#i produced this from crayon drawings from when i was five years old

[katiedido2]

Star Watching

So I seem to be inspired to write after I read anything by @willow-salix. I hope you enjoy this snippet of life on Tracy Island with smol kiddos.

John saw Selene having fun with a nephew and wanted his turn.

~~~

The little boy made his way into the lounge on silent, socked feet. He spied his uncle and aunt comfortably snuggled on one of the sofas. He smiled. Daddy had told him it was a clear night and the stars would be easily seen from the lounge's balcony. He looked back to see if either of his parents had noticed he wasn’t asleep. He didn’t see them and, listening intently, didn’t hear them either. Likely, they were involved in getting his older brothers ready for bed. Good. He wanted to stargaze with his uncle by himself. Kip was too restless to sit still, and Alex insisted on bringing paper and crayons to draw with and then bemoaning it was too dark to see the paper. He shook his small head. He loved his brothers fiercely, but sometimes he needed quiet time to just stare at the night sky and think. He knew he’d be able to do that with his Uncle John.

Selene was the first to become aware of the small boy’s presence in the room. She nudged John and whispered, “Ginger, three o’clock.”

John glanced at his wife and subtly peeked over the tip of his tablet. A small, red-headed five-year-old stood huddled next to the side table at the edge of the room. “Three o’clock is the balcony, my love. The ginger is at eleven o’clock.” Selene rolled her eyes.

“Should we acknowledge him?”

John thought for a second. “No. Let’s see what he does.” She nodded, and they returned to their reading, though John kept half an eye on his nephew.

Virgil and Rebecca had three boys. Their eldest, Kip, with his curly black hair and soulful brown eyes, was his father in miniature. Great-grandma Sally gleefully produced baby and childhood photos to confirm it. Alex had been born with his mother’s blond hair and blue eyes. However, by his third birthday, his hair darkened and his resemblance to his Uncle Scott was uncanny. But the resemblance to father and uncle, respectively, was only physical. Kip had inherited his uncle’s Yolo adventurousness and Alex, his father’s cautious, methodical, compassionate soul. They couldn’t have been more different, yet they were inseparable, with Kip dreaming up grand adventures and Alex working out the logistics to make them happen. One was off in the clouds, and the other was calmly grounded. Their mother called them Earth and Sky. Their little brother, however, was of a reserved disposition. 

Virgil’s youngest was a quiet child who enjoyed his own company. A precocious child, he had learned to read at three and proved to be a piano prodigy, like his mother. But space fascinated him, and he loved looking at the night sky. He eagerly absorbed Granpa Jeff’s and his astronaut uncles’ stories about the stars, the solar system and their adventures in space. The ginger hair had been a surprise at first, but since she seemed to be replicating Jeff’s sons, Rebecca had chuckled and said the baby should be called John. Virgil had immediately agreed but asked if they could call him Jack. And Jack Tracy he was.

(When later asked by an eager great-grandmother if there would be more babies, Rebecca had kindly and firmly said no. Since she had reproduced Scott, Virgil and John, then next would surely be a Gordon, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be the one to unleash another Loki-like ray of sunshine on the world. She would leave that honour to Scott or Gordon. Thus far, the two men - and their wives - had produced smart, happy boys who had taken after their mothers.)

Now that he was aware of the small boy’s presence, John was hyper-aware of his movements. He heard small feet quietly, carefully pad down the steps into the sunken lounge and was not surprised to find bright turquoise eyes looking intently at him when he glanced up from his tablet a moment later.

“Hello, Jack.”

“Hi, Uncle Jay.” Jack looked very serious. John hid a smile.

“How may I help you?”

Small ginger eyebrows rose. “Star watch?”

It was Selene’s turn to hide a smile. Jack was as obsessed with space and the night sky as Kip was with flying and Thunderbird One. John smiled at his namesake, set aside his tablet and rose, taking a small hand in his.

“Okay. But do your parents know you’re here?” Jack shook his head. “Well, we’ll have to let them know before we go outside.”

Small shoulders slumped. “They’ll say no.”

“How do you know?”

“Mummy said no, 'cause it was my bedtime.” A pout was added to his downcast expression. John’s lips twitched.

“I’ll ask, and maybe she’ll say yes. Okay?” Jack looked dubious but nodded his head in agreement.

John touched his comms. “Rebecca?”

“Yes, John?” Rebecca’s normally crisp British accent sounded worn and tired. He could hear Virgil talking to the twins in the background.

“It’s a beautifully clear night, and I was thinking of taking Jack outside to star watch.”

“I’m sorry, John, but Jack’s sleep.”

John looked at his nephew. “No, he’s here with me.”

“He’s what?!” Jack huddled closer to his uncle. John could almost see Rebecca’s eyebrows raised in surprise. To the surprise of both gingers, she chuckled. Sighing, she said, “Okay. But only for a half hour, Jack. You’re so cranky if you don’t get enough rest.”

Jack nodded as if his mother could see him. “K, mummy.”

“You two have fun.”

“Thanks, Becca. We will.” John smiled at Jack, scooped him up in his arms and spun him around, the boy's giggle tickling his soul. Smiling, the two headed outside. Selene dimmed the room’s lights and went to the kitchen to make cocoa for the stargazers.

John set Jack on his feet. “Crisscross applesauce?” John nodded and sat with his legs crossed. He patted his thigh, and the little boy settled into what he called his ‘Uncle Jay chair’, reclining against John’s chest, his head neatly tucked under John’s chin.

“What do you recognise from the last time?”

Small fingers pointed to tiny pricks of light in the night sky, confidently naming the stars his uncle had taught him. “That’s Altair…and Vega…and Deneb. They’re the Summer Triangle.”

“Very good.” John pressed a kiss on the little boy’s head, momentarily overwhelmed by how much he loved this small person.

When Virgil and Rebecca learned that it would be unlikely for John and Selene to have children following her accident, they had, in unison, asked the couple to be Jack’s godparents. Since they weren’t a religious family, John had asked what role they were meant to play as godparents. “Love him,” had been Virgil’s response. “Love and care for him if we’re unable to.” And John did. That surprised him the most - how much he loved this child. And his logical mind couldn’t find a reason to help him understand why he loved Jack as much as he did. Why he loved him more than his other nephews. Was it their shared love of the stars and space? Was it because they were both third-born? Was it because they were both quiet and preferred solitary activities? Was it because they were gingers? Was it the way he seemed to trust John implicitly?

John had discussed it with Selene, and she had suggested that he was overthinking it. “There doesn’t have to be a single reason you love Jack. You love him because he’s him.”

“But why do I love him more than the others?”

“Maybe he fills that part of you that longed for a child of our own?”

“Sele-”

“We opened our hearts to the possibility of a child, and it was taken from us.” She wrapped her arms around him. “We’ve accepted we’re a family of two, but that doesn’t mean your heart has completely healed.” She shrugged and looked at him. “Maybe Jack fills the space that was left? ”

“Maybe.” John had kissed his wife, grateful as always that they had found each other.

“Uncle Jay?” The small voice brought him back to the present.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Should I show you the others I remember?”

John hugged the small boy. “Yes, show me what you remember.”

As if sensing his uncle’s disquiet, Jack twisted in John’s lap and kissed him on the cheek. He resettled himself, and clutching one hand in his small one, he pointed out the other stars he remembered. Wrapping an arm around the boy in his lap, John kissed the top of his head as tears filled his eyes. He swallowed, trying to keep them from falling. Selene approached and sat next to him. She set a tray with three cups of cocoa on the ground and looked at her husband.

“Are you okay?”

John nodded, feeling silly for being so emotional. He shifted a little to wrap an arm around his wife. He held both of them close to him.

“John?”

“Uncle Jay?”

John sniffled, kissed Selene and kissed Jack’s temple. “I’m good. I’m better than good. I’m perfect.” Selene wiped away a rogue tear on his cheek. “Jack, do you see that winking star over there?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s named after your grandmother. Let me tell you all about it.”

-fin-

[itsclydebitches]

Discredit Part Three! (Click on each pic for something resembling quality!) 

Part One---contains translations, podfic, and related works---Part Two

Tagging, credit, and transcript all below the cut 💜

First off, people who specifically asked to see more of this nonsense may God in all Her glory bless you accordingly: 

@internet-or-sleep, @just-some-girl-on-the-internet, @readytoocomply, @vocallsama, @fellowshipofthegay, @lucky-leafeon, @alph4centauri, @sumoranges, @diaphanedreams 

Aziraphale’s profile pic is courtesy of good old Neil, found here. All others are from Creative Commons. 

Sorry it took so long to produce more stupidity. YOU ALL ROCK  🎊🎊🎊 Here, have a messy transcript. 

Abdou G. 

Have you ever walked in on a conversation and, despite clearly missing the majority of it, feel like you could reconstruct it, word for word if necessary? That happened at Fell’s today. The ‘talk’ had obviously been going on for a while, but I can give you a perfect summary here: rude fuckboy thinks he gets to say who God is, Fell was having none of it.

Best response? Turn around, walk back to your apartment (pro-tip: this only works if you’re just a few blocks away), and change your shirt. I walked back in with my I MET GOD, SHE’S BLACK tee and had the pleasure of seeing Fell do a double-take.

“Yes, thank you, that’s what I’ve been trying to say!”

***

Doug E. 

Scout’s honor: I once saw that Crowley dude unhinge his jaw and eat a large pizza in one goddamn bite.

Update: you heathens read about this gay abomination with his dislocated jaw and what you decide to question is whether I was acTUALLY A SCOUT? 

***

Mary L. 

I came in with my four-year-old last week fully intending to keep him within sight at all times. Yes, I bought one of those kiddie leashes and no, I don’t regret a thing. You try holding down two jobs as a single mom to the bonefide antichrist. I love my boy, but the devil got to him, telling him things like, “Yes, Freddie, permanent marker would look just great on Mum’s only work jacket!”

I said as much to the owner because this mom needs to vent sometimes.  

I wish I could give this place a higher rating, but the ownership is frankly terrible. Inconsistent hours, no help when you’re trying to find a book, just basically all around bad customer service, BUT it still gets five stars because when I told the guy I was raising the antichrist?

“Oh yes. I did that myself not too long ago!”

We parents need to support one another. Otherwise the world is going to burn. So here’s a good review for you, Mr. Bookshop Guy. A part of me hopes you’re a better dad than you are a bookseller. The other part? The bigger part? It’s very aware that Ms. Pot here just met Mr. Kettle.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Freddie just got into the flour.

***

Alfred B.

I hereby nominate Mr. Fell as the British Steve Irwin. I’ve never seen anyone handle a red bellied black snake like that. I mean yeah, they’re a chill species overall, but there’s a difference between casually handling a snake and fucking chucking one onto the chair because it’s in your way. (Okay. Maybe Irwin was a little nicer.) 

Renee K. 

whos steve irwin?

Alfred B. 

...How old are you?

Renee K. 

15

Alfred B. 

You existed on this planet for two years with him and you dare to ask me this? Go boil your head and then use google. Good god.

***

Mark F. 

overheard the owner telling his boyfriend that last they met his brother tried to set him on fire? and succeeded?? actually now that I think about it, not sure which brother they were talking about---his brother or boyfriend’s brother--but WHOEVER has the brother needs to... i don’t even know. do something about that? ring the police or go to therapy or SOMETHING. i mean maybe they already have, i’m just an eavesdropping tourist, but the idea of someone setting that bow-tie cutie on fire—DID I MENTION THAT? PERSON ARSON. MURDER—makes my blood boil

***

Shiefa N. 

People aren’t joking about overhearing weird conversations here. I walked in on two men (owner and husband? owner and escort?) debating Seven Minutes in Heaven. You know, that stupid kissing game the better looking kids got to play in middle school. It got pretty heated at one point (pun not intended), arguing about whether seven minutes of making out was divine or damning behavior. I hung out long enough to catch the segue into a lust vs. love debate and then had to skedaddle. Nice couple. I support their weird flirting habits.

***

Chang Z. 

Is it legal to visit a store for things other then what it sells? I realize that makes me sound druggie or something but I swear I’m dealing with a much healthier addiction. (Ha. Maybe.) I cosplay (yeah, yeah, move along, trolls) and Mr. Fell has an absolute wealth of historical clothing. It’s astounding! I thought they were particularly detailed costumes at first, but no. I’m majoring in Textile and Apparel Studies. I know a naturally worn piece of fabric when I see it. Mr. Fell is always cracking jokes about how he wore this frock in the 19th century, this shirt in the 17th, oh don’t you just love my old vest? (He has... so many vests...) I indulge him because anyone who lets me borrow this stuff for free deserves all my attention and fake laughter.

Yeah. You read right. Artifacts borrowed for free. He’s even let me alter some of the stuff because I’m not exactly his size. Should this stuff be in a museum somewhere? Probably. Am I calling anyone to take my personal cosplay supply away? Noooope.

***

Leah M. 

Helping to spread the word here because I’m not sure how much foot traffic this place actually gets.

I pass Fell’s every morning on my way to work and yesterday there was a new sign in the window. This might not seem very interesting to most people on here, but you’ve got to understand that Fell’s never changes. None of it. I’ve lived in Soho since I was a boy and this place has always had the same placard with his insane times listed, same stripped paint on the door he’s never gotten around to fixing, same spiderweb in the corner I absolutely swear. My dad used to pop in there when he was in college and I swear he’s taken me through the stacks, points out books that haven’t moved in 30+ years. It’s nuts and more than a little bit impressive.

So you can imagine my shock when I passed by and saw not one, but four new papers in the front window. They’re drawings and I recommend going and taking a look for yourself. I don’t think I can accurately describe the utter chaos of crayons and glitter that’s displayed there, let alone what it’s trying to depict. A dystopia? The end of the world? If so the apocalypse features a surprising number of dogs.

There’s a fifth paper off to the side, written in Fell’s messy penmanship. It just says, “My god-children drew these!” and if that’s not the cutest things you’ve ever heard get out of my face.

***

Gabriel A. 

azirfell

alzaphral

azzzzzirafal

i’m a litttle drunk but azifjkaafha’s place is good he just needs a name easier to spell

***

Aziraphale 

Dear Gabriel A,

My partner Crowley told me about this site and the many lovely well-wishes you all have left us here. I have come to express my thanks and to offer a bit of advice. You are hardly the first person to struggle with my name, dear girl! I recommend the following three step process:

A - simple, yes? + zira - a nickname I’ve adopted over the years, easy enough to recall + phale - this is admittedly more difficult as our ending, “phale,” is neither spelled in a way nor presumed to be pronounced like the “fell” sound we end up with. In truth my name is more along the lines of Azz-ear-raf-AE-el, but change is inevitable and you needn’t hear about that transformation, nor the etymology involved in getting “fell” out of “phale.” I say this not because I don’t wish to teach you, but because my partner has reminded me--in a rather rude tone I should add--that this site has a word limit. Suffice to say you should simply memorize the “phale” portion and you shall be, as the expression goes, in tip top shape!

Best regards,

Aziraphale

P.S. Nothing personal, dear boy, but I fear I’m not terribly fond of your name either. I would highly recommend changing it if you’re ever of a mind to do so. Cheerio!

[picturebookmakers]

Marika Maijala

In this post, Marika talks about ‘Ruusun matka’ (Rosie’s Journey), her wonderfully fresh debut picturebook as an author and illustrator, published in Finland by Etana Editions. She talks openly about her intimate creation process, and the challenges of writing.

Visit Marika Maijala’s website

Marika: When writing this blog post, I am completely stuck in my writing process. I am trying to write a new story, but it keeps escaping me. Actually, even this blog post makes me a bit nervous, because it is a story as well: How did the book turn out the way it did?

Rosie and the race dogs in ‘Rosie’s Journey’ (Etana Editions, 2018)

My first picturebook as an author was ‘Rosie’s Journey’. It’s the story of a race dog, who runs away from the race track to find a place where she can run the way she likes to. Now, as I am struggling with my writing, I have returned to this project often and tried to figure out how I did it. It is hard to reach, as now, looking at it after a couple years have gone by, I only remember chaos, randomness and doubt, exactly the same feelings I am having now. I think I need to go further back to see how it started.

I remember sitting in a book meeting in a publisher’s office a few years back. We were discussing a forthcoming book project. There were two stories on the table, and the publisher asked which would I rather illustrate, this other story, or this one, with two happy dogs? I remember replying immediately: “the one with happy dogs”. The other story got selected, and it turned out to be a great book, but I think that deep inside of me I only want to draw happy dogs. In the end I even made a very stupid story for myself about four dogs driving around in their car. They are happy.

So maybe that’s why the main character in my first authored book is a dog. She just appeared in my sketchbook one day. Here is the first sight of Rosie. She seems happy.

This was a new notebook – an A3 Moleskine I had bought on one Interrail trip in Italy, and I carried it all the way home through Europe; how stupid. Especially as it was still empty after two years. That was a time when I was very tired of my work. I had illustrated children’s books for over a decade, worked with wonderful writers and received nice reviews for my illustrations. But I felt I didn’t really enjoy drawing. I used computer a lot, because I didn’t trust my drawing skills. So I took out this huge notebook and started scribbling, messing around. Drawing badly. Pictures came out. They were bad, but I enjoyed making them.

Around that time, I was selected for a masterclass with some other Finnish illustrators. Our teacher was Kitty Crowther, whom we all admired very much, so this was a special weekend for all of us. January was cold that year in Helsinki, and the course took place in a spooky old house by the sea. We were running on the frozen sea and making all kinds of exercises to free our creation and find our inner stories.

That weekend, I showed my new drawings for the first time to other people and got encouraged by the feedback I received from Kitty and other illustrators. Maybe I really was going in the right direction? We still often talk about this weekend with those artists, and looking back at it now, I think it was an important turning point for many of us. For me it was.

This is one of the drawings I did on the course. I still look at it when I am having a bad day, or I feel lost. Depending on the day, I am either the lion or that person getting eaten by the lion.

More drawings of Rosie started to appear in my notebook. I dared to show them to my publishers Jenni Erkintalo and Réka Király at Etana Editions. They were also encouraging and said that there was a story building up. I think it has always been difficult for me to see value in my work and ideas; this is why having friends and colleagues whom I can trust has been so important. When I doubt, they say just go ahead. I try to do the same for them. Through this whole process I was not alone, and so many decisions concerning the images and the story we made together with Jenni, Réka as well as the editor Kirsikka Myllyrinne, who encouraged me to keep the story very simple.

Here we get to the point where I always struggle: the story. When I was forced, I was able to produce this synopsis for the book:

The story goes: First, Rosie runs at the stadium, then she runs to escape the stadium, and in the end, she runs with friends because she wants to. And at the turning point, she stops. How did this scribble grow into a picturebook with 25 spreads (normally the picturebooks I illustrate have about 12 spreads)?

I think this book grew out of drawing – the joy of drawing. In a way, this is the content of the story as well, to find your own way of being, your own expression. For Rosie it is running, maybe for me it is drawing. And when I found the enjoyment in drawing, I got enough courage to finally write the words too, which so often escape me.

And maybe, in the end, it was just about finding the right tools for drawing. I remember an exercise from Kitty’s course, in which we were drawing, eyes closed, only feeling the paper, and the pen touching the paper. I really love how the crayon feels
 on this particular type of paper. And funnily enough, to approach a visual task through some other sense than vision, helped me to create an image I felt was also interesting to look at.

Drawing in these notebooks was a very physical act: I filled five of them, drawing dozens and dozens of pictures. Also, scanning the images from these books required some patience as they are large, heavy and annoying to handle.

One of my crayon boxes is an old Russian box of chocolates given to me by Finnish writer Hannu Mäkelä. We have made many books together. He is also the creator of my favourite books from childhood: the ‘Herra Huu’ (Mr. Boo) series.

It is quite an exhausting method to search for the story through drawing. I guess I sort of needed to live the story myself, to know how it goes. There are a large amount of drawings that did not end up in the final book. But I think I still needed to draw them.

Life on and under the bridge in a sketch for ‘Rosie’s Journey’. Unpublished.

Rosie makes a leap. Unpublished.

I don’t like to put morals in my stories, because who am I to teach anyone. I would rather let people find their own meanings in the story. Maybe I am more trying to find out about things myself, I have questions in mind, not answers. And some questions get answers during the process, some don’t.

Maybe the questions in this story were: What is it to be happy? What is it to be free? What is keeping us from doing things we love? Why do we hurt, imprison and enslave each other: humans, animals? Can I do something? If I save myself, what happens to the others? What can be discussed in a children’s book?

