#huckster has gone out

[pisswizard420]

as we speak i am in fact writing part of my special little guy's backstory, that goes a little bit into his family's history

[chronically-ghosted]

go west, to the southern plains, go west to breathe (lover, share your road - part i) series masterlist | AO3 Link | prologue | part ii

chapter rating: T

word count: ~21K

chapter summary: at the end of the line, you make a business proposition to Joel Miller. He brings you and Ellie home to the last sanctuary left in this world in exchange for your skills. What you find there and what you find out about Joel Miller is not what you expect.

chapter warnings/tags: depictions of going hungry and poverty, sexual harassment, period accurate sexism, depictions of a sick child, reader depicted as skinny but due to lack of food not her natural body type (and this will change), allusions to domestic abuse, hurt/comfort, pining, the beginnings of a praise kink, let the idiots in love begin

a/n: shout out to the ever incredible @jennaispun for beta-ing the prologue and this first part!

“After a long walk in hell, I found you. You made hell feel like home, you made the flames feel warm. It’s true, you haven’t saved me but you were the closest thing to heaven.” — Maram Rimawi

part i:

Beneath the soot-gray fingertips of your gloves, the dust of the high plains sits coarse and heavy on the tattered, yellowing strip of paper. You hold it down flat as a brutish wind snakes up the empty dirt road through the center of Dalhart, grabbing hold of the brown dust that clings to everything — and tugs. Underneath your pale blue dress, with the hemline torn and the collar in need of stitching, your heart pounds as you read the small, almost guilty, advert:

Help wanted. Can pay.

Contact Joel Miller.

The promise of actual money should have had every able-bodied American scrambling to answer the advert, but by its place near the bottom of the announcement board outside of the country store, buried beneath slashed prices for milk and eggs and headlines out of Washington – it seems certain to be relegated into obscurity. 

For all you know, this could be months, even years, old. Miller, whoever he was, could be long dead, or gone with the rest of the exodus to California. Or he could have gone the way of your “Uncle” Robert – a huckster, discovered too late; one of many who prey upon the desperation that sticks to the country like the acrid smell of smoke. Your hand shakes as you pluck the yellow card from the wooden plank. There is no contact number, no address. Another trick? Dust stings the corners of your eyes when you pinch them close, your breathing quickening, your pulse sharp in the sleeve of your ratty glove. 

Oh, God, what are you going to do? What if this is nothing, just like Robert’s promise? What if there’s nothing here for you? What if –

A small hand on your forearm centers your spiraling thoughts. From beneath a faded blue baseball cap, two brown eyes peer up at you, firm and reassuring. 

“You okay?” She keeps her voice low, just like you asked.

“Yeah, El–Ellie, I’m fine.” You squeeze her too-thin hand, your stomach toiling with guilt and its own emptiness. “Just figuring out what to do next.” 

“Is finding and murdering this asshole Robert still off the table?”

You frown, your niece’s quick temper more from your dead sister than you. “It is. Now, I’m going inside to ask about this advert. Maybe this Miller still has a job or two open.”

Ellie’s eyes fall to the slip of paper in your hand, her aggressive scowl tightening into something that too closely resembles fear. She knows what’s at stake just as much as you do and you hate that that knowledge ages her youthful face. 

“You stay close and don’t let anyone get a good look at you, okay?” 

Ellie nods, already familiar with the routine, and scoops up your luggage case, her tattered satchel hanging off her other shoulder. She had been wearing pants long before reaching Dalhart, but it soothed you to think the eyes of cruel men passed right over her, their interest rarely in young boys. 

A bell above the door tinkles when you open it, but by the dull, muted sound, it most likely has a few dents. Behind you, the afternoon heat follows you in, the sunlight illuminating the floating dust mites in the air. The door whines as it closes, brightening the inside of the store, where the mites settle back into the silver layer that sits over cans of tomatoes and peaches, linens, boxes of gum and cigarettes. Nearly everything sits untouched and unmoved, old dust settling between cracks and grooves, patrons not having enough money to buy something and the owner not having enough to change out stock. Struck still, frozen in a single, long exhale. The slow, creaking death of the economic system has reached Dalhart too. You shudder, suddenly cold as if in a mausoleum. 

The further away from Boston the train took you, the further back in time you felt. Here, you are reminded of the old general stores of cowboys and pioneers. But maybe, that is exactly where you are: out of time.

A man in long white sleeves, coiffed hair, and perfectly round glasses, looks up from the wilted newspaper spread out over the counter. 

“Can I help you?” His accent hails from the east, North Carolina most likely. However, his manners are not reflective of that famous southern hospitality. He looks at you like you’re a bad dream and it unsteadies you.

“Y-yes. I, uh, I’m hoping that you know a-a Miller. Joel Miller? I have his advert and I’m, um, I’m looking for work.” 

The man’s thin eyebrow jumps mockingly. Aren’t we all, sister? But eventually, he shakes his head.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing all the way out here, but this ain’t no place for a young lady out on her own, job or no job. Where’s your husband?”

“Dead.” Your voice doesn’t waver, but then again, why would it? 

The clerk’s eyes soften, if only slightly. “I see. But I’m sorry to say, there is no job here for you.”

Your mouth instantly dries out. “What do you mean? Where’s Mr. Miller?”

“He’s a mean ol’ sunuvbitch, livin' God knows where. Comes in twice a month for supplies and he’s back out into the prairie.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t see why that’s a problem –,”

“He ain’t fit for civilized life, ma’am.” The clerk drops his nose, eying you seriously over the rim of his black glasses. “Whatever he’s offering, you don’t want no part of it.” 

“I think we’ll be the judges of that.” Beside you, Ellie drops your suitcase and it loudly clatters to the ground. “Thanks for the tip though.” 

The clerk’s eyes widen – this is terrible behavior even for a boy – his mouth unfurling to give a nasty tongue-lashing, when you interject, your voice thick with pleading.

“I would just like to meet the man. Please, sir.” The clerk, like most men without scruples, can barely resist the sound of a woman begging. Those uncanny blue eyes find you again. “Has he come in recently?”

You can feel Ellie’s wicked sneer behind you, the clerk’s gaze switching between the unlikely pair in his shop. Finally, he shrugs. Who gives a fuck if one more woman goes missing?

“He’s due for a resupply.”

“How soon?” Your palm sweats under your gloves.

He narrows his eyes, evidently annoyed that a woman would reject his warnings. “Soon. We have a parlor in the back if you’d like to wait for him. But you have to buy something,” he adds vehemently. 

You nod, unsteady on shaking knees as you walk towards the door in the back of the store. 

“Thank you, sir. You have been so kind. We very much appreciate it.” 

Any chance that the clerk finds you sincere is lost when Ellie wraps her knuckles on the counter as she passes.

“Buh-bye, dude.” 

The parlor is small, dark, damp, and smells faintly of kerosene and leather. A woman, most likely the wife of the clerk you just annoyed, glares from behind a counter as you and Ellie walk in. 

“Lunch.” Not a question.

Ellie looks up at you, eyes wide, fearful. You hadn’t let her see what is left in your purse, but she knows it’s low.

With your stomach in knots, you wouldn’t be able to eat anyway. You pluck out a dollar, bringing your total down to three dollars, and giving it to your niece.

“Order whatever you want.”

The beating heart of the blazing Texas sun edges downward across the open sky, falling, until it drops completely behind the harrowingly flat horizon. Purple erupts in its wake, the last pump of blood of a dying muscle, and nearly instantly, the temperature drops. You watch the explosive coronary of the sky from a table at the back of the parlor, your own pulse doubling the later it gets. You squeeze your hand between your thighs to keep your fingers from drumming uneasily on the table. But for once, Ellie doesn’t pick up on your nerves. 

A dollar went farther out here and, as a result, Ellie is allowed her first big meal in months. Twice now, she’s nearly forgone the silverware to shove food directly into her mouth with her fingers, had it not been for your glares to remind her to slow down.

“This is slow,” she grumbles as she licks her bowl of mashed potatoes clean. Of course, half of what she ordered sits waiting for you, but you know she needs this meal more than you do – even if your rumbling stomach disagrees. You’d already had lunch at the train station; one more missed meal won’t kill you and less for you means more for Ellie.

Suddenly becoming a parent to a very opinionated fourteen-year-old girl was not something you had anticipated, and most times you figured you were doing it all wrong. The least you could do is give her everything you could.

“You think he’ll show?” 

You tear your eyes away from the parlor door, blinking back into your body out of your cloud of thoughts. Ellie’s little hands grip the bowl, a white smear sitting on her bottom lip, her eyes dark as they watch you. 

You grin as her pink tongue swipes up to lick her mouth clean. How easy you forget she’s only fourteen, with her loud mouth and provoking eyes. “Eat your food, Ellie.” 

The words have barely left your mouth when the door to the parlor bursts open. Two men, clearly drunk and smelling of it, stumble in. This is the part where you wish you too could believably dress up like a man. Your pulse thrums in your neck like a heightened prey animal. 

One pushes the other’s shoulder, smirking, and grunting something. His friend, also in a cowboy hat but half his size, nods and makes an unsteady line for one of the tables, while the other does his best to get to the bar. 

The man at the table has light green eyes, overly thick eyebrows, and a flat mouth, loose with drink. He flops into a wooden chair and you watch as the Texas Rangers badge on his chest flashes in the firelight behind him. Your stomach tightens. 

He stretches out, feet crossed over his ankles, limp hands crossed over his denim jacket, hollering at his friend and the woman working, who looks equally displeased to see them as she did you and Ellie. 

Smirking, his eyes slide from the wooden bar top, over the back wall, and right onto you.

You watch as his gaze blurs for a moment, a film of beastial hunger smothering the color of his eyes. You can feel your pulse in your ankles now.

“Well, now, what do we have here?” The lilt in his voice calls out two unspoken words: fresh meat. Distressingly steady, he climbs to his feet, his hat tilted obnoxiously on his forehead. “Where did you come from, you pretty little thing?” 

He saunters over, his thumbs stuck in his belt, the gun at his side snug in its holster. The grin on his face is hideous. You’d smack it off if you weren’t suddenly overcome by a debilitating fear. A look like that on a man is never, ever a good thing.

“Whatcha got there, Lee?” his buddy calls out from the bar, beard drenched in beer foam. 

“I dunno quite yet, Knapp,” he says over his shoulder, his livid green eyes never leaving your face. He nearly folds in half to press his spider-like hands on the surface of your table, coming inches from your face. His breath smells like corn whiskey and cheap tobacco. “Guess I’ll have to find out. What’s your name, pretty thing?” 

“Or she could not tell you her name and instead, you could fuck off.” Ellie’s scowl wrenches her mouth open, her knuckles white around her spoon. There’s a part of you that fully acknowledges and accepts that if given the signal, she’d scoop the fucker’s eyes out with the silverware right here. “We’re eating here, or are you too busy smelling like a fucking whiskey barrel to notice?”

As with most adults when Ellie decides to show her teeth, Lee stares stunned before the self-righteous anger sets in. Your heart stops for a moment when you think he’s going for his holster, but instead, he uses the flat of his hand to swat her hat off her head.

“Shut up, you little fucker, where’d you learn your fucking ma–,”

Ellie’s long hair tumbles down her shoulders, the baseball cap on the floor behind her. 

Lee is stunned into silence once again. The parlor goes deathly silent.

It’s Knapp who sets off the explosive spark again. “Holy fuck, you’re a little girl.”

Ellie snatches up her hat, cheeks flaming red, but Lee’s hand grabs her wrist. 

“A kinda cute one at that,” Lee sneers. He twists her arm and she yelps. Knapp at the bar laughs, his paunch shaking as beer sloshes over the side of his glass. The woman is cleaning something with a rag, turned away from the scene, her shoulders hunched to her ears. You’re on your feet, your hand on her purse. “What are you thinking, hm? Dressing this sweet little girl up like a boy?”

The trigger clicks and Lee and everyone else in the parlor freezes. The edge of your lash line is wet, fear rolling through you like fog on the bay. Your hand is steady, miraculously, but your voice isn’t.

“L-l-let–,” your voice cracks and you try again. You only have one gun drawn on Lee and you pray to whatever god is listening that Knapp doesn’t remember his. “Let her go.” 

This small pistol is your last line of defense against those who would take everything from you. You couldn’t keep your sister safe, your husband didn’t want to be saved, but you’d die before you’d let anyone come within an inch of Ellie. You pawned off your wedding ring long before you ever considered selling this weight in your hand. You couldn’t physically win a fight but you’d be damned if you weren’t going to take someone out with you.

There’s more than one reason you never let Ellie look into your purse. You won’t make eye contact with her now.

Lee’s eyes harden into black flints in his head. “Yeah? You’re shaking like a leaf. You ain’t gonna do shit about it.”

He twists harder, forcing Ellie to her knees, his mouth smearing into a sickening sneer, Ellie’s cries loud – “get off me, you fucker!”

All you have to do is miss. Once. 

Your arm shifts right and you fire. You meant to hit the floor, but instead the leg of a chair at a nearby table shatters, wood and smoke sparking into the air. Lee and Ellie jump, their struggle broken, but Ellie’s quicker, smarter. Hunched to avoid debris, they are nearly eye to eye and Ellie doesn’t hesitate; she jerks her head back and then launches her forehead forward – square into his flat nose.

The crunch is sickening and it turns your already empty stomach. Lee shrieks, releasing Ellie, his hands flying to his misshapen nose to staunch the river of blood pouring from his nostrils. 

“You bitch!” he whines, voice wet and gummy as blood trickles down his throat, eyes watering. You hear a roar of anger as Knapp stands, no longer finding any of this funny.

“Get behind me, Ellie.” You snap, eyes on Knapp as he lumbers forward. She hesitates, looking like she’d like nothing more than to kick Lee up the balls, but obeys the closer Knapp comes. She slots behind you, eyes sharp on the squealing man on the floor. 

“She broke my fucking nose, man,” he cries, face already purpling. 

“Yeah, and don’t you forget it, you fucker!” She snarls over your shoulder. One hand holds your elbow, and the other brandishes her mother’s knife that had been at the bottom of her satchel seconds ago. Fuck. 

Ellie Williams is not, and never has been, nor will be, one to deescalate a situation. Knapp responds in kind. His drunk fingers fumble with his holster, his face contorted with rage.

“Shootin’ at an officer of the law – you’re gonna hang for this, you thieving little c–,”

“Knapp.”

A fifth voice – low, deep, a mammalian bark that grinds the chaos of the room to a halt. The large man stalls, his engine snagged by the rough grain of that voice. On the floor, Lee lets out one quiet whimper as he cracks open a pulsating black eye.

In the glow of the firelight, you watch as beads of sweat swell on Knapp’s big forehead beneath his wide-brimmed hat. His wide eyes flash between you and the man who just walked in.

“M-Miller, the fuck you want?” 

Your heart seizes in your chest. Miller. 

Joel Miller. 

You never thought your saving grace would come in the shape of a hulking, dark-eyed man. 

A well-worn handkerchief around his neck, crusted over with dust, his broad shoulders stretch a denim work shirt, the unbuttoned collar loose and just as dirty. Worked-over hands, dry and brown as the earth, curl into fists at his side. Tight jaw, flared nose, eyes black, his presence expands in the cramped room, a leviathan cresting dark waves to command the roaring void. 

“Back off, both of you.” 

Knapp sneers, desperately tugging at some misguided sense of bravery, with sweat running hot and fast and smelly down the sides of his rubbery face. “Y-yeah, or what?” 

“You fuckin’ know what.”

Knapp visibly swallows and lowers his pistol, hands trembling. Lee whines from the floor, his eyes open as wide as the swelling will allow, abject terror on his face as he stares up at Miller. Neither of them move.

A guard dog satisfied by the corralled sheep, Joel’s heavy gaze roves from the two men, across the room, to you.

His expression doesn’t change. 

The weight shifts across the stiff planes of his shoulders, and he turns, leaving as quickly as he appeared. Beneath his thick boots, the wooden floor creaks and it rouses you. Your mouth is so dry you can feel the skin of your lips split apart. 

“Mr. Miller, w-wait.”

He doesn’t. 

With a single glance to the men still frozen in terror, you follow him through the now-dark and empty store. The cold desert air cracks hard against your overheated cheeks when you burst through the door, into the black night. The moonlight illuminates the threads of silver hair in his beard that the dark parlor hid. His fingers work slowly, unhurriedly, as he tightens the leather buckle beneath the wide girth of his off-white horse. It lifts its head as you stumble out onto the dusty road, its round eyes watching you with more interest than its rider. White ears twitch forward, a snort from the long snout, and Joel rubs the soft place between two giant nostrils without looking up. 

“J-Joel – Mr. Miller, please, I need your help.” 

“Already got it.” His shoulders flex and roll as he loads up another loose sack onto the rump of the horse, then tightens the securing belt. It snorts again and shifts on its hooves, its long tail flicking back and forth. 

You shake your head, swallowing the hot rush of embarrassment. The wind licks at your ankles and you fight back a shiver, bringing a hand to your shoulder to warm the goosebumps. “No, sorry, I mean – I’m here to help you. I saw your advertisement and I was wondering if the position was still open.”

The buckle quiets. The dirt at his feet crunches as he faces you. 

There are no trees in Dalhart, Texas. There are barely any clouds, no coverage. Overhead, the few buildings not yet folded up in the wake of the financial collapse throw shadows over his angular face, but you can still feel the trace of his gaze over you. A curious search, the investigation of scent. 

Then he shakes his head.

“No.” 

Your entire chest tightens. “Has the position been filled?”

“No.”

“Then why–,”

“I don’t need you.” He lifts up the third and final sack and you feel your hope being carried away with it. “Need a farm hand. You’re not the type.”

“N-n-no, I’ve worked on a farm. I-I’ve only planted seeds but I’m a quick learner and I–,”

“No.” 

“Sir – please, I’ll do anything–,”

“Then go home.” He unties the reins from the wooden post and clicks to the horse. Its big eyes watch you as he turns them for the road. “There’s nothing here for you.” 

You absolutely will not cry in front of this gruff stranger. Panic icing down your spine, you follow him on weak knees. In the wake leftover from the wheat boom, Dalhart is quiet as soon as the sun goes down. Empty of people, of light, of any sort of guiding hand, you try to appeal to the last human you’ve found at the end of the world.

“Mr. Miller, there must be something you need. I’m a hard worker, smart, you won’t have to train me at all. Please. I’ve been a housekeeper, a seamstress – a nurse. I —,”

The horse huffs when Joel pulls tight on the reins. 

In the moonlight, all of his hair looks gray. Your heart plunges in your throat. You can feel your stomach trying to digest your spine.

“Done any work with kids?” He asks, after a moment. 

His brisk question is not what you expected. You can barely hear him over the pounding in your heart. 

“Y-yes. I’ve treated children before. A-and I was a teacher, briefly. I’m very good with children, actually.”

The scarred hand at his side tightens, flexes open and closed, the tips of his thumb and forefinger twitching over the other. Over his shoulder, you think his head tilts a centimeter towards you.

“You know what? Fuck this.” 

Out of the shadows of the county store, Ellie tears down the steps, her face pink and her hair stuffed back up her ball cap. She loops her small hands around your forearm and tugs, her eyes like chips of bark, glaring hatefully at the man in the middle of the street. Faint dust churns beneath her faded sneakers. 

“She’s fucking begging you and you don’t give a fuck, you old shithead!” She tugs again. In the flash of the moonlight, a glassy film has settled over her eyes. “C’mon, we don’t need him. We – don’t need – him.” 

“Ellie, please!” You grab her by the shoulders, a soft hand in a swirling tempest, and she settles, her mouth twisted up in anger and embarrassment. She hates that you have to beg anyone. “Please.” Shielding her from him, you squeeze her shoulders. “I know, Ellie. I know. But I have to keep you safe.”

Ellie finally turns that hot glare at you, eyes damp. Petulant when terrified, your sister was the exact same way. 

Fuck, Anna, it should have been me.

“She yours?”

Joel rests his weight on his left knee, fingers loose around the reins. He’s lowered the mask around his mouth. You snap your head up, your voice thankfully steady. “She’s my niece. She . . . I’m responsible for her.” 

Below your palms, Ellie stiffens. 

Fifteen feet from you, Joel nods, the muscle in his jaw tight. The horse huffs and he glares at it like it just yelled at him too.  

“I’m not in the habit of pickin’ up strays,” he says as if that means a lot. 

Hope springs in your chest and it snags the air in your lungs. “We’re not. I-I mean, we’ll work hard. Please, give us just one chance.”

“And you expect me to take on the both of you.” It isn’t a question, but his eyebrow arcs all the same. “That’s two mouths I gotta feed, ‘steada one.” 

