wedged between forgotten promotional posters and a lopsided stack of cassette tapes. You tug it free, sending a small snowstorm of dust into the air, and crouch beside it, brushing your fingers across the lid like it’s some long-lost treasure chest. 

Inside, the box breathes with memories. Scraps of receipt paper scrawled with titles, our first dance, the song that made him cry, she kissed me right after this. There are folded letters, never mailed, the edges soft with time. A napkin with lyrics on it, smudged by what looks like coffee and tears. A ticket stub taped to a candy wrapper. Even the heartbreaks have a scent, like old perfume or the last note of a piano song, lingering, trembling, unfinished. You call Ni-ki in, your voice an echo beneath the fluorescent hum. He crouches beside you, brows lifting in surprise as he sifts through the box. 

“I didn’t even know this was here,” he says, holding up a note that simply reads: Tell her I waited. 

You don’t speak for a while. You just sit there in the quiet cathedral of forgotten feelings, both of you wrapped in the ghosts of other people’s love songs. Then, without really deciding to, you both begin writing. You find a postcard from the shop’s drawer, one with a faded illustration of Anchor–Crest’s pier and on the back, you begin your letter. You don’t write dear Ni-ki, and you don’t sign your name. But the words feel like rain loosening roots. You write about the feeling of walking barefoot on warm wood, about the first time you saw him framed by vinyl sleeves and sunlight, about how love can sneak up on you like low tide, gentle, inevitable, and full of pull. He writes too, tongue poking out in concentration, his pen scratching like a record needle over the silence. He won’t let you peek, just tucks the folded paper into an envelope and seals it with a thumbprint like wax. 

“These are for someday,” he says. “Not now.” You both dig a small hole beneath the porch behind the record shop, where the wood creaks like it’s keeping secrets. You bury the letters there, beneath a flat stone. No ceremony. No promises. Just a glance between you, wide-eyed and quiet, as if you’ve both whispered a spell. “Let’s come back in five years,” he says. 

And there’s a softness to his voice, but not the kind that swears forever. It’s a softness that knows the ocean, knows how it takes and gives in equal measure. He doesn’t say if you’ll come back together. He doesn’t have to. The ache is in the silence. Later, walking home beneath a sky full of melting light, you think of Seoul. 

Of its towering buildings, its bus-strewn chaos, its neon buzz. You think of your apartment window that doesn’t open all the way, of the way people brush past you on sidewalks like wind. Anchor–Crest is not forever. It was never meant to be. It is a pocket of sunlight in a drawer of rainy days. And your time here ticks forward now, louder than it did before. 

You try not to count the weeks left. You try not to picture packing up your life into boxes again. But the truth sits in your stomach like an untied ribbon. You are leaving. Eventually. The shop, the porch, the chalk sea star. Your grandmother. Him. 

And there are still so many letters unwritten. Still so many songs that haven’t reached their final chorus. But for now, you let yourself linger in the feeling. The one where you’re young and held by a town that feels stitched together by sea-salt and happenstance. The one where you bury love in the dirt and believe, even for a second, that five years is a promise time might actually keep. 

The week spills forward like syrup, slow, golden, clinging to every breath of summer left. You spend most days with Ni-ki, moving in and out of the record shop like it’s a second skin. He’s still a little awkward, all long limbs and mumbled thoughts, but he’s grown into the spaces between your silences. You know the way he hums when he's sorting jazz records, the way he taps his fingers against the counter when he's thinking, the way he always buys two sodas but only ever drinks one.

Ni-ki makes playlists like other people make to-do lists — tiny, specific, chaotic. For mornings with rain and toast. For when the light hits the counter just right. For crying, but romantically. You love them all. They’re tucked into his computer like little offerings, each with a title that reads like a whisper only the sea would understand. One afternoon, the shop is quiet, no customers, just the sleepy spin of the ceiling fan and the sun dusting across the floor like spilled milk. Ni-ki runs out to grab something from the corner store, and you’re left alone with the soft glow of his world. 

You wander to the computer, looking for a playlist to fill the silence. You’re not snooping, not really just following the trail of titles like breadcrumbs through a strange, beautiful forest. That’s when you see it. A folder named with your name. Just your name. Nothing else. The breath catches in your chest like it hit a tripwire. You click it before you can talk yourself out of it. Just one playlist inside. No title. No description. You press play.

The first song is soft, barely there, like something found floating in a bottle at sea. It’s not loud or dramatic, not the kind of love song that begs or screams. It’s the kind that waits. That watches. That understands. It sounds like dusk and waiting hands and things unsaid. You sink into the chair, the quiet pressing in around you, every note curling like fingers around your ribs. And then another. And another. A piano tune that reminds you of your grandmother’s humming. A song with lyrics about leaving but hoping to be remembered. One with no lyrics at all, just violins trembling like heartbeats under glass.

By the time Ni-ki walks back into the room, you don’t even notice. Not until he’s standing behind you, quiet as the space between chords, does he see what’s on the screen. See you. Doesn’t move to shut it down. “I didn’t mean for you to find it yet,” he says, his voice low, barely brushing the air. You turn to him, startled, a little breathless.

“But I guess I wanted you to, eventually.” He looks down, like he’s embarrassed by the rawness of it. But there’s something steady in him too like he’s decided not to hide anymore. His hand twitches at his side, unsure. You want to reach for it. You want to press your forehead to his and say nothing and everything at once. Instead, you just smile, the corners of your lips catching like the edge of a secret.

“Thank you,” you say. Simple. True. Ni-ki shrugs, but you catch the soft pink creeping into his ears. “It’s... just stuff that made me think of you. Or reminded me of the way you look at things.” You don’t ask what that means, exactly. You don’t need to. The music still plays in the background, gentle as sea glass against the tide. You stand there together, not speaking. Just listening. Like the songs are doing the talking for you. Like they’re tracing outlines around what neither of you knows quite how to say.

You’re falling in love. That much is clear now. But it’s not the kind of falling that feels like tumbling, it's slower, softer. Like leaning. Like growing. Like sunlight creeping up a garden wall. And somehow, it feels safer to fall into his songs first, where feelings can bloom behind lyrics and hide inside metaphors. Where everything you can’t say yet lives in the space between verses.

That night when you’re home You’re curled on the sun-bleached window seat in your bedroom, the hush of late night wrapping around you like a linen blanket. The light is syrupy, slanting in through gauzy curtains, and the room smells faintly of ocean salt and garden soil. Outside, the sea is quiet for once, a sheet of silver velvet instead of its usual restless thrashing. You’re scrolling through your phone, fingertips slow as though afraid of disturbing the images. 

There’s Ni-ki asleep in the breakroom, mouth slightly open, limbs askew like a collapsed scarecrow. There’s a blurry picture of the cat from the shop curled up beside a stack of jazz records, a paw draped over Miles Davis like it’s protecting something sacred. You and Ni-ki, holding up vinyl covers in front of your faces, Fleetwood Mac for you, The Cure for him posing like ghosts inside old album dreams. There’s the pier, all orange burn and watercolor clouds, and the beach the morning after the storm when everything looked dipped in silver. There’s a picture of your hand and his, side by side, resting on a crate of soul records. Not touching, not quite. But close enough. 

You don’t even feel it at first, the tears slipping loose. Just a tightness in your throat, a soft pressure behind your eyes like the weather's changing. And then it spills. Quietly. No gasping sobs. Just a silent, steady leak of feeling, like your chest couldn’t hold the tide anymore. You try to wipe at your cheeks with the sleeve of your shirt, but your vision stays blurry, your breath uneven. You don’t hear your grandmother until she’s already there, a shadow in the doorway, framed by soft light. She says nothing for a moment, only steps into the room and sits beside you on the window seat, her knees creaking like the old wooden floorboards. 

She hands you a tissue from her pocket, always prepared, like grandmothers are, and waits. You’re still crying when you turn to her, voice watery and unsure, but honest. “I think I’m falling in love with him,” you say. It’s the first time you’ve said it out loud. The words feel too big for your mouth, too raw, like they might catch on your teeth.

She doesn’t react with surprise. Just watches the sea through the window like it might offer an answer. “And you’re not staying,” she says, more a statement than a question. You nod, your voice barely a whisper. “I wasn’t supposed to stay. It was never supposed to be like this.”

She hums a soft sound, part sigh, part knowing. Like she’s heard this story before in the rustle of waves and the creak of porch swings. “I loved a boy here once,” she says, her voice light and low. “Before your grandfather, He Played guitar barefoot on the pier. Gave me a daisy every Sunday after church even though I stopped going.” You blink at her, surprised. 

“I never got to say goodbye to him,” she continues, Like she said before. her gaze far off now. “But I remember the way he laughed. The way he carved our initials into a driftwood post that probably doesn’t even exist anymore.” She looks at you then, her eyes a little tired, but warm like candlelight. “Love doesn’t always come when it’s convenient,” she says. “But it comes all the same. And when it does, you let it in. Even if you know it’s not staying. Even if it hurts.”

You let out a soft breath, leaning your head on her shoulder, feeling the steady rhythm of her presence. Outside, the wind picks up again, and the sea seems to lean in, listening. “You’re young,” she murmurs. “And you’ll leave. Maybe you’ll come back. Maybe you won’t. But what you feel now? That’s yours. No one gets to take it away from you.” You sit there together, letting her words settle like dust in the golden light.

Later, she gives you a cup of tea and tells you which flowers in the garden mean “hope” and which ones mean “goodbye.” And when you finally go to bed, the sky is stained with stars, and your phone rests heavy on the nightstand filled with memories you’re not ready to let go of, not yet. You fall asleep wondering what Ni-ki’s doing, if he’s listening to music, if he’s thinking of you. You are in love. And the tide is coming in. 

The record skips. It’s one of those old pressings Ni-ki found buried behind the counter, the cover sun-faded and warped with time. You teased him when he put it on, called it prehistoric, called it haunted. He clutched his chest dramatically and staggered back like you’d struck a mortal blow. Now the needle stutters again and again in the same three seconds of melody, a loop of velvet sound unraveling in the half-light of the shop. You laugh, throwing your head back as the music hiccups between notes, and Ni-ki watches you like he’s trying to memorize the way your joy looks. You tease him again about the dinosaurs dancing to this record in their day and he rolls his eyes and grabs your hand, pulling you into the open space between jazz and rock. 

“C’mon,” he says. “Show some respect to the classics.” 

So you dance. Not gracefully — god, not even close. You’re both barefoot, sock-footed, floor-sliding disasters. But your laughter rises like smoke in the golden dust of the room, and the shop feels like a dream someone once had about what love should feel like. The string lights hum above you. The air smells like warm wood and vinyl and strawberry gum. Your heartbeat is a tambourine, loud and messy, and the world shrinks down to the space between your palms. 

Ni-ki spins you — badly, crookedly — and you trip into his chest, laughing into the fabric of his shirt. You can feel his breath against your temple, uneven. And then he stops. Not in a grand, dramatic way. Just… stops. Like someone hit pause. The room keeps breathing around you light flickering, music skipping, the cat knocking something over in the back but he’s still, and when you look up, his face is unreadable.

“What?” you ask, quiet, breath still catching in your throat. His eyes flicker over your face, soft and sure and full of something heavy. Something that feels like oceans, like root systems, like the sound of a song you haven’t heard in years but still somehow remember.

“I love you,” he says. Just like that. No crescendo, no string section, no poetic build. Just the words, like they’ve been waiting for this exact crack in the melody to tumble out of him. The record keeps skipping. Your heart doesn’t. You freeze halfway through a breath, halfway through a life you weren’t expecting to build here in this sleepy town with its sand-dollar skies and salt-tongued wind. You blink. Your throat feels like it’s full of sun. You’re not sure when the laughter left, when it turned into something else, quieter, heavier, sweeter.

“I—” you start, then stop. Because there’s no poetry that can carry it, no metaphor wide enough to hold what you feel for him. So you do the only thing that makes sense in that moment: you say it back. “I love you.” Simple. Soft. Like the tide rolling in. Like garden roots twining under earth. Like the first light of morning spilling over the horizon, sure as anything.

His mouth curls into that shy smile, the one that only ever shows up when he’s caught off guard, when he’s trying not to look too proud. And he leans his forehead against yours, just breathing, the record still spinning in its loop beside you. You close your eyes. Outside, Anchor–Crest glows in the last stretch of summer. The sea is humming something low and endless. The sky is cracked open with stars you’ll never name, and your heart is a constellation, rearranged. Here, in the hum of old vinyl and new love, you both stand still in time. A little broken, a little breathless. But whole, in a way neither of you expected. Love didn’t knock on the door this time. It slipped in through the cracks. And now, it lives here too.

That night, the air was velvet with warmth, stitched through with the quiet hum of late summer. Even the stars felt closer, like they'd leaned in to listen to your joy. You walked home with your heart wrapped in golden thread, still light from the weight of Ni-ki’s words the way he’d said them so plainly, so gently, like he was handing you a seashell and not the whole universe. "I love you." You said it back, like a vow. Like a secret you’d been waiting to remember. The night had a heartbeat to it, rhythmic and slow, like the tide curling back from the shore. You felt it in your veins, that gentle ebb of something new beginning. Your feet barely touched the ground, soles kissed by memory and moonlight, the scent of salt lingering on your skin like a promise. 

You pushed open the door to the beach house still glowing from the inside out, a smile soft and blooming on your face and then everything broke. 

She was on the floor.

Your grandmother.

Crumbled like a fallen flower, like someone had picked her soul and forgotten to press it in the pages of time. You didn't scream. Not at first. It was as if the world went silent, sound sucked into some black hole just behind your ears. The air turned cold. You dropped your keys. They made a sound like thunder, and suddenly, your lungs remembered how to panic. You ran to her — fell to her — and called her name over and over like it was a spell that could undo the unraveling. She didn’t answer. 

The ambulance came with sirens that howled like the sea in winter. Your hands were sticky with worry, your voice cracking like broken records as you tried to explain what had happened, except you didn’t know. You didn’t know how long she had been there. You didn’t know if she was in pain. You didn’t know why the world could be so full of love and grief in the same breath. The hospital smelled like disinfectant and lost hope. The walls were too white, too still, like they were waiting to echo something terrible. Nurses moved like shadows, soft-footed and swift, and no one looked you in the eye. You sat in a plastic chair that didn’t know you, gripping your phone like a life raft. You didn’t call Ni-ki. You couldn’t. The words were too big to say out loud. 

A doctor with kind eyes came to you. You already knew. His mouth was still moving, but the ocean inside you had risen too high. All you heard was water. All you saw was the garden — the moonflowers blooming like ghosts, the crooked heart near the step, the sea star drawn in chalk. She was gone. 

No fanfare. No lightning strike. Just… gone. The same woman who told stories with her hands and grew meaning from soil. The woman who painted porches and loved thunderstorms and believed in the language of flowers. The woman who once ran barefoot across this very shore, laughing into the wind, now just a stillness you couldn’t reach. 