In the story, I combined my own history and happenings during the past few years with the story of a real rescue dog, Rosie. My friend saved her from a bad place and took her to her home, where she lived peacefully with three other dogs. She was a hound dog, just like Rosie in the book, the most elegant creature I have ever seen. I thought that maybe through my experiences I was able to understand her, that there are feelings, desires, experiences, all living creatures share.

An early sketch for ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

Race depot in ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

This I try to keep in mind when I draw and write children’s books: we share so many things, even with those we think we don’t share anything with at all. In a way I want to stress that, as much as we are and will always be focused on our own little lives, and the ups and downs in them, there are millions of others doing the same thing. And these ups and downs are very precious for those experiencing them. Kindness I also like a lot.

A sketch from my Italy notebook.

I love to watch people and animals doing their things. At the stations, in malls and supermarkets. On the streets and in the parks.

The train station in ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

I love to draw so many details in my illustrations that they often almost steal the story. Or they become the story, which actually I don’t mind. Something I really was fighting against in Rosie’s story as well was its linearity, the basic narrative structure it follows. Maybe I was trying to show options of where the story could go. Or that in a way our stories depend on other stories.

Spring in the city from my second authored picturebook ‘Suden hetki’ (Etana Editions, 2020).

People and animals living their lives in ‘Joulu juksaa’ (Etana Editions, 2019), a Christmas story written by Juha Virta and illustrated by me.

For many of the ‘best’ pictures (in my opinion) in ‘Rosie’s Journey’ I don’t have different/alternate versions. The pictures came out in one moment, with no effort, no planning, no pain. I didn’t want to redraw them; they had everything I wanted in them. In a way, I had made it easy for myself, as the concept of the book is so clear: Rosie is just running through different sceneries and settings; all I needed to do was to draw them. The themes – freedom vs imprisonment – I had in my mind and they can be found in the pictures when you study them.

I said that creating the story was a challenge for me. Still, I guess I know what I like in a story. I wanted it to be a simple story. And I didn’t want there to be any big climax in the end. Rosie just finds two friends and they run together. As simply as it sometimes goes in life. But we made a little change in the way of telling things, when the dogs start to run together. Until this point, Rosie has been running alone through large panoramic scenes, in an undefined time. In this important moment, when the dogs find each other, the story time is slowed down, and cut into a sequence of images, like in a film.

Rosie, Siiri and Iida in ‘Rosie’s Journey’.

In a way ‘Rosie’s Journey’ is a classical coming-of-age story, which pictures the growth of a protagonist to selfhood. I think the story became clear to me only when I made the last image. And it really is the last one in the book (although of this portrait there are at least five different versions). Also, the text on the last page was the last thing I wrote in the book. It came after long discussions with many friends, having gone through some small hardships in life, having tried terribly hard to find the right words, and then they came, immediately when I stopped trying:‘I am Rosie’, says Rosie. — ‘Shall we run again?’

There are so many ways we can express ourselves, and no way is above or below. I guess it depends on each of us which we find most important, or dear, easy or hard. I noticed that for me, when making this book, it was important to utter words as well. At first, we had thought with the publishers that it would be a book without words. But to dare to use words, and to use my own words, felt very important to me. Maybe for me, an essential way to express my thoughts and feelings about this life is to combine words and images. A long time after finishing the book, I found this drawing in my childhood home.

“I am Marika Maijala. I am 4 years old, my sister is 7 years, and my mum 8 years.”

I tried to draw a picture of my writer’s block. I am the tall creature piling heavy stones into the hot air balloon. A little girl asks, “What are you doing?”. I am making an easy thing difficult. Instead of just letting the balloon fly, I fill it with stones. Or, maybe I am making the impossible: I’m going to fly with a balloon that really cannot fly. I guess I can choose.

Illustrations © Marika Maijala. Post edited by dPICTUS.

Buy this picturebook

Ruusun matka / Rosie’s Journey

Marika Maijala

Etana Editions, Finland, 2018

Rosie is a race dog. By day she runs at the track. By night she sits in her little room. One day she doesn’t stop at the end of the track. She jumps over the fence and runs away. Rosie keeps running. Where does she go? A sensitive portrayal of a special journey by award-winning illustrator Marika Maijala. This large-format book is Marika Maijala’s debut picturebook as both author and illustrator.

Finnish: Etana Editions

Swedish: Förlaget

French: Hélium

Spanish: SM

Italian: Clichy

Korean: Munhakdongne

Chinese (Simplified): Gingko/Post Wave

Chinese (Traditional): Pace Books

[arashisenshi]

List 5 things that make you happy. And if you want, share this ask with the last 10 people who reblogged something from you.

Gosh, @sordidgoddess, I have no idea how, but I totally missed the notification for this - sorry! What a great thing to think about!

1. Pets. Fluffy pets. Puppies mostly. I am the kind of person who will totally lose track of what I am saying or what anyone is saying, because a doggy walked past. I will point it out and go all goofy “Puppyyyyy!” like a five year old. I cannot afford a dog, living alone and being away at work a lot, but I am currently very set on adopting a cat, hopefully before the year is over :). 

2. Travel. I love discovering new places, even if I find it hard right now to motivate myself to do much of anything. I also love the carelessness of vacations - no alarm clocks, no deadlines, no obligations, no playing nice with people you don’t care about. No rush to anywhere. Just casually and leisurely discovering a new corner of the world at your own pace and absorbing it through all your senses.

3. Reading. I am super excited for a visit home, mostly because there will not be much else to do than read. I have bought the two volumes of Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer this summer and have not found the right frame of mine to devour them yet, but I have high hopes for December still... Also, I might have called it a guilty pleasure, but I have sort of weaned myself off feeling guilty for my pleasures - I love meself a fluffy m/m romance with a (generous) dash of smut. This past week I finished the last two books in Alexis Hall’s Spires series (books are unrelated to each other, by other than the general love story backdrop - though they touch on other topics, such as depression, grief, BDSM, homophobia, etc. - and the fact that inevitably one of the characters will produce something edible at some point and the recipe is shared at the end of the book :)) ).

4. Colors. Colors make me silly happy. I cannot stop myself buying markers and crayons that see far too little use (should be one of my resolutions, drawing/coloring more, except I gave up resolutions). A couple of days ago, when I got off the train to go to work, I was greated by a glorious rainbow and it plastered a grin on my face for half a day. 

5. As stupid as it sounds, the little marvel of technology that is a smart phone. I am not much of a people person. Real life interactions are tiring and sometimes awkward and far too censored and so easy to get distracted from and more often than not forced or with people to whom I am indifferent or only mildly interested in. But a message from a friend on kik or whatsapp or whatever other social media channel is like a lifeline. Yeah, I am one of those people buried with their nose in their phone on the train. It allows me to keep in touch with people I care about or do things I really enjoy or look at stuff I find pretty, or read, or listen to music, and generally to wrap myself in a bubble of things I like and are me and wear it like a coat.

@bornliar , @lektim , @homeintexas , @therunawaywholived , @ahbaeth - are you up for this? :)

[urdearestmom]

Roachie and Eggie: Dynamic Duo

this is dedicated to @belbys and the anon on her Tumblr! 

ao3 link

“Hey, Eggie.”

Eddie’s eyebrows knit together. “What the fuck did you just call me?” He looked over to see Richie grinning at him over top of the comic book he was reading.

“Eggie.”

Eddie was unimpressed. “So because you can’t get away with any of your other stupid nicknames you come up with an even stupider one.”

Richie sucked in a deep breath and attempted to look hurt. “Well, ah say,” he cried dramatically, “Ah do say, you hurt me, sir!”

“Beep beep, asshole.”

“I can’t believe you don’t remember, Eds.”

Eddie put down his pencil and turned away from his homework. “Remember what? And don’t call me Eds, you know I hate it when you do that,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Richie sat up on his bed, shaking his hair out wildly. “In kindergarten, remember? When we met?”

7 YEARS EARLIER

To say that Richie Tozier was annoying was to say the least, but Eddie Kaspbrak would never admit that he actually didn’t mind the other boy. They were classmates, or as Richie insisted, friends.

There were certain things that Eddie liked about him, such as his glasses because they made him look like a fly and Eddie thought it was funny, and his voice because it could sound different if he made it (most of the time Richie was just loud, but if Eddie got hurt it would get all soft and quiet and it was just about Eddie’s favourite thing about Richie). There were, however, things he didn’t like about Richie: how his hands were always dirty, how his pants always had grass stains no matter which pair he wore, and how he was always trying to get Eddie to play with him in dirty places.

“I can’t play in the grass, I have allergies!” “I can’t play there, it’s dirt!” “The playground is full of germs, I’ll get sick!” “Richieeeeee!”

“Aw, come on, Eds!”

And then, of course, there were the nicknames. Eds. Eddie Spaghetti (that one had happened after their teacher taught them about rhymes). Eds Spagheds. Lord Eddington, even, although that one was rare. It was a total nightmare and Eddie absolutely hated it.

(He didn’t really, but this was one secret he would never let Richie in on.)

One day, during arts and crafts time, their teacher had said that everyone’s task was to draw their family. Eddie had gotten right on it, using a bright pink crayon to draw his mother and a red one to draw himself. He made them holding hands, and over their heads he wrote MOMA and ME in the shaky handwriting only a kindergartener could produce. Next to him, Richie was scribbling at the speed of light, holding his left arm over the page he was drawing on so Eddie couldn’t see his picture. When Eddie was finished, he looked over only to see the other boy staring back at him.

“What?” He asked.

Richie grinned. “I was waiting for you to finish your picture so I could ask you something.”

Eddie’s eyebrows furrowed in curiosity. “What?”

“How do you write your name?”

Eddie could feel a sneeze coming, but he started answering anyway. “E, two Ds-” Here he sneezed, but he continued. “I, E.”

“Okay!” Richie turned back to his paper with a smile and started writing something. When he was finished, he held it up proudly to show Eddie. Eddie frowned. On the paper there were four people: the two taller ones were labelled DADy and MA and were done in orange and purple crayon, and the two smaller ones were labelled ME and EGGIE. They were drawn in green, but ME had some black scribbles across his face that Eddie thought might be Richie’s attempt at drawing his own glasses.

Richie’s face fell at Eddie’s expression. “Don’t you like it, Eddie?”

“You wrote my name wrong. It has two Ds, not two Gs.”

Richie pulled a face and looked at his drawing again. “But you said it had two Gs!”

“I sneezed! It has two Ds!”

Richie pouted. “I’m not gonna fix it ‘cause it’s gonna look ugly.”

“You’re ugly,” Eddie retorted. “Why did you draw me? I’m not your family.”

At that, Richie’s smile returned. “Miss Smith said your family is people you love, so I drew you. You’re my bestest friend, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“Don’t call me that, Richie!”

“What if I call you Eggie instead?”

“No!”

“Eggie! Eggie! Eggie Eggie Eggie!”

“Miss Smith!”

PRESENT DAY

“I still can’t believe you were stupid enough to think that Eddie had two Gs in it.”

“I was five!”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “Doesn’t mean you weren’t a dumbass.”

Richie got up from his bed and opened his closet, rummaging around in it for a bit before popping back out with a box. “I know I still have it in here somewhere.” He started rifling through the box, eventually pulling out a badly folded sheet of paper with a triumphant grin.

Eddie walked over and sat down next to his friend to look at it better. It was indeed the kindergarten drawing of Richie’s “family”. Looking at it and seeing the badly written labels and hastily scribbled crayon all over the page gave Eddie a rush of warmth, and he saw a flash of a five-year-old Richie with flushed cheeks chasing him around the schoolyard of Derry Elementary, giggling the whole time. He was about to speak when Richie interrupted.

“Hey, do you think there’s an alternate universe where you’re named Eggie?”

Eddie gave him a flat look, the nice thing he was about to say immediately shrivelling up on his tongue. “Sure, but in that universe you’re named Roachie.”

Richie slapped his knee as he laughed. “Ladies and gentlemen, Eds Gets Off A Good One!”

“Shut the fuck up, Trashmouth.”

“I can see it now! Roachie and Eggie, dynamic duo, taking comic book stores everywhere by storm!”

“Oh my god.”

“I’m going to start on this right now! We’re gonna be real superheroes, Eds!” Richie surged up from his bed and grabbed a piece of paper and pencil off the desk.

Eddie rolled his eyes. “Your superpower is living without your head. ‘Cause you’re a roach?”

Richie’s eyes widened. “You are so chuckalicious today, Eggie. You must be learning my ways,” he said sagely.

“Whatever you say, Roachie.”

Richie grinned and started writing across the top of the page in big block letters.

THE ADVENTURES OF ROACHIE AND EGGIE: DYNAMIC DUO

[nekumiko]

Colors

Fandom: Daiya no Ace

Genre: Romance

Rated: T

Words: 1,531

Chapters: 1/?

Summary:  She's fascinated with his hair. Just his hair. But Ryousuke finds it invasive, and of course he won't let her off that easily.

Chapter One: That hair is legit

Pink.

It’s the color always filled in last. In her watercolor, oil pastel, colored pencil, and rarely, crayon drawings— the best is always saved for the last. Sometimes, even, pink would be the only color seen, and always in that one specific feature, with the rest of the drawing left uncolored.

It’s not her favorite. In fact, it is so overused, it basically blends into the background. It’s in shop displays, clothes, cell phones, toiletries. More so on girls’ birthdays, and of course, Valentine’s Day.

So, what sparked the partiality?

Pink is usually associated with the female population. And being surrounded all her life by girls who, along with her, have belongings seasoned with pink here and there (even if, for some reason, most would claim they hate pink), she has gotten used to the notion.

So to see it in the sun-beaten, dust-ridden, testosterone-dominated baseball field is, well, intriguing.

A random passerby the brunette had been that day when the sun caught the out-of-place color. She had thought it was someone’s t-shirt that got unfortunately mixed in with the wrong laundry pile (because it was kind of low). But there it had shone in all its glory under the sun—a mop of pink hair.

Hair. A permanent feature of a person.

Person. She’d been staring at a person.

Her new muse.

Well, okay, maybe she hadn’t been just a random passerby. She had to audition for the art club. So she had decided to impress them by trying to master drawing a moving subject. And who could be more perfect than someone from Seidou’s baseball team? (Besides, the female art club members wouldn’t really dislike a bit of fanservice.)

Informed that a practice game within the members of the team would happen that afternoon, she had rushed over and luckily found a nice spot.

That was when that head of cotton candy pink had emerged from the dugout, and since then, she couldn’t look away.

A drawing of him in an almost-perfect double play was produced. She had passed the audition, got in the art club. But she couldn’t move on.

She couldn’t stop drawing.

Weeks had passed. His name, she had learned, was Kominato Ryousuke. A second-year back then (at first, it had surprised her—for very obvious reasons—though she’s not really one to talk).

Now, why pink? Surely it’s just hair dye, but still, why pink? He doesn’t look like someone who’s that hungry for attention.

Weeks turned into a year of near-daily observing and drawing, and she’d hauled home a bag full of papers from her apartment. It’s not all Kominato, though. There’s also the Seidou team—old and new—with a bespectacled young catcher rivaling the amount of drawings she has of the second baseman.

Honestly, she’s not interested in the person. Severe bluntness aside, you’d also never really know if he’s looking at you. That’s pretty scary, right? It’s uncute.

It’s just his oddly beautiful hair that she adores. And now, there’s one more year left to admire it. Just one more year of Kominato filling her sketchbooks.

Somehow, it feels lonely.

And she had to cringe at that. Shake her head. Slap herself thrice.

They’re not even friends.

But it really doesn’t help that just months ago, while gazing out the snowy surroundings from inside the crowded train back home, she had seen that familiar pink reflected in the glass. But as she had turned to get a better look, he already got off the train. Off one station away from hers.

Of course, she wouldn’t go so far as finding out where his house is. The only effort she’d do for him is to go to his games. She won’t even try getting close. Just drawing from a distance is enough.

She has a life apart from Kominato Ryousuke.

Or so she thinks.

The new school year rolls in. Stepping out of the train to Tokyo, she unmistakably sees again a flash of the pink she’d grown accustomed to.

So before she knew it, her feet are hurrying over to him. And like it’s been bottled up in her for so long, she calls out, “Kominato –!“ But then, she misses a step and almost tackles her pink-haired senior to the ground.

Luckily, he had turned to her before she even finished. She falls into his chest, but stays upright because of his hold on her shoulders.

It makes her heart thump loudly in her ears. Not out of excitement. But out of fear. Definitely no lovely, tingly feelings here. Because this is not a romantic encounter. She is in an embarrassing (and crowd-disturbing) situation with Kominato Ryousuke of all people. “I-I’m so sorry, Kominato… -san…?”

She had looked up to see that his cheeks are starting to glow bright red as he slowly releases her. Also…

“Hair…” She absentmindedly stares.

Kominato’s fox-eyes are already too small, so wouldn’t he have difficulty seeing if he covered them with bangs?  “I-I think you’ve got the wrong person.” And he’s got a too-soft voice. No way would Kominato Ryousuke be nice to people who almost knocked him down in a crowded station.

Her eyes widen, processing his words just five or so seconds later. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” She bows apologetically. “I just happen to know someone with the same hair color. Didn’t think it’s a fast-growing trend in hair dyeing.”

“Hair dye?”

“I mean, there’s no way that’s natural, right? Anyway, sorry for bothering you!” She bows again, laughing nervously, and turns to make a run for it. Adrenaline would get her out of there despite her bags’ weights. But, as if suddenly realizing something, she stops. “Although you reacted when I called his name.”

The guy takes a deep breath. “I am Kominato. Kominato Haruichi.” The blush in his cheeks lightens to a rosy pink as he mutters, “Aniki must not have mentioned me to his friends yet.”

“Aniki?”

“Kominato Ryousuke.” He slightly turns his head away. “You mistook me for my older brother.”

A few moments of silence unfold as she blinks back at him. “You mean… natural pink hair is actually a thing?”

Haruichi, she learns, would be a freshman member of Seidou High’s baseball team.

In the short time they had walked together (her apartment is conveniently in the same path as Seidou’s), she could say Haruichi is the polar opposite of his brother. The younger Kominato is sweet and easily flustered, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s like they’re only similar physically.

Both of their eyes are a mystery. While Haruichi has his eyes hidden by his too-long bangs, the older brother has too-small eyes that you’d only probably see if you stand close to him. And who would want to be at such short distance from him? He’s pretty much feared by his underclassmen, maybe even by his peers.

They also have the same height despite the two-year difference. Although she can’t really laugh at that, because the first-year’s even taller than her.

And of course, they both have the same eye-catching, genetically pink hair.

From behind, they look so identical.

First day of school brings her once again to the first floor hallway of Seidou High. Taking her time to get to the stairs leading to the second-year classrooms, she sees him.

“Ha~ru~ichiii!” She grabs his shoulders, expecting a surprised yelp and a cute blush. “Good mor… ning…” She instantly freezes.

“Oh, Stalker-chan! What pose shall I do for you today?”

Slowly, she backs away. “Kominato-san…”

“Ah, so drawing people without their permission isn’t enough for you now? You decided to be a higher level of creep by touching them?”

“I-I didn’t mean to… I only thought you’re…” She gulps and looks away, but glances back with a frown. “And I thought I told you before—!“

“You’re incomprehensible as ever.”

“No, you just cut me off!”

“You’re incapable of completing a decent sentence. It got irritating. Did you think that’s cute?”

“I-I wouldn’t want to be cute for you.”

The senior goes silent.

Unnerved, she looks away again.

Then he continues, “As if I’d see you that way, anyway. When did stalkers even look cute? They’re feared.”

“You’re the scary one.”

He leans in, to which she steps back. He smirks. “Are you actually trembling?”

“No!”

“You’re really loud. Just go to your classroom, creep.” He points behind him, at 1-B’s classroom.

“As if you’re any taller than these first-years.”

“What was that?”

“Did you even grow from your first-year high school height?”

“Have you been watching me even before you got into Seidou? My, how scary.”

“Don’t be so full of yourself.”

“Which reminds me! You seem to know Haruichi already. And you’re close enough now for sneak attacks? He’s only arrived here a few days ago. You’ve become increasingly dangerous by the minute, Stalk~er-chan.”

“It was just coincidence that—“

“Just get off my case, Stalker. Give me a peaceful final school year.”

Pink.

The color of his beautiful hair.

The color of her flustered cheeks whenever she gets to interact – usually in a verbal battle that she loses – with her muse who has hated her guts since the beginning.