“She can have mine.” In the silence, you think you can hear the faint choir of crickets. You remember the tarantulas and centipedes that lived inside the walls of your husband’s prairie dugout, and your stomach twists. “Ellie can have whatever you give us.” 

She makes a brief cry of protest, but you squeeze her shoulders. The sharp flair of his nostrils smooths and the corners of his eyes pinches, tilting his eyebrows up. He’s still glowering, but somehow, his expression has suddenly opened, just a crack. 

And then he nods. 

“Stay here a night. I’ll be back in the morning with the wagon.” 

And that’s it. You have a job. 

You’re so elated it takes a minute for his words to sink in. He turns back down the road, the horse's hooves clipping on the dry ground. You follow after him, hand outstretched.

“Oh, no, w-we can walk, it’s no trouble. Let me just get our things and–,”

“Too far to walk. And there’s things out in the dark more dangerous than those fuckin’ rangers.” He nods to the country store, eerily quiet. It sits, ugly, like a brown old frog. “There’s a hotel just up the road. It’s not much, but it’ll do for one night.”

“But, sir, we really can’t stay. I don’t – there’s no –,”

You stumble to a stop when those merciless dark eyes root you to the ground. The leather reins squeak when he tightens his fist around them. Again, you are under the impression of a dog sniffing out your scent for any deception, any treason. He takes you in, all of you in – your ratty gloves, your torn hemline, your tattered collar – and by some miracle, he doesn’t say anything. Instead, the groove above his nose softens. 

Wordlessly, he reaches into his back pocket and takes out five dollars from a brown leather wallet. He offers it to you between two fingers. 

Take it, his eyes command. 

You do, with a shaking hand. You hate charity, you hate that you’re at his mercy –

But Ellie has a bed for the night. Inside, warm. Where, hours ago, she didn’t. You smother your pride and nod, gaze at the scar on his cheek that you only now notice at an arm’s length away. 

“One night,” he says. “For you and the kid.”

You nod again because that’s all you really can do, his pity clutched in your fist and held against your heart. 

Ellie scowls as he swings up onto the horse and readjusts his mask. 

“What a guy,” she murmurs to you, her eyes still narrowed. Joel clicks his teeth, and the horse trots off into the dark, a lone man riding out into the featureless night.

Evidently still feeling slighted, Ellie sticks her tongue out at the denim back.

“Better keep that tongue in your mouth, kid,” he hollers before digging his heels into the horse’s flanks. “Liable to be chopped off like a copperhead.”

Ellie’s mouth snaps shut.

The money Joel gave you is more than enough to cover a room and another plate of food. You even spurge your own money on some small candy for Ellie, determined to give Joel back every cent left over and then some, once you’ve proven you can earn your keep.

For you and the kid.

You shake your head, lost in your own thoughts, the gnawing hunger in your belly satiated, as you pull back the covers to the twin bed. The metal frame squeaks as you climb in, your night dress thin and ragged as the rest of your clothes. 

“C’mon, Ellie, time for bed.” When she doesn’t move, you stop rearranging the pillows and look at her. In her own white nightie (because she’d outgrown all her other pajamas), she sits in front of the roaring fire, her chin on her knees, and her arms wrapped around her shins. 

She’s quiet - either a good sign, or a terrible one. 

“Ellie, sweetie, we’ve gotta get some sleep. It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow.” 

You watch as her narrow back expands and falls in one slow breath, her skin bright in the firelight.

She nods mutely and climbs into the space beside you. She rolls onto her side, away from you, her hands tucked up under her head, her knees curled up beneath her. 

This is where Anna would know what to say. How to soothe this girl with so much awareness in a world that is raw to even those willfully ignorant. You can’t bullshit Ellie the way you can some kids. She knows too much. Seen too much. 

You settle down next to her in the shadow of her shoulder. Your fingers hover, locked between the yawning gap of touching her and not touching her, when she finally speaks.

“Is this really going to work?” Her voice is quiet, soft, dust-covered and buried. “Is Joel really gonna . . . are we safe?”

You cannot bullshit Ellie Williams.

“I don’t know. I’d like to think so. I know you don’t like him, but I think we can trust him.”

She’s quiet again, only this time because there’s something she doesn’t want to say. 

“Not like Uncle Robert – or Robert, if that’s even his real name. I’d never met the man in person, but I wanted – so badly – to believe . . .” You swallow, your own shame boiling your skin. “I think we’re safe with Joel Miller.”

The god’s honest truth. 

She hears it in your voice.

Ellie tips back to look you in the eyes. She’s lost so much weight recently. “Yeah?”

You tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, the ghost of your thumb across her cheek. She allows the show of affection. “Yeah, El. I do.” 

You want to say: you can trust me. I’ll always take care of you.

But you know it would only come out hollow.

Neither of you would think it was honest. 

She pulls away from your grasp, her eyes almost golden in the firelight. She nods and stares at the burning wood. 

“Okay.”

“So . . . is your car, like, broken or something?”

You elbow Ellie and she sits up from hanging over the edge of the wagon. She frowns at you – what? – and you both glance at Joel at the front of the wagon. If the question annoys him any more than he perpetually already is, he doesn’t show it. 

“Don’t have one.” He says to the back of the horse. The wagon rocks and sways over the clods of dust and stone in the road. “Never did.”

“Uh, why?”

“Cars break down in the dust storms. Short out. They end up being more trouble than they’re worth.” 

Again, that half-centimeter turn, his tone implying what his eyes can’t, faced away from you. Ellie narrows her eyes at the back of his head. She wrenches her mouth open, fire in her eyes, but she catches you glaring, and her mouth snaps shut. Pouting, she chucks a lone pebble off the back of the wagon. 

The sky is strikingly blue, bright as a livewire, the air warm and crackling with the early summer heat. Away from Dalhart, away from the collection of dust on every surface, dripping through every crack, you find the clarity and distance of the southern plains to be . . . unexpected. So careless and abrasive one minute, but then, in moments like these, it became hard to believe that nature could ever be so cruel as to make the earth rise up and swallow it all whole. 

You swing your legs off the wooden edge, the sunshine warm on your knees. It’s no use trying to hide how badly your socks need darning, so you lean back and stretch your legs as far as you can, your face tilted towards the sky, the still air peaceful. This morning, you’d put on your yellow plaid dress, torn cotton lace around the sleeves that stop at your elbows. You tucked your hair up and pinned your straw hat to your head. It was a reflex, to present your most beautiful self to a man, even one you barely knew. By the way Ellie had rolled her eyes, she felt no such compulsion. 

Demure, your mother always told you, you’re not very pretty, you’re not very bright, the least you can be is demure. 

The wagon shudders, clicks, over the empty road and you open your eyes. Ellie is turned away from you, eyes out to the fields on either side of you. You don’t understand what she’s looking at, until you realize that’s exactly it: there is nothing to look at. On the other side of those loopy barbed-wire fences through cock-eyed posts, there are miles and miles of nothing but churned-over dirt. A lazy wind spins over a patch of emptiness, tossing clods and sand into the air, an aimless sadness as tangible as the dust itself. Phone lines stand, corroded and chipped, along the side of the road like tangible manifestations of a deadly infection. 

“There’s no crops here either.” Ellie says, voicing loudly what you only thought. You can’t see her face but she sounds as stunned as you are. “What happened?”

You watch over her shoulder, eyes level with the earth bleached of all material, all life. With the drought, your husband’s field shriveled up in months, the cracked ground peeling away from the sodhouse in some places. You still have nightmares about waking up with grit between your teeth, choking and coughing up bloody chunks of mud.

This is desolation on an epidemic scale. 

“Ask different people ‘n they’ll tell you different things.” Joel says in his slow drawl, the crackle of the earth soft beneath the wooden wheels. “No one really knows. But nothing like this happened when the buffalo grass was here, ‘steada wheat.”

“Wait, you were here before Dalhart?” Ellie twists on the wagon, leaning over the lip where Joel sits and drives the horse. 

“My family was. Here before anything. My grandpa befriended the Comanche Indians and –,”

“You got to hang out with Indians?” Ellie nearly hurls herself over the edge of the wagon to try and look him in the eye. “What are they like – did they teach you how to shoot a bow and arrow – can they really ride horses like that –,”

“Ellie!” You want to grab her by her collar and yank her back into the wagon. “Not so many questions.”

The noise Joel makes is somewhere between a grunt and the word no.

“It’s fine –, “ he looks down at Ellie, still curled around the back of the seat, her eyes wide with a giant smile on her face. His ever present scowl doesn’t seem any deeper, nor does it deter her. Joel turns away again and in the sunlight, his hair is gooey, caramel brown. You stare at the dirt road while listening, the back of your neck hot. “They’re good people. Didn’t deserve what happened to them – to any of ‘em. But they taught my grandpa and grandma how to take just what they need, nothing more. But then everybody needed grain, offered money for cheap, easy labor. They poured in here, into the prairie, and in years, it became this. Folks blame the drought, but it’s more’n that.”

Ellie’s inordinately quiet. She knows exactly what your husband did to you, to your family, and now, maybe to the entire land. 

“‘Next year’ people, they claim,” Joel continues, his voice deepening with anger, “‘next year’, things’ll be better. ‘Next year’ the rains’ll come. ‘Next year’ the wheat’ll return.” He shakes his head, boots creaking against the toeboard. “Anyone who thinks that is lyin’ to themselves. Anyone’s who’s been here, seen what’s here, for us it’s been –,”

“The end of the world.” 

The silence that follows your words stretches long, an anchor dropped off the end of the wagon and rattling around the wheels. You swing your legs, fingers curling around a tear in your hemline. It wasn’t the first time you’d heard those words to describe the state of things. That’s what your husband called it and you believed him. 

Evidently, Joel agrees. His wide shoulders taught, the denim blue faded beneath the boundless sky, he nods.

“Griiim,” Ellie mutters as she curls up and drops her chin on her knees. 

You’ve been watching a single cloud chase the sun from the floor of the wagon when Ellie, silent for all of about fifteen minutes, lifts her head from her hands draped over the edge. Her eyes go wide, her ears pink from the sun, and says:

“Whoa.”

The horse huffs as you sit up, a soft wind snagging the loose hairs on the back of your neck, and your mouth drops. 

Grass. 

Fields of it. 

The air is fresh, warm, and filled with the scent of living, breathing earth. Tipped with lush purple seeds shaped like paintbrushes, a sea of stalks bend and ripple in the cooling breeze, undulating like waves on solid ground. The wind is soft here, teasing, rolling through the tall grass, carrying the scent of growth and green in the air. You’re suddenly aware of how dry your mouth is, cracked and padded with dust. 

“We left it be.” Joel offers simply, voice too gruff to surely be filled with pride. “It’s endured and survived, and so have we.”

Further back, you can see where the line of his property ends – a harsh division of paradise and purgatory – and marked to the north by a dip in the ground and even over the crunch of the wheels over the ground, you hear it: water. 

A river. An oasis in a wasteland. 

Ahead of the white tufts of hair on the horse, the road curves, disappearing into the sea of grass, but letting your graze drift up, you see an a-frame home, white like a lighthouse at the edge of a storm. The instant the home comes into view, Joel clicks his tongue, urging the horse faster – eager. 

He leads the horse up through the road, through the grass, and on the other side, by the river, two cows chew up the green, oblivious. Beyond them, tucked behind the house is a barn. Low to the ground but wide, hunched like a fighter with a heavy center of gravity, it looks ready to endure and survive. As this entire secret world had. 

Joel tugs the horse to a stop, the wagon rattles as it slows, by the wide porch of the a-frame. It sits also low to the ground, wider with a dark roof, held together with something black and smeared. You’re so distracted by the unique qualities of this house in the middle of paradise that you miss it when the door creaks open until you’re staring down the barrel of a shotgun.

“Who are you?” The voice behind the gun is deep, even if the barrels shake slightly. In the dark of the doorframe, you can’t quite see their face, only their short stature. 

You see Ellie’s hand twitch towards her knife, which she now carries in her sock since the night of the county store. 

However, Joel is less concerned. In fact, the boulders of his shoulders loosen, ease to simple muscle and blood. He makes a noise that on anyone else, it might be considered a laugh, a chuckle, but he isn’t even capable of smiling –

He slings down from the seat and pats the horse.

“Easy there, Annie Oakley, it’s just me.” 

The shadow in the doorway stiffens.

“Dad?”

The shotgun lowered, the shadow staggers into the light. Brown eyes, just like his, scrunched against the blinding sunlight, a girl with the most beautiful head of curls blinks at Joel, her thin hand held up to shield her face. 

“Hey there, baby girl.”

In a single leap, she jumps down from the porch but all too quickly, the smile slips from Joel’s face.

“Hang on, not too fast–,”

She stumbles towards him as best as the metal braces around her knees, down to her ankles, will allow, defiant and smiling, despite the beads of sweat that have swelled over her forehead. Joel surges forward, faster than you thought possible, and reaches for her, nearly on one knee. 

“Slow down, please, Sarah.”

“Dad, I’m fine,” she huffs before tossing her arms around his neck. “I’m fine. Just – missed you, is all.” 

You can’t see his face, but he straightens up still holding her. With one hand he flattens those curls to her cheek, and kisses the other. 

“Enough to forget all the things I taught you about gun safety? You just tossed that thing aside,” he scolds fondly. She rolls her eyes as he sets her down. 

“Okay, but if you didn’t know it was me, you would’a been totally scared, right?” 

She watches as he chuckles, a deep, warm sound, but her own smile flatlines when she spies Ellie climbing down from the wagon. You ease off the edge, your lower half sore from the ride. 

The girl, Sarah, narrows her eyes. 

“Who are you?” She positions her body slightly in front of Joel’s. “And why are you dressed like a boy?” 

Joel’s soft scolding – “Sarah” – is lost beneath Ellie’s scoff. She adjusts her satchel. 

“Why are you dressed like Raggedy Ann?” 

Her father’s massive hands clench down on her shoulders, Sarah’s scowl evident that she’s about half a second away from launching herself at Ellie, leg braces be damned. 

“Now, let’s slow down here.” Joel’s deep baritone is light, but just as firm as his grip. If you knew him better, you’d think he is about to laugh, the lines around his eyes thick, while his mouth stays flat. “We got off on the wrong foot. Sarah, this is Ellie and her aunt. They’re going to be staying with us for a while to help out with your schooling.”

Those curls go flying, her frown now pinched in worry. Another girl caught between a child and adult – for the sake of their single parent, you notice, your chest tight. 

“I thought you needed a farm hand. You were going to teach me.” 

“You know you already read better than I do.” 

“Dad–,”

“Miss here is also a nurse.” 

“Oh. Oh.” She glances down at the metal braces as if she’d forgotten they were there. The skin on her knees is chaffed, rubbed pink. “She can . . . help me?”

Twin pairs of brown eyes settle on you, one hesitantly curious, the other aggressively determined. 

You can, right?

Ellie’s staring at the braces, her gaze distant, heavy. She’d seen this before, but everything back then moved too fast. Back then, there was no time for braces.

Braces only help a small percentage of polio patients. The lucky ones.  

You nod, your heart hammering under your chest bone. “Yes – yes, sir. I think with Ms. Kenny’s therapy, we might be able to alleviate some pain.” 

Those eyes, exactly like and so unlike her father’s, widen.

“Really?”

You introduce yourself with your first name, pressing the crease in your glove between your nail and your thumb with your other hand.

“I’d like to try, Sarah.”

You suddenly understand that Sarah is Joel Miller’s most guarded secret, out here in paradise, paradise as the most beautiful prison in the world. He continues to stare at you from under thick eyebrows after Sarah moves away from him. Ellie, caught off-guard by her forward movement, takes a significant step back.

“I, um, got some marbles out back,” Sarah starts, thumbing over her shoulder, and every other word sounding like an apology. “If you wanna play.”

Ellie jerks forward, her eyes round with excitement, but stops. She looks at you.

“Can I?” 

Soft when eager, just like her mother. So unlike you. You nod.

“Stay close, okay?” 

You and Joel watch as Ellie and Sarah toddle around to the back of the house, Ellie quietly narrating every thought she has as she keeps pace with Sarah.

Those look actually really cool, you know?

Yeah?

Totally. Have you read Amazing Stories? You look like you could be part of the Space Family Robinson.

Who are they?

Oh, you’ve never read those!? Okay, so they’re a family who live in space and they go on these awesome adventures together to different planets and . . .

The farther they go, the faster Joel turns back to stone. His gaze lingers just a hint longer before those dark eyes pin you to the ground. 

“You said you can clean? Cook?” 

You nod quickly. “Yes, sir.” Guard dog Joel. Stocky pitbull, teeth long and wet Joel.

He tilts his chin towards the house.

“Kitchen’s in the back. I gotta clean up the wagon and the horse, then gonna tend the field. I’ll be back in a few hours, but Sarah knows where to find me if y’need somethin'.”

You nod again, but he misses it, turning away to unbuckle the horse. You slide your trunk and Ellie’s satchel off the end of the wagon and head into the shadow of the house.

The white clapdoor snaps shut behind you, followed by the softer snik of the screen clicking into its frame. Slipping the bobby pins out of your hair to release your hat, you take in the Miller home.

The air is cool. Dust motes float in the sunlight streaming in from the second floor over a staircase with wooden wainscoting leading away from the open front room. With a brief glance up, you can see the faded white walls of the upper hallway, some not-yet-seen window drawing in bolts of morning light that pierce the air in bullet holes. It’s quiet and it smells warm, like lace kept in the back of a drawer near a wall that faces the heat outside. 

A blue two-seater couch faces a squat fireplace, with a Queen Anne table sandwiched between the two. Behind you, a large grandfather clock ticks and waits, a server waiting in the shadows with a watchful eye to report back to its master on the going-ons of the house. With only a cedar hutch, a few daguerreotypes, a smattering of books, the room is sparsely decorated, but kept clean and organized. You could see Sarah, a focused look in her eyes, sitting on the steps of the stairs and making Joel move and rearrange furniture over and over again until the room felt right. 

Through a white arched doorway, you find yourself in the kitchen. The light sparks more brightly here, the sky a stark blue through the four square window over the kitchen table and above the sink, reflective of the sun. You realize then the house runs north to south at an angle, where there are limited windows in the walls on the east and west sides, thereby limiting direct sun exposure and, more importantly, heat. Both the kitchen and the front rooms had been built out of the line of the sun, making cooking and cleaning and living bearable without a painful glare. 

A thoughtful and patient consideration.

Someone had attempted to add some levity with brown and blue plaid wallpaper around the cove of the dinner table, all the way to the other side of the room around the kitchen counters and stove. But unfortunately for everyone else, the wallpaper is hideous, only tampered by the off-white counters and cupboards. 

The cupboards have glass doors, blurring ceramic cups and plates on the tops of the shelves. 

It reminds you of the small apartment Anna and you lived in back in Boston, when it was just the two of you. It wasn’t much, but it felt sturdy, secure. Safe.

A door to the right of the stove has a latch, and you lift it and poke your head inside. A chilly darkness greets you, along with the scent of wet, deep earth. A basement? No. Not this close to the kitchen. Curiosity pulling you forward, you descend the sturdy wooden stairs, into the sunken darkness. You count ten until a draft licks your ankles. You keep going, one squeak of wood after another until - you touch soil. The heady scents of pine bark and peat moss soothe the air from where your feet press into the ground, fertility thick like mushrooms in the gut of a lichen-drenched tree. But it’s dark, too dark to make out much, barely your own hand in front of your face. With your fingers outstretched, as if you’ll bump into a gas lamp conveniently on the ground, you shuffle forward and almost immediately a cold chain tickles your face. You grab out of instinct and pull. 

Nearly blinded by the light that erupts from an exposed bulb directly in front of your left eye, you stagger back, wincing, your footsteps muffled by the earthen floor. You blink through the tears as the secret at the end of the stairs finally reveals itself. 

A pantry. A cellar. 

At least twenty feet deep and ten feet high, with rows and rows, stacks and stacks, wood shelves cover nearly the entire length of the underground room. In between the rows, large barrels sit, quiet and sturdy, with bottles of vinegar and olive oil sitting on their rims. 

You realize two things within seconds of each other. 

This house has electricity. It stands above the ground, proud, independent, full of heat and light. So unlike your husband’s dark hole in the ground. 

and

there is so much food. 

Pickling jars. Seed pouches. Culled wheat. Cans of fruit and vegetables and eggs. Olives with squash and pumpkins. Crates of potatoes and half bottles of wine and syrup. Onions and carrots and spices and garlic.

A feast. Meals for days and days and days. The bounties of earth stored, safe beneath the ground, like a secret. 

It’s more food than you’ve seen in years.

A hunger like you can’t remember having roars in your stomach out of nowhere and everything pitches to the right. The edges of your vision blurs, your shoulder knocking into stone wall, and breathing becomes a nearly impossible task. You turn, nearly stumbling up the dozen steps that have turned into a thousand.