Your mother arrives at the hospital in a swirl of too-late urgency, her coat hanging off one shoulder, her eyes rimmed with the kind of red that only grief or airports can give. The moment she sees you curled in a waiting room chair like a child who outgrew their lullabies something shifts in her. She doesn’t ask questions, just sits beside you in that sterile, humming quiet, and takes your hand like she’s trying to rewind time. You don’t look at her right away. You’re staring at a wall of brochures for grief counseling and end-of-life care, sterile pamphlets with soft blue skies and paper-thin smiles. None of them know your grandmother. None of them say what to do with the ache that’s bloomed inside your chest like a bruise that remembers. 

“I haven’t told Ni-ki,” you whisper, your voice a wisp of breath lost in the fluorescent hum. “I couldn’t. I—I didn’t want it to be real yet.” Your mother nods, quiet. She waits. She’s learned by now that the heavy things come out not in sobs, but in slow-dripping truths, like honey off the edge of a spoon. 

You swallow hard. “This summer... it was supposed to be temporary. Just a stopover. A break. But it turned into everything.” You pause, the words catching on the swell in your throat. “I fell in love. And not just with him.” Your mother turns her head to look at you, her expression gentle, waiting. 

“I got to know her,” you say. “Like... really know her. Not just the letters she sent on my birthdays or the way she smelled faintly like mint tea when we hugged. I mean the heart of her. The garden of her. I watched her coax meaning out of moonflowers and paint stories into the wood of the porch. She told me about her first love and ghost ships and the wind and what it meant to stay. And I saw her — really saw her — as the most magnificent woman I’ve ever known.” Your voice falters, not from lack of feeling, but from too much of it. Like your chest isn’t wide enough to hold the hurricane inside. 

“I wish I’d known her my whole life. I wish I hadn’t waited until now.” You wipe at your face with the sleeve of your sweater, a small, shaking gesture. “And now that I do know her... now that I love her like this... she’s gone. And I’ll never get those years back. I’ll never get to give them to her.” Your mother pulls your hand into her lap, and for a long while neither of you speaks. The silence is softer now, a blanket instead of a wall. She doesn't offer empty comforts. Doesn't say "she's still with us" or "everything happens for a reason." Maybe she knows those are just sugar on a wound. 

Instead, she says, quietly, “Your grandmother always said you reminded her of the sea. Not because you were wild, but because you were full of mystery. She said you’d come to her when you were ready.” You close your eyes. You can almost hear your grandmother’s laugh again, warm and round like a bell swaying in the breeze. You remember her eyes, how they crinkled when she smiled, how they softened when she looked at you in the garden, in the porch light, in the little moments that had begun to feel like home.

“She was waiting for me,” you murmur.

“She was,” your mother agrees.

You lean your head against the window, watching the first light of morning break across the sky. Pale and slow and inevitable. And with it comes the ache, deep and hollow, like the hush after fireworks, like the space between the waves. You know the grief won’t go away. Not really. It’ll settle into the folds of your life, soft and sharp, tender and terrible. But so will the love. So will the memory of her hands in the soil, her voice weaving stories into dusk, the crooked heart and the sea star and every single moonflower. You close your eyes and see her not as she was in that sterile hospital room, but barefoot on the pier, smiling like she was in love. And you carry her with you. Just like she knew you would. 

The next day rises slow and reluctant, as if the sky itself mourns with you, its color the pale gray of unsent letters and unopened boxes. The air hangs heavy with quiet, the kind of hush that settles over houses in mourning, where even the walls seem to breathe softer, out of respect for the memories folded into their corners. You and your mother work in near silence, the occasional scrape of a drawer or the rustle of paper the only sounds that dare break the stillness. 

You're in your grandmother’s room — no, her sanctuary. Every object a relic, every fabric still scented faintly of lavender and time. Her closet creaks open like it’s exhaling a lifetime. You fold each sweater like it’s sacred. Your mother dusts the porcelain figurines on the windowsill with a reverence that almost breaks you. There's an old music box that still plays a broken lullaby, and you let it play anyway, let it warble its way into the silence, because somehow it feels right.

Then there’s a knock. Soft, like he already knows not to come in loud. Ni-ki stands on the porch with his hands tucked in his jacket pockets, hair tousled, eyes tentative. There’s something about him in this moment that makes your throat tighten — a boy made of quiet compass points, showing up not with answers, but simply to stand at the edge of your ache. He doesn’t ask for permission to care. He just does. “Hey,” he says gently, eyes flicking from you to the open boxes stacked beside the door. 

“Hey,” you reply, voice a thin ribbon barely tied. 

“I… wasn’t sure if I should come,” he admits, his words trailing like seafoam at your feet. “But I figured maybe you’d need help. Or company. Or neither. I didn’t want to assume.” You shake your head. “We’ve got it. Thank you, though.” 

He nods, not offended, just accepting. He glances over your shoulder, where your mother moves about like a woman deep inside her own memories. Then his eyes land back on yours, soft and unreadable. “I’m here,” he says simply. “Just so you know. For whatever you need. Whenever you want.”

And even though you won’t ask him to stay, even though your hands are already full of the past, you lean in. You kiss him. Just a brush at first like your lips are remembering how—but then firmer, more certain. He still tastes like strawberry soda and the sound of old records. His hand finds yours like it always does, like it never left.

You pull back before the kiss turns into something bigger than either of you are ready for. “Thank you,” you whisper. And it means more than gratitude. It means I see you. It means I don’t know how to hold all this grief, but I know you’ll hold me if I ask. It means stay, even if I’ve asked you not to.

He nods again, slower this time, but his eyes linger. He senses it, how you're a little farther away than before, how there’s something behind your eyes that you haven’t named yet. Not quite a wall, but a curtain half-drawn. You can see it in the way his mouth opens like he wants to ask, then shuts again, letting the quiet settle. He doesn’t press. He just squeezes your hand one last time, then turns and leaves with a slow, uncertain step, like he’s afraid to break the air around him.

The door clicks softly behind him. You’re alone again, except for the smell of old cedar and rosewater and the echo of everything she ever said to you in the garden. And still, you pack. You hold a scarf up to your face and breathe her in, as if doing so will keep her a little longer. And you begin to realize that grief is just love stretched too far to touch. But still reaching. Always, always reaching.

Two weeks pass like fog rolling in over the tide, slow, thick, and strangely silent. Anchor–Crest has grown quieter without her in it. The house feels emptier, not just in the way that missing a voice makes a space feel larger, but in the way that time itself seems to avoid the rooms she once warmed. You move through the days like someone walking underwater, each step slow, each breath thick with what’s left unsaid.

Your phone buzzes here and there, little flickers of Ni-ki checking in. A “how are you?” on a Tuesday morning. A blurry photo of a cat wearing sunglasses taped to the shop register. A song link sent with no caption. You respond, always, but only just enough. A thumbs-up. A heart. A two-word answer when three would’ve meant more. You miss him. But grief is a strange ghost it doesn’t like company, and it doesn’t like to be shared. You keep it close, like a stone in your pocket. Heavy. Private.

You haven’t gone back to the shop. You told him you needed time, and he didn’t ask how much. That’s the thing about Ni-ki, he gives you space, even when it probably hurts him to.

Most days you sit in the garden, tending the white flowers she planted with her hands and her stories. Moonflowers, angel’s trumpet, pale blooms that catch the dusk and make the lawn look like it's glowing from within. You water them carefully, whispering things into the soil as though she might still be listening. You catch yourself talking to her aloud sometimes. "I don't know what I'm doing," you tell the wind, and it rustles the petals in reply. "I don’t know how to say goodbye to all of this."

Sometimes your mom joins you. Sometimes she doesn’t. The suitcases are back in your room now, open-mouthed and waiting. You’ve started folding clothes into them but keep pulling them back out again, as if something in you refuses to be packed away yet.

You think of Ni-ki all the time. Not in loud, desperate ways. But in small ones. The way your hand itches to text him when you hear a weird song on the radio. The way you half-turn expecting to see him when you pass the record shop. The way you walk past the porch and feel the tug of those letters buried in the dirt. You haven’t dug them up. Not yet.

One evening, just before the sun falls behind the hills, you sit alone on the porch with a cup of tea gone cold. The air smells like salt and something softer—like honeysuckle and memory. You open your phone, scroll through photos. There he is. Asleep in the break room, hair all over the place. Holding up a record like it’s a mask. Laughing, mid-sentence, eyes crinkled like a boy who’s never known heartbreak.

And suddenly you’re crying again.

Because you love him. Because you don’t know what to do with that. Because you want to stay, and you can’t. Because you stayed too long in the garden and now you don’t know how to walk away from anything.

The grief doesn’t come in waves anymore—it’s more like weather. Always there. Sometimes soft, sometimes storming. But always, always in the air. And love, somehow, is tangled up in it. In her. In him. In this whole town that you only just started to know. You press your forehead to your knees and breathe. Then, through your tears, you whisper into the dusk like you’re writing it in the stars:

“I don’t want to leave.” But you will. You know you will. And when you do, you’ll leave pieces of yourself here like breadcrumbs. Ni-ki. The porch. The ghost of her laugh in the kitchen. The sea, always just outside the door. And the flowers. The flowers that still bloom, even when no one is watching.

The day of the funeral arrives wrapped in an overcast sky, the kind that presses low over your shoulders and makes everything feel heavier, even your bones. People come and go like shadows, brushing your hand, murmuring soft things that dissolve before they ever reach your ears. You smile politely. You nod. But you’re not really there. You’re somewhere deep inside yourself, tucked into a memory of her humming in the garden, of her hands brushing soil, of the scent of jasmine and salt water.

You wear the dress she bought you last spring the one she said made you look like a poem. You can’t remember the last time you ate. Or slept. You stand at the front of the small chapel, and your mother speaks with a voice made of tissue paper and strength. You try to speak too. But when you look out into the sea of solemn faces, your throat closes. You only manage her name. Just her name. And somehow, that’s everything.

Ni-ki is there, just as he promised, in the second row. Black shirt, solemn eyes, hair curled slightly at the ends from the humidity. He doesn’t take his eyes off you. Not once. He doesn’t say much — not yet — but he stays near, orbiting quietly like a moon. Afterward, when the service fades into hushed conversations and half-finished casseroles in aluminum trays, you and Ni-ki slip away. The backyard feels like a different world. The tide is low, the wind soft, the horizon painted in pale grays and creams. You sit on the old blanket she always kept on the porch swing, now dusted with sand. He sits beside you. For a long time, neither of you speaks.

The silence stretches out like a bridge between you. And then, gently, like someone testing the strength of old wood, Ni-ki says, “What happens now?” You don’t answer at first. You just watch the water folding over itself in lazy spirals. Then you whisper, “I’m leaving in three days.” He flinches — not visibly, not really — but you feel it. Like a thread pulled too tight.

He nods. “Right. Of course.”

“I don’t want to,” you add. But it comes out too soft, too late. He looks down at his hands, now buried in the sand. “Then don’t.” You turn to him, your voice frayed at the edges. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?” His tone isn’t angry, not exactly. But it’s desperate. There’s something wild and wounded behind his eyes, like he’s already bracing for the loss. “You said you loved me.”

“I do.”

“Then stay.”

The wind picks up. A gull cries overhead, cutting across the moment like a jagged line of chalk.

“I can’t,” you whisper. “I have a life in Seoul. School. My mom. I can’t just throw that away.”

“And this?” He gestures toward you, toward the blanket, the sand, the sea. “What is this?”

You feel your voice crack, a fault line splitting down the center of your chest. “This is love. But is love enough, Ni-ki?” He stares at you like you’ve struck him. “It should be.”

You bite your lip, trying to swallow the rising tide inside you. “Love isn’t a place. It’s not a house you can live in forever. Sometimes it’s just a moment… a season… a song. And then it ends.” He stands. Not abruptly, not angrily. But with the aching finality of someone walking out of a dream. “So that’s it?”

“I don’t want it to be.”

“But it is.”

You nod.

And that’s when he says the words that split the night in two: “Then I guess goodbye is all we have left.”

He turns and walks away, his footprints pressed into the wet sand like an unfinished story. You don’t stop him. You can’t. Your legs won’t move, and your heart — oh, your heart —i s a cathedral crumbling brick by brick. You sit there for a long time, long after the light fades from the sky and the stars blink open above you. You cry, quietly at first, and then louder. You cry like you’re emptying the ocean. You cry until the sand beneath you is wet and cold and the blanket smells like sea and grief and everything you’ve lost in one summer. You loved him. And it wasn’t enough. And maybe, just maybe, that will always be the hardest truth to carry. 

The day you leave Anchor–Crest, the morning air smells like salt and rain-soaked earth, and the sea is still singing its slow, eternal lullaby to the shore. The house is quieter than it’s ever been too quiet, like it’s holding its breath. Your mother is already packing the last suitcase into the car, her movements careful, subdued. You wander the garden one last time, barefoot in dew-damp grass, letting your fingertips graze petals like they’re goodbyes written in bloom.

That’s when you notice the stone small, flat, painted a pale lavender and nestled beside the angel’s trumpets. It looks like it doesn’t belong. But then again, so many of the most important things in your life didn’t, not at first. You kneel, brush away the soil, and find a bundle beneath it. Letters. Six of them. Folded carefully, tied with a ribbon that smells faintly of rose and time.

They are from her. Your grandmother. Your heart stutters. The first begins simply: "If you're reading this, it means I’ve already gone."You sit cross-legged in the grass as the sky begins to clear. Sunlight slants through the clouds like it’s searching for you. You open the letters one by one. She wrote about the day you were born how your mother called in the middle of the night, crying and breathless and in love. She wrote about the day you first stepped into Anchor–Crest with your guarded eyes and city-stitched edges, how she’d known, even then, that you needed a summer to soften. She wrote about your laugh how it sounded like hers used to. She wrote about Ni-ki, though never by name. “That boy who looks at you like he’s already writing a song about you,” she said. And she wrote about the garden. How every flower held a secret, and every secret led back to someone she’d loved.

The last letter is the smallest. Just one line, barely inked. "If you come back in the spring, I’ll still be here—in every bloom." You press the letters to your chest and close your eyes, letting the ache spread slow and sweet, like honey melting in tea. Her love, once distant and mysterious, now roots deep inside you an anchor you never expected to carry. It grows alongside the grief, and somehow, makes space for it.

Ni-ki doesn’t come by to say goodbye. You didn’t expect him to. Some stories don’t end with grand gestures or kisses at the train station. Some endings are quieter — softer — like the hush after a song fades out, leaving only the echo behind. As you get in the car, the wind lifts through the trees and sets the garden to whispering. The angel’s trumpets nod, the moonflowers still curled in their slumber. You turn in your seat and look back at the porch — the crooked heart painted near the step, the tiny sea star still drawn beside it in fading chalk. The sun rises higher, and for a moment, the whole town seems caught in amber. Like it’s waiting.

