#its....stuy..............?

[roseband]

...im so angry in a way i can't even quantify.

his parents tried to give him a massive wad of cash as a wedding gift, which he refused and told them to "put towards his sister's college if they can't afford it" cause he knew it was another quid-pro-quo

so, in front of his sister they admitted the years of bullshit they've been putting us thru (including her cause they were threatening to withhold college tuition to try and make her harass us too?).....hurting our 11 year relationship was cause they wanted him to be destitute so he'd "have to stop slacking and get a job using his finance degree"

chat.... he's an imports manager.

im going to FUCKING SCREAM??? HES A MOTHER FUCKING IMPORTS MANAGER "not using his finance degree" my ass? what the fuck he's an imports manager who services 8/10 of the top retailers in the usa for his company....(which also sell product ive done art on cause im on a top 10 global ranked brand for apparel lol??)

we're literally so fucking privileged cuz we both got jobs in the field we wanted near immediately out of college with 0 loan debt cause we went to cheapy schools and had partial scholarships........ we both ended up on apparel product development design teams.... him on costing and me on art???? what. the. fuck.

but his cousin who lives in a literal TRAILER is successful cause he "owns a business" (bankrupted three restaurants so far babe), and were "poor" cause we live in an apartment (in a neighborhood with a 110k median household income??? while we're statistically upper middle class now before 30 in fucking nyc.....?)

and his literally illiterate aunties who don't speak english or mandarin....only fuzhounese so they're completely isolated, tooooottttallly know more about what a "finance degree is for" than someone who went to a top 25 globally business school and two people who literally met at one of the top fucking public high schools in the entire mother fucking united states of america???? that has a focus on fucking math?????? FUCK? we went to math nerd school and math nerding gets us raises....i have an arts job and all my raises are based on me being able to write scripts....cause im naturally good at math.

"they're elders so they know more" well they sure as well don't know how to fucking READ? so they...ummmmm.... don't? i would not take career advice from someone who cant.....read? probably perfectly nice people.......but they cant......read?

[robfinancialtip]

🎬🎥 Katrina Chiovon talks about her life and career in the entertainment industry. "The Glitch," a comedic science fiction short that Katrina produced and directed, was shown at the Chelsea Film Festival. She's a very talented person. Problems with sound quality and a sound guy contracting COVID during production weren't the only obstacles Katrina overcame; she showed remarkable perseverance and resolve to finish the project.

🛠️🔊Technical difficulties with the sound and the complete loss of all film progress because of an accident in the sound studio were among the many obstacles that the production of "The Glitch" had to overcome. Katrina had an unwavering commitment to her endeavor even though she had periods of frustration and wanted to quit. She stresses the significance of perseverance and creative problem-solving in hardship.

🏠💔As a young girl, Katrina dealt with a lot of upheaval and difficulty at home. Katrina was eventually placed in a foster home due to her family's situation. She loved her mother deeply, but their connection was strained because she couldn't understand her decisions in light of her life.

🎭🌆Katrina always felt a strong pull toward the arts, especially dancing and acting, even as a little girl. When Katrina recalls her love of acting from childhood, she remembers trying out for a role in a Brady Bunch movie. She arrived in New York City at seventeen and a half, seeking opportunities such as modeling for Ralph Lauren and Glamour magazine. Katrina overcame the dangers and difficulties of growing up street-smart and alone in the city.

🌟👼Despite Katrina’s many hardships and disturbing incidents while residing in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, she persevered and found solutions. Even though she was aware of the threats she faced, she attributes her survival to gut feelings and, maybe, a guardian angel. She exemplifies the strength and determination to follow one's passions despite challenges. Katrina also sought acting roles, landing parts in films including Vendetta Wounds and The City on the Edge. Her film debut was in Christopher Corulla's Old Secrets No Lies (2010). The picture had its world premiere that year at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it featured the late Vinnie Vella.

💪🙏 Katrina demonstrates the significance of self-belief and resilience in the face of adversity. Her unwavering dedication to filmmaking and the arts propelled her through challenges, culminating in a successful debut at the Chelsea Film Festival. Her inspiring message resonates with aspiring artists and entrepreneurs, urging them to embrace challenges as pathways to growth. Let your determination turn obstacles into stepping stones to realizing your dreams.

[spyld]

BOUÔNJOUR!!!

i’m really sad i can’t speak Jèrriais fluently since it’s the dying language of my island, but i am insanely proud of the fact i’m trying to learn. only 3% of the population of Jersey can speak Jèrriais.

although Jèrriais is most commonly compared to French, its accent is more similar to a South African :) There’s also a few variations in vocab used too. In French, a beach is ‘plage’. In Jerriais, it’s ‘grève’, like Grève de Lecq.

i’m sorry if this isn’t what you wanted, but it’s a language critically endangered, and wanted to share it on a larger scale :)

posso parlare e scrivere Italiano, ma è una lingua che sto imparando a scuola e non da solo. preferisco parlare di Jèrriais perché mi piace molto.

I had never heard of it before, thank you for sharing!!

Here's the wikipedia for those interested. It is indeed listed as critically endangered :/ Hope you succeed in stuying it!

[monsterswithimagines]

Undisclosed Desires - Part 15

Joe Goldberg x female!Reader

Summary: Twenty minutes before he would have met Guinevere Beck, Joe meets you instead. You intruige him, but it will soon become clear that there is something off about you.

Words: 1388

Masterlist

Warning!! You guys are going to love me for this one. Or hate me. Lol.

You are not the first woman I've had to kill for.

Candace had lots of male friends, and at one point or another, they all tended to get too close to her. But she liked it, and she was sad when they died. She blamed herself and asked stupid questions like: “why does everybody around me get hurt, Joe?”

You are stronger than Candace. You recognize how bad Jasper was, and you are not sad. You don't ask stupid questions, either. You just shrug after you tell me your coworker died and say “he kind of had a drug problem, so…”

And that is that.

You are not fighting with your grandparents anymore, but now you're fighting with your mom. When I come over, you're usually in a bad mood and no amount of me trying to make you feel better helps, because you don't want to feel better. You want to be angry.

“What?” you snap at me when I tell you to put on your jacket. “I don't want to go out, Joe.”

“C'mon,” I say, trying to stay calm. “We're going for a walk.”

I'm lucky you like to be told to do things, even when you're angry. Other women might have fought me, but you put on your jacket. You're basically steaming out of your ears, you're so mad, but you go with me.

You don't ask me where we're going when I hail us a cab. You're trying to stonewall me again, but this time I won't let you.

This time, I think I really have found something that might help.

Here's something I've learned about you, (Y/n): your emotions hit you like a freight train. When you're anxious, you don't know what to do with yourself, so you rearrange all your furniture. When you're happy, you sing and you dance. People like you usually have the most destructive anger, and you know that, so you turn it all inwards and shut people out.

Other people would try to blow off steam with sex, but you've convinced yourself that even after nearly three months of dating, it's still too soon for us. You told Grey about it a while ago, which is good because it means you're finally ready to tell the important people in your life that we're together (you also, finally, told Nadia).

But also, (Y/n), I'm going a little bit insane.

I have to blow off steam, too, you know?

There's a derelict building in Bed-Stuy. When walking past it, you might just assume that it's sitting empty. But no. It's owned by a friend of Mr. Mooney's, and it's a legitimate business.

You're suspicious when I try to lead you inside, but then a woman opens the door for us and you relax a little.

The woman greets us happily. She introduces herself as Janine and tells you she loves your top. She's thirty and bottle blond and wears a lot of pastels. I can tell you want to throttle her, but you thank her instead.

Janine leads us to a room which is set up just like a regular office, and hands you a baseball bat.

You look at me blankly.

“What is this, Joe?”

“Well,” I say, as Janine hands me a baseball bat as well. “It's a rage room.”

“A what?”

Maybe they don't have rage rooms in The Netherlands, or maybe you've just never been to one.

“A rage room,” I repeat. “It's a place where you can go to destroy things.”

“You guys have an hour,” Janine tells me happily, and then she leaves.

We're alone and you're still not getting it. You follow me into the room, but you don't know what to do with yourself. I'm going to have to get this thing started.

I lift the baseball bat in my hands, feeling its heft. It's not one of those cheap plastic ones, but real, solid wood like the one I keep under the counter at Mooney's. You could really hurt someone with this.

I throw all my weight as I swing the bat. You gasp when the desk lamp shatters.

“Like that,” I say.

I can see the wheels inside your brain turning. I'd love to know what you're thinking right now. You've never seen me do anything violent, so maybe you're trying to process that. Or maybe you're just trying to process the fact that I expect you to destroy things.

You lift the bat. You look at it like it's an alien.

Then, you swing it, and the analog computer screen crashes to the floor.

You like it.

You are smiling and the desk is next. You tell me to help you and we go at it together, hitting the cheap wooden furniture until it splits right down the middle. I throw a chair at the wall, you swing at the corner table. We both leave the bookcase in the corner alone, though. We would never destroy books. We're better than that.

You look beautiful when you're violent.

Your hair is flying around and at some point, you take off your jacket. There is a drop of sweat running down your collarbone until it disappears into your tank top, right between your boobs. There is even some dirt on your forehead, I don't know where it came from.

Then, you're done and you see me watching you. You drop the baseball bat and you rush me. For a moment, I think you might even hit me. My head is still in that place. But of course you don't.

You put your hands on my cheeks and I wrap my arms around your waist and drop my bat, too, and it clatters to the floor loudly.

Did I tell you you're a fast learner, (Y/n)? You are so good at kissing, now. You know exactly what I like and I know exactly what you like. When we kiss, it's electric, and that's not just because we're both sweaty and out of breath and ready to blow off even more steam.

Your hips are pressed into mine and you can tell I'm hard, but you don't pull away from me. You let me push you against the wall and kiss and bite your neck. You moan. You're not sure what to do with your hands so you grab my shoulders, and you bring your leg up so it's rubbing me through my jeans.

I really think you might let me fuck you right here, in this room that we just laid waste to together. But then, the worst thing that has ever happened to any man ever, happens to me.

A flash of lightning. I groan. I hide my face against your neck in embarrassment.

You are quiet. You're not sure what just happened.

“Did you just…?”

Of course I just. It's been so long, (Y/n). I should have known this would happen the second you put your hands on me.

“Joe?”

“I'm sorry,” I say.

I'm not sorry. This is kind of your fault. But what else do I say when I just came in my jeans like a high school boy?

You take a deep breath. Then, you laugh.

You're laughing at me. I've ruined everything.

“Oh, my God,” you say. “I've never made a guy come before.”

You're not laughing at me. You're laughing at yourself - at the power you have over me. I pull away from you and you're smiling, and then you kiss me again. Slow and sweet this time.

“Next time,” you whisper, “you're going to be inside me when that happens.”

I could get hard again right now. I really could.

But our hour is almost up. I don't want Janine to come in here and find us fucking against the wall. And, really, now that I'm thinking more clearly… I don't want our first time together to be like this. I don't want your first time to be like this.

“Can't wait,” I say.

The cab ride back to your apartment, and then mine, is the most uncomfortable I've ever been. I'm glad when I can change out of my dirty clothes. But it was worth it because You've never made a guy come before.

I was your first. I will be your first.

And it will be soon.