The tacky memories that stick to the crevices of your dreams yawn awake, bringing with them dry mud in your mouth and thick salt to your eyes. Mud, dirt, dust – everywhere. In that stinking hut in the ground, the dust replaced your molecules, your atoms, until you too might blow away, until you are cracked and empty and dry. The static from the dust storm memories shoots down both of your arms and you sway on your feet. Your heart suddenly pounding so achingly fast, you have to drop your forehead against the flat surface of the closed door to keep the room from spinning. 

You had forgotten what safety looked like.

You had forgotten what living could be.

You know the ringing sound of that gunshot is just in your head, it’s not real, but you shudder all the same, your hands curling into claws under your chin, your nails tearing up the white paint. 

You’re here, not there. You are safe. Ellie is safe. That house and him have been entombed together under piles of dirt, with the bugs and the rot and the stench from the weak stove. Rivers of sweat rolling down the back of your neck, you beg yourself to stop shaking. You feel like cheap terracotta pottery – made from dirt, left too long to bake in the sun and made brittle; one good tap and you’ll shatter. 

You breathe in and taste wet salt. Breathe out and cry – cry from the fear and the dread and the relief and the hope. God, that hope tastes worse than all the dirt in the Panhandle of Texas.

You cry and cry and cry until you don’t feel so brittle anymore.

Sunlight has struck copper, heavy, tangy in the mouth, when the back door opens and the house is instantly filled with the sound of girls’ rabid conversation. You step back from the stove, cheeks warm and arm sore from continuously stirring the rice and vegetable soup. It’s not as thick as your mother once made, but without milk, it would be nearly impossible to improve. You smile at the girls as they tumble in, more dust mite than human, whispering about some secret. 

“Having fun?” You ask with a grin on your face as Ellie helps Sarah take off her shoes, already attentive to what a girl with her health concerns might need. 

There’s an overlap of chatter as Ellie and Sarah both answer you and then, answer each other.

“Well, good,” you say, turning back to the stove, making sure the bottom of the soup doesn’t burn, “but whatever you got up to, it’s all over your faces so please wash up before dinner.” 

“It smells real good, miss,” Sarah says as she hobbles over to the sink and starts rinsing off her arms and cheeks, while Ellie takes off her own shoes. “What is it?”

“Something my mom used to make when the cupboards were bare.”

Sarah stills, the water rushing over her soft skin. Those inquisitive eyes are just as captivating, just as forceful as her father’s, but for entirely different reasons. She tugs the words out of you by the sheer, needling strength of her gaze.

“I mean – I found the cellar, the house is incredibly well stocked, but I didn’t see any preserved meat or dairy and I didn’t – I didn’t think your dad would want me poking around out back.”

Immediately Sarah softens and rolls her eyes. “Dad’s all bark and no bite,” she huffs. “We’ve got stored beef and cheese in an ice chest downstairs. I’ll show you around tomorrow.”

You smile and those brown eyes go warm in the coppery light. “Thanks, Sarah.” 

“Bunch up, I gotta wash my hands too.” Ellie none-to-gently bumps Sarah with her shoulder to get to the sink but before you can scold her, Sarah swings back, using her precarious momentum, and pushes Ellie back. They both giggle. Something that’s been cramped far too long in your chest loosens. 

“So, Sarah, tell me where you are with your schooling. Do you have books, diagrams?”

She thinks for a minute as she opens a drawer that leaves her back to you and takes out two, then four thin cloth placemats. She hobbles back to the table to carefully spread them out.

“I was up to seventh grade before the school shut down. That was about two years ago, so Dad’s been trying to make sure I don’t forget anything. He got me a Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare a while ago and made me read it out loud to him. He has me work on my letters every day – including cursive.” She adds, with a bright spot of joy cranking her mouth open. You imagine someone like Sarah would have beautiful penmanship. “He shows me around the yard, asking me to identify plants and animals, especially anything that might be poisonous. I don’t think he really understands it but he explains what happens when you add water to a seed and keep it in damp earth. Oh, and he has me help balance the books for the farm – what we made, what we sold, how much we have left, stuff like that.”

You smile at her over your shoulder as Ellie hands her bowls. “Accounting.”

“Huh?”

Ellie rolls her eyes. “It’s so boring, don’t worry about it,” she whispers conspiratorially.

“What your dad is teaching you is called accounting,” you say a bit firmly, eyes tracking your niece as she shows no shame. “It’s a very special skill to have, especially if you work on a farm or in a business. Do you like it?”

She nods rapidly, those cork-screw curls bouncing around her thin face. “Yeah! I do! I’m much faster than Dad when it comes to figuring out the sums and dollar value.”

In the front hall, the clap door creaks open then slams shut, heavy footfalls proceeding the man that makes them.

“Does that happen a lot?” you ask softly as Sarah sidles up next to you to peer into the pot.

“Where I know more than my dad?” Sarah smirks up at you, all devious youth. “More often than you think.”

A mini sun bursts from the ceiling as Joel flicks on the light switch and is almost immediately tackled by Sarah. The copper sun on the horizon finally, in the distracted moment, slips down and drags the night behind it. It’s purple twilight outside when Joel lifts his head from the embrace around Sarah’s shoulders to stare at the two strangers in his kitchen.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” you say brightly and you can almost picture your mother in the same exact position in front of the stove, stirring soup until her cheeks were pink, her hand resting low on her back, her tummy round and full in her second attempt to keep her husband’s rage diverted from her. It’s a boy, she promised.

The memory makes you so violently ill out of nowhere, you lose your appetite. But you persevere; you carry on and load up the bowls Sarah stacked for you. Ellie saves you from having to dislodge the prickly knot in your throat when she snags a bowl and eagerly yells, “get it while it’s hot!”

The arrangements from the stove to the table are a bit of a blur, the slick anxious weight from earlier today curling around your lungs again as you remember shadows in chairs like these, but so different from the flesh-and-blood bodies that occupy them now. 

You’re dazed, a little light-headed, but not so much to miss the glance between Joel and Ellie. A junkyard puppy skirting the territory of an older watchdog, a bone in each of their mouths and dragged to opposite corners of the battlefield. Satisfied with the lines of demarcated territory that had been drawn, they call a temporary truce by eating in complete silence, until Sarah groans.

“Oh my god, this is better than it smells!” she hums, her mouth full of potatoes. 

“Just wait till she adds chicken,” Ellie grumbles, mouth cupped open to keep from spilling. You watch her, a faint smile on your face, and the slippery feeling fades. When cleaning up, she missed a spot on her left nostril and you fight the urge to clean it with your thumb.

“There’s more.” 

Your gaze snaps to Joel hunched over his bowl. The spoon that Ellie and Sarah have to both clutch in their fists to eat barely swings between his massive fingers. 

Joel’s dark eyes trace down your nose, your chin, your neck, to where your hands lay flat on the table in front of you. Your own bowl and spoon sit on the counter behind you. You worry you might have upset him, with the way he’s frowning.

“There’s more,” he repeats, same tone. 

“I'm sorry?” 

He puts his spoon down and clears his throat, then nods to the pot on the stove. Ellie watches him out of the corner of her eye.

“I saw how much you made. If you’re hungry, you should eat.” 

As though speaking a language only you could hear, he looks at Ellie the same time you do. 

She frowns. “What? Is there something on my face?”

Sarah begins to giggle, nodding, when Joel starts again.

“You should eat. There’s enough.” 

It’s like his eyes can see through your blue veins and clammy skin, to your yellow bones and clawing stomach. You choke on the mudball that’s been hovering in your throat for months and nod.

“Alright.”

You don’t know if you’re actually hungry – you can’t really remember the taste of warm food – or if you’re doing it just to appease him, but something about the heat of the bowl and solid spoon in your hand, it rouses you from this sinking you find yourself in. Your bones feel like jelly.

“How’re the fields, Dad?” Sarah asks with her big eyes, seemingly unaware of the layered exchange between you and her father, or kind enough not to address it. 

He responds to her, his voice deep in the cavern of his chest. It’s an easy way he speaks to her, heavy with the seriousness she’s earned to be talked to like an adult, but gentle enough that for all his low grumbling, it comes out as a thick murmur. You find yourself listening to their conversation, their interactions, as soothing as music turned low from a well-tuned radio. Ellie is even roped in when Sarah tells Joel all about the Space Family Robinson and Ellie’s knife. “It’s really cool, Dad,” she says preemptively. “She knows how to use it and she’s really safe.” 

“Well, if it’s really cool . . .” he fills his mouth with potatoes, tamping down the ghost of a grin on his lips around the spoon. 

Ellie shuffles in her seat, her own hesitant smile glittering in her eyes, and with only minor prompting, she holds no prisoners when gleefully telling Sarah that she’s got the story of finding a mess of wriggling worms out by the back of the barn all wrong. 

“Just keep ‘em outta my side of the bed, alright?” You grin at her, spooning another dribble of soup into your mouth. You’ve realized too much, too fast can just as easily twist your stomach so you focus on cradling a digestible amount of food – broth, potato, carrots – in the well of your spoon. 

But the landscape beyond the silver lip has stilled. Both girls are happily slurping up the last bits of their meals, throwing quips back and forth, but Joel’s shoulders have locked up again, the bones of his wrists flat, a static alertness that you’re sure would travel all the way down to his ankles if he was standing up right. You aren’t sure if Sarah has picked up on the subtle change in his breathing – from the deep well of his lungs to shortened and shallow – but somehow you have. 

You’re staring at him far too long.

Those thick eyebrows pitch down again. Beneath the loose button that pins your dress closed over your chest, you feel a swell of heat and you wish you were like Ellie, capable of making an easy joke – what, is there something on my face? The heat bubbles almost uncomfortably under his weighted gaze. 

“I hate bugs,” you blurt out, desperate to give him what he wants, if only you knew. The girls glance at your sudden outburst. “I don’t like worms especially. I don’t mind straw beds, as long as they’re clean – I mean, I–I hope they are, the straw beds, not the worms.” 

Another eternal second of being pinned down by Joel’s frown, this one decidedly less hostile, before understanding breaks open the harsh lines of his mouth and around his eyes. His eyes go wide for less than breath, then he drops his gaze to the bowl. His shoulders shift, muscle redistributing weight as he settles his thick forearm closer to the edge of the table.

Oh, that relief of muscle says. 

“You’re not sleeping in the barn.” Joel says, head tucked down. At that, Ellie slows her ravenous eating and frowns at him. 

“Then where are we sleeping?”

Joel lifts his head, a new, special emotion just for her tugging on his mouth: exasperation. “My room. You two in there and I’m takin’ the couch.” 

Shame and embarrassment drip down over your skull, between your ears, like a cold, runny egg. 

“No, we couldn’t possibly–,” 

He shakes his head, eyes still on the split potato chunk at the bottom of the bowl. His hand flexes briefly and you think of it around the bridle of the horse. 

“It’s not up for discussion.” 

Beside him, Sarah frowns at him and you’d wonder how many times in her life he’s ever said that to her – if you could think properly over the roaring of blood in your ears. 

“Joel,” you say, something syrupy under your tongue molding the words Mr. Miller into a tone you’d use for an old friend. “I can’t ask you to–,”

Hand flexes. The seat of the chair squeaks.

“You’re not askin’, I’m tellin’.” You’re still vastly underprepared for when those eyes - those deep, dark eyes - suddenly snap on you, as if your very presence commands his entire attention. You notice the dirt underneath his nails and around the knot of his wrist on the table. He’s filthy. 

Quietly, with the surety of a dog slipping its snout between its paws, he cuts the last chunk of potato in half with the curve of his spoon. “The new mattresses’ll be here next week. We’ll make do ‘till then.”

The slurp of soup between his lips seems to signal the end of the conversation, but you can’t quite mash together your kaleidoscope-spinning impressions of the man across the table from you. 

“Thank you . . . Joel.” 

He nods, back teeth breaking apart the soft mush of the potato. He swallows and glances back up at you. 

“It’s good,” he says, briefly holding his spoon aloft. “You did good.”

His words burst the choking bubble in your chest and warmth drips down your spine, splashing in the cradle of your hips. Hunger rises, but it’s a different kind of hunger. A growl of neglect. One you sometimes wondered if it was even possible for you to ever even feel. 

Even while you were married to your husband.

You put your spoon down to keep your hand from shaking. The soup won’t feed this new churning hunger and, frankly, you don’t know what will. 

You did good, he praised, parsed out like torn bread tossed across a black lake. 

It makes you warm in places food never could.

The immediate next morning, you meet the sun early, eagerly. Eager to wake and rise and become so useful, you are intricately tied to this house; if you are removed, a vital piece of the land, the prairie is torn up along with you. Ellie sleeps softly next to you, curled up in the same position she was in the hotel bed, tucked in so tightly as if to take up the least amount of space possible. She sleeps, unbothered, blissful, and again you fight the urge to brush the hair that covers her sleeping eyes. You settle for tugging the beautiful quilt, with its stunning blue and red and green patches, up to her shoulders. 

As you tie your dress up, your suitcase partially open and on the ground, movement from outside in the dawning pink catches your eye. A brisk shadow, those thick shoulders proceeding a taught waist are unmistakable as they move towards the barn. You stand, transfixed for a moment as broad hands slide open the barn doors, you hear a faint creak, and he disappears inside. The capability of those hands; the surety, where every action is deliberate and intentional – it makes something arc up your throat. A warm piercing that bursts through bone and muscle alike. Trembling fingers tug at the wilting lace around the cuffs of your dress, imagination stretching out into the dark morning, inspired by curious and impossible ideas of those hands. 

Something – most likely Sarah next door – squeaks the floorboard and those tendrils of thought snap back as if someone had slammed a lid shut. You glance at the clock and make a mental note to wake up earlier tomorrow, to beat him to the kitchen. 

You are also desperately eager to get out of the room where you can practically smell Joel on the walls. It’s simple, just like the rest of the house, but amongst the hand-drawn sketches of himself and birds (likely gifts from Sarah), the half-spent candles and well-read books, you find him in everything. You wonder, briefly, if the indentations made on the cotton mattress are from him or you – the scent of his hair in the pillow from sweat or soap. 

The encroaching feeling that you don’t belong here in this house nearly swallows you whole as you dress in a room you definitely don’t belong in. 

Joel remains a distant figure, a familiar shadow across the lightning horizon, long after you finish the eggs and toast. You consider perusing the pantry for blueberries or something similar, when Sarah comes down. Fresh-faced, dressed with the care most people reserve for church, she stumbles in, her braces clacking as she finds a seat at the table. 

You notice a brief flash of pain across her face when you bring over a plate of food. She unconsciously rubs a circle with her thumb on her left knee as she picks up her fork.

“Pain today?” You ask, eyes on her knee, even though it’s obvious. 

She nods, strained. “Just a little bit. But it’s nothing. I’m sure it’ll go away when it warms up outside.” 

You doubt that is remotely true, but you let her hold the comforting lie. She doesn’t seem like the type to swallow pity with ease, and neither was Anna. You put on that detached but focused "nurse's" mask, your lips a straight line and brow furrowed, your voice slipping on something more commanding too.

“Let me see.” 

Sarah blinks at you briefly, evidently surprised by your shift in demeanor but eventually, she obeys. She drops her fork and slides the chair back, the chair legs squeaking against the rough wooden floor.

You crouch in front of her, gathering up her ankle first and testing its mobility.

“When were you diagnosed?” you ask, as soft as you are firm.

“Never, technically.” She watches you and occasionally winces. You wonder how long she’s grown stiff like this. “The doc had left over braces that Dad bought before the guy skipped town.”

“So then how did you know it was polio?” 

By her sudden stillness, you know this is the first time that word has been uttered under this roof in a long time. You lower her ankle, rising gaze meeting hers. Her mouth is pulled tight. You can practically read the familiar headlines as they scroll across her mind.

New Polio Cases by the Thousands

Polio Claims Life of Infant

Polio Outbreak: Thirteen Dead

“Not every case is serious,” you say, gently, using the word serious in place of fatal. You don’t want to scare her unnecessarily. But by her wide eyes, you know the word sits in her chest all the same. 

“I know. And I know it can be made worse by moving too much. That’s why Dad’s always on me about resting and going slow.” 

You return to your examination. Her skin is rubbed raw in some places by the braces. You remind yourself to ask Joel for some old sheets to make better padding. 

“That’s not always true,” you say, shifting to her other leg. “Even though she was sore after, Anna often said she felt the stiffness go away after walking around the neighborhood block.”

Curious, Sarah tilts her head, those lovely curls swaying like leaves in a breeze. “Who’s Anna?”

Your skin around your eyes tightens – how could you be so careless with such a secret – when you hear feet thundering down the stairs and a second later, Ellie swings around the lip of the doorway.

“Is that toast?” She asks, eyes wide and hopeful. “If you got bacon, I’m gonna start kissing faces.”

You and Sarah exchange a small grin before you stand up right and Sarah returns to her own meal.

“No bacon today, but who knows what else is stored in the pantry?” 

“Oh, fuck yeah,” Ellie exclaims as she slides into a chair, her own plate pilled far too for a girl her size. “Treasure hunt.” 

You see the tips of Sarah’s ears go briefly pink at Ellie’s language but the muffled smile on her face hints at awe, impressed – so you let that one slide. A stream of light through the half-shut curtain tugs your thoughts outside, to the man literally toiling in the fields. 

“Does your dad want me to bring him some food?” You ask, standing from the chair and glancing out the window. You can’t see him any more and for some reason that makes your chest go tight.

Sarah shook her bouncy curls. “No. He’ll come in and get it when he’s hungry.” 

You didn’t like the idea that you weren’t going to be directly feeding the man who employed you literally to cook for him and his daughter.

“Does he like coffee?”

Sarah arches an eyebrow at you. “Yeah, he loves it. But I’ve tried for years to make it the way he likes and he always drinks it, but I think a little piece of him dies inside every time he does.” 

“Then you must be a great cook too,” Ellie smirks up at her. In response, Sarah smiles impishly around a mouthful of eggs. 

You hold that little bit of information about Joel - something you knew that he didn’t know you knew - close, like a dollar bill in your pocket. You drum your fingers, searching for memories of how Anna used to shoe-string coffee when you couldn’t afford a maker in Boston.

“Did you eat?”

Ellie’s voice tears your gaze from the window. Her plate is only halfway empty. Her fingers uneasily move the fork around.

“Yeah,” you answer truthfully. In fact, you are rather ashamed by how much you took, sitting at the table in the purple dark, before you remembered that you had to feed three other people. “I’m good, Ellie. Thanks.”

She nods, returning to her plate and shoveling two bites into her mouth without slowing down.

“What’s first today?” Sarah asks, her eyes bright. “I can show you my sums. We have a chalkboard in the barn.”

You smile at her eagerness to show off while Ellie dejectedly pokes at her remaining floppy eggs. She had never been one for school, another thing you found hard to relate to about her. Fortunately for her, Anna nor you ever had the time to be as diligent about her education as Joel had been for Sarah. And unfortunately for her, you intend to fix that as quickly as possible. 

“I’d love to see them, Sarah, but would you mind showing me around the cellar first? Maybe there is bacon hiding down there somewhere.”

You don’t miss the small smile that creeps across Ellie’s face.

“Junk or keep?” 

Sarah looks up from the tip of her stick dragging nonsense through the barn’s dirt floor, her chin flat in her palm, elbow on her knee. She frowns at Ellie holding up . . . something that might have been a tractor part at one time. 

“I don’t even know what that is, so – junk?” 

Ellie shrugs, tosses the piece back and forth in her hands, and then chucks it like a ball to the opposite end of the barn. It collides loudly with the wall and Flora, the white and black cow, lifts her head at the noise from her stable and lets out a low groan. 

The entire barn smells of hay and animal but in a way that is warm, almost comforting. The two cows lazily munch from their troughs in their stalls, occasionally eyeing you as you carry items back and forth. It’s fortifying in a way only working outside and with your hands can offer. 

You turn to her disapprovingly but she’s already back, elbow-deep, in the pile you had designated hers to sort. Sarah, to whom you suggested rest this morning, goes back to boredly drawing circles in the dirt. Even though she clearly hates the idea of being idle, you are surprised she takes your medical advice without any fight. 

If you had successfully completed your duties as cook, now it was time to take on your other task as teacher. Sarah had a few textbooks, but mostly outdated and only one copy. You know trying to find a full library in times like these is laughably impossible, but there is nothing wrong with hoping for a blackboard. You’d made one before when the school district you tempted at didn’t approve new funding, and you feel confident you could do it again. Trouble is, you have nowhere to put it, much less set up a laughably impossible classroom for two students. 

Until Sarah casually mentioned the unfortunate pile of junk in the back of her father’s barn, “taking up at least half the space in there.” 