You think about the letter you buried with Ni-ki beneath the record shop porch. You think about the roll of undeveloped film tied with ribbon, still tucked in your bag. You think about what it means to leave, and what it means to come back. About how sometimes, they’re the same thing. Your mother starts the car. Gravel shifts beneath the tires. You look out the window, past the houses and salt-washed signs, past the place where the sea meets sky and dares you to choose.

Maybe you’ll come back in the spring. Maybe you won’t. The story doesn’t say. And that, somehow, makes it feel more like life.The garden keeps growing. The sea keeps singing. And the ending stays open, just like your heart. 

(★) @izzyy-stuff , @beomiracles , @dawngyu , @hyukascampfire , @saejinniestar , @notevenheretbh1 , @hwanghyunjinismybae, @ch4c0nnenh4, @kristynaaah , @simj4k3 , @sangiewife , @hyunj00 , @firstclassjaylee , @teddybeartaetae , @i-am-not-dal , @xylatox

[bestanimal]

Round 3 - Reptilia - Charadriiformes

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

Our next order of birds are the diverse Charadriiformes, collectively called “shorebirds”. This large order contains the families Burhinidae (“stone-curlews” and “thick-knees”), Pluvianellidae (“Magellanic Plover”), Chionidae (“sheathbills”), Pluvianidae (“Egyptian Plover”), Charadriidae (“plovers”), Recurvirostridae (“stilts” and “avocets”), Ibidorhynchidae (“Ibisbill”), Haematopodidae (“oystercatchers”), Rostratulidae (“painted-snipes”), Jacanidae (“jacanas”), Pedionomidae (“Plains-wanderer”), Thinocoridae (“seedsnipes”), Scolopacidae (“sandpipers”, “snipes”, “curlew”, and kin), Turnicidae (“buttonquails”), Dromadidae (“Crab-plover”), Glareolidae (“coursers” and “pratincoles”), Laridae (“gulls”, “terns”, “skimmers”, and kin), Stercorariidae (“skuas”), and Alcidae (“auks”, “puffins”, “guillemots”, and kin).

Charadriiformes are small to medium-large birds that typically live near water, however, some live in the open sea, some live in dense forest, and some living in deserts. Most eat small animals ranging from invertebrates to fish to other birds. The order was formerly divided into three suborders based on behavior, the “waders”, the “gulls”, and the “auks”, but these three groups were paraphyletic. However, they represent a good summary of the main forms charadriiformes can take. The “waders” are generally long-legged, long-beaked birds which tend to feed by probing in the mud or picking items off the surface in both coastal and freshwater environments (however, terrestrial shorebirds like the Woodcock [Scolopax minor] and thick-knees [family Burhinidae] would also be considered “waders”). The “gulls” are generally larger species which catch fish from the sea, scavenge, or steal food from other animals. The “auks” are coastal species which nest on sea cliffs and dive underwater to catch fish, on flipper-like wings that can swim as well as fly. Now, it is generally understood that the auks are closer related to the gulls than any other family, and birds traditionally considered “waders” exist in all three suborders. Charadriiformes are one of the most, if not the most, widely dispersed bird orders, living on every continent and in almost every habitat.

Charadriiformes demonstrate a larger diversity of reproduction strategies than do most other bird orders (see propaganda below the cut for more). In most species, both parents take care of the young, but in some, the father is the main caretaker. Some breed and raise young in large colonies, while others nest alone.

Alongside the waterfowl, the Charadriiformes are the only other order of modern bird to have an established fossil record within the Late Cretaceous, living alongside the other dinosaurs. The modern groups of charadriiformes emerged around the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, roughly 35–30 million years ago.

Propaganda under the cut:

Many of the “stone-curlews” or “thick-knees” (family Burhinidae) are nocturnal, singing their eerie wailing songs at night. Suiting their nocturnal habits, they have very large, yellow eyes. They are effective hunters of insects, and some farmers will keep tamed thick-knees around their fields for pest control.

Like flamingos, the rare Magellanic Plover (Pluvianellus socialis) lives and breeds near saline lakes.

The unique Sheathbills (genus Chionis) are the only Antarctic birds without webbed feet.

Sheathbills and the Spur-winged Lapwing (Vanellus spinosus) have rudimentary spurs on their “wrists”, in place of wing claws, which they use for defense.

The “Trochilus” or “Trochilos”, sometimes called the “Crocodile Bird”, is a mythical bird first described by Herodotus (c. 440 BC), and later by Aristotle, Pliny, and Aelian, which was supposed to have been in a symbiotic relationship with the Nile Crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus), supposedly cleaning parasites and debris from the crocodile’s mouth and teeth. Various charadriiformes have been suggested as the inspiration for the Trochilus, including the Spur-winged Lapwing and Egyptian Plover (Pluvianus aegyptius). These birds are the most likely to feed around basking crocodiles, and tend to be tolerated by them, but this “tooth-cleaning” behavior has never been witnessed in the modern day. Nevertheless, the legend has become so prominent that these birds are sometimes still used as examples of symbiotic relationships!

The European Golden Plover (Pluvialis apricaria) spends its summers in Iceland, and in Icelandic folklore, the appearance of the first plover in the country means that spring has arrived. The Icelandic media always covers the first plover sighting.

The avocets (genus Recurvirostra) (image 2) are some of the only birds with upturned beaks. They use their strange beaks to feed on small invertebrates such as brine shrimp (genus Artemia) and brine fly (family Ephydridae) larvae.

The unique Ibisbill (Ibidorhyncha struthersii) has evolved a convergent appearance to the unrelated Ibises (subfamily Threskiornithinae), which are Pelecaniformes. Its long, downward-curved bill is used similarly to the ibises, as it probes under rocks or gravel for aquatic insect larvae.

Another charadriiform to convergently evolve with a pelecaniform is the Spoon-billed Sandpiper (Calidris pygmaea). While it is the size of a typical sandpiper, it has the spoon-shaped bill of a Spoonbill (genus Platalea). It has a similar feeding behavior to spoonbills, moving its bill side-to-side as it walks forward with its head down. However, this sandpiper typically feeds on tundra mosses, as well as small animals like mosquitoes, flies, beetles, and spiders, as well as brine shrimp occasionally. The Spoon-billed Sandpiper is critically endangered, and its population has been decreasing since the 1970s. It is estimated the species may become extinct in 10–20 years if its habitat is not protected. The Spoon-billed Sandpiper was the milestone 13,000th animal photographed for Joel Sartore’s The Photo Ark.

While oystercatchers (genus Haematopus) are monogamous and tend to return to the same nesting site every year, some have been observed “egg dumping”, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds such as gulls.

The Jacanas (family Jacanidae) (image 4) are sometimes referred to as “Jesus Birds” or “Lily Trotters” due to their highly elongated toes and toenails that allow them to spread out their weight while foraging on floating vegetation, giving them the appearance of walking on water. They are one of the rare groups of birds in which females are larger, and several species maintain harems of males in the breeding season with males solely responsible for incubating eggs and taking care of the chicks.

A “snipe hunt” is a type of practical joke or hazing, in existence in summer camps and scout groups in North America as early as the 1840s, in which an unsuspecting newcomer is duped into trying to catch an elusive animal called a snipe, a creature whose description varies. However, snipes (three separate genera in the family Scolopacidae) are actual birds, who search for invertebrates in marshland mud with their long, sensitive bills, and are highly alert. They would be hard to catch in a pillow case.

The Ruff (Calidris pugnax) is notable for having 4 separate sexes: 1 female and 3 types of male. The most common male, called the “territorial male” has a black or chestnut ruff, is much larger than the female, and stakes out a small mating territory in the lek. They perform elaborate displays that include wing fluttering, jumping, standing upright, crouching with their ruff erect, or lunging at rivals. The second type of male is the “satellite male”, which have white or mottled ruffs, are larger than females but smaller than territorial males, and do not occupy territories. Satellite males enter leks and attempt to mate with the females visiting the territories occupied by territorial males. Territorial males tolerate the satellite males because, although they are competitors for mating with the females, the presence of both types of male on a territory attracts additional females. The rarest type of male is the cryptic male, or "faeder", which permanently mimics the females in both size and plumage. Faeders migrate with the larger males and spend the winter with them, but use their appearance to “sneak” into leks and gain access to females. Females often seem to prefer mating with faeders to the more common males, and those males also copulate with faeders (and vice versa) relatively more often than with females. Homosexual copulations may attract females to the lek, like the presence of satellite males. Satellite males seem to be more attracted to faeders, and in homosexual encounters, the faeders are usually “on top”, suggesting that the satellite males know their true identity. The behaviour and appearance of each male Ruff remains constant through its adult life, and is determined by genetics.

The unique buttonquails (family Turnicidae) convergently evolved the small, round shape of the galliform quails. Unlike true quails, the female buttonquail is the more richly colored of the sexes. Both sexes cooperate in building a nest in the earth, but normally only the male incubates the eggs and tends the young, while the female may go on to mate with other males.

The stork-like Crab-plover (Dromas ardeola) is unique among waders for the shape of its bill, specialized for eating crabs, and for making use of ground warmth to aid the incubation of its eggs. The nest burrow temperature is optimal due to solar radiation and the parents are able to leave the nest unattended for as long as 58 hours, protected by large colonies of up to 1,500 pairs. The chicks are also unique for for being less precocial than other waders, and are unable to walk and remain in the nest for several days after hatching, having food brought to them. Even once they fledge they have a long period of parental care afterwards.

The skimmers (genus Rynchops) are the only birds which have a built-in underbite, where the lower mandible is longer than the upper. This adaptation allows them to fish in a unique way, flying low and fast over streams, letting their lower mandible skim over the water's surface, ready to snap shut the moment it touches a fish.

The Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger) is the only species of bird known to have slit-shaped pupils.

Gulls, Skimmers, and Noddies can see ultraviolet light.

The snow-white, pigeon-like Ivory Gull (Pagophila eburnea) breeds in the high Arctic and is an opportunistic scavenger. It has been known to follow Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) and other predators to feed on the remains of their kills.

Some species of gull, such as the Laughing Gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) and Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) have adapted to live alongside humans in places where humans have overtaken their habitat. These gulls have little fear of humans, and will pirate food from them just as they would any other animal.

Auks are superficially similar to penguins, having black-and-white colours, upright posture, and adaptations for swimming underwater. However, they are an example of convergent evolution, and are not closely related to penguins. Auks fill the niche of penguins around the arctic, while penguins fill the niche of auks around the antarctic.

In fact, the extinct, flightless Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) was the original “penguin”. Penguin was the Spanish, Portuguese and French name for the species, derived from the Latin pinguis, meaning "plump". The penguins of the Southern Hemisphere were named after it because of their similar appearance and flightlessness. The last two confirmed Great Auks were killed on Eldey, off the coast of Iceland, on June 3, 1844.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[serpentface]

Ancient funerary cairn mounds in Wardi territories: a post:

The internal structure consists of an above-ground tomb made with bricks or large stone slabs, upon which rocks are piled. Most mounds found in the lowlands also have multiple layers of dirt piled atop, resulting in the mounds becoming covered in grass and appearing as a small unnatural hill. The entrances to the tombs are always sealed with slabs or stacked stone, though the east-facing 'windows' are left open. Pillar shaped cairns were often built on their peaks, though few of these remain standing. If one looked inside, they would find a human body laid on its back with its feet towards the door, and usually at least one khait (tacked with reins and a saddle blanket) buried in there with them. The person would be fully clothed and surrounded by grave goods, sometimes carrying weapons and almost always carrying a torch.

A how a well-preserved mound looks in the present day, with its 'window' still exposed and pillar cairn intact. The stones piled around it is the work of contemporary people, intended (more as a psychological/magical barrier than a physical one) to keep livestock out and ghosts inside.

Burial mounds are associated with one the major prehistoric material cultures found across and beyond the region. Societies that formed cairn-building material culture were probably ancestral to all proto-Wardi peoples, but the practice split and existed concurrently to others as a matter of cultural shifts (most significantly the adoption of khait for highly mobile nomadic pastoralism, with other populations retaining on-foot travel or adopting settled/semi-settled subsistence methods). Khait-nomadic populations retained this cairn grave practice, while others shifted to smaller above-ground tombs located near settlements (and eventually shifted entirely to cremation). As such, cairn mounds can be found everywhere but occur most densely in open grasslands of the interior.

The cairn-building practice gradually diminished and eventually was restricted to a few major groups, some of whom abandoned khait-nomadism while retaining the practice and some of whom even traveled short distances overseas. The last two populations who built cairn graves were clustered in the Highlands and the Elumuqi island chain to the south. The latter went culturally extinct in conflict with early proto-Jazaiti migrants by 2500 years BP, while the former went extinct in the Yellowtail River Valley and northwestern ranges of the Highlands by about ~1700 years BP. Neither was a wholesale extinction of the population itself (members likely abandoned settlements and dispersed elsewheren in small groups, resulting in the final cultural extinction), but both entailed rapid depopulation, and the Highlands remained unusually sparsely inhabited compared to surrounding lowlands when proto-Finnic migrants started arriving a couple centuries later.

The most specific (though heavily mythologized) descriptions of these people in the oral record occur in Jazait and Atig Wermani cultures. In the former, the story of their settlement describes encounters with the fierce people who inhabited the islands and built the cairns. They looked like humans, but were feathered like birds and could transform into albatross to hunt for fish. They would kidnap newborn Jazait children in the night, exsanguinate them atop the cairns to feed their dead in the underworld, and would perform horrible shrieks and screams throughout the process. The early Jazait went to war with the cairn-builders and killed their clanmother, and the rest fled as birds. This story may contain traces of the real people, as the wearing of gull and albatross feathers is likely, and the shrieking Might refer to funerary wailing practices (which are ubiquitous enough among minimally connected peoples west of the Blackmane mountains to be likely Very ancient).

The ancestors of the Atig Wermani story would have encountered their neighboring cairn-builders much more recently (relatively speaking) and their accounts are a little more grounded as a result. It describes them as a people who lived in the Yellowtail River Valley, herding horses, hunting deer, and interring their dead within the cairns. The entire people was cursed by the Yellowtail river itself after their king drowned his own brother within it. The valley was flooded and most of the people drowned. Those who fled up into the hills survived, but were transformed into feydhi khait. The Highland cairn-builders are Exceptionally unlikely to have had any form of monarchy, but the other descriptions of their subsistence may be accurate, and it is almost certain that the feydhi khait landrace largely descends from this people's herds (and were found feral and re-tamed by later proto-Finnic settlers).

---

The consensus on these mounds tends to be that they are Extremely haunted. It's well-known that they're graves, and that they contain bodies that have been left to rot (and thus are assumed to contain trapped earthbound spirits, especially dangerous given their great age). Some taboos regulating behavior around the mounds are near-ubiquitous, such as belief that one should never tread over a mound, point at a mound, or look directly at its window on a moonless night (when earthbound ghosts are considered most active). It's usually difficult to prevent free-ranging livestock from walking on them to graze, and unexplained disappearances from herds are sometimes attributed to the mounds. Other taboos tend to be localized in nature, as a matter of small communities near mounds figuring out how to coexist with the dangerous ghosts.

