#i mostly used them to help keep the wadded up paper that bulks up her torso in place

[clanoffelidae]

I don’t have an updated picture of her but I’ve been working on my lab wolf some more. Idk if I ever shared a picture here to begin with so this is her from a while ago. :)

I had to hide her a while back because we had an important tour group coming by, so I stashed her in that little space you can see behind the paper stand (black thing right behind the wolf) and the broken glass box (white box to the left with the bright orange biohazard trash bags). Because I then put paper in said paper stand I no-object-permanence forgot she was there lmao

She’s made entirely of stuff from within the lab, mostly scrap paper that would need to be shredded anyway, some wooden stir sticks we use to agitate samples (we work with serum but sometimes samples have clots we have to agitate so the serum can be separated out since the clot is stuck to the side of the tube and won’t let the serum separate, horses also tend to have fiber clots that basically hold the serum captive and so we squish it out with the stick before centrifuging), some bits of scrap parafilm that would be thrown out otherwise (we order some liquid media that comes parafilmed shut and normally the parafilm would just get trashed, it’s on sterile media so it’s not contaminated or anything, I would NEVER use parafilm that had been on a sample lmao), and tape :)

My bosses don’t mind bc she’s something I work on very scarcely during short incubation periods I don’t have time to do anything productive with, or for a few minutes at the end of the day etc. For instance the test I currently run has some wash cycles where I put the slides in a basin with some PBS and they sit on a plate that automatically moves in a circle to gently wash them for 3 minutes, then I change out the PBS and let it go for another 3 minutes, then change the PBS and it goes for 4 minutes, then I can continue. This happens twice throughout the test and I’ll use these short periods to finish filling out some paperwork if it’s not done, but if it is then like 🤷 whoever’s running the test will usually just sit/stand there waiting to change the PBS so my bosses don’t mind if I work on lab wolf a little bit during those times. She doesn’t take up much space, I know to hide her from higher ups who might disapprove, and is just a fun little thing for me to do to keep myself occupied and I’m clearly enjoying myself so there’s no reason for them to snip at me. I also do some origami out of scrap paper and they’ve told me to de-clutter before when I made too much and I didn’t mind, it was just something to do to keep my hands occupied, so they know I’ll get rid of her if I have to (albeit not without a fair bit of sadness as I’ve put much more work into her than any of the origami 🥲)

And the only things she’s made of that wouldn’t be trashed anyway are some tape and wooden sticks. We throw the sticks out if we accidentally drop them and she’s the only thing I’ve made with them, and she uses about as much tape as we might use to shut two broken glass boxes to send down for autoclaving, and we send down at least half a dozen a week, so it’s not as if I’m repurposing all of our lab supplies for arts and crafts or anything lmao. So no one really minds as long as I’m not working on her excessively, don’t let her get in the way of work, and make sure to hide her/not work on her when an audit or tour group is coming by.

I call her my lab wolf not just because she’s something I work on at the lab but because she can’t LEAVE the lab due to our rules about decontaminating anything that leaves the lab. She wouldn’t be able to be safely decontaminated so she can’t ever leave the lab. In the lab she was born and in the lab she shall die one day. At MOST if we were moving to a new lab location she might be able to be put in a bag, have the outside of that cleaned, and then unpacked once back in the lab, but I could never take her home or anything.

Sadly I never brought my phone in to get a picture of her during her early stages, this is the only picture I have, but she actually has a jointed spine/tail and a rib cage under there for support! Of course, with all the tape/paper/parafilm on top she doesn’t have much range of movement anymore, but her neck/spine/tail is made of small cut pieces of stir stick taped together, and had quite a good range of motion when naked! The rib cage was both to increase her weight at her center of mass to make her more stable, and so that way I had a good base to work with to help make sure her chest was larger than her abdomen. :) You can still feel some of the ribs if you gently push along her chest, and cab faintly see a shadow of one in front of her shoulder there!