She wasn’t wrong.

“Yuck – is your dad a hoarder?” Ellie asks with slight disgust as she pulls up a stack of newspapers held together by twine. “Why does he even have this stuff?”

Sarah grins, delighted by Ellie’s prickly teasing. “This place actually used to be pretty organized. This was his space for a long time – where he went to think, or figured out what crops we needed for the next year.”

Her smile crumbles. “But, uh, then I got sick and now he doesn’t come out here unless it's for work.”

Ellie pinches the soft of her cheek with her teeth, nodding, her eyes downcast.

“So . . . junk?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” 

The stack of newspapers comes up to her knees and Ellie struggles, off-balanced, to carry it across the hay-covered floor. 

You reach for it and she gives it to you gratefully. You take it with a smile; you never know what she’s going to appreciate or just see it regretfully as charity or pity. 

“I think your dad is losing it,” Ellie says as she wipes sweat from her brow, shaking her head far too seriously. “Losin’ it, big time.” 

Sarah giggles.

You drop the stack of papers in the corner, but when you let go, the string snaps and the papers spill everywhere. With a sigh, you kneel down and gather them back together, but not before a few headlines catch your eye. 

Your heart twists.

Paralysis Takes Three Children

Join the Mothers’ March on Polio

QUARANTINE: POLIOMYELITIS

Why would Joel keep these? Everyone knew how devastating polio could be to children, even infants. Why would he –

Roughly dispersed throughout the article, sentences and phrases were underlined in blue pen. Sentences containing, “iron lung”, “bedrest”, “antibiotic” –

No cure.

Warmth spread out across your chest. Joel was looking for a way to treat his daughter, the only way he could in a town without a doctor: outside information. Something about this makes the space beneath your chest bone hurt so badly, you get a little nauseous. 

Now you consider conserving these papers as if they are important historical documents. Behind you, where Ellie and Sarah are lobbying jokes back and forth, you see more stacks of neatly contained newspapers. He looked everywhere and found nothing. 

You reshuffle the stack that fell, when you spot something else that hardens the warm feeling in your chest and makes it brittle.

Mob Over Breadline Kills FIVE

Experts Say There is No Way Out of This Depression

Mother of Drowned Children Claims She Did “What Was Best”

The rough floor hurts your knees. Eyes closed, you try to ignore the flood of images of what you witnessed in Boston, how desperate and cruel people became in Oklahoma. With each memory, your heartbeat pounds harder.

Red. Blood. Pink. Skin. White. Bone.

The riots got to be so terrible, but people were just hungry.

Ellie calling your name jerks you out of the sinking muck of memories. 

“What? What is it?”

She eyes you with distant concern then glances at Sarah. “She wanted to know where you learned all this stuff.”

“About cooking, and teaching, and nursing,” Sarah clarifies. “I think I’ve read every book in our house probably four times and I still feel like I don’t know anything.” 

“You probably know more than you think,” you offer as you scoop up the uncomfortable newspapers, easily switching tracks of thought to mute the swell of horrors from the rotting box in your mind. You leave them in the corner for Joel to do what he wishes with them and stand, dusting your dress off. “What do you call the process by which plants get energy from the sun?”

Sarah’s eyes brighten immediately. Where her body fails her, her mind is as sharp as a tack.

“Photosynthesis!”

“Good,” you nod, smiling. “And what’s the primary source of energy in animal cells?”

“The mitochondria!”

“Very good.” 

Ellie sighs angrily from her pile and puts her hands on her hips. “I think I’m gonna make like mitosis and split, if we keep talking about all this boring stuff.”

Scorned for her love of learning a second time and already in a bad mood from the pain this morning, Sarah frowns. 

“What’s your problem? Why do you act like school sucks? You had your mom teaching you –,”

“She’s not my mom!” Ellie snaps back, her knuckles white around a rusted bucket. “She’s just my aunt!”

“Yeah, well, I have an uncle I never even get to see!” Sarah stands up as smoothly as she can, but her knees and ankles are pink again. Her calves shake. “You’re lucky!”

Ellie’s teeth clench in the back of her jaw, lip curling. 

You remember distinctly more than once having to pick Ellie up from school early because she’d been caught fighting and you take a step in her direction, even if Sarah could no doubt land a few solid ones in. 

“And you’re–,”

“Ellie.” You know how rough Ellie can be. You remember the tone to take with unruly students, even if you don’t mean an ounce of it. “Don’t. Just let it g–,”

“Why do you always take her side?” That ire whips around to you. Loyalty, that was another trait her mother favored. Ellie’s shoulders roll forward, her fists clenched. “Why do you let her talk like she knows anything about us? About Mom?” 

“I’m not taking a side, Ellie,” you say firmly, your chin tilted down to her. One day she’s going to be taller than you, you know it. “Both of you, this is enough.”

That was the wrong thing to say. Ellie tosses the broken bucket in her hand to the ground and storms towards the barn doors. 

“You just like her because she’s a fucking dork like you,” she growls under her breath before shoving open the large square door. 

It swings shut, the metal clattering against the wood. The brief stream of light filtering in is shortly swallowed up into the shadows again. 

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says almost immediately, her brown eyes swiveling on you. Her skin is tinged a little lighter and there’s sweat along her hairline. With a fleeting flash of worry, you wonder if she’s in more pain than she lets on. “I didn’t mean it . . . I mean, I think she is lucky to have – but . . . I shouldn’t have said that.”

She drops your gaze and you think those dark eyes might be softer, wetter than usual. She plucks at the hem of her dress, her mouth twisted to the side. 

Where Ellie explodes outwards, Sarah implodes inwards. You never could understand Ellie’s inclination to destroy everything around her.

You hand her a broom, with a smile on your face. 

“Do you want to tell me about your uncle?” 

She takes it slowly from you, eyebrows furrowed down. This is a look you are familiar with, even when it comes to Ellie. She is stuck between answering like a kid, getting it all off her chest to be free of the emotional burden, and swallowing it all to please the adults in her life. 

You’ve also found Ellie tends to open up when she doesn’t have to look you in the eye. Sarah’s own gaze is stuck to the floor as she vaguely sweeps at the hay. 

“We don’t talk about Uncle Tommy a lot,” she mumbles. 

You focus on untangling an old bridle. “Oh? Why?”

“Dad’s still pissed at him for moving out to California. Said he left what’s really important for a bullshit dream.” Her eyes pop up, wide and shocked. “Sorry, that’s what he said.” 

Despite your limited time with him, you can easily see how Joel Miller might take something like that personally, but you just store that away too, another breadcrumb leading the way.

“Why California?”

“It’s–,”

The barn door opens again and Joel’s shadow breaks through the almost painful white light. Behind him, Everett (the horse) snorts and huffs, pulling along the giant creaking plow, the air suddenly pungent with the smell of warm dirt, leather, and animal sweat. Joel murmurs something to the frothing snout and wipes his own forehead with the back of his arm, smearing sweat and dirt across his browline. He stops when he sees you two staring. 

By Sarah’s wide eyes, it’s clear Uncle Tommy is a subject that is not often brought up in this house either. Joel frowns, but just as he opens his mouth, you interject – you know how to deflate a potentially angry man.

“We were just cleaning up the back of the barn,” you say, careful not to use words like junk or scrap heap. “I’m hoping to use the space as a school, for Sarah and Ellie.” 

His gaze settles on you, like the dust at his feet. 

“Mhmm.” His tone scrapes something low in your stomach. 

“I’m sorry – I should have asked – I didn’t think –,”

“No, it’s –,” he shakes his head. His eyes catch Everett’s foamy nose and he pats it, noting the long sweaty forelock. “Smart. Next spring, we’ll come up with something better, but there’s no time now, with the harvest comin’.” 

You nod, peeling off what you were going to say from the back of your teeth with your tongue. Joel casually drags his fingers through Everett’s forelock before stepping back to unhook the plow’s leather buckles. It’s when he shifts towards Sarah, looking to her, that he grimaces. 

He put his weight on his right knee and it immediately caused him pain.

“We could help,” you offer, eyes on his knee, his thick fingers rubbing into the muscle just above his knee cap. "Ellie loves being out in the sun and I can teach her how to plant–,”

“‘M fine,” he mutters gruffly, straightening up and wiping his hands on the cloth around his neck. “Sarah, go inside for a bit. There’s something she n’ I gotta discuss.”

His tone indicates this is not the time for eye rolling but she does it anyway.

“I’ve said for years that you need help, Dad. She’s just offering to–,”

“Sarah, inside. Please.” 

Sarah scowls and drops the broom against one of the stalls. She hobbles out of the barn, first scrunching her nose up at Joel’s obvious smell, then muttering something about having to go look for the hell spawn. You finger the scrap metal in your hands, a fluttery nervousness growing in your stomach the closer Sarah gets to the door. With one more disapproving shake of her thick curls, she shuts the door behind her. 

Everett nickers and paws the ground, eager to be returned to bed after a long morning of work. Light streams in gold from the slanted windows above the loft, separating the front stalls from the back of the barn where you stand, fidgeting. There’s no escaping the hot animal smell now, and it’s your turn to be intercepted by Joel. 

Another apology is nearly out of your mouth when he speaks first.

“Do you know how to shoot a gun?” He asks, his mouth set into a firm line. In the half-darkness of the barn, you can’t quite make out his eyes. 

You swallow against the encroaching dryness in your throat. “I-I have a gun. Keep it in my purse, o-only for emergencies and I–,” 

“That’s not what I asked.” He shakes his head, tone soft, almost gentle. He glances past you to the stacks of newspapers you had moved into the corner, the ones about violence and pestilence. He rubs his fingers between the bridle and Everett’s thick hair. “Found a hole in the barbed wire fence today.” 

You frown, the tension of his voice indicating a severity you are utterly unprepared for. “What does that mean?”

“Someone tried to cut through.” 

A white hot panic lurches up your spine out of nowhere. Fueled by fear, you see the outline of your husband shambling across the propertyline and you go cold. 

“W-why would someone do that? What are they after?”

His hand stills as every muscle in his body briefly tenses. Eyes dark beneath a tight brow, the tightness in his jaw is an answer and a threat all at once. He looks almost offended by your question.

You know exactly what they would take. 

All you can do is nod. 

Everett nudges Joel’s shoulder, impatient to get out of the harness, for that bath he so very much deserves. As though you had disappeared, Joel unbuckles the restraints, taking a brush to the gray coat as he goes. Maybe you’d misread that last signal and he thought he told you to fuck off.

You move towards the back door when his voice, timbre deep and low, stops you again.

“I’m gonna to teach you to shoot.” He announces to the lathered withers of the horse. “But you keep that gun on you, at all times, especially when you’re out with the girls. You got that?”

He pauses just as he slides the hitch off the horse's back, his arms covered in dirt as dark as the leather. It’s minute, the shift in his weight, but you suddenly realize he wants verbal confirmation.

“Y-yes. Yes. I’ll take it with me.”

The minutia shifts again, a lessening of tension across his broad shoulder, his thick back. He nods. 

“Good.”

The aching need for him to say more, for that good to turn into you did good or good job – or good girl – it sparks so fast and hot inside of you, you think you’ll choke. Instead, you leave through the door on unsteady legs, jaw locked tightly shut. 

You find comfort in the monotony of sewing. 

Anna always scolded you for it, that you were “giving into women’s work.”

How are they ever going to take us seriously when you actually like doing this dainty shit? 

But where Anna seemingly delighted in her mile-a-minute thoughts, you need an outlet – some way to settle, to ground yourself in the here and now. Furthermore, you could sew anywhere – on the train, on the bus, in a foreign house in the middle of nowhere where you were, again, dependent on the kindness of a complete stranger – 

It isn’t sewing specifically that you enjoy. If there was another activity where your mind could detach itself from your body, you would have liked it too. Here, in this space of blank concentration, you separate further from yourself with every stitch you pull together. Here, you are not a sister, a housewife, or an aunt. Not a nurse or a teacher or a failed fieldhand. 

Not scared of living or scared of your husband or scared that you’ll fail your sister over and over and over again – 

For a handful of minutes, you are not scared and you are the closest thing to yourself you can possibly be. You think, as a child that might have been the closest you’d actually been to understanding your own wants and dreams and desires, but now it is through this act of repetition, of delicate guiding, do you find yourself remembering what it was like to exist unafraid, as thoughtless as a child.

You sit on the edge of Joel’s bed, eased into something vaguely like relaxation by the needle and thread in your hand. You’d found some old pillows in the barn earlier today and surprisingly the stuffing was still intact. After watching Sarah struggle today, you knew you couldn’t spend another second watching the poor girl hobble around on painful braces. 

It’s twilight, the sun gone beneath a blanket of scarlet and indigo, everyone fed and full – the girls almost instantly forgetting their first fight in favor of a discussion about their most effective marble-flicking techniques – and you already have at least one leather-bound pad that is twice as thick as her old one. You grin, excited to share your creation to her. You wonder what Joel will say.

Through the wall over your shoulder, in Sarah’s room, you can hear the low murmur of their voices, as quick and fast as two co-conspirators. You can’t quite make out what they’re saying, but the words don’t matter. It is the high joy in Sarah’s voice, or the creaky laughter from Joel. They could be speaking in a completely incomprehensible language but the sentiment is unmistakable: you make me happy and I love you.

I love you.

The needle and thread stills in your lap. 

You glance out the window, to a much smaller shadow in front of the barn as it cuts and darts in the blurry half-light. The silver tip of Anna’s knife winks in the glint of the light from the windows as Ellie slashes and digs in the open air. Alone. 

In the late hours, in the hours when the veil between life and death felt so especially fragile, Anna made you promise that you'd look out for Ellie, to raise her as your own. To finally give her a childhood like the two of you never had. 

You had done that. You raised her. She’s alive and healthy and fierce. 

But would she find your sentiment about her unmistakable? Do you know hers as intimately as you knew your sister’s? 

Do you make her happy when both of you are constantly reminded of the ghost between you?

Sarah’s chatter echoes throughout the dark house, disembodied and entirely untethered.

It’s one week into this new, adjusted life in a house you haven’t yet found a home in when the unthinkable happens.

A loud, wet cry startles you awake and immediately your hand flies towards Ellie, panic like ice in your jaw. Your palm touches her shoulder, but she’s already sitting up, eyes towards the door. She glances at you and from your stumble out of a dreamless sleep, you realize it wasn’t Ellie who made that noise. 

It comes again, as sharp as a bone crack, and you both scramble out of bed.

Sarah. 

Up against the far wall, in the corner where her bed tucks up into the corner, Joel holds her like a lion clutches to prey. 

Giant, fat teardrops pour down the sides of her ashen cheeks, those bright eyes clamped shut, her mouth twisted in agony and she claws at her father’s forearm across her shoulders. His other hand is going white from her fingers crushing his in a bone-cracking grip. His voice is soft, firm, and fast in her ear, comforting and scared as hell, as she whimpers. 

Every muscle from her thighs down is stretched taut. Every muscle unwillingly tightened, flexed, the chemicals in her brain battling the commands of the bacteria. The pain, as described in medical journals, is crippling. 

Ellie glances at you out of the corner of your eye. Muscle spasms. 

“Sarah, darling, how long has this been going on?” She’s trembling from the pain and exhaustion. You wrap your robe around you before kneeling down to inspect her — and you feel Joel’s glare nearly singe the skin from your face.

“Don’t touch her,” he snarls and pulls her closer. Sarah whines and buries her face in his shoulder, trying to stifle her sobbing to keep from shaking and causing more spasms. “She’s–,” 

“I can help her, Joel.” Your training became a bulwark – strong, immobile – in moments like these. Maybe it was all an act but that first rush of hope that you could ease pain, soothe what hurts, made you feel like you were made of gold. You let that unbreakable shine pierce Joel’s gaze. “But you need to listen to me.” 

Sarah squeaks and you watch his resolve instantly break. Shakely, he nods. 

“Ellie,” you instruct over your shoulder. “Go start boiling water. There’s a pail out on the porch.”

She is out the door before you finish your sentence. She knows exactly what you need. 

Help on the way, you turn back to Sarah, her feet twisted in grotesque contortions. 

“How long has this been going on?” 

“About ten minutes,” Joel grumbles. She squeezes his hand so hard you hear his knuckle pop. She sobs, open mouth, and he presses his cheek to her. He murmurs softly, “I’m sorry, I know, I’m sorry.” 

“Is this the longest fit she’s had?”

Joel reluctantly nods. 

“Sarah,” you say and gently touch her knee. She peels her eyes open, cheeks stained with tears, eyes wet with fear. “We need to loosen your muscles, okay? That’s what’s causing you pain right now. So, we’re going to use heat and pressure to do that.” 

She nods, gaze solidifying with your every word, every word a new step out of the path of pain. Joel smooths her curls off her sweaty forehead, his own wide-eyed stare never leaving your face. You roll up your sleeves and curl up your hair off the back of your neck just as Ellie stumbles back into the room. She’s got at least five towels around her neck, and she’s red-faced and straining from keeping the pail of boiling water from spilling or burning her. She eases it down next to you and hands you a towel. Both of you each take a side and immediately tear the one in half.

Before you wore gloves, some sort of protection, but now there is no time. You hear Ellie inhale sharply, recognizing what you’re about to do a second before you do it.

You dip the towel into the steaming water, let it soak, and pull it out. You grit your teeth against the immediate burn on your palms, the trail of fire over your knuckles and wrists, as you squeeze out the dripping water, Sarah’s soft cries in your ears enough to push past your own pain.

Half-way between an inhale and an exhale, you think you hear your name. 

Ellie already has another dry towel loose around one of Sarah’s legs. She glances at you, her brows knitted together. 

Ready? She asks without words.

You drape the hot towel around her leg and Sarah yelps. She thrashes in her father’s arms as you wrap the towel tighter and tighter. Expecting Joel’s inevitable bark, a hard shove against your shoulder, get away from my daughter – but it never comes. 

As soon as you tighten the towel as firmly as it can safely go, Ellie slides in next to you and begins to massage the muscles in her calves, her feet, her toes. 

Sarah whimpers again, but the sound isn’t as sharp, pain-choked. Joel holds her tighter, as if her torso is also knotted and could be relieved with warmth.

On an inhale, you pick up the other half of the towel, drench it in boiling water, and wring it out with your bare hands. A silent prayer for lotion is fleeting as it drifts through the dense focus of your mind. You squeeze out the dripping water and wrap Sarah’s other leg, prepped again by Ellie. She watches you as you tug and tuck the steaming towel, her own focus as sharp as a tack, mirroring your motions as you knead and massage the muscles. 

After a few minutes of faint whining, a couple of sobs, the room slips into an exhausted silence. Her breathing slow on his chest, Joel draws back her damp curls and finds her face relaxed, asleep. His mouth parts and the skin around his eyes goes slack.

Relief. 

With a shudder, Joel knocks his forehead against hers, his thumb on her chin as if to feel her breathing. You look away, the moment so tender it shouldn’t be witnessed. 

You realize then how badly your palms ache. 

The towels have lost their immediate heat, so you unwind them. Ellie’s small hands overlap yours as she helps. For some reason, you can’t bring yourself to look her in the eyes. The both of you fall back into roles most comfortable to you. 

The wet towels gone, you wrap her legs more tightly this time, slightly past the edge of comfort. You ease her back, flat into the bed, and some small part of you is aware Joel is letting you guide her. He slips out from behind her when you tuck her in, tight with another blanket around her legs. She could be exhausted for days after this.

“We’ll need to keep heat on her legs every thirty minutes, fifteen if we can manage,” you say as you fold up the damp towels. Joel hasn’t moved. Stares down at Sarah’s small body. “I’d like to keep a warming pan here, to have hot water on hand if she wakes up in pain again. When she comes out of it, she needs water and food. Have her eat it slowly, small bites at first.”

You remember a doctor at the hospital where you trained as a nurse give advice to a newer doctor: medical mysteries and illnesses are one thing. Nervous parents are something else. 

You call his name and he doesn’t move. 

You step forward, touch his forearm, and he blinks at you. He feels so remarkably solid.

“Joel. She’s safe.” 

“Do you want me to go get more towels?” Ellie’s gathered the damp towels off the floor, her chest wet. She stares at Sarah’s bed frame. 

“Get breakfast first. Then I might need your help later.” She nods, turns to go, but hesitates. Her mouth is pinched tight, eyes wide, looking for something to ground her, to calm the vortex that the adrenaline in her veins widens with each beat of her heart. She looks so . . . childlike. 

She looks so much like Anna.

The momentary fortified strength shatters and you're afraid again. What do you say to comfort her? What would Anna say? Good job, I'm proud of you, thank you -

But then she turns away, carrying the dripping towels, and you lose your chance to parent.