Next: Not even an acquaintance, but a nuisance

[thesilverdreamer]

Roger Rabbit and the Ink Machine: Chapter 1

Read on Fanfiction.net here

Read on AO3 here

Summary:  New York City, 1948. Alice Angel has gone missing. The NYPD laughed at the prospect of a Missing Toon Report, and nobody wants anything to do with Toons. Desperate, Joey turns to Eddie Valiant, the Detective Who Works for Toons. A few months out from the Marvin Acme case, Eddie quickly realizes that something funny is going on at Joey Drew Studios, and he aims to find out what.

Characters: Eddie Valiant, Roger Rabbit, Joey Drew, Henry, Bendy, miscellaneous characters from Bendy and the Ink Machine

Rated T for language

From the Case Files of George K. Fowler, Office of Extranormal Affairs

June, 1947: Marvin Acme, acclaimed comedian, industrialist, and the creator of Toontown, is found dead, apparently murdered by one of the very same Toons he had been supporting for almost two decades. Maroon Cartoon’s Roger Rabbit is believed to have killed him in a fit of jealous rage after learning that his wife, Jessica Rabbit, was having an emotional affair with Acme. Detective Eddie Valiant, of Valiant & Valiant, uncovers the truth: Judge Doom of the Los Angeles Circuit killed Acme and framed Roger to gain control of Toontown. Acme’s will is found, bequeathing Toontown to the Toons. Valiant begins helping Toons again after several years’ lapse, and Roger Rabbit signs a contract with Walt Disney Productions to have his own cartoon.

New York City, 1948

Joey Drew was either out of his mind or an idiot to fly a detective from LA to New York. Eddie Valiant wasn’t complaining, his plane ticket, lodging, and time were being paid for in advance by Drew Studios, plus the job itself. (Alright, so he was complaining a little, but odds were good that this would be a simple missing toon case the NYPD wasn’t taking seriously, worse case scenario he got to see the Statue of Liberty. He was, after, all, the shmuck who agreed to come out here.)

Drew Studios was smack dab in Manhattan, at Broadway and 3rd Avenue. The building was unimpressive, but apparently it had several basement floors. Joey Drew had a reputation for being a little peculiar, even for a man who worked in cartoons. The front face of the building was dominated by a colorful sign reading, ‘JOEY DREW STUDIOS.’

Eddie breathed a long-suffering sigh, hefted his travel bag over his shoulder, and pushed through the revolving door.

The studio was alive with the sound of creators at work, and it almost sounded like home. The entrance hall had posters all the way down showing some of the characters in Drew Studios’ cartoons. Boris the Wolf (less villainous, more hungry), the Butcher Gang (a recurring group of bad guys made up of Charley, Barley, and Edgar), Alice Angel (her mediocre debut was followed up by the fantastic ‘Hell or High Water’ and her popularity exploded), and of course, studio mascot Bendy the Dancing Demon. Bendy was the big star, and had been ever since Drew Studios started getting some recognition back in ’35.

The hall opened into a lobby, and an inter-office courier nearly ran into Eddie, gave a half-hearted apology, and kept on going. There were a couple of young men bickering off to the side, and a projector played an old Bendy cartoon on a screen at the back wall.

A woman wearing a knee-length checkered skirt and red lipstick approached Eddie as he took the scene in. “Can I help you, sir?” she said. She had a distinct Jersey accent.

“Yeah, uh, I’ve got a meeting with Mr. Drew?” he said. The secretary, probably, consulted her clipboard and asked for his name. “Valiant.”

“Hm, I’m not seeing—”

A sharp whistle cut across the lobby, and a man who definitely wasn’t Joey Drew but still seemed kind of familiar strode across the room, up to Eddie and the secretary. “It’s fine, Sherry, we’re expecting Mr. Valiant,” he said. He was distinctly short, white, and slim. He looked young, without a trace of gray in his hair, and had a very thin pencil mustache. He was dressed professionally, but his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his tie was thrown over his shoulder to keep it clean. There were dark spots under his eyes.

“Alright, Mr. Hoskins,” Sherry said, and quietly made a gesture like adjusting her collar; he picked up on her meaning and quickly sorted out his tie.

Sherry fluttered away, her heels clicking on the wood floor, and Eddie forced himself to look in any other direction. “So, uh, Mr. Hoskins?”

“Please, just call me Henry.” Henry Hoskins, now that was a name that Eddie recognized from his research. Cofounder of Drew Studios, head animator for what little traditional animation they still produced. Despite his significance in the studio’s history, he stayed out of the public eye, especially compared to Drew. “Pleasure, Mr. Valiant, I’m the lead artist here.” Henry held out his hand for Eddie to shake.

‘Lead artist’ was a roundabout way of alluding to Henry’s bigger role; he was one of those rare gifted people who possessed the power to literally bring their art to life. Some called them, ‘Old Men,’ after Disney’s Nine Old Men, who had that power to a man.

Eddie shook Henry’s hand. “Eddie Valiant.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s many people in this industry who haven’t heard of you after last summer,” Henry said.

“You’d be surprised.”

“Well, at any rate, I’d like to talk somewhere a little more private. We’re trying to keep things quiet as long as possible.”

He led Eddie down the left wing to what was presumably Henry’s office, surprisingly small for one of the studio’s founders. There was an ordinary desk and chair, along with a light table that had been in use recently. He probably didn’t have people in his office very often, judging by how the desk and chairs were piled high with papers. As Henry moved a heavy-looking binder off of a chair, Eddie looked around a little.

Framed art covered the walls, but especially over the light table. There were character model sheets, concept art, a few posters. Some photographs had been pinned up. There was one of Henry and another man, at least a few years younger. Another was clearly a wedding portrait, showing Henry and a pretty woman with dark hair. Eddie checked surreptitiously to confirm that yes, Henry was wearing a wedding band.

Then there was another photo, this one of a little girl who couldn’t have been older than five, and right next to that photo was a child’s drawing of Bendy done in crayon.

“Your daughter?” Eddie said.

Henry swung his head around to see what Eddie was referring to, and broke into a smile. “Yeah, my little girl. Beth just turned six. Do you have any children, Mr. Valiant?”

Eddie shook his head emphatically. “No, no no, that life ain’t for me.”

“Well, it isn’t easy, I’ll say that much, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Then again, if even half of what the papers say is true, you’ve taken on some work far more difficult than raising a child.” Henry threw his hands up as the mess defeated him. “Bah. I’m sorry Joey didn’t come meet you himself, he’s scatter-brained at the best of times. I—what in the world is that noise?”

There was some kind of rustling noise coming from the coat closet. Eddie was closer, so he pulled the door open, and a puny cartoon devil came tumbling out, dramatically gasping for air.

“I thought I was a goner!” Bendy wheezed. “It smells like a sewer in there!”

“Bendy!” Henry snapped, but he didn’t look all that bothered by it, smiling as he spoke. “How long have you been in there?”

“Uh…what day is it?”

“Same as when I saw you this morning. Why aren’t you on set?”

“Cause they’re still cleanin’ up after the last take,” Bendy drawled, dropping all of the wheezing he had affected. It was a gag, between Toon and creator, maybe not exactly that situation but the format of Bendy cracking wise while Henry was the straight man was nothing new. Not for the first time Eddie reflected on just how weird artists were.

“So, this the flatfoot who’s gonna find Alice?” Bendy said, turning his attention to Eddie and sizing him up.

“I hope so,” Henry said. “Mr. Valiant, Bendy. Bendy, Eddie Valiant.”

“Hmph,” Bendy grunted, and Eddie’s response was more or less the same. He was way too used to being around Toons.

“So, Alice Angel?” Eddie said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Henry said, sobering. “Alice has been missing for a little over a week. The last time anyone saw her was the Friday before last. Joey tried to report her missing, but New York’s Finest laughed at him.” The sarcasm was practically dripping off of Henry. Bendy murmured something about, “@#&%ing pigs,” with the sound of a bike horn. Definitely a New Yorker.

“No surprise there,” Eddie said. He held up his box of cigarettes. “Alright if I smoke?”

“Sorry, I’d prefer if you didn’t,” Henry said. Eddie nodded and quietly pocketed the box. “We tried searching for her ourselves, but everyone here is so busy with work. There’s been some calls to PI’s in the area, but they didn’t want anything to do with Toons. If I’m being honest, as much as I trust Joey, I objected when he wanted to hire you, Mr. Valiant, but I think he’s panicking.”

“Well, if we’re being honest, I thought it was a little funny myself. As for your little starlet…” Eddie set his jaw. “She wouldn’t be the first to go running off into the city for a good time, but she doesn’t seem like the type. Anybody check her place?”

“Hm?” Henry blinked. “Oh, no, Alice lives here in the studio, along with Bendy and Boris.”

Well that explained some of the expansions, dorms for the Toons. It was practically unknown in Hollywood since Toontown was brought to life, and even before then it was uncommon for studios to have private housing for their ink-based stars. Toons weren’t treated well in general, but there was still some acknowledgement that they were people, human-like, and wanted to be treated like adults. Unless it was funny, of course. Hell, even Roger—

“ACHOO!”

The room went very still, as that had definitely not been either of the humans who had sneezed comically loudly, and Bendy wasn’t trying to use Henry’s shirt as a handkerchief, and also the sneeze had come from Eddie’s travel bag.

“I, uh, think your bag might have a cold,” Bendy drawled.

Eddie could feel his blood pressure rising. He dropped his bag unceremoniously to the floor, and the impact was accompanied by a yelp. Eddie roughly unzipped the bag, reached in to the elbow, and yanked out a Toon rabbit by the straps of his red overalls, wriggling as he tried to get free. “Oh, boy, is it stuffy in there! My ears were burning, was somebody talkin’ about me?”

“Roger!” Eddie snapped, as he lifted Roger Rabbit up so he could look him in the eyes. “What’re you doing here?”

Roger rambled, oblivious to Eddie’s frustration. “Well, I heard you were going to New York, and I’ve always wanted to go to New York, so I thought, why not go see New York with my best pal? Then we can solve a case together, just like the good ol’ days!”

“’The good ol’ days?’ You mean last summer, when you were framed for murdering Marvin Acme and almost got the both of us killed?”

“Yeah, just like then!” Roger said earnestly.

Eddie closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and dropped Roger so he could rub his temples. Bendy looked excited, which couldn’t be good, and Henry was laughing. “Do I even want to know what you did with my spare clothes?” Eddie snapped.

Meanwhile, a ten-year-old girl in Albuquerque was very confused when she unpacked her suitcase and found a pair of men’s boxers with hearts printed on them.

“Pu-bu-bu-bu-robably not!” Roger trilled, and darted away from Eddie to avoid retaliation.

Roger stopped in front of Bendy and gasped dramatically. “Oh, boy! I never thought I’d get to meet Bendy, I just saw the last cartoon you were in! Oh, the artistry! The drama! The tragedy! It was inspired!” Roger cried, swooning.

Bendy was all too eagerly soaking up the praise. “Well, you ain’t too bad yaself, Rabbit. Put ‘er there, pal,” Bendy said. Roger happily shook his hand, and even as Roger was viciously zapped by Bendy’s joy buzzer, he shook Bendy’s hand so strongly that the little devil was lifted up off his feet and shaken up and down. By the time they were finished, Roger’s fur was singed and Bendy was dizzy and a droplet of ink fell from the edge of his widow’s peak like sweat.

“Toons,” Eddie said gruffly.

“Toons,” Henry said cheerfully.

Artists.

A knock came at the door, and a blonde kid pushed it open. “Henry, you’re needed on the sound stage. And have you seen—oh, Bendy’s right here, perfect. You should know, Mr. Drew is getting anxious.”

“Yes, yes, I’ll be right there,” Henry said. “Do you mind coming downstairs, Mr. Valiant? Knowing Joey, if he doesn’t see you with his own eyes he’ll end up keeping you waiting a while.”

Eddie just gestured for Henry to lead the way.

There was a lift to the lower floors, Henry explained, but the sound stage was only one floor down. The stairs were easier. Bendy hopped up on Henry’s shoulder and Henry didn’t even blink; Roger saw this, looked at Eddie hopefully, and Eddie ignored him.

All things considered, the studio was nothing special compared to the kinds of setups you saw in LA, but you wouldn’t know it from the way Henry spoke proudly about starting the studio with Joey Drew, creating Bendy and building the studio into a strong contender, expanding the staff to a fair size, if smaller than some other studios of the same age—coming up on fifteen years.

There was one weird thing, though.

“What’s with the pipes?” Eddie said, of the clear plexiglass pipes carrying a trickle of some dark black substance. The pipes seemed to run (and drip) everywhere in the building, from the lobby to the offices to the stairwells.

Henry didn’t even need to look to know what Eddie was talking about. “Much like your being here, a result of Joey panicking. I’m still not all that sure about it myself, I was a little distracted with a newborn, but I have my suspicions. Around that time, before Bendy became real, the studio was having some trouble. We couldn’t really keep up with the larger studios out west. I’m thinking Joey got pulled in by a conman, he was desperate but it could happen to anyone—”

Bendy cut in when it was clear Henry was going to keep rambling and making excuses. “Joey wanted to try and use some hunk-a-junk ‘Old Man-in-a-Can’ to try and make me real. Not to, uh, doubt him? But let’s just say I’m real glad Henry pulled it off before the machine ever got off the ground.”

Eddie made a sour face. “Hold on, hold on, he tried to build a machine to make Toons?”

“Well, yes,” Henry said, wincing. “Don’t get me wrong, Joey’s my best friend, but he can be a little…”

“Short-sighted. Impulsive. Dumb as a box of rocks,” Bendy said.

“Anyways! It was a mess from the beginning, but it never would have worked, Joey’s Ink Machine,” Henry said. “I saw the blueprints once, most of the writing was some nonsense scribbles. He’s embarrassed by it, really. But it’d be expensive and messy to take it all apart, it’s just been left as it is.”

“A monument to stupidity,” Bendy quipped, and Henry shook his head.

Joey Drew was even more of an eccentric than rumor claimed, then. Bringing Toons to life without needing an Old Man? He wasn’t the first person to try, but there was a reason that studios still employed Old Men. The attempts ended in spectacular failure, and the failures were well-publicized. From what Eddie knew, nobody had really tried to do it in at least ten years. The general conclusion was that it was impossible to replicate an Old Man’s power. Joey must have been really desperate.

The sound stage on B1 was a raucous mess of people moving back and forth trying to get their jobs done. Above the sound crew setting up and testing mics, above artists organizing work, above the cleanup crew getting out of the way, a man’s booming voice dominated the room. “Somebody shut off that fan! I want that playback ready to go on cue this time! And where is Bendy?”

Crew moved aside as somebody pushed their way through, and there was a man Eddie recognized from his picture in the papers, looking a little red in the face from exertion and the stage lights. Joey Drew was a white man standing at about six foot tall, built sturdy. His facial hair was grown out and a little unkempt, and already light hair was shot through with gray. He had clever eyes and laugh lines.

“Finally!” Joey declared. His voice was deep and booming, filling the space he was in. He pointed a finger at Bendy as though in accusation. “Just where did you run off to? After everything that’s happened, I would think you—”

Henry grabbed Joey’s hand and forced it down. “Give it a rest, Joey. He was upstairs in my office, meeting Mr. Valiant.”

“Wait, Valiant?” Joey said, and for the first time he looked at Eddie. His face was starting to return to a healthier pallor. “Mr. Valiant!” Joey exclaimed, with no small amount of relief, and he laughed. “Goodness, I didn’t expect you here so early!” It was almost four in the afternoon. “Oh, but it is wonderful to meet you in person, put ‘er there.”

They shook hands, and Joey’s grip was firm. “Mr. Valiant, please do forgive me, but could I have just one minute and then we can go back upstairs.”

Eddie waved him along. Joey pulled Henry and Buddy up towards the sound stage, clapping Henry on the back and they chatted amiably as they went out of sight. Eddie took a few steps off to the side to lean against a wall in a mostly unoccupied corner. A janitor in denim coveralls was leaning over a trash can, rooting around in the garbage.

“Lose something?”

The janitor jumped and hit his head on the edge of the trash can and stood up straight massaging the bump. He was a young black man, in his early twenties at best. “Nope, didn’t lose nothing! I was just, uh…” He had a strong Brooklyn accent. “Definitely did not lose my keys, nosiree…”

“Don’t worry about it, kid, no skin off my nose,” Eddie said, and then he rethought it. “Just one question, though, how long have you been missing your keys?”

The janitor, his name tag said Wally, looked at Eddie funny. “Uh, I had them an hour ago? But thanks, anyways. Oh, hell, I’m outta here,” Wally said suddenly, and darted away as Joey returned.

Joey had his attention split as he opened a small vial. It looked a little like something Eddie’s girl Dolores had ordered out of the Sears catalog, some oil that was supposed to relieve stress but mostly the strong smell just gave Eddie a headache. Running a cartoon studio, though, Joey probably needed all the stress relief he could get.

Joey sniffed the contents of the vial and made a face. “Blast it, I think it’s gone bad. Mr. Valiant, does this smell like lemon to you?” Joey said as he suddenly shoved the vial in Eddie’s face. Eddie reflexively pushed it away but not fast enough to avoid catching a whiff of something that was not lemon, but smelled a lot like eggs that had been rotting for months. Eddie turned away to cough and retch.

“What the hell?” Eddie spat as Joey was laughing. Roger came closer to investigate, caught the scent directly, turned green, and dropped to the floor stiff as a board clutching a drooping flower between his hands.

“Ha-ha! Oh, dear, I just couldn’t resist!” Joey said as he wiped his eyes, tearing up from laughing so hard at Eddie. Eddie just scowled at him. “Oh, don’t be like that, Mr. Valiant, it was just a joke.” He corked the vial and replaced it in his coat pocket. The smell was still present, but Joey seemed unperturbed. He tapped a finger on the side of his nose. “Can’t smell a thing, never been able to, makes the gag just a little more convincing.”

“Yeah, well, right now I’m wishing I couldn’t smell.” Eddie really had regained his sense of humor since the Acme case, but that didn’t mean he had the patience for some guy who thought that Acme Brand Stink SyrupTM was a replacement for an actual joke.

“Oh, for the love of, I’m sorry, alright? It won’t happen again,” Joey said, and to his credit he sounded pretty genuine.

“Right, well, I’d like to get to work, if you’re done playing pranks.”

“Now hold your horses, Mr. Valiant, there’s no need to be hasty. A minute one way or the other won’t make much of a difference.”

Eddie begged to differ, but made himself shut up and stay put. It was hard when Roger was standing behind Joey waggling his finger and making faces.

“There we go. Now, Mr. Valiant, tell me, have you ever seen an Old Man use their power?”

“You kiddin’? I’m from LA, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an Old Man.”

Joey pouted at him. “Well, I personally never get tired of watching.” He turned back toward the sound stage.

The crew was settling and clearing the space, and on the sound stage Henry was with an assistant artist on one side and the director on the other, looking over a drawing done by the assistant with Henry’s guidance and input.

There were no bright colors or auditory cues when an Old Man went to work. There was just an invisible shift in the air, like the way light passing through a gap in the curtains moved across the wall. And as Henry’s eyes passed over the empty space, the image in the drawing was reproduced in three dimensions. The floor became a city street, the back wall, a store front. A couple of lamp posts, a manhole cover, the sidewalk, all of it rounded and polished and matching the style of Drew Studios’ cartoons.

So there was still some wonder at seeing drawings come to life. Everybody was watching quietly, but nobody seemed quite as happy as Henry, even after using his power so many times. It was never mundane to him, how could it be?

As it was drawn by another artist, the set would only last a couple of hours before turning to dust. Only if Henry drew it himself would it be permanent. Nobody quite knew how that power worked, but there was a consistent set of rules to how it could be used.

When the set was completed, Henry was perspiring and grinning. The page in his hand had started spontaneously leaking ink from the center out, and by the time he was done it was soaked through with black ink.

Henry took a step back, and like that, the spell was broken, and everybody went straight back to work.

Joey clapped a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, and Eddie jumped. “Alright, then, let’s get to business.”

Joey’s office was three times the size of Henry’s, significantly more organized, with significantly fewer personal touches. The left wall had a bookshelf mostly filled with knick-knacks, and the right wall had a couple of newspaper clippings, a magazine cover, and a poster for the Butcher Gang. It was a little chilly, the vent was wide open. Eddie made Roger wait outside the office, which carried its own risks, but it was at least a calculated one.

“So, Henry already told you what’s happened?” Joey said as he stepped behind his desk.

“More or less. You want me to find Alice.”