[cartermagazine]

Weeksville, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is home to many monumental neighborhoods, but few come close to the history and culturally rich Weeksville. Originating in the mid-1800s sat a small African American village named Weeksville, formed during the post-abolition era. At that time, Weeksville and the surrounding Brooklyn area had one of the country’s densest rates of enslaved people. Brooklyn continued to develop, resulting in Weeksville’s absorption of the Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights neighborhoods. Despite the merger, echoes of Weeksville’s past still exist.

Weeksville earned its name from a freed African American dock worker named James Weeks, who purchased a plot of land in the community following abolition in the state.

As word spread that African Americans like Weeks were making a living in New York, more would head to the area for the same opportunity as long-standing families continued to sell off their land in the Brooklyn area. In the 1850s, the population boomed to over 500 residents, nearly half of the residents were originally born in the South. All with different stories and backgrounds, the occupations of these settlers included educators, health care professionals, and entrepreneurs. As time went on, the Weeks village would go on to operate a “colored” school, cemetery, senior home, and multiple churches. Not to mention, the village was amongst the highest rates for ownership of property and business among an African American settlement.

Weeksville quickly became a safe haven for African Americans throughout New York.

The community has changed over the years, but the history of Weeksville remains one of the most influential neighborhoods in New York State, particularly for African Americans.

CARTER™️ Magazine

[mastcrmarksman]

He's been gone for some time; it's been longer for Stephen than for Clint due to time dilation, so to say that Stephen missed him would be an understatement.

Pulling Clint into a kiss, he grins. ❝ So, should I get you a CHANGE OF ADDRESS form or...? ❞

He doesn't allow Clint to answer before his lips are on his again, and the Cloak of Levitation chooses to partake in their reunion with a very thoughtful and tasteful pinch to Clint's ass.

Time was always the greatest enemy of any superhero and their mind; Clint's battle with time had to do with how long it took him to recover form anything, where in someone like Captain America might be out of days, he was always weeks. Carol could shrug off a bad hit in hours, he'd still carry a bruise for days.

Stephen being away for weeks was bound to happen, would keep happening, because that's the nature of both being superheroes. Clint doesn't really take Avenger calls much these days; although he's repaired his place with them and he still wants to be an Avenger. He's just never the right fit for the call, and he has a duty to the Thunderbolts and city of New York. Although if anyone needed him for any world saving crisis he'd be there; he'd be there if Stephen needed him. Even if all things magical were way out of his depth. Or even something he was entirely comfortable with.

Staying at the Sanctum over the month had proven two things for him. Time away absolutely makes the heart grow fonder and the Sanctum might actually be home; like he might sublet his own apartment and only visit Bed-Stuy to keep up with being the neighborhood's protector and landlord for his building. He's gotten use to the mundane chores around the Sanctum; that it's felt like home.

Being there every night happened because he rather sleep in Stephen's bed. Clint's always known that once he's really with someone, he wants to be around them all the time. Ask any of his ex-girlfriends and they'd tell that he could quite annoying in that way.

There's a new stand with bunch of barren branches in one of the corners of the room with a hood light installed above; since magical snakes were still snakes and Clint figured that Anton and Aleister had been good enough, that he'd fix them up a basking tree which he had.

The kitchen's still a war zone, but Clint's positive that Wong has made peace that this was Clint's kitchen now too and he saw the man break out leftovers from the pasta that Clint had made. Bats has been getting walkies with Lucky three times a day. He's taken several messages, all transcribed onto sticky notes and put into a stack, for when Stephen returns to sort through and figure out if he needs to still deal with that.

All that unfortunately does confirm what one annoying visitor has said. He's become a houseboy, which had been offensive when Satana had said it. He didn't believe in anything, but he had to thank someone when she had FINALLY taken off.

Clint's done the best he can with staying here; but Stephen's still missing (not literally; just in his heart). He's even killed a monster; it was a really fucked up looking rat with eyes on its back and spider legs. He stored it in the freezer because as far as Clint understands; Stephen needs to eat monsters now and again. Well, the creature had really freaked him out, but it seemed big enough to make a small meal out of... so into the freezer it had gone.

Clint's currently assembling arrowheads when a wayward sorcerer came home. His work with the Thunderbolts recently had led him to getting into more situations where arrows were left behind (it's really heartbreaking this keeps happening). So he had to stock up on arrow shafts and remake a bunch of his trick arrows; it's intricate work. Especially when he's working with his putty or explosive heads. Luckily, he's simply spooling some cable that gets stashed on his quiver for when he needs to attack it to an arrow and make a zipline or anything.

Since there very well could have been explosive being set off when the dogs startle him with their barking and there stands Stephen. From the sight of him, he can tell that it's been possibly longer than the month it's been for Clint based on his hair alone. He looks good, however and Clint's not sure who pulls the way inward first since he has suffered terribly this past month. How dare he, he's had to put up with so much, and he needs to get his hands on him and his lips on him.

❝ You ⸻ ❞ He starts to say before Stephen's cutting him off with a question. CHANGE OF ADDRESSS. Considering Clint's has set himself up a little workshop for his arsenal and his Hawkeye gear is hanging up, still needing to be sent to get cleaned; the question is more on the nose. His neighbors have taken to calling him the Hawkguy again to tease him for how little they see him besides needing him for apartment maintenance or scheduling the building a handyman.

Clint should later debate if that's a serious query he should answer. It would be easier to burn his junk mail if it was coming to the Sanctum's address. It's something to consider, and ask Stephen if he'd like that too later.

There's no complaints that could possibly leave his lips before Stephen's covering them again. Good man, smart man, because Clint's always been known for his ability to complain about anything. This next kiss is interrupted and punctuated by a yelp from an emphasized HMPHT OH from Clint as something pinches his ass. It's definitely not a hand, he knows that much.

A hand strays to slip past and rub over Stephen's back, it's a gesture not for Stephen but for the Cloak. ❝ Hey there, Red, missed you too. ❞ His other hand, however, goes to grab at the front of Stephen in his garb, fingers hooking into the top of the collar and holding him still. ❝ You owe me big time. ❞ It's been a long month after all; and he's been lonely. Doing it solo just wasn't his style. ❝ If we're not wrapped up with Red in bed, in five minutes; you're in even bigger trouble. ❞

He can deal with arrow assembly later, although things later. First, he need to get reacquainted with Stephen, who realistically probably needed a shower. After, he can worry about making food, Clint needed to tell him about the monster rat in the freezer. ❝ I took so many messages for you and look, the Sanctum didn't fall apart. ❞ He thinks that actually may be Wong's doing, but Clint's taking the credit. If only because he's treating the sex they were about to have as one part of the many rewards he deserved for suffering for a whole long month.

[zalrb]

Hi! Just watched La Haine and you included it on your 'favorite movies' lists, would you share your thoughts on it?

Oh, La Haine, the first French movie I watched that I actually enjoyed, haha, although the research paper I'd written on it in uni was fairly critical.

which, looking at now, I still think is true, so it's by no means a perfect film, I think that a lot can be said (and has been said) about its lack of depth concerning the social issues that are acknowledged throughout the movie -- in the paper I wrote, I focused mostly on how the movie fails to acknowledge the correlation between racism and police brutality and not - which is in relation - that despite it being a movie about the three boys, Vinz takes a central role and has arguably the most interiority when Hubert and Said would be effected the most by their circumstances and I think that's a disservice because Kassovitz, despite showing a glimpse of brutality that Hubert and Said are subjected to, he was coming from a place where despite the cultural and racial backgrounds of the three characters, they're all living in the same place and all have to deal with the same type of issues and while of course living in the same environment would mean sharing commonalities of experiences, it's both naive and dishonest to say that they're all going through the same thing and that's a privileged position to take.

I made comparisons to Do The Right Thing because Spike Lee considered La Haine to be a ripoff of the movie, which I can see, Kassovitz himself said that Lee (as well as Scorsese) was a very big influence and you can see that in the movie

although of course in terms of this, movies reference other movies all the time so that's always up for debate.

Anyway, even with all of the issues I have with La Haine, I think it's a gorgeous piece of cinema (That staircase shot is iconic)

and it uses cinematic language -- editing/cinematography to communicate a lot about the themes and the characters and where the characters come from and very significantly, how these characters feel

in comparison to something like Do The Right Thing where Spike Lee was more concerned with showing the ecosystem of a particular neighbourhood and using characters as representatives of certain ideas and certain systemic issues - like the Jordans scenes is all about the gentrification of Bed-Stuy - I think it's safe to say that La Haine was more interested in getting into the psyches of the youth who live in a banlieue and communicated that effectively.

Like a lot of the time, you hear reviews of movies with adjectives like "searing" or "urgent" or "raw" that it almost becomes a cliche but I think it rings true for La Haine because of very calculated choices

I find it a very visceral viewing experience.

[phamhanomii]

Stuying artstyles!! _MaRaRu_ on twt // GO CHECK THE OG ART ITS SO BEAUTIFUL!! I tried to recreate this artist's painting style! I'm proud! <3

Process!! I just loved doing this!! I hope to improve more!!

Sketch~

[1elouise]

your new chapter was so nice! branch finally gets somewhat close to getting a break lmao

also as a side note, if youre not a new yorker, the neighborhood is usually referred to as bed-stuy, and its not really a ghetto anymore. brownsville would probably be more fitting imo <-- i have strong feelings about nyc and i am physically incapable of not sharing them

loving the spiderman au, thanks for keeping us well fed!

thankyou! I am not a new yorker and only got my information from dated reddit threads, so i'll probably change it. Thankyou for liking my fic :) (and the little New York fun fact)

[rockislandadultreads]

Book Recommendations: Wayward Women in Literature

Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other...

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.

In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

[themculibrary]

Fics With Titles That Start With Z Masterlist

Zap! (ao3) - orphan_account steve/tony, pepper/tony E, 13k

Summary: All you had to do was touch your other half and zap! Literally, you got an electric shock and some lovely blue patterns wherever you happened to touch. Tony never thought he would get a soulmate until he did, and as luck would have it, it would be the good old Captain America! How could two people be so different and yet so perfect for each other?

Zap (ao3) - LegendsofSnark bucky/clint E, 1k

Summary: Tony creates a set of Avengers toys, Clint tests one out

Zelenyy (ao3) - hitlikehammers steve/bucky, clint/phil T, 3k

Summary: zelenyy, зеленый (adj): green; verdant.

If anyone thinks the whole Right on, fuck yeah, let’s join up with the goddamn Avengers! choice was an easy one, well: they’re wrong.

Screwing with Tony Stark, however, is a really good barometer of how far Bucky’s come in the process of living out said choice.

Zen and the Art of Steve Rogers (ao3) - Gfawkes steve/bucky E, 45k

Summary: "Damn. This fucker is stripped."

And so he was.

Bucky had stripped off his t-shirt. A beautiful thunderbird tattoo flexing its spread wings across his shoulder blades.

Desire flared inside Steve, like the flaming bird burned into Bucky's skin. Half of him suddenly regretted every decision he'd ever made. The other half thanked the gods he was standing where he was.

zen & the art of superhero maintenance (ao3) - curiouslyfic clint/steve T, 7k

Summary: In the aftermath of the Battle of Bed-Stuy, Clint gets a new tenant.

He doesn't move in alone.

Zenith (ao3) - Cyan_Rain wanda/vision T, 61k

Summary: Billy and Tommy wake up miles from Westview, in a world that's nothing like the idyllic life their mother made for them, a world still reeling from a bizarre mass disappearance and reappearance people are starting to call "The Blip."