Joel has curled himself into the rocking chair by her bed, so close his knee touches her mattress. He holds her thin hand in the cup of his two massive palms. His heel taps loosely, quietly against her rug, every possible outcome of this morning striking him in the chest with each drop of his foot. His face is a blurred, dark shadow, hanging between his shoulders.

To describe Joel in this moment, nervous seems quaint. 

In silence, you gather up the tepid pale of water and exit the room, closing the door after you.

The rest of the day passes in haze, tendrils of sleep still between the cracks in your brain left there by the harsh break into consciousness. 

You have Ellie feed the animals, and you start a load of laundry. The ratio of dry towels to wet is rapidly becoming unbalanced and you know after the initial attack is over, pressure is more important than heat. Sarah has barely moved all day but she is responsive and drinks water when she comes out of her deep sleep. You’ve made soup again – a heavy meal that doesn’t require much managing and can be easily re-served – and it gives you time to think. Sarah mentioned the doctor skipping town, that he had all but dropped everything and ran. You wondered what else might be in the doctor’s old shop. Morphine seemed too valuable to have been ignored in any ransacking, but often doctors kept a secret supply, unbeknownst to even most nurses for special cases or when supply was low. You think about that and stir the pot as the sun crawls across the sky. 

With your head bent over the pot, something moves in the field outside and you watch with surprise as Ellie leads one of the cows, Fauna, out of the barn. Through the rippled glass, you watch her talking to the cow, her face scrunched up in concentration, and shockingly, Fauna appears interested, her big ears flicking back and forth. But Ellie leads her only a little bit from the barn, in the grass but visible from the house. She drops to her knees and takes out a wooden stake and a hammer — nevermind where she found those – and then ties Fauna’s lead rope to top of the stake sticking out of the ground.

Ellie wags her finger, her back to the window, her stance very serious. You smile to yourself and to Anna as she marches back inside and shortly returns with Flora, the other cow, to do the same. She gives them both a stern talking to, as evident by her hands on her hips, before turning back to the house. You glance down, knowing she wouldn’t appreciate it if you saw her babysitting the cows. It was what Joel did every morning – let the cows out to graze – but she did it in her own Ellie way: on a smaller scale and perhaps with a little more gentleness. 

See, Anna, she’s all grown up.

By nightfall, both of you are exhausted. You don’t know how Joel manages to run this place by himself, especially with a sick child, but after one day, you’re ready to curl up into bed and never leave. Ellie looks like she’s about to face-plant into her soup, her eyes half-shut. You smile, stretching, before gently shaking her shoulder.

“Go to bed, Ellie. You’re exhausted.”

She blinks harshly, indignant and scowly, as you take both your bowls to the sink. “‘M fine. Just a lil’ –,” she yawns deeply, “sleepy.” 

“You’re right. My mistake.”

“Besides, we got coffee coming, don’t we?” 

On the counter, your make-shift coffee press gurgles, the cap steaming from the bubbling water over the grounds you found in the cellar. You eye her over your shoulder.

“You don’t even like coffee.” 

“Yeah but you’re staying up, right? You and Joel?”

Neither of you had seen Joel leave Sarah’s room all day. Ellie eyes the ceiling as if she can see right through it. 

“I’m taking him some food and a cup of coffee,” you say as you finish drying the plates. There’s a rigidness to your hands as you delicately lay the plates flat, unconsciously careful to keep them from making a sound as they touch. “But at St. Joseph’s, some of the nurses would offer to keep vigil, to give the parents a chance to rest.” 

You know in your heart he won’t take it. You just hope he finds your coffee inoffensive.

But Ellie doesn’t respond. She sits still, staring at the ceiling. 

“Ellie, she’s going to be okay.”

Those bright eyes fall on you. “You can’t know that.”

In your hands, you wind the damp towel between your fingers. They’re pink and still ache but the rough linen is a welcome distraction from the churning acid in your stomach.

“This isn’t going to be like last time,” you say, your hips against the counter. “Sarah’s infection is nowhere near her lungs. And she’s been responding to treatment.”

Ellie drops her gaze, her bottom lip curled between her teeth. 

“Don’t say that unless you mean it. Unless you can swear to me.” 

One of life’s simple truths: parents lie. 

You recognize there is a part of her that wants you to look her in the eyes and lie. She’d be angry, eventually, if your lies were exposed, but in that moment, as she sits in an unfamiliar house, at an unfamiliar table, with you and this wretched ailment the only things she knows to be constant – she wants a comfort you can’t give her. You are not capable of parental truth.

“I can’t promise anything.”

She inhales, breathes shaky, and exhales, the spoon in her hand trembling. “I know.” 

Hands full of a white, chipped food tray, you knock twice carefully with one hand like you had been trained to before opening the door. The lamplight has been turned on, but the room, blanketed in darkness and shadows, looks the same. Sarah sleeps deeply, if not well, her hand curled by her face against the pillow, her heavy storm of curls cradling her head gently. Joel watches her, as still and silent as the moon. His foot has settled, but now he breathes so slow he might not be breathing at all. 

Of all the terrible things you had seen during your time as a nurse, witnessing someone like this is always the hardest. Feeling helpless is a sentiment you are all too familiar with and the thought of someone just sitting there and watching you with your grief makes your skin itch. 

“Joel.” A formality, because those trapped in a cyclone of worry require a slow approach, easing a startled animal. “I brought you something to eat.”

Speaking, it lets him acclimate to your voice. 

You set the white tray on Sarah’s dresser, a piece of furniture meticulously crafted. Like Joel’s room, there are books everywhere, but more animal drawings, some directly on the walls. Sarah’s brilliant personality expanded here, in the blues and pinks, not capable of being contained in a single body. 

A body that seems so small and fragile in that little brass bed, while her father looms impossibly large.

“Joel.” Again, soft, but this time you put a hand on his bicep. Never near the neck, an older nurse warned you, that area is sensitive. His denim shirt is soft beneath your fingers, nearly bleached white from the sun and worn smooth from dust and dirt and wind. You think you smell churned earth and hot leather in the instant it takes you to kneel down beside him, your grip sliding from his shoulder to his forearm. With the other hand, you tip a steaming cup into his open palm. 

“Sarah told me you liked coffee.”

Slowly, as though he had blinked and reality disintegrated and reformed around him, Joel’s gaze slides from Sarah’s waxy face, to yours, and then the hand on his forearm. The back of your scalp prickles, the bulwark of courtesy shaking, before you remember you’d done this hundreds of times, to people of all ages, men and women. He seems to understand this – a professional gesture – and he takes the mug from you. With an almost perplexed expression, he stares into the nearly black liquid, his jaw tight. 

And then he drinks, without saying a word. 

You think you might have heard a low rumble from him, a pleased groan as heavy as the plow in the barn outside, but the floorboards creak when you stand up, so you might have been imagining things.

“This tastes good,” he says bluntly, voice weather-beaten. You smile into the bowl of soup as you wave a hand over the steam to cool it down to something bearable. “How?”

Despite his monosyllabic responses, you take this as a good sign. Something tells you that you’ve made exceptional progress by getting him to talk at all. 

“I got pretty good at making cowboy coffee, as my sister used to call it, before we moved to Oklahoma. You already had the beans in the cellar,” you say, shrugging as you bring the soup over to him. He eyes it warily, as if this is not the appropriate time to eat, as if his own suffering would make Sarah’s lessen. 

You’d only ever seen that instinct in a handful of parents while in the hospital and it made something wide and warm press up against your chest bone. 

So you don’t give him a choice. You push the soup into his hands with enough speed that he has to take the bowl or drop it entirely. He, like most people with common sense, takes the bowl. He has a second to frown at you before you turn away to Sarah. 

“And I suspect they were hidden down there on purpose?” You ask as you take out another blanket from the basket beside her bed and flutter it over her legs. You remember stories about the women working with Elizabeth Kenny filling quilts with rocks or beans, anything with weight, and putting them over the affected limbs of polio patients. The compress soothed the ache. 

Sarah snores gently in her sleep as her father behind you laughs, a soft rush of air from his nose, his mouth preoccupied with a half-grin. 

“I try not to hurt her feelings,” he admits quietly. You hear the clatter of metal on porcelain as you fold and refold the blankets to carry more weight. “That girl is a lot of things, but good at making coffee isn’t one of ‘em.” He slurs around the soup in his mouth. 

It’s hard to believe she’s only a year older than Ellie. They have both lost things, indescribable things at too-young an age. But where Ellie carries it in the grip of her hand around her knife, Sarah takes it on the chin. 

Polio, a disease of freezing agony. 

You wonder how much of Sarah’s inner world she keeps to herself. 

Like with Ellie, you fight the urge to brush a lovely curl away from her cheek. 

“You have a special girl here, Joel.” 

You feel his gaze on the back of your neck and you drop your gaze from her pristine face, remembering it’s not your place to look at her like that. Not like how you want to look at her.

Not like how you might want to look at him. 

Joel shifts on his feet, leaning forward to put the now empty bowl on the ground.

“I know.” By the strength of his tone, he admits to knowing that you see the bright light about Sarah like he does and so he lets you look. Your heart stutters at this silent transference and you grab blindly for that mask of noble duty. 

“How has her breathing been?” You sit down next to her and pick up her wrist, feeling for that steady pulse. You relax slightly when it’s easy to find. The beat of it is a little faster than you would like, but it hasn’t woken her up. 

“Good.” A disgruntled groan from the chair as he adjusts behind you. His voice is rich like molasses, dripping warmth down the knots in your spine. “Woke up here n’ there, like you said. Gave her food. Got her water. But she just went right back to sleep.”

“But she ate and drank?” 

He nods out of the corner of your eye. You check the mobility of her joints and they seem to be back to their natural looseness. Whether she’ll feel strong enough to walk is another matter entirely, but it’s not good to worry him unnecessarily. 

“That’s good, Joel. That’s really good.” 

You smile at him and finally, finally, the corners of his eyes soften, his brows pluck up, and he breathes deep. The tension leaves his body the way steam leaves a lake in the hours before dawn, the cup of coffee resting on his thigh. His gaze falls from your face to hers, shrouded in shadow.

“She’s never slept this long after an attack,” he says quietly. “Always restless, pain flaring up. We once stayed up a whole day and night when it got bad.” 

He shakes his head, clears his throat a bit as if the words in his mouth leave behind a mucky, sour taste.

“Thank you. For treating her properly.”

For doing what I couldn’t. 

It’s true. But no amount of reassuring – I’ve just had training, you did the best you could – would dissipate that repugnant scent of guilt lingering in the air. You are forced to let it linger, unable to say a single damn thing that would mean anything to him. 

As he finishes the last dregs of coffee, Joel unwinds his long legs from beneath the seat and his knees crack. Stiff joints after a long day of stillness, but immediately his fingers fly to that same spot he touched in the barn in that afternoon, his mouth tight from the unexpected flash of pain. 

Immediately you kneel down, worried at the slight hiss he made, fingers inches from his thigh when he straightens.

“You don’t have to–,” he shifts as if he can pull away from your touch and stay seated. “It’s not that bad –,” 

You frown at him. “Can the person here who has had actual medical training determine that?” 

Something light flickers over his eyes, so fast it might not have been real, smoothing the lines around his mouth. Joel nods, glancing to the floor. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

That single word almost splits your skull in half like lightning. 

You are immediately grateful for the heavy shadows in the room. Your palms, smarting all day, are now blistering with heat. Mouth shut tight, you don’t trust whatever sits behind your lips, so you begin your inspection of his muscles. Thumbs down, you feel along the lines that lead down to his knee.

Hard, firm, you notice. Made solid by work and toil. A few of the bricklayers and farmers you’d attended to had muscles like these. Despite the rough denim and how unsettling it is to be this close to him, it’s easy to lose yourself in the methodology of the human body. You’ve learned to read sinew and bone and scar tissue like a map and you come to find that the topography of Joel Miller is mountainous. 

“So, mhm, where’d you learn to make coffee?”

You thought the stiffness in his thigh was due to lingering pain, but when you look at him and his guarded expression, chin tilted into his chest, fingers tight around the bottom of the seat, you realize he is uncomfortable. He is made uncomfortable . . . by you. Something sharp pokes through a slot between your ribs and you sit up straighter, trying to make your touch even more clinical if possible. But what he says next, you aren’t sure if it’s genuine or genuinely meant to hurt.

“Your husband?” 

You shake your head. “My sister, actually. Ellie’s mom. We’d trade night shifts when she was a baby. One of us would come home from our second job, and the other would leave for their first. Anna said she’d never have survived those first years without coffee.”

You can hear the question he wants to ask buzzing in his head, your thumb rubbing therapeutic circles around the inflamed area. But instead he asks:

“And you . . . you like coffee?” 

You shrug. “I don’t think I ever slowed down enough to ever taste it in the first place.” 

With Joel Miller, silence means a thousand things. It’s not the way he looks at you, but the way he looks into you.

“Anna always said we’d be fine, that two unmarried women with a baby could make it in the city. But I wasn’t so convinced. There wasn’t much time for something like enjoying the taste of coffee because I was always busy taking every job I could get.” 

“Like treating sick kids.” He says it like he just found a piece of you off the ground and added it to a sprawling puzzle. He politely stares over your shoulder.

You swallow, throat tight. “Actually, um, Anna had it - polio - too. I took the job as a nurse to learn how to treat her from home.” 

Those heavy eyes swing into you full force and you can feel your stomach roll and collapse against your spine. 

“Every case is different, Joel. What I did for Sarah, it wouldn’t have helped someone like Anna.” 

“But she died?” A third unwelcome presence. 

“Yes. She went fast. There was nothing anyone could do to save her.”

There was nothing you could do to save her. 

Your thumbs are starting to ache, but you don’t want to leave just yet. You want to sit and listen to his voice, even if it’s pitched in anger towards you. 

But it’s not. His next words come out soft, if not a little bit disbelieving. 

“Where did you come from?” Joel asks. “You said the city, Oklahoma. How’d you end up in fuckin’ Dalhart, Texas?” 

You use your elbow on the thicker muscle up his thigh and he tries very hard not to wince. 

“We grew up in Boston. City girls all our lives. We had big plans of catching the bus line and going all over the country, just the two of us, but then Anna got pregnant and overnight, everything changed.”

He nods, knowingly. You add that to your own Joel Miller mosaic.

“I met the man I’d marry while I worked as a maid in a motel. He was a banker, or so he told me, and he wanted to whisk me away. We were three months behind on our rent, so I told him yes, I'd marry him after knowing him for a week — as long as I got to bring Anna and Ellie with me. All he talked about was money, so I thought he had it. What he did have was enough to get us to Oklahoma, buy some farm equipment for the wheat boom, and then lose it all in a handful of years.”

“And then we lost Anna. We lost my husband. I went back to trying to find a job in town with no jobs.” You pull your hands back, the deep tissue of his thigh flushed with blood from your therapy, and having nothing more to do, little more to say, you drop them into your lap. “Just after we missed the payment for the equipment for the second month, I got a letter from a man claiming to be my long lost Uncle Robert. I hadn’t eaten in three days and Ellie just got tagged by the police for shoplifting. I sent him a letter back and he said if I sent him our last twenty dollars he’d get us set up in Dalhart where he had a successful car dealership. I did and he didn’t and if you hadn’t picked us up, I don’t know what we would have done.” 

You sit with the hot truth of it and he sits with the both of you. It’s silent in a way that only a house in the middle of nowhere can be. Sarah stirs in her sleep, her legs rustling the sheets, but doesn’t wake up.

“You don’t have to do that here, you know.” He straightens his legs, just as quietly as the rest of the house. He crosses his arms over his chest and you think about the muscle just under his forearm, thick and immobile as sea-drenched rope. “Not eat . . . for Ellie’s sake. There’s enough for you and her. Always.”

You think of the cellar with its soft dirt, cool air, the endless rows of stored fruits and vegetables and meat, buried like a still-beating heart beneath the dust-whipped house in a paradise on the prairie. 

“But I understand the inclination.” With you on the ground before him and Joel leaning forward, elbows on his knees, his broad back arching under the stripe of white moonlight, he looks at you. 

Really looks at you. 

Like recognizing like.

A passing in a distorted mirror that might be me but it’s not but I think I know you all the same there is a thing just like me out in the world and it sees me.

Slowly, hesitantly, as if he’s afraid you’ll bite, he reaches forward and takes your wrist from your lap. The calluses on his thumb brush roughly against the knot of bone as he twists your palm upward. Pink, too pink, a stinging color, even in the low lamplight. Joel works his jaw back and forth, staring at your palm with weary concern, as if it told him things he didn’t want to know. 

His gaze lifts and your fingers curl instinctively in. He’s trying to make you look and you don’t want to. He sees your sacrifice and you don’t want it called that, there’s certain nobility in sacrifice, in a sort of suffering for other people, but it’s not sacrifice if you go willingly and despite you not wanting to look, not wanting to put a name to it, not wanting to take up any space at all, he looks at you like he, a man as broad and wide and powerful as he, is grateful. 

For you. 

Every bulwark inside of you, every foundation that you had built yourself because you never had the chance to grow hearty roots somewhere permanent, rumbles. Shakes, beneath a single solitary, rolling earthquake. A landslide of earth behind the strength in his eyes. 

“For her, for Sarah, I’d do the same,” he says. 

For her. For the children in your lives. 

Do you even like coffee? All you know is how to make it. What would you do with it if you did? If you liked coffee? If you loved it.

If there was someone outside yourself and Ellie to make you coffee simply because you wanted it. Because you were in a circle of people for whom people would do things for. For her. For you. 

The heart of Joel is like coffee: dark but warm. 

Your wrist slips between his fingers, finding refuge again in your lap. 

“I know.” 

You wonder what it would be like to be within Joel’s circle of people for whom he does things. To be given coffee, just because you want it. 

You bet it’s warm.

You stand up, collect the empty, used things, and wish him a good night. 

A noise and sunlight startles you awake. Your eyes tear open, hand flat on an open pool of sunlight in the center of the mattress, head twisted and knees bent up by your chest. In your sleep, your body twisted itself into a Gordian knot, unable to escape the dreams about the cellar ground turning into coffee beans, and the cramped bloodflow leaves you disoriented until you can roll onto your back and remember where you are. The smells that surround you. 

You hear the noise again and you think of Ellie and in that instance where complete consciousness returns to you, the weight of her is gone. Literally.

Ellie is not in the bed beside you. 

The room’s brightness is suddenly too bright, the clear, electric blue sky too blue – it’s too beautiful and it lulled you into a sense of comfort. Stupid, so stupid. You ignore the warm floorboards against your bare feet, the faint birdsong from outside, as you rush towards the source of the sound, towards Sarah’s bedroom – oh god, I was wrong it’s too late it took her in the night and I –

The sound you do not recognize, the sound you could not comprehend while buried in dreams and memories, is the sound of laughter. Loud, full laughter.

The brass bed creaks as Ellie uses the mattress to fling herself into the air. On the other end, just as determined to reach the ceiling, is Sarah. Hands outstretched and reaching, her legs bend and flex and propel her up and up. Every time she gets within a handful’s reach of the ceiling, Ellie’s laughing, cheering her on, and then it’s her turn, Sarah giggling as Ellie’s face scrunches up as she reaches out towards the blue sky on the other side of the roof.

“Oh, hey!” Ellie says, pink-faced and causal, half-way out of breath. Sarah spins, mid-way through a jump, her eyes bright, sweat peaking on her brow line. “Sarah bet – I couldn’t touch – the ceiling — so we’re taking turns – loser has to shovel – the barn!” 

You watch, dumb-struck, as the bet continues, the girls laughing and criticizing each other and offering techniques as they work in tandem to fling the other one higher. Sarah is flush with vitality, with life, with a dewy glow reserved for spring mornings when the earth stretches awake after the death of winter.

And Ellie . . . she looks her age. 

The earth has shifted beneath your feet, while you were sleeping, and a seedling has been planted, the dawn of something new, something fresh and utterly unexpected. You can feel it in your bones. Hear it in their laughter. 

“Not a bad thing to wake up to.” 

Joel, arms crossed, eyes soft, leans up against the door frame, blue striped pajamas low on his hips, a thread-bare white undershirt cupping his biceps. He eyes you from toe to head and stops when he meets your eyes. You wonder how long he’d been standing there – if he too woke to noises he couldn’t explain, rushed in here, and found something miraculous.

The smile crinkles his eyes as it unfurls across his face. 

“I haven’t heard her laugh like that in a while,” he says quietly, head tilted towards the bed, as if there could be any other meaning. “I owe you one.” 

You could say the same thing about Ellie.

There’s the line, the boundary of the circle to the place of being warm. He’s not cleared the way for you, not invited you across, but he’s shown it to you. You can see it, feel it, and know what it takes to get there.

Your smile blooms. The girls’ laughter rings throughout the house and into the sunlight.