“That’s exactly right, Mr. Valiant. It’s been madness this past week, I’m at my wit’s end. Speaking of, I really am sorry about the state I was in when you first came downstairs, it’s just been…difficult,” Joey said. “We’re all so worried about her, the police only mocked me, and I shudder to imagine what could have happened to her.”

“Mm-hm,. You gotta understand, Mr. Drew, you’re not giving me a lot to work off of here, and I can’t guarantee I’m gonna find her. It’s not easy to hurt a Toon, but it ain’t hard for a smart Toon to make themselves disappear.”

Joey shook his head. “I hope she isn’t hurt, but even if she did run away, she couldn’t possibly have done it without help.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Just what I said. Alice, and Bendy and Boris as well, they’re all clever, but not particularly, what’s the word, worldly. They don’t really leave the studio very often, and when they do they usually have a chaperone, either myself or Henry.”

Eddie squinted at him. “No offense, Drew, but that’s a little funny to keep Toons locked up in a studio.”

“Not locked up, goodness!” You make it sound like they’re here against their wills!” Joey said, visibly appalled. “But, Mr. Valiant, this isn’t Los Angeles. There isn’t a haven like Toontown here in New York, but people aren’t any kinder to Toons here than they are in California. Do you recall Fleisher Studios?”

“Sure I know ‘em. Hell, my brother and I worked for ‘em once back in the day. They, uh…” Eddie frowned as he recalled the details. Had to be spring of ’42, Fleischer Studios was going defunct. The case wasn’t actually for Max Fleischer, Valiant & Valiant were hired by Betty Boop and Bingo after the couple moved to California along with some other Fleischer Bros. Toons.

Eddie wet his lips. “Right. The stalker.”

Now it was coming back to him. Betty had a stalker who had been harassing her for some six months. The creep wasn’t subtle about it, but he was a human and she was a Toon, so the NYPD would not do a think about it, and the stalker even followed Betty and Bingo all the way across the country. They had been afraid he might try to hurt one or both of them, so Teddy got Betty and Bingo safely to Toontown while Eddie waited at the motel room and gave the stalker the scare of his life. The involvement of Valiant & Valiant did not make the papers, but word of mouth still spread the story among the Toons.

“Alright, I get what you mean.”

“Thank you, Mr. Valiant,” Joey said, relaxing a little and smiling gratefully. “It’s incidents just like that one that make me fear for the safety of my Toons. They haven’t expressed any interest in living somewhere else, so I’m only too happy to let them have a home here.”

Persuasive guy, Eddie thought. “So, whether she left of her own will or not, somebody else had to be involved. That’s definitely something to look into. Still can’t guarantee anything, but I can do some digging.”

“Fantastic,” Joey said, flashing a big grin. “About your compensation, I admit that this work is a little nebulous and the time frame is going to be uncertain.”

“At least a couple days.”

“I thought as much. We’ll stick with the daily rate we agreed upon plus expenses, yes? You do have a reputation for results, and for being a man of strong morals, so I think I can trust that you won’t sit back and do nothing.”

This was already going better than Eddie feared it would. “That sounds damn fair, Mr. Drew.”

And they shook on the agreement.

“So Alice lives here in the studio, but does she have any friends outside of it?”

“Ah, I wouldn’t know, I speak with her less than I would like,” Joey said, as he went to write out a check for the first day of work.

“Then who would know?”

“Well, Henry is certainly closest with the Toons,” Joey said. “But he’s a tad busy at the moment, and rather worn out. Otherwise, she spends quite a bit of time around our Music Director, Sammy Lawrence. You’re welcome to speak to him, the lift can take you down to level B4. I only ask that you avoid going into sound stage while it is in use. Level C is under construction but the button on the lift is disabled anyways. And there is one room on this level you will pass on the way to the lift, it’s boarded up, but that is the site of a, eh, project that didn’t work out.”

“The Ink Machine?”

Joey’s lip curled. “So, Henry told you about that, did he? Wonderful. Nevertheless, I recommend staying clear. And that goes double for Roger. The last thing I need is Disney on me, on top of everything else.”

That, at least, Eddie could understand.

When Eddie went to leave, he was relieved to find Roger was just where he left him, now chatting with that same janitor from downstairs. Wally wasn’t doing his job in the slightest, but was leaning on his mop with the bucket left right where somebody could step in it.

“Wally! Perfect timing!” Joey boomed, and Wally nearly fell over in surprise, stood upright, and grinned. “You can show Mr. Valiant—”

“Show him the door! On it, boss!” Wally said, dropping his mop and pushing his sleeves up.

“Show him the lift, Wally!” Joey interjected.

“Show him the lift! On it, boss!” Wally said in the same tone, fixing his sleeves and adjusting his cap.

Joey clapped his hands together. “Well, Mr. Valiant, on behalf of every one of my employees, I wish you could luck. I believe in you, Eddie, and with the power of belief, nothing is impossible.” He was beaming, and there was a twinkle in his eye.

Eddie nodded and touched the brim of his hat. “Let’s get going, Roger.”

The door closed loudly behind them.

“So, you find your keys?” Eddie said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah!” Wally said, and kept on walking as he fished out a keyring and jangled it. Roger was intensely fascinated by the keys. “And now I get why you were so curious about when I lost ‘em, if they’d been lost a while somebody might’ve used them to break in.”

“Smart kid,” Eddie said dryly. It really had been his concern.

“Don’t think it’s that much. Aw, geez, Eddie Valiant. My aunt’s wild about that true crime stuff. Uh! Not that I’m gonna mention anything about it until after you’re done,” Wally added quickly. Again, smarter than some of the people Eddie had worked for in the past. “You are here to find Alice, right? She’s quite a gal, just hope she’s alright.”

Wally took Eddie down a hall, past administrative offices, and down a small flight of stairs to a break room. In the back corner was the lift Joey told him about.

“Hey, so, I couldn’t help but overhear a little,” Wally said. “You’re gonna go talk to Mr. Lawrence?”

“’Overheard,’ huh?” Eddie said doubtfully. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Can I give you a piece of advice?” Wally crossed his arms and slouched. “Sammy’s pretty much always angry at everybody, and it’s easy to cheese him off. He’s just damn good at makin’ music so everybody puts up with him. But, if you want to start out on his good side, offer him a cigarette. He’ll probably turn you down, but he’ll be a little easier to talk to.”

And that was why you were polite to the janitors: they had the dirt on everyone. “Offer him a cigarette, huh? I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks, kid.”

“Yeah, well, no problem, Mr. Valiant,” Wally said. He held out his hand. Eddie frowned, but he shook the proffered hand. “Good luck finding Alice.”

“…Yeah.”

Weird kid, but Eddie had met weirder in just the last hour. Eddie pushed his hands into his pockets.

The lift was a little rickety and very slow, but better than too fast. Eddie pulled the grate shut, and Roger insisted on pushing the button, but at least he didn’t push all the buttons.

As the lift slowly descended, Eddie lit a cigarette. He set his jaw, and noticed Roger looking at him eagerly. “What?”

“I know that face, that’s the Eddie Valiant Thinkin’ Face!”

The worst part was that Roger wasn’t wrong. He really had been thinking.

Eddie tapped his cigarette and said, “You ever see an Old Man work, Roger?”

Roger perked up. “Oh, sure plenty of times! Not as much at Disney, but at Maroon Cartoons, all the time!”

“So, you know what it looks like and you saw when Henry made the set a bit ago. You notice anything weird about it?”

“Huh, weird?” Roger said, and he tapped his chin in thought. “Well, now that you mention it…” He tilted his head to the side. “I ain’t never seen an animator get so tired after Old-Manning. It’s usually easy for ‘em, right? But Henry looked like he was gonna pass out by the end of it.”

Ignoring the interesting turn of phrase, Eddie nodded. “What else?”

“Uh, oh, yeah, and the paper he was using!” Roger exclaimed. “It got all gross and inky, made a whole big mess! I’ve never seen anything like that happen before?”

“Me neither. I already felt like something was up, but now I’m sure of it.” Eddie pulled out the paper that Wally had quietly given him while they shook hands and held the note up to Roger. “Something stinks at this studio.”

Written in a heavy hand were the words:

DON’T TRUST JOEY DREW

[iconicstyles]

Nanny Wanted Chap 2

Yay! Part 2 to Nanny Wanted. I have to say I’m surprised how well this has been received. Thank you so much for the love and I hope you enjoy this new part

Turns out hiring a nanny had been the best thing Harry had done in years. Not only did Grayson love having her around but Harry was able to start recording again. Over the years he had written songs for other artists, sure, but it was different writing his own music. All of his emotions were put into the songs, most of them came from his own personal experience. He had journals full of lyrics and he was ready to actually make the music he wanted to make.

Of course, his label was thrilled when he told them he was ready to record his first solo album. He went to work almost immediately. This was a good thing for his career but he soon realized it wasn’t the best with Grayson. Harry took him to school in the morning but by the time he got home late at night his son was already in bed. Every day he tried his best to get home at a decent hour but at the last minute something would come up making him stay. One night he got home right after bedtime. Bursting through the door he spotted Y/N sitting on the couch folding laundry. “I just missed it.” Harry frowned, dropping his bag with a soft thud on the floor.

Y/N nodded with a frown of her own on her face. “I’m sorry, Harry, I tried to space it out but he was so tired. He fell asleep after one story.”

“No, no, it’s my own fault. We were trying to get this song done and I just didn’t leave when I should’ve.” Falling backwards into a chair he sighed. “Some father I am.”

“Harry, don’t do that, you’re an amazing father. Grayson talks about you all the time, you’re his hero.”

“I just need to get my priorities straight.”

“To be fair, you’ve done that his entire life. I mean, you put your career on hold to be a stay at home dad. You’ve done all of this by yourself.”

The room fell silent. Harry watched on as she went about her business folding the rest of the laundry. He doesn’t remember telling her to wash his clothes but he saw a few of his shirts laying neatly on the back of the couch along with his son’s train pajamas. Before he knew it she was done and putting everything into a basket. “Hey, I have an idea, what if Grayson and I visited you at the studio tomorrow? He’s getting out of school early and I know he would love to see where his Daddy works.”

The sides of Harry’s mouth perked up into a smile. “Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a plan.”

“Awesome, it’ll be a great surprise for him I’m sure he’s missing you as much as you’re missing him.”

“Not with you here.”

“I may be his nanny but I’m not the one that raised him. You’ve done a good job with him. He’s such a sweet kid, I have to convince him to eat his veggies though.” She told him, gathering her bag to leave for the night.

“That’s a fight I’ve had with him since he was able to eat solid food.” He chuckled. “Good night, Y/N.”

“Good night, Harry, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

After she left Harry went about his nighttime routine with a newfound happiness within him. He was excited for Grayson to see him work. Then thoughts of his son being backstage when he performed filled his head. He could imagine looking sidestage to see Grayson cheering his Daddy on with Y/N standing right beside him. Harry really did feel like she came into his life for a reason.

The next day Harry woke Grayson up as usual. He didn’t let on that anything was going to happen that afternoon. After dropping him off at preschool Harry headed straight to the studio. He had began working with a brand new band when he first started recording and in a matter of weeks they had become some of his best friends. They all liked the same kind of music, writing sessions came easy, and before he knew it they had five songs written and ready to record. The process was one he was used to but now it was his own music. “If I fuck this up it’s all on me.” He told his producer.

Hours passed but with each minute Harry was anxiously waiting for Y/N and Grayson to arrive. He had told everyone they were visiting which brought a newfound excitement. Harry constantly talked about his son. He would show pictures of Grayson on his phone, this whole album was for his child. He couldn’t wait for Grayson to hear some of his music. “Harry, I think they’re here.” He heard someone announce.

Excusing himself from the room he walked outside to be greeted by his mini-me running towards him. “Daddy!” Grayson exclaimed.

“Hey, buddy! How was school?” Harry asked, picking up the excited boy.

“Great, I drew you something.” He grinned, holding out the sheet of paper. “See, you’re singing! And there’s me with Grandma and Gemma and nanny Y/N.”

“Looks amazing, Bug, I think I’m going to put it on the fridge in our kitchen. That way when I’m here at the studio I can see it.”

“And think of me?”

“Exactly.” Harry smiled, leaning over to kiss Grayson’s cheek.

It was then Harry spotted Y/N walking towards them. “When I told him where we were going I don’t think a brick wall could have stopped him.” She laughed. “Did you show him your picture, Gray?”

“Yeah! He said he’s going to hang it on the fridge.”

“Come on, I’ll give you two the grand tour.” Harry said, placing Grayson on the ground to lead them back inside.

Grayson wasn’t too interested in the tour until Harry showed him all the instruments. In no time he was running towards the drums. Harry hung back watching as Grayson took in everything around him with a look of amazement on his face. Hearing footsteps coming up behind him he turned to see Y/N walking into the room. “This was a good idea, thank you.” He whispered.

“No problem at all, like I said I could tell he missed you just as much as you missed him.” She smiled. “Looks like he’s got a bit of music bug like his daddy.”

Harry glanced over at his drummer, Sarah, showing Grayson the drums. She had given him a pair of sticks to let him hit the snare a few times, encouraging a beat the four year old could follow. “He’s a natural!” Harry grinned.

“Daddy, which one is yours?” Grayson asked pointing to the guitars.

This gave Harry the perfect opportunity to start explaining everything to his son. He loved the way Grayson’s eyes would twinkle whenever someone would play an instrument. After a while though one of his producers said they needed to get some work done. “We just gotta finish up this one song then we’ll be done for the day.”

“Daddy can I listen?” Grayson questioned.

“Of course, come with me,” Harry directed Grayson and Y/N to where his producer sat behind a large window. “There’s a couch you two can sit on and watch the magic happen.”

Gently taking Grayson’s hand in hers Y/N leads him back to where Harry instructed. Harry watched on through the window, seeing Y/N sit on the couch and Grayson climb onto her lap to be able to watch his father. With wide eyes and a smile on his face he listened closely as Harry began singing. They had been working on a ballad, one that Harry had written when Grayson was born. He had been holding onto it for this long, he couldn’t bring himself to give it to another artist. It held so much emotion for him he couldn’t imagine anyone else singing it but him.

Like any other four year old listening to his father sing the same part over and over could only hold his attention for so long. Half an hour into the recording session Grayson was getting antsy. Luckily Y/N was prepared. Pulling out a drawing pad and crayons she instructed him to draw a new picture. “Let’s give your daddy a collection of pictures to keep with him here at the studio.” She told him.

It didn’t take much convincing. One of Grayson’s favorite things to do was draw. His teacher constantly told Harry how creative the boy was. “You have a artist on your hands.” Was always said.

“I hope so, I have one of the best decorated refrigerators in England.” Harry jokes which is the truth, whenever Grayson would bring him a new picture he would have to find a space for it on the fridge.

Y/N sat beside Grayson as he drew a new picture, giving him her opinion when he would ask for it. “I think blue is  fine hair color,” She smiled when Grayson was trying to decide what color to give the character in front of him.

“Not blue!” He giggled. “Daddy doesn’t have blue hair.”

Harry walked into the room to hear his son giggling, one of his favorite sounds in the world. “Well what’s going on in here?”

“Nanny Y/N said I should give you blue hair!” Grayson exclaimed.

“Did she? Now does she think I need to dye my hair blue or something? Is that it?”

Y/N laughed. “Hey, you never know, maybe Smurf would be a good look for you.”

“I don’t think I could ever pull off a color like that,” Harry chuckled. “You ready to go, Bug? It’s getting late and we still need to get you fed and in the bath before bedtime.”

Grayson grumbled but agreed, helping Y/N as she began to clean up his crayons. “We can finish your picture tomorrow, ok?” She asked earning a nod from the boy.

It was later than Harry originally planned. Instead of cooking dinner that night he decided pizza would be a good enough meal for the night. Grayson had no problem with that idea but frowned when Harry said he would need to eat his veggies the next day. “Would you like to stay for dinner?” Harry questioned Y/N?

“Oh, I don’t want to be a bother, I should probably head home.”

“Nonsense, you could never be a bother,” Harry said.

There was no point in arguing. They drove to a local pizza shop where Harry ordered their food to go. After picking up their pizza they head back home. By the time dinner was served Grayson was basically sleeping standing up. “Poor thing, knackered aren’t ya?” Harry whispered picking up his son from his car seat.

They were able to coax Grayson just enough to eat one piece of pizza before Harry was carrying him off to bed. When he came back into the living room he noticed Y/N cleaning up whatever had been thrown around the room that day, whether it be toys or clothes. “Oh, love, don’t worry about that.” He said.

“I don’t mind, I don’t want you waking up to a dirty house,” She shrugged, dropping the clothes into a spare laundry basket.

“Well at least come eat, looks like it’s up to us to finish this.” He chuckled pulling out a seat for her.

Y/N nodded. “Like I would ever give up the chance to eat pizza.”

After grabbing them both a water bottle from the fridge Harry joined her at the table. “So how are you liking the job? I’m not putting you out am I?”

“Of course not, it’s the best nanny job I’ve had.” She explained, wiping her mouth. “Grayson is the best, I can’t believe you done so well by yourself.” She wanted to slap herself as soon as the words left her mouth. “I’m sorry...I didn’t mean it like that.”

Harry waved her off. “Don’t worry, I honestly can’t believe I’ve raised him by myself either. I had a lot of help but for the most part it’s just been me and him.”

Y/N has had a question in mind ever since she started the job. “Uh, if you don’t mind me asking but...what happened to Grayson’s mom?”

Harry should have expected this. She was around his son, she saw it was his just the two of them, of course she would want to know about Grayson’s mother. Taking a deep breath Harry processed his answer. “When Grayson was born his mother and I weren’t together. We weren’t going to try to be together, that had been clear for the both of us. After he was born he went home with her and I just kind of took whatever I could get. Then she just decided she wasn’t ready to be a mother.”

Y/N’s mouth opened in shock. “She just gave him up?”

Harry nodded. “I can’t believe it either. One night she calls me crying and saying she just couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t about to let her give up my son to some stranger so I got full custody. Technically she still has her parental rights because I never thought to have them terminated but we had an agreement. I take care of Grayson and she leaves to never come back. You probably think that’s heatless.”

He almost jumped when he felt her smaller hand rest on his forearm. “I don’t, any mother that can just walk away from a child like Grayson doesn’t deserve him.”

“Well you’re amazing with him. You would think you’ve raised your own children.”

“No, just my younger siblings. I was the oldest to three younger brothers. There were so many wrestling matches and near heart attacks with three boys in the house.”

“You miss them?”

Y/N’s smile faltered. “I do...one of my brothers, the youngest, passed away shortly after I moved here.”

Harry wanted to crawl underneath the table. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, no, you didn’t know. It’s ok, a drunk driver hit him one night when he was leaving work. The cops said it was quick, he didn’t suffer but...it was still my little brother. Nothing bad is supposed to happen when you’re that young.”

The room fell into an awkward silence. Harry wanted to comfort her but didn’t want to push his boundaries. Finally he just whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Y/N gave him a sad smile. “It’s ok, you gotta keep going. I just wished I was home when it happened. That was a phone call you could never prepare yourself for.”

Harry couldn’t imagine. He had an older sister, if anything were to ever happen to her he didn’t know what he would do. How his mother would go on. “How are your parents?”

“They’re ok, they have each other luckily. And my other brothers are close by. Aiden, we’re the closest in age, he and his wife just had their first baby. A little girl, she’s precious.” Y/N explained, pulling out her phone to show him a picture of her niece.

This was a side of her Harry loved to see. She had such a happy, carefree presence about her he would have never been able to guess she had been through such heartache. For the next half hour she told him stories about her hometown, showed him pictures of her family. Photos of herself in college attending football games, a group picture of her and all her brothers on Halloween when they all decided to be the Power Rangers. “Aiden and I argued for days about who was going to be the red ranger.” She laughed. “He won, obviously.”

“Well you make a great pink ranger.” He smiled.

“I think so too.” She giggled. It was then she noticed the time. “Shoot, I’m sorry, it’s almost nine o’clock, I need to go before I miss the last train.”

“Love, you don’t have to leave now. It’s late and you shouldn’t be at the train station by yourself.”

Y/N thought about it for a second before agreeing. “You’re right, I guess I can call Bradley.”

“Who’s Bradley?”

“Oh, my boyfriend,” She said not noticing Harry’s eyes widen slightly. “We live together, he’s probably wondering where I am.”

It had been the first time he had ever heard of her having a boyfriend. He was a little surprised. He listened on as she dialed a number on her phone. A nagging sour feeling settled in his stomach but he chose to ignore it. As much as he may have liked Y/N she was his nanny, nothing more. “He’s on his way, sorry to be here so late. You must be ready to get rid of me and get some sleep.” She said snapping Harry from his thoughts.