Six years later, there has been no sign of Wanda for so long she's presumed dead. Her children decide it's time to find answers.

Billy, Tommy, Vision, Doctor Strange, America Chavez, and Reed Richards follow a series of clues to another universe, to a variant Earth so different from their own it might as well be an alien planet, where they will face unknown dangers, strange mysteries, and possibly the Scarlet Witch.

Zephyr in the Sky (ao3) - Ladyladylady bucky/clint E, 32k

Summary: Bucky Barnes did not expect Clint Barton to walk into his bar, but he wasn't surprised when he went home with him. No, it was more the three kids and ex-wife that caught him off-guard the next morning.

Join Bucky as he navigates a relationship with a (sexy) older man who's awfully good at keeping secrets while balancing his school, work, and borderline co-dependent friendships with the Maximoff twins.

A love story told through tarot cards and dim-lit bars.

Zeppelin Bend (ao3) - msraven clint/phil M, 8k

Summary: The idea of intimacy of any kind is laughable and my paranoia is increasing to the point where I rarely get more than a few hours of sleep at night. I’m tired and I’m lonely. So if you can help me with all or any of those, I say show me where to sign.

Or the fic where Phil is a very high-priced prostitute.

zero missed calls (ao3) - zippe mj/peter G, 6k

Summary: SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME SPOILERS

Multi-universal communication through phone calls isn’t the easiest way to reach someone. Peter doesn’t care, because his phone is ringing when it never does.

Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart (ao3) - ereshai clint/phil G, 3k

Summary: Phil likes Clint more than he should, so he's just going to distance himself until he gets things under control. Too bad Clint isn't cooperating.

Zombie Hunters, Assemble (ao3) - ereshai clint/phil T, 1k

Summary: Clint has been traveling through the zombie-infested Midwest, alone except for his dog, Lucky.

Zombies (ao3) - EaSnowPw tony/stephen G, 4k

Summary: OR

The zombie survivors welcome a new member in their midst.

Zoo (ao3) - Crockzilla peter/wade, bucky/peggy/steve, pepper/tony, rhodey/sam T, 4k

Summary: Sam takes all five Littles to the zoo. At the same time. Rhodey helps.

Zoodipity (ao3) - Captain_Panda steve/tony T, 14k

Summary: Fury's finally had enough and has kicked the Avengers out of his house headquarters.

With the Grand Zoo Opening just around the corner, Tony's ability to wave a magic wand gets them a chance of a lifetime--or maybe the chance to get a lifetime ban from a Zoo that hasn't even opened yet.

On the bright side, at least they'll have lots of good stories to not tell!

Z to A (ao3) - memoriaeterna wanda/vision, pepper/tony T, 88k

Summary: The moment of disorientation was nothing compared to the next thing he saw. He was standing in the midst of an airport, looking directly at a girl with the familiar red leather coat. The mutual recognition was instant. Leipzig. Or, Peter and Wanda sent back in time to stop the inevitable. Good news: they are not alone. Bad news: who and from when.

[brostateexam]

In 2013, a friend and I decided to try our luck and see what all the Cronut hype was about. We arrived at Dominique Ansel in Soho at 7:30 a.m.: A decade later, I couldn’t tell you what flavor Cronut we had, but I do remember the roughly 40 customers in line, a handful of those who even brought folding chairs.

Croissant innovation has continued: These days, though, waiting in lines for the next it-dessert has become my job — particularly since bakeries increasingly have as much status as hot restaurants, in part because more people can afford a luxe pastry than a four-course tasting menu.

Any New Yorker will tell you that lines in general are almost never worth it. In a city with a plethora of dining options, there’s always somewhere else to go. Onetime hip bakeries like Sullivan Street Bakery, Magnolia Bakery, and Arcade (RIP) may have long existed in the city, but in the last three years, something new has been happening, making more people take interest than ever before. Even the James Beards are paying attention: 2023 is the first that it’s adding an outstanding bakery category to its awards list.

Pandemic pop-ups pushed the needle for bakeries. When COVID closed restaurants, pop-ups exploded as a way to fill that niche. Baked goods — a combination of take-out-friendly structures and a salve in a sad time — were ready for the taking.

“I think people were looking for a little bit of pleasure or just a pick-me-up — a little bit of light in all of the darkness,” said Autumn Moultrie, co-owner of microbakery Back Alley Bread. “Microbakery” is a term that’s come to refer to online operations, as opposed to a physical location; Back Alley Bread, which began in 2020 on Instagram, signed on to open its first storefront this week at 53 Rockaway Avenue, between Sumpter and Marion streets, in Bed-Stuy.

Though some reports have suggested that pastry chefs are going extinct at NYC restaurants, in truth they are just evolving. Fandom has outlasted the onset of the pandemic, she says: “Pastry places are becoming the destination, not the afterthought, or just end of the meal.” Moultrie says that for Back Alley, the secret to its success was staying nimble, and not just pigeonholing its goodies into one niche — selling angel donuts, Frito pie, and Jamaican patties all under the same roof.

[feelslikefallynn]

could you maybe show all of your tattoos sometime and tell us their meaning?

Hi, yes of course, sorry it took a while!

I have 6 tattoos in total, I got two of them in China, as a reminder of the time i lived there for a year. One I got on Tenerife, as i'm stuying tourism (its the Palm tree, who would've guessed lmao), one from a friend that wants to be a tattoo artist one day and two in my fave tattoo Shop where I live!

The sun and the waterlily are a reminder of the City i lived in when I stayed in China, as the City is know for its beautiful water lilies, the sun symbolizes that as long as you stay positive you can get through everything (i struggled a lot mentally when i was there)

The chinese Word is my chinese Name, as a sign that i accept my chinese side as i struggle/d a lot with my identity

The palmtree I got with all my uni girlies as we all study tourism and love to travel

The hands with the moon are the counterpart to the sun on the other side as i live by the Motto "be like the moon and inspire people, even when you're far from full"

The butterfly and the Knive as a symbolization of myself as I look really innocent but there is more to it than people might think

And the Rose is just a drawing i made when I was 18, to Show that art is still a very important part of my life!

[pocketminstrel]

choy commons form

To put it concisely, I'm a huge fan of your work because I'm a huge proponent of community-led food systems that are humanizing, healthy, accessible, racially equitable, and environmentally sound! I'm super passionate about where I can support repairing harm (on people, the planet) caused by corporate farming/distributing and help put more power in the hands of local production. I have been involved with the Greene Hill Food Co-op for a few years, and have taking up foraging in recent years (mostly fungi) to build my ecological consciousness. So much of my Korean heritage has deepened my passion for food and food systems, with its mesmerizing level of various grains, plants, and herbs, and their preparation and preservation! I think of farming and foraging as the source of so much wisdom, culturally and otherwise, in regards to stewarding, exchanging with, and caring for land... as inhabitants of it! __

I grew up in a predominantly white and hispanic neighborhood, and come from Korean immigrants. I don't remember much of a time where I wasn't conscious of my race, and I think of my childhood as a very angry one largely as a result of it. This consciousness led me to explore race, class, and gender as a young adult - much of my lasting education has come from reading Audre Lorde, Baldwin, Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Today, I continue to grow my knowledge of via the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research and my involvement via Bed-stuy Strong. In recent years, I've been examining the ways in which racial equity intersects with my industry - tech - and have created resources for students and coworkers on the subject of both white supremacy culture and race + technology - can, and should, technology be "neutral" & how might we bend technology toward ensuring freedom and justice? I have also been a leader in Squarespace's AAPI resource group, organizing book clubs and community events. More recently, as myself and a loved ones suffer from chronic health conditions, I've become interested in disability justice and have been thinking a lot about community care and interdependence (which extends to all social justice really.)

[inklores]

𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞 | (vi.) hurt carves itself in something’s bones

⇽ chapter v / chapter vii ⇾ | series masterlist. | wattpad | ao3

summary: nothing cuts like a scalpel. or a mother. (wc :: 12.5k)

content contains: brief mentions of alcohol, platonic fluff, mentions of surgery, bit of swearing, mommy issues, descriptions of pregnancy, portrayal(s) of grief,

HOSPITALS CAN BE A SCARY place for some. To others, it was a sanctuary.

There was some silent, startling chill someone could feel when they traipse dimly lit halls. It was scented with sanitizer and packaged, polyester sheets, carving through their senses like a scalpel. The squeaking of sneakers against waxed speckled tiles and the tittering of phones and overhead speakers was a woeful song. Medicine was memories and melancholia. A mausoleum to die in or a bed to live again. For most people, the operating room was the elevator between life and death. The surgeon was God and the operation was Judgement. 

The hospital was Xiomara’s second home and second church. It had seen her through many different phases of her life. Infanthood when the world welcomed her to its blistering, skewed chaos. A childhood spent in the hospital’s daycare. In womanhood, she graduated from the Crayola-colored cubbies and into surgery. Through motherhood. Through widowing. Through loss and gain and loss again.

Xiomara had walked those halls as a dreamer, as a doctor, as the family, and as a patient.

It was her sanctuary.

Her dad was the captain of Brooklyn’s 72nd precinct. Her mom was an operating room nurse, after serving as a Navy nurse for seven years. Her older brother completed his residency at that very hospital. They were the scary family. The respected, proletarian, go-getting breed. Where success was, that six-letter last name typically was tagged onto it.

Supermom and superdad with their superson and superdaughter in their Bed-Stuy brownstone.

It was in their names. Victor, pretty self-explanatory. Xiomara, ready for battle. Never winning. Just ready for the grime and sludge to walk through. Blindly tossed between loss and triumph. Victor teethed on competition. Xo balked at second place. Soccer and gymnastics championship trophies battled for prestige. Her little height marks on the bathroom doorframe were always a smidge under her older brother’s. They had been weaned on hard work and service along with their mashed carrots and My First Bible passages. Passion slid between her teeth as cold and hard as the medals that studded the Solano household mantle.

Trailblazers were birthed and brought up in that household. Of course, Victor always got to be the number one boy. The first for everything— the first child, the first to go to an Ivy League, the first doctor, the first to get married before a pregnancy.

At least he wasn’t the first human mutate in the family. 

That much was Xo’s special victory.

The sight of the dimensional watch filled Xo with the anticipation of ripping off a Band-Aid to reveal the macerated, pruney flesh beneath. Miguel could have sprung for a more inconspicuous design. Maybe toss in a beveled face, and streamline the band. Instead, it wrapped loudly against her wrist, begging for attention, piquing curiosities, and bringing unwarranted questions that she didn’t have the answer to. It was the world’s worst statement piece but Miguel was exact with his code of conduct. No intrusions. No noses poking where they shouldn’t. A Spider’s mask was the guard of their secrets, the guard to their identity. But Xo didn’t have a mask.

Swallowing her shudder, she pulled the sleeve of her coat over the ostentatious watch stirring to life with three numbers blinking on the congruent face. 510. So, it wasn’t a dream. Xo would blame the fatigue of being paged at five o’clock in the morning for an emergent trauma for why she was entertaining dimensional travel. She couldn’t help it. With a simple brandish of her fingers, she could input another sequence of digits. Conjure a portal. Surf on quantum particles. Travel to another world—

“Kavita Chaudhuri, 32 weeks pregnant. Sustained a fall down some stairs. Head C.T. shows a subdural hematoma but the baby’s in distress. I paged Strange and O.B.” 

Travel later. Save lives, now.