But, outside of paradise, away from the river and the white a-frame house, from the horse and the cattle and the long strands of prairie grass, where there is not enough to eat and the earth is in its death rattle, the wind blows. It swallows up dust, and dirt, and fine sand, gluttonous. It swirls and pulses, agitated and restless and seeking violence. Spinning with the power to blind with a single whip of dust, it spins up over the earth in its death rattle, where there is not enough to eat, towards the prairie grass. Towards the horse and the cattle. Towards the river and the a-frame.

Towards paradise with the promise of total ruin. 

END OF PART I 

series masterlist | AO3 Link | prologue | part ii

[three--rings]

Most people don't have any understanding of what has been lost in Lahaina Town. Not just lives and property, but an entire town.

Most people hear "a city/town in Hawaii" and they picture probably resorts. And there are plenty of resorts nearby. But those are all fine.

Lahaina was an old whaling town dating back to the original colonization by white settlers. Before white people arrived, it was the capital of the island, where the high chief ruled, including Kamehameha the Great. The buildings are old, wooden, and crowded together. Obviously that was a problem in the face of the insanely fast wildfire.

But these weren't mansions, Mc or otherwise. It was a tourist town, a destination for cute, spendy shopping and dining, full of art galleries. (OMG THE GALLERIES. There was so much ART lost. There was original Dr. Seuss art in one gallery when I was there in January. That's gone now. Etc.)

But the people who lived and worked in Lahaina were mostly working class, working retail and restaurant jobs, living in old apartments and small houses. Lots of elderly, lots of non-white in a wide range of ethnicities, old hippies who have been there since the 60s and 70s. Yeah they were probably a little better off than people who drive in from other places to work in West Maui, at least because their property was high value, if they owned. But they lived without A/C, hung their laundry on lines, biked to work, called in sick to go surfing when the waves were up. There was a Chinese cultural center and a Buddhist temple, two different structures, if that tells you anything. Multiple museums housing historic items and cultural centers.

And the town will be rebuilt, in some form, I imagine. Or re-developed, more likely. People who are now homeless, who can't afford to rebuild or pay for two residences while the recovery happens will be bought out by deep pocketed developers. If they rebuild Lahaina Town I'm afraid it will be Lahaina Town tm by Disney.

Another fake paradise for tourists with lava rock from the Big Island. Another bit of Hawaii swallowed by capitalism and climate change.

I'm not painting everything about Lahaina as it was as perfect. Front Street was an often gaudy display of brand names and hucksters out to shovel in the tourist dollars. And of course the politics of Hawaii are incredibly complex and fraught in so many ways. I'm just a mainlander haole. I will never live on the islands, despite my family there constantly asking me to move. But I've spent more time there than anywhere I haven't lived, almost all of that time in West Maui.

My mom works in a building that is not there anymore. She just described that job to me as "the last job she'll ever have" as she's 79 and very happy with working two days a week selling t-shirts to cruise ship people. My brother has worked in a gallery on front street for the last ten years.

I don't know. A city of almost 15,000 permanent residents is just gone. 50 or so are confirmed dead, in some horrific circumstances from what I hear.

My mom says people are just walking around with thousand-yard-stares, aimless, clutching cell phones trying to get signal (there isn't any, but you can get lucky and get a call through. Some texts are going in but not out.)

So I don't know folks. Keep those people in your thoughts. If you can donate, I think this may be a good place because it's going to lots of local orgs on the ground: https://www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/maui-strong

I keep thinking of new sad things.

Anyway I'm going to leave you with a picture I took while strolling down Front Street one evening.

[ultraericthered]

I've been very familiar with Wicked for several years now. I read the novel that the musical was based on (which mostly kind of sucked), knew the story of the musical, and have listened to the soundtrack. But it alway sat just okay with me. In particular, the character of Elphaba Thropp, I felt, was a very interesting concept - what if the Wicked Witch of the West was a layered, sympathetic, relatable person whose whole deal was so much more complex than simply being "wicked" for no reason, and that popular image of her as the cruel, nasty, fearsome hag we're all familar with was a myth based in a propagandized narrative spun to turn people against her? With Glinda the Good Witch, the Wizard of Oz, and the land of Oz itself all being deeper and darker than they appeared at a glance? That is fantastic on an imagination level, though it took the musical to fully realize the idea, and we got a great take on the Oz lore and great iteration of the Wicked Witch as a result. But I still didn't feel Elphie was anything too much greater than the character who sourced her (Margaret Hamilton's Witch in particular is a great villain on her own merits), and she sort of started a trend in both parodies and legit works of going for the lazy "they're not truly evil, they're just misunderstood!" villain revisionism, particularly when coupled with the equally lazy "and the people you thought were good guys were actually the real villains!" Count Dracula, Captain Hook, Maleficent, Jafar, Cruella De Vil, the Grinch, Carmen Sandiego, Lex Luthor, Light/Kira and even other lesser villains like the fucking Beanstalk Giant got this treatment over time. It's like Wicked made what was done as a joke with the Big Bad Wolf way back when acceptable to play straight, so it was a sore spot on Elphaba's legacy for me.

But let me tell you...watching Wicked Part 1 in theaters in the year 2024 the other day made something go off in my head. Elphaba's story through just Act 1 alone struck a chord with me that it hadn't before, to the point where I had to hold back tears towards the very end. Suddenly not only was all the political commentary in the story so much clearer and more relevant than it had ever been, but I got Elphie's character arc and a core piece of it that ties directly into that political commentary after it had gone over my head for years.

SPOILERS FOR WICKED PART ONE WILL FOLLOW

So the part of Elphaba's story that got me was her "relationship" with the Wizard of Oz. How she lived her life since childhood idolizing this man, absolutely loving the idea of the Wizard, being thankful to him for every blessing she and the land of Oz had, and dreaming of a day where she'd one day meet him, be apprenticed by him, and become like family with him because if he, the Great and Wonderful Wizard of Oz himself, could accept her, then the entire rest of Oz would have no choice but to accept her too. She'd finally have the mass acceptance, validation, and care from others she'd always yearned for. And yeah, that has to do with her self worth issues and yearning to belong somewhere with someone, and I always got that well before seeing the movie. Struggling with your self esteem and feeling ostracized from the world around you due to having been born different from others with whom you share that world was always the relatable aspect for Elphie for me, 'cause I've been there.

But the stuff with the Wizard once she's actually met him took on a whole new meaning for me now. It's been said ad nauseum now that the idea of some carnival barker huckster fraudster simpleton being put into a position of political power and leadership despite having no actual power and next to no merits to him all while others around him with their own sinister agendas look to curry favor with him in order to use him to their advantage and reap benefits from his position, and these people creating a scapegoat out of whoever can serve as a "common enemy" to unite people in fear, anger, hatred, grievance, prejudice and opposition to, is more timely, hard-hitting and realistic now than ever before, drawing parallel to the rise of our incoming First Felon President and the MAGA nightmare we cannot seem to awaken from. All of it said, all of it true. However, it cuts way deeper for me. In my scenario, the Wizard of Oz isn't the Felon, as I never had any faith or loving for that man and all he did was exceed my reservations about him. The Wizard of Oz is my country, the (former) United States of America itself. Just like Elphaba in Emerald City, on the days following November 5 2024, I had to look at something I'd been taught was Great And Wonderful since childhood, something I'd loved and gone on believing truly was Great And Wonderful for years, and reckon with the harsh truth that I'd learned about, loved, and had wanted to serve something that never actually existed. And the fault doesn't lie with the Founding Fathers and the fundamental creed that America was built upon, which is as Great And Wonderful now as it was all those centuries ago. The fault is with the sad reality that, due to people, ideas, beliefs, systems, institutions, traditional practices, holes and vices in government, and the corrosion of democracy, the nation we've had since the founding, the nation I've lived in from the day I was born, has constantly failed to live up to its own core ideals. People in power still can and do take away "certain inallieable rights" that all humans are born with from the humans born with them, all citizens are not treated with equality, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is continously impeded, we are not "indivisible" no matter how fragile the states hold together, there is not "liberty and justice for all", there exists a certain class of people who are, in fact, above the law, the three branches of governments seldom function the way they were made to, and the melting pot isn't "melting" people the right way as much since we've become more exclusionary than inclusive. As with the Wizard and the Grimmerie, this country is run by weak, stupid, mediocre men who are either unable to read the Constitution, or they can but just do not feel inclined to actually follow and respect it in letter and spirit. The only truly good, fair and just thing for a long while was the "self-governing" nature of the populace's participation in democracy and the self-corrections that would be made from it... but that ended up exploited in order to become the very thing that sealed its damnation. My nation was never evil, but at the same time, it has never been great, as it's so often failed to do good. It's a nation of moral goodness in perpetual bondage by the not-so-good that wants to exploit all the good it's capable of for them and their interests alone. "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave?" Sure, but only because the Free and the Brave who've lived here are all far better than it deserves.

And then we reach "Defying Gravity." I always linked the title of this song to Elphaba taking flight on her broomstick. But only now do I grasp the full meaning of that title, and the weight the term holds in its proper context. Elphaba is making a choice to defy Oz. To rebel against a corrupt system by a corrupt government that is corrupting the land and harming vulnerable others. She makes this choice even when what she's rebelling against holds the advantage in all power sans magical and possesses the resources and means to turn the ignorant masses against her and ensure they remain on their side. From the offset, she is very unlikely to prevail. That's why it's like struggling against a greater force that is trying to push you down and can normally easily do so - a force like gravity. And yet Elphie fights. She defies. She does so even if it means she has to make herself look like a villain, reasoning that even if her enemy is great and powerful, and the odds of defeating it seem impossible, it's not more powerful than her skills, her gifts, her convictions and her willpower. And so long as she has those, it can and will never bring her down.

I'd say the lesson here is "domestic terrorism in defiance of your government is good, actually", but it's a little bit more complicated.

So yeah, Wicked Part 1 is a masterpiece and Elphaba Thropp is an inspiration. If what she does is "wicked", then let us all aspire to be as wicked as her as the fight to rejuvinate the soul of our decayed republic and lay claim to a better future for all people in it goes on.

[justforbooks]

Naomi Klein, author of era-defining bestsellers, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No Logo, is back with her most compulsive and personal book yet: a revelatory journey into the mirror world of our polarised age

When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger.

Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity - all we have to meet the world - so unstable?

To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister. This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass.

It's for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[the-lunar-library]

TO THE RAVENS

Creative, cosmopolitan, and idealistic, Kokkonas is something of an antagonist – at least to our heroine Akantha. Though she styles herself a philosopher and an artist, Kokkonas travels as a musician alongside the prophet Alexandros, and her profession places her outside the boundaries of respectable society. But that doesn't bother her. In fact she revels in challenging the narrow, misogynistic views of Rome.

She started out a simple enough character in my mind, a shallowly mean antagonist. But one thing I love about the character-building process is how they start to surprise you, and Kokkonas insisted on becoming more complex than I'd first given her credit for.

Kokkonas is a fun character. In some ways, she's admirable – she's intelligent, voraciously self-educated, and believes passionately in the value of women, even when she comes across as a laughable fanatic to others. But she's also petty, self-absorbed, and way too caught up in Alexandros for someone who sees herself as prioritizing women and their needs. She's a character whom you can't early on label as “correct” or “incorrect” and then read through her lines and actions accordingly. Sometimes she's right. Sometimes she's wrong. You have to think about her. Both Akantha and Alexandros often laugh her off, but I hope that while the reader enjoys her in her more catty, antagonistic moments, they still take her seriously.

She has some historical basis, being based on two characters from Lucian's essay “Alexander the False Prophet”. The first is Cocconas, “a Byzantine writer of choral songs” who traveled around and entered music competitions for his livelihood. Along with being a man (sorry, Kokkonas), he was Alexander's partner in huckstering; Lucian actually says that of the two, Cocconas was the worse. The second character is an unnamed woman whom Alexander and Cocconas befriended and who also traveled with them. She was from Pella where, so Lucian claimed, they bred large beautiful snakes as household pets. Thus we have Kokkonas the wandering chorale master with her pet snake Harmony, whom she probably loves more than her own life.

The most obvious departure from reality is her gender. For my novel, I wanted Cocconas to be part of the story, but I felt like having two men, two false wonder-workers (“two consummate rascals”, thank you, Lucian) would take some focus away from Alexandros. I also wanted there to be lots of female characters, and I thought it would be fun to have a rival to Akantha who's also in on Alexandros' secrets. But she's not just a rival. As I said before when writing about Akantha's development, researching the reality of women's lives during this time enriched the book so much. Kokkonas survives in the same misogynistic constraints as Akantha, but she's defied them, at least partially, and gone out of her way to learn about heroic women of the past. She deeply admires figures like Aspasia, Cleopatra VII, Berenice II, and Sappho, and through her we get a glimpse of women who were able to attain some respect and stature. And while Kokkonas is mostly fictitious, it's important to remember that there were women who pursued greater independence, certainly women who dreamed of having more political and social power than the mainstream allowed. Does that mean they were good people in every respect? No. And you are indeed supposed to criticize Kokkonas and even make fun of her at times. But she's definitely not always wrong.

As for her design, most women of the time would dress pretty plainly, in subdued colors. I wanted Kokkonas to have an archaic, theatrical flair. She's the sort of person who would combine whatever aesthetics tickled her fancy, so she has references to ancient Egypt, Scythia, and the Minoans. Unlike Akantha, she wears her hair long and loose, and her makeup is much flashier. Her jewelry isn't expensive, but it's colorful, eye-catching, and she wears it lavishly. She projects an air of great worldliness and confidence. She strikes Akantha at their first meeting as sphinxlike.

We don't learn much about her past in the novel, and even my ideas there are vague. I suspect her origins were fairly conventional, but at a young age, she broke free from convention and she's just kept going.

[francesbeau]

‘Cosmetics, Fashion and The Exploitation of Women.’

- Joseph Hansen , Mary-Alice Waters , Evelyn Reed. 1986

‘The capitalists want women go blame themselves not the social relations of production for the economic problems they face everyday’ (pp.16)

‘Since women are getting jobs that men ought to have they are alleged to be responsible for the high rate of unemployment of black males.’ (pp.17)

‘The class distinctions of women transcend the sex identity of women. This is above all true in modern capitalist society, the epoch of the sharpest polarisation of class forces.’ (pp.58)

‘In the competitive sex market which features capitalism,women are obliged to compete with other women for economic security, whether it is in the form of jobs or husbands. Therefore,women do not "indulge" in cosmetics. We are under social compulsion to use them.’ (pp.57)

‘As we have frequently pointed out, the past fourteen years of war boom and prosperity have produced a conservatizing effect upon the working class which we describe as a "bourgeoisitica-tion." One of the forms this takes is the readiness of the workers to accept bourgeois opinions and propaganda as scientific truthand adapt themselves to it.’

‘Let me say, first of all, that working-class women do not "in-dulge in"cosmetics. Our use of cosmetics is far from an indulgence it is basically an economic necessity and from this has become an aesthetic necessity.’

‘The cosmetics industry and their hucksters do not thrive on the natural beauty which is the birthright of youth of whatever class.’ It thrives on the lilies who have begun to fade, a phenomenon of nature which strikes every woman in her thirties. And in days of yesteryear, a woman was rated old by the time she reached herforties. It is an inherent part of every normal female ego to strive toward the preservation of youthful beauty, and this is a proper female goal worthy of the considered attention of a revolutionist.’ (pp.49)

‘once the fresh bloom of youth is gone, the working-class woman has neither the means to patronise the beauty shops nor the energy after wrestling with pots,bpans, and children to devote to the preservation of personal beauty, and soon she has joined the ranks of the drab millions.’ (pp.49)

‘Art is no longer restricted to formalistic classifications, but is diffused and coordinated in the beauty and the unity of all objects in the environment of the wealthy.’ (pp.47)

‘Rather, the revolution in art forms will no longer be just for those who can afford them, but will be the rightful heritage of every citizen in the communal world. Communist man will make an art of his waybof life, surrounding himself with the creative outpourings of his inherent talent.’ (pp.47)

‘socialism will extract the hypocrisy and the mysticism out of bourgeois morality and leave the universal ideals of buman brotherhood.’ (pp.46)

‘socialism will free this revolution from the bonds of the profit system, and cities will be planned for the use, convenience, and beauty of living, rather than for the profit of the realtors, speculators, and contractors.’ (pp.46)

‘The wealthy are beautiful only by their own standards which in the long run assign women the roles of mother and plaything. For this, youth is considered paramount.’ (pp.41)

‘Capitalist standards of feminine beauty are established primarily by men who, corrupted by an exploiting society, cannot see women as anything more than methers and playthings.’ (pp.41)

‘Let me say, first of all, that working-class women do not "indulge in"cosmetics. Our use of cosmetics is far from an indulgence it is basically an economic necessity and from this has become an aesthetic necessity.‘

‘The artists hold up the mirror to life in a reflective mood or in anger or compassion or sardonic humor. They seek to capture the joy and sorrow of life.’ pp.68)

‘It is only in class society that the myth has grown up that labor is identical with exploited labor.’ (pp.70)

‘Through the identity they make between labor and exploited labor, they perpetuate a split between producers and consumers, glorifying the latter at the expense of the former.’ (pp.70)

‘Not labor but the conspicuous waste of the products of labor is the mark of capitalist social distinction.’ (pp.70)

‘Social value and distinction were registered in the realm of production, and that is why the women of primitive society were so valuable and regarded so highly.’ (pp.70)

‘As the capitalist commodity market expanded, more and more attention was directed toward the population of women as important buyers of consumer goods of all kinds.’ (pp.71)

‘The propaganda machine as a whole is a vast institution. It has control of the mass arenas for selling commodities and bourgeois ideology: the radio, television, but above all the press. Capitalist newspapers and magazines are built around and maintained by the pages of advertising.’ (pp.72)

[johnnyrobish]

Jim Bakker Claims Satan Directing People to Mock Him for Selling Survival Food 

During a recent episode of his show, Televangelist Jim Bakker said he went on social media and was both shocked and dismayed to learn that people were mocking him out for the up to $4500 “survival food buckets” he sells to followers in preparation for the “End Times.”  When asked by a fellow “Jim Bakker Show” cast member why anyone would want to mock him out over that, Bakker replied, "I believe it's satanic.”

Yep, why it’s a damn shame a fella can no longer scare the hell out of gullible people in order to get them to send him all their hard-earned cash - without being ridiculed for it.  Why the nerve of those folks to mock him out!  After all, it isn’t like he’s the type of guy who has ever gone to prison for pulling off a huge con job on his followers before.  Speaking of which, I’ve actually seen some of the slop he throws into those “survival buckets,” and I’m here to tell you not even Satan would eat that shit.  Of course, hawking survival food is only one of the reasons folks mock him out.  Wonder if he’d care to know the rest?

Anyway, my guess is he got all the recipes for his bucket food from the mess hall cooks who prepared his meals in prison.  You know, stuff like cheap, dehydrated white rice, Velveeta Cheese with a few stems of broccoli thrown in, or some white flour pancake mix.  Now, not to be critical of Pastor Bakker, but I always thought Pat Robertson made much better pancakes.  Not to mention, has anyone ever noticed Bakker’s survival food comes in the exact same buckets that Purina uses for their “Tidy Cats” clumping litter?

Of course, all those Libtrads are bound to say “This man has no business being on national television,” and frankly, I have to admit that I fully agree with them.  Why with the sneaky, conniving hustle this huckster has going on, where he really belongs is in the United States Congress - and serving on the Republican “Freedom Caucus” along with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz.

Now, the question is, why would anyone even need survival supplies for the “End Times” in the first place?  I mean, I thought the “righteous” were supposed to get raptured up to heaven before the apocalypse even happens.  What’s up with that?  I say “to hell” with Jim Bakker and his bucket food.  As for me, when those “End Times” come, why I’m gonna go out with a big Mexican Fiesta bucket and a nice bottle of fancy tequila.  After all, who the hell wants to greet the apocalypse sober?

If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve just read, please consider joining me at:

[scary-movies-on-netflix]

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (2023)

This is a fancy found-footage movie, but first we start off with a little documentary about a 1970s late-night talk show called “Late Night with Jack Delroy.”  We follow his career and learn that he’s a member of “The Grove,” a “Bohemian Grove” knock-off.  Then Jack’s wife dies of lung cancer, despite being a non-smoker!  Jack takes a little break, but then he returns to his show.  Unfortunately, his ratings don’t compare to those of Johnny Carlson (who, if you don’t know, dominated late-night TV for several decades).  The narrator then states that we’re about to watch the footage of Jack Delroy’s Halloween 1977 broadcast.