These tombs are generally left untouched and don't frequently suffer robbery, but are sometimes broken into to exhume and cremate the body and their associated grave goods when the spirit is blamed for grave local misfortune. This is generally considered a desperate measure and very risky maneuver, as chances are very low that earthbound spirits that old can be sent onwards by even by the best of funerals.

[itsgivingmami]

Sea Salted Honey- pt. 2

Coastal TownAU Rhea Ripley x Reader

Contains some very tame smut—

The Woman With the Note in Her Window

The sun rises slow and golden through sea-salted glass.

Sunday creeps in gently—no sirens, no phone buzzes, no voices hollering down the beach. Just the hush of waves and the occasional gull gliding overhead. It smells like warmth. Like tide-washed air and her own skin stretched over sleep-heavy bones.

Rhea stirs late. Later than she ever lets herself. But the shop’s closed—always on Sundays—and her body aches in that quiet, satisfied way that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with how close she got to kissing you last night.

Close, but not quite. And that might be why she’s still lying there, long after her usual wake-up time. That almost has her haunted.

The sweet ache of you, echoing soft under her ribs.

She rolls out of bed eventually, sheets sliding from her hips, one tattooed arm thrown over her face before she swings her legs over the side of the mattress and stretches. Her ribs crack. She groans. Pads barefoot through the hallway until she reaches the kitchen and pushes the screen door open just wide enough to let the breeze kiss her skin.

The stove clicks to life. Coffee grinds hiss beneath the pour. She moves without thinking, mug in hand, toes curling against the cool tile, leaning her hip into the counter. And—just like every morning—her eyes drift toward the side window.

Your cottage. Angled perfectly to see from here. A habit she doesn’t talk about, not even to herself. It’s not spying. It’s checking.

Just checking.

Sometimes it’s the glint of you moving past the curtains. Sometimes it’s your porch light, left on a little too long. Today—it’s something different.

A note.

Pressed against your living room window.

Recycled cardboard. Black marker in crooked letters.

“BRUNCH? Come over when you see this. Door’s unlocked. XO.”

There’s a little sketch in the corner. A flower. Maybe a heart.

Something casual.

Something playful.

Something that makes her jaw tighten to keep from smiling like an idiot.

She doesn’t wait long. Doesn’t ask if she’s invited. She knows the answer.

A quick shower. Her softest tank and loose drawstring pants that ride low on her hips. Her hair’s still damp when she crosses the patch of grass between your places, sun rising behind her like a spotlight.

The door’s cracked. Just like you said.

She taps twice—then lets herself in.

The smell hits first.

Peach and cinnamon. Butter. Something sweet browning low in the oven. A pan hissing on the stove. Your curtains are dancing on the breeze, and somewhere, Nina Simone is murmuring about love like a secret.

She steps inside like she’s done it a thousand times before.

Like she belongs here.

Like you’re already hers.

And there you are.

Bare-legged. Oversized tee hanging off one shoulder. Turning something golden in a skillet, your back to her.

She stops. Watches.

The curve of your spine. The way you sway to the music. That soft line of your neck she keeps thinking about kissing.

God, you’re beautiful.

“Hey,” she says. Her voice is rough from disuse, deeper than usual.

You jump. Then smile wide when you see her. “Oh fuck—hey! Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in. The record was loud.”

She steps forward and hands you her coffee mug as a peace offering, a crooked smirk tugging at her mouth. “I was hoping the sign was for me.”

You grin, sip from her mug without hesitation. “Who else would it be for?”

Rhea shrugs like it’s nothing, but there’s something glinting in her eyes. “Could’ve been for Pearl.”

“Pearl’s in church.” You lean in, mischievous now, voice a little lower. “You, however—look like sin.”

Her breath stutters.

The line shouldn’t hit so hard. But you say it like you mean it. Like you’ve thought about it.

And she’s not used to being the one undone.

She reaches for the plate you hand her instead—toast, ripe stone fruit, something whipped and sweet that smells like honey. You slide a chair out for her, paint-stained towel covering the cushion, and sit opposite with one knee tucked under you like this is the most natural thing in the world.

And maybe it is.

Maybe it always has been.

The table’s cluttered. The light’s warm.

She’s never wanted to stay somewhere so badly.

You talk—about paint, music, how you nearly gave up on this recipe until it came together last second. She listens. Really listens. Watches the curve of your smile, the way you lick honey from your thumb, the color smudged under your fingernails.

“This is nice, right?” you say, tilting your head.

Rhea’s throat tightens. “Yeah.”

“It’s not fancy, but—”

“It’s perfect,” she cuts in. Voice soft. Sure. “Don’t change a thing.”

You smile. And when your hand brushes hers as you reach for your fork—

Neither of you pulls away.

—

The Woman Who Ran Into the Storm

The week passes like amber. Thick, golden. Sweet in places, sharp in others. The kind that lingers on your fingers long after you’ve forgotten how it got there.

Rhea starts showing up more. Not with expectation. Just with presence. She never announces herself in advance, but she never assumes either. She brings you tea on days when she goes to the hardware store and drive by the cafe, a fresh set of brushes once when she noticed your best one starting to fray, and sea glass in her pocket that she sets on your table without a word.

She’s tactile in small ways—ringed fingers brushing your elbow to catch your attention, her hand pressed steady against your back as you cross a rocky patch of beach. She doesn’t ask to touch. She just knows when. And when not to.

You learn she can’t cook. She burns toast. Once tried to boil pasta without salt and stared at your look of betrayal like you’d just insulted her honor. But she makes grilled cheese so good it borders on criminal, and she insists on cutting it into triangles with almost too much pride.

She learns that you hum when you paint and swear like a sailor when you stub your toe. That you eat Oreo’s when you can’t sleep, and your hands get twitchy when you’re nervous. You catch her watching you sometimes—not out of lust. Just… hunger. Curiosity. Like you’re a mystery she’s not trying to solve, just savor.

One night, the two of you sit on the sand just after sunset. You’re sketching a broken piece of pier and she’s watching the waves with her arms draped over her knees. She doesn’t talk unless you do. You like that. She doesn’t fill the quiet—she respects it.

Sometimes she walks home with your scent on her shirt. Sometimes she forgets to take her mug back. Once, you watched her disappear down the path with your hoodie slung over her shoulder, and something in your chest fluttered like a tide about to change.

By the time the storm rolls in, it’s been eight days.

You haven’t kissed.

But it’s not for lack of want.

It’s for the holding.

The ache.

The knowing that when it happens—it won’t be soft.

—

That strange color—unnatural, like green glass melted into cloud cover—pulls Rhea’s attention before she even finishes locking up the shop.

Her forearm brushes against the doorframe as she watches the shoreline, brows furrowed, tongue pressed flat behind her teeth. The clouds roll thick above the water, too fast, too low. Her fingers twitch at her sides like they’re bracing for impact.

The wind shifts.

Not just heavy. Tense. Like it’s carrying news she doesn’t want to hear.

And then—her stomach knots.

You haven’t passed her window today.

Every morning since you met—not long, not long at all, but long enough to feel like something holy has rearranged itself in her chest—you’ve appeared like clockwork. Messy bun. Paint on your arms. Mug of something too herbal. Loose sleeves. A nod. A wave. Sometimes a smile that ruins her whole afternoon in the best way.

But today—nothing. Not since you called her from bed to ask how she slept and managed to get her to abandon the board she’d been working on for an hour.

No glimpse. No sound. No curtain drawn back. No sliver of movement through the window she checks far too often.

Her pulse picks up. She tells herself you’re fine. Maybe sleeping in. Maybe in the bath. Maybe elbows-deep in some piece that’s got you forgetting the world again. But the thought doesn’t settle.

Not with that sky. Not with that wind. Not with the way the down pour looks like it’s nowhere near close to letting up.

Not with the ache low in her gut to do with how quickly you’ve gotten under her skin.

She drags a hand down her face and exhales, but the sound comes sharp, irritated. Not at you. At herself.

She hasn’t felt like this in years. Not since the last time a storm ripped through and left something inside her different.

Not since she was twenty and alone in a new city that didn’t care if she drowned.

She remembers the flash of lightning through an empty hotel room window. The silence of a phone that never rang. The stupid hope that someone would come find her despite the fact no one knew she was there. They didn’t. She sat on the floor, back against the bedframe, cold to the bone and furious that it mattered.

She’s never let herself need anyone since or let anyone make her needed.

Until you.

And now she’s standing at the edge of a storm, fighting the urge to sprint barefoot down the beach and pound on your door like the sky’s already falling.

Her jaw locks. Her fists clench.

No. No.

You’re fine.

Probably.

Maybe.

Fuck this.

She grabs her hoodie without bothering to dry off her hands, keys already clenched in her grip. The door slams behind her. Wind yanks the hem of her shirt sideways as she crosses the shop threshold and starts down the path toward your house.

She tries to walk.

She does.

For about two seconds.

And then she starts to run.

She doesn’t care about puddles. Doesn’t care about the spray of sand slapping against her legs. She barrels through the wind like it owes her an answer. Her heart hammers. The trees bend overhead. Porch lights flicker.

And then she sees it.

Your house.

Dark.

Lights completely out.

Not even the glow of candles or the flicker of a flashlight.

Something crashes through her chest like a fist.

It’s not that the power’s out. It’s the silence.

It’s the lack of movement.

It’s the quiet like a swallowed scream.

She stumbles onto your porch, soaked to the skin, chest heaving. Rain drips from her hair into her eyes and she wipes it away furiously. The screen door creaks under her grip.

“Hey,” she calls out, too loud. “It’s me.”

Nothing.

She pushes the door open.

“Babe I’m here!” Still no answer.

Her throat locks tight.

She steps into the dark, her boots tracking water across your hardwood floor. Her eyes adjust. Everything’s exactly where it should be—mugs on the counter, a book left open, the soft smell of lavender and paint in the air—but you’re not in the living room.

She rounds the corner faster than she means to.

And there you are.

Standing in the kitchen, barefoot and blinking at her in wide-eyed surprise. Hair tousled from searching for tea lights, wrapped in an old oversized tee—hers, she realizes belatedly, the one she left behind last night after dropping off a coffee and forgetting to take it back. Your face glows faintly in the light of one single candle, placed carefully on the windowsill.

“Rhea?” you ask, voice soft with disbelief. “What the hell—are you okay?”

And that’s when she breaks.

Her heart doesn’t just slow.

It drops.

Because you’re here. You’re safe. You’re warm and real and alive and hers for just this moment. And she didn’t know how scared she was until now.

“I couldn’t get ahold of you,” she breathes, taking a shaky step forward. Her voice is hoarse. “Your lights were off. No candles. I thought—fuck, I thought something happened.”

Your expression softens. You reach for her without hesitation, your fingers brushing over her wet sleeve. “My phone died. I was looking for a lighter. I didn’t even realize—oh my god, you ran here?”

She nods, eyes locked on yours like if she looks away, she’ll lose you again.

“I didn’t want to wait,” she says. “Not if you needed me.”

Then there’s a beat.

One, deep breath between you.

And Rhea crosses the last bit of space and kisses you.

Hard.

Desperate.

Not the careful kind. Not the flirtation you’ve been trading back and forth for days. No teasing. No testing.

This is need.

Her hands come to your waist, your cheek, your jaw. She kisses you like she’s never going to let you go again. Like she already lost you once in her mind and doesn’t plan on giving the universe another shot.

You melt into her before you realize it’s happening. Your fingers slide into her wet hair. Your mouth parts. The storm howls against the house, and Rhea holds you like she could take the brunt of it if it tried to take you from her again.

She pulls back just enough to look at you.

“You have to answer next time,” she murmurs, forehead pressed to yours. “Please,”

“I will,” you promise, breathless. “I promise.”

And when you wrap your arms around her, tug her close into the candlelit dark, Rhea finally exhales the fear she didn’t want to name.

Because you’re safe.

And now, you’re in her arms.

Right where you belong.

—

The Woman Loved

She doesn’t want to let you go.

You tell her—gently, like it’s not obvious—“Rhea, you’re soaked. You need a warm shower, or you’re going to get sick.”

And she should listen. She should nod and do the rational thing. But she doesn’t.

She just tightens her grip.

“No,” she murmurs, mouth against your shoulder. “Not yet.”

You huff a quiet breath, half laugh, half flustered. “Baby, come on.”

She pulls back just enough to look at you—wet hair plastered to her face, lashes heavy, expression soft but stubborn. No.

“Then I’ll come with you.” You negotiate,

And before you can take it back—before you can even blink—her arms shift, one under your thighs, the other around your back, and you’re being lifted. Carried. Koala-hugged straight toward the bathroom as if you weigh nothing, as if letting go would break something in her she doesn’t know how to fix.

“I could walk—” you start to say, but she cuts you off with a quiet growl.

“Not letting go.”

She sets you down with care—bare feet on cool tile—and steps out of her hoodie with a flick of her wrist. The tank beneath is soaked to her ribs, clinging to every defined line, ink gleaming like war paint.

You can’t look away.

The air thickens.

You reach for the shower handle and flick it on, steam rising, warmth flooding the space. She watches you. Watches you with that look—like you’re art she hasn’t finished tracing, like her hands are starving and her restraint is cracking with every second.

Her fingers graze your hips. Barely there.

“You sure?” she asks, voice low, rougher now.

You nod. Once. Steady. “Yes.”

The shower roars behind you as her mouth claims yours—firm and hungry, hands splayed against the small of your back, guiding you step by step into the steam like she owns the air you breathe.

Your shirt is gone in a breath.

She peels your pants away with wet fingers and gritted patience, dragging the fabric down your thighs, lips never straying far from your skin—pressing kisses into your shoulder, your collarbone, your neck like she’s marking a path she intends to follow again and again.

You gasp against her mouth when the first spray of hot water hits your spine—sharp, clean, a contrast to the heat of her body closing in. The tiles cold at your back, the air thick with steam.

She groans—low and rough, like she’s waited too long for this, like kissing you is the only thing that’s kept her from shattering since the moment the storm hit.

Her hands slide down your waist with purpose, fingers pressing into the curve of your hips. She doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t ask. She just takes—like it’s her right, like you’ve already told her yes a thousand times.

And you have. With every glance. Every lean. Every time you opened the door.

When your hands move to her soaked tank, she breaks the kiss just long enough to let you strip it off—tugging it over her head, water pouring over both of you, plastering dark strands of hair to her temples. The fabric hits the floor with a wet slap.

Your breath catches.

She’s unreal like this—drenched and undone, jaw tight, every inch of her inked skin gleaming with water. Heat and muscle and tension. Her chest rises and falls in sharp, shallow bursts. Her eyes drink you in like it’s the only thing grounding her.