“No, not at all, I quite enjoy the company honestly.”

Y/N smiled at him again. “I enjoy your company too. I haven’t talked about...I haven’t talked about my brother in so long.”

“Well anytime you want to talk I’m here,” He said. “I know I’m your boss but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk.”

“I appreciate that, Harry.”

Harry stayed up with her until Bradley arrived to pick her up. He had to let him in the gate but then was a little irritated when her boyfriend didn’t offer to walk up to the door. Y/N didn’t seem to mind though. She just said goodbye and that she would be back bright and early the next day. After she was gone it was like the house lost a little bit of light. Even after Harry went to bed it was like something was missing. He tried his best to push those thoughts away. This was his son’s nanny after all.

The next morning Harry was awoken by Grayson jumping onto his bed. “Woah, bug, someone’s up early.” Harry yawned.

“That’s because it’s Halloween! I get to dress up for school!”

“Oh right, and what are you going to be? Hmm…” Tapping his finger on his chin he pretended to think. “Oh right, you’re going to be a tree aren’t you?”

“No, Daddy! I’m gonna be Spider-Man!” Grayson giggled.

Gathering his son into his arms Harry laughed. “Right, what was I thinking? You’ve had your costume picked out since June.”

“Come on, daddy, I want cereal!”

With that they were up for the day. Harry poured them both a bowl of Cheerios and listened to Grayson talk about their Halloween walk at school. “They’re gonna let us walk through the halls and get candy!”

“Really? Well don’t eat too much, we’re going trick or treating later tonight.”

“Will Nanny Y/N come?” He asked, clear excitement in his voice.

“I’ll ask her when she gets here, all right?”

Once he ate his breakfast Harry directed Grayson into the bathroom to brush his teeth and comb his hair. “About time for a haircut, bug.” He told his son as he tried his best to tame the curls much like his own.

“But I want to grow it long like your’s was.” Grayson frowned.

As much as Harry would love the idea of watching Grayson’s hair grow that long he knew his son wouldn’t have the patience for it. The boy had enough knots and tangles in his hair as it was, any longer would surely be a nightmare. When he finally got the boy’s hair under control they went to gather his stuff for school. “All right, Spider-Man, let’s get dressed.”

Grayson had been looking forward to Halloween for weeks. Ever since they bought the costume he had been pestering his father to let him wear it. “I won’t get it dirty! I promise!”

Now it was finally time for him to wear it. “Now no wearing your mask in class, all right? You still need to pay attention when teacher is talking, ok?”

“Yes, daddy.” Grayson muffled voice said through the mask.

“All right, grab your bucket, let’s get going.”

With a bounce in his step they walked out to Harry’s Range Rover. It was a short ride to school. When they got closer Harry smiled seeing all the other’s kid’s costumes. A bunch of Disney princesses, a lion, and then the occasional vampire and witch. “Have a good day, bug.” He told Grayson as an attendant came to help him out of the car.

“I will! Don’t forget to ask Nanny Y/N about trick or treating!”

“I won’t, love you.”

“Love you too!”

Harry stayed parked until his son was safely inside the school. After watching the door shut he drove off back towards home. Even though Harry was excited for Halloween he wasn’t looking forward to trick or treating. It was always stressful because of who he was. One reason Harry gave up his career was because he wanted his son to have a normal childhood. No photographers, no pictures of him in the magazines, he wanted Grayson to be a normal kid. Unfortunately there things out of his control. He remembered the first time he ever set foot outside with his newborn. The paparazzi were relentless in their efforts to get the first picture of his baby. When they finally got one the internet went crazy. Then somehow it got out that he was raising Grayson alone that caused even more rumors.

It bothered him. The fact that people knew who he his son was, where he went to school, it terrified him that something could happen out of his control. “I know you want to protect him but you can’t protect him from everything.” Anne had told him when some rag published pictures of Harry taking Grayson to school.

“It’s not fair, I asked for this life but he didn’t.” Harry mumbled.

“I know, love, but you can’t keep him hidden forever.”

Even though Harry wanted to homeschool Grayson after the paparazzi crashed the first day of school he knew he couldn’t do that. If he wanted his son to be a normal kid then the first step was a normal school. There still was the question if Harry started touring again just what would they do but they would cross that bridge when they got there.

When Harry got home Y/N hadn’t arrived yet giving Harry a little time to get his things sorted. He usually dressed up along with Grayson when they went trick or treating but he hadn’t thought of a costume yet. He wanted something that would somehow disguise him just in case they did run into photographers or fans. He must have hit a creative block because no costume ideas came to mind. After vetoing several ideas he heard the front door open. “Hello?” He heard a soft voice call.

Peaking around the corner he noticed Y/N walk through carrying a bigger bag, no doubt he own costume. “Hey, I didn’t expect you to still be here.” She smiled when she saw Harry.

“Decided to stay home today, they didn’t really need me at the studio.” He explained. “I’ve been trying to think of a costume for tonight.”

“Oh gosh, you waited til the last minute too? I got home last night thinking I ran out of time to find a good costume.”

“Well did you think of something? Maybe you can help me come up with something.”

“Honestly, I found a plaid shirt and decided I could be a scarecrow.” She laughed pulling out a shirt. “If you like I could do your makeup to make you look like a skeleton. Kind of generic but at least it’s something.”

“That will work, thank you, would you like some coffee?”

“I would love some, thank you.”

Grabbing two mugs from the cabinet Harry asked. “So was Bradley mad last night about having to get you?”

“No, not really, he had to get up early this morning but he didn’t say anything.”

Even though it was none of his business Harry found himself curious about her relationship. “So...how long have you two been together?”

“About a year, we were friends with the same people and kept running into each other. Then one day we kind of just hit it off. He works in construction.”

“Oh, that must be a good job.”

“It is, he’s gone a lot though. He travels all over.”

She didn’t really offer anything further about him so Harry dropped the subject. He didn’t know why it bothered him so much. It was just a nagging feeling of jealousy inside which he had no right to. If Y/N was happy then that was all that mattered.

After a cup of coffee Harry retreated into his office to listen to some demos his producer had sent over. He needed to approve of what all he liked and also narrow down which songs he wanted to record. Over the past four years he had written plenty of songs but he wouldn’t be able to put them all on an album. It was going to be a chore figuring out which ones would be good enough for his first solo album.

Around lunchtime Y/N crept inside with a tray of food for him. “I thought you may like some lunch.”

“Oh, sure, thank you.” He mumbled not looking up from his computer.

“Would you like me to pick up Grayson so you can continue working?”

That question brought Harry out of his trance. Checking the clock he groaned. “Shit, I didn’t even realize what time it was. I have to pick him up in an hour.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do it. You just finish up here.”

“Ok, thank you, Y/N.”

“No problem, I should probably get going though, the traffic will be awful. I’ll see you when we get back.”

Nodding once Harry watched on as she left the room. It was times like this he was grateful to have a nanny. When he found himself focused on work he needed to stay concentrated to be able to finish it which was difficult with a four year old running around. It would be especially hard today because he knew his son would be on a sugar high. While he was finishing up the song he received an email from his manager. It was basically an overview of what they had planned for his album. It would start with his first single then radio interviews, his first live performances, and then a tour if Harry felt up for it. Just seeing the words sent panic through him. How was he going to explain this to Grayson? How would he be able to leave him for weeks on end? After reading that email Harry had to turn his computer off. He didn’t want to think about it anymore.

He decided to fix Grayson a snack to eat for when he got home. The boy would need something in his stomach other than candy before they headed out later that night. As he was looking through the fridge he heard his phone ring. “Hey mum,” He greeted.

“Hello, love, I was just calling asking if you would mind if I came along with you and Grayson trick or treating.”

“Of course not, I’m sure he would love that. You have a costume?”

“I’m sure I can find something. So how is this nanny doing? You haven’t said anything about her.”

“She’s great, she went to pick him up from school.”

“What’s her name again?”

“Y/N, she’s from America, she’s great with him. She does work around the house without me even telling her to.”

“Well sounds like she was a great hire. You seem quite taken with her.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Don’t even go there, mum.”

“What?! I didn’t say anything.”

“I know where you were headed with that sentence and don’t even think about it.”

Ever since Vanessa Harry had all but given up dating. He became a full time dad and didn’t have the time or energy for dating. “All right, all right, I won’t say anything. I’ll see you later, love.”

“Bye, mum.”

As soon as he hung up the phone he heard the door open. “Daddy!” Grayson cried running full speed into his father’s legs.

“Woah, hey, bud!” Harry exclaimed bending over to pick him up. “How was school?”

“It was great! Me and my friends were like the Avengers! Then we got a bunch of candy.”

Over his head Harry spotted Y/N carrying Grayson’s backpack and Halloween bag. “Yeah, you should see his loot.” She laughed holding up the bag.

“Well I have news, grandma is gonna go trick or treating with us tonight.” Harry told his overly excited son.

“Yay! And Nanny Y/N said she’s going too! It’s gonna be so much fun!” Grayson smiled.

“All right, you little candy monster, how about you sit down and eat your snack. We’ll be lucky if you lay down long enough to take a nap.” Harry chuckled placing his son at the table.

Grayson grumbled but obeyed his father. Sitting down at the table still wearing his costume he ate what was in front of him, even though it was fruit. “Daddy says bananas are the best fruit.” He told Y/N.

“Well I think I would agree with your father on that one, even though strawberries rank pretty high up there.” Y/N laughed.

“Still no match for the banana though.” Harry argued.

Even though it took some coaxing they were able to get Grayson down for a nap. “And then when you wake up it’ll be time for us to go trick or treating.” Harry had told him as he covered him up.

Harry stood close by to make sure Grayson was fully asleep before leaving the room. He spotted Y/N in the kitchen pouring Grayson’s candy bag into a Halloween bowl. “I found this at the store and thought you and Grayson may like it.” She smiled

“Yeah, I kind of failed when it came to Halloween decorations this year. We didn’t even have time to visit the pumpkin patch.”

“Well that just means you have to go big at Christmas.”

“I usually do, we get the biggest tree, Grayson puts all the ornaments on the bottom because that’s all he can reach,” He laughed. “I usually fix it after he goes to bed. Then we try to watch a Christmas movie a night.”

“I like that tradition.”

“Do you go home for Christmas?”

“I didn’t last year, I spent it with Bradley’s family in London. It was the first time I had met him, I was a nervous wreck.”

“Did you like them?” Harry asked.

“They were nice, they weren’t really into the holidays though. It just seemed like they were ready to get them over with.”

“Well that’s no fun.”

“No, especially when I’m so used to my family. My mom loved to decorate the house for Christmas. She collected Santa’s, our tree had so many Santa ornaments, Santa pictures she would put on the walls replacing our normal ones, our stockings had Santa’s on them. My brother, Colin would say it looked like Christmas threw up in our house.”

Harry laughed but he liked the sound of her holidays back home. It sounded like what he wished for his home. He liked to have a lot of decorations both on the inside and the outside. “That sounds pretty nice though.”

“Yeah, it was, they didn’t really decorate after Davis died but they’re slowly getting back into it.”

Harry noticed the sadness that flashed in her eyes but noticed how she tried to cover it up. He felt bad because it seemed like she tried her best to stay strong and not really process what had happened. “Well if you would like to go home for the holidays just tell me. You don’t need my permission but I would tell Grayson where you’re going.”

“Thank you, Harry, I believe we are this year since we spent Christmas with Bradley’s family last year.”

“Then I’ll be sure to give you a present before you leave.”

Y/N rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to get me anything. You’ve already given me a job, that’s more than enough.”

“Well you’ve help more than you could imagine.” He smiled. “So you think you better do my makeup before he wakes up?”

“Yeah, we better, as soon as he’s up he’ll be ready to head out.”

With Harry sitting on a chair Y/N stood in between his knees to get close enough to his face. She started with the outline of a skull and began filling it in with white. Once the white paint was dry she went in with the black covering up any bits of skin that showed. The final step was drawing some lines over his lips. “You are absolutely spooky now.” She said stepping away to observe her work.

Handing him a mirror he was able to take a good look at his reflection. She had done a great job. “Nicely done, thanks.”

“No problem.” She beamed as the door opened.

“Hello,” Anne greeted, a witch’s hat on her head and wearing a long black dress. “I’m ready for some candy. Where is my little lovebug?”

“He’s taking a nap, he should be up any minute though.” Harry explained.

Like clockwork Grayson came bounding down the hallway. “Grandma!” He cried.

“Hello there, my love, how are you?” She asked picking him up. “You ready to go trick or treating?”

“Yeah!”

“Well just wait a few minutes, Y/N and I need to change.” Harry announced. “Plus I want pictures of all of us in our costumes.”

Harry went into his own room while Y/N headed to the bathroom. Harry ended up just wearing a black sweater and black jeans to go along with his black and white makeup. As he went back into the living room he noticed Anne helping Grayson put on his mask and shoes. “Ready, Daddy!”

“I see that, be still a second.” Harry instructed holding up his phone to snap a few pictures of Grayson and his grandma.

Five minutes later Y/N walked in wearing her plaid shirt and lines painted on her face giving her the illusion of stitches. “Ready.” She announced.

“Hang on, you get over there so I can take a picture of all of you.”

Several pictures later they were finally off. The good thing about Harry’s house was it was close enough to some upper scale neighborhoods. Every year the houses were decorated for Halloween, tables were set out for giving out candy, and no one cared about Harry’s status. For the most part he was able to walk around with Grayson without anyone bothering them.

When they arrived there were already children running from house to house gathering candy. There were even some teenagers out and about enjoying the evening. Harry parked down the street and then they were off. Holding Grayson’s hand they went to the first house with Y/N and Anne following close behind. “I don’t think we were properly introduced.” Anne sighed. “I’m Anne, Harry’s mother.”

Y/N held the older woman’s hand in her own giving it a small shake. “I’m Y/N, it’s nice to finally meet you. Grayson talks about you and Gemma all the time.”

“Precious thing, he is. I’m glad you’re around now, I can see how much it’s helped Harry.”

“I’m glad to help.” Y/N smiled as Grayson ran up the steps to the first house.

An hour later they had covered pretty much the entire neighborhood. They were getting ready to leave when Harry noticed the first flash. “Shit.” He mumbled when a second one followed.

Gripping Grayson’s hand tighter Harry counted them. Around nine in total but he spotted more cars across the street coming to a park rather quickly. “Y/N, take Grayson.” He instructed.

He heard his son whimper which angered Harry. Were these idiots really going to ruin a child’s Halloween just for some pictures? Y/N picked up Grayson without question and waited for Harry to say something. “Just stay behind me and mum, ok? Keep your head down until we get to the car, ok?”

Y/N nodded, running one of her hands over Grayson’s back trying her best to comfort him. Anne took her spot at Harry’s side hiding Y/N and Grayson as they began walking. The flashes increased almost blinding him as he pushed through the crowd. “Excuse me, please.” He told them, his voice harsher than usual.

They weren’t going to let them pass without getting a shot. The clicks continued even more. Some tried to take a picture from above. Harry held an arm out preventing them from getting closer to Y/N and Grayson. Turning his head he noticed Grayson had buried his face in Y/N’s neck and she was speaking to him in a soft voice only he could hear. It warmed his heart but he had to focus on getting them to the car safely. When they finally reached it he took his son from her arms so he could strap him in his seat. Even while he was strapping him in the flashes continued making Harry’s blood boil. Once Grayson was buckled in Harry almost slammed the door to prevent anything else. “Don’t you guys have anything better to do on Halloween?” He hissed.

Walking around to the driver’s side he cranked the car and sped off not caring if he ran any of the photographers over. Looking in the rearview mirror he watched as Y/N continued to talk to Grayson. She talked to him about anything she could to keep his mind off of what just happened. “Did you know I used to collect comic books? I’m sure I have plenty of Spider-Man in my collection.”

“Really? Could you show me?” Grayson asked.

“Of course, I’ll just have to find them.”

Harry glanced over and his mom who had also noticed the conversation going on in the backseat. She had a small smile on her face as she listened on. Harry was just happy his son didn’t appear to be in any distress. It had been the first time in a while paparazzi had caused that kind of scene. “We’re home.” He announced.

While Y/N changed Grayson into his pajamas Harry and Anne began to cook a quick dinner. “She sure is a good one.” Anne whispered.

“She is,” Harry agreed.

Anne wanted to say more but decided against it. Of course she wanted the best for her son and grandson and she believed they had found it in their new nanny. She would just have to wait and see what the future held.

Later on Anne left to head back home after they put Grayson to bed. Y/N stayed behind to help wash dishes while Harry dried. “Sorry about the way the night ended.” Harry apologized.

Y/N glanced at him. “Don’t worry, everything’s fine. I just can’t believe you’ve had to deal with that for this long.”

“Did they say anything to you?” If anything was said to her that Harry deemed out of line he was more than prepared to get in contact with his lawyer or anyone to get it taken care of. Go after him but leave her and his family out of it.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s over. I think I’m just ready to head home, take a nice hot bath, and get into bed.” She sighed as she let the water drain from the sink.

Harry agreed with that idea. “Thank you for coming out with us tonight. Even if it didn’t end like I wanted it to.”

“I had fun. I’ve always loved Halloween, I won’t let anyone ever ruin that.”

“I’m glad...so I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“I’ll be here.” She grinned as she gathered her stuff.

It had been the first time she ever had to deal with parts of Harry being famous. It was terrifying but it also upset her that Harry had to deal with it. He was such a normal guy it was easy to forget just who he was. She just hoped she would be ready to deal with everything else that came along with knowing Harry Styles.

[impressivepress]

LACMA’s uneven new Picasso and Rivera show reveals an unprecedented, must-see discovery

In 1915, Pablo Picasso acquired a small Cubist still life painted by his casual friend and acolyte, Diego Rivera.

The young Mexican artist, 28, had been traveling through Europe and living in Paris for years, and he and Picasso were neighbors in Montparnasse. A small but powerful surprise haunts his little still life, on view in an unusual new exhibition about the dialogue between the two artists that opened last Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The tabletop is covered by a turquoise-green decorative cloth, similar to the patterned designs Matisse was making after his return from Tangiers. In the center, a yellow, white and red bottle of sweet Anis liquor opens out like a Cubist fan, next to a triangular black inkwell pierced by the blade of a tall purplish pen.

Sand is mixed into some pigments. A technical experiment, the rough surface compares actual textures with illusionistic ones, like the painted wood-grain table that Rivera also surely borrowed from Picasso.

Amid the still life’s faceted planes, however, Rivera also painted something strange — one or maybe two wine glasses that overlap. One appears white (light reflected on glass), the other wood grain (the table refracted through glass); a mottled green circle of tablecloth pierces each. Their conjoined forms produce an unexpected double-image — not just wine glasses but a human skull.

The gesture is sly. Rivera’s painting knits together two robust traditions — a common European still-life symbol for life’s vanity, plus a distinctly Mexican version of the death’s head motif, which dates back before the European conquest to Aztec, Mixtec and even Mayan art.

Rivera’s home country, 5,000 miles from Paris, was then deep into a bloody peasant revolution — a convulsive civil war that would drag on for another five years. It was plainly on the artist’s mind.

Except for a brief 1910 visit, Rivera was absent from Mexico for the war’s duration. But the painter was no stranger to its long-simmering motivations.

He was born in the once absurdly rich silver-mining hill town of Guanajuato, scene of some of the most horrific abuses of the Spanish viceroyalty after the European conquest. The family’s house was just up the street from the market warehouse where the slain leaders of the 1810 Mexican War for Independence had their severed heads strung up by Bonaparte forces loyal to New Spain.

The small painting’s admixture of traditional and avant-garde French, Spanish and Mexican elements is thus remarkable and revealing. “Cubist Composition (Still Life With Bottle of Anis and Inkwell)” adds a subtle but inescapable political dimension to Cubism’s otherwise formal investigations, which focused on principles of representation and abstraction.

Here’s another surprise: The Rivera painting, which has remained in Picasso’s family ever since he acquired it a century ago, has apparently never been publicly displayed — or even published — before now. The LACMA exhibition will be seen only in Los Angeles and Mexico City (it travels to the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in June), so don’t miss the unprecedented chance for a look.

Oddly, however, neither the object label nor the exhibition catalog mention the skull. Nor does either text offer any interpretation of what the picture might suggest.