Her instincts sprang, freed from her own bleary cognition. Xiomara looked down at the expectant mother and her shiny, tear-streaked face. Dark, anguished eyes were fluttering in and out of sentience. Her temple was roughed up, a red swelling promising a gnarly bruise in the coming days but that was the least of their worries.

The warbling of the ultrasound carried Dr. Cecilia Reyes’ recapitulating account through Xiomara’s consciousness like a battering ram. Her eyes darted to the grainy imaging, the ebbing black and gray blobs where she spotted the irregular wedge-shaped lesion flicker on the screen.

“It hurts, please, it really hurts—” Kavita pleaded, face screwing up as she hissed in pain. 

Xo did the best she could to ignore the humming driving against her eardrum, tickling the nag that cocooned in the back of her brain for months and raising the hairs of her nape. No doubt Reyes saw the jolt in her shoulder, nudging at her ear like a mosquito perched on her lobe, telling her to look where only she can. Assess where only her eyes would let her look.

“Hold on, Reyes, wait, move the wand up a bit.” Xo’s hand gingerly wrapped around the probe that rubbed over Kavita’s stomach. She inched it upward, buffing out the hasty smear of gel that already thinned out over the curve of her womb. Xo looked at the ultrasound monitor. The black and gray amalgamation throbbed once, twice, centered in the head.

“We have a bleed,” Xo exhaled. “Baby’s brain is hemorrhaging. Okay, Kavita,” she looked down at the despairing woman, her face rounding out with softness, “you’re in no shape to push and the baby’s in distress so we’ll have to perform an emergency C-section.”

Then up to her resident. “Get ready to run, Reyes.”

A crash cesarean wasn’t the tricky part. It was the stuttering terror of glitching that strung her along, stoking tension in her muscles as she waited for the obstetrician to pull her fingers out from the folds of her patient’s womb. When the pace of her breaths fell out of synchronicity with the droning beeps of the vitals monitors, Xo felt her lungs burn with how quickly she sucked in air. To stay in balance. Find the rhythm to conduct her precise, delicate motions. Otherwise, the OR was drenched in the strained type of silence that was punctured by the metallic clink of forceps. None of her music was humming in the background. Xo almost craved this quiet even if it betrayed her own routine and comfort. It was as sobering as a plunge in Arctic waters. The trepidation that haunted her as she was shuttled between parallel realities, holding a palm over scars that were slit open, was quieted now. In this sterile cocoon where everything was within the bounds of understanding.

The O.B. was amused at her off-putting request for a silent procedure.

“Didn’t think I’d get a chance to bust out my new playlist, Dr. Solano,” she remarked over the rustic ambiance of Springsteen and The Ronettes. 

The baby was out before the sanitized theater doors burst open, a familiar baritone demand cutting through Xo’s concentration and the bridge of Walking in the Rain:

“What’s mom’s status?”

Xo couldn’t see Stephen, but she could visualize cattish blue eyes zeroing in on her from over the cotton edge of a mask. Vigilant. Maybe slightly dubious. 

“B.P. and heart rate’s been fluctuating but she’s ready for you, Dr. Strange,” Reyes reported from the neonatal incubator.

“Alright,” Stephen huffed, his arms crooked upward as a nurse fastened a crinkled surgical gown over his navy scrubs. His acute gaze roamed over two imaging scans. “Let’s prep her for a craniotomy.” 

“Breathe, Stephen.” Xo suppressed a smile as she looked up from the preemie, eyes absorbing the fluctuating lines and numbers on the teeny monitor illustrating her vitals.

“It’s four in the morning and I don’t have an Americano in my hand. Tell me to breathe again,” he dared.

“Baby’s APGAR is at 4, let’s move her to the NICU,” Xo directed, attaining an alert nod from Reyes.

Xiomara wouldn’t deny it, surgeons could be messed up. They find joy in the feel of a scalpel in their hand and are hyper-attuned to the beeping of monitors in pin-drop silence. It was giving a butcher a white coat, the license to cut, and the instinct to move on from tragedy. From patients dying on their watch to articulating the gravity of a diagnosis to a fragile family, the intrinsic quality that all surgeons shared was the ability to affect trauma and also feel it, heavily. Investment was different from attachment. It was a fine line that every surgeon must understand, to forfeit emotional outrage for logic. It struck a different chord when the patient was a child. When working with children, being embraced by their bright and buoyant souls, loving and growing fond of them was only human. To get caught up in cries and giggles. It was the biology of the healer to dote on the helpless, from the most wide-eyed of toddlers to the most despicable, reckless teenagers. No longer was it a matter of investment, of fulfilling an oath, but a responsibility. The promise of a future, of a young life, in trained gloved hands. A terrifying duty and the most lavish adoration.

Love was Xiomara’s building block. Her centric thread wove with the resilience that children had, allowing them to survive worse. Falling back on rainbows and fairy dust was easier than… the parts that made her world spin to a stop.

Xo felt the earth slow beneath her soles as she monitored the baby’s extubation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Truly, a little thing. Quiet, amidst the diminutive squalls of the other infants and premature deliveries tended to in the nursery. Xo felt scared to blink or breathe next to her. Tiny creases of her eyelids flanked a button nose smaller than a pinhead. Opaque skin stretched waxen and thin across brittle arms and legs and a chest that was given lift and fall by the manual ventilator pumping premature lungs with artificial oxygen. With frantic hope.

“She’s breathing over the vent, Dr. Solano,” Reyes said gently, lifting the diaphragm of the stethoscope off her minuscule chest. 

“Hm, good.” Xo took in the dizzying web of wires and tubes that sprouted from the baby’s body and felt a flint ignite in her chest. Rough way to greet the world. “There’s still a lot of blood draining.”

“A stroke before your life starts…” Reyes shook her head, unable to tear her gaze away from the miracle nestled in a blush pink blanket. “She’s a fighter.” 

A beat of pleasant silence pulsed between them, fed by the calming night that would retire for the dawn.

“You know, at this stage, the O.B. would tell you that the baby is the size of a squash. Or a Napa cabbage,” Xo remarked. “The 32-week mark.”

It was a simple, throwaway comment that uttered by anyone else would have been a cue for awe. It mattered, coming out of her mouth. She’d seen it in the way people tiptoed around her after those few months she took on leave. Interns and residents obeyed her directives with little protest— even those who were slammed with hours of scut work. The Chief kept a remarkable, busy man like Stephen Strange on her case. Xo heard it in the way people spoke in all these cruel hypotheticals. God, isn’t it sad that she was widowed so young? Husband and daughter both. Should’ve saved the daughter. Always saving other kids now. Xo Solano: childless widow. That cut a tragic figure. Dr. Xiomara Solano MD: Chief of Pediatric Surgery. Now that was a success story.

Any thought besides remediation was recycled for fuel to keep her running. Xo finished her rounds, mother-henning her first and second-year residents through the pediatric ward with a puzzling engagement that curbed many from believing she had less than three hours of sleep. Some of the residents had never been on a peds rotation, granting her the chance to remind them what they were doing and who they were helping.

She always said it best, earning a droll but impressed smirk from Strange: Peds was the toughest surgical specialty. Sure, there were fairy princesses and clowns that came to entertain brightly painted halls. But it was the elite of the elite. 

Even after she orbited the breadth of the peds ward, sunlight continued to bleed into the bluish sky. A quick check at her phone made a heavy sigh loosen her shoulders.

Ten past nine. Xo had been awake for five hours and her day hadn’t even started.

Xo wondered if “Spider-Man” Miguel was riding a similar ship in his kaleidoscopic world. It was a curiosity she had dwelled on numerous times with her Miguel when he would spend pitch-black hours advancing on genetic research in his lab and home office. There were times when her juvenile cynicism would get the best of her. That clearly, the work she was doing greatly outranked his. It deserved the spot on the figurative mantle. He was staring at clumps of cells through a microscopic lens while she was repairing organs and sewing flesh. She supposed the thresholds of superiority were frail now. Being Spider-Man was a second job, saddled with presiding over his arachnoid assemblage. Miguel was not only a scientist and leader, he was a hero. The swift and dare she say, terrible sword of justice.

And he expected her to be one too?

A robotic songbird’s trill came muffled. Reyes was assigned to the NICU, allowing Xo to zip away and peel back her white sleeve. Lyla’s glamorous apparition beamed up from the graphical interface of her watch. 

“Doc, you’ll want to keep an eye on the news,” warned the AI, “we’re getting reports of disturbances in Harlem. Could be an anomalous presence. It isn’t your birthday by any chance, is it?”

“Are-are you kidding— I have surgery in the next hour,” Xo whispered through tight teeth.

“Sorry. Miguel’s keeping an eye on it too. Like a training exercise. Baby’s First Vigilante Outing.”

Miguel O’Hara strove to fix what was broken, by his own accord or savage providence. Xiomara was familiar with damage and she only knew one way to heal it. “If there’s a civilian disturbance, it’ll come in as trauma. I can help then— in a legal way.”

“Oh-kay,” Lyla drawled, entirely unconvinced, “You need backup, don’t you?”

Was this her call? Xo pinched her eyes shut, nervous energy thrumming within her vessels. “Uh— what’s backup?”

“More like ‘who’ is backup.”

“Uh…” Xo shifted her weight. “Is-is he really backup? I mean, doesn’t he have people—spider minions— doing that?”

“Oh, he does.”

Xo’s tongue rolled thoughtfully against the wall of her cheek. Respiratory monitors beeped together, blending into a mismatched dissonance that fell behind the rising tempo of her heart. It was disorienting, all of it. Surgeons have always been a confident bunch but Xo had never felt more stranded than she did then. Bones breaking. Organs bursting. Flesh splicing. Run a needle, repair the damage, and alleviate the pain. Cold-cut, medical textbook jargon. Her breaking point was her starting line, once at work, but now as Spider-Woman? This wasn’t the same case. There was no science here. No rules. To a surgeon, there was nothing worse… and nothing better. The instinct to have an answer, to have assurance, even in the total absence of it was built into her nature.

“Let’s…” She flavored her response with a modicum of sangfroid, fueling the authority she carried beneath this roof. “Let’s wait it out, can we?”

Lyla blinked. Physically tilted her funky sunglasses and stared. 

Suddenly, Xo felt like she was in third grade again, a nauseating uncertainty enveloping her like an oppressive weight. “Wait, was that the wrong answer—”

She vanished without a response, sucking back into her gadget and flipping Xo’s stomach simultaneously. It harangued her like a specter clinging to her ankles or a needle lodged in her shoe. Xo didn’t notice the extended amount of time she spent looking at the television monitors suspended around the sterile halls, absorbing the spewing of anchors and commentators. Of course, in her patients’ rooms, she was likely to find SpongeBob rather than CNN. A sobering yank to reality. But still… the prospect of devastation molded to the crevices of her brain. Unsteady as moonlight on water.

“Dr. Solano?”

“Hi—” Xo cringed as she became acutely aware of the charts she was examining and the fitful reflex of slamming the binder cover over her knuckles. Fingers throbbing, she met the doe-eyed gaze of her resident. “Hello, what can I— what is it, Reyes?”

“The labs for the kid in 319 are ready… unless that’s it?” she questioned, dusky face wrinkling with apprehension as she handed Xo a tablet.

“These?” Xo breathed out, jerking a thumb to the binder that enclosed her hand. “No, no, these are… purchase agreements. I’m buying a house. With a screened porch. I love sunlight.”