She’s definitely not the most anatomically correct or impressive statue out there but she’s just something I’m doing for fun at work during my occasional down moments where I don’t have the time to start anything else, and I love her :)

[revolution-john]

How to Get to Destin

Downtown Hillsong crawled with potential felons on Fridays. The Hillsong County courthouse was a four-story beige brick building where motion hour for criminal cases was held every Friday. That’s where Maddie planned to meet Bone Sommers. Bone practiced law, but everyone knew he didn’t try at it much. He made a run for commonwealth’s attorney about five years ago and lost. After dropping that race to a known liar and embezzler, he went back to his dad’s old scrap yard and had been living there in a trailer ever since. He was smart and under the radar enough that Maddie wanted him for their lawyer if anything started flying from Dollar Bill’s trial and landing on her.

In the past year she had made a dozen or more runs along what the local cops called the The Flamingo Pipeline. A straight shot into Florida and back, two-day turnaround. There were a scary number of doctors in Florida prescribing without care oxycodone, hydrocodone, and Oxycontin. Prescribing any and all kinds of painkillers. Then, like all the rest, Maddie didn’t take long to get greedy. After her Pipeline runs she made regular monthly rounds at four local doctors and two pain clinics in nearby Inez. A side investment. There were a lot of loose ends, loose lips. Any of this could come out during Dollar Bill’s trial and Bone was at least some hope, if he would show up.

It was early afternoon before Maddie saw Bone’s truck pull into the courthouse parking lot. It looked put together with random pieces from his scrapyard, a gray fender wall, a tomato-red tailgate, and Bone looked as poorly thrown together when he popped out from the driver’s side. A short man, his jeans were too long and the heels of his boots had ridden the cuffs frayed against the ground. He was forty-seven and looked sixty, except in the eyes. His eyes were sharp blue under mostly oil-black hair. Wrinkling his face against a shaft of sunlight, he walked slowly, and Maddie seemed to remember he usually moved faster.

“Bone,” she said and nodded. “I’ve seen you move faster. What you been up to, besides making me wait outside a courthouse for two hours?”

“Maddie. Well, honey, I’ve been having a heart attack and not giving two shits, lately. I guess I won’t ask how you been. Not so good, considering you need a lawyer.”

“A heart attack?”  Maddie asked. She was looking in particular at the cigarette pinched in the fingers of his free hand. In the other was a cup of coffee. “When was that?”

��Been just about two weeks now. On my birthday, if you can believe that.”

Maddie pointed to the cigarette.

“Yeah,” Bone said in a way of acknowledgment. “You think it counts as suicide?”  He pulled a four long, hard draws and flicked the stub against the side of the courthouse.

“Not really sure, but late happy birthday.”

 “Ah, to hell with happy birthday,” he said, but was surprised she remembered. That was something.

He lit another cigarette.

“Okay then,” Maddie said. They had moved to the side of the entrance and Bone sat with his legs swinging off the side of the brick wall that lined the sidewalk.

 “I hope it counts as suicide, cause that’s my intention.”  He might have been talking to himself, eyes fixed across the street to a man selling green and red crosses made from beads. “You see that guy? His name’s Simon and he’s deaf and dumb. He hocks them bead crosses for seven bucks. I went by the Dollar General store and bought the same stuff and turns out it only costs about fifty cents to make one, when you figure it all up.”

The man, Simon, always smiled. She had seen him out here a few times. He smiled more in a day than Maddie had smiled in the last ten years. She looked again at Bone’s cigarette. “How many of them you going to smoke before we go in and get this started?”

Bone nodded, took a last drag from his cigarette, and caught up with Maggie. He hadn’t been in a courtroom in twelve years.

 Maddie married badly. Her husband, Shane Younce, was a no count, quick-tempered, spoiled mama’s boy who convinced himself he was a real man by beating Maddie into the hospital about three or four times a year.. Less than three months into the marriage, It was a hard thing to handle sober and so Maddie started buying weed from the car garage just below Hillsong’s public swimming pool. And for a time the weed and the liquor and beer kept her mind just numb enough to deal with Shane and all the hell he brought. But the Younce’s were connected in the little town, and for the very same reason she couldn’t even consider a divorce, she also found it wasn’t difficult to get stronger drugs riding on their good name.