Instead, the focus is fixed on details of the artists’ biographies — on how Picasso got the Rivera painting and what Rivera got in return — plus their formal experiments with materials and techniques for re-imagining representational painting. Both are important, but neither is enough.

“Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time” is uneven that way. There are wonderful objects to see. But sometimes a viewer is left hanging.

Part of the reason is structural. The exhibition is organized like a graduate school art history lecture, where slides of different artworks are projected side-by-side to compare and contrast. The show juxtaposes actual paintings, sculptures and drawings, not photographs; but the binary system creates a closed loop that has trouble breaking out.

For instance, it’s easy to read visual similarities and divergences in the Cubist faceting of paired landscapes. Picasso’s earthy color and schematic architecture in a bracing painting from the crucial summer he and Georges Braque spent painting side-by-side in the French Pyrenees couldn’t be more different from the explosive burst of light in Rivera’s semi-rural scene, where the sun breaks through fog over a viaduct and factory smokestacks.

But the Rivera, painted in an industrializing town just outside Paris, is finally more closely informed by the work of Robert Delaunay than Picasso. The pairing is peculiar — as is the colorful little still life’s juxtaposition with a fine Picasso drawing in black ink and watercolor, when its vibrant palette owes so much to Juan Gris.

The show’s structural organization is reductive, simplifying art’s layered density. That’s counterproductive, working against the very complexity that makes Picasso and Rivera such brilliant, enduring artists.

In five sections, the show means to tell the story of the relationship between the two artists, as well as the relationship between the art of antiquity and their individualized forms of Modern artistic expression. The aim is not without merit.

Both artists began their training in tradition-minded academies — Picasso at Barcelona’s Academy San Fernando, Rivera at Mexico City’s Academy San Carlos. With great facility they both drew from plaster casts of Greco-Roman sculptures, as academies everywhere taught.  

Picasso’s Venus de Milo drawing, done when he was about 14, focuses like a laser on her naked upper torso and perky bosom. Rivera’s, executed at about 16, shows the armless sculpture lying on its back on the ground — European Classicism toppled. Picasso the ladies’ man and Rivera the anti-colonialist are announced, at least in general terms.

Then comes the essential Cubist room. It’s one of two major highlights in the show, partly because great Cubist paintings are rare in L.A. museum collections.

This selection of 10 includes “Student With Newspaper” (1913-14), its inebriated young man crowned by a jaunty beret, his face derived from a bleary-eyed, West African Wobe mask. Bold block-letters spell “urnal,” a fragment of “journal,” also wittily evoking “urinal.” Mixed materials of plaster, sand, crayon and paint — a delirious experiment — connect it to Rivera’s still life.

Rivera’s magnificent “Zapatista Landscape” will join the show in February, following a prior commitment to a Paris exhibition. (LACMA’s exhibition remains through May 7.) It’s an astounding mountain of Cubist structure cobbled together from the revolution-minded iconography of a serape, sombrero, straw mats and peasant gourds all anchored by the vertical slash of Emiliano Zapata’s rifle.

The catalog, however, is determined to emphasize the painting’s formal properties at the expense of its meanings. Rivera is said to have been furious that Picasso “stole” a new foliage technique from “Zapatista Landscape” for use in the shrubbery in one of his own paintings — shrubbery he later painted out.

I suspect, though, that draining the political power of Rivera’s motif for simple decorative ends might have had something to do with the Mexican’s anger toward the Spaniard. The Zapatistas were hell-bent on agrarian reforms, fueling the revolution. Rivera’s landscape foliage wasn’t just any shrubbery, and Picasso’s “theft” could easily be seen as an affront to a painting that stood as a resolute repudiation of Spanish colonialism.

The catalog even mistakenly says that Picasso’s discovery of his own “native” antiquity, shown by his use of forms from the art of ancient Iberia, predates his Cubist phase, while Rivera’s use of pre-Columbian motifs occurred afterward, beginning in 1921. The claim is disproved by the unmentioned skull in Rivera’s Cubist still life.

In the 1920s, after World War I and the Mexican Revolution were over, what shifted in Picasso’s and Rivera’s work was the artistic balance of power. For Picasso, that meant formal play derived from ancient Iberian sculpture, which reflected his Spanish heritage, mixed with Greco-Roman formats. For Rivera it meant greater prominence for pre-Columbian painting and sculpture.

The show juxtaposes the monumental, tunic-wearing graces of Picasso’s “Three Women at the Spring,” his first Neo-Classical painting, with the “Lansdowne Artemis,” an imposing first-century Roman sculpture of a Greek deity.

Meanwhile the frontal, bilateral symmetry of Rivera’s “Flower Day,” its central figure wrapped in the red, white and green of the Mexican flag, valorizes the vendor stooping beneath the massive basket-load of calla lilies, their phallic golden stamens transforming the white blossoms into sombreros. The painting faces similarly designed basalt sculptures of the Aztec female water-deity, Chalchiuhtlicue, personification of fertility.

The 15 pre-Columbian sculptures form the show’s other highlight. All but one are on loan from the peerless collections of Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology and the Diego Rivera Museum-Anahuacalli, the “modern Aztec temple” housing his mammoth collection of nearly 60,000 ancient artifacts. LACMA deputy director Diana Magaloni, who co-organized the show with director Michael Govan and several specialists, is former director of the Anthropology Museum and arranged the exceedingly rare loans.

In a nutshell, then, the show’s story arc goes like this: The two artists both started with Greco-Roman antiquity, then went Modern; finally, they synthesized the radically new with the venerably old, forming a kind of “Modernist Classicism” — Picasso’s based on European models, Rivera’s on American ones.

After bloody, bitter wars, a destabilized present was undergirded with indigenous foundations. That story is already pretty well-known, of course, so points off for lack of originality. But extra credit for all those impressive highlights.

~ Christopher Knight · DEC. 9, 2016.

Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for criticism (he was a finalist for the prize in 1991, 2001 and 2007). In 2020, he also received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Art Journalism from the Rabkin Foundation

[zazamatic]

When she was only six years old, Genevieve Jones, known to her friends as Gennie, began accompanying her father Nelson, a medical student and amateur ornithologist, on buggy rides into the wilderness, searching for birds’ nests and collecting eggs to add to their make-shift cabinet of natural history. 

Gennie had grown up a bright, curious young woman, fascinated with science, gifted in art, and an avid reader, but awkward and shy — unusually tall at nearly 6 feet, with a skin condition that made her appear flushed at all times.   Still, she fell in love with a man ten years her senior, whom Kiser describes as “an exceptional musician and literary critic, but, unfortunately…a periodical drunkard.”  In 1876, just before Gennie turned thirty, her parents broke off her engagement, concerned about her suitor’s drinking. To console her broken heart, Gennie went away to stay with her best friend Eliza’s parents in Pennsylvania, where she visited the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia and saw some of the hand-colored engravings in Audubon’s now-iconic The Birds of America, noting that even Audubon had neglected to include eggs and nests as anything more than a decorative prop.

When she returned home to Circleville, Ohio, Gennie had grown unusually despondent. Her parents became increasingly concerned and, eventually, Nelson encouraged her to pursue her illustrations of nests and eggs, and collect them into a book — an idea he had previously rejected whenever Genie had brought it up, due to astronomical costs of creating a lavishly illustrated book, but was now ready to support it as a much-needed distraction from Genie’s anguish, for which he felt personally responsible.

Family and friends rushed in to support the project and Gennie set out to illustrate the 130 species of birds that nested in Ohio, many common throughout the rest of America. She and Eliza labored over the intricate illustrations, while Nelson devised a business plan to produce 100 copies of the book, to be called Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, and sell them by subscription in approximately 23 parts, charging $5 for the hand-painted version and $2 for the uncolored version. When the first twenty subscribers were secured, including some of the country’s most prominent ornithologists, production began. Kiser describes the astonishingly laborious and scientific process, reminding us of how far we’ve come with design and printing technology:

Gennie and Eliza drew illustrations in wax pencil on both sides of sixty-five-pound lithographic stones. Then Howard placed the stones into crates that were shipped eighty-nine miles to Cincinnati, where [the printing company’s] artisans fixed the drawings with a solution of nitric acid, applied ink to the surface of the stones, and printed test proofs to determine the quality of the renderings. When errors were found, the ink was cleaned off and the stones were recrated and shipped back to Circleville for corrections. The first stones made several trips back and forth before the artists conquered the challenges of keeping the points on the wax crayons sharp and the edges of the line drawings crisp.

In 1878, the first three lithographs of part one were finished and sent to ornithological publications for review, earning Gennie’s artwork praise as equal to and even better than Audubon’s. Elliott Coues, a prominent ornithology bulletin editor, wrote:

I had no idea that so sumptuous and elegant a publication was in preparation, and am pleased that what promises to be one of the great illustrated works on North American Ornithology should be prepared by women.

Once the first batch was mailed in 1879, the overwhelmingly positive response nearly doubled the number of subscribers to 39 — 34 for the hand-colored version and 5 for the uncolored — including former President Rutherford B. Hayes and a young Harvard student by the name of Theodore Roosevelt. But fate threw Genie a cruel curveball — a mere month after the first part was mailed, she contracted typhoid fever and fell violently ill. On her deathbed, she instructed her brother to keep the project alive and enlist the help of their mother in producing the illustrations. She died on Sunday, August 17, 1879, at the age of thirty-two.

In the years that followed, Gennie’s suitor, overcome with sorrow, committed suicide. Her family remained in profound grief and shock, from which their only solace was in bringing Gennie’s vision to life in its full glory. Her mother, Virginia, learned the lithographic technique and began illustrating the eggs and nests Gennie had collected. Kiser writes:

Gennie’s book became the Jones family’s transitional object, a physical entity with which they could distract themselves from their heartache and into which they could invest their passion and energy. Virginia poured all the love she could no longer give to her daughter into illustrating the nests and eggs. Virginia had never drawn or painted anything that required scientific accuracy before…. Despite her grief, she struggled with overcoming her casual artistic style and transformed herself into a scientific observer. Analysis and intellectual rigor were essential, because an artist does not draw what she sees, she draws what she understands.

http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2011/09/book-of-week-birds-and-their-nests.html

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/06/27/americas-other-audubon/

http://ornithologyexchange.org/forums/blog/19/entry-1069-i-spy-something-fowl/

http://www.sil.si.edu/ondisplay/nestsandeggs/essay.htm

[rhaella]

Parenting, Stannis found, was a trial. He could not fathom that he had ever, in youth, been so utterly needy as his five-year-old daughter. But there were few activities that tested his patience more than coloring time.

Shireen had been fond of coloring since her little hands were strong enough to hold a crayon. And for reasons he’d never understand, she always preferred her father color alongside her.

So every Sunday after breakfast became reserved for coloring time.

This Sunday, Shireen had picked a picture of a castle and asked Stannis to photocopy the page so they could both color the same picture, as they always do. Stannis used the grey crayon, making his castle out of stone. Shireen, on the other hand, was using purples and pinks and blues to make some sort of patchwork castle.

“You know, real castles are usually grey,” Stannis said.

Shireen looked up at him and grinned. “Of course I know, daddy, but my castle is purple and pink.”

“And where do you hope to find pink and purple stones?” If Shireen’s kingdom could find a stonemason to provide pink and purple stones, he supposed they would cost at least twice as much as his simple grey stones.

“My castle isn't made of stones,” she said, as if it were the most obvious fact in the world. “It's made of candy.”

“And if it rains, won't your castle melt?”

“It never rains in my kingdom.” Never rains, Stannis thought. It would seem that Shireen’s kingdom would have a tough time growing food. Or perhaps they would thrive on imports, but what would they produce? He decided not to dwell on it.

Stannis’s grey crayon had grown dull from all the Sundays he’d used it. He doubted Shireen had ever touched it, since she preferred brighter colors with absurdly detailed names like cerulean. He'd have to buy her more crayons soon. He always bought the 36 pack. The 64 pack with the sharpener was too frivolous and Stannis didn't want his daughter to become spoiled.

They finished at nearly the same time, and Stannis admired his work. 56 stones made up the castle, and he'd colored the castle’s banners black and yellow to match his family’s ancient crest. The princess in the corner he’d colored to look like Shireen, as he did with every princess. It even included Shireen’s greyscale scars, which were on the page before he'd even copied it.

Before giving Shireen a new coloring book, Davos would come over and together they would draw greyscale scars upon each girl’s face, so Shireen could see princesses that looked like herself. The first time they'd done it was as a present for Shireen’s third birthday party. They'd bought her a coloring book full of princesses and they'd drawn the scars on each and every one. “Look, daddy, these princesses look like me! They're so beautiful!” she'd squealed in delight upon seeing them, and he knew he could never give her a coloring book any other way.

Over two years later, and Stannis and Davos had perfected the art of drawing greyscale scars on princesses.

Shireen waved her finished picture in front of Stannis’ face. “Daddy, it's for you!” He took it from her hands. Shireen had decorated her candy castle with black and yellow banners as well, imitating the ones hanging in his study, and the princess was colored with bright blue hair. She'd even signed her name at the bottom in her big, messy handwriting.

It really was quite a pleasant picture, despite the strange patchwork design on the castle itself and the foolishness of candy as a building material. And, he realized, Shireen hadn't once gone outside the lines.

“Wow, Shireen,” he said, astonished. “You colored this so neatly.”

He was used to gritting his teeth and holding his tongue when she handed him her pictures, bright messes with stray lines everywhere. Davos had told him that it's normal for young children to color outside the lines, and he supposed Davos would know considering the abundance of sons he’d raised. But still, Stannis could not stand coloring outside the lines. And he certainly couldn't imagine that he had done it as a child.

Shireen grinned up at him. “I wanted to color neatly like you, daddy. Do you like it?”

His heart swelled with pride. “I love it, Shireen, truly. I can't believe how much you've grown.” He scooped Shireen into his lap and she buried her face in his shirt. “I think this one deserves a spot on my wall at work, so all my coworkers can see it.”

Shireen nodded. “I think so too.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. “I love you, daddy.”

“I love you too, princess.”

As he hung Shireen’s picture on his wall the next morning, he thought that maybe candy kingdoms weren't so bad, after all.

(Read on AO3)

[joel-furniss-blog]

True Crime and Serial Killer Art

Speaking on social taboos, the subject of death and surrounding issues regarding it remain one of the most prominent today. In multiple different societies there have been traditions to avoid omens relating to death or the deceased. The indigenous Shuswap people of Canada treat widows and widowers as unlucky to hunters and seclude them from the tribe. Among the Agutainos of the Philippines, widows may not leave their huts for seven days after a death, and it is said whoever looks upon her perishes suddenly. Although we have eased on the idea through the centuries and built a much more sound understanding of it, it still remains a subject that we don’t talk about on a regular basis, despite its presence and inevitability within our own lives. More than half of Britons are unaware of their partner’s end-of-life wishes and I’m assuming some don’t even know their own.

The reason is we don’t want to die. It’s simply in our nature to survive for as long as possible. But there remains an interesting case about dying that both intrigues and disgusts us. Murder.

In 2015, Making a Murderer was uploaded to Netflix, an episodic documentary detailing the story of Steven Avery, a man convicted for the murder of Teresa Halbach and the case surrounding it with the overarching question on whether Avery’s conviction and imprisonment was wrongful. The series received around 19.3 million viewers in the US alone, all watching the evidence unfold on whether Avery was wrongfully convicted or not, a real person in real life. The series was basically reality television at its logical peak, directly dealing with life and death. It’s interesting, we understand these subjects as demanding respect and reverence, but can’t help but gawk. Despite being a taboo, death fascinates us to no end, especially the subjects of these crimes or murder cases which breed intrigue into the reasoning on why we would kill our fellow humans.

This fascination is manifested within the True Crime genre, a non-fiction literary and film category in which actual criminal activities and details are analysed and recorded for entertainment. The genre appears in many forms, literary work such as the Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter detailing the Manson murders, television such as the previously mentioned Making a Murderer, films like the dramatized Zodiac by David Fincher retelling the Zodiac Killer’s crimes, or podcasts like the popular Serial which narrated the real life murder of Hae Min Lee. In other words the genre has spread itself over all media and has become virtually inescapable to most media-watching people and we can’t help but continue to watch due to a shared sense of morbid curiosity or perhaps an infatuation with these characters.

Nowadays the documentary works account more sensationalist crimes and focus more on the profile of the committer rather than the crimes and victims themselves. The serial killers or mass shooters are displayed as psychologically layered and charismatic characters rather than morally reprehensible killers. People like Ted Bundy, Jeffry Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy are seen as pop culture figures subject to their own biopics and documentaries exploring their every move as if they were celebrities. Some murders even went on to inspire popular movie franchises such as Ed Gein, whose grisly habit or creating trophies from his victim’s skin and slight oedipal relationship with his deceased mother inspired famous movie villains Leatherface, Buffalo Bill, and Norman Bates. We’re infatuated with these people and their crimes, the idea of them taking the life of someone else and defacing their corpses is so alien to us as regular minded individuals that we can’t help but stop, stare, and shake our heads. But some people take it further than simply looking at a distance.

Hybristophilia (also known as Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome) is which one feels arousal and facilitation for someone who has committed a serious crime such as armed robbery, rape, and murder. The paraphilia can be experienced in either passive or aggressive ways, with passive hybristophiliacs often writing romantic or sexual fan mail to notorious criminals, sometimes even developing a romantic relationship with them resulting in marriages behind bars. Most hybristophiliacs have delusions about their idols, rationalising their crimes, believing they would never harm them, thinking they can change their lovers for the better, or actively putting themselves into positions in which they can be seduced or manipulated. Aggressive hybristophiliacs are different as they are willing to help their lovers with their criminal agenda via luring victims, hiding evidence, or even helping commit the crimes. They are attracted to their partners due to their psychotic actions and are unable to understand that they are often being manipulated or abused as well. Psychologist know little about this paraphilia but hypothesise that the hybristophiliacs are submissive victims, narcissistic enablers, or vicarious thrill-seekers. Some believe it’s the natural pinnacle of the ‘caveman’ mentality, where traditionally masculine and aggressive figures are seen as more attractive than others.

In this age it’s much easier to see examples of this paraphilia. On blogging site Tumblr there is a fandom of often teenage girls who obsess over Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine high school massacre, and create video and photographic montages and tributes to the deranged teenagers they saw as outcasts and underdogs, even affectionately referring to themselves as ‘Columbiners’. Other internet communities such as ‘Incels’, a group of sexually frustrated men, herald Elliot Rodgers, a misogynistic mass shooter responsible for the 2014 Isla Vista killings as a saint figure due to him sharing some of their views. This is the case for many murderers online. You can type in the name of a famous serial killer into Tumblr and find blogs and posts dedicated to him, even sexual fanfictions between them and a non-descript self-insert character designed to represent the reader. Some of this worship is either ironic, for humours effect, or simply just to be edgy, (which is why I found interest within this) but many of them do see a small piece of themselves within these people, a cut of self-loathing outcast and edgy passion they can identify with. Because often the idols they herald are youthful and full of hate, and this overly emotional position can lead them to creative outlets.

For example, the previously mentioned Columbine shooters often expressed themselves through their uncommon fashion choices, enjoyment of alternate music, radical political opinions, and a series of videos for a school project entitled Hitmen for Hire in which the two swore and yelled violent statements at the camera in between acting out shootings on students in the school’s hallways. The video is embarrassing to watch and is reminiscent of many people’s cringeworthy teenage years when they thought rebelling against the norm was the coolest and a completely new idea, when in reality it always comes off as lame and a massive blunder in the future. The same goes for Isla Vista killer who wrote a 107,000-word manifesto entitled My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger, in which Rodger’s discusses key events in his life that led him to his delusional and psychopathic state. I haven’t read the entire document as I don’t have the ten hours it takes to read, but from the experts and snippets I have seen the document reads horribly and in explaining himself and trying to spur sympathy or profess his superiority, Rodgers comes across as a whiny, unaccepted 14-year-old too big for his britches rather than a twenty-two-year-old adult.

The reason I draw attention to these people is that I’m interested in the theme of creativity within murders and mass shooters. Many serial killers either produce drawings and paintings before or after they are incarcerated, drawings and paintings that are documented online. They range in quality and merit, with some being near photorealistic recreations, highly stylised sketches, and colourful and detailed paintings while others are the most basic of sketchbook doodles. But there always remains something interesting to each one, whether it be the execution (of the art, not the killers) or the subject matter. For example, John Wayne Gacy’s works were deeply rooted within pop culture with him painting figures such as Charles Manson, Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King’s It, the titular Seven Dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and punk singer GG Allin. He even showed a small knowledge of the artworld with a grotesque painted recreation of Salvador Dali’s In Voluptas Mors. Another murderer who had a passion for the pencil was Danny Rolling who’s highly detailed and meticulously sketched pencil drawings show elements of surrealism, gothic and heavy metal imagery, and some running themes of popular figures such as Hitler. The drawings are disturbing yet technically impressive and stylistically interesting (some are even for sale online) and perhaps if he wasn’t a psychopath he could have found success.