She should probably get used to it. The little lies smuggled like nettles in the grass.

“Okay, uh, I paged Dr. Strange like you asked me to. He’s…” Reyes’ lips puckered, snipping her tangent. “Well, he’s—”

Xo’s eyes crinkled with her subsequent grin, the bluish glare of the tablet lighting a puckish glint in her eyes. “Is the ice water in his veins a bit chilly today?”

“Frozen. Solid.”

“I’m sorry for siccing him on you,” Xo admitted, burying her hands in her coat pockets. “I thought after his craniotomy he would’ve been in an approachable mood but that’s just his warm-up.”

Stephen Strange was a smug, self-important glory hound oozing with braggadocio— also known as a neurosurgeon. He didn’t nest interns though they clamored over having the honor of assisting in the latest tumor he was besting. His name studded the OR scheduling system like gold stars. Patients flew from here, there, and yonder to get treated by him. Where other surgeons hesitated, Stephen was already scrubbing in. There was a reason why he was called Scalpel Jesus. But he was also the man who let her stand in front of her fellow interns when she couldn’t see a rare hemispherectomy. He was the mentor who saw her.

Xo wouldn’t do him the courtesy of pouring honey in his candied ears. But she was certain that she would’ve been just an ordinary surgeon without Stephen Strange. Not the extraordinary surgeon he had pushed her to be.

While her resident shrunk back from his glacial scowl, she grinned and waited for it to round at the edges.

Beams of light should have been bursting out from his marble spine. Perhaps a glow of sanctity crowned his head. He simply strutted down the hall toward the nurses’ station like his name was inscribed on each of the tiles that were blessed to keep him upright. Spartan, midnight blue scrub cap still wrapped around his coif, never disturbing the ludicrous amount of gel he treated his hair with.

“You’re my neuro on-call,” Xiomara reasoned when he brushed past her with barely a flutter of his lips. “Strange. Good morning.”

Finally pulling his attention away from his tablet dictating the OR schedule for the day, Strange released a long, sore sigh and scrutinized Xo. His caustic gaze darted to Reyes, peeking out from behind the beaming surgeon’s shoulder like a frightened cub. “Do you have a problem?” he questioned coolly.

“No,” Reyes said, wide-eyed.

“Are you holding a flat white?” 

“No, I—”

“Then why am I still seeing you?” 

Xo giggled. “Relax, killer, she’s on my service today. Monitoring our newest preemie while Mama recovers. I paged you.” She turned to Reyes. “Head to the NICU and you’ll call me if…” She pursed her lips.

“If she has apneic episodes,” recited Reyes.

“Good girl. Monitor her C.B.C. and keep an eye on the drain.” 

The two attendings leaned against the desk herding busy nurses as the resident zipped away. “They’re like sticky things that won’t blow off,” Strange commented.

Xo’s head snapped toward him, a smirk edging her lips. “Do you ever wake up in the morning and realize that nobody likes you?”

The fatigued glare Stephen shot her made her shrug. “Watch it. I’m the only friend you have,” he threw back.

“Stephen, I get it, I get it. Peds is too dainty for you and so is teaching even though we are a teaching hospital with a Level One trauma center and an excellent fetal surgery fellowship program,” Xo prattled, her words punctuated by her drumming knuckles against the desk. “I guess the sad, sad faces of little kids is… not enough,” she twisted her head upside down, pouting at the disgruntled neurosurgeon, “for Dr. Stephen Strange.”

True to form, Stephen tapered the glaciers that were his eyes. Cold, firm, always moving. “You’re droning, Solano. What is it?”

“Please don’t kill me.”

“Oh, good God, what did you do?”

She stood on grass between the nettles.

“I have another job offer.”

Strange ended up getting his flat white. Xo ordered the first thing she could identify on the menu of the hospital’s coffee cart. Boiling and a bit watery but the caffeinated notes scraped against her tastebuds like varnish remover. Her long, stalling sip burned her mouth yet she couldn’t flinch beneath his watch. The pin-drop silence of the attendings’ lounge was rare—the absence of a coworker seizing some sleep on the creased red couch, was even rarer.

Arms came across Stephen’s chest, scrubs and coat faring little for his tall build. Silver striated the cowlick that arced over his lined temple. He wasn’t too mad, Xo deduced through the way he crossed his ankles and languidly rested his weight against the back of his chair.

She let little details fall from her lips, corpuscles of reassurance to tug at the disquieting tension that entwined them. “It’s in a very nice, up-and-coming area.”

Xo deliberately steered around the words that indicated any region. She was hesitant to even frame her explanation in geographic coordinates. Stephen had covert ties to nearly every hospital on the Eastern Seaboard, undoubtedly several in the West. Hidden threads and favors preserved in amber. He wrote the recommendation letter for Xo’s pediatrics fellowship. Singular. Wasn’t like she needed another one.

“What hospital?” he inquired, sifting through his granola for dried cranberries. He was hubristic as she expected, languid in his tone and the roll of his eyes. His presence alone seemed to overflow in the chair.

“It’s…” Xo swallowed, milking that bit of static for all it was worth, “Well, not really one, but it will be spectacular once I’m done with it, so…”

“Ugh, don’t tell me it’s L.A. Mercy,” Stephen groaned, arrogance compounded with each word.

“It’s not a bad word, Strange.”

“Well, it’s a bad hospital,” he popped a handful of mix into his mouth, snacking on oat clusters, “and they’re not poaching my firstborn.”

Xo sputtered, her stomach lurching in mortification. “Firstb— are you serious?”

His long sip of his coffee spoke a thousand, ostentatious protests.

“Okay, you can not keep helicopter-ing me,” she huffed and rubbed out a tired itch that took root in her eyelid. The vein tensed and seized, inviting a twitch that she blinked out. “I did my residency and I’m doing my fellowship here. I’m allowed to leave.”

“Uh-huh.” Curt, dismissive, snowballing to his verbal excavation. “And you’ll be leaving what, exactly? Your own service, a state-of-the-art PICU and NICU, and a salary that makes you one of the highest-paid surgeons in the Northeast.” Strange clicked his tongue. “No, no. You’ll be wasted there. You’re good. You’re good and gifted and ungrateful.”

“Ungrateful— really?” she huffed. “When I told you I wanted to specialize in peds, you didn’t talk to me for almost a year.”

“Now you have cartoon animals on your lab coat— you’re a surgeon, Xo.” Stephen inclined his chin toward the cutesy patches above her embroidered name.

“Do you want one too?” she jibed, ignoring his irritated mutter, “I-I think I’ve got a lion or a crocodile wearing sunglasses. Really spruces up your look.”

“All I’m saying is, everyone wants to dance with you, so maybe don’t pick someone who’ll step on your toes.”

“The new place is giving me a prestigious research grant to head the genome surgery program there.” Damn it. “The,” her throat was dry when she cleared it, “The Nuuu-eva York Grant. It’s privately owned. You won’t find it like online or anything. Besides, I didn’t make a decision yet.” She twisted her lips in thought. “Okay, it’s like buying a dress. I try it on, see if it makes me look nice—show off what I want, do a little twirl, make sure I have the best earrings for it—but I carry it around the store to see if I still like it at the end.”

“And what about your old dress?” he inquired. Her current research, she translated. “You still,” his brow crinkled, “fit in it.”

It’s almost like I asked that myself. Xo withered, hearing vocal reverberations bounce against her skull in waves. Did she say that out loud?

Flippant words fell in dominos and she shrugged. “I can have two dresses.”

The humor wasn’t lost on Strange. His lower lip snagged on his teeth in a sore motion, eyes surveying the interns, nurses, and residents who were scarfing down what little breakfast and coffee they could sniff before a Code Blue could go off.

Welcome the soft, rare visage of Dr. Stephen Strange.

“Xiomara, word runs quickly around this hospital. You had an issue in the OR? With the multi-organ transplant case?” he listed. “Blake said you had a seizure and you were kicked out. Then you disappear for the night, you don’t pick up your phone, your mom is blowing up my work cell—”

The neutral line of her lips wilted. “My mother has your phone number?”

“Figured it was her when she started asking a neurosurgeon with a Ph.D. what the fertility rate for a 31-year-old woman was.”

Xo took a rather large gulp of her latte to stop from screaming.

“Xiomara, are you in trouble? Do I need to get you help?” he probed with a benign amplification. She felt like one of his post-op patients. Placid from morphine that anesthetized the measured incisions, the fresh stitches, and atrophied muscles. Snared by the modulated tone Strange always took with his post-op patients. Firm and cool, a brain surgeon’s arrogance expunged in favor of cold-cut wisdom.

Wrapped in an unfathomable tactic that made her stomach shrivel in remorse.

“Do you… need to go back to grief group?”

And have widows in their 60s and 70s and 80s look at me like that? No. Xo adored the women she met. Got coffee or dinner with some of them occasionally. But she couldn’t fall back into that uncertain path. She could at least appreciate his offer. 

The tension that strung his face visibly melted. “Don’t make me sound old and uncool.”

“Cool people don’t say they’re cool,” she mused.

“Are you taking steroids?”

Xo’s forehead creased, exhausted curiosity coiling around her tongue. “Did you get calls from my grandma too?”

“Dr. Solano, even through your lab coat, I can see that you’ve…” Strange’s free hand made swivels, shoving in a tangible clumsiness that made his neck flare red. “Bulked up.”

“Oh, I feel like that violates ten different workplace harassment policies.” Xo grinned to placate him and ward off the bodies that were scurrying around carrying labs and cycling through patient rooms. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of their presence was not the weight of Stephen’s accusation, but the fact they were as immobile as pillars.

Two years ago, she could’ve flung him the standard replies. Late-night trips to the craft store to get supplies for a school project due the next day, dirty dishes that had passed her comfortable threshold of thirty-six hours of sitting in the sink, chaperoning field trips, fucking croup or colic or the pox. Xo could feel how barren her armoire was now, the odd moth flitting out in a cloud of dust. Surgery seemed to swallow all of her time and touch none of it at the same time.

Relentless, Stephen continued to hypothesize, tilting his pouch of trail mix for Xo to defeatedly scour. She popped a sultana in her mouth, sucking on the wrinkled sugary skin as she was laid bare to his conflated sentiments of bemusement, indignation, and perhaps—using the other superpower she carved out through their years—a mentor-mentee affection that he so often liked to sweep under a see-through rug. 

“Dr. Strange to the ER. Dr. Strange to the ER.” The page crackled through the intercom.

“Ah. A poor mortal is in need of a god,” Xo sighed.

Strange fixed her with a squint although the anticipation of the page wormed in his statuesque poise. “Look, I taught you better so for my own ego, I’m gonna level with you in that, sure, maybe you aren’t doing anything stupid that will endanger your life, your job, and your medical license.”

Xo drew in a breath, letting it ice her lungs. “Thank you,” she stressed, with a sincere squeeze of his shoulder. “For believing in me.”

His courtesy to her dignity was equally negligent to his heroics of sliding the world back beneath her feet.

“Joke all you want, kid. But if you want to yell or scream or punch something because whatever’s happening is happening, then do it. Be a mess. I can take it,” Stephen affirmed. “But in the OR, you will not be a mess. Leave it at the scrub sink and pick it up when you’re done.”

Even when he was duly called away, she heard his words sink into her marrow, sending rolls of nausea throughout her body.

One of Strange’s more desperate and naturally corrosive wiles really. Just a few words though they stuck as she too was whisked away for a consult. A meditation to gnaw on, laying siege to the control she mailed herself in. 