In the first week at the garage, dropping Shane’s name, she connected with Dollar Bill, a mid-level drug dealer who sold in bulk from the back of the garage. He fixed her up with whatever she needed, and for the right price, too. From there it happened fast. One buy led to others and within two months Maddie was driving the Pipeline.

The set up was a good one until an undercover fed got Dollar Bill on audio and hidden camera selling him a Ziplock bag stuffed with pills. First thing Maddie thought to do was call Bone, who was okay with getting some work. She had a few thousand saved back from buy money for her last run that never happened. It really wasn’t her money. Fact of business, she didn’t really know whose money it was, but that wasn’t going to matter if she got sent to prison when Dollar Bill started singing.

The catastrophic possibility of Dollar Bill singing to the feds was what Maddie outlined for Bone outside courtroom B on the second floor, the circuit court level. She waited for what he would say while he shuffled around the water fountain.

“Can’t for the life of me see why they never put chairs or benches or something in the hallways,” he said, squatting beside the fountain.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What about all of this, Bone?  I’ve done handed you a wad of money. What are we going to do?”

“Not much to do while the judge still has court going on.”

She cracked the double doors to the courtroom and saw Judge John Carter Henley up in his high seat. He moved papers back and forth in front of him. Some blonde woman in a power suit was leaning up to talk to him so her calf muscles were nice and round and smooth. It made Maddie sad all over again thinking about her own stick legs and her belly pooch from drinking too much beer. Made her want something to drink right that second.

“I’ll have to sit down with him in chambers,” Bone said. He said his last word as if he were spitting something foul from his mouth.

“I need a drink or something,” Maddie said.

“You and me both.”

Maddie thought back to Bone talking about suicide when he first got there. “And what’s all this stuff about suicide?” she asked. “What the hell, Bone.”

He straightened up against the wall and slid to his feet. The wind escaped his lungs in a gush of air like it had been held captive, a secret from the rest of his body.

“I don’t know, Maddie, honey. I’m just tired is all. It drives me crazy that you probably wouldn’t be dealing with any of this if it wasn’t for that husband you got.”

“You might be right,” Maddie said. “But nobody twisted my arm, either.”

“Well, least you got something to get your blood going, even if it is worrying Dollar Bill Damron’s going to point his finger at you.” Bone’s face went still and serious. “The worse kind of life is one where they just ain’t nothing happening. It’d be nice to just strike out and head to the beach somewhere. Not Myrtle Beach. I mean a real beach. Some place like Destin, that town in Florida. You may even went past it or something on your trips down there.”

“Sonofabitch, I’m dead in the water,” Maddie hissed, more at the wall than to Bone.

The courtroom doors came open and three men tucked sideways past them. Maddie peeked in and saw a lot of movement near the bench. Bone asked the men before they rounded the corner if court was breaking and they told him the judge ordered a fifteen minute recess. He took Maddie’s elbow and leaned into her. When they were clear of the doors into the courtroom, Bone gave out a loud grunt.

“Maddie, honey, I just can’t do this for you. You already paid me, but I have to tell you that going up to the judge before Dollar Bill or whoever even mentions you is pretty much insane, no offense. You’re implicating yourself, understand?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I should’ve told you before now, but I’m in a rough place,” he said.

“You think?” She ran her fingers through her hair. “Jesus, Bone. So what am I supposed to do?”

“Go home,” he said. “I’ll keep my ear to the ground and give you a call tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to go home,” she admitted. “Let’s get something to eat or whatever.”

“Shane makes home not such a great place to be, I guess,” Bone said. “We’ll figure something out. We will.”

He turned the corner and left. The bailiff for courtroom B closed the suite doors and a quiet dropped all around Maddie.

“I don’t want to go home,” she said again in the empty hallway.

 The diagnosis was exactly the same as a month ago. The heart meds weren’t doing what they were supposed to be doing and the right coronary artery had experienced too much trauma from the heart attack. It didn’t help, the doc said, that Bone hadn’t stopped eating red meat, had continued smoking, and drank more now than he had before.