There’s a particular work by a particular murderer I would like to look at. Richard Ramirez AKA the Night Stalker was an American serial killer, rapist, and burglar who operated in the Southern California area between June 1984 and August 1985 before being convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five counts of attempted murder, eleven counts of sexual assault, and fourteen accounts of burglary. Ramirez’s art was poor, mainly done on notebook paper with biro pen or coloured crayon and featured themes similar to the previously discussed killers, pop culture icons and gothic/heavy metal imagery to create unthreatening and frankly lame pieces. But one stands out from the rest by evoking an unsettling feeling within the viewer, an untitled drawing depicting Ramirez’s favourite actress Abigail Breslin. The drawing appears to be almost entirely made with black biro sans the lips which are a shade of deep crimson and scrawled with an unidentifiable material (possibly felt tip), all drawn on a piece of thin, folded, off-white paper. While the technical style of the portrait is poor and hasty, I find an infatuating quality surrounding it, one element is drawn from the style itself. It is a simple line study and form register, featuring no shading what so ever and sparse detail, for example, the ears are left blank, the natural flow of the hair is only alluded to with some scattered lines, the nose is only represented by a single line, and the eyes are totally undetailed except for a pair of pinprick pupils. Another factor is how some of the lines in the image falter before they can connect, examples found in the left shoulder line falling just short of the neck, ponytail trailing off into noting and right corner of the dress missing a connection. The most prominent feature of the drawing is the lips, almost grotesquely oversized and curled upwards in a sickeningly dead smile at the viewer, the deep red almost seeming like a bloody gash in the otherwise plain white image. The blood red slit for the mouth, the dead and unblinking eyes and the not-all-there composition make the image deeply unsettling even without the context of Ramirez’s heinous crimes and the knowledge that the subject was less the sixteen-years-old when Ramirez drew her. Paired with that knowledge it is a horrifying piece that can make the skin crawl.

While some might think that writing about and shinning a light on these deranged killers to advance my own visual art may be amoral or at least cause for concern, the idea is one I wanted to explore at the start of this project. I want to learn how one can be different, break taboos, transgress standards yet still be accepted, this is a good way to explore that. In dealing with this unspeakable yet fascinating taboo of murder and sexual assault I’m gaining key information and a creative stake in my project that will hopefully help advance it in a visual and conceptual way. Also, creating work based on serial killers is very edgy.

I would also like to stress that I do not support any act of murder, rape, or other crime done by anyone mentioned in this document.

[yusselah]

Draw Well, Be Well

My Daughter’s Reminders

My daughter Jenny grew up falling down, with a fractured tibia here and a black eye there. Injuries stemming from a central nervous system disorder with a  hard to pronounce name: Incontinentia Pigmenti. After 32 years, the words still freeze on my tongue. 

I.P. is not a one-size-fits-all genetic disorder in the ways it affects the lives of the baby girls who are born with it. For Jenny, a woman with a girlish face and a small body, this rare neurocutaneous condition deprives her of many things: the balance to stand, walk, or enjoy the kind of grapho-motor control that enables her mother and brother, both formally trained artists, to draw with precision. 

Precision can be very appealing in the right hands. But my daughter doesn’t draw for appeal, or approval. She draws to be well; to feel well; and for her, thank goodness, the very act of picture-making has for decades now afforded her a pleasurable way of breaking past the gravity of her immense motor and cognitive challenges. The story of Jenny’s love of picture-making and the goodness she’s drawn from pictures are perhaps best illustrated in the images she paraded through my old appointment book in a furious sprint over a cold winter’s night when she was 16. As they remind me, indeed I cannot forget them, she was quite ill in body and mind following a mind-shattering fall after becoming severely sleep deprived at a special summer camp. Had the staff been trained to detect and act on the signs of her obvious sleep deprivation, she might have been spared the half year she lost while living in the painful limbo in her shattered consciousness, where unrecoverable sleep falls. She might have avoided her hallucinations, and the dreadful fear of being swallowed back into the jaws of the seizure monsters that ripped entire pages from her school calendar while she was a little girl. 

I refer to these images as my daughter’s reminders, in part because she made them in an old datebook of mine, drawing freely over pages containing handwritten reminders of my appointments and tasks to be completed. But even more so because her images like the fast-falling peanut shell and winged red horse she drew there remind me of the importance picture-making has played in our lives. They remind me how reliably Jenny Lily Gordon, now 32, has piloted herself through dark times on the tip of a pen. How she’s drawn genies back into fallen bottles. And created a hearth of warm friction when her off-kilter body ran a little too cold - as it often does when her neurological temperatures flowed in different directions. Warm on her left, frosty along her right. But “just right” — like a fairy tale porridge — when her busy left hand is working with her eyes to make a new picture.

From the moment she was able to pick up and hold onto a crayon at the age of three, which was not easy for her, drawing has given my daughter a trustworthy way to communicate when words failed her. You see, Jenny’s thoughts get stuck in the upper shelves of her fragile brain’s speech and language freezer. She finds it easier to produce certain kinds of ideas using ink and lead pigments which fly effortlessly from her drawing instruments without a lot of words weighing them down.

Making pictures offers her a profound well-spring of wellness because the activity also provides a fount of liberating physical release. For although she can’t ice-skate or play soccer, she can take great speed on the point of a No. 2 pencil. And the rhythmic sound the lead tip makes against a sheet of paper is music to her ears. “The paper is a mountain I can climb, where you and me can go up to anywhere, we can fly away,” she once told me as we drew beneath a star-studded August sky . To Jenny, the earth’s gravity can be supremely limiting while her paper universe is boundless.

Since her earliest years, our curly-headed, cognitively- and visually-impaired daughter, has been drawn to our home’s bright, white shelves. They’re packed with paper, old calendars, new and used sketchbooks, fat patches of fabric and pens and inkwells of tangy colors: raspberry, lemon, blueberry, carrot, eggplant and chocolate. She continues to reach for these colorful supplies to flavor her way over the bitter aftertaste of some pretty potent medicines.

These particular reminders of Jenny’s scratch deeply into my memories --and my wife’s -- of many of her hardest times. Times when she lost her appetite completely. Times when she couldn’t grip a spoon or hold a cup of milk; night times when repeated falls from her consciousness — sparked by uncontrollable seizures — ripped entire pages out of her school calendar. These are the kinds of drawn reminders I kept hidden in a desk drawer for years even though I cherished them as visual celebrations of Jenny’s remarkable tenacity and strong desire not to be counted out.

When the tornado side effects of her powerful anti-convulsants began to lighten, she immediately reached for her friction sticks to draw her way back to a steadier state of mind. Her pens and pencils were like a conductors’ baton with which to find the music to lift up and re-organize her disordered mind. The pictures were dance partners to her songs. Pictures went hand and hand with singing. They were dance partners that came together over many hours, across many days, until a new destination appeared. These pictures trigger my gratitude for the ancient red line of drawing - the pulsating, sanguine line which runs like the Hudson River through all of human time. Drawing has also given me a way to express gratitude everyday for a piece of chalk, for a circle, or those beautiful, swift lines that drive comic books.

But I have a special gratitude for these images she paraded across the grey pinstriped pages of my old 2007 appointment calendar. They remind me how drawing alongside her for over three decades has again and again restored our hope of finding some joy in the next five, ten or fifteen minutes. The hope that drawing provides is coming in very handy right now as we live through this vaccine-less pandemic.

It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but to me these pictures are worth a thousand pictures each. An entire year can be glanced in a solitary image: like that long stretch of time when Jenny’s leg was broken in a completely preventable fall. Thank goodness her hands weren’t hurt. She could still wield magic markers, whose bright, magical colors and pungent scents helped lessen her pain.

“My leg hurts, but the itching is worse,” she told me as we drew cats’ faces over the dense, white cast that stretched from her foot all the way up her thigh. She had injured her right leg during a fall from a rowing machine in a health club. The “trainer” had not remembered to fasten the seat belt, but left Jenny’s right foot tightly fastened to the binding in machine’s pedal; when she slid unattended from the seat and struck the floor, her bound leg twisted radically, resulting in what her orthopedist reassured us was “just a skier’s fracture.” But “just” to Jenny is not really any old just. The fracture healed fine, but the surrounding anatomy never quite restored.

I’m reminded how at night her swollen limb throbbed with blue pain - and that the little balance she had before, enabling her to stand up and pivot with our support, was gone. So we carried her.

One night as we drew more icons over the rock-hard plaster, she paused to say, “Joseph, did you know I am drawing-able? I am very, very able to draw. I can draw all day. I’m never afraid. I have zero paper fright.”

“So you have no ‘stage fright’ when you draw?,” I clarified.

“Zero!” she shot back. “It never hurts to draw, it’s never scary so don’t be scared, dad, ok?”

Ever since, I have tried to take her word for it. Not fearing how a picture might be seen or judged by others is a freedom few of us carry over from childhood.

“Jenny doesn’t draw for anyone’s sake but her own, does she?” an artist friend John asked me as they sat together at a tall window overlooking a row of massive trees outside our Bronx apartment.

She had been drawing at that sill for several hours, filling the pages of an old composition book that once belonged to her brother. Old sketchbooks, spiral notebooks or other semi-used booklets of paper held a special allure because they contained the appealing marks of people whose drawings she loved.

“What are you drawing?” John asked. “The birds, the squirrels?”

The animals were busy that afternoon, flying between branches which dropped red and yellow leafs

“I’m just drawing a picture, John,” she replied. “You want to make one?”

“I once just drew lots of pictures, too, Jenny. On the farm where we all grew up. I drew between my chores and homework.”

“You weren’t scared right?”

“Not a bit,” he replied, as he grabbed a pencil.

Picture-making’s reliability in shifting one’s vantage point is helpful when you’re perpetually sitting on the edge of your next fall. For eleven years she was besieged by seizures while transitioning into and out of sleep. I am reminded of those nights by her image of the hovering “seizure monster” who, she said, was like “crocodiles biting through her pillows.” They flew off with her voice. “I couldn’t speak when they came.” Examining her picture several years later, she told me “I’m glad that bitch is gone.”

Many of our hardest falls are lurking just around the corner, yet we don’t see them even as we’re heading towards them. Like that tree branch snaking beneath the cement sidewalk, opening up a crack that swallows the wheel of your wheelchair, sending you crashing. A collision with asphalt can mark up your porcelain face with alarming exclamation points. These shout out your extreme vulnerability to your neighbors when they see you in the lobby of the 14-story, red-brick high-rise you call home. 

“The colors hurt a lot more than my face does” she once confided, referring to the attention that comes with every bloom of these dreaded color palettes. The hues of purple, crimson, curry yellow, and cloudy grey can take weeks to fade. These are times to stay clear of windows and mirrors, because the reflections really do hurt. Whenever she got slammed she reflexively turned to picture-making, selecting and blending soothing colors and picturing a reassuring and perhaps more stable landscape.

All of this is to remind me how I am deeply grateful for these particular pictures made in her fierce sprint to recover herself from the calamitous fall she took when she was 16. These are the book of pictures I hid away for years. I just couldn’t bare to look at them. They were too potent, too illustrative of that most shattering fall that I should have seen coming. I felt guilty for having placed my paternal trust in that Godforsaken sleep away camp; a sailing camp stationed in a former nunnery in picturesque Newport, Rhode Island. It was there that she fell unnoticed through her REM cycle into the depths of the most severe sleep deprivation. A clueless trio of camp nurses were simply too untrained to see what had happened to her, even though she was unable to speak, sit, eat or  recognize her own parents. “Oh, she’ll be just fine,” the smiling nurse told us, having no idea that Jenny’s severe sleep loss had disorganized her brain so profoundly that she took a year to fully recover. She lingered in that place where unrecoverable sleep falls, alone and lonely, a lost soul in a song-less, picture-less limbo. She dwelled in that nowhere space from late August through late December.

It was a hellish period during which time I soon came tumbling down my own mental hill, like Jack following Jill. Which is why these images remain such vivid reminders of that night in late December as Jenny’s recovery began to take shape in this remarkable parade of pictures, which sprouted fruits, and birds, and rivers, and strange bits of self-portraiture, like that disembodied head rolling down August.

They are still dancing in my old datebook with the red ribbon place mark. Her quickly drawn bright plumes of birds feathers and her fast-falling orange peanut shell all poured forth one winter’s night and morning four months after her August fall. They flowed swiftly when just a few hours before she could barely lift a pencil. After so many painful days of passivity, depression, and sleep disturbed nights, they took form through her tired fingers onto the grey pinstriped pages of my old Lettes of London appointment book. And as she drew I knew as only a parent can know that our daughter was surely on her way back to her steadier self again.

I saw the sparkle return to her wan, brown eyes; and the red rouge come back to her pale cheeks. Should I ever forget what drawing can do for a human being  I will look at these pictures once again. 

When she first reached for the place-mark of that old appointment book, I was annoyed with her lingering illness and with myself for having held onto all these dozens of outdated appointment books - paper objects that had left me bound to the past, and clinging hopelessly to the idea that if I could just plan my days carefully enough that I might not be so fearful of the future. I had gritted my teeth as I began tossing the red- and black-covered journals into the trash. But when the red ribbon danced from the Lettes’ binding it lit Jenny up like a fuse. “Please give it to me, I want to draw in it,” she said as I handed the book over and helped her gather up her markers. 

She quickly began charting her way across the meridian of reminders cluttered with notes of my old appointments. Several hours later, she was still going strong, but I insisted that she stop and try to get some sleep. As sound sleep cycle was still eluding us. She nonetheless awoke early the next morning to continue drawing. 

“Look at all of these wonderful pictures you made. You draw so well,” I said as she moved her friction sticks swiftly over the pin-striped pages like a wind-filled sailboat cutting across Naragansett Bay.

“Well, dad, you know,” she replied, “Draw well, be well.”  She lifted her head to survey the colors of her many pens that lay before her, picked out several reds and oranges, and drew on fearlessly for hours. 

- Joe Gordon

[dani-ellie03]

Fic: Wednesday’s Child (13/?)

Title: Wednesday’s Child Summary: The next time Emma Swan wanted magical help, she was on her own. Because now they were stuck with a pint-sized savior who clearly had an attitude problem and a terrified but pretending not to be pre-pirate. Spoilers: If you’re current, we’re good. Rating/Warning: PG-13, mostly for safety. Family angst/fluff, as per usual. Disclaimer: Once Upon a Time and its characters were created by Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. I’m just borrowing them but I’ll put them back when I’m finished! —–

{1} {2} {3} {4} {5} {6} {7} {8} {9} {10} {11} {12}

At ff.net and below.

Tagging @shealivedarnit (If anyone else wants to be tagged, let me know!)

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Even with the added complication of dealing for five, Go Fish could only carry a family for so long. After two full games – make that three for Henry and Killian, who'd played the first game on their own – it was clear that Henry's impromptu playmates were getting antsy. Poor Emma was trying her hardest to settle a wriggling Neal while, seemingly in response to their shared discomfort, Killian shifted position on the blanketed floor every few minutes.

Henry caught his grandparents' eyes, who both nodded their permission. Yes, it was high time they found another activity to occupy the children. "I don't know about anyone else," Henry said as he collected everyone's paired cards, "but I'm all Go Fished out."

"Yeah, same here," Emma agreed. "I think the squirt's done, too."

A touched smile lit David's face at his little daughter's use of the affectionate nickname her adult incarnation had given her baby brother. "It certainly looks like he is," he agreed, his voice soft. "Let me see if I can settle him."

After slipping his little prince from his little princess's arms, David did a quick check of the baby's diaper. Neal must have been wet because David excused himself to go change him.

Oh, there was no way in this world or any of the others that Henry was going to tell his ten-year-old mom that her baby brother had been fidgeting because he'd wet his diaper while sitting on her lap. An adult would have been able to take that news in stride, of course, but a ten-year-old would more than likely be grossed out.

Henry should know. He'd been a ten-year-old not that long ago.

With David gone,Snow and Henry were left to figure out the family's next activity. The thunder seemed to have let up a bit but since whipping wind splattered the pouring rain against the windows, outside activities were a no go. Heck, any activities that required leaving the blanket fort were probably a no go. Whether little Killian's fear of storms was restricted to thunder and lightning, Henry wasn't sure, but he was not about to put it to the test.

Although, how adorable was it that little Killian was afraid of storms? This little boy would eventually grow up to be a fearsome pirate captain who could sail through the worst storms the ocean had to offer. When had he outgrown the fear? And how?

Knowing what he did of his stepfather's past, though, Henry wondered if he even really wanted to know.

A heavy sigh escaped Henry's lips. None of this mental meandering was helpful. It would be a good hour before his grandma would even consider getting lunch ready and they still had two little kids to occupy until then.

Thinking up family activities was hard.

After another moment of thought, it came to him. "Mary Margaret, you still have all those art supplies, right?"

A smile lit his grandmother's face. "I do indeed. Everyone who wants to draw, please raise your hand."

As Henry had hoped they would, both Emma and Killian stuck their hands in the air. After all, what little kid didn't like to draw?

Teaching elementary school for twenty-eight years during the first Curse had pretty much left Snow with enough leftover art supplies to open a craft store. She kept the bulk of her collection in a big green plastic tote, the kind used for storing things in attics or basements. In the apartment, she'd kept the tote tucked into a corner of her bedroom closet but Henry didn't know where she'd stored it in the farmhouse.

"I'll be right back," Snow said now and ducked out of the blanket fort, presumably to retrieve the tote.

"What are we going to draw, Henry?" Killian asked as he rearranged the blankets and pillows on the floor around him to make himself a little drawing nest.

"We're going to draw whatever we want," Henry replied with a smile. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this little boy was Killian. The innocence in the boy's eyes was so different from the Killian Henry knew. How many awful things had the boy experienced to tear that innocence away piece by piece?

"What if we're not very good at drawing?" Emma asked, her voice soft.

In some ways, it was easier to believe that this little girl was Emma. Though she was sometimes unsure of herself in a way that adult Emma wasn't, she still had the same manner of searching for sincerity, of feeling people out before letting them in. Very little of the innocence in Killian's eyes remained in Emma's.

"It doesn't matter if you're not very good at drawing," he said, swallowing a lump that had unexpectedly arisen in his throat. "You can color or do whatever you want. You could even try to draw what you're comfortable with. You just might end up surprising yourself."

Emma gave him a tiny, grateful smile.

Footsteps trailed down the stairs, quieting the children. The footsteps bypassed the living room and headed to the kitchen. A moment later, the radio in the kitchen snapped on, tuned to the oldies station. "We need some working music!" Snow called on her way back to the blanket fort, much to the children's amusement.

Playing the oldies station was a pretty smart idea on his grandmother's part, Henry figured. Going by simple math, little Emma's musical knowledge ended at the early 90s. Hearing songs produced after the grunge era might have made her ask too many questions.

Snow returned to the blanket fort then, plastic tote in hand and old copies of The Daily Mirror resting on the closed lid. She set the tote down and removed the lid as she plopped down next to Emma. "Wow," Emma whispered when she spied the veritable art supply hoard in the tote.

"If you've ever wondered what happens to the art supplies in your classroom when the school year is over, now you know," Snow laughed.

"You're a teacher?" Emma asked, raising her gaze to Snow's. When Snow nodded, Emma smiled. "I should have guessed. You're good with kids."

The girl resumed digging through the tote, completely oblivious to the touched smile lighting Snow's suddenly watery eyes. Henry saw it, though, and gave his grandmother a smile. She returned the smile, blinked back her tears, and rested her hand on the small of her little girl's back. "All right, everyone, let's get to it."

True to her concerns, Emma chose a coloring book and a ninety-six-count box of crayons. Killian dug out a sketch book and charcoal pencils while Henry grabbed a pad of drawing paper and a package of colored pencils. Snow handed out sheets of newspaper, while instructing the children to put them underneath their chosen canvases. "I'd rather not have to wash crayon or pencil out of my linens."

"Yep, totally a teacher," Emma teased.

Henry looked up, wide-eyed. That was the first time little Emma had joked with them! The progress must have given Snow courage because she rubbed a couple of circles over Emma's back before asking, "May I share your crayons?"

"Sure," Emma shrugged, shifting the box so that both she and Snow could reach it. Snow smiled, snatched a coloring book from the tote, and settled down next to her daughter.

As everyone got to work – and Emma hummed along with the songs on the radio, which was in all honesty as too adorable for words – Henry snapped a quick picture of the kids and Snow and texted it to Regina with the caption, "Family art time."