Mami wouldn’t like this new dress.

Xo had thoughts. She was the head of Peds, after all. She’s repaired everything from a toddler’s failing liver to a teenager’s hernia. But three hours post-rounds, with the endless chittering of beepers and phone lines and code calls, her own skin crawling with endless predictions of disaster and the crowning cataclysm that would be the missed phone call she just received from her mother, Xo couldn’t stand it anymore.

Right on cue. Victor texted her a gif of Kermit the frog falling off a roof.

V: This is what Mami thinks ur gonna do.

X: Ur so annoying

V: Where were u on Tuesday? She was calling me 

X:

Party popper emoji. Clinking glasses emoji.

V: Do u even have any friends to party with?

Hello

My bad, jesus

Xo

Xo

Xo 

Xo 

Maritaaa

X: I’m busyyy.

Xo pursed her lips, brewing in thought and vindication. Her thumbs tapped on the keyboard.

X: I’ve got a partial splenectomy for my spherocytosis kid.

V: Uh-oh me no like big Band-Aid words :(

X: ass

She watched the tiny messaging bubbles ripple in waves. Disappeared once, then came back, jumpstarting her nerves like it was a car battery. Xo wondered, briefly, whether he might send her good tidings, even a thumbs-up emoticon. The notion to ask her older brother about her new “job offer” burned like light against a lantern. For a middle-aged cardiologist operating in solo practice, he could understand. He progressed through life. She watched it happen in monosyllabic sentences and arid text messages. Victor could defrost and heat up some of that fabled big-brother advice that he otherwise stowed in his emotional freezer for their entire lives. Just a bite was plenty—

He sent her a link to the Doc McStuffins theme song.

X: It’s after 5, don’t u have a PA to overwork and a bland spaghetti dinner to eat

V: Nah, Cat’s on some new celebrity food kick now. U wanna come over for dinner tonight?

Xo bit her nails for a Convenient Page, or, with an extra serving of regret, a Code Blue that a nurse or resident would be frantically calling her to tend to. A catalyst for a polite evacuation— something to give her an excuse to hang up. Hit her Do Not Disturb function and see her screen go black. Leave and return to her sanctuary—

V: Cat’s been asking. She and the twins were asking cause they want to see u.

Mami’s coming too.

Xo

Xooooo

She chewed on a soggy curl of orecchiette. Her fork prodded at clumps of beef, red pepper, and onion all slathered in whatever jar of marinara shirked in the lonely pantry. Her phone was sandwiched between her shoulder and ear, nestled in her neck as she stacked her coasters, then took it apart, before assembling the stout ceramic tower again.

The line rang once, twice too long before she heard the click. Immediately, her finger hit the speakerphone button.

“Hi, Mami.” She uttered in a tiny voice. The distance in her tone was almost too computed. Hinging on just enough affection so she wouldn’t get any static about why she sounds so bereft to speak to her mother. “Sorry, I didn’t get to call you back quicker. There was an emergency trauma that came in— ran longer than I thought.”

“Oh, okay, okay.” Julieta Solano sang softly from her end of the line. Xo almost flinched at how it blared over the loudspeaker but she hovered over her screen nonetheless. “I’m just checking in, mija. Seeing if your phone works or that I wasn’t erased from your contacts.” She let out a giggle that sounded cut from ice.

Xo exhaled through her nostrils to quell the fatigue that began to weigh down her bones. “No, Mami. I’m busy like I told you.”

Agonizing silence. Then—

“So,” Julieta began with her patented mild and sweet drawl, a beautiful intonation of a two-letter precursor to something that would likely make Xo bash her head against a wall, “Vico tells me you didn’t respond to his invite for dinner. Are you on-call tonight? Again?” 

“Psh, he tattled on me?”

(X: you cried to mommy srsly?

V: huhhhh? can’t hear u over the delicious smell of smoked mackerel)

“So, it’s true?”

Xo could have said yes, enunciating that she preferred to live in the hospital than come to the place she was oriented to call home. Instead, she cast her gaze across the studio like a fisherman tossing a hopeless net in the Dead Sea. Trying to capture fish instead of algae and microorganisms that survived off of sunlight. There were abandoned cardboard boxes glued together by a varnish of dust. A stainless steel pan accompanied a saucer that was still bound in its cellophane coat. A thing of Motrin in her bathroom cabinet, a singular fork jammed in three-day-old pasta, and to wash it, a bristle sponge sopping in the sink. Moldy brie and fig jam and cabernet sauvignon in her skeletal refrigerator. The strange apartment left much to be desired. 916 square feet of desolation. A pathetic nab at reincarnation? Her own personal olive branch? 

“Who knows?” Xo’s clipped voice diced her words into uneven fragments. Harsher than she intended and cautious, all of a sudden. “Hospital is enforcing an 80-hour work limit. Maybe I’ll push my luck. Do some surgeries in the basement.” Sew a mask and become a nocturnal, insect-themed vigilante. “Keep me on my toes. You’ll never see me again.”

“Mm. What’s a bit longer?”

A sliver of onion crunched between Xo’s molars, flooding her mouth with sulfur.

When Julieta spoke again, her tone was a few degrees colder. “Well, Marita, if I can stand in an OR for over thirty years, serve two tours, and raise two children, you can manage to tear yourself away from the scalpels and scrubs for a night. Come to dinner. It won’t be as painful as you think it’ll be, sitting with your family, I promise. Catalina is inviting her friend— cómo se llamaba… ah, Lawrence. Very handsome. He’s an actuary. Catholic.”

“Lawrence.” Xo tried out the gaudy name on her tongue. Her fork pushed around the remnants of food in her bowl like it was a hockey puck. “But that’s a little too pale for you, isn’t it? Salt-and-peppery? Lobster red sunburnt?”

“Marita, it doesn’t matter what I think.”

Ah, yes. The old “honey-on-the-bear-trap” voice. Fly close enough to saccharine clouds and wind up with torn ligaments and ruptured tendons. Julieta was right, it didn’t matter what she thought. It didn’t matter until it always, inevitably, did. 

“Well,” Xo chose to elevate her own authority, like a child bartering for a late curfew, “I’ll spare you the drive to Tribeca so you don’t have to stomach the crappy wine Vico’s gonna serve but Lawrence is going to be a Gregory-failure. Just like Greg was a Philip-failure and Philip was a Harry—”

“Don’t be parochial, Xiomara. I don’t need these stupid comments when you can’t be bothered to be honest with me.”

She fell silent. Her fingers frisked over a prickly sensation that skittered across her blotchy neck. The light bulb above her head buzzed. She should change it. 

“And don’t pick on your brother. He didn’t tell you this— good thing, but the clinic’s losing their patients. It’s a-an unplugged sink.” Xo could almost hear her mother shaking her head. “Everyone they treat falls through the drain.”

Xo lurched forward abruptly enough for the granite counter to jam into her stomach. “Victor never had a business mind, Mami, you and I both talked about this but why does it sound like he only heard it from me? Is it because he did?”

“Well,” Julieta sputtered, “now you see why he doesn’t tell you things.”

She hoped her mother heard the clattering of her bowl in the sink. Right in the soft part of her eardrum.

Yeah, when has he ever? Xo felt the dangerous words sear on the cap of her tongue, down to her toes. 

“Well,” Xo smacked her lips, “if he told me what was happening when it did—for once—I could’ve helped him. Our cardiologist is on maternity leave, Victor could have filled in for a time and-and then get transferred to another hospital.”

“Ay, you know Vico. He needed somewhere to stand when he came back from Iraq. How can he fall to his knees when he’s always so busy looking up?”

Xo shifted on her feet. “He was always looking up at Daddy, ma. Vic’s a good doctor, I know that— I believe it but opening his own clinic was just a way for him to flash his feathers at Daddy because he always thought Victor was wandering in a desert with his pants sagging at his hips.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, what would I know about my own children? I’ve only been a mother for 40 years.”

“Mami—”

“Mm, no, no. Mama will be quiet now. Marita knows everything there is.”

Though it was easy to get chucked into this tumultuous rhythm, Xo had to concede. Five minutes was a new record.

Bringing up Papi was the friction against the proverbial matchstick. It was easier to zero in on the waving smoke. Xo tried to put the pieces together. To a mother, even her mother, being helpless like that. A kindred ache in her bones. She wanted to grovel and vomit and cackle all at once.

“Mami, I’m proud of Victor,” Xo confessed in a voice that barely punctured the numbing quietude. “I’m just saying, maybe he should listen to me for a change. I listened to him when he told me to take the fetal surgery fellowship at Metro-General.”

“It’s a dangerous world, Marita, and you are a young woman. Why do you think your Papi spent $3,000 on those hoo-joo-jutsu classes you were taking?”

Irritation unwound a pulse in her temple. “Ma, it’s jiu-jitsu— yeah.”

“Anyway, Vico agreed it wasn’t a good idea for you to go to UCLA. Away from your family. All alone, you would never survive, no matter how hard you think you can.”

It was different of course, when Victor gathered and wrapped up his life to ship off to Fallujah then Stanford for twenty years. But her? She would be an anathema.

Xo looked down at the sauce-stained Tupperware in the sink, the tiny bits of onion swimming in the murky, soapy water. You ate three-day-old scraps of pasta and washed it down with boxed wine, Xiomara. Maybe she has a point. 

Still, her finger pulsed over the red decline button. She couldn’t tolerate the soft humming of the line in their gaps of silence, the angelic clinks of the ceramic teacup she pictured her mother was also scorching her skin with. Was it hibiscus tonight? Or earthy chamomile? Something acerbic, Xo was sure, and targeted. She wanted to make sure she was drinking acid before she picked up the call, to spit it into her daughter’s mouth, fingers squeezing her cheeks. Diligent mama bird. And her stupid, sheltered, featherless hatchling.

Xo only opened her mouth after she was sure her throat wouldn’t betray her and her retaliations wouldn’t waver. But her mother couldn’t see her, and so she couldn’t snipe on the way Xo raised her thumb to quickly swipe away a slug of salt beading at the inner corner of her eye. “Maybe I have aspirations that you never took seriously because you didn’t like them. It’s okay, Mami, I was supported enough by the right people to chase after them and I did.”

“Hm, that’s all fine. The right people and me, the villain. Your dream killer. You’re allowed your aspirations, Marita. Would it be so horrible for you to make room for someone else’s?”

Fetching herself a cup of water from the tap, Xo huffed— translated: You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

“Christ… I hope one day, reugo a Dios, you’ll have another child. Another daughter, quién sabe? I had you when I was your age but I wonder if you’ll at least have the choice to contend with her or love her.”

That was sick. The air in the room was sick. She was sick, to her core. Xo could imagine dissonant strings being plucked and pulsing keys, a chaotic explosion of cellos and violas all shrieking together, prophesying a bloodthirsty shark in the waves. Or her mother. Instead, there was silence and the tri-tone beeping of the refrigerator. Oh. Xo left the door wide open. Bathing her face in the brisk air that circulated naked shelves. Reluctantly, she retrieved a plastic carton of pre-cubed pineapple. 

But Julieta was relentless. “It’s difficult. Your brother called for a massacre on my body. You… you fired the killing shot.”