“There’s something else,” Doc Bradley said just before the appointment was over. “Your blood results showed cocaine in your system, Bone. Cocaine. Are you seriously telling me you’re using cocaine?”

“Um, yeah. I snorted a little to see what it was like. Trust me Doc, you don’t really want anything to do with coke. The results are undesirable.” Bone stopped. The look on Doc Bradley’s face was too much. He had forgotten that they blood tested him every appointment. Now the whole visit was going to be about cocaine. “Let’s chalk that one up as post-traumatic stress, what’s say, Doc? I’m just trying to get my head around this thing.”

“You are not terminal, you jack ass,” Doc said. “You’re not the walking dead. It ain’t good, I’ll say that. I won’t bullshit you. But you’re not dead.”

Bone nodded his way out of the appointment, took some ass-chewing, and left the office without having changed his views on anything. He lit a cigarette and reached under the seat and found the pint of vodka. He chased three drinks with some flat Pepsi and left the parking lot driving slow and careful.

The pay lake sat like a shined plate fifty yards or so from Route 670. Bone knew Shane would be there only a short time, fishing for bluegill to rig for bait if his net gave out fishing for cat down at the spillway. There was a window of opportunity, though, and Bone knew how to make the most of a window.

He had borrowed Casey Osborne’s truck, because Casey Osborne didn’t really give two shits if he got deep into anything. He was too far gone on meth and knew eventually he would end up in prison sooner or later. Deep tint, green-maybe-blue-maybe-black paint job, easy to forget with all the other trucks at the lake. Bone parked at the edge of the dirt parking lot and took a quick inventory of who was there. Other than Shane, only three other guys were fishing the lake. He could make that work. Tucking a row of quarters into his palm, Bone made a fist, pulled the ski mask down to his chin, and got out of the truck. Soon as his feet hit dirt, he took a dead run toward Shane. His figured if the three guys noticed who he was, it really didn’t matter. Two reasons: one, he was dying and, two, about everybody sort of wanted to see somebody beat the lights out of Shane Younce’s eyes for how he always treated Maddie.

Shane hardly had time to realize he was in something deep before Bone started popping him in the chest and shoulders and then the thighs. Hooks, jabs, a lot of punches landing everywhere except his head and face. Shane wasn’t a small guy, so he fought back some, but after about five hits to the torso he mostly lay on the ground and took the beating. Bone didn’t stop until Shane threw up, a bright yellow puddle that covered his tackle box. Once that happened, Bone took off in a sprint back to the truck. In the rearview he could see the other guys making their way over to Shane. They were smiling.

 Bone got a phone call from Maddie two days after tracking Shane down at the pay lake. She wanted to talk to him and asked that he come to her mom’s house on Rolling Branch. He saw Maddie first thing when he made it to the end of the long dirt driveway leading to the house. She waved from the porch steps and didn’t move when Bone got out of the car.

“You look more ragged than the last time I saw you,” Maggie said.

Bone sat down beside her. “Well, everything’s still making sense then.”

Maggie laughed, but it was weak and forced. She picked up his right hand and turned it over. His knuckles were skinned and raw.

“Destin,” she said.

“What?”

“Destin. Remember you were talking about heading out for a beach somewhere? Somewhere like Destin. Not Myrtle Beach.”

Bone took a pint bottle of vodka from his jacket pocket and took a long pull. “Absolutely I remember.”

“Be nice wouldn’t it?” Maggie said.

“That’s a fact.” He offered her the bottle. “So Destin. That’s what you called me about?

Maggie took his hand again and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, let me show you something before you finally finish the world’s longest ever suicide.”

Behind the house, the yard fell off in a long grassy slope. When they made it to the edge of that slope, there was another smaller one, soft and sandy, that ran straight to the river. Maggie took small steps down the sand bank and helped Bone until they both stood on flat land at the river’s edge.  

The water was usually a muddy brown, but the full afternoon sun sent flashes of white light across the surface. Maggie sat down, pulled her shoes off, and put her bare feet in the water. Bone watched the dancing light for a few more seconds and then did the same, closing his eyes so the only thing he could hear was a strong, steady current moving farther and farther and farther away.