We then proceed to the meat of the movie, the broadcast of the show, but during commercial breaks we then watch behind-the-scenes discussions.  Anyway:

First Segment: Jacks starts off with his monologue, and we meet his sidekick, Gus.  Jack’s first guest is then some dude named “Christou,” who is a psychic.  Christou performs some readings for the audience, but it’s clear that he’s just a huckster.  However, as his set is ending, he seems to have a real psychic reading!  He mentions someone named “Minnie.”  Cut to commercial!

Second Segment: Jack’s next guest is Carmichael.  He is a former magician, but now he goes around debunking purported psychic phenomena.  He argues a bit with Christou and calls him a fraud.  Christou storms off the stage, but before he can leave he projectile vomits over the stage.  Cut to commercial!

Third Segment: Christou is gone, but now Jack talks about a book called “Conversations with the Devil.”  We watch a film clip of a Satanic cult run by a dude named “Szandor D’Abo.”  Jack then brings out Dr. Jill (the author of the book) and Lilly (the subject of the book).  Lilly was a child member of that cult mentioned in the previous sentence, and she’s just creepy, mostly because she seems to have no social filter and likes to stare at people. 

Fourth Segment: Jack continues to interview Dr. Jill and Lilly, including talking about the demon that apparently lives inside Lilly.  It’s not the main demon of the cult, Abraxas, and Lilly calls it Mr. Wriggles.  Carmichael, the skeptic, expresses skepticism.  Jack eventually browbeats the reluctant Lilly into summoning Mr. Wriggles on-air. 

Fifth Segment: Two chairs are set up on stage for Dr. Jill and Lilly.  Lilly is tied to her chair.  Dr. Jill hypnotizes Lilly, and then the demon appears!  Lilly’s eyes are different, and the skin of her face is cracked.  She speaks with two voices.  She talks about Jack’s past and his dead wife and then speaks profanely.  Dr. Jill slaps the demon out of the Lilly, but then Lilly levitates in the air!  The demon finally leaves and cut to commercial!

Sixth Segment: Before we come back Jack is informed by the producer that the ratings are through the roof!  Back on air, Jack, Dr. Jill, Lilly, and Carmichael argue a bit.  Jack gives Carmichael the chance to prove his point, and Carmichael cajoles Gus, the sidekick, to joining him on stage.  Carmichael shows Gus a little hypnosis wheel, and then he is hypnotized!  Then worms begin to crawl out of Gus’s body.  A huge worm burst out of his face.  Carmichael says, “Dreamer, here!  Awake!” and the worms are gone!  Carmichael explains that he hypnotized the entire audience, not just Gus, and they trot out a TV to watch a replay, where we see Carmichael just talking to Gus about worms.  Lilly is upset and says that maybe they should watch the footage of their demonstration.  Jack bumps the last guess and agrees.  They rewatch Lilly’s possession, and they see that it wasn’t faked!  It actually happened!  They see a single frame where Jack’s dead wife appears behind him as an apparition.  Carmichael is pissed, because he thinks that the entire thing has been set up.

But then the lights go out!  The lights come back and Lilly is surging with energy.  Her head splits open and she is the demon.  Gus tries to banish the demon with his necklace cross, but the demon twists his head around 180 degrees.  Lilly next turns on Dr. Jill and levitates her in the air by her own necklace.  The audience begins to run out as the necklace slices the woman’s neck open.  Carmichael, meanwhile, bows before the demon, but it immolates him.  Jack flees the stage.

He finds himself back at the beginning of the show, and then we step out of the show.  (We can tell because we switch from the old 4:3 TV proportions to the modern wide-screen film proportions.)  We watch scenes from the little opening documentary, but everything is weird and strange.  We see him talking to his wife again, and she accuses him of “forgetting.”  Jack is then at a ceremony of “The Grove,” and a guy in an owl mask hoots at him.  We then see Jack’s wife on her deathbed, and she explains that Jack made a deal with “The Grove” for success, but the cost was her life!  She begs Jack to kill her, because of the pain, and he stabs her with a dagger. 

But we are then back in the TV show.  Jack has stabbed Lilly with the dagger.  Everyone else has been killed by the demon.  Jack says, “Dreamer, here.  Awake,” but he does not wake up.  The transmission ends, and the TV tells us, “So it is done.”

This was good.  Reading up on its production, to include creating a vintage-style set and utilizing both equipment and techniques from a bygone era, you can tell that the entire production was a labor of love, an homage both to horror movies and late night talk shows.  I can remember Johnny Carson.  He was an old dude with a bemused expression who asked guests questions about their new TV shows or movies.  It wasn’t anything too exciting.  This alternate universe version of such a show was fascinating.  The acting and the plot were excellent.  The commercial break segments broke the found footage conceit, by showing us things beyond the camera’s view, but that was a rule worth breaking in this case.  This film was a vision of Jack Delroy’s desperation to be famous and what that cost him.

[solarsonicsoda]

Wrestlemania Main Event Reviews - Wrestlemania XII

Shawn Michaels def. Bret Hart (c) in Overtime of a 60-Minute Iron Man Match for the WWF World Championship in 61:52

Jose Lothario comes down the ramp to Shawn’s intro and it is funny. Shawn comes down with the zipline! WHAT A RIDE! It is a pretty cool entrance! Bret’s out and we’re ready to go! We get to hear Hebner explain the rules but I don’t think the crowd can hear him.

Feeling each other out to begin, some nice mat wrestling as HBK tries to roll out a hold but Hart keeps it synched in. Hart is able to keep the headlock for a long long time and it’s kinda cool but maybe not the most exciting hold. Nice technical sequence when HBK breaks free that ends with him back in the headlock. Very nice. Hart going back to these head and neck holds is a fun little detail but does result in a lot of dead time. When these two get going, it’s great but this definitely has that retro, wear down style. HBK in control now working the arm. Quick burst as they battle back and forth to work their choice of body part. The crowd is not too hot in this one. The Huckster and the Nacho Man is mentioned on commentary as well as the Hollywood Backlot Brawl. Ah yes, this time in WWF.

Some punches and quick action sends Bret to the outside with a hurricanrana and the crowd love it. Hart sends HBK out with an Irish whip but he skins the cat, more running the rope and Hart trips HBK with a knee. He locks on the chin lock again. Shawn is out and gets the armbar on. Hart gets up, running the ropes from HBK and he gets caught with a spinebuster, Sharpshooter attempt and sends HBK out with a clothesline. Fight on the outside, Hart into the ring post and HBK accidentally superkicks the time keeper. That is probably the most high impact move so far, 15 minutes in. Hart locks in the chin lock again as the time keeper gets checked on. The time keeper is stretchered off as the chin lock stays on. HBK gets out with the arm drag takedown and sends Bret to the ropes who comes back with the clothesline and the chin lock is back on. I can’t decide if this match is too repetitive or not. Action out of the chin lock, Hart holds the ropes to avoid a roll-up but dropkick and Hart is down with his arm locked up again. Hart finds his feet as HBK yanks on the arm and eventually sends him back down. Cool stuff.

Hart rolls over to the chin lock but HBK reapplies the arm lock quickly after. Hart uses the elbow in the corner to get out and uppercuts to HBK. HBK Irish whips Hart but drags back with a knee to the gut and sends into the ring post. Then he flings the arm into the rope and capitalises on the arm with moves like and armbreaker and sending into the corners. Hart mounts a comeback but the attack to the arm from HBK takes him down and he slowly picks at the arm again. Hart gets up and stomps the face, but he’s hurt and HBK can get back to the attack. Hart gets out with a guillotine on the middle rope and slingshots HBK to the corner. His arm hurts but he gets a cover but HBK kicks out. He counters Bret and sends him facefirst to a turnbuckle. He goes for a corner crossbody but Hart dodges and kicks him as he balances on the top ropes. Hart attacks and hits a bulldog then goes up top. HBK tries to counter but Hart brings his head down with a knee, sending the referee down. He checks on him and HBK comes with the flurry, but kick out! Hart hits a piledriver but HBK kicks out! Hart goes up top and HBK stews, he throws Hart down and flips through with the West Coast Pop, backbreaker, kick out. Hart rolls out before Sweet Chin Music, but HBK leaps with a flying crossbody.

HBK back in the ring but gets Hart in the ring before ten. Top rope crossbody, Bret rolls through, kick out. Backslide battle, roll up, kick out. Fisherman’s suplex from HBK, kick out. HBK locks in a sleeper hold, Hart backs him into the corner to break but HBK locks it in again. Over 35 minutes gone now. Hart tries to back into the corner again but HBK sends him into the buckle himself. HBK flips out a back suplex, Hart into the corner, backdrop over and out sends HBK into the cameraman which is cool. Hart gets sick of waiting and heads out after HBK, slams HBK back-first into the post. Sends him back in, Hart picks at him. Sends him flying to the corner with high impact and then an elbow drop to the back. HBK tries to reverse but Hart has control. Kicks in the corner and a Banzai Drop to the back. Hart sends HBK to the corner, he flips up in recoil to the top rope, Hart hits a back suplex off the top, kick out. Great stuff. Camel clutch but HBK gets out, sunset flip but no dice. Hart regains control, sends him top rope. HBK punches Hart but blow to the gut as he goes for the double axe handle. Russian leg sweep by Hart. Corner Irish whip that makes a nasty noise, flings HBK out the ring, and also hits Jose Lothario with HBK’s boot. Irish whip into Lothario and the steel steps by Hart and mouths off the Lothario. Hart on top but HBK hits with some strikes, though Hart hits his own. Less than 15 minutes remain.

HBK is able to roll up Hart who sends him outside with a kick out. Suicide dive from Hart. Apron suplex to HBK, reversed, reversed again with a German suplex from Bret. Strikes back and forth with HBK on his knees, big headbutt downs HBK. 10 minutes remain. HBK slowly fights out another head hold. Double clothesline. HBK connects with some strikes but Hart puts him up top. Superplex but Hart is tired. Sharpshooter attempt but HBK kicks out from the tie up. Single leg Boston crab on HBK but he gets the ropes. Backbreaker from Hart and 5 minutes remain. Hart on the middle rope with something but HBK with both feet to the face. Dropkick from HBK and he’s super tired. Forearm in the corner and Irish whip to the other corner. Hart throws him to the ropes but he returns with a flying forearm. Kip up from Shawn and he hits the back elbow off the ropes. Powerslam and a double axe handle. Suplex from HBK and then the elbow drop off the top. Kick out. Gutwrench suplex from HBK and a moonsault but no win. Hart sends him to the corner but quick big boot. Hurricanrana pin off the middle rope but kick out. Powerslam and a minute remains. Top rope but Hart counters and the Sharpshooter is locked in! HBK won’t give up and time expires at 0-0!

Hart leaves with the belt but President Monsoon has a word with Hebner. Sudden death overtime rules! There must be a winner! Hart is not happy but he comes back in. Shawn is still down holding his back as Hart mouths off in the ring. Things restart and Hart wails on HBK. The back is targeted with strikes and a backdrop. Backbreaker, Irish whip to the corner, HBK jumps over Hart coming in and hits Sweet Chin Music! They’re both down! Sweet Chin Music again as they both get to their feet and Shawn covers for a strong three count! The boyhood dream has come true! He’s emotional in the ring and Hart walks out before HBK even stands. Both Shawn and the crowd’s celebration is more tired and reflective than most! What a battle! 

Pros: Smart action, callbacks, some nice spots, nice closing sequences, big win, big fight feel, story Cons: Long, not enough action between wear-down spots, crowd quiet for stretches

This match is divisive and I think I fall towards the more positive side of things. Watching it in the middle of the day helped but the length, while definitely a feat, didn’t drag too much. I think the first half spent a bit too long in unexciting holds, and while this made the action we got more thrilling as well as having some cool moments within it, I think more action could have been added whilst still keeping the excitement and the holds could have been more engaging. There were some great moments though, and when things got going, they really got going. The match was maybe ambitious, but it was two greats who gave it their all. The story was also nice, both the triumph HBK dreamed of and the in-ring tale of HBK defying what Bret expected and taking after his style and both men battling to target a limb better, even when it wasn’t obvious. Would have made more sense for Bret to target the back and Shawn to target the head and neck but that’s kind of besides the point. It was a clinic but not without its flaws, and I could see how it could have any rating from 3-5 stars honestly, and maybe even further. 

4 STARS OUT OF 5

[kaijutegu]

It helps if you read it in an old-timey prospector voice for Handsome Harry's lines and a noir detective voice for Old Dick and Dick Junior.

De-stroke-ified: Three boys/men with strange names have gone out to dig for fossils in South Dakota. Their friends, both named Dick, are concerned about their whereabouts, and Handsome Harry, the Serpent of Siskiyou (I believe this means he's a tasty snack of a man from California's Siskiyou Mountains/Siskyou County), knows where they are: digging fossils in South Dakota.

Harry says that he has a flyer they put out, and while they might be lying (a "bazoo" is a mouth and if you're operating a bazoo with two tongues, you're lying or trying to con people), if they are telling the truth, he'd rather have the thing they found than a gold mine because the thing they found is insanely valuable. He then hands them a flyer that says, essentially

GET OVER HERE AND LOOK AT THIS THING

For fifty cents, you can come stare at our freak, the best freak in the world! We dug up a human fossil. Is it a man? a boy? Who knows, and who cares, come look at it before we ship it off. We named him Biff-Bang the Granite Kid, and if you come to this empty store under Andy Hoover's (probably) illegal casino with fifty cents, you can see him. We sold him to a museum in Chicago for ten thousand dollars, so pay your measly fifty cent to see him before he gets on the choo choo train and moves to Chicago forever!

Best Wishes, Two-Spot and Bung Loo

Old Dick thinks this is funny as hell, but little Dick is worried because their only friend with a normal name, Fritz, isn't in the report. What happened to Fritz? (My guess: they covered him in gypsum dust and he's pretending to be Biff-Bang the Granite Kid, but I'm not tracking the rest of this story down to find out because I don't care about Fritz.)

___

What's actually most interesting to me in all of this was I wanted to make a joke about paying Field Museum prices, because that's the only museum in Chicago that would have hosted Biff-Bang the Granite Kid, so I pulled the annual report for 1902 and the vast majority of admissions were free.

Saturdays and Sundays were completely free, and there were several ways to get in for free on paid days. Over 10,000 people came to the museum on its biggest attendance day in 1902, but the highest number of paid attendance on any day was 522 people.

What I'm saying here is if you could wait a little... and travel to Chicago... you could see Biff-Bang the Granite Kid for free, without having to give your fifty cents to two hucksters who set up in an abandoned storefront under a (probably) illegal casino.

o-oh

oh ok

(source)

[its-vannah]

Sweet Nothing | Jacaerys x Reader

A/N: My goal is to finish this Masterlist by December, and I've got to say that this is one of the most wholesome fics on this whole list. I dearly loved writing it, and I hope y'all love reading it ❤️

Warnings: Childbirth, intense pain, labor, birth, lots of fluff

Midnights Masterlist

Another restless night had gone by, with bouts of sickness and fever. Laying in bed, feet propped up, you tried to ease the pain in your stomach.

You were only eight months pregnant, but you felt as though the baby could arrive any day now. Praying to the Gods to give you another month, to ensure the safety of both you and your unborn child, you hoped they answered.

I found myself a-runnin' home to your sweet nothings

Jacaerys had insisted on being by your side throughout it all. He had instructed your handmaiden to care for your oldest son, Arewyn, while he tended to you.

Slowly opening the door to your shared chambers, he held a cold, damp rag in his hands. Standing at the side of your bed, he placed the rag over your forehead in an effort to break your fever.

That I'm just too soft for all of it

He sat beside you, gently running a hand over the curve of your stomach, a soft smile on his face, "I can hardly wait, my love."

You let out a content sigh, the baby kicking against his hand, "I don't think the babe can either."

Placing your hand on top of his, you guided him to the upper part of your stomach, "Just wait..."

A hard kick came, and Jacaerys released a breathy laugh, "A strong one we have, don't we?"

"Oh, I'm sure of it," You winced at the pain in your lower stomach, exhaling slowly, "Too strong."

"Any day now, my love, I'm sure of it," He said, pressing a kiss to your stomach, and then your forehead, "Is there anything I can do?"

You shook your head, "I don't believe so, but..."

I spy with my little tired eye

Pausing, you saw the door opening from the corner of your eye. It was slow, as if each push was a struggle.

Tiny as a firefly

Seconds later, a small boy peeked his head through the door, pushing his body through, his eyes wide as he saw you.

A large smile plastered on his face, he ran towards you, his feet slapping against the stone floor.

Desperately trying to get up on the bed, he motioned for his father to lift him up.

And smooth-talking hucksters

"Is the baby here? Can I see it? What's it's name? Is it's name Arewyn, too? Do we have the same name? What does it look like? Like me?"

The constant questioning typically drove those in the palace mad, but Jacaerys found it endearing. He remembered when Joffrey was that young, only three and full of questions.

Jacaerys grinned down at his son, lifting him into his arms and setting him on his knee, allowing him to face you.

You say, "What a mind"

"He has a mind of his own, doesn't he?" Jacaerys said, trying to tame his son's head of curls which he had seemingly inherited from his uncle.

Arewyn searched the room, "Where's the baby?"

You pointed to your stomach, "Not here quite yet, my love."

"When is it going to be here?"

"Soon, my sweet, have patience," Knowing fully well it was impossible for a four year old to practice the art of patience.

This happens all the time

Shaking your head, Jacaerys smiled, nuzzling his son's cheek, "Always asking questions, aren't you?"

"Tell me, Arewyn, where is Pia?" You asked, caressing his small cheek, "She was supposed to watch you."

Arewyn furrowed his brows, crossed his arms, and huffed, "She wouldn't let me see you and the baby. So we played a game. She hid, and I found her."

"So where is she?" Jacaerys asked.

He shrugged, "I didn't find her yet."

Everyone's up to somethin'

The two of you shared a look, shaking your heads, "He's too smart for his own good."

Feeling a sharp pain in your abdomen, you held back the urge to cry out, not wanting to scare your son. Suddenly, you felt warm.

Grasping Jacaerys hand, you shot him a look, "Go fetch the Maester."

He jumped up, Arewyn still in his arms, and promised he'd be back shortly.

-------------------------------

Every time you pushed, you felt a stabbing pain inside you. Although Arewyn's birth had hurt, you hadn't expected this birth to be worse.

They said the end is comin'

A fresh stream of tears cascading down your face, the maester promised it would be over soon.

Out glad-handing each other

Jacaerys held your hand, which was quite the fest itself with how hard you were gripping him, tighter with every push.

Nearly out of breath, you shook your head, suddenly dizzy, "I can't..."

"You should be doing more"

"You must, Princess," The Maester urged, "You need to push more."

Struggling to breathe, you kept pushing, crying out in pain.

After what seemed like hours, you heard the cries of a newborn baby, begging for it's mother.

The wetnurse lifted the babe, a smile on her face as she wrapped it in a blanket, "A boy, my prince."

Jacaerys smiled as she handed the babe to him, as you were too weak to hold him in your arms.

We almost forgot it

Watching as your husband rocked him slowly, back and forth, you nearly forgot about the pain.

The Maester sent a handmaiden to grab fresh linens as he tended to you, and she returned with not only the linens, but little Arewyn, too.

Outside they're push and shovin'

Rushing to your side, he struggled to climb on the bed. Using all his might, he gripped the sheets and sat cross legged beside you.

Attempting to lean over you to get to his brother, Jacaerys reached out a hand to stop him, "Careful, Arewyn. Your mother is still weak from the birth."

And the voices that implore

Groaning, Arewyn tilt his head to get a better look at the babe, a soft smile on his face, "Is it—"

"A boy," You answered, "We have yet to chose a name, my love."

"Then pick one," He urged, excitedly, clasping his hands together, "You can name him Arewyn."

Jacaerys shook his head, "That's your name. He needs a name of his own."

You gazed up at him, "Not quite a name of his own, but a memory of another."

It took him a moment to connect the dots, but once he did, he pursed his lips, "Are you sure?"

"I'm certain."

Jacaerys looked at your eldest son, turning the bay to face him, "Lucerys the second."

Arewyn smiled at him for a moment, before looking between his parents, "That's a long name. Can I call him Luc?"

To you, I can admit

Memories struck Jacaerys, of the times he and his brother had spent together, before he nodded, "I couldn't think of a better name."

All that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothin'

Before the births of your son's, you and Jacaerys shared a strong, beautiful love. And even after the addition of your heirs, that love continued, with only one difference. It was stronger. It was unconditional.