She spoke with the same grave coating that Victor did when Xiomara mustered the courage to ask about the day she was born. All Victor remembered at the ripe age of nine, was being traded off from their tío to their abuela while their Papi stayed in the hospital after his long shifts. The constant shifting and constant terror of watching Julieta recover. Was it really all he remembered? Probably not. But it was all he chose to tell her. Being who she was, Xo tried to fill in the teeny gaps that prodded at her mind, begging for fruition. There was a simple solution that she began to assemble as she grew up:

“You could’ve stopped at one.”

Julieta laughed. A quiet, tired, frustrated one which made something go sideways and sharp-teethed in Xo’s stomach. “You think your Papi would hear any of that? No, no. Anything for Javier to have his little girl, su princesita.”

She swallowed the pineapple chunk she was chewing on. “Yeah, well, what a Greek tragedy, Mother.”

It was more of an ancient comedy if she put some thought into the deriding parallels. She was, in succinct, maternal terms, the planned and unwanted offspring. Meanwhile, Gabriella was her unplanned yet desired treasure. “Wanted” was too weak of a term, reckless of the adulation that rooted in Xiomara the second she felt the flutter against her stomach walls. A beloved presence.

Then, she struck colder and drier. “Try being the tyrant. Your Papi wanted what he wanted and he got it and he left me with the discipline. That was the tragedy. He could never raise a hand toward you. Could’ve burned the house down. All you’d get was a pinch of the ear but not if you stuck out that bottom lip, only then, he would put you on his lap and you’d eat pastelitos past your bedtime.”

Those words dragged their talons across Xo’s innards, yet she suffocated her fork in her grip. She wondered what the most gruesome laceration was. The hazy memory of her father that Julieta tried to macerate or the sheer falsity of it all.

“That’s just what you thought.”

“No. That was what I lived through.”

Xo slammed her fork on the counter and watched it scuttle across the granite. Something began to fossilize her lungs, forcing her to conserve what little, pure oxygen she had remaining with slow, gravelly breaths. Was it the worst sin that her father held her and fed her sweets? To huddle her close into the light of the sun when she had been nursed in the endless shade. 

“You— okay. You can say whatever you want about me and Papi but you don’t know everything.” Xiomara floundered, aqueous words getting mangled in her throat.

“You’re right. I don’t,” Julieta sighed heavily. “Because I was never taught your secret handshake, was I?”

A grating sound ruptured the line. Maybe an animal was chewing on the telephone wires. That didn’t make sense, she was using a cell phone. Whatever. Xo hoped one was or she would chew an electrical cable herself.

“Mami… it’s been a long day. I’m exhausted.” Xo wished she hadn’t called. “Aren’t you?”

“I am. Very.”

Xiomara continued to speculate even when, deep down, she knew the truth. That she was the piece of her mother that had to be bottled up to keep from spilling foolishly. To not drown in a house that always flooded. But instead of coughing up water or building a dam, that worry of hers simply leaked into her womb and grew a daughter.

“Well,” said Julieta, with a decisive smack of her tongue. “I have to go and get ready for dinner. I will give Victor and Catalina your best but ay, Vera and Victoria wanted to see their tía, but I guess I will hug them for you too.”

(X: tell the girls tía xo loves them so so much 

V:

Thumbs up emoji

don’t kill urself 2nite)

“Ah, and tomorrow, Victor and I are meeting with your Tío Benedict tomorrow. I want to change the backsplash in the kitchen to Moroccan zellige. Re-do the living room to beige silks.”

“Mid-century?” guessed Xiomara bleakly. “Nice, I like it. Yeah, the backsplash needed some changing.”

“Hm. Don’t forget to pray. Sueña con los angelitos.”

“Buenas noches, Mami.” 

The line clicked and went quiet. Xo breathed.

When Xiomara was younger and would study for tests or prepare book reports, Julieta would come into her bedroom holding a platter of cut fruit. Watermelon, pineapple, papaya—which would be fervently left untouched until Victor came to finish it off. Xo ate the fruit even as she plucked out her eyebrows over a chemistry equation. She swallowed down this sweet, sliced-up modicum of love. Ameliorating some chasm that seemed to lengthen as she grew into her hips and tugged her hair out of curly pigtails. 

She looked down at her bowl of pineapple, the measly few chunks swimming in tinted pulpy water.

Xo didn’t recall asking for remorse fruit again. She ate it anyway.

In a place that felt little like home and less like a sanctuary.

─────────EARTH-928, NUEVA YORK─────────

From the rooftop, he lifted a hand down the length of his face, sweeping down the rivulets of water that hailed from the weeping sky.

The storm was forecasted but the illicit stain of Nueva York’s inner workings managed to corrupt even the most purifying mechanism of nature. Harsh droplets battered against the sonic overhead lines that arced into the charcoal brume. The glittering beam at the center of the city flashed each time lightning shattered the sky. He narrowed his eyes, a soft exhale hitting against the molecular composite of his mask and ricocheting the warm puff back against his lips. The worst thunderstorms couldn’t inhibit criminal activity, at least not the type that operated to the degree that made Miguel O’Hara’s blood roil with rage. In anticipation of his events for the night, he skipped his usual scraps of a meal before setting out on his cyclic patrol. A spider-man’s work was never done and never found recess.

“Lyla?” His voice croaked, tempered by the odd tranquility of the drowning night. “What’s their ETA? Or do I have to swing by a donut shop and leave ‘em a note?”

The humanoid projection of his LYrate lifeform approximation flickered into his vision, standing over the face of his watch. “We’ve got a unit en route. Estimated, thirty seconds.”

The timely wail of sirens punctured the wind-beaten silence.

“Guess that means you’re off duty,” remarked Lyla. “There’s uh, something else by the way.” 

“What now? An ax murderer?” Miguel deadpanned, glissading between towers. Vehicular lights zipped by in fluorescence lines beneath him, failing to disrupt his visual acumen as the city sank deeper into the umbra of the moon.

“Wouldn’t that be fun?” Lyla marveled with an equal scoop of sauce. “No, no. It’s uh, Earth-501. The disturbance I alerted Dr. Solano about.”

Miguel’s instincts were sharpened with panic. His ribs caved in, grazing against his lungs like steel serrated on a whetstone.

Lyla, for the sake of his mangled dignity, reined in her merciful solace… and the emotional cutlass that she had raised over his neck. “Calm down, Miguel. Seems like it resolved on its own. No spider needed, squeaky clean.”

Well, that was unlikely. Lyla knew better than to gloss over the fine details that would’ve held reign over Miguel’s conscience. Nevertheless, he grunted in response, choosing to ignore the alarm that was ready to blare in the back of his head. If by any hope it could wait, he would begrudgingly let it. Miguel had somewhere to be, a respite from the obligations that he forced himself to include within everything else in his periphery. Even the chance of an alteration in this monthly routine was enough to jostle his faithful motions. He caught himself rebounding off the facet of a tower with a neon web retracting as quickly as it was fired.

Before long, the contours of Babylon Towers realigned his atoms. The sterile air of his apartments was a nippy, but familiar welcome to Miguel, but he had no time to dwell on somber greetings. He fleshed out time for a rinse, focusing on soap and suds to sluice the day’s feverish grime off his flesh, and traded in his arachnoid suit for a practical, synthetic wool ensemble.

A thorough check-up in the mirror felt necessary, to ensure he didn’t leave with an offending bruise or a split lip. And a cramped minute dedicated to studying the three surveillance monitors set up in his office wouldn’t hurt. Bringing work home had always been a fault of his, and Miguel was once promised it would earn him a nasty earful down the road. For that blustery evening, one transparent tablet stole his succor.

“Lyla,” he rumbled, perched on a razor’s edge of a dissociative episode. A mechanical chirrup emanated from the leftmost monitor his assistant was fiddling with. With a single perusal, Miguel recognized the gridlock of concrete lattices. Cushioned by the bottom half of Manhattan, hugged by Greenwich Village from above. It was a consolidated, rosy chip of the arachno-humanoid poly multiverse, one he had calculated an impulsive, disastrous visit to not long ago. His heart stuttered in his chest.

“No signs of an anomalous presence on 501,” reported Lyla.

“So. Local,” he assumed with a half-hearted lift of his shoulders.

“It’s how it always starts out, doesn’t it? The handmade suit, bank robbery, or convenience store if you’re feeling spicy.”

A low hum vibrated in his throat, seemingly conveying the heavy message that Lyla was implicating: She needs to take the first step.

“Seems like she’s more ticked off over having you clean up a mess than doing it herself, Miguel.”

“Sounds about right.” The hologram jutted her chin at his tired surrender to her wisecrack. “Hook me to her comms. Keep it quiet.”

“You’re still spying on her? And admitting it this time?” Lyla gaped. “Miguel, this is some growth.”

His glare snapped up to duel her glittering eyes. “Funny. Would ya just do it?”

A heartbeat later, wisps of tawny and amber light spun together into a lifelike silhouette.

It took him a second to adjust to her surroundings. It wasn’t the penthouse. A pitiful excuse for a home, her home. Urban and rather chic, yes, representative of the upper middle class she was seated in. Miguel would wager his variant’s life insurance payout was split between her grief group and the enameled cookie jar gathering dust by the vase of browned carnations. The ruffled blooms were a rich red, once, when they were handed to her by the teary-eyed, smiling mother of a little boy who underwent a tumor resection. Even wilted, those flowers were the only semblance of life in that apartment.

(No one has yelled there. No one has slammed a door or gone to bed angry.)

Wrapped in fleece, she leaned against the counter poking at an unappetizing pasta dinner. For her sake, the loungewear fit astronomically better than the rags he issued her. A visibly soft pink thing that clung to her skin like a protective blanket. He could hear another voice in her midst, saw the splintered second where she flicked away a tear, and a primordial, cognizant grief cleaved open in his sternum.

“Maybe I have aspirations that you never took seriously because you didn’t like them. It’s okay, Mami, I was supported enough by the right people to chase after them and I did.”

“Hm, that’s all fine. The right people and me, the villain. Your dream killer. You’re allowed your aspirations, Marita. Would it be so horrible for you to make room for someone else’s?”

Miguel felt tangled in the silence too. A regressive dread spread throughout his veins like the paralytic he could so easily inject from his canines. That was his natural state, after all, when mother and daughter’s serrated voices would overlap. One, youthful and strangled by desperate tears, and the other, suffused with an ancient, biting regret. Miguel was a neutral power during those rifts. An unwilling spectator at the first and last Christmas repast that felt normal. Back then, his loyalty was silently declared yet never expressed with more than a hug or a soothing kiss on the hair.

But now, Miguel could watch and only watch from a thousand galaxies away. Barbed wire coiled around his throat as it did hers in the inhospitable haven of her mother. 

“Christ… I hope one day, reugo a Dios, you’ll have another child. Another daughter, quién sabe? I had you when I was your age but I wonder if you’ll at least have the choice to contend with her or love her.”

He felt a painful spasm behind his ribcage. It worsened with the way her face crumpled. The projection was painfully crystalline and he could see flecks of glassy light burnishing her artificial eyes. A new shade of agony, birthed.

It forced him to confront the ignorance he would execute in a matter of minutes—the punishment he inflicted on himself with every turn of the moon. Miguel chose self-imprisonment in the past, lingering in a waiting room in figurative detention. You owe this to them, was his incriminating verdict. You. Sinner. Now… it felt like another betrayal to her. Another stain in his ledger.

“Miguel? It’s late.”

Like fingers snapping in his face, he straightened up. With a swipe of his hand, the monitors disappeared, as did the quarreling voices, and her face.