Your palms trace the hard line of her shoulders, the smooth slope of her arms, the ridges where her ribs taper into her waist. Her skin is hot under your hands, radiating hunger she barely keeps caged.

You press your lips to the hollow of her throat and feel the vibration of her moan under your mouth.

She backs you into the wall with deliberate pressure—her body a shield, her hand braced beside your head, the other sliding up your thigh in a slow, maddening drag. Teasing. Possessing.

Her touch is firm but not rough. Not yet.

She kisses you again—harder now, deeper. A groan rising in her throat like it’s been buried too long.

“I thought I lost you,” she growls, teeth grazing your jaw as her hand curls around the back of your thigh, lifting it up around her hip. “I thought you were—fuck, baby. You can’t do that to me.”

Your breath shudders out.

“I’m here,” you whisper. “I’m right here.”

She exhales like she’s been holding that panic down for hours.

Her lips crash into yours again. No patience this time. No caution. She pins your wrists above your head, water cascading over her arms as she presses closer, thigh firm between your legs. Her strength cages you, but you feel worshipped. Not trapped.

Held.

Wanted.

Her body grinds into yours—urgent, sure, slick and searing as her thigh rocks against you, and you arch under the pressure, gasping into her mouth.

Her fingers wrap around your wrists tighter, holding you steady.

Like she’s daring you to run.

Like she’d chase you all over again if she had to.

Your name falls from her lips like a vow. A warning. A plea.

And then she’s everywhere.

Mouth hot against your throat, collarbone, chest—kissing and nipping as if the heat between you is the only thing anchoring her. Her hand slides between your thighs, fingers slipping against you with confident pressure—firm, teasing, devastating.

You moan into her shoulder, fingers clawing for something to hold onto. But she has your wrists. She has everything.

Her voice is wrecked in your ear.

“Good girl,” she murmurs. “Just like that.”

The words send a bolt of lightning through you.

Your hips grind forward, your thighs clenching, your body aching toward every point of contact. She doesn’t ease up. Her hand moves with devastating rhythm—drawing it out, dragging you closer to the edge with every pass of her fingers.

You sob softly, your cry swallowed by the roar of water and the press of her mouth.

She praises every sound you make.

Every arch. Every whimper.

She holds your gaze when you try to close your eyes, shaking her head slightly, commanding without speaking—Look at me.

You do.

Even when your vision blurs. Even when the pleasure surges up like a tidal wave, crashing down through your limbs, pulling a ragged cry of her name from your throat as you fall apart under her hand.

Your legs tremble.

She lets your wrists go, but only to catch you—arms wrapping around you instantly, holding you upright as your body shakes with the aftershocks. She kisses your cheek. Your jaw. The corner of your mouth.

Soft now.

Reverent.

She doesn’t say I told you so.

She just holds you there—breathing steady, hands gentle again as she strokes your back, fingers tangling in your wet hair.

And then, quietly, lips brushing against your temple:

“Next time,” she says, voice dark and still wrecked, “I’m not stopping there.”

You laugh—a broken, beautiful thing. Shaky and soaked and full of something you can’t name.

“Good,” you whisper.

And she smiles against your cheek.

Because now she knows you mean it.

—

The Woman Who Hates Tea

The rain passed sometime before sunrise, leaving the town soaked and softened, the clouds retreating in long, silvery streaks across the pale blue sky. The streets are damp and scattered with leaves and drifted sand. Palm fronds hang heavy over telephone lines. The sea is still loud—but not angry. Just breathing.

You and Rhea walk to the café in silence, your fingers laced together, her hoodie hanging off your shoulders like it belongs there.

She hasn’t let go of you since the night before.

Not really.

Not in the shower, where she kissed your shoulder until the water ran cold. Not in your bed, where she curled behind you with her arms wrapped tight around your waist like she could keep the storm out that way. And not this morning, when she watched you get ready to go out like she had every intention of ruining you again as soon as the town stopped spinning.

Now, as you reach the little café by the dunes, she gives your hand one final squeeze before you both let go—stepping inside to find Pearl already sweeping water from under the door, Jay wiping down counters with his usual music playing low from a Bluetooth speaker clipped to the windowsill.

“You made it,” Pearl says brightly, glancing up from behind the broom. “We weren’t sure you two would be in this morning.”

“We were already up,” Rhea says, grabbing a mop from the corner and leaning it against her shoulder like a bat. “Figured we’d help.”

You smile, brushing a damp strand of hair from your cheek. Pearl eyes you for a long moment—curious and a little amused.

You’re not sure what gives it away. The hoodie. Or maybe the way Rhea hasn’t stopped glancing at you like she’s still checking for damage.

And as you pass Pearl, she leans just close enough to murmur, “So… is that girl of yours the kind that sticks around, or just good in a storm?”

You open your mouth—but before you can speak, Jay’s voice cuts in from the bar, dry and without looking up from the espresso machine.

“Rhea doesn’t drink tea,” he says, flicking a switch.

Pearl raises an eyebrow.

“Still,” Jay shrugs. “orders the jasmine rose every few mornings. Same time. Never drinks it. Just leaves with it like it’s for someone else.”

Your face heats.

Pearl glances between the two of you. Slowly, slowly, her mouth curves.

Rhea, still sweeping, doesn’t look up—but her voice carries across the café, casual and unbothered.

“I like the smell,” she says, then glances over her shoulder. “And the person who drinks it.”

Pearl snorts.

Jay just smiles behind the bar.

You shake your head as you drop a stack of towels on a nearby table, but you’re smiling too—because the way Rhea is watching you now, eyes half-lidded and proud, makes it impossible not to.

And when she walks past you a few minutes later, her voice drops low enough for only you to hear:

“You can tell Pearl the tea’s not the only thing I plan to keep coming back for.”

—

Thanks for reading.

Likes, comments and reblogs always appreciated💜

[multiplicationdivision]

Beach Body

——————————————————————————

The beach was a perfection like nothing the town of Rusty Coast had seen in the last recorded memory. Gone today were the rocky waves lapping amidst thick fog and heavy crashing of the winter fishing season. The air from miles out was still and comfortably warm from the coming summer, a fact that would’ve made it feel lonely if not for the steady rhythmic pound of waves accompanied by the rise and fall of cackling gulls and the occasional sneeze of a seal somewhere in the distance. Somehow in this cove the frigid pacific water was warm, the curls of seafoam lapping up the beach onto their feet before sinking back in with the countless bubbles of hidden sand crabs.

Rhett could already feel himself baking in this sun, although that was no indication of the sun today. Being a Irish man in California was just a fact of burning sometimes, not that getting pink in just a couple of minutes was ever fun. Worse when your company seemed to only relax in this secluded place’s warmth, his two housemates relaxed as they moved set up their towels and awkwardly drag their single board onto the sand.

Evan was the darkest one out of all of them, although a few quarters of non-stop accounting classes certainly pulled as much color out of him as possible. Same with Oliver, who’d once discovered this beach ages ago when he’d had the time to surf.

Now they were a house graduated, each of their degrees piled on their kitchen table and only the evidence of the work it took to get them being the scrawniness of their muscles and the near complete translucence of Rhett himself. It had felt like years before physical activity was even an idea in their heads, but it was felt now.

“You struggling Oliver?” Rhett called out to the guy clearly coming apart at the task of pulling the massive surfboard across the rocky tidepools. Even the crabs seemed slightly worried for the guy, having the mind to leave a large berth for his flailing. It was odd to imagine Oliver used to surf on that board nearly everyday and Rhett and Evan couldn’t help thinking that it was slightly pathetic. It was paired with their affection at the “please ignore me” look on the guy’s sweaty face, although sharing a bed with the guy would likely ensure it.

“Fucking idiot” Evan sighed in the direction of the ever-stubborn Oliver, as he sat down, shrugging off his shirt and kicking off the converse that had already gotten heavy with sand. His body wasn’t much to look at these days to a passerby, but Rhett was a long-practiced connoisseur in enjoying what others were too shallow to appreciate. He let himself lean back into the guy, against the familiar warmth of the guy’s chest and the slight unpleasantness of the man’s chronically cold hands.

Evan was ever his particular brand of affectionate as he whined in displeasure “Dude your damn Nikes are getting sand on my towel”, his tone already betraying that he was saying it more for himself than Rhett. Rhett wasn’t in the habit of undressing himself these days and teasing Evan was as fun as it always was, although the idea of exposing more of himself to the sun than necessary was an equal component. Instead, he just grabbed a handful of sand and released it onto Evan’s head, watching the man sputter in annoyance.

“Evan, I think you have some sand on your face” Oliver said casually at the amusingly enraged man and the self-satisfied smirk of Rhett. The surfboard sat just a couple feet from the tidepools, Oliver having stealthily abandoned the task to the small company of crabs now crowding his old board. They guy was soaked with sweat and probably a tumble in the same tidepool, judging by the sandy mud on his shorts and a lost sandal.

Not that he would need the cheap cloth sandal being carried off by a crab in the distance.

They weren’t a foolish group having come here expecting to surf as they were. Hell they weren’t even dressed for it, Rhett in his jean shorts and the others in old basketball shorts. Not that they’d be dressed in much soon anyways, judging by the impatience tenting Oliver’s shorts, matching Evan’s own defiantly pressing against Rhett’s hand even as Evan tried unsuccessfully to douse Rhett in sand himself.

“Weathers so perfect boys that we could just spend today without any of that extra business” Rhett said jokingly, although he didn’t stop Evan from hooking his thumb under his shirt and wrestling it off of him just like they had so many nights this week.

Oliver enjoyed the sight and stretched, slipping his own athletic shirt off with a groan. His own little play on Evan’s weak mind judging by Evan seeming to slip at the distraction at the sight.

They’d gotten so far from the awkward pairing of roommates they’d been at the start of their college careers. Evan a supposed straight guy, Rhett a closeted bisexual and Oliver a nervous gay man. They’d been roomed together in a dorm their first year, some fluke leaving them three guys with a single bed. A month of two of them sleeping on the bed and then Oliver and Rhett had begun to share on their nights. A month after that and somehow Evan found himself tangled in their little pile, his sleeping bag rolled up into the corner.

Class was just too much to not have good sleep to stave off the exhaustion. That had been a good excuse before administration caught up to the fluke and got them a new bunk. At the time they hadn’t even really discussed it before the bunk was just another shelf, full of papers and junk.

Evan was no longer a self-described straight man, although one has to abandon the title when they start feeling FOMO after catching their bedmates sucking each other’s dicks after a cancelled class. Especially so after the six or seven-hundreth time of giving and receiving the act himself.

So they’d stuck together through all of college’s trials and tribulations. Found themselves a big enough flat with a single bedroom, each of them feeling some sense of their internalized homophobia act up even in the apathetic face of a apartment manager who couldn’t give a shit about what three college kids got up to in their spare time. Their separate closets seemed to merge after some time, initially just with the excuse of all the wasted space. Not that Rhett ever really cared about their collective image as platonic housemates, but it had taken the other two sometime to stop fixating on whose hoodie was who’s. You gloss over the lube visible under the bed enough times to your basketball friends and suddenly it seems like a wasted effort to care if your mixed up the underwear. Hell, they were even close enough in sizes that they could just wear whatever, although Oliver had become the defacto buyer. He’d bought every bit of clothing that now was now in a growing sandy pile beside him.

A anxious glance by Evan to their surroundings and the three’s jean shorts and black pair of boxers were tossed into that pile, leaving Rhett a self-satisfied hard naked man, the pair of Oliver’s Nike blazers he’d been wearing scattered around them.

“Completely private beach Evan” Oliver comforted, slipping his own shorts off and having no boxers to remove, the man never bothering to wear any when it was just them. A particularly unfortunate habit when he was packing so much, his oversized cock having been a particular distraction when they’d gotten Chipotle on the way. It wasn’t big enough to escape his shorts, but it had been enough for eyes to keep glancing the way of the thing’s attempted to escape the torn up synthetic fabric.

“Sorry I’m not an exhibitionist like you fucking perverts” Evan said as he awkwardly tried to sightlessly pull off his own shorts, struggling to do so under the weight of Rhett and the overwhelming draw of Oliver’s cock, now standing like a flag pole. It was especially ironic of a statement given he’d been the one to suggest this entire thing. What they were doing could’ve been done in the privacy of their own home, could’ve been done with no risk of someone witnessing it.

They’d done it like that so many time before, letting the process be done with closed blinds and locked doors.

Oliver had looked so empty as he’d looked at his surfboard this past three months though and Rhett had been especially pissy so many times in public when Evan had brushed off contact. Oliver couldn’t care less with how Evan acted beyond their bedroom but Rhett was right. Doing what they were doing on a private beach wasn’t much of a advancement in Evan’s fight against toxic masculinity, but the effort was enough to bring Rhett’s frustration back into his shit-eating grin that always marked him when he was at his happiest and horniest. Certainly helped get Oliver back into fighting order as well, the guy clearly very turned on himself, but more so looking at the surfboard more often than not, eyes glazed over with what was definitely the three’s evening after this.

Truth be told, Evan was a fucking pervert himself, so as much as he wanted to make his boys happy, he was also kind of turned on by the being out in the open on the beach thing. Rhett could see through him just like always, nudging him to look at his own sizable cock before giving it a single stroke before happily watching the static reach Evan’s brain.

“Our guy’s got his mind already so far in the gutter huh” the ginger man said at Oliver with a exasperated expression. Oliver just laughed, as if his shorts didn’t lay beside him wet with pre-cum.

“Getting ahead of ourselves isn’t he” Oliver said, bending down over them, cock nearing the positoon where it could easily slid into either Rhett or Evan if he wanted to. Both would be very receptive to the idea.

That wasn’t what was happening though.

“Just fucking get on with it Oliver.” Evan snapped, fighting every urge he had to wrestle the two others into the ground and fuck them himself, lest he physically explode. “Do you have the trunks or not”

Oliver’s practiced seductive face cracked before he rolled his eyes, accompanied by Rhett’s vocal disappointment at not continuing to mentally screw with the man he still held down under his own weight. Oliver was always the reasonable one of the three, but not enough to ever stop joining Rhett’s campaign at teasing their partner

“Fine, fine, yeah” Oliver said as he got back up, wandering over to the pile of clothes to fish into his short’s pockets. “You better have prepared them right”, he said, pulling out the fabric within them as Evan almost re-activated his mini rage at the idea of having not done their preparations right.

Four years in the running and he’d gotten fucking good at the spell.

The fabric wasn’t anything special. Just a pair of trunks, blue and white and much larger than their size 34 waists. A pair of swim trunks made for a man triple their size. The only hint of something peculiar about them being the mess of symbols stitched into the waistband.

The first year it had been a messy affair, borne of an accident with a strange grouping of strange people and acquisition of a relic of a necklace, with symbols embossed into its chain. The second year and a bad experience had been one they’d recreated when curiosity overtook locking that necklace in a lead box in their kitchen. The third year and Evan had a ge course of old witchcraft to get him through the process of amateurly experimenting with the situation, trial and error leaving him something like an expert in the only supernatural thing they’d ever witnessed. Year four and each of them had studied those symbols long and hard, seen every way their group shifted and changed the outcome.