[dailyadventureprompts]

You've done a few Monsters Reimagined posts about gods already, so I was wondering... any ideas for reimagining Lolth? I know in your Drow post you suggested just ditching the spider cultist stuff, but I do think Lolth herself has some potential. (I have some ideas of my own, which can be summed up as "to high elves, Lolth IS an evil trickster, but to Drow she's the goddess of law, art, magic, and anything to do with webs, and CORELLON is the trickster" but I'm curious what ideas you have)

Deity: Lolth, Queen of Spiders and Weaver of Lies

Its said that in the dawn era when the world was still settling the first mortals caught one of their gods in a lie. It was a benign, harmless thing, but that first falsehood turned sour in the god’s mouth, and when spitting to earth it took a shape with many legs, and scuttled off into the dark

Setup: None can say where Lolth or her cult first emerged, as a goddess of deception she has worn many guises and worked to obscure her true origin since perhaps the first moment of her existence. even her commonly recorded name; Lolth, is but the most recent of her aspects, one that many scholars believe she has abandoned in recent ages as more and more of her followers awake to the cruelty of her doctrine, leaving behind a hollow idol the way a spider sheds its carapace when it grows. 

Lolth is a goddess of deception, not the simple half truths that everyone lets slip now and again (though some more orthodox faiths claim that these lies give life to spiders), but to the falsehoods that warp the perception of individuals, communities, and entire nations: they are out to get you/ I didn't push you, you fell/ our way is the godly way, all others are degenerate. When one of these delusions takes root and begins to skew lives, the goddess weaves another thread into her tapestry of deception, wrapping her victims in a false reality the way a spider wraps its prey. Lolth too is an enemy of objective reality, sowing madness in the minds of mortals or using her agents to muddle and destroy historical records.

Logically it doesn’t make sense to worship a goddess of deception, nightmares and gaslighting, until one asks who might benefit from others falling prey to such afflictions. Tyrants, abusers, con artists, the ones that think they’re clever enough to lie forever or the ones so prideful they believe that their opinions override reality. These are the ones that feel the tug of the spider’s string, and delude themselves into thinking they are puppeteer rather than puppet.

Adventure Hooks

After the death of their high priestess, a cult of darkelves found their connection to the spiderqueen severed, throwing them into a theological crisis that left most of their leadership dead as each tried to backstab their way into proving that they were Lolths next chosen.  Faced with a total lack of guidance, the cults lesser acolytes and henchmen have taken to following the last survivor off this divinely ordained massacre:  A former apprentice of the high priestess who died performing a grand rite and was transformed into a deathlock for her trouble. Kept around as both jester and example of what fate awaits those who waver in their faith, this cackling cadaver has forgotten much of who she was and now calls herself Hollowhead, a cruel nickname given by her mistress when she realized her dead apprentice always had spiders on the brain, literally.   Now tugging at the neck chain that once secured her to the high priestess’s throne, Hollowhead leads the cult out to enact whatever whim her goddess puts in her head, with the features on the menu being sacrifices, rampant poisonings, and gross transfigurations.    

In one of their many adventures, the party end up clashing with a charming huckster who’s gone and made an enemy of some very powerful people. Perhaps he’s backed a guild leader into a bad business deal, or swindled a fortune out of the party’s prospective patron. Perhaps he introduces himself as a mentor for a young party of roguish individuals and then leaves them holding the bag in the midst of a heist. When he dies (either when the party catches up to him or months later after he’s been justly tried and tossed in a dungeon) he realizes that he’s called  upon the weaver of lies one too many times in the course of filling his pockets, and is at risk of having his soul claimed once it passes into the underworld. To avoid this terrible fate, the huckster pulls one last trick, stealing himself from the goddess’s clutches and wandering the world as a ghost. Never one to be denied her prize, the goddess dispatches a monstrous construct from her realm, a Retriever, to fetch the trickster’s wayward soul and flatten anything that stands in its way: such as the party, who the huckster has been quietly haunting for some time as a means of tagging along with their adventures. 

On the trail of a missing merchant caravan, the party encounter a village Where Everything Is Fine, with the one exception being the library dedicated to Ioun seems to have been boarded shut. Folk here vaguely remember the merchant passing through, but having come a long while the party decide to rest in the rustic and comfortable inn to enjoy some good food and the owers’ charming hospitality, only to wake up with one of their number missing. Find out their horrifying fate under the cut

They find their missing friend some hours later living a completely different life, having been married to an attractive and attentive stranger for some years and never once having contemplated becoming an adventurer and leaving the village Where Everything Is Fine. Snapping their friend out of it is as easy as noticing the faint trace of webbing near their ear and squishing the spider that’s crawled in there carrying a number of delusions with it, but there’s no telling which one of them could be next to forget. Checking inside the boarded up library reveals a few haggard townsfolk and a VERY paranoid priestess of the goddess Ioun who’ve been hold up inside while the rest of their neighbors went all Norman Rockwell/Stepford wife. To hear them tell it, things started happening after the innkeeper’s wife showed up with bruises after the two had a raucous shouting match infront of  a large crowd of patrons. The two had always had a rocky relationship but she insisted over and over again that Everything Is Fine… and people started to agree with her. Desperate to preserve the illusion of a blissful homelife, the innkeeper’s wife has made a spontaneous pact with Lolth, and her increasingly blasphemous self delusion will stop at nothing to ensure that no one ruins her fantasy. Depending on how tactful you want to be consider having her turn into a giant spider monster, with her abusive husband hollowed out, alive and aware but filled with innumerable skittering young.

Titles: Queen of Spiders, Weaver of lies, Mother of Deceit, Lady of truth (for the faithful)

Signs: Excessive spiders, or spiders where there should not be spiders (such as in your mouth or ears), a pervasive sense that someone is lying to you or that what you perceive is not real, faces momentarily showing opposite emotions.

Symbols: Spiders and their associated iconography, more subtle symbols may include objects in groups of eight, like eight stars in a ring upon a flag or eight jewels set in a fractal spiral upon a broach. Other cults unconnected to spider iconography use that of weaving: looms, spinning wheels, dropspindles, and may occasionally substitute silkworms for spiders where regionally appropriate.

Followers:In addition to her active cults, such as the most well known among the darkelves or creatures like the chitine Lolth is a proactive goddess when it comes to choosing champions, most often selecting for those with the capacity for controlling or deceiving others, or those victims who would replace their abusers rather than see their torment end.  Some few desperate also worship Lolth as a means of protecting themselves from deception or madness, but the queen of spiders is likely to exact a heavy toll for such protection, if she extends it at all.

Also yeah, no sexy spider goddess art for you folks. Her many-legged majesty may take on a pleasing guise when trying to entice you to do something but when it comes time to throw down you’re going toe to toe with something that exemplifies madness and lies and treachery

Art

[adultswim2021]

Tom Goes to the Mayor #28: “Undercover” | September 11, 2006 – 12:30AM | S02E15

This could be my favorite Tom Goes to the Mayor episode. (sexually) Might it be yours?

I really do think this one reaches new, trial-blazing levels of dumb in a really joyous way. The plot: Tom finds out that there's too much starch in his children's school lunch. Despite the fact that this seems like a pretty open and shut case, the Mayor decides that it's vital that Tom go undercover as a school boy, exerting an incredibly unnecessary amount of effort to do so. Tom has to get his legs shortened and his vocal chords stretched in order to give him the appearance of being a child.

While Tom’s in school as “Wilson Briar”, he manages to become accepted as a cool kid, and bullies his own son (for whom he's ostensibly doing all of this for, to protect him from having too much starch) in order to not blow his cover. He also gets a little girl to develop a crush on him and gets so swept up in his newfound acceptance that he almost does a very top-level democratic donor thing to her before realizing he's an adult man and runs out of the school, screaming.

The wonderful thing about this episode is that the entire thing is built on the faultiest of premises. The whole anti-starch movement stems from a Married News segment, which seems like it's actually part of an infomercial for an unwieldy machine that tests your child’s stool for starch. The pitchman for this is played by Bob Odenkirk and he is harkening back to his Mr. Show days with the SuperPan sketch from season two. Could it be they are going through all this trouble because a huckster is trying to sell starch-testing equipment on TV and they hired the married news team to lend some credibility to the endeavor? The show doesn't really say so, but it seems like that's basically what's going on.

No part of the plan makes sense. The Mayor is portrayed as having a high-level position in the school, with his own office. The Mayor spanks Wilson Briar in his office as though he’s completely forgotten that it’s actually Tom. Also, why can't the Mayor just go into the cafeteria himself and test the food? Why does the machine only test stool and not the food itself? Why can't they just apply common sense and observe that the school is serving foods that are known to be high in starch? What's even so bad about starch? Literally, the only tangible way they demonstrate the way starch can harm you is with a little play with Jan and Wayne Skyler, where Wayne is a doctor informing Jan she has too much starch in her system. She begins sobbing. That's literally the reason they are doing all of this!

The unfortunate thing about this episode is that it isn't terribly user friendly. I had a friend who expressed interest in this episode because she loved both Zach Galifianakis and Michael Cera, who are both guest stars (with Zach reprising his role as the doctor from whatever other episode that was). She also knew Mr. Show and pretended to be a fan of it to placate me. But I remember her watching this, her first episode of Tom Goes to the Mayor and sending me messages over AIM: “I thought this was a cartoon?” (this one starts COLD with the Married News Team and lacks the opening sequence entirely). When it was over she wrote “I don't think I like comedy anymore”. You really do need to see a few episodes of this show before watching this episode.

This one has one of the funniest endings since Porcelain Birds: After Tom runs out of the school screaming (which I remember going crazy laughing at), it cuts to the Mayor calling a meeting at Gullivers, announcing the permanent closures of the school. Then he honors Tom, whose just gone through reheightening and vocal chord normalization surgery. They hang up a banner misidentifying him as TAUMPY TEARRS, which is one of the funniest misspellings of a name I've ever seen in my life. His voice isn't quite back to normal, and his reheightening surgery is just two rickety too-tall wooden stilts placed where his shins should be. They buckle and break under his weight and he tumbles to the ground, we see less-than-a-second of blood spraying out of his leg stumps, cut to credits. Fuck dude, it's so funny. This episode rules.

MAIL BAG

I once saw garry shandling crawling around in some park in LA. I wish I took a picture of it because he died not long after. Wouldn't it be cool to have the final photo of a celebrity? Who would you like to have a final photo of?

I guess JFK but the photo is of him on a toilet with a gun in his mouth, and he’s waving his hand as if to say “don’t take a picture of this!” this would dive conspiracy theorists mad. I guess. If you want a real answer I guess it’d be a picture of Michael Ian Black smiling nicely

[justforbooks]

A gripping ride into the uncanny mirror world of our polarised culture, from the international bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine. What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all? When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger.

Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity - all we have to meet the world - so unstable?To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister. This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass.

It's for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[spectrumed]

8. book

I decided to start writing a book. A novel, it’s going to be fiction. It’s a big project. I dread big projects. I don’t feel as if I am ever able to complete them. It’s going to be left unfinished, why do I even bother? So many projects that I’ve started and never finished. I get an idea, then I can’t make myself do the actual work to make it a reality. Why do I think I can write a book when I can barely read books without becoming distracted and doing something else instead? I give up too easily. But, then again, do I really have it in me to produce something that is good? That people would want to read? Insecurity creeps in, telling me that I will fail. I fear failure. Of course I do, who doesn’t? Whenever people say that their greatest fear is failure, all I wonder is who out there is not afraid of failure? Is there someone out there with so much confidence that they absolutely do not in any way fear failure? Even narcissists technically fear failure, it is what leads them to such ridiculous overcompensation, putting on the facade of bravado to mask their actual dire sense of insecurity. Do not fall for the scams, no person is truly without self-doubt. (Well, I guess maybe psychopaths, but there’s a whole lot of things amiss with them.)

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve entertained myself by coming up with stories, fictional universes that I would populate with characters of my own invention. When I was a kid, what I really wanted was to become a comic book writer and artist. Well, in between other gigs I imagined would suit me, including at one point wanting to be a “singing farmer,” as I put it. Still, I’ve always returned to fiction and storytelling. There’s something about creating a world that lets you so fully distract yourself from all the stressful daily hullabaloo that goes on around you. Escapism, it’s fun, it’s therapeutic, I think. There’s a reason why humans have been telling each other stories for millennia, since even before we lived in houses. Back when we were all huddled around the fire, wearing our best comfortable animal furs, sharing tales of the hunt. Your uncle who once took part in killing a mammoth, the impressive beast nearly gorging him with its big tusks. How clever he was when he noticed that the mammoth had one leg weaker than the others, and used that to his advantage. How the entire hunting party banded together to bring the behemoth down, getting all that meat to feed their families with for months! Stories make you feel good. Like as if you have something to celebrate, even when you might be starving due to the more recent hunts not having gone as well. Damn that saber-tooth tiger that killed your uncle…

Storytelling is linked to acting. Both with acting and with storytelling you have to commit. Whatever you are doing, whatever role you are performing, you have to sell it. You may be on stage talking about that time you went scuba diving with your future wife, and how you encountered an oyster with the most magnificent pearl inside, and how you made a ring for the pearl and used it when you proposed to her. You have to sell it. You have to get the audience laughing, gasping, crying, going “aww,” feeling as if they were there with you that day. Of course, they don’t know it is all just lies. You made it up. It’s all fiction. But you committed, so they won’t ever know. Storytelling is a gift to others, people will appreciate you if you tell good stories, but you’re also kinda deviant. Even if it’s technically based on a true story, you’ve certainly added your embellishments. You’re a trickster, a devious individual. No wonder actors have historically been seen as dubious folks. They come into town, romances all the young women and men, telling them big tales of their lives on the road, and they can’t possibly know if you are telling the truth or not. You may just be lying. You probably are lying. Let’s be honest, you’ve probably not told a single true thing in your life.

I am bad at the hustle. No, I can talk quite well, and I can keep people’s attention for a long while. But I can’t be a huckster. Going out there, putting myself on the line hoping people will swallow my bullshit. I can’t really avoid speaking from my heart when I do speak. Or when I write, as I happen to be doing now. This blog has so far been thoroughly candid in places, in such a way I may come across like I’m at a confessional. Not that I have much evil to confess, but I can’t help but be transparent. I can’t flip into different kinds of personalities, each with its own schemes and plots, being some master manipulator, someone who you can never figure out what they're truly up to, or what they truly want. No, what I am is clearly written on my face. I’ve got one self, and it is the one before you. He’s hairy, and tall, and a bit of a dork. I am happy to talk to you, to engage with you, but I won’t be anyone but myself. I am me. I hope that’ll do.

Of course you are familiar with all those pick-up artists that plagues the internet. Or well, not just the internet. Go into any old-fashioned bookstore (where they store books on paper, not in digital code,) and you are bound to find some sleazy book written by a sleazy guy about how to sleazily seduce women. Those books don’t want you acting like me. According to them, seduction is all about manipulation. To figure out the very right thing to say to get women to fawn all over you. They don’t want you to be sincere, telling the truth as you see it. Nah, you gotta keep that stuff bottled up, deep down inside your soul, because most likely, your true self is ugly. It’s interesting how you can get little details from these pick-up artists depending on the sort of things they say, the tips they provide. The fact that all of them seem to harbour this festering misogyny is no big surprise, but every so often, you get these little glimpses of these people’s true worldview, one where power is everything, true love is a fallacy, and happiness is a lie manufactured by Hollywood to make us all into docile consumers. No wonder the “red-pill” so often leads to people taking the “black-pill.” First hucksters will lure you in, telling you that they’ve got the secret as to how to be a success, then when they’ve got you isolated, they reveal to you how truly misanthropic and bleak their actual beliefs are.

I am fascinated with cults, for much of the same reason why I am fascinated with storytelling. What is a cult leader if not just a great storyteller? They’re something like the modern day shaman, capable of spellbinding people with their weird idiosyncratic way of speaking. High-functioning people with autism are often said to have an idiosyncratic way of speaking. No, I am not suggesting that cult leaders are all somewhere on the spectrum, though it wouldn’t surprise me if some famous cult leaders did turn out to have been on the spectrum. However, for an autistic person to become a cult leader, I think they would have to be a true believer, and not some fraud just looking to scam others. Ultimately, no autistic person would want to surround themselves with people unless they truly do believe it is essential, to like, save mankind from damnation or something. It’s the difference between sincerity and insincerity. It is difficult for autistic people to be insincere, as insincerity requires a lot of social skills that autistic people struggle with. Having to juggle all these balls in the air, making sure you keep the big lie going, that you remember to change your behaviour depending on who you are speaking to in order to keep them from figuring out that you’re a bullshitter. Hollow people are great at being insincere. People like L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the highly profitable cult that is Scientology, was at his core a hollow individual. He had no problems twisting the minds of the people around him, because he never felt a need to be sincere. If an autistic person were to become a cult leader, I can guarantee you that it wouldn’t be a profitable cult. Nah, autistic people aren’t in it for the money, we’re all about keeping it real.

Being a sincere person, surely I should be able to write a novel and make it feel earnest. Like it was delivered with passion, because I wouldn’t be able to write anything that wasn’t true to myself. Well, I do hope so. Having something I’ve made be referred to as genuine is something I see as a great compliment. I’m a student of art history, I’ve made some “serious” art before, I know how terrible art can be when it is not delivered with good faith. Sure, some art is cynical, or ironic, but even then, it tends to come from a real place. Good artists, even when they’re fully armed with the dada mindset, must believe in what they are doing. Whether they are doing it for a laugh or not, that’s irrelevant. Even if all you wish is to be silly and make something that is comical, you have to believe in what you are creating. Or else people won’t bother engaging with it. Why look at a painting by someone who is just interested in making money? Insincere artists do exist, and they can end up becoming quite successful, but ultimately, history won’t be kind to them. Damien Hirst comes to mind, heard he's into NFTs now.

Sure, I don’t like insincere people. Does that make me a bigot? Like, it’s not as if they can help themselves. It’s just who they are, spineless maggots with no soul. It doesn’t mean we have to hate them. No, no, no... I am just generalising. Don’t go thinking there’s just two kinds of people in the world, the sincere and the insincere. It’s not a binary. Most people are both, just like with introverts and extroverts, humans are complex. But there are definitely those that decide to feed into their insincere side, realising that it is often the key to success. Through insincerity, you learn to let go of self-doubt, you stop worrying so much about what others think of you, because you are never truly yourself. If they hate you, then so what? They don’t actually hate you, they just hate a role that you are playing. So what if you seduced that woman, made her feel as if you were the perfect match, then you ghosted her and completely forgot about her? It’s her fault for falling for your tricks. You were clearly just playing the game, being a super-seducer, she should have known better. By embracing insincerity, it’s like gaining a superpower. No longer do you have to care about the impact you have on others, no longer do you have to worry about what it means to be a social human being making choices that affect the others around you. Because you’re not the person they think you are. Actually, you’re not quite sure you’re the person you think you are… Who are you?

I’ve got the plot all laid out in my head for the novel. It’s going to be based in the fantasy world that I’ve been working on for the last few years. I’ve been working on this world for almost half a decade now, come to think of it. Why do I keep feeling as if I am never able to keep to a project, when I’ve clearly been working on a massive project all this time? Sure, it’s all just in my head, but it’s not as if most people have the kind of patience to keep going back to a single big project, even if it is just in their head. Not once, while thinking about my fantasy world have I been distracted and started thinking about cute puppies, instead. And you know how difficult that is. Maybe I am too hard on myself. Maybe I will finish this book, and maybe people will want to read it. Maybe it will even get a minimal number of angry reviews, like, I may get a book published without some folks trying to harass me into committing suicide for daring to think I can write. Some people may even be enthusiastic, blowing up my ego with great praise. Maybe someone will come along and tell me that they want to buy the rights to make my book into a movie or a television series. Maybe I will get rich? Maybe I will get famous! Woo! Success here I come!

Well, no, here I go being insincere. That’s not what it’s about. I should be writing this book because I want to write it. Because I want to prove to myself that I am able to write it. Sure, it’s not as if there’s not a little brain goblin inside my mind whispering sweet nothings about how one day I might turn out a real respected author. One with real fans that gets to do big book tours talking about how brilliant I am, how brilliant my work is, and how brilliant things are going for me. I am not going to pretend I don’t have the same aspirations for success that others have. Inside of me you will find the same greedy piglet of an ego hungry for more adoration and more validation that you will find in any person. Humans don’t know when to quit, we always want more. But I am at least safe knowing that I will never debase myself, descending to the same depths as those inhabited by soulless grifters who go through life abusing the trust of others in order to get by. I’m sincere, in the end. I always turn out sincere, in the end. I am a good boy.

And I am also really sexy. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before on this blog, but I am really, REALLY, sexy. Like, you wouldn’t believe it. Oh, I am so hot. And if you follow and subscribe and hit that bell, I will teach you how you can be just as sexy as I am! And buy my book! And my merch! And my new single! And of course, my new cryptocurrency, by the name of “autism-coin.” It’s going to be a real success on 4chan, let me tell ya!