Moments later he received a text not from his mom but from his formerly wicked aunt: Tell your grandmother that I've changed my price after that picture. I need to see these two in person.

Henry chuckled and handed the phone over to his grandmother. "Tell them to come over at 12:30 for lunch," Snow said, smirking as she handed Henry his phone back. "We're having grilled cheese."

He relayed the message and swallowed a laugh when the reply came in: Why does the menu not surprise me? We'll be there.

Thinking quickly, Henry also texted his mom to ask if she could bring him some of his old chapter books. Crayons and coloring books wouldn't hold two antsy children for very long, either.

"Who's coming over for lunch?" Emma asked as she frowned down at the picture of a cartoon witch seated on a broom with a cat on her lap that she'd chosen to color. The book she'd grabbed was filled with pictures for all the annual holidays. Somehow it didn't surprise Henry that his little mom had gone straight for the Halloween pictures. She did seem to be having trouble deciding what color to use for the embellishments on the witch's dress, though.

"Regina and her sister," Snow answered. The coloring book she'd chosen depicted birds and forest scenes, also not a surprise to Henry.

"Will they be able to fit in the blanket fort, too?" a somewhat distracted Killian asked. On the paper in front of him, a sketch of a tall-masted ship on a roiling ocean had begun taking shape. Idly, Henry wondered if the weather outside had at all played a part in Killian's chosen scene.

"Of course they can," Emma replied, smiling up at the little boy. "This is the hugest blanket fort ever!"

Killian laughed and returned his full attention to his drawing.

Henry smiled as well and looked down at his own drawing. He and Killian – well, adult Killian – had started having a kind of art class during the evenings after homework and deputy duties were done for the day. Killian's style was realistic while Henry's lent itself more to cartoon illustration but he certainly appreciated the advice his stepfather had given him. And he was using that advice now, working on a cartoon depicting his grandmother and his little mom lying side by side on their stomachs as they shared a box of crayons. A napping Wilby taking up residence on Emma's other side made the entire scene that much cuter.

Something told him that the drawing would end up on his grandparents' refrigerator from now until he went off to college.

For a couple of minutes, the only sounds were the rain pattering the roof and windows, the wind whistling outside, and Emma humming along with the radio. When David returned to the blanket fort with a freshly changed and calm Neal, the baby's babbling broke the comfortable semi-silence. "What did we miss?" David asked as he sat down cross-legged on a pillow and nestled Neal in his lap.

"Free art period," Henry said with a nod towards the tote. "Grab some supplies and have at it. Oh, and Regina and Zelena are coming over for lunch."

As David retrieved a thick red crayon, a sheet of white construction paper, and a page of newsprint, he chuckled. "Someone's price changed, I take it."

"Indeed it did," Snow laughed, causing Henry to smirk and Emma and Killian to exchange a bewildered frown. After a beat, though, the kids shrugged at each other and returned to their artwork.

Henry didn't go back to his drawing, though. He simply sat back and took in the little family scene in front of him. Little Emma and Killian lay head to head on their stomachs, their feet in the air. Snow had taken her attention off the coloring book and was now focused on her little daughter beside her as if trying to memorize her like this.

David sat with his back to the entrance to the fort, guiding little Neal's hand with the crayon gripped in it along the paper. Clearly he hadn't felt right about Neal watching the other kids color without participating in the activity himself. Without calling attention to it, Henry snapped a picture of them to use as a reference after he finished the drawing of Emma and Snow.

Just as Henry was about to get back to his drawing, a little voice singing stopped him. It took him a moment to realize that Emma was singing along to Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man."

Henry exchanged a surprised look with his grandparents. As a general rule, Emma Swan did not sing – though there had been certain exceptions here and there – and here she was, singing along as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Henry noted with amusement that David also looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if hearing those lyrics in his little girl's voice was raising his overprotective-dad hackles. (Not that little Emma had any idea what the words she was singing actually meant.)

The magic was broken when Emma changed out her crayon and spotted the three of them staring at her. "Why are you all looking at me like that?" she asked, frowning.

Oh, crap. How could they explain that they were simply fascinated by the sound of her little voice? Thankfully, Snow once again managed to strike the perfect balance between not giving her the complete truth and not telling a lie. "That song came out years before you were born. How do you know it?"

Emma shrugged. "One of the ladies at one of my group homes liked the oldies and this one was her favorite. I only know it so well because she played it over and over and over again."

Everyone chuckled. "Well, don't let us stop you, kiddo," David said softly.

Emma smiled, plucked the black crayon out of the box, and set about coloring the cat while finishing out the song in a soft murmur.

"Mary Margaret?" Killian said after a beat.

"Yes, Killian?"

"Even though it's storming out, I'm having fun a lot of today."

"Yeah, me too," Emma added.

Snow, Charming, and Henry all shared a touched look. Talk about heartwarming! "I'm very glad," Snow said, smiling tenderly at the children, "because we are, too."

-----

Chapter Fourteen

[gracewithducks]

The Cat in the Hat Returns: VOOM! (Genesis 3:6-10; Isaiah 1:15-18) - The Gospel of Dr. Seuss series #1, preached 3/1/2020

My kids are artists. They are made in the image of a creative God, a God who delights in drawing rainbows across gray skies, who loves to paint the clouds orange, purple, and gold, a God who knelt in the mud to form beings out of dust.

 My kids are artists. Like the God who made them, they look at the world and search for ways to transform it, to make something new, to bring color and manifest joy.

 And I appreciate their creativity; I love how my children have learned to embrace their visions, to dream their dreams, to care enough about the world they live in to work to make it more beautiful. I love when their creative spirit leads them to new solutions to their own problems; I love when their creative spirit helps them made new friends, helps them try new things; I love when their creative spirit produces amazing artwork to frame and hang on our family walls.

 I appreciate their creativity a little less, however, when they are so inspired that they try to skip the middleman and create their artwork directly on our family’s walls. Or floors. Or furniture. Or skin. Or clothes.

 And by now, our kids know the expectations. They know that crayons and markers are only for paper – they know, because they’ve been taught, reminded, caught, punished, taught and reminded over and over again. They’ve had to clean up their own messes; they’ve learned just how hard it is to erase pencil marks off dressers and scrub markers from bedroom walls.

 But sometimes, sometimes, the call of inspiration is too much to resist; sometimes, even though they know better, sometimes our little people just can’t help themselves.

 Not too long ago, our five-year-old felt the creative spirit calling her, and she was moved to design a new art installation on our bathroom wall. She worked with a variety of media: pencils and crayons and markers and watercolors and lip gloss, brought together in pursuit of one glorious and colorful vision.

 My daughter really is a great artist. But she also is a smart little girl, and even as she admired her handiwork, she knew that mom and dad would probably have very different feelings about what she’d done.

 So she turned her pencil around, and started trying to erase the evidence from the bathroom wall. Unfortunately, that pencil eraser just made smudges and smears and made everything look worse.

 But B didn’t panic. Fortunately, she was already in the bathroom, and there was a sink right next to her. So she started the water, and she dipped her paintbrush into the water, and she started trying to paint her masterpiece away.

 The wet paintbrush did some wondrous things to blend the colors, but the art remained. So B turned next to the bar of soap. Again, she used her paintbrush, dabbing it first in the soap, then attempting to use the soap to swirl the colors away.

 Again, she discovered a new artistic technique. But again, the artwork stubbornly remained.

 And now she was starting to get a bit desperate. She reached for the bottle of hand sanitizer, pumped out a handful, and tried smearing it directly on the wall. Hand sanitizer is pretty strong, but mostly, it just transferred more of the colors to B’s hands, while leaving incriminating little handprints behind.

 She reached for the towel, tried to wipe her hands clean, and tried to wipe the whole mess – the paint, the crayons, the markers, the gooey lip gloss, the water, the soap, the sanitizer – she tried to wipe it away. And she ended up with a colorful towel, and a smudged and blotchy wall, and a panic in her little heart.

 She did the only thing left to do: she scrubbed her hands, balled up the towel in the corner, turned off the lights, closed the door, and walked away.

 Maybe you can relate: maybe it’s been a few years since you created artwork on the walls, but maybe – like B, or like the Cat in the Hat – maybe you’ve made a mess which you only later discover you just can’t figure out how to clean up. Maybe it’s the words spoken in anger, which you just can’t take back – maybe it’s the email you wish you never sent; maybe it’s the money spent on an impulse which you later regret; or maybe it’s years of neglecting your physical health, only to reap the consequences… or years of letting your fears and insecurities keep you from doing what you really want to do, or trying something new. But no matter what you do, you can’t undo what you’ve done… and no matter how hard you try to fix it, to clean up the mess, you just keep seeming to make it worse.

 Eventually, though, it catches up to us. Eventually, reality sets in. Perhaps it surprises you not at all to know that my daughter’s bathroom masterpiece was discovered… it was discovered by her older sister, her wholly unsympathetic older sister, who delighted in tattling, who took great joy in a superior attitude, who scolded and admonished her little sister… until mom and dad reminded her how, at the same age, big sister expressed her creative side with a bottle of red nail polish… all over the bookshelf, and the books, and the box fan, and the carpet, and the walls… We reminded her how her own creative spirit once inspired her to doodle with a permanent marker on the face of a flatscreen television… We reminded her how all of us have made messes, and we all make mistakes.

 And suddenly, big sister didn’t have nearly so much to say.

 Not one of us is perfect. We are made in the image of the creative God – but we fall short; we make mistakes along the way. All of us have, at times, whether intentionally or not, all of us have made messes of God’s good creation; all of us have disappointed God, and hurt others, and hurt ourselves; all of us have sinned.

 And much like my five-year-old artist, much like the Cat in the Big Hat, we find that – try as we may, we just can’t fix it by ourselves. Everything we try just moves the mess around. It’s like a bad attitude: and maybe you manage not to yell at your boss, but instead you yell at the car that cuts you off on the way home; maybe you control your temper with the grandkids, only to let it loose at the server at the restaurant; maybe you keep your cool with your neighbor, only to scream when the kids won’t eat their veggies; or maybe you watch the news, and it makes you feel overwhelmed and anxious, and because no one on the TV listens to you anyway, you end up yelling at your spouse or your best friend instead. Everything we try just moves the stress around. Even if we get the mess out of our own house, we just set it loose in the world – and we can’t ignore it; no matter what we do, we can’t make it go away.

 After trying and failing to clean the mess himself, the Cat in the Hat finally asks for help; one friend after another, Cats A, B and C and down through the alphabet all do their best – but nothing works, until finally we meet tiny Cat Z.

 And the Cat in the Hat says,

 “Z is too small to see. So don’t try. You cannot.

But Z is the cat Who will clean up that spot!...

“He has something called VOOM.

Voom is so hard to get,

You never saw anything Like it, I bet.

Why, Voom cleans up anything Clean as can be!”…

Then the Voom… It went VOOM!

And, o boy! What a VOOM!

Now, don’t ask me what Voom is. I never will know. But, boy!

Let me tell you. It DOES clean up snow!...

[And the Cat said,] “If you ever Have spots, now and then,

I will be very happy To come here again.”

 Finally, the whole mess disappears: through the power of this mysterious Voom, which cannot even be seen – but which is the only thing with the power to make everything clean.

 “Voom is hard to get,” the book says, and “Don’t ask me what Voom is; I never will know.”

 But friends, I know what it is. And the good news is, it’s not “so hard to get” – all you have to do is ask.

 Because Voom is the one thing that works, even when our own power fails; Voom is the one thing that can clean us when we can’t clean ourselves; Voom is the one thing that erases our failures and our sins, and allows us to start with a brand new clean slate. Voom is the love of God; friends, “Voom” is the Cat in the Hat’s word for grace.

 You can’t control it. You can’t see it. But grace changes everything.

 That’s what we see in our scripture for today: grace. In Genesis, a mess is made in the garden; a mess that the first people try to clean up, to hide with some fig leaves – but they can’t hide what they’ve done.

 But then God shows up, and offers grace: even in the midst of judgment, they are given real clothing, to protect them in this harsh new world. And later in Isaiah, the prophet speaks to a people suffering in exile, a people who are suffering for their faithlessness, wallowing in the messes they’ve made, and through Isaiah, God promises: though your sins be like scarlet, I will cover them, clean them, fresh as newly-fallen snow.

We are entering the season of Lent: a season which invites us to take a good and honest look at our lives, to face up to the messes we’ve made, the mistakes we’ve tried to sweep under the rug, the flaws and failures we’ve hidden behind a smiling face – Lent invites us to acknowledge our sin. We all have fallen short. We all have made messes, all over the place.

 But here is the good news: that’s not where the story has to end. The Cat in the Hat is finally wise enough and courageous enough to ask for help – and we can ask for help, too. And if we do, when we cry out to God, we are given the gift of grace: God’s power to heal us, to cleanse us, and to enable us to begin again.

 I hope that my daughters never become so afraid of punishment or failure that they stop creating masterpieces. And I also hope that they are learning that our love is always stronger than our frustration, and no matter what mess they’ve made, if they ask us, we will help them make it right.

 And friends, I hope that you know that God’s love for you is so much greater, so much deeper, so much more powerful and patient than our love could ever be. May you have the courage to keep seeking joy; may you have the hope to follow the divine and creative spark within you; and when you mess it all up, may you be strong enough to ask for help… and know that you will always be met with God’s amazing grace.

 God, we thank you for hearing us when we ask for help. We thank you that we are not alone in our messes. We thank you for the gift of grace; for giving us voom – that invisible, undeserved, powerful grace. Give us the courage to ask for help; give us the joy that comes from doing the best we can; and by your grace, when we fall, help us start all over again. In Jesus’ name we pray; amen.

  Note: this picture of my little Things meeting The Cat and his friends is a couple of years old, but it will always be one of my favorites! Thank heavens for these little mischief makers. They are worth all the messes. Always.

[realrhythmskrp]

DISPATCH, 04/22/17: Kaleidoscope Records has officially released information about vocalist, lead dancer, and main rapper, Ja San, also known as Sunny, on the company’s official website! Sunny is a ‘97 liner and has been beloved by fans. He was announced as a sorted trainee under the group Solar and is speculated to debut in 2017. Find out more about Sunny below!

I, JA SAN, have read and understand the terms and conditions as my position of VOCALIST/LEAD RAPPER/MAIN DANCER of SOLAR and agree to honor the standards that are to be expected of me as an employee of KALEIDOSCOPE.

OOC INFORMATION

Preferred name: Ossy Pronouns: they/them Timezone: EST Other muses: Seongkyeo

IC INFORMATION

Faceclaim: Park Jimin of BTS

Name: Ja San Stage name (if applicable): Sunny

Idol concept: The powerhouse of the group, so to say, as they can do almost everything but specialize mostly in dance. They are not very outgoing and not very open to fans and even the members, but they are a crucial part of the group and it’s important to keep them around. The fans aren’t quite sure why he clearly shows he is not comfortable with being an idol yet.

His fans refer to him as Sunny, although his group mates usually just call him San or a nickname off of that. And while he is a very dedicated member of his group, he’s only great at being a member and not really showing off. San doesn’t like doing promotions, doesn’t like fan meetings, but it’s not because he doesn’t like his fans, it’s because he is an awkward person when it comes to people he doesn’t know. Fans tend to bag on him for this, but he hopes that as their debut date gets closer and closer, fans will start to understand that he just isn’t good at being, well, him.

Birth date and age: Oct. 31th, 1997; age 19 Company name: Kaleidoscope Records Group Name (if applicable): Solar Group Position (if applicable): Vocalist/Lead Dancer/Main Rapper

Strengths: The powerful vocals he can produce are always a strength, and he can spit a rhyme very well, but his main strength is dancing. He is blessed to be extremely creative and talented in every category but sometimes he does feel that it’s not enough.

Weaknesses: What he feels he could do better at, though, is being more outgoing and pushing himself further towards the fans. He is a kind person, but he is so easily shy and very quiet, so he doesn’t often feel comfortable when on variety shows and in the public. He likes to hide, so to say.

Positive traits: good-willed, strong-minded, perfectionist Negative traits: self-deprecating, unsure, stressed

PERSONAL HISTORY

his life was in the hands of people he didn’t trust, but there was nothing he could do about it. what would it be like to control your own life for once? he never knew, but he wanted to know, and he set out to do it. he was only 16.

sunny doesn’t know his parents. does he have siblings? he also doesn’t know, but he grew up with people he called mom and dad and brother and sister, but they were never truly related to him. his tone of voice was anything but meaningful at the words “mom” and “dad” because he felt like his life was just a fantasy he would never get to break free from. it’s just not fair to him.

it is when he hits the age of 5 that he is sent to a foster home after sitting in the program since he was 3. sunny doesn’t know his parents. that’s because they dropped him off at the child services center after his third birthday, because they couldn’t take a kid any more. he has a bad memory of his childhood, or maybe it’s just his mind blocking out everything bad that had happened. all he can remember was filing into the foster care program with his hand holding a stranger’s, stuffed bunny held tight, eyes wide with what he says was curiosity, but was easily mistaken for fear, and his life on the line. from that day on, his fate had been sealed. he was an outcast child, or, at least, one of the many.

sunny didn’t make friends easily. it wasn’t because he didn’t want to, but because he was too afraid to. kids already had their friends, they were already getting along and he didn’t want to ruin it. he was too sad, too shy, and way too young to be trying to get along with all of the other older kids. all the other three year olds didn’t really talk much either, so it was hard to put yourself out there when you were so young, so little, and so scared. this is how it was for the next two years. at five years old, he was finally taken into a family.

his mom owned a small shop on the corner of an intersection in Busan. his dad was a CEO for some company he still can’t remember the name of. his brother was fifteen, a middle school student, and a bully. his sister was twelve, in elementary school, and a bully. sunny? he was five, unsure of his life, and the person always in the middle of the fights between his foster siblings. it was horrible to see kids fighting all the time, especially kids that had to pretend to be related. but there was no way out of this one. he spent most of his days in the shop with his mom after he got home from school, helping customers behind the counter and restocking the shelves closest to the ground. when the shop wasn’t busy, he would sit by the window in at a table his foster mom had set up for the three kids and watch people pass by.

there wasn’t much else to do when your family rarely got along.

that’s how he grew up. at six, he was had written his name on the bottom of the chair by the window. at seven, he had his own stack of printer paper and a pack of 12 crayons sitting on the table. at eight, he had binders of pictures he kept hidden in the corner between his chair and the wall. at nine, he was drawing people that passed by. at ten, he wanted to be an artist when he grew up, but he didn’t get much support from anyone else. at eleven, he learned how to read and write a lot better and in more creative way. at twelve, he is writing stories and drawing out the scenes, mostly about the people around him. at thirteen, he was a teenager, and his foster mom allowed him one gift that was way too expensive for any other occasion.

he simply asked for a piano, and that was what he got. so, at fourteen and fifteen, he is practicing the piano every day, playing melodies over the sound of his family arguing about who should have the remote or where the next paycheck should go to. he is starting to understand a lot of things now. his brother is now twenty five and still mooching off of his parents and his sister is twenty two and out of the house, she went off to college and he hasn’t seen her since she left. he is a teenager witnessing his family’s struggle every day and he doesn’t like it. his piano was his best friend and his key to tuning out the constant arguments his parents would have with his brother about getting a job, moving out, having a steady income… he was tired of it.

when sixteen hit, he packed his bag before school one day. his school books were pushed under his bed and his clothes were stuffed into his backpack instead in the best way possible. he was ready to leave, the desire to live a life on his own that wouldn’t require listening to a feud every day burning inside of him. so he waves goodbye to his foster mother as he gets on the school bus, but when he gets off at school, he detours. he’s going to find his own way now. so, he dropped out of high school.

he never thought he would see the day when he was actually making a living off of what he loved to do; writing, drawing, playing a piano, and composing. so when he is scouted after a late night performance on the other side of Busan in a small bar, he is surprised, because he’s almost seventeen. the age where he is still too young to be an adult, but too old to be a kid. but he knows this kind of offer is rare, and he steps up to it, not wasting a moment before he is thrown together with a bunch of other guys and forced to practice day by day, night by night, and somehow, he gets accustomed to it. that dissatisfactory has turned into a reason to wake up every morning, a reason to prosper, to shine. but he didn’t realize just how popular he would get within the first few years of their pre-debut.

he’s nineteen now. he’s living. he’s breathing. but he doesn’t feel right, sometimes, but he pushes those thoughts away. he tries to be the best he can be for not only his group, but himself, and he knows his fake family is out there somewhere… but so is his real family. no matter what, though, his family is now here at kaleidoscope, and he plans to keep it that way for as long as he can.