Back at home a small collection of boxer briefs had the symbols stitched into it. It had taken an embarrassingly long time for them to figure out sizing up them to avoid going through a pair every time, but practice makes perfect. They’d had a while to figure out what fit them best after their little rituals, evident by the backpack in the jeep full of an outfit that would most definitely fit them when the day was done.

Evan looked at the never worn swim trunks shed a cloud of sand before watching Oliver ball up the fabric and throw it at the two, Rhett lazily catching it. The Irish man lifted the waistband up, making a show of inspecting the symbology before Evan snatched it from his loose grip.

Just a swipe of the runes by it creator and the stitching began to heat, a shine of blue tracing the threads. It left a pressure to the air, particles of blue lifting off as energy subtly wafted from the spell.

Evan could tell when Rhett was excited by the way he stopped a limp mass weighing him down. There was something in the energy that was intoxicating to the guy, although he’d always been proven to be susceptible to the sway of the supernatural. The guy had been the one who’d almost been snatched by the strange folk they’d stolen the necklace from, almost making Evan speculate if there was something magic too loved about the guy. The symbols were something reminiscent of Gaelic, so maybe this was all down to fairies.

Or maybe it was just because Rhett never hid how much he loved this shit. It bled into each of them as they could almost feel his movements echo into their own. Rhett’s hand coming up to held hold the trunks and move them past their feet, helping focus Evan’s motion as every touch of the symbols on their skin felt like pure twistings of nervous system madness, feeling their cells open up with every reprogramming of the runes into their bodies.

Oliver watched with rapt interest, hand on his cock as he watched the points at which the two’s feet stuck together, the skin already latching on and binding the feet into the same motions. Evan’s heel sinking into Rhett’s, the two tones of skin initially meeting like oil and water before blending into a gradient. Evan’s melanin leaking into the joining points and travelling outwards in all directions.

They managed to remember to move the trunks up further, even as the feeling of nerves joining brought their brains to jelly. They’d done this ritual so many times, yet Rhett’s skull still swum as he felt 20 toes move instead of his typical 10. It was worse when he could feel the sensation of sinking twice over, feeling the feet begin to sinking further into their counterpart. It was impossible to describe, the paradoxical feeling of one’s body in itself.

The runes dragged against their legs and they were magnetized between the two men. Calves gluing to each other as their feet further merged, the feeling of their feet feeling the insides of their counterparts like they were a skinsuit ready to be filled. The toes aligning, yet not having enough space to fit within each other and instead forcing the mass to expand outwards with no where else to go.

It left a pair of men joined at a pair of large feet, their calves merging as their tibias converged, muscles physically joining and building upon each other.

Oliver found himself unconsciously stroking his dick, only coming to from his studying of the way the legs converged by the look of Evan, having forgone the effort of continuing pulling up the trunks longside Rhett, the two having failed to will past the need of their body to release the pressure building up. The magic’s effects clashed with neurons, inevitably ending in the body concluding a massive pent up amount of arousal, always leading to the brain to forget the task at hand and begin furiously attempting to cum in anyway possible.

Not that cumming could help when the magic’s effects on cells made a refractory period non-existent. It was an effect that continue on post transformation, a reason they could never really do school work alongside maintaining the spell.

The two failed in their willpower and gave way to attempting to the impossible, Rhett hungrily grabbing his cock and pumping it as Evan failed to reach his own with Rhett on top of him, yet still connecting through his fading brainpower that a suitable hole was perfectly aligned with his cock.

Before the two could get two carried away, Oliver leaned over them and grabbed the trunks with a tight grip before pulling them up, feeling the runic power hot on his skin.

It was too much too soon for his boys, but that was always inescapable. The very fact that it had to be done is what left Oliver enjoy it so much, seeing the symbols leave after images of energy as they slid up. Watching Evan and Rhett’s eyes roll back as their thighs and waist burrowed together.

It was one thing to feel one’s leg hair scratch against the nerves of another’s skin, but it was mind melting to feel a cock sink far further than it should’ve into the body. Just one thrust and Evan’s cock sunk like it was moving through wet clay, dragging against Rhett’s entire prostate in a long torturous moment. It was headed for Rhett’s cock, destined to fill the thing in a way that its nerves wouldn’t be able to define.

Oliver watched the two be unable to fully commit to the motion before he knew it was his right to join, just when the two felt they’d reached the climax, Evan’s cock still not aligned to shove into Rhett’s. Oliver would help, but his route was going to be selfish.

It was often easier to fit their cocks together by size, like a matryoshka doll. Evan’s cock into Rhett’s bigger one, Rhett’s into Oliver’s monster. Well fitting sleeves, nestled within each other.

Fuck if that wasn’t boring though.

Oliver lifted up his transcending partners abdomens enough to shove his his feet under them through the waist band that was already tight around their conjoined waist. He’d always had the best strength of mind out of the three, but even he bulked underneath the weight of the runes nuclear energy deciding that it would be easier if his legs just slide directly into his partner’s, like he was sliding into a particularly awkward pair of pants. He steadied himself by tightly gripping Evan’s shoulders as he pushed himself in, feeling hugged from all sides as the mass of the conjoined body pressed in from all sides.

He powered through, feeling his feet finally squeeze past the ankles and wriggling his toes into their proper position just as the bones of his partners invaded and fused into his body, dissolving his flesh into its own and reconnecting his brain to the feeling of the combined mass, warm sunlight on legs that were now a perfect blend of their skin tones, Oliver’s ankle tattoo bloom up into the skin as if it had always belonged there.

When his waist finally locked into place he could feel his cock slide against Evan’s, the sensation bringing enough clarity to the guy’s mind to begin to object to what was going to surely burn out his mind. It was an entirely to simple of a motion for Oliver to twist his barely merged waist to slot into Evan’s cock before pressing into Rhett’s, holding up as he strained his neck over the two as he listened to them moan, almost in complete unison.

Rhett’s cock and Evan’s beneath it stretched as Oliver shoved his massive cock into them, forcing their skin to expand to his length, feeling his testicles join Evans before fusing with Rhett’s, leaving a sensation of overstuffing before an almost blue ball sensation of the balls combining took over.

One of them cursed and then the puzzle pieces connected, nerves finally aligning as Oliver and Evan’s cocks dissolved and then reformed Rhett’s cock into a combination of the three, a olive erection framed by dark auburn pubes. It was long enough for both Rhett and Evan to immediately take to it, their brains finally having a outlet for their raging desires as Oliver continued to fight falling into the hormones filling them all. 3 times of the testosterone pulsing upwards alongside the multiplicatively nerve dense cock sending waves of euphoria up them.

Rhett and Evan gave a final pump of their cock before their right hands stuck together, palms fusing to leave a many fingered hand that was soon pouring in a tide of semen that seemed to endlessly flow, most assuredly ruining their towel.

With no where else for the symbols to touch, the energy would always pour up into the body, allowing a respite in the overpowering sensation.

Rhett could feel his mind come back to him as he lifted up his fused right hand to his face, watching the cum drip off as his number of fingers decreased as the copies fused together. He could feel Evan help him control it, both of their brains moving it together. They’d been a chaotic tumble of limbs the first time this had happened, the necklace having been tried on by Rhett one fateful day leaving Oliver to discover the chaos made up of the Irish man and Evan.

They were pretty sure that necklace had been intended as a curse, but now they fused harmoniously, the nerves entangling and their brains having gotten used to moving as a group. It let them do such impressive things as move their legs together halfway through the ritual, or wipe off their massive hand of an absurd amount of cum.

The energy amassed in their cores and they let themselves press into each other, Rhett and Evan sinking into Evan’s chest. They could feel their ribs slot into each other and the spines line up before slowly fusing like they were being zipped up. Their hearts layered upon each other, not bothering to fuse as they settled into always pumping away impossibly from within each other. It would be the final evidence of them being separate people, feeling the slight asynchrony of the three’s hearts on each other.

Evan and Rhett lifted up their combined hand to feel it pump as their body reshuffled, the heads coming to comfortably line up instead of being lined up back to front.

“God I never want this to end” Evan choked out through their fusing lungs, feeling the quick pump of their separate hearts against each other. It left their cock harder than ever, already rearing to go, but Oliver was able to stop his endlessly horny partners with a simple slipping of his hand into their large shared arm. It was simply a glove and so much easier than the legs, feeling the knuckles crush together and the joints melt together. It was awfully trippy feeling his much smaller left hand in comparison to the much larger right, the sheer difference in muscular power astronomical.

They always ended up practically superhuman and it was only so long before that feeling of pure power was enough for them to forgo separation altogether. Oliver hoped today was the day that happened, with all their obligation and responsibilities behind them.

He wrapped his left arm around Rhett and Evans and before long they were a single indistinct mass, bundles of arms beneath a singular skin that fluidly aligned, the muscle and bone weaving together into a suitable match for the right. Both arms melding further until the shoulders finally completed merging, leaving the three with the unified need to stretch, feeling the back crack as tension released up the spines.

They were now one three headed body sitting on the sand as the waves crashed in the back. They hadn’t even needed the stimulation to let loose into the swim trunks, another massive volume of cum dripping out. Rhett gasped for them all before they stilled, heads beside one another with Evan in the center, Rhett taking the left and Oliver on the right.

They’d stayed at this stage before, letting the magic settle down before removing the fabric containing the symbols. It was a quite enjoyable thing, to be so fucking massive yet still completely themselves. Half of the reason why they could work so perfectly to stand up and stretch as they were now was built on winter and spring break experimenting with every way they could be multi-headed. They’d alternate who was in what position, testing which person had dominance over the limbs (the answer being random every time). Now Evan seemed to be the lead as he reached into their trunks to provoke yet another burst of cum that would leave all three dizzy, half falling over back onto the sand.

“We’ve gotta go further” Rhett said, holding onto the ball of energy in their chest. It was a reminder more so than a demand, all three having wanted for this final step for a year of class.

It wasn’t a privilege when they were still pretending to be three separate people. When they explained themselves as a throuple to hosts of acquaintances, the words ringing false every time.

They found themselves in sophomore year in each other. Experimentation had led to a point so far that to come back had felt laughable at the time. How they’d separated that first completion had been a miracle and every division felt worse and worse with every repetition. They couldn’t do a thing like this during their school years because there was always a risk they couldn’t differentiate back into three people enough to return. It got harder every time.

Even now they felt the absences in their minds. Memories they recalled remembering but that had returned to the rightful skull upon separation. Rhett’s forced enrollment in baseball as a teenager that only was looked on with fondness by how Evan’s and Oliver’s neurons fawned over how adorable he’d been. His own guilt towards never being enough for his distant father flung to the dark recesses of his brain as the memories of Oliver and Evan’s sweet upbringings gave him a childhood he could enjoy. Oliver’s endless tainting anxiety banished by the ever-present encompassing of others into his most private closed off spaces, handing off old traumas to be soothed by brain tissue that wasn’t trained to fixate on it all. Instead, Evan’s self-confidence overlaid it alongside what felt like the man’s overpowering appreciation for all things Rhett and Oliver, enjoying every tiny quirk and flawed complication to the two, which wouldn’t disappear but be revealed as a treasured peculiarity that had never actually been as awful as they’d thought. Evan himself could feel the shame he’d always kept dull under Rhett and Oliver’s life and then suddenly they’d be complete. Free.

It was hard to pretend to be anything but incomplete after that, so when their massive hands began crush their heads together, none of them could tell who was ordering it.

One would expect the sound of melons cracking or gore. Something about the head just made one expect it to burst, especially now when the pressure built but didn’t seem to relieve. But then the ball of energy moved up their spines and the runes flared.

Any physical sensation was overpowered the moment their brains connected. The feeling of their spines and necks pushing into each other or the sensation of their heads forcing together, rendering their jaws inoperational and their breathing stilted.

Evan felt like he was a river between two oceans, but that wasn’t right. A river flows from one to another, yet lives flowed between him and into him. He remembered so much.

He remembered painting, months upon months of painting. Sketching and ripping and sculpting as every form of his artistic expression fell upon the idea of a third. Life drawings of men and woman all left purposefully without, sections of their body removed with the only evidence in the silhouettes of the heads, faces, arms, fingers and feet they once had. Abstract art his professors had complimented him for time and time again, although he failed to communicate that they were still incomplete. He simply didn’t have the parts of him who were so good at detailing those missing pieces at the moment.

The information tilted into the man with red hair and he felt his emotions come back to him. He hadn’t felt this way in a year, every bit of feeling back where it belonged. He knew he should’ve always felt this way and that when he hadn’t he’d been numb. Not depressed, but not all there. The part of him that hadn’t been the red-haired man at the time was left with too much feeling, overcoming him in every way. Had that part been the angry and desperate part he thought he’d been? It was a ridiculous thought now that he remembered how it was ridiculous. He remembered having felt so much and having loved himself for that exact reason. He remembered missing the clarity of feeling that way and he was relieved that he could feel it again.

Oliver was the last to remember that he wasn’t Oliver any more. Was white light the thousand of hues contained within its wavelength or was it in the end its own energy. The answer is that there was never any actual color, it was an illusion. Oliver had been Oliver up until he remembered that Oliver was an illusion. A vague identity formed up by interests, hopes and dreams that had always hoped to be shared. To connect and to be validated in every way. Laid out and dissected on a platter for the ways that its purposes were true. To form even grander arguments to the validity of its existence and being based on a mountain of new evidence. The man that was Oliver understood.

He wasn’t Oliver, nor Evan, nor Rhett. They were him, but the opposite wasn’t true. They were pieces of this man the moment they first come together and to be anything close to independent people after that was an act. It was feeling like he did now that was why he could only be himself when he had the long time it took to tear himself into pieces.

His face swam and he knew the hue it would return to, the dark auburn he could see looking down at his pubes. He could feel the roughness of his facial hair, back to having the potential of being thick as evident by the stubble across his face. He’d let it grow out one summer, now remembering how handsome he’d felt as the memories condensed. It was another reason he couldn’t imagine doing this again, feeling his life as himself scatter amongst his pieces. The three would remember bits and parts of a better existence, but the information was too divided to ever be enough.

He stroked his cock under his swim trunks and remembered just why he wasn’t overcome with masturbation all this time, all his willpower now firmly in place. It would feel better anyways with other partners now that he couldn’t possibly feel jealous of himself with other people. That was simply a ridiculous concept he realized for the 3rd time again.

He felt normal which was always a trip because his components thought he felt strong. In actuality they were just so frail that to be him felt like being a god. Being whole was a hell of a drug, but he certainly looked like a fair bit like a god now. Muscles back to a fairly sufficient degree, although he’d certainly need to work on them again. Growing incredibly scrawny in three bodies could only contribute so much muscle to the whole again, but he’d always been quick at gaining muscle.