“Right.” Get back on track. “Keep Jess on standby. Route all outgoing cases to Kess. Kid never sleeps, might as well keep her busy.”

“Got it, boss.”

Lyla retreated to an icon in his watch, a contraption he was poised to unclasp and set aside. Just for an evening, an hour. 

Miguel felt a sharp guilt knot his throat and he rolled the sleeve of his turtleneck over its glassy face instead.

He chose wheels over webs. Driving soothed him in a way howling winds and laser silk failed to. The droning hum of the voltaic motor spread a balm over his cluttered conscience but trod around a chaos of trepidation that grew louder as he approached the door.

Panes of frosted, tempered glass flanked by strips of black mahogany.

And when it swung open, Miguel’s sanctum of control was plucked from his hands. Part of it all too was the memory that everything spurred. The picture frame behind the man’s head stuck to its same spot on the harsh, angular wall. A sweetly smiling face captured in a moment, this world’s moment—his world—he was due to remind himself.

Because most recently, Miguel O’Hara refused to accept that time did not heal all wounds.

And some wounds were cut deeper than his.

Captain was a whole head and a half shorter than him—which, at Miguel’s lofty height, was pleasantly average—yet he always felt like he was looking up at him. Whether it be the jitters of a first-time boyfriend or the cool press of a ring in his palm, intent on asking for a blessing. The delicate arch of Captain’s iron spinal cord shrunk him down another inch or so and rather than a navy suit embellished with a brass badge, he wore a starched button-up and slacks. But his was not a delicate constitution. When Captain spoke, the gravitas of his presence was enough to straighten the hairs of Miguel’s nape. The smallest corpuscle of Javier Solano’s authority demanded Miguel stand humbly, and he did. Sheepishly. Like a little boy. The man who would be son. 

“Miguel.” A hand extended, age and vigor buried in the wrinkles of his spotted skin. 

“Captain.” A word so delicately uttered, framed by a pang of instinctive guilt which made Javier Solano of Earth-928 nod with the trimmest hint of approval.

Even at his age, Captain was as formidable as a chunk of marble, all rough edges and haunted contours. Grief had cast ten years on his visage. Irredeemable loss, carved in the pockmarks and lines that creased his skin and rendered him scarily reticent.

Even as the air grew ever-volatile.

She was diminutive in a sage blouse with sleeves of lace, fine as gossamer, and tailored ivory pants. Iridescent, like a lacewing, and just as invasive. A string of turquoise and pearl and gold draped down the front of her body in two modest layers. It was a penchant she passed down to her daughter, Miguel noticed when he first met Julieta Solano. Manicured elegance. As flighty as a hummingbird, disappearing behind pantry doors, shouting for help, and spitting on any friendly hand. Dazed and distracted. Strung like a bead on a thread.

When Julieta laid glazed eyes on him, she shrieked and kissed his cheek. Miguel steadied her hand “in the nick of time”—thanks to the superhuman disposition he concealed—keeping the glass of red she held upright.

“Oh, pobrecito, Miguel, your eye bags have their own bags.” Five talons dug into his cheeks, the others balancing a tray of silver branzino. “¿Quieres café?”

“Gracias, señora, but I’m—”

“No, no— you need something to drink— Victor! Vico, ven aca!” The metal tray slammed down with an echoing bang. The skin of the branzino crisped against their foil envelopes. “Why is no one here— no one is helping me! Victor!”

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it, ma, let me.” Miguel inched his hands toward her worn ones still clasped fervently to the etched handles of the hot tray. It was as close to defusing an active IED as he could get though at that moment, Miguel was certain he would rather cradle an explosive.

His gaze darted to catch Victor for a fleeting second as he melted into the boiling paracosm of steam, perfume, caramelized onion, and masa flour. A silent nod was traded, wherein Miguel glimpsed the exhausted apprehension flooding the Solano firstborn’s eyes. He looked thinner than he did the month before, a thick scruff shrouding the lower half of his face. Though, Victor was not entirely a husk of who he was. He inserted himself into the crevices he could find— moving a boiling pot from one burner to a cold one, swabbing at a dollop of mole that dried on the oven timer. 

“Ay, it is too hot in this kitchen. I need peace and quiet but people keep coming in and out.” Julieta’s scarlet nails came to frantically comb back jet-black strands, stuck in a loop of the meticulous habit.

“Everything looks beautiful, Mami,” came Victor’s timely, terrified compliment.

“Smells good, really,” chimed in Miguel. He felt diluted ice crack beneath his feet and wondered just how long it would take for him to plunge through.

Julieta sagged against the juncture of the kitchen sink and the counter. “Beautiful… Victor.” Her voice was hoarse. “Get out of here. Go.”

He did without argument, though the lingering gaze he gave his mother struck a sympathetic twinge in Miguel’s chest. It was just him and Julieta now and he felt inclined to sit or hug himself to look smaller. He amassed too much space in that kitchen, thickened shoulders nearly threatening to break the walls that sheathed them. Not quite fitting in but forcing himself to do so. Some lessons were never learned.

Miguel took a moment to look at the woman. Invisible tears had melted black beneath her waterline, in a shadow, flecked by some harsher globs.

“Ma,” he tried again, ducking his head to conserve her dignity, “everything smells good. Everything looks beautiful.”

“I can’t do this myself,” Julieta muttered, taking a sip of her endless red. Her foggy gaze raised to burn into his. “I can’t do this alone. I can’t— I don’t think.”

Miguel shifted on his feet. “You’re not alone. We’re here, we love you. I’m happy to be here.”

“I’ve been here since the morning. Feels like forever.” Julieta pointed a tired finger down at the tiles. The stove sizzled with a forgotten component of an entrée. “It’s hard.”

He pivoted, letting himself rest his body weight against the counter. Poised to listen and silently assure her that he would. “What’s hard? What is it?”

She laughed. Or performed something similar to it. Either way, her tinted lips stretched into a face-splitting grin. Weariness was gathered in the creases of her foundation and powder. A rasp of amusement was wrenched from her larynx. “How she got so lucky… I don’t know. Being at rest. I can’t get out. She did.”

“C’mon, ma— don’t…”

She hummed, long and sonorously. Like the pull of a cello string at a funeral march. “You are a good boy, niño. You are. You should’ve married her. Take her away. She never said she wanted to leave but I know she did.” Another sip, taken with a molasses-slow cherishing of the heady numbing it offered.

Miguel struggled with this imbalance. Before, hatred and grief were split between them, unwillingly. Fed through the umbilical cord and undisturbed by its severance. But what happened to one half when its host vessel was cold and buried?

He looked at Julieta now. At the beads of salt water that brimmed lashes, framing bloodshot eyes.

Perhaps it returned to its creator.

(It was impossible to extract it. To take this agony upon himself. In plain summation, it was an easy calculus to solve but he could never get close to an answer. Despite these visits, with a clean sweater and a cajoling word, a firm handshake, an anecdote of his research post-Daughter, and a demure drop of his gaze.

Because no one leaves home.)

“For your happiness, Miguel, I regret that every day. But she would’ve been your nightmare.”

Julieta said she like he was a victim, even if he dodged the bullet. 

“C’mon, let’s sit down. Let’s eat.” He couldn’t help the brittle nature of his words— comforts he despised yet needed to say. To atone.

Miguel waited out the fit of breathy rejections, then tried again to encourage her for dinner. Like always, her blame was misfired but he had no right to tamp a mother who was mourning? Drowning? Maybe, he swallowed thickly, jealous? He foolishly decided on sympathetic.

“Look, uh, I’m gonna go sit down, ma, okay?” He lifted a hand, brushing an imaginary itch on his upper lip. “Would you come with me?”

“No—”

“—We’ll sit, have dinner, c’mon—”

She warded him off with a trembling hand, the overhead lighting glinting on the points of her nails. Her eyes were shut tightly into creases, a knife flanked between teeth where a tongue should be. “I hear you, Marita. I know. I will come in a minute. Go.”

It took him a moment to find his voice, to feel level with the earth. “Are you good?”

“I said go,” she bit, “I’m good. Now go, Miguel. Have a drink with him. Leave.”

Miguel crept away and found the gall to inhale once again. He welcomed Captain, who spoke to him over mouthfuls of a peaty whisky. Ice clinked in the lapses of quietude. Victor left his drink untouched, letting a finger coast the rim. Not quite there but not distracted in his father’s presence. He dared not slouch and he appropriately nodded at the Captain’s tales of the notorious Spider-Man’s exploits— “notorious” attached so hesitantly, even if they shared in the same perverted, self-made definition of justice.

Captain told Miguel about the percentage increase of muggers hauled into the station. Seized with extreme prejudice, hunted down by his teeth and piercing sirens. He noted the pattern, how they all fit a similar slew of charges— attempted murder, possession of an illegal firearm, armed robbery, assault. Most of the victims, Captain said, were women.

A plate shattered. Julieta cursed. Chair legs screeched as Victor ran up to help her. Captain barely flinched. He only took another sip and informed Miguel that most of the victims were women. Sweet, sniveling chickadees who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

But as shards of ceramic swept together, offset by Victor’s calming mewls, Miguel concentrated on how Captain stared at the most imperceptible gouge on the mahogany table. He lifted his tumbler to his lips and drank. Miguel copied him.

He had skulked in as guilty as a sinner under that splintering roof. 

(Mother cried. Captain was quiet. Victor pleaded. She, haunted.)

Yet now, Miguel was terrified that he was the saint.

──translations: cómo se llamaba; what was his name?; I’m Mexican and Spanish, but; reugo a Dios; I beg God; quién sabe?; who knows; su princesita; his princess; pastelitos; small cakes/pastries; Sueña con los angelitos; dream of little angels; Buenas noches; good night; pobrecito; poor thing; ¿Quieres café?; do you want coffee?; ven aca; come here

[cartermagazine]

Weeksville, Brooklyn. Brooklyn is home to many monumental neighborhoods, but few come close to the history and culturally rich Weeksville. Originating in the mid-1800s sat a small African American village named Weeksville, formed during the post-abolition era. At that time, Weeksville and the surrounding Brooklyn area had one of the country’s densest rates of enslaved people. Brooklyn continued to develop, resulting in Weeksville’s absorption of the Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights neighborhoods. Despite the merger, echoes of Weeksville’s past still exist. Weeksville earned its name from a freed African American dock worker named James Weeks, who purchased a plot of land in the community following abolition in the state. As word spread that African Americans like Weeks were making a living in New York, more would head to the area for the same opportunity as long-standing families continued to sell off their land in the Brooklyn area. In the 1850s, the population boomed to over 500 residents, nearly half of the residents were originally born in the South. All with different stories and backgrounds, the occupations of these settlers included educators, health care professionals, and entrepreneurs. As time went on, the Weeks village would go on to operate a “colored” school, cemetery, senior home, and multiple churches. Not to mention, the village was amongst the highest rates for ownership of property and business among an African American settlement. Weeksville quickly became a safe haven for African Americans throughout New York. The community has changed over the years, but the history of Weeksville remains one of the most influential neighborhoods in New York State, particularly for African Americans. CARTER™️ Magazine carter-mag.com #wherehistoryandhiphopmeet #historyandhiphop365 #cartermagazine #carter #staywoke #weeksville #brooklyn #crownheights #bedstuy #blackhistorymonth #blackhistory #history https://www.instagram.com/p/Co9tQ9eLVR4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=