The surf was loud and his surfboard was floating in a tidepool a bit away, the oncoming tide causing it to rock back and forth. He remembered being so pitifully cute struggling with it watching from third person and his hearts pumped in asynchrony, the only argument against him having always been just himself. The contradiction felt good oddly enough and he felt turned on by the thought of himself. It was pretty offputting being a narcissist in such a way, but jacking off in a mirror was a activity he had done too much to care about. He had a great excuse for studying his body for all the ways he was handsome and maybe he talked to himself far too much, but how couldn’t he. He’d been formed by a love for himself and who was he to deny himself that.

He flexed, feeling his body move like it should, all ducks in a row. The runes against his skin settled and just a little motion on the purposefully loose knot holding the embroidery together was enough to tighten it the symbols into meaningless nothings. His hands came back sticky of course, but it wasn’t anything the surf could fix.

The waves were perfect for a man like him, the perfect height and the perfect rhythm. They fell in gigantic spiral that he would paint later now that he could remember just how mathematically the angles combined and the paint could set. Now he would grab his surfboard easily underhand and dive into the waves, remembering just how much the feeling was incredible. He stay here till the sun set before likely airdrying (considering he’d completely ruined the towels), towing his surfboard to his jeep and pulling out the backpack full of clothes that he’d worn last summer. He’d go home and meet the eyes of the still apathetic apartment manager who’d grown used to seeing him replace the three boys she was equally apathetic to.

He'd never been able to be permanently himself and there was a league of challenges to get there. For one, a new closet fitting the style his components had grown for him over the past year. For two, a solution to combining the legal and emotional connections of three men together, although he was smart enough to probably achieve it all with magic. He’d worried about it when he hadn’t had all the pieces to know it was probably pretty simple.

He would enjoy his day here and go home to sleep back in the same singular bed. He’d wake up the next day and he’d continue waking up the next day forever as himself. It was how he was supposed to be.

Just Everett

[slippinmickeys]

Funfetti

Love this series

Quonochontaug family vacation and finding a puppy

The call of a gull, the low rumble of surf, the screen door whacking into weathered shaker siding. It felt like 1973 all over again. If he looked in the loft, Mulder was half-convinced he’d find Samantha up there, twirling her braid in her fingers and reading Charlotte Sometimes. 

“William!” Scully hollered from the deck, hand hovering over her brow to block the glare. “You need sunscreen!”

From closer to the roar of the waves, Mulder heard their son shout something back, and Scully wandered back into the cottage, a sour look on her face. 

Mulder sidled up to her and pulled her in for a low body hug, leaning forward to collect a kiss. 

“He’ll be fine for a little while without it,” he said. 

“He has my complexion,” she replied. “He won’t.”

“Let him get a few ya-yas out first,” Mulder said. “He’s excited. That’ll dim. He’ll be complaining that he’s bored in less than an hour.”

“He’ll be red as a lobster in less than an hour.”

“Then he’ll have something else to complain about,” he murmured into her lips, collecting another kiss and lingering for a moment before Scully pushed him off of her. 

“Go,” she said, shooing him away. “We have a lot to unpack.”

A week in Quonochontaug with a newly minted ten year old, the start of summer break. Scully actually agreed to five days off the clock, a record as far as Mulder knew, though he’d have to clamshell her laptop onto her fingers a few times to get her off her email. Then he’d have to hide her charging cord. 

They’d broken the drive in two, the meaty chunk having been the day before with an overnight in New York City–William’s first time. A long day in the car capped off with an early dinner at the Palm and the Lion King on Broadway. Mulder had shown William how to tie a Windsor knot, and when he thought back to the moment, his throat closed up a little. 

“I’ll get the groceries from the car,” he volunteered and ducked out the back door to the car port which was surrounded by overgrown hydrangea and woodsy, unproductive lilac. Out on the road behind the house, the mailbox listed tiredly, the faded stickers with the family name missing the R. 

It had been years since he’d been here, not since William was little. He paid a local vacation home management company to turn on the water and drive by every few weeks. There were still sheets to pull off of furniture and it needed a serious airing out. There were shadows lurking in corners. And memories. And a bullet hole in the old wood paneling. 

A scattering of small stones pulled away Mulder’s attention and Will came bounding up to him from around the side of the house. 

“Dad!” he said, out of breath. “Look what I found!” 

The boy held up the carapace of a small horseshoe crab, his face full of wonder and delight. 

“Nice,” Mulder said. “Though don’t bring it in the house, it’ll stink the place up.”

“More than it already smells?” William joked and tossed the dead creature into the bushes. The house had a closed up redolence of mildew and stale air. 

“You have no idea.” Mulder popped the trunk of their car and pulled out a couple of fully loaded grocery bags, handing them over to his son. “Take these and put them in the kitchen, would you? And then I want you to go around and open all the windows. We’ll get this place aired out.”

William reached forward and took the bags without complaint. “Can I sleep in the loft?”

Mulder thought of his sister, of over-warm July nights bunked up with her because she was afraid of the sound of fireworks. 

“Sure, bud,” he said, his voice a little quiet. 

***

Scully at the sink, a billowing plume of steam over the carmine cap of her hair as she dumped a pot of spaghetti into a colander. Beyond her, in the kitchen window, sat a dusty bowl full of sea glass. Mementos were hiding in every corner of the house. 

“Should we eat outside?” Scully asked. 

Mulder had tongs in one hand and an ancient ratty oven mitt in the other, pulling a cookie sheet of garlic bread out of the tired old oven. The smell that wafted up and over him was heavenly. 

“I didn’t get a chance to clean the bird shit off the picnic table yet,” he frowned. 

“Inside it is,” Scully said, upending the dripping colander into a bubbling pot of marinara. “Will!” She called out. “I need you to set the table!”

Mulder ended up helping, the muscle memory of childhood reminding him what cabinet plates were in, which drawer held the serving spoons. The ice tray wasn’t frozen yet, so they sipped tepid water out of olive green glasses, and Mulder opened a bottle of Chianti, fortifying himself with its acidic dryness, warmth spreading through his stomach. 

Around a mouthful of spaghetti, Will piped up hopefully. “Can we go kayaking tomorrow?” 

“Sure,” Mulder said airly. They’d have to rent some. Maybe an ocean kayak they could keep for the week. 

“It might rain,” Scully cautioned. 

The light went out of Will’s eyes. 

“We’ll go rent one anyway,” Mulder said, giving Scully a look. She apologized with her eyes. “Even if it rains,” Mulder went on, looking at the boy. “That way you can go as soon as the weather clears.”

William perked up at this, and took a massive bite of garlic bread. 

“Slow down, William,” Scully said, then turned to Mulder. “Do they rent them at Quonnie Pond? I can’t remember.” 

Mulder shook his head. “There’s a place in Charlestown that delivers. I’ll call first thing in the morning.”

***

With the sunrise came the rain. 

Will stood in front of the sliding door morosely, complaining of boredom. 

Scully was curled up on the couch with a paperback and Mulder was so shocked by the sight that he was suddenly and quite determinedly of a mind not to let anything mess it up. Particularly tween ennui. 

“Grab your coat,” he said to his son.

“What for?” 

“We’re going into town. You and me.”

Will looked at him suspiciously. 

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” Mulder said, pulling on his own rain slicker and tossing his son’s to him. “Shopping. A tee shirt to prove you were on vacation. Ice cream. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll buy fudge. Come on.”

Scully gave them a Toodleloo wave without looking up from her book. 

As he and Will climbed into the car, he noticed the gutters were full and overflowing next to the house. He’d have to find a ladder and some work gloves. 

The idea of a second house, of a summer home, seemed romantic from the outside, but the logistics of owning two homes–even if his father’s estate paid the taxes on this one–were a colossal headache. And they rarely visited. But he couldn’t bring himself to give it up. It was a place that his sister had been happy. 

“Dad?” William said, his voice tinged in concern. 

Mulder gave him a reassuring smile and cranked the engine.

***

They were running out of shops and the rain was coming down harder, a gloomy June mist that brought with it a particular chill. Mulder had just bought a whale-shaped wooden cribbage board that William was less than enthusiastic about learning how to use. He dropped his change in a ceramic March of Dimes receptacle when the shopgirl gave him a friendly smile. 

“That’ll come in handy,” she said kindly. “There’s a chance it’ll rain all week.”

Out of the corner of his eye Mulder watched William wilt. 

The girl noticed. “Or not!” She backtracked as Mulder took his son by the shoulder and led him out of the shop. “Twenty percent chance of sun tomorrow!”

Will flipped up his hood as they stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Couldn’t we just play Uno?” he said glumly. 

“You’ll get sick of Uno,” Mulder told him. “And your mother tends to get persnickety about Mattel’s rule that you can’t play a Draw Two on a Draw Two.”

“It’s a dumb rule.”

“I agree.” 

They were crossing an alleyway on their way back to the car when William pulled up short and turned to peer into the murk. 

Mulder stopped a step and a half later and turned curiously to his son. 

“Everything all right?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“Will?”

William glanced briefly at his father and then back down the alley.

“Greyskull,” the boy said, distracted. 

Mulder instinctively reached to his hip for his weapon, but his belt loop was empty—he’d left his sidearm in a lockbox at the house. He wrapped the plastic bag tightly around his recent purchase and slid it into his back pocket. 

“What is it?” he asked, placing a protective hand on William’s shoulder. 

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “There’s something down there.”

“Something dangerous?” If there were, he thought, Scully would kill him.

“I don’t think so,” William said, then took a hesitant step into the alley. 

Mulder, not knowing the right course of action, decided to let the boy follow his instincts. 

After a few timid steps, Will began walking with more confidence, eventually stopping in front of a large black dumpster. Mulder waited warily at his elbow. 

“There’s something in there,” his son finally said, looking up at Mulder for guidance. 

After years on the job, Mulder’s first instinct was ‘dead body,’ followed by several other morbid guesses, each one more distasteful than the last. Without his son staring at him with baleful, please-fix-it eyes, he might otherwise have walked away and let someone else handle it. 

Mulder sighed and hesitantly lifted the lid, peering reluctantly into the fusty gloaming. A moment later, something in the darkness moved and Mulder jumped back, the dumpster lid slamming closed with a crack.

William’s eyes went round as saucers. “What? What is it?!” 

When nothing happened, Mulder, chagrined and more than a little embarrassed, licked his lips and stepped forward again.

“I don’t…” he started. “I don’t know.”

He girded himself, and lifted the lid again. This time he noticed—on top of several slimy black garbage bags and days worth of unidentified refuse—a damp cardboard box slumped against the dumpster’s nearest wall. And inside the box, movement.

Mulder swiped a hand forward trying to hook a finger on the edge of the box to pull it closer, but couldn’t quite get a purchase on it. He sighed, stepping away from the dumpster, his hand still holding up the lid. 

His eyes swept their surroundings. 

“Hey Will,” he said. “Grab me that plastic milk crate over there,” he pointed. “I need something to stand on.”

Will skipped over eagerly and came back with the crate, happy to have a job. 

Mulder set the crate upside down in front of the dumpster and scrambled on top of it. 

Movement again from the box, this time accompanied by a low, animal sound. 

Christ, if this was some batshit rabid raccoon, Scully would have his hide. Nevertheless, the added height made it far easier to reach into the mephitic brume of the dumpster, and he was able to grab a corner of the box and heft it up and over the side, depositing it onto the wet asphalt at Will’s feet. 

As he stepped down off of the crate, the boy was already bent over the box, peering inside. Before Mulder could bark some kind of parental warning, William was looking back up at him, his face showing a mix of surprise and delight. 

Mulder leaned over for a look himself. 

Inside the disintegrating box sat a curled-up shivering mass of damp off-white fur. Sorrowful eyes looked up at him, pleading and miserable. 

A puppy. Some kind of lab mix by the look of it. 

William reached into the box and the creature wriggled under his hand, its tail beginning to thump wetly against the cardboard. 

“Can we keep him?” Will asked with a kind of dulled hysteria to his voice, and Mulder instantly knew he had just unwittingly come upon one of life’s great reckonings. 

“No,” he said levelly, putting his hands on his hips and staring down at the conundrum in front of him. 

The puppy, after a couple of gentle pets from William, was already up on its back legs, its sharp little puppy-claws rapidly rendering the side of the box that contained it into pulp in its reckless enthusiasm to connect with its savior. The boy picked up the wriggling mass and instantly got a face full of enthusiastic kisses. 

Will turned a dolorous eye toward his father. 

“We can’t leave him here, Dad.” 

Mulder looked around helplessly, his options quickly winnowing down into his only real choice. 

He sighed again, looking down at boy and puppy. 

“Shit,” he muttered into the fetid air.

*** 

“Absolutely not!” said Scully somewhat shrilly when William walked into the door carrying the dog. They were not twenty feet into the house. 

William threw a look at his father. They had talked about this in the car, betting what Dana Scully’s reaction would be. 

“Your mom is going to kill us,” Mulder had said. 

“No,” William rebutted from the backseat, the puppy on his lap. “She’s going to kill you.”

If Scully’s eyes were any indication, the boy had been right. 

“Mom!” William pleaded. 

“Scully,” Mulder hoped to at least be able to explain the situation before his wife lost her shit completely. 

“Mulder, what the hell-”

Mulder turned to Will, who seemed reluctant to put the dog down, lest his mother march over and fling the poor animal into the wilds. 

“Why don’t you take him outside, Will. See if he’ll do his business.” 

If the dog peed on the floor, or god forbid, took a dump, the level of escalation Scully would take the situation was heretofore untested, as far as Mulder was concerned. And he’d seen her stand up to Congress. 

The second William was out the door, Scully whirled on him. 

“Mulder-”

He held up a hand. “Scully.”

“Mulder!”

“Dana!” she barked sharply.

At that, she pulled up short and closed her mouth. 

“Firstly, he already knows we’re not keeping it,” Mulder said, watching as her shoulders lowered from up around her ears. 

Mulder exhaled so he could speak more calmly. 

“We found him in a dumpster,” he said, trying to drum up some sympathy for the poor creature. “Someone had thrown him out like trash.” 

Scully’s eyes softened. “Why did you bring him here, though? Will’s going to get attached, Mulder. It’s going to be Mr. Bubbles all over again.”

Mulder thought briefly of their week as goldfish owners. 

“We would have gone right to the shelter, but it’s Sunday. It’s closed. We’ll take him over in the morning.”

Scully sighed. Lowered herself onto the couch. “What were you guys doing in a dumpster?”

“We weren’t,” Mulder said. “We were only walking by the alley.”

“Did you hear it or something?” 

Mulder shook his head, moved to sit next to her. “Greyskull,” he said. 

Scully turned to look at him. 

“He knew something was wrong. Could sense it somehow,” Mulder went on. 

Scully looked a little dazed. Mulder knew what she was thinking. William was a kind, empathetic kid. If he could sense the suffering of animals, people, bad situations, the world was going to be a very hard place for him to navigate. To live in. 

“I’m going to make some calls,” Mulder said. “Loop the Gunmen in, too. See if we can find someone to help him learn how to…I don’t know. Shield himself, somehow.”

Scully nodded, leaned back on the couch. “One day at a time,” she said, repeating a necessary family mantra.

Mulder thumped back into the cushions, himself. “Yes.”

“We can’t let him give the dog a name, Mulder,” Scully said after a minute. “Remember when he named those two lobsters we brought home for a Valentine’s Day dinner?”

“Horace and Petey.”

“He cried for an hour and swore off shellfish.”

Mulder remembered. “More Horace and Petey for us,” he said. “They were delicious.”

Just then, the door burst in on a gust of cool air. William trundled in happily, the dog at his heels.

“He pooped and peed!” he reported happily. 

“Nice work, pup,” Mulder said, smiling. 

“Oh,” said William, reaching down to scratch the puppy behind an ear. “His name is Krypto.”

Mulder could feel Scully’s gaze boring into the side of his head. 

***

The rain hadn’t stopped all day, and by evening, it had gotten downright chilly. 

Mulder threw another log on the fire, hoping the flue wasn’t blocked by leaves or a bird’s nest. Next to the fireplace, leaning against the couch, Scully sat on the floor, Krypto curled up against her leg, his little block of a head resting on her thigh. She was staring into the flames, absently running her fingers through the soft fur of the puppy’s ear. 

Near the door were plastic bags of various dog accoutrements; a small bag of puppy chow, a leash and a collar with the tags still on. Just in case. 

William had begged to let the dog sleep with him that night, but Scully had put a stop to the thought immediately, telling William that the dog was likely to need to get up and be let outside in the night and that she would oversee the process. He needed his sleep if he was going to kayak the next day. The boy didn’t like it, but he saw the sense in doing exactly as his mother said in their current situation. He’d gone to bed without a complaint or a plea for ten more minutes.

Mulder poked at the fire until it was burning to his satisfaction, and, confident the chimney was drawing properly, he lowered himself to Scully’s other side, draping an arm around her shoulders. 

“What time does the shelter open?” Scully asked, leaning her head back to rest against Mulder’s arm. 

“Nine, I think.”

“Hmm.”

Next to her, the puppy woke, stretched his legs out and yawned with a soft doggy sound. His sleepy eyes rove up until they connected with Scully’s, and his tail began to thump softly into the floor. 

“Another man unable to resist the exquisite Scully charm,” Mulder commented softly. 

Scully huffed a soft laugh and ran her hand over the length of the puppy, earning her a more vigorously wagging tail. 

“Krypto,” she said, shaking her head. 

The puppy wiggled more firmly into her side. 

“Superboy,” sighed Mulder.

Scully reached over with her other hand and squeezed his leg. 

“We talked about getting him a dog, don’t you remember?” Mulder asked. 

“When he was begging for a sibling,” Scully clarified. “And six years old.”

“Your argument was that he wasn't old enough for the responsibility.”

Scully rolled her head to look at him. 

“I’m not advocating anything here, Scully,” he said. “I’m just saying.”

Scully was silent for several minutes, and the dog eventually sat up. One second of eye contact with the woman before him and he climbed into her lap and licked her face twice. 

Scully reached forward, held the puppy’s face in two hands, gazing into his sweet brown eyes. 

“We’re not going to the shelter in the morning, are we?” Mulder asked softly. 

His wife sighed, still holding the dog’s downy white head. 

“God damn it,” she said. 

[k20spock]

The Slay the Princess Voices as Birds

I'm not much of a voices guy but I do love biology and assigning animals to characters, so I am assigning all of the voices a bird species and explaining why I picked it. enjoy

Voice of the Hero: House sparrow

[ID: A photo of a male house sparrow perching. End ID.]

Hero is the one I struggled with the most and this bird is actually crowdsourced! It does fit though I think. Sparrows are associated with commonness and familiarity, fitting for a voice who’s always by your side. Some more modern interpretations of sparrow symbolism paint them as hardworking and honest too. I think an everyday bird/voice doing his best is perfect for Hero.

Voice of the Cheated: Seagull (No specific species in mind, but definitely a more urban species like a European herring gull)

[ID: A photo of a European herring gull with its beak open. End ID.]

Seagulls are very cheated birds. They’re considered pests for doing what they have to do to survive with their habitat severely altered by human activity and just happened to adapt better than a lot of other animals. I will forever defend seagulls. They’re also very loud, shrill, persistent birds, qualities I associate with Cheated.

Voice of the Stubborn: Cassowary

[ID: A photo of a Southern cassowary. End ID.]

Cassowaries are widely considered the most dangerous bird and while technically that’s not true (there are more recorded ostrich attacks), the reputation is not undeserved. They’re big, powerful, and can be vicious fighters capable of disembowelment and throat-slitting with their massive claws. Their name in the Biak language literally just means bird strong. 

Voice of the Cold: Northern shrike

[ID: A northern shrike perching on a branch with a dead mouse. End ID.]

By now I’m pretty sure everyone knows about shrikes but if you don’t, let me explain why I picked them for Cold with an alternate name for Northern shrikes: winter butcherbirds. Yeah shrikes are little songbirds known for impaling their prey on sticks as a convenient storage system. I picked Northern shrikes specifically because of that very Cold name, winter butcherbird, and the fact that they breed in the cold reaches of Siberia, Canada, and Alaska.

Voice of the Smitten: Albatross (again, not necessarily a specific species but if I had to pick I’d go with one of the two royal albatrosses for the name)

[ID: A photo of a Northern royal albatross in the water. End ID.]

Ok there’s so so many birds associated with romance so there’s just a plethora of things you could go with for Smitten but I went with an albatross for a few reasons. They’re known for mating for life, having elaborate courtship dances, and being extremely dedicated to their partners. Very much romance birds. They’re also birds that inhabit isolated areas, and are very naive to potential threats because they don’t live in places with natural predators. This made them easy targets for hunters and their feathers were used in garments, which makes me think of Smitten’s line about making a shawl from his feathers. The thing that really sealed the deal though is there’s also some really interesting symbolism associated with them. In literature, they’ve been used as a metaphor for a burden difficult to escape from with the phrase ‘an albatross around your neck’. This just fits so well with Happily Ever After I had to pick albatrosses.

Voice of the Skeptic: Great gray owl

[ID: A photo of a great gray owl on a branch, looking down at the viewer. End ID.]

Owls are associated with wisdom and knowledge, Skeptic is the voice who is the most determined to reason and puzzle his way out of this situation, owls aren’t actually any more intelligent than the average bird, Skeptic’s rigid thinking often prevents him from understanding their situation in a way other voices can. Besides, owls are just a bit spooky and associated with death, something I think fits with Skeptic’s gruff noir detective vibe. I’m not too picky on the exact type of owl, I just picked a great gray because I think they just look like they have Skeptic vibes. I could also easily be convinced of a little owl though, the species associated with Athena that really kickstarted owls’ association with wisdom in Europe and is also associated with death through popular legend saying its calls heralded the death of Julius Caesar. I can also understand why people would go with a crow, but I wanted to go with something different and I feel like the Narrator’s taken it already.

Voice of the Paranoid: Cockatiel

[ID: A photo of an alert wild cockatiel with a raised crest. End ID.]

This pick is one I can see people disagreeing with so let me just explain myself: cockatiels are parrots, yes, birds that don’t really fit with Paranoid’s vibe (and I gave a different parrot to another character already and I’m trying to have some variety here). However, cockatiels in my personal experience are very nervous, neurotic birds with very distinct fear responses. Namely, hissing and raising their crest. I also think it’s fun having Paranoid be a bird often kept as a pet (like what Nightmare’s planning to do!) and having him be a bird capable of mimicking speech. Perfect for repeating a mantra over and over!

Voice of the Hunted: Common pheasant

[ID: A photo of a male common pheasant. End ID.]

Pheasants are simply the birds I associate most with being hunted. They’re one of the oldest and most popular game birds in the world and their anti-predation strategies just boil down to fleeing.

Voice of the Opportunist: Common cuckoo

[ID: A photo of a common cuckoo perching on a branch. End ID.]

I am firmly against ascribing human moral values onto animal behavior, and this includes cuckoos. But like… they’re opportunists. Common cuckoos are obligate brood parasites, which means they lay their eggs in the nest of another bird, often laying eggs designed to look similar to the eggs of the host species. Once they hatch, cuckoo chicks will attempt to eliminate other eggs or hatchlings from the nest to get all the food and attention of the parents to themself. Their deception even continues to adulthood, adult cuckoos mimic the predatory sparrow hawks to ensure they aren’t attacked. Like come on. What else could Opportunist possibly be.

Voice of the Broken: Chicken

[ID: A photo of a chicken. End ID.]

I’ve got a few things in mind with this one. Firstly is that many chickens are raised for meat (which is not an inherently bad thing provided they’re treated ethically), and I think it suits Broken to be a bit of a “doomed” bird. But secondly is that chickens play a religious role in many cultures. In particular, they were a big part of Ancient Roman beliefs and practices. There was an entire chicken-based form of divination. The only other bird I can think of with as much association with religion are doves and they’re much more widely associated with peace and love which, respectfully, isn’t really Broken’s vibe, so chicken it is.

Voice of the Contrarian: Kea

[ID: A photo of a kea walking. End ID.]

The other parrot I mentioned earlier. Kea are parrots native to New Zealand known for their intelligence and love of fucking with people. They’re nicknamed “clown of the mountains” and will investigate and tear up anything which includes cars. They’ll tear up cars. For funsies. If you gave a kea a knife, I’m 100% sure it would throw it out a window.

And that's all of em! Maybe someday I'll draw designs based on these.

[jadafitch]

Pond Island Light, Kennebec River, Phippsburg, Maine. Until 1937, Pond Island hosted a colony of terns, but the growing gull population forced them to clear out. In 1960, when the light became automated, all the buildings, except the tower were removed. In '73 Care of the island was transferred from the Coast Guard to Fish and Wildlife to be re-established as a tern colony. Thanks to the help of National Audubon, tern decoys and calls were deployed, gull nests removed, and finally in '99 the first common tern chick in over 60 years hatched. Then in 2003, Pond Island recorded its first successful breeding pair of endangered roseate terns.

[tanoraqui]

rereading the Dalemark Quartet because of this fantastic podcast series, and a few notes:

I really cannot imagine Duck as looking like anything but my own younger brother. I don’t imagine Tanaqui as looking like myself, despite the many years of having this username and relating intensely to DWJ’s first girl narrator & mythic history-weaver trope. I don’t have any problem imagining Gull, Robin or Hern as they’re described. But Duck, young or grown, looks like my little brother (who, for the record, is currently doing grad school chemistry, which is definitely a sort of magery).

I’d argue that Mitt and Navis have a parallel moment of first-meeting, future-of-the-country-deciding Mutual Vibes Check to Hern & Kars Adon. It’s just that Mitt is 3 years old at the time, so Navis is mostly going “why is there a toddler here. …Hildy-coded, though”, while Mitt has gotten all the way to “he’s a little strange but I can and will trust him with my Dream of a Better World.” (They are both correct.)

I’m having a LOT of thoughts about the fantasy trope of “there used to be magic & gods but now there’s less or none at all”, and all its variations, in comparison to Tolkien and modern works. But I’m having so many that it needs to be a separate post and maybe short essay.

The structure of the series is so interesting. It’s not chronological at all, which actually makes the gap—15 YEARS—between books 3 and 4 even more agonizing to imagine waiting through. Books 1-3 are all separate tributary rivers pouring into 4, and each one ends on more of, in effect, a cliffhanger: Cart and Cwidder with a fairly normal “this adventure is entirely resolved but there are likely more to come.” Drowned Ammet wraps up the story but is lacking some denouement, they never actually reach the North, it’s just safely in sight, it’s clear that they will reach its relative peace & safety—but we don’t see them do so, and we don’t know what happens to them when they do. And Spellcoats! Has a vision of how the plot will resolve, but very pointedly ends before showing it! All we have to know what happened to any of the characters is a historically uncertain postscript, and the knowledge that (more) modern Dalemark exists as it does! Much less any mention of anyone or anything—except technically the earl and earldom of Hannart—from either of the previous books. And she left the readers like this for fifteen years!

If I’d been a teen in the late 70s reading these books as they came out, when Crown of Dalemark was accounted in the mid-90s, I would’ve screamed aloud. I would love to know if anyone reading this post did have that experience.

[shadowwolfsage]

How rough was it for Nora to adjust not being on the same team as Ren?

Ren: (sitting in the library, enjoying the peace) I wonder how Jaune is handling Nora's, Nora-ness?

Nora: (rushing up to him) RENNY! Guess what?

Ren: (releases a small sigh before giving Nora his gull attention) what's happened?

Nora: So Jaune-Jaune was doing a project for Mr. Ooobleck.

In the distance: DOCTOR!

Nora: And it turns out I'm part bear faunus! Isn't that amazing?!

Ren: oh that. I already figured.

Nora: wait what? How?

Ren: (counting on his fingers) you have an almost instinctive hunger for honey, and salmon. You have the typical biting habits of faunus descendants. You sleep insanely deeply during the winter to the point its almost worrying. Aaand, its part of your medical records which I, as your pseudo-brother, and the responsible one between us, always handled.

Nora: D'awww. Party pooper

Ren: So how has your team been treating you?

Nora: OMG they're the best! Jaune likes to listen to my stories, Yang is an amazing workout buddy, and Ruby is always down to go on little adventures. Plus we all get to cuddle at night like one big sleepover. Why?

Ren: (resisting the urge to test howmany bullets it'd take to break Jaune's aura after remembering all the bite marks he saw on him earlier) No reason, just worried since this is our first time being apart like this.

Nora: (blissfully unaware) thanks for always looking out for me, Renny

[aaknopf]

Our ongoing affair with our cities, with fields, flowers, and creatures around us, and the closeness engendered by our sharing space and time with them, animates Vincent Katz’s poems in Daffodil.

City Birds Flying

Among the ugly new buildings I’ve come to like, I’ve been seeing, for a few days now, A strange and beautiful phenomenon: Birds, pigeons I assume, like to circle within their blank spaces. Whether for air current, flying bugs they can eat, convivial exercise,      whatever, They go there and add charm to these harsh, uncaring façades. Other birds fly here too, gulls and others, Here near the river, they also add glory and grace to the view. And now, my friend, my buddy, my pet, my dove Has returned and sits on the fire escape railing out my window, A light breeze ruffling his feathers.

More on this book and author:

Browse other books by Vincent Katz and learn more about Daffodil.

Vincent Katz will be in conversation with Edmund Berrigan to discuss Daffodil at 192 Books in New York, NY on April 17 at 7:00 PM. A livestream and archived recording will be available here. Vincent and Claire Millikin will read their poetry at Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, MA on April 24 at 7:00 PM. You can register here for the in-person event or register here to tune in virtually via Zoom. Please check Vincent Katz’s author page for more information about other upcoming readings and